1 in 4 Comics Readers is a Senior Citizen

One of the prevailing myths I often hear from academics/educators who study comics is that teachers need to be careful not to co-opt this form of literature from their students. The assumption is that comics reading is the domain of youth culture rather than pop culture, that comics "belong" to kids rather than to everyone.

The truth is that for a few decades now, the average age of the comics reader has been rising. Many feel that 40 year old men have made up the bulk of comics readership for the last twenty years. And, of course, there's that fact that in comics' heyday, almost everyone read comics. In other cultures, sequential art is enjoyed by multiple segments of the population as well.

To further attempt halting the concept of comics as youth culture, consider that Simba Publishing just releases a report stating that 1 in 4 comics readers is over 65 years old.

As the press release reads, "Despite notable efforts from many in the industry, comics and graphic novels continue to be repeatedly mislabeled as just another children’s book category,” said Warren Pawlowski, online publishing manager for Simba Information and an analyst within the company’s Trade Books Group. “With nearly a quarter of the comic reading audience beyond the age of retirement, there is a misconception that needs to be corrected.”

Yep. Or should I say, Yessiree! Also see here for a broader overview of the comics and GN market. If you have the Benjamins, that is! (You'll see what I mean)

Ben Bova, You Ignorant Slut

Ben Bova's words on graphic novels, graphica adaptations of print works, and the "decline" of literacy are making the Interweb rounds. And, believe it or not, he's being called out for his shortsightedness and lack of evidence supporting his assertions (my favorite comment to his words so far inspired the title to this post)by folks who aren't teachers or teacher educators. Perhaps we have truly turned the corner, folks......

And the Congregation said "Amen!": The Spurge weighs in on Equating All Comics with Super-Hero Comics

Kudos to Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon for taking to task a blogger's perhaps well-intentioned post of the most important "gay moments" in comics. The problem? Every single entry came from super hero comics. Spurge's complaint, and a pet peeve of mine as well? The embedded assumption from the writer that super hero comics are the only genre that count, if not the only genre that exists.

Spurgeon calls for a a simple solution: If you're doing best-of lists or articles that focus solely on super hero-genred comics, say so.

"Amen!"

Fightin' Fallacies: Mythbusting w/ Bucky on Pop Culture and Appropriation

While at NRC this weekend, I heard an argument/precept about teaching comics that I've heard before but have never directly commented on herein, so I thought I might finally do so.

The idea is that teachers need to be careful about how they teach comics because doing so overtly and directly in a way that might fully explicate the text might be a way of subsuming students' popular culture. The assumptions underlying the directive, as I understand them, are that youth culture shouldn't be appropriated by adults and that more children read comics than adult teachers.

There are a number of fallacies at work in such a statement, though careful teaching is always a good thing, of course. One myth is that kids read more comics than adults. American comics seem to have a history directly tied to youth culture. This is undeniable. But, since the 1930s, there have been moments when the reading market was comprised mostly of children and moments when the reading market was more diverse. For example, the crime and horror and romance comics of the 1950s were supposedly not marketed directly to child readers (but sort of the same way that Joe Camel wasn't marketed to children) but to older readers.

In the contemporary moment, the average comic book reader is believed to be an adult male in his mid-thirties. Many industry leaders are at this exact moment bemoaning the lack of child-centered comics, and companies like TOON BOOKS have sprung up to fill the void left by aging super-hero comics readers, more intellectual, graphic novel reader, and those who have always preferred the indy, not-for-kids stuff in the first place.

So, it may not be true that more kids are reading comics than adults. And if comics readership is no longer the cultural domain of children, then teaching them isn't appropriating their culture and thinking that it is can be viewed as misinformed thinking pulling on schema from a bygone era.

Another fallacy that I see as inherent in the argument is that popular culture = youth culture. While it may be true that youth culture is often, if not always, intertwined with the popular culture, that relation can not always be reversed. When Ray Browne pioneered the study of popular culture (and let us remember that there are scholars beyond education professors who study popular culture. It is its own field), he was focusing more on the elements of society that academics and others found to be "mundane," not exclusively on elements of youth and childrens' culture. Bumper stickers, advertisements, housing floor plans, wallpaper -- these are elements of popular culture that have been studied that may or may not have connections to youth culture.

I'd also like to point out that another way of viewing a teacher who integrates the study of popular culture and/or youth culture is to see the teacher as acknowledging kids' interests. Overt, direct analysis of those texts can be a way to show respect for their interests and to show how "their" texts are just as valid and important as older, more traditional texts, each of which was at one time part of the popular culture as well. As well, since adults consume youth culture too, "their" culture can be said to be "our" culture anyway.

So, I think direct, overt instruction on comics and high-level literary/artistic analysis of them in the classroom should be approached with the same care as anything else that gets taught, but I wouldn't worry too much about anyone's culture being subsumed or taking anything away from students. Sure, I've had a student tell me "You can even make a comic book boring!" during an analysis of metaphor and symbols between a comics text and a traditional text, but some students are going to balk at anything that examines things seriously. That student held the minority opinion in his class, by the way. All the other students were excited to be reading a form of literature that they viewed as valid but had never thought would be considered valued in the school setting.

Ah, when the school world and the real world mesh, it can be a wonderful thing!

Fightin' Fallacies Again: Mythbusting with Bucky

It's been a while since I posted something on fighting' fallacies associated with comics in education, but I think it may be time to revisit the topic based on certain ideas, trends, and opinions I've noted over the last six months or so.

1. Talk about how graphic novels match up with local/national standards is moot because of the new CORE standards being developed by the National Governors Association and the CCSSO.

I have seen much hubbub about how the CORE standards being developed under the Obama administration are going to obliterate any and all other lists of standards available nationwide, and while the CORE documents will certainly influence state and organizational standards, I think it might be a bit of hyperbole (at least I hope it is) to suggest that states will drop years of work on crafting standards to adopt the CORE standards. Rather, what I think we'll see is that the CORE standards will be suggested as THE BARE MINIMUM, and states will be encouraged to adapt -- not adopt -- them to the standards documents they've already crafted.

As for standards like those for the English Language Arts that have been published by NCTE/IRA, I have it on good authority from a representative at NCTE that these standards are not being updated in response to the CORE standards, not yet anyway.

Several recent and upcoming publications deal with how comics and graphic novels can be used to meet state and national (NCTE/IRA) standards. Brian Kelley recently published a document relating to New Jersey's ELA standards. Michael Bitz's recent book and his upcoming book, as well as a couple of his articles, reveal how using comics as composition meet many of New York's state ELA standards. Katie Monnin will soon publish a book that deals explicitly with NCTE/IRA's standards for ELA. All of these are and will be valuable to teachers and will help make the case for comics' worth in America's school rooms.

I've also heard folks try to make a distinction between having standards and the phenomenon of standardization. The problem is in interpretation. Too often, once standards are set, they become the rationale for standardization of curriculum. This leads to stolid curricula that focus more on the standards than on best practices, and after time, this also forms a sort of indoctrination that state education leaders accept and then feed their teachers. The "cure" for this, of course, is trusting teachers to be intelligent enough to see any set of standards as a bare minimum rather than the "gold standard" and having leadership that finds ways to assist teachers in being critical thinkers and experts in their fields.

2. Graphic novel proponents seek to supplant traditional print-based literature with graphic novels.

I think I can speak for most of my colleagues who advocate for using graphic novels and comics in the classroom when I say we probably all support a supplemental or complimentary approach, one where graphic novels are integrated into the ELA classroom along with traditional-based print texts.

I get it from both ends, it seems. I've read criticism of my edited collection Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels that suggested I and my contributors wanted to replace canonical texts with graphic novels. This isn't the case -- not in every possibly exigency, anyway. On the other hand, folks wonder if I and my co-writers aren't suggesting that comics and graphic novels aren't good enough, strong enough, to stand alone and be taught on their own. I think folks need to give comics-in-literacy scholars and teachers the benefit of the doubt (and read their texts more deeply).

I think most of us seek a balanced approach, where comics are used in pre-existing curricula where they fit best and with students who they can best engage (read "all students" on one level or the other) and only replace a text when a teacher was already looking to do so before considering a sequential art narrative as the replacement.

I think most of us do feel that certain graphic novels are good enough to be taught in their own right. I just think most of us are knowledgeable enough as pedagogues to know that teaching any text in isolation is not the most effective means of teaching.

3. The argument has been won. There is no need to continue work that falls under the rubric of "graphic novel advocacy."

There are so many of us using comics in the classroom now, so many blogs, so many books coming out, so much attention from MLA and YALSA and the ALA and NCTE, etc., and so many articles on sequential art in the classroom that it may seem that everyone has gotten the message. Especially for those of us who live and work in progressive environments where all or most of the people we see everyday are the kinds who readily accept comics' place in the classroom, this is dangerous thinking. Your world may not be my world may not be the world of a teacher in rural Wyoming or even in Washington, D.C.

As someone who lives in Texas, as someone who has, since 2000, taught in the states of Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas, and as someone who travels the country talking with teachers about comics' use in secondary education, I can tell you that it is a Manhattan-sized assumption to think that everyone everywhere -- whether "everywhere" pertains to state, k-12 school, college of education or university English department -- is on the same page or at the same level of their development when it comes to graphica. Austin is not El Paso is not Houston is not San Diego or New York.

While I get as frustrated as anyone when newbies try to reinvent the wheel regarding comics terminology, use, and advocacy in the classroom, especially when they do this in print (and especially when that print doesn't cite previous writing that has established a groundwork), I accept that, nationally, we see a range of acceptance of the form, ranging from elective courses on GN's at the high school level and courses focusing on them at colleges like Stanford, MIT, and Yale, to fogies still afraid to accept the form as viable for their sixth graders and considering it a threat to literacy, intelligence, and quality living.

The battles are still being fought in k-12 and university departments near you, whether it seems that way or not. So, there's plenty of room for more advocacy work regarding the sequential art narrative, and any work that deals with it in a positive light, even if it is crafted by those who believe the good fight has been won, might be said to be advocacy literature anyway.

(*draft. I may revisit this for edits later)