by Robert Gulya
Illustration by Zac Schaffner
I guarantee that if you told more six-year-olds that they could spend their life studying comic books, we’d have a whole lot more people staying in school, and a whole lot more people studying English. In today’s academia, this is becoming a more realistic possibility. In 2008, the University of Florida, University of Toronto, and University of California-Santa Cruz introduced comic studies as an area of specialization for graduate students. So, I wonder, when did the comic become a legitimate form of academic literature?
Perhaps the turning point came in 1992, when the graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale won the Pulitzer Prize, leading to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which defined and provided a history of the genre. Throughout time, “low art” mediums often reveal the most interesting things about society because they challenge the accepted hegemony and, in doing so, bring about change and innovation. Believe it or not, Shakespeare’s theater was considered a “low art” form by his contemporaries.
Here at Rutgers, comics are becoming increasingly prominent in English and History classes. Professor Martin Gliserman has taught the graphic novel Ghost World in his introductory prose course for several years, and last semester a course exploring Jewish Graphic Novels was offered. From a pedagogical standpoint, comics offer Professor Gliserman a new way to study narrative: “When we study the graphic, we learn about the prose (and vice versa); we find new—obviously visual—modes of performing narrative.” Comics illuminate the way that we approach and read other mediums, such as the novel or the short story, because “[they] help a student to know what style is when we see different modes where style is an issue.”
This year, two students, Mimi Zander and Lauren Felton, wrote undergraduate theses on graphic novels. After taking a course their freshman year, both grew increasingly interested in studying graphic novels. “The course taught me a lot about the stylistic choices comic artists make in their works…and it also taught me about how images and text work together,” Lauren explained. In our age of visual communication she believes the ability to “read” images will become increasingly important and should become “an integral part of our English education.” Likewise, Mimi finds comics exciting in that they provide a new medium to explore, and they are not “less valuable” than the classical canon, just different.
What does the future hold for comics in academia? It’s tough to say. Lauren and Mimi are optimistic because of the amount of support they received during their research from the Rutgers University faculty. However, both mentioned they also faced criticism from their parents, and Professor Gliserman emphasizes the slow process of incorporating comics into academia. “Would a grad student doing graphic novels find a job?” he ponders, “…probably not at Rutgers English.” It has been a long, steep climb for comics, but this is typical of new forms that challenge the “high art/low art” hierarchy. Perhaps, for comics, it’s just a matter of time.
Robert Gulya
Illustration by Zac Schaffner