Month: January 2023

The Rhetoric of Comics

Post author By Pamela Jackson
Post date January 23, 2023

Written by
Ben Jenkins, Lecturer, Rhetoric and Writing Studies
San Diego State University

Normally, when I tell my colleagues about the plan for one of my courses, I quickly see their faces drop as they realize that they’re stuck listening to me talk about rhetorical analysis. They’ll usually give me at least a few “that’s really interesting” comments with a nod of the head before they quickly remember that they urgently need to grade some papers or give blood.

But ever since I started telling them about my new course, The Rhetoric of Comics, I see genuine excitement overcome their whole body. They become animated as they forget to ask me about the research and pedagogy and instead focus on their own favorite comics. I’ve had discussions with people about Batman, their favorite manga titles and other works they’ve enjoyed since they were kids. Those discussions usually circle back to a question like “do you think I’d be able to use comics in my course?” It’s at this point that I direct them to the work being done at Comics at SDSU. As part of the NEH Comics and Social Justice Grant awarded to Comics at SDSU, I was able to create a course centered on the rhetoric of comics that allows students to understand the rhetoric used in comics, how that rhetoric helps or hinders marginalized voices, and allows students to practice what they’ve learned as they work on creating their own comic.

Throughout the process of developing this course, I kept trying to recall what I would have wanted to study in a rhetoric of comics course as an undergrad; the development of the three main projects was the key to everything.

With the first project, I centered the focus on exposing students to the visual rhetoric present in comics, and how the medium allows for a level of communication that isn’t possible in film, books, or audio. I developed lesson plans ranging from interpreting color, to general introductions to the concepts of visual rhetoric and sequential art.

Part of the fun of creating this class was coming up with a reading list. The main textbook I chose to use was Scott McCloud’s Making Comics (2006). While the content has some information he covers in his previous book, Understanding Comics (1993), it also contains helpful information on the developmental aspects of creating a comic book. By utilizing the information from McCloud and other scholars, I was able to create lessons that highlight the many rhetorical and creative decisions comics creators make throughout the process.

While I chose a number of comics to highlight as examples of storytelling and technique, the main comic I focused on was The Magic Fish (2020) by Trung Le Nguyen. Nguyen’s limited use of three color palettes paired with three different storylines helps clarify the difference and meaning of each path. With Nguyen’s beautiful work, and with McCloud’s technical explanations, I was able to create lessons that help students see how comic storytelling creates a world for the reader that doesn’t compare to other mediums.

The second project was created with social justice and marginalized communities in mind. For this project I ask students to compose a multimodal essay, comic, or presentation based on their analysis and comparison of two comics that are either about a marginalized community, or feature a main character from a marginalized community. By comparing comics featuring marginalized communities student’s are able to recognize how assumptions and stereotypes play a role in the creation of some comics, and the interpretation of characters by some readers.

Finally in the third major project, I ask students to build upon what they learned as they created a comic of their own. I don’t expect the students to be expert artists, but I do want them to use the visual rhetorical strategies they’ve learned about in McCloud’s text, and to mimic storytelling and artistic techniques they might have seen in The Magic Fish and other comics. Just like Nguyen was able to tell his own story detailing what it was like to come out to his friends and family, I encourage students to tell their own individual stories through the comic medium.

Comics aren’t something one necessarily expects to encounter in a university setting, but they’d be wrong. Comics have been a part of our society for…well, I don’t actually know how long. I’m not a historian, but if you’d like to learn more about the history of comics, we have a course for that here at SDSU, and now we have a rhetorical analysis course on comics as well. It’s been a privilege to be able to create this class. My only hope is that the students who take the course learn to love and appreciate comics as much as I do.

Ben Jenkins completed his MFA in creative writing and his BA in English at SDSU. Currently, he works as a lecturer at SDSU while also teaching English at Miramar College. Ben is a tribal member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. In 2016, he won the new voices Native American writing contest at the literary journal, See the Elephant.

Some of Ben’s interests include: literature and issues pertaining to American Indians and other indigenous people throughout the world, civil discourse, our relationship with technology, social justice, the environment, visual rhetoric, and comics.

Tags comics, comics@sdsu, curriculum, SDSU

NEH Comics and Social Justice Grant William Nericcio

Social Justice and the Teaching of Comics at San Diego State University: A Case History Focused on “I/Eyegasm 21st Century Comics, Photography, Cinema, and Cultural Studies”

Post author By Pamela Jackson
Post date January 13, 2023

Written by Dr. William Anthony Nericcio, Director, MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor, English and Comparative Literature, SDSU — Nericcio is also the publisher of Amatl Comix, the comix studies imprint at SDSU Press.

As I faced the prospect of teaching an English 157 Comics and History course for the third time at SDSU, I was hit with a wave of trepidation: how could I teach the course differently this term? After all, I did not want to fall into a rut. The first iteration of the class had been entitled The Virus Eye/I and had debuted to around 150 students in the fall of 2020. The next iteration of the class, also to some 140 plus students was a little out there–it was called Psychedelic Mirrors: Sex, Drugs, and Rocknroll in the Age of the Televisual. Now I had gotten word, Fall 2022, that the class registrations had been growing and that I would be teaching 270 students in the class–I had to redouble my efforts and hit it out of the park and I had to do so in way that was true to the mission of the class, part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, “Building a Comics and Social Justice Curriculum,” co-directed by Elizabeth Pollard and Pamela Jackson, both of whom also lead our university’s Center for Comics Studies.

I called this third try “I/Eyegasm 21st Century Comics, Photography, Cinema, and Cultural Studies.”

And though the focus of the course was going to be keyed to social justice issues: racism, discrimination, systemic violence and the like, I did not stress this in the course description, nor did I heavy-hand it to them in the opening days of the class. This was the premise of the class according to the syllabus:

Buckle your seatbelts and order up some eye-protection — this is NOT your grandfather’s “Comics and History” class! Our Fall 2022 experimental comix extravaganza will emerge out of the twisted corridors of something called I/Eyegasm as we explore the deliciously and outrageously twisted psyches, minds, and visions of outrageous women and men in some of the most exotic and eye-opening comix, film, sequential art, photography, and cultural analysis this side of the planet. Our focus (pardon the pun) will be both the “I” and the “Eye”-“I,” the name we give to our complex consciousness and “Eye,” the name of the organ that dominates us in the digital age. Between Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and more, our eyes have never been more saturated, never more filled with stimulus.

Our class will both study and (even possibly) reinforce our shared 21st century electro existential experiences where the mesh of our minds with computer screens, smartphones, and television screens comes to saturate our consciousness. The books and movies and pictures and videos we will experience this term will open our eyes to brave new worlds. But these works are not without their tricks, not without their surprises, and the fractured souls they flaunt before our eyes will test our intellect, imagination, and, most deeply, our emotions–they may even tattoo our psyche! Works to include artist/authors like Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Hernandez, Emil Ferris, Robert Crumb, Marjane Satrapi and more. Open to all majors and minors with no prior expertise with comics or literature anticipated or expected.

But the class featured writers who were transgender, Jewish American, Mexican American etc and it was through the diversity of representative artists–including Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Emil Ferris–that I was able to gently inculcate the arcane and troubling histories of social justice and attacks on justice that are part of our legacies as Americans, as denizens of this planet My great colleague, Dr. Gregory Daddis, has written of his class for this same NEH/SDSU initiative something that also guided me in my course-crafting; Daddis writes about “how comics, as cultural products, influenced Americans’ understanding of social justice issues helped shape the fundamental objectives that I hoped my students and I would achieve by course end.” They did for me as well–but as I have taught large lecture classes for 30 years here at SDSU, and to largely non-English major, General-Education-unit-seeking undergraduates, I had learned that you have to let the works do the major lifting when it comes to issues of Social Justice — telling them they had to be thoughtful never works, showing them the benefits of thoughtfulness and empathy always works.

For instance, the class opened with FREUD FOR BEGINNERS by Oscar Zarate and Richard Appignanesi–the titillating enchantments of Freud were used as a kind of sleight of hand to lure students for whom comics are new and alienating into the web of our efforts; here’s a snapshot from my actual day to day course calendar:

Screenshot of a page from Dr. Nericcio's class calendar. It reads:"It's only the 2nd day of class ... and guess what! You've finished reading a book as you enter GMCS 333 having completed your reading of Oscar Zarate's and Richard Appignanesi's FREUD FOR BEGINNERS. Kiss your brains for being the rock star undergraduate that you are ... (not coming to class with the assignment complete, kick yourself in the existential backside for being a slacker!). As you read, think about dynamic connections you might draw between what you are reading and seeing and what you yourself have experienced recently. I don't know about you, but the Covid plague has been wreaking havoc on my unconscious, filling my dreams with fantastic visions and outrageous situations. Additionally, as you read, I also want you to watch the text, as this strange book is actually at least two books at once! The first is obvious: Richard Appignanesi, the writer and intellectual historian glossing key concepts and events from the life of Freud and the history of Psychoanalysis. But there is also another book: Oscar Zarate's drawn rendition of Freud's life and history, but, also, Zarate's keen, savvy curation of engravings and drawings and photographs from the late 19nth century and early 20th century. What might, on the surface, appear to be an illustrator playing with nasty pictures, is also, on further observation, a critical operation, where a cartoonist and visual arts curator attempts to reveal the tricky, complex relationship between images and our psyche, between pictures and our imagination. All of this, of course, will help us better understand the dynamics of sequential art, of graphic narrative, of .... COMICS!"

I also wanted the students to start thinking about themselves and their own relationship to visual representation, so I had them do an assignment in class where they did their own self portraits. First, using our class Facebook page, I would introduce them to new artists incorporating new approaches to self-representation like Titus Kaphar’s “Shifting the Gaze.”

Screenshot of a post from the class Facebook page. It shares an article from the New York Times about the politics of art.

Then, I would highlight their own incipient graphic efforts–expertise in art was not a requirement!

Screenshot of a post from the class Facebook page that shows a student drawing from a lined notebook.

During the semester I also used social media to underscore connections between the works we were experiencing as in this Tumblr share–it was also a way to introduce them to more artists:

Screenshot of a post on Tumblr. IT SAYS, "This picture illustrates the feelings incorporated in many of the books we read. Whether it be the difficulties of Kafka living as a Jew in a place where they were hated, the constant compulsions faced by Jason Katzenstein in “Everything Is an Emergency,” the women objectified in John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing,” as well as criticized in Marjane Satrapi’s “Embroideries.”"

click for the original posting

We also ran into challenges during the semester — this was a group of 200-plus freshmen many of whom had not been in a classroom for two years owing to Covid. So we had to come up with ways to test the students without alienating them, and we were largely successful. Here is an example of their first quiz that had little value but that let them know exactly how they would be tested on the mid-term:

Screenshot of an assignment titled, "NOT THE MIDTERM, IN-Class IMAGINATION CHALLENGE NUMERO UNO!"

By the end of the semester, our hope was that the course, a disguised macro-meditation on the value of empathy would translate months later, after the course was over, into a successful meditation on the value of social justice in a world that, at times, looks down its nose at “woke” or “progressive” values. The secret of social justice focused pedagogy is that it makes better people of us all — one of the reasons that literature and comics play a special role in higher education.

A first-generation citizen of the Ivory Tower, William Nericcio was born in Laredo, Texas, and educated at the University of Texas, Austin, and Cornell University, where he completed his Comparative Literature Ph.D. at the age of 26. Now the Director of MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts & Sciences Program, Nericcio also serves as Professor of English and works on the faculties of Chicana/o Studies & Latin American Studies at San Diego State University. Nericcio’s signature book Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America, appeared with the UTexas Press (2007). His next books were on playwright Oliver Mayer’s works, The Hurt Business (2008) and Homer from Salinas: John Steinbeck’s Enduring Voice for California (2009). Nericcio’s #BrownTV: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen (2019), co-authored with Frederick Aldama, appeared with Ohio State University Press. He also co-edited Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (2020) for Hyperbole Books.

Tags comics, comics@sdsu, curriculum, SDSU

Grace deVega Uncategorized

In the words of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, “Part of the journey is the end.”

Post author By Pamela Jackson
Post date January 4, 2023

Written by Grace deVega
SDSU History Major, 2022

This quote is particularly fitting for this final blog exploring my process in designing the digital exhibit “Sound of Comics” for SDSU’s Center for Comics Studies. Of all of the academic endeavors I have undertaken while at SDSU, this one has felt the most like a journey. There have been multiple paths to tread, obstacles to overcome, and constant support and encouragement along the way. And now I have reached the end: You can access “Sound of Comics” here.

In terms of multiple paths, some of the most significant decisions I have made in the final part of this curation have pertained to paring down the content. I cultivated a substantial number of collection pieces — far more than could be included — after scouring the materials in the library and beyond. The process then became a task of figuring out connection points between the pieces and organizing them into a proper exhibit. Often, I created a visual guide to help me write down all of my ideas and begin building relationships between avenues of content.

As evidenced by this brainstorm web, I had several different avenues that I wanted to explore with music alone. I also knew that too many subsections would overwhelm my audience with text and images, so I selected specific pieces and paths to pursue, which helped the claims in the exhibit appear more intentional and direct. For instance, one path that I did not pursue outright was the notion of “Dance” in comics, but I still found ways to incorporate the dance-related ideas into some of the collection’s pieces. Each of the exhibit sections received similar treatment, and the end result was three major categories with several smaller subcategories that reinforced the ideas of their parent topics.

With reference to obstacles, most of the barriers that I faced dealt with translating the exhibit into its digital form. As I expected, there was a significant learning curve when first working with WordPress, which is the platform that I selected (having chosen from Omeka, Google Sites, Adobe, and a few other digital exhibit options). I watched several tutorials and made several unsuccessful attempts to figure out the system at the beginning. However, I eventually learned the tools of the platform, as well as figured out how to manipulate those tools to produce the content and design that I desired. Most of this work came through trial-and-error, which was difficult but ultimately rewarding when I was able to see the finished product of each section. In addition, I decided to format the layout of all of the pages before implementing their text and images which proved useful in building my confidence and knowledge of the platform while also ensuring their uniformity. Perhaps most importantly, I was able to overcome these challenges through the support of Dr. Pamella Lach, the Director of the Digital Humanities Center at SDSU. I met with Dr. Lach several times, and she helped me select WordPress as my digital platform, as well as offered advice on best practices throughout the process. Her support was particularly helpful when discussing accessibility with the website and making certain that the exhibit is compatible with screen readers and all other ADA compliances. I am so grateful for her assistance and insight.

To that final point about support, I have been fortunate throughout this entire process to receive advice and encouragement from a variety of sources. Along with the indispensable support of Dr. Lach, several other scholars have offered their perspective in improving my work and helping me examine sound in comics more thoroughly. Over the last month, I have had the privilege to interview several comics scholars, querying their understanding of sound in comics. I interviewed Dr. Barbara Postema, who studies wordless comics, to discuss comics that tell stories when conventional forms of sound are intentionally limited. Dr. Postema explained the role of images, pictographs, and expression lines in replacing alphabetic symbols when figures communicate. For instance, she referenced the dashed dialogue lines in Hawkeye #19, which she labeled “asemic,” or lacking in semantic content, as a key example of this type of wordless sound conveyance. She mentioned the frustration that audiences experience when encountering communication in this form, and I found such insight extremely helpful when creating the “Disability and Sound” section of the exhibit.

I also had the opportunity to interview Dr. José Alaniz, a comics scholar and professor at University of Washington, Seattle. Our conversation covered a wide array of topics pertaining to sound in comics, and one of my biggest takeaways from Dr. Alaniz was the ability of sound to both reinforce and distort the reality of the comic. We discussed the “mimetic function” of certain sounds, such as including a pre-existing song within a scene because it establishes the setting in time and in its similarity to the world of the audience. At the same time, Dr. Alaniz pointed out that depictions sounds are often “toyed with,” as he called them, to underscore the unfamiliarity of the landscape and exacerbate the divide between the world of the comic and the world of the reader. His perspective proved invaluable when I discussed environments in the “Music” and “Sound Effects” sections of the exhibit.

Lastly, this project would have been “dead air” without the guidance and supervision of Librarian Pamela Jackson and Dr. Elizabeth Pollard. Pam Jackson provided me with some of the first comics that I read for the exhibit, and she, along with the rest of the Library’s Special Collections and University Archives team, have been incredibly helpful, thoughtful, and considerate over the course of my research, especially when I spent hours in their archives poring over comics. Similarly, Dr. Pollard always made herself available to answer questions, provide feedback, read over text that I had written, and connect me with people that could support my efforts. I have grown so much as a student, scholar, and fan of comics under her guidance. Lastly, Dr. Pollard and Librarian Jackson have shown genuine enthusiasm for my work throughout the entire process, which has helped me stay motivated and reassured in the steps I had taken, even when I questioned myself.

So, while this may be the end of my journey into sound in comics, I could not be more proud of the work I have done or more appreciative of the people who helped me get there.

Grace deVega (she/her) is a Fourth Year History and Political Science student at San Diego State University. She previously won the President’s Award at the SDSU Student Research Symposium and 1st Place in her Division at the CSU Research Competition for her research into the impacts of the 1986 Philippines People Power Movement on nonviolent revolutions. She has also played clarinet for the past twelve years, including in the SDSU marching and concert bands, which is where her passion for music and aural studies derives.

Tags comics, comics@sdsu, SDSU, sound in comics