Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
their middle and high school classroom as a means of engaging their students’ interest and
enhancing their (the students) literacy. This is a bold proposal. Comics, after-all, are still
thought by many of us as “childish,” undemanding reading material, and middle and high school
as the time and place to leave childish things behind. In order for them to become literate, many
of us likely think, young adults need to be introduced to literature, and this means reading
books--specifically, the “great” books of the English canon. But Versaci not only believes that
comic books are the ideal medium to turn adolescents onto reading, he also believes that they
constitute a form of literature. He thinks that the contemporary bias against comic books is as
unwarranted as was the previous bias against novels; and, as one whose most memorable reading
moments in his adolescence came from comic books, I applaud his attempt to redeem their value
as meaningful reading material. However, even I am not sure whether comic books get students
more interested in reading. My own suspicion that it is the graphic material (i.e., the pictures) in
comics that has the greatest impact on the reader/viewer. This suspicion--one which I believe is
shared by many--is not adequately addressed nor quietened in his essay. In fact, his most
convincing example of the sophistication of comic books, and of the complex interrelationship
between images and words that they purportedly offer, really is one in which he persuasively
demonstrates the communicative power of its visual images. Though there is much to be said for
helping students become more critical in their viewing habits, it would seem a sort of intellectual
development that ought rightly to hold a secondary and distant place in an English class to the
Versaci begins his article by summarizing his assessment of how most of his adult
students remember their middle and high school English classes. He tells us that most of them
were left thinking of literature as “medicinal” (61), and reading as a chore. Literature, according
to Versaci, is frequently taught with such reverence, canonized works are too often
unquestionably considered containers of great riches, that students learn or intuit that it is their
role to learn to appreciate its/their (literary books) value. Versaci believes not only that comic
books are a type of literature, but that they are ideally suited to capture the interest of
adolescents. Because “readers ‘see’ the characters through the illustrations,” comic books “‘put a
human face’ on a given subject” (62). According to Versaci, young adults find comics more
inviting and accessible than other sorts of books, but he argues that comic books need not be any
less sophisticated or demanding than other forms of literature. He suggests that the “interplay of
the written and the visual” (62) in comics means that reading them demands “an active [. . .]
Versaci not only hopes to convince us that comic books can capture and excite students’
interest in literature, he also wants us to believe that introducing comic books into classrooms
will help make them aware that there are “high” and “low” forms of literature. When comics are
incorporated into the curriculum, he believes that students, finding it strange that they are asked
to study and analyze comic books, are encouraged to think about the consequences of
attributions of literary worth. He clearly hopes that students will judge contemporary
designations as to what constitutes literary quality as largely arbitrary, and that they will learn to
In order to help nurture doubt as to the value of current assessments of literary merit,
Versaci feels he has to succeed in convincing teachers to begin introducing comics into their
classes. He has a powerful “card” to play, and he plays it early in his essay--and well. Most of
us probably feel ambiguous at best about the curriculum we were required to cover in high
school. And if he is right in implying that the traditional canon persists and continues to
dominate the middle and high school curriculum, it is all to easy for us to imagine it as a source
of continued frustration for current and future middle and high school students. Versaci, then, in
reminding us of our own likely difficult encounters with intimidating works of literature, likely
prepares us to at least to listen to his argument in favour of comic books in the classroom as a
Versaci does not try and “sell” teaching comic books in the classroom as the ideal means
to slowly introduce students to the literary canon:--comic books are not to Versaci a “stepping
stone” which lead students towards discovering the celestial riches found in true literature. This
unapologetic appreciation of the value of comic books is beguiling, but makes his task harder
than it might have been had he acknowledged the “supremacy” of books over other written
mediums. So strong is the influence of the existing assessment of comic books as juvenile
reading material that we might more readily and openly attend to an argument in favour of its
incorporation into the middle and high school curriculum had he made clear that he considered
comic books merely a useful teaching aid. Comic books as literature, comic books as different
from but equal to books, is simply a very tough sell. However, Versaci shows some skill, some
For example, Versaci stays very far away from the likes of Superman and Spiderman as
examples of what he would like to see explored in class. Instead, he draws our attention to
comic books such as Daddy’s Girl, which deals with an adolescent girl who has been “sexually
abused by her father” (64), and to Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and II, a series which “retell[s] the
story of the author’s father, a Holocaust survivor“ (63). Comics, he is attempting to get us to
contemplate, can be serious stuff--so serious, in fact, that they might be deemed inappropriate for
young adult readers for reasons very different from those which here-to-fore might have come to
mind. Versaci also takes care to mention the names of writers of comic book writers (such as
Neil Gaimon) who also happen to have established themselves as award winning writers of
young adult and adult fiction. The quality of the writing in theses comics, he is preparing us to
Versaci also does a good job, then, in getting us to conceive of the writing in a comic
book as potentially very literate, and of its subject matter as potentially both serious and suitable
for young adult minds (though it is worth noting that he thereby supports the supposition that
literature, even if it can be expanded to include comics, must necessarily deal with “serious”
subject matter). He is also persuasive when he argues that, because young adults are not
intimidated by comic books, they therefore feel more comfortable engaging critically with them
than they do with books they recognize as part of the English canon. However, most teachers are
probably concerned that comic books are all about the pictures, that is, they likely believe not
only that there is too little writing in comic books but that whatever writing exists in comic
books will inevitably be overwhelmed by the power of the pictures that accompanies it. Versaci
begins to make an argument which addresses this concern, but ultimately ends up reinforcing our
likely belief that comic books are more accurately conceived more as a visual medium than as a
written one.
Versaci does not directly address the concern that there might be too little actual writing
in a comic book to develop literacy, but he characterizes the reading process involved in
exploring a comic book so that we are likely reminded of the one form of writing whose
sparseness is considered amongst its primary virtues--namely, poetry. He slyly suggests that
because readers of comic books must constantly relate words to images while they are reading,
that there is more going on, word-for-word, in a comic book than there is in a “traditional” book.
He writes:
conflict, setting, tone, and theme, they also operate with a poetics that blends the
He certainly seems to be arguing here that comic books can be used by a teacher to develop all
the sorts of critical thinking skills that books can (as well as some they can’t), and this argument
But he makes a much bigger mistake when, in his example of how text and graphics
interrelate in a comic book, he is evidently most interested in the communicative power of the
comic’s pictures. He writes about the effects of the presentation of the character Lily in Debbie
Forced to look at a relatively confined space with such intensity, students noticed
that the panels gradually become darker as Lily’s initial enthusiasm at having a
diary is undercut by the fact that her privacy has been violated. They also noticed
how the direction of Lily’s gaze varies through the four panels and that in the
crucial third panel, where she is responding to this violation, she seem to be
looking directly at the reader. Some students interpreted this visual strategy as
Though Versaci takes care to characterize the students as readers here, clearly, in this description
of the graphic drama of Lily’s gaze, they are better and more accurately conceived of as viewers.
Versaci seems more honest in his characterization of students when he writes that “this activity
appeals to [him] [. . .] because it forces [his] [. . .] students to be more critical viewers [emphasis
added]” (65). It is undeniably a terrific thing, as he argues, in this age of “movies and television”
(65), to develop critical attention to the visual medium, but comparing comic books to movies,
television, and even to video games does not do his cause much good. Too much has been made
of getting students to read and write, too little has yet been said about the virtues of visual
literacy, that the very last thing he should have done is to have linked comic books to
predominately visual mediums such as movies and television--especially those which share their
However, simply because Versaci fails to convince me that comics do encourage verbal
reading skills as much as they do visual reading skills does not mean that he leaves me
convinced that they do not promote literacy, nor that they are inadequate material to get students
to think critically about what they read. I imagine if I was in a classroom in which some of the
students were having difficulty with the offered curriculum, and if I possessed the power to alter
the existing curriculum, that I might just introduce them to some of the comic books that Versaci
introduces us to. But I am aware, though, that there are other options. For instance, the books I
am reading for my EDCI 353, books which apparently I will have the ability as a teacher to
incorporate into my classes, may not have the graphic enticements that comic books have to
attract attention, but they likely address adolescent concerns and interests far better than the older
curriculum must have done. They have the added virtue of being--self-evidently--reading
material. In sum, there may be other sources for teachers to turn to other than to comics if Huck
Finn, Shakespeare et al. continue to bore and intimidate current middle and high school students
as much as they may have previous generations of adolescent students. And, given that he leaves
me imagining comic books as more akin to video games than to classics of literature, I’d
Work Cited
Versaci, Rocco. “How Comic Books Can Change the Way Our Students See Literature: One