Author: katrinalo

Although Frey and Fisher advocate for the use of graphic novels and other visual media as a means of engaging students in creative writing, they nonetheless seem to situate these texts as something other than or outside of academic text. That is, while graphic novels may mediate learning through their pop culture appeal to students, they still seem to be presented as forms of “low-brow” reading and not as legitimate literary texts themselves. Invariably, the written text is still privileged; indeed, the authors’ focus was on using graphic novels, a “form of popular culture,” to “[scaffold] writing techniques,  particularly dialogue, tone, and mood,” and even “[began] with the idea that graphic novels were comic books at best and a waste of time at worst” (24. This brings up questions of what exactly constitutes a legitimate and appropriate “academic text” for study in the English classroom and who has the power to make those decisions. Though this issue is beyond the scope of my post, I think these questions of legitimacy, access, and power imbalances in curriculum-planning bear further consideration.

To return to the article, while the authors’ focus seems to be on using students’ existing visual literacies to foster or reinforce more traditional forms of literacy, I would like to argue that not only should we treat graphic novels as literary texts in the classroom, but that we also need to explicitly teach visual literacy skills to our students. Although it is true that many students come into the classroom already possessing a different visual literacy skillset and perhaps have more confidence / practice in interpreting and encountering visual media, I think it is nevertheless important to give our students certain literary tools to enhance their reading, understanding, and analysis of graphic novels and their articulation thereof. Close reading and other analytical skills, after all, are transferrable across various literacies, and fostering students’ confidence and ability to analyze a graphic novel may also help them improve their analysis of more traditional forms of narrative, and vice versa.

Thus, I think if we are going to use graphic novels in the classroom, then we need to teach students the conventions of the discourse. At the very least, they should have an awareness of terminology and formal elements specific to graphic novel studies, elements  that authors use to influence readers’ perception of the work. Just as students doing a film study need to be aware of certain aspects of film (such as camera angles, zoom, story boards, etc) that mediate or even manipulate our emotional reactions, so too, students studying a graphic novel need to understand elements such as framing, gutter space, panels, etc. In other words, students must be given the tools to understand not only what is on the page and what the effects of the page are, but also how these effects are achieved.  The very nature of the graphic novel medium, after all, affects how we approach the narrative.

One significant difference between prose fiction and graphic novels, for example, is that graphic novels are a “unique hybrid of text and image” that demands a continuous shuffling of attention between the images and words (Rosen 3). Hirsch uses the term “biocularity” to highlight the “distinctive verbal-visual conjunctions that occur in comics,” and it is this biocularity that enables what Eisner termed “sequential art” (as qtd. in Whitlock 966). Specifically, sequential art conveys a story or information through presenting images in succession; however this “sequence of images [is] linked by juxtaposition, rather than chronological order,” and consequently, is able to “manipulate the time and space within a narrative” (Rosen 3). Thus, while capable of portraying a chronological account of events, comics are also able, at the same time, to depict simultaneous events by juxtaposing two different scenes. However, because comic panels are arranged side by side, there necessitates the existence of a “gutter,” or the negative space between the two images. These gutters, according to Whitlock, “fracture both time and space, offering a staccato series of frames” that require the reader to fill in the missing parts themselves and achieve narrative closure by “mentally [constructing] a continuous, unified reality” (970). Reading and analyzing graphic novels, therefore, require a different set of literacy skills, skills we should not automatically assume our students already have.

Works Cited

Frey, N. and Fisher, D. (2004). “Using Graphic Novels, Anime, and the Internet in an Urban High School.” The English Journal 93(3): 2004. 19-24. Print.

Rosen, Elizabeth, K. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008. Print.

Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: the seeing ‘I’ of the comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4(2006): 965-979. Project MUSE. Web. 20 Nov. 2009.

By: Katrina Lo