A Q and A related to the webtext “Perspicuous Objects: Reading Comics and Writing Instruction” (published at Kairos). The Q and A was originally published at John Pell’s Blogora / Rhetoric Society of America blog, April 3, 2015.
1.) What can students of writing and rhetoric learn by looking closely at comics and graphic novels?
Can I start with a digression into film? (I’m going to do that.) I first taught Intro to Film at Ball State, which has a very strong film and media studies program, housed in Telecommunications. My course was housed in English, though, so we ended up with sections of Intro to Film that were split between English majors who loved close reading and film-focused majors who knew how to light a scene but didn’t always have patience for analyzing the details. There were moments of amazing culture clash in those classes, where the film students would pan a film on technical or stylistic grounds and the English majors would defend it as narrative. The trick was to get the English majors to see and assess the filmic style, and to get the film majors to understand style as a narrative or rhetorical choice, rather than as “correct” or “incorrect.” If things were working right, at the end of the course students could not only name what a filmmaker was doing technically in a given shot but also see how the complex composition in that shot connected to the complex set of moments that made up the whole film.
Roger Ebert inadvertently summed up the teaching-and-learning problem I’m talking about, in a brutal negative review of Battlefield Earth (John Travolta’s Scientology movie). Ebert said the director had “learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he [had] not learned why.” And that’s sort of what’s at stake when we talk about visual communication and rhetoric: Not just naming the visual moves, not just making them at random, to add variety for variety’s sake, but getting a sense of why and when you’d make these moves—of how to deploy them with rhetorical sense and power, how to improvise with them, how to read them with rhetorical smarts. Our culture is jammed with terrific examples of visual communication, of course, but I would argue that film and comics offer us an almost incredibly rich source of sophisticated visual rhetoric deployed to communicate and to move. And I love—as an aside—that these forms became sophisticated in the hands of practitioners who were often trying to figure out how to make compelling stories about gangsters and superheroes and teen romance. Where would we be without Saturday morning serials? Where would we be without Stan Lee?
So the short answer to your question is that the visual is crucial to contemporary communication and persuasion, and learning to describe and even to deploy comics-like rhetoric in sophisticated ways can be a wonderfully effective way to understand, access, and study the powers of visual rhetoric.
2.) Could you say a bit about why you think this genre is useful in the teaching of writing and/or rhetoric?
More and more in our college writing courses, we teach students to compose visually and physically, to understand the design dimensions of their writing as rhetorical, and to begin to name the visual tools they’re using, at least in a basic way—contrasts, repetitions, alignments, proximities, for example. The “why” of this tends to be obvious to anyone who’s worked through a big stack of resumes or read a poorly formatted proposal or seen a bad slideware presentation: strong visual and physical design of documents becomes real evidence of clear thinking and organizational skill. Weak design wastes the time and energy of its recipients. Strong design—whatever strong design means for the communication at hand—conveys more useful information in a page than weak design communicates in three. And I’d say there are a lot of subtle, highly helpful design moves a composer can make with just text in a standard typeface running more or less straight down the page. So that gets at what you’re asking about comics and teaching writing: Given the limited amount of time we have in any one course, and given how much of our students’ composition is likely to be text heavy, why make room for visual, sequential narratives like film and comics?
For one thing, film and comics, even in pretty small doses, offer opportunities to understand how images and visual gestures become compelling and significant in the context of a longer (or larger?) composition. How does the insertion of an image affect a composition, beyond illustrating an already-made point? How can we look at the concatenation of images and words on a page in sophisticated ways? What language do we have for that? In film commentary, there’s a tendency to assign generic meanings to certain shots and compositions. For example, high angle shots are often said to indicate that a character is vulnerable. But they don’t have to indicate that, any more than jagged lines in a comic absolutely must signal tension or violence. Those formal qualities may lend themselves to those meanings easily, but they don’t begin to express those meanings until they’re deployed in context. Similarly, naming a visual “move” isn’t the same as analyzing the move in action as part of a unique composition. Looking at a comics page and asking how the writers and artists achieve the esoteric rhetorical effects on that page by concatenating many elements will take students farther than just naming parts. Puzzling over the rich, idiosyncratic moves of comics artists can raise different and often more interesting questions than looking at the standard products of graphic design (though those can be great, too).
On top of that, all of our newfangled image-manipulating tech allows students to make things with images. In this context, I think even small doses of visual narrative analysis help students begin to produce much more sophisticated visual products. Mindful, informed analysis of sophisticated visual narrative can help them to expand their consciously-held store of possible visual moves, and it alerts them that they can notice visual rhetorical moves in the wild and then learn to use those moves themselves.
And my experience is also that students can be much more free about arranging and rearranging and editing and revising a sequence of images than they are about doing the same with traditional text. Students often enter college writing without a vision for revision as part of writing. They’re thinking, “Look, it almost killed me writing these five paragraphs. Now you want me to explode them and rearrange the bits and pieces? Stop.” But moving images around doesn’t feel so awful, partly because they’re coming to the process without pre-conceived and self-limiting ideas about how it’s done, partly because producing images has become so nearly instantaneous. If we can get our students to revise and rearrange a set of images in order to make different kinds of meaning with it, then that learning can help us make the case for doing the same kinds of revising and rearranging with more traditional texts. If we can get them to see how images are full of complicated and subtle signals that they can deliberately take charge of, then they can begin to imagine how the same is true of text.
So there’s some teaching by analogy there, and there’s some collapsing of the analogy to make the case even stronger: your visual composing and your textual composing not only seem a lot alike, they are a lot alike. So by the time we get to composing long traditional essays, students are a little more prepared for the notion that while they have made a point in one way, they might instead make it in any number of other ways, and they might rearrange and recompose their ideas in more and less effective ways. They’re more ready for the notion that the same conclusion might be defended in vastly different ways.
I’m beginning to ramble, though. Let me sum up like this: I tend to weave a few complex visual narratives and visual compositions into my teaching of writing in order to activate my students’ minds to the rich communicative possibilities of the visual, and—building on their new mindful experiences of sophisticated visual communication—I tend to ask them to try to compose with the visual as a way to make composing new to them, so that they will reevaluate what it means for them to write even a very traditional essay. Even a limited introduction to principles from film art and comics art helps me reach those goals.
3.) How did composing for the web shape your thinking about the form of “Perspicuous Objects” as an argument?
You know, one of the first reasons for making this a digital piece was that I wanted to use Scott Kolbo’s art—as much of it as I could logically fit in, really—and it’s hard (expensive!) for print to support that, or to get a good grip on how the art will be displayed when the piece goes to print. My plan was to get Scott to help me show what I was talking about, and once we decided to compose visually for the web, we got a lot of permission to design tons of Scott’s work into the argumentation, if that make sense. So Scott has a recurring character in his art called “Heavy Man,” who has a reverse superpower where under pressure he gets so heavy he falls through floors. And as I developed my discussion of criterial aspects, visual analysis, and Batman, I was able to just shoot Scot an email and say, “Hey, Heavy Batman. Can you make it happen?” And Scott made it happen. We also have a “Heavy Charles” for the section where I discuss Charles Schulz and Peanuts. And these drawings tend to be more than just illustrations, because having someone with Scott’s skill helping me build the piece meant that the art could become part of the argument as the argument grew, rather than being tacked on at the end of the process.
But I should back up. My writing process began with a Computers and Writing conference presentation about the visual rhetoric of comics, which I expanded into a fairly typical first draft for an academic essay. But then Scott and I began talking about collaborating and Mike Edwards from Kairos encouraged me, so when I began the process of refining the essay, I did so with the idea that I was building a webtext. That shift raised questions about how people would read “PO” and about how extensive the finished product would be, could be, should be.
Having Scott along meant I could refine my case visually, as I’ve said. Breaking up the essay into pages meant thinking about how each section might stand alone or might work in sequence (or out of sequence) with the others. And then we were able to add additional sections. We put in the whole of Scott’s “Sonic Medicine” comic broadside, at high resolution. I wrote and included a pretty long analysis of the broadside as a comic, using the kind of approach I’m defending in the “Perspicuous Objects” argument. And we also included a gallery of Scott’s work, and a brief interview, and an explanation of Scott’s characters and ideas. And even a relevant exploration of the grotesque in literature. The webtext format allowed me to not only use Scott’s work but also provide fairly rich context for it, so that the webtext as a whole defends ideas about comics, tries to put those ideas into acton, and includes a comic that both helps me say what I want to say and suggests how much is still unsaid, since I clearly don’t say all that might be said about the form and content of “Sonic Medicine.” In a traditional academic journal context, most of that would have been left out. The result of working it all into “PO” is that the webtext can be entered in several ways, at several levels. There’s that traditional academic essay baked into its DNA, but there’s also the exploration of Scott’s work, individual pages that can be seen as mini-essays, and my analysis of Scott’s work. Multiple ways in, multiple kinds of audience invited in, I hope. A webtext that offers an argument and some answers, but that also (I hope) just opens up some conversations about how comics work and about how writing teachers might work with comics.
Rpt. from “Three Questions with Fred Johnson.” Interview by John W. Pell. The Blogora. Rhetoric Society of America, 3 Apr. 2015. Web. ~2000 words.
Here is an Image article on Scott Kolbo’s art: “Far as the Curse is Found: The Art of Scott Kolbo,” by Cameron J. Anderson.