Teaching Roundtable: Comics, Childhood, and Children's Comics

Nancy reads comics. Of course she does.

This post is about teaching. As I said when I started KinderComics, one of my goals in doing this blog is to brainstorm publicly about a course I'll be teaching this coming Fall 2018 semester at CSU Northridge: an English Honors seminar titled Comics, Childhood, and Children's Comics (English 392). Despite having taught at the intersection of comics and children's culture for years (including bringing comics into my entry-level Children's Literature class and designing courses on picture books that also explore comics), this upcoming Honors seminar marks the first time I've actually pitched a course devoted to children's comics per se. I'm excited about the prospect, and honestly a bit daunted by it too.

Why daunted? Comics and childhood, together, make for a sprawling, complex area—and perhaps you can tell from my course's title that I haven't yet committed to a particular focus. Which is to say that I haven't decided how to delimit the course or what objectives to put front and center. I've been thinking about those things for a while. Thing is, the students and I will have fifteen weeks together, which in practice, experience tells me, means about twelve weeks tops for introducing new readings. What's more, part of the brief for an Honors seminar with, say, between a dozen and twenty students is that the students take turns presenting to and teaching one another, sharing the results of deep, self-directed research (fitting challenges for an advanced course). So it seems clear that I'll have to make some severe choices when it comes to focusing down. Yow!

I've thought of at least four potential foci that are important to me:

1. The tradition of comics about children, particularly US newspaper strips, from the late 19th to late 20th century, including formative work by Outcault, Dirks, Swinnerton, and McCay and beloved later work by cartoonists like Crosby, Crockett Johnson, Schulz, Watterson, and Lynn Johnston. This could entail tapping the scholarship of, say, Jared Gardner, Ian Gordon, Philip Nel, and Lara Saguisag, among others.
2. The roughly mid-20th century concern, or moral panic, over comics as children's and young adults' reading, particularly in the US, which led to the damning of comic books in other media and the imposition of a suffocating self-censorship "Code." This is a well-covered and  probably inescapable topic, one that taps research by, for example, Martin Barker, Bart Beaty, James Gilbert, David Hadju, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Chris Pizzino, Leonard Rifas, the late John Springhall, and Carol Tilley.
3. Critical, unsentimental, or subversive depictions of childhood in contemporary comics, particularly graphic memoirs, for adult readers. I think here of David B., Bechdel, Thi Bui, Findakly and Trondheim, Justin Green, Nakazawa, Satrapi, Small, and so on. The scholarly sources here are legion, including Michael Chaney, Hillary Chute, Elisabeth El Refaie, Andrew Kunka, Joseph Witek, Gillian Whitlock, and many others. Memoir is probably the most obvious intersection of comics and literary criticism at the moment, and depictions of childhood are vital to the genre.
4. The current young readers' comics movement that has grown around the idea of the graphic novel (and most nearly reflects the focus of this blog!). That movement intersects children's and YA literature study, children's and teen librarianship, the growing professional literature on teaching with comics, and the idea of comics as a distinctive form of, or pathway to, literacy. Again, the scholarship here, though recent, is growing by leaps and bounds. On the literacy teaching side, I think of James Bucky Carter, Katie Monnin, and many others; on the literary criticism side, I know of no better distillation of current trends than the collection Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox and published just last year. It is this area that got me excited about teaching the course, and so I feel it has to be well represented.

All these areas seem important. Child characters are central to the satirical and sentimental uses of comics and to the form's popular spread; the history of moral panic is crucial to understanding comics' reputation, even now; the depiction of childhood in adult texts is key to the burgeoning alternative comics and graphic memoir canon, from Binky Brown to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters; and the sheer popularity of graphic novels for young readers today is a trend so dramatic as to throw all the other areas into a new light. So, the question for me is, what objectives do I want students to achieve as they work at the crossroads of comics and childhood?

With all this in mind, I'm inviting several of my close colleagues in children's comics studies to join me here in an intermittent series of posts that I'll call a Teaching Roundtable. This roundtable will amount to, again, brainstorming, and perhaps debating the importance of our different teaching objectives. First up, TOMORROW, will be Dr. Joe Sutliff Sanders, author of, among other things, the new book A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child (U of Minnesota Press, 2018), editor of The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines are Not So Clear (UP of Mississippi, 2016), and faculty member at the Children's Literature Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Joe will be following up on this initial post -- readers, please come back tomorrow to follow and chime in on the discussion! Add your voices! Thanks.