R comics gud?
Learning to Draw a Great American Novel
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: October 6, 2004
DOVER, N.J.
SOMETIME in 1939, when Joe Kubert was 13 years old and an aspiring cartoonist, he rode the subway from the far reaches of immigrant Brooklyn to the unknown world of Manhattan and applied for a job. There was an artist in his mid-20's, name of Will Eisner, who was putting out a newspaper comics supplement called "The Spirit," and the word was he needed a kid to sweep up the studio.
So Joe walked into the place and what hit him was not sights but smells - the gummy erasers, the musty paper, the opaque white paint used to cover mistakes. Even as he went on to the renowned High School of Music and Art, studying classical composition and anatomy, he learned about story and character and craft from Will Eisner and his staff artists.
When Joe graduated from high school, he gave no thought to any career except illustrating comics, selling five-page stories for $5 a page, ultimately becoming famous for the World War II series "Sgt. Rock." From the beginning, though, he noticed one trait about many of the most accomplished cartoonists. Rather than admit they worked in comics, they told outsiders vaguely, "I'm a commercial artist."
On a Monday morning 65 years later, Mr. Kubert leaned over the drafting table in his own studio, playing the venerable role of mentor, but doing so in a very different way. He directs what might be called Comics U., one of the few accredited schools of cartoon art, if not the only one. The techniques he picked up informally - "one piece at a time," he recalls, "from whoever's kind enough to give you the time" - his students acquire in a precisely devised three-year curriculum. Where 22 pupils enrolled when the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art opened in this town about 40 miles west of Manhattan in 1976, now 125 are enrolled, and this fall's incoming 45 were culled from nearly 300 applicants from around the globe.
As much as the school represents Mr. Kubert's enduring impact, it stands also for the growing literary legitimacy of comics, their growth in length and sophistication into "graphic novels." The form traces its origins to Will Eisner's "Contract With God," an unsentimental memoir of his Bronx childhood published in 1978. Since then, the practitioners have ranged from Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Holocaust narrative "Maus," to Chris Ware, who portrayed two generations of fatherless boys in "Jimmy Corrigan." Several of the most acclaimed graphic novels - Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor," Daniel Clowes's "Ghost World," and Max Allan Collins's "Road to Perdition" - have been adapted into films. Michael Chabon paid homage to the comics industry heyday of the 1940's and 50's in his prize-winning (unillustrated) novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay."
Mr. Kubert's school has played a major role in codifying and propounding what might be thought of as the canon of cartoon art. "The art of comics is a complex and demanding one with a grammar, principles of style, and traditions all its own," said David Hajdu, the author of a forthcoming history of the early years of the comics. "An education in traditional literature can surely help the author of a traditional novel, just as an education in the traditions of comics can help the author of a graphic novel."
The working title of Mr. Hajdu's book, "The Ten-Cent Plague," attests to the contempt heaped on comics for much of the past century, when they were derided by cultural mandarins and political figures as mindless diversions at best and incitements to juvenile delinquency at worst. Nonetheless, Mr. Hajdu pointed out, at least one "prominent and immeasurably influential" school of comic art functioned in the 1940's. Led by Burne Hogarth, who illustrated the "Tarzan" comic strip, the school was later subsumed by the School of Visual Arts.
Most commonly, though, young illustrators served de facto apprenticeships like the one of Joe Kubert to Will Eisner. Those lessons now inform many of the courses in Mr. Kubert's school.
EDUCATION: Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors (December 26, 2007)
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Some parents and teachers regard comics, with their sentences jammed into bubbles and their low word-to-picture ratio, as part of the problem when it comes to low reading scores and the much-lamented decline in reading for pleasure. But a growing cadre of educators is looking to comics as part of the solution.
In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.
“It’s very much a teacher-led kind of movement in that teachers are looking for ways to engage their children, and they’re finding some of that in comic books,” said Michael Bitz, who founded the Comic Book Project as a graduate student and is now its director. “For kids who may be struggling and for kids who may be new to the English language, that visual sequence is a very powerful tool.”
The recent interest in comics as a literacy tool comes as graphic novels have cemented their status as sophisticated works of literature, and as teachers nationwide are struggling to boost reading scores. Proponents of comics in the classroom say that they can lure struggling readers who may be intimidated by pages crammed with text. They also say that comics, with their visual cues and panel-by-panel sequencing, are uniquely situated to reinforce key elements of literacy, like story structure and tone.
Still, skeptics fret that in the wrong hands, comics could become simply a vehicle for watering down lessons.
“If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool,” said Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. “What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step.”
Lisa Von Drasek, the children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education, said that “not a semester goes by that not a parent or a teacher expresses a concern about a comic-format book that their child has taken out or is using for their reading time.” Usually, she said, the critics come around. “What we say is, ‘Whatever works.’”
Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland’s schools superintendent, said that years ago, she noticed teachers’ discomfort when their children were spotted with comics.
“They tried to justify it by saying to me, ‘Well, this student or this group of students, they hate reading, and we’re just trying everything,’” she said. “We’re trying to open the eyes of teachers and educators to this as a possibility, this as something that might really help children and is good education.”
In the 2005-6 school year, teachers at eight Maryland schools taught lessons based on old Disney cartoons as part of a Comics in the Classroom pilot program. Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, were commissioned to evaluate the program. They did not try to gauge how much students learned, but found that teachers and students had positive perceptions of the program.
“There were some teachers at first who thought: ‘Oh, my God, comics? What’s next?’” said Susan Sonnenschein, an associate professor of psychology at the university, who was one of the evaluators. “I think the teachers changed their impression.”
The state, working with Diamond Comic Distributors and Disney Publishing Worldwide, has since refined the curriculum and invited 200 teachers to take part on the condition that they provide additional feedback. It is also planning to introduce teachers to a new series of original comic books for early readers, to be released starting this spring by Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, and her husband, Art Spiegelman, who revolutionized comics with his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus.”
Ms. Mouly said that she believed her books had “enormous” potential to turn children on to reading. She cited the experience of her own son, now 16, who learned to read through French comics like Astérix.
“The one thing that retained my son’s interest night after night was the comics,” she said. “Whatever that light bulb is went on.”
At Public School 59 in the Bronx one recent afternoon, students clustered around tables, plotting out their own comic strips at one of the Comic Book Project’s after-school programs.
At one table, Jamie Collazo’s and his friends’ faces lit up when asked about their favorite activity: video games like Ultimate Spider-Man, Super Smash Bros. and Wolverine’s Revenge.
“I’m a game freak,” exclaimed Jamie, 11, saying that this was “when you collect a lot of games and you can’t stop playing them.” Reading, he said, “is kind of boring to me.”
But there he was, brainstorming a tale of three powerful gods who land on Nerainis, a planet between Neptune and Uranus.
Gabriel Cid, 10, agreed that “reading is kind of boring,” but said comics were different.
“Superheroes, comics, that’s when it gets interesting because you get to see all the cool stuff,” he said. “We get to do our own design, and we get to color whatever we want — create our own characters and stuff.”
By the end of the hourlong session, there were comics about islands populated by Native Americans, and about aliens who communicated in Morse code. There were plenty of misspellings (“to be countind you,” one child wrote in lieu of “to be continued”), but there were also instances in which students asked one another how to spell words like “mysterious.”
Amid the sketching, coloring and debating over the best way to split four panels into eight, Dr. Bitz of the Comic Book Project saw glimmers of learning: children composing, revising and organizing their thoughts into linear narratives.
“Because it’s their story,” he said, “they want to make it right.”
Letters
Pictures May Be Worth a Thousand Readers
Published: December 28, 2007
To the Editor:
Brian Ralph
Re “Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors” (news article, Dec. 26):
No less a personage than Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century English lexicographer and author, would doubtless approve the use of comics in making reading more accessible to 21st-century students.
“I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards.”
So quotes James Boswell in his “Life of Samuel Johnson.” Joan Downs
New York, Dec. 26, 2007
•
To the Editor:
It is about time comic books got their due as an educational tool. They are accessible and children love them.
When I was very young, my mother, who had been trained as a teacher, would read to my brother and me every afternoon. Sometimes it was the classics, sometimes it was classic comics like Archie and Little Lulu.
By observing my mother read, my brother was reading comic books on his own by the age of 3. He would then read them aloud to the other children in the neighborhood.
My brother went on to become a lawyer, and I went on to a career in publishing (books, not comics). And we are both still regular readers.
The other children went on to become doctors, lawyers and teachers, among other professions. Obviously, no harm done.
Anything that encourages an interest in reading is a good thing.
Jo Fagan
New York, Dec. 26, 2007
•
To the Editor:
In 1971, a Fallsburg Central High School English teacher named Andrew Neiderman, now a popular author, started an adventurous new program. Its goal was to develop and improve the reading skills of poor readers throughout the grades.
These students were borderline or failing. Many were not showing up at school because it held no interest for them, and many looked forward only to dropping out.
Mr. Neiderman created a reading lab where students could read whatever they liked — comic books, the sports pages, Popular Mechanics, TV Guide, whatever.
Mr. Neiderman recruited me to tutor these students. I saw that by reading what they liked, these disengaged students became engaged. Reading was fun, and the students, happy to read, did.
As they did then, the skeptics today, you say, fear “that in the wrong hands, comics could become simply a vehicle for watering down lessons.”
Four decades after Mr. Neiderman’s experiment, there is no reason not to try comic-based or other alternative literacy programs. Jay Burstein
New York, Dec. 26, 2007
CRIME; Revenge of the Krath
Published: January 18, 1998
For months, investigators in Pearl, Miss., have insisted that the teenagers linked to the shootings at Pearl High School belonged to a devil-worshiping group called the Kroth. Grant Boyette, the group's 18-year-old leader, supposedly persuaded his friend Luke Woodham to go on the Oct. 1 shooting spree, inspired by Boyette's devotion to Satan. But in a recent development, Jason Pollan, a class of '97 Pearl High graduate, has come forward to argue that Boyette was inspired as much by ''Star Wars'' as by Satan. Pollan was involved in a 1996 role-playing game with Boyette that featured the Krath, characters from ''Star Wars'' comic books. Did investigators, who haven't said where they heard about the Kroth, hear it wrong? They aren't talking, but Pollan says Boyette's playing style did reveal a dark side. Here's a look.
THE GOAL: Pollan and Boyette met at Pearl High three years ago, where they discovered a mutual interest in ''Star Wars'' movies and comics. Pollan, the game master, used standard rule books on role-playing games to devise a fantasy narrative in which invented characters took part in a drama of political intrigue. Boyette came by Pollan's home regularly for a period of 10 months. The game's overall purpose was to ''guide'' players from bad to good. To this end, Pollan introduced the Krath, a group of sorcerers founded by two evil children, Satal Keto and Aleema, who kill their parents and topple the government of the Empress Teta System. ''I made up an evil character named Kefka to lead Grant, hoping Grant would see the ills of Kefka's choice to be a bad guy,'' says Pollan. The only problem: ''Grant didn't do that.''
THE PLAY: Game players had ''free will,'' meaning that they rolled dice to determine their responses to narrative events dreamed up by Pollan. For example, if one character shot another, the roll would dictate whether he missed, wounded or killed. Most of these encounters weren't violent, but Pollan says Boyette, who named his character Che Guevara, always resorted to mayhem. ''It was lunatic. It got annoying real fast.'' Another bad sign: the name Boyette chose for Che's spacecraft. Most players picked peppy ones like Flare. Boyette went with Noriega.
THE END: Pollan eventually tired of Boyette's trigger-happiness: ''I told him I didn't want to play anymore.'' Boyette later started his own game, Pollan says, which included Luke Woodham and two friends who have been charged with (and pleaded not guilty to) murder-conspiracy. Pollan heard through mutual friends that Boyette's version of the Krath was violent, stocked with drug lords and killers. Pollan stopped playing the game; he's now writing short stories about the Krath instead.
When Fun Isn't Funny: Evolution Of Pop Gore
By SARAH BOXER
Published: May 1, 1999
''I think I'll give it to yuh in the belly! Yuh get more time to enjoy it!''
Quick, name the year of that quote. It was 1954. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist, was citing comic book dialogue to illustrate its brutalizing effect on children. Of course it could have been yesterday.
When two Colorado teen-agers, armed with pipe bombs and sawed-off shotguns, stormed Columbine High School and shot a dozen students, a teacher and themselves last month, the video games Doom and Quake and the Internet were named as possible suspects. In Time magazine Jeff Inman, a youth intervention specialist in Georgia, indicted the video games: ''You can actually set the gore level. . . . How much blood do you want to see splattered? It's sickening. It gives kids a lack of respect for life.''
Has anything changed in 50 years? Around 1948, Wertham noticed that many juvenile delinquents consumed a lot of crime and horror comic books. He argued in his book ''Seduction of the Innocent'' (Rinehart, 1954) that there must be a connection. ''An attitude which I have found most frequently engendered by crime comics is an attitude of brutality,'' he wrote.
Wertham described a boy who burglarized stores as saying, ''I read the comic books to learn how you can get money''; a 10-year-old ''inveterate reader of comics'' who threatened a 3-year-old, ''Now I must gouge your eyes out!'' and a comic-reading boy who was asked about his future profession and answered, ''I want to be a sex maniac!''
Amy Kiste Nyberg, the author of ''Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code'' (University Press of Mississippi, 1998), suggests Wertham was a more complex critic than most people think. He fought racism and sexism in comics. He was one of the first psychiatrists to look at the culture children are reared in rather than at the character of individual children.
He was also the first to point out the homosexual undertones of Batman and Robin: ''Robin is a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. . . . He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.''
However complex he was, Wertham is now linked with his fanatical campaign against comics in 1954. ''Seduction of the Innocent'' created such a tremor that during Senator Estes Kefauver's Congressional hearings on juvenile crime, not only Wertham himself but also a number of comic artists testified. Walt Kelly, the creator of ''Pogo,'' Milton Caniff, the author of ''Steve Canyon,'' and Joe Musial, who drew ''The Katzenjammer Kids,'' went to the hearings to defend the virtue of comic strips and distinguish them from the ''bad'' sort of comics.
But it was William Gaines, the head of E. C. Comics, publisher of ''The Crypt of Terror'' and ''The Vault of Horror,'' who stole the show. As Ms. Nyberg describes it, Gaines insisted his stories were in good taste and often had an ''O. Henry ending.'' Senator Kefauver then held up a cover of Crime SuspenStories and said: ''This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?'' Gaines said yes, then explained that it would only be ''in bad taste if, for example, the severed head was held higher and blood was shown dripping from it.''
That killed off horror comics, crippled crime comics and transformed Mad from a comic book into a humor magazine. But not because the Federal Government intervened. (The First Amendment was in the way.) Instead, comic book publishers, worried about their business, began to police themselves.
In 1954 they formed a trade association, the Comic Magazine Association of America and, within that, the Comics Code Authority. They rated their own comics, giving a seal of approval only to those that complied with the code. And comic book distributors vowed that they wouldn't touch anything without the seal. Here are some of the requirements of the Comic Code, as it stood then:
''Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals. . . . Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gun play, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated. . . . If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity. . . . In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.''
Under the Comics Code, even a comic of Bugs Bunny stealing something would not fly, says Art Spiegelman, the creator of ''Maus.'' Soon after the code went into effect, only the bland survived: funny animal comics, Archie comics and tamer superhero comics like ''The Flash'' and ''Green Lantern.'' It was not until a decade later that underground comics took off.
The Comics Code is still in effect. But its rules have changed to fit contemporary standards, and now most comics slip through the cracks anyway, because the distribution practices have changed.
Are there any echoes of 1954 still rumbling in the current anger against video games and the Internet? Mr. Spiegelman thinks people have gotten wiser. ''They know it's not video games, it's also guns, the breakdown of the social fabric.'' People can see, he says, that Japan has more violent comics than we do but far less murder. They see that the causes of violence are complex. But one thing has not changed. Complexity makes people feel helpless, Mr. Spiegelman says, and when they feel helpless they look to the past, saying things like, ''Remember when comics used to be funny?'' Of course that's what they said in 1954.
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Real-Life Superheroes To a Bunch of Comics Geeks
December 18, 2007 - By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES - 730 words
The Comic Book Is Back, in Luxe Coffee-Table Form
December 3, 2007 - By JOSEPH V. TIRELLA - 901 words
Wonder Woman Gets a New Voice, And It's Female
November 27, 2007 - By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES - 899 words
Asian Confusion
November 11, 2007 - By JIM WINDOLF - 830 words
PHENOMENON; Comic Genius?
November 11, 2007 - By BEN EHRENREICH - 861 words
pix dump 4 merry Holidays 2007 slideshow
http://www.flickr.com/groups/646368@N22/pool/show/
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: October 6, 2004
DOVER, N.J.
SOMETIME in 1939, when Joe Kubert was 13 years old and an aspiring cartoonist, he rode the subway from the far reaches of immigrant Brooklyn to the unknown world of Manhattan and applied for a job. There was an artist in his mid-20's, name of Will Eisner, who was putting out a newspaper comics supplement called "The Spirit," and the word was he needed a kid to sweep up the studio.
So Joe walked into the place and what hit him was not sights but smells - the gummy erasers, the musty paper, the opaque white paint used to cover mistakes. Even as he went on to the renowned High School of Music and Art, studying classical composition and anatomy, he learned about story and character and craft from Will Eisner and his staff artists.
When Joe graduated from high school, he gave no thought to any career except illustrating comics, selling five-page stories for $5 a page, ultimately becoming famous for the World War II series "Sgt. Rock." From the beginning, though, he noticed one trait about many of the most accomplished cartoonists. Rather than admit they worked in comics, they told outsiders vaguely, "I'm a commercial artist."
On a Monday morning 65 years later, Mr. Kubert leaned over the drafting table in his own studio, playing the venerable role of mentor, but doing so in a very different way. He directs what might be called Comics U., one of the few accredited schools of cartoon art, if not the only one. The techniques he picked up informally - "one piece at a time," he recalls, "from whoever's kind enough to give you the time" - his students acquire in a precisely devised three-year curriculum. Where 22 pupils enrolled when the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art opened in this town about 40 miles west of Manhattan in 1976, now 125 are enrolled, and this fall's incoming 45 were culled from nearly 300 applicants from around the globe.
As much as the school represents Mr. Kubert's enduring impact, it stands also for the growing literary legitimacy of comics, their growth in length and sophistication into "graphic novels." The form traces its origins to Will Eisner's "Contract With God," an unsentimental memoir of his Bronx childhood published in 1978. Since then, the practitioners have ranged from Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Holocaust narrative "Maus," to Chris Ware, who portrayed two generations of fatherless boys in "Jimmy Corrigan." Several of the most acclaimed graphic novels - Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor," Daniel Clowes's "Ghost World," and Max Allan Collins's "Road to Perdition" - have been adapted into films. Michael Chabon paid homage to the comics industry heyday of the 1940's and 50's in his prize-winning (unillustrated) novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay."
Mr. Kubert's school has played a major role in codifying and propounding what might be thought of as the canon of cartoon art. "The art of comics is a complex and demanding one with a grammar, principles of style, and traditions all its own," said David Hajdu, the author of a forthcoming history of the early years of the comics. "An education in traditional literature can surely help the author of a traditional novel, just as an education in the traditions of comics can help the author of a graphic novel."
The working title of Mr. Hajdu's book, "The Ten-Cent Plague," attests to the contempt heaped on comics for much of the past century, when they were derided by cultural mandarins and political figures as mindless diversions at best and incitements to juvenile delinquency at worst. Nonetheless, Mr. Hajdu pointed out, at least one "prominent and immeasurably influential" school of comic art functioned in the 1940's. Led by Burne Hogarth, who illustrated the "Tarzan" comic strip, the school was later subsumed by the School of Visual Arts.
Most commonly, though, young illustrators served de facto apprenticeships like the one of Joe Kubert to Will Eisner. Those lessons now inform many of the courses in Mr. Kubert's school.
EDUCATION: Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors (December 26, 2007)
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Some parents and teachers regard comics, with their sentences jammed into bubbles and their low word-to-picture ratio, as part of the problem when it comes to low reading scores and the much-lamented decline in reading for pleasure. But a growing cadre of educators is looking to comics as part of the solution.
In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.
“It’s very much a teacher-led kind of movement in that teachers are looking for ways to engage their children, and they’re finding some of that in comic books,” said Michael Bitz, who founded the Comic Book Project as a graduate student and is now its director. “For kids who may be struggling and for kids who may be new to the English language, that visual sequence is a very powerful tool.”
The recent interest in comics as a literacy tool comes as graphic novels have cemented their status as sophisticated works of literature, and as teachers nationwide are struggling to boost reading scores. Proponents of comics in the classroom say that they can lure struggling readers who may be intimidated by pages crammed with text. They also say that comics, with their visual cues and panel-by-panel sequencing, are uniquely situated to reinforce key elements of literacy, like story structure and tone.
Still, skeptics fret that in the wrong hands, comics could become simply a vehicle for watering down lessons.
“If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool,” said Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. “What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step.”
Lisa Von Drasek, the children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education, said that “not a semester goes by that not a parent or a teacher expresses a concern about a comic-format book that their child has taken out or is using for their reading time.” Usually, she said, the critics come around. “What we say is, ‘Whatever works.’”
Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland’s schools superintendent, said that years ago, she noticed teachers’ discomfort when their children were spotted with comics.
“They tried to justify it by saying to me, ‘Well, this student or this group of students, they hate reading, and we’re just trying everything,’” she said. “We’re trying to open the eyes of teachers and educators to this as a possibility, this as something that might really help children and is good education.”
In the 2005-6 school year, teachers at eight Maryland schools taught lessons based on old Disney cartoons as part of a Comics in the Classroom pilot program. Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, were commissioned to evaluate the program. They did not try to gauge how much students learned, but found that teachers and students had positive perceptions of the program.
“There were some teachers at first who thought: ‘Oh, my God, comics? What’s next?’” said Susan Sonnenschein, an associate professor of psychology at the university, who was one of the evaluators. “I think the teachers changed their impression.”
The state, working with Diamond Comic Distributors and Disney Publishing Worldwide, has since refined the curriculum and invited 200 teachers to take part on the condition that they provide additional feedback. It is also planning to introduce teachers to a new series of original comic books for early readers, to be released starting this spring by Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, and her husband, Art Spiegelman, who revolutionized comics with his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus.”
Ms. Mouly said that she believed her books had “enormous” potential to turn children on to reading. She cited the experience of her own son, now 16, who learned to read through French comics like Astérix.
“The one thing that retained my son’s interest night after night was the comics,” she said. “Whatever that light bulb is went on.”
At Public School 59 in the Bronx one recent afternoon, students clustered around tables, plotting out their own comic strips at one of the Comic Book Project’s after-school programs.
At one table, Jamie Collazo’s and his friends’ faces lit up when asked about their favorite activity: video games like Ultimate Spider-Man, Super Smash Bros. and Wolverine’s Revenge.
“I’m a game freak,” exclaimed Jamie, 11, saying that this was “when you collect a lot of games and you can’t stop playing them.” Reading, he said, “is kind of boring to me.”
But there he was, brainstorming a tale of three powerful gods who land on Nerainis, a planet between Neptune and Uranus.
Gabriel Cid, 10, agreed that “reading is kind of boring,” but said comics were different.
“Superheroes, comics, that’s when it gets interesting because you get to see all the cool stuff,” he said. “We get to do our own design, and we get to color whatever we want — create our own characters and stuff.”
By the end of the hourlong session, there were comics about islands populated by Native Americans, and about aliens who communicated in Morse code. There were plenty of misspellings (“to be countind you,” one child wrote in lieu of “to be continued”), but there were also instances in which students asked one another how to spell words like “mysterious.”
Amid the sketching, coloring and debating over the best way to split four panels into eight, Dr. Bitz of the Comic Book Project saw glimmers of learning: children composing, revising and organizing their thoughts into linear narratives.
“Because it’s their story,” he said, “they want to make it right.”
Letters
Pictures May Be Worth a Thousand Readers
Published: December 28, 2007
To the Editor:
Brian Ralph
Re “Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors” (news article, Dec. 26):
No less a personage than Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century English lexicographer and author, would doubtless approve the use of comics in making reading more accessible to 21st-century students.
“I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He’ll get better books afterwards.”
So quotes James Boswell in his “Life of Samuel Johnson.” Joan Downs
New York, Dec. 26, 2007
•
To the Editor:
It is about time comic books got their due as an educational tool. They are accessible and children love them.
When I was very young, my mother, who had been trained as a teacher, would read to my brother and me every afternoon. Sometimes it was the classics, sometimes it was classic comics like Archie and Little Lulu.
By observing my mother read, my brother was reading comic books on his own by the age of 3. He would then read them aloud to the other children in the neighborhood.
My brother went on to become a lawyer, and I went on to a career in publishing (books, not comics). And we are both still regular readers.
The other children went on to become doctors, lawyers and teachers, among other professions. Obviously, no harm done.
Anything that encourages an interest in reading is a good thing.
Jo Fagan
New York, Dec. 26, 2007
•
To the Editor:
In 1971, a Fallsburg Central High School English teacher named Andrew Neiderman, now a popular author, started an adventurous new program. Its goal was to develop and improve the reading skills of poor readers throughout the grades.
These students were borderline or failing. Many were not showing up at school because it held no interest for them, and many looked forward only to dropping out.
Mr. Neiderman created a reading lab where students could read whatever they liked — comic books, the sports pages, Popular Mechanics, TV Guide, whatever.
Mr. Neiderman recruited me to tutor these students. I saw that by reading what they liked, these disengaged students became engaged. Reading was fun, and the students, happy to read, did.
As they did then, the skeptics today, you say, fear “that in the wrong hands, comics could become simply a vehicle for watering down lessons.”
Four decades after Mr. Neiderman’s experiment, there is no reason not to try comic-based or other alternative literacy programs. Jay Burstein
New York, Dec. 26, 2007
CRIME; Revenge of the Krath
Published: January 18, 1998
For months, investigators in Pearl, Miss., have insisted that the teenagers linked to the shootings at Pearl High School belonged to a devil-worshiping group called the Kroth. Grant Boyette, the group's 18-year-old leader, supposedly persuaded his friend Luke Woodham to go on the Oct. 1 shooting spree, inspired by Boyette's devotion to Satan. But in a recent development, Jason Pollan, a class of '97 Pearl High graduate, has come forward to argue that Boyette was inspired as much by ''Star Wars'' as by Satan. Pollan was involved in a 1996 role-playing game with Boyette that featured the Krath, characters from ''Star Wars'' comic books. Did investigators, who haven't said where they heard about the Kroth, hear it wrong? They aren't talking, but Pollan says Boyette's playing style did reveal a dark side. Here's a look.
THE GOAL: Pollan and Boyette met at Pearl High three years ago, where they discovered a mutual interest in ''Star Wars'' movies and comics. Pollan, the game master, used standard rule books on role-playing games to devise a fantasy narrative in which invented characters took part in a drama of political intrigue. Boyette came by Pollan's home regularly for a period of 10 months. The game's overall purpose was to ''guide'' players from bad to good. To this end, Pollan introduced the Krath, a group of sorcerers founded by two evil children, Satal Keto and Aleema, who kill their parents and topple the government of the Empress Teta System. ''I made up an evil character named Kefka to lead Grant, hoping Grant would see the ills of Kefka's choice to be a bad guy,'' says Pollan. The only problem: ''Grant didn't do that.''
THE PLAY: Game players had ''free will,'' meaning that they rolled dice to determine their responses to narrative events dreamed up by Pollan. For example, if one character shot another, the roll would dictate whether he missed, wounded or killed. Most of these encounters weren't violent, but Pollan says Boyette, who named his character Che Guevara, always resorted to mayhem. ''It was lunatic. It got annoying real fast.'' Another bad sign: the name Boyette chose for Che's spacecraft. Most players picked peppy ones like Flare. Boyette went with Noriega.
THE END: Pollan eventually tired of Boyette's trigger-happiness: ''I told him I didn't want to play anymore.'' Boyette later started his own game, Pollan says, which included Luke Woodham and two friends who have been charged with (and pleaded not guilty to) murder-conspiracy. Pollan heard through mutual friends that Boyette's version of the Krath was violent, stocked with drug lords and killers. Pollan stopped playing the game; he's now writing short stories about the Krath instead.
When Fun Isn't Funny: Evolution Of Pop Gore
By SARAH BOXER
Published: May 1, 1999
''I think I'll give it to yuh in the belly! Yuh get more time to enjoy it!''
Quick, name the year of that quote. It was 1954. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist, was citing comic book dialogue to illustrate its brutalizing effect on children. Of course it could have been yesterday.
When two Colorado teen-agers, armed with pipe bombs and sawed-off shotguns, stormed Columbine High School and shot a dozen students, a teacher and themselves last month, the video games Doom and Quake and the Internet were named as possible suspects. In Time magazine Jeff Inman, a youth intervention specialist in Georgia, indicted the video games: ''You can actually set the gore level. . . . How much blood do you want to see splattered? It's sickening. It gives kids a lack of respect for life.''
Has anything changed in 50 years? Around 1948, Wertham noticed that many juvenile delinquents consumed a lot of crime and horror comic books. He argued in his book ''Seduction of the Innocent'' (Rinehart, 1954) that there must be a connection. ''An attitude which I have found most frequently engendered by crime comics is an attitude of brutality,'' he wrote.
Wertham described a boy who burglarized stores as saying, ''I read the comic books to learn how you can get money''; a 10-year-old ''inveterate reader of comics'' who threatened a 3-year-old, ''Now I must gouge your eyes out!'' and a comic-reading boy who was asked about his future profession and answered, ''I want to be a sex maniac!''
Amy Kiste Nyberg, the author of ''Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code'' (University Press of Mississippi, 1998), suggests Wertham was a more complex critic than most people think. He fought racism and sexism in comics. He was one of the first psychiatrists to look at the culture children are reared in rather than at the character of individual children.
He was also the first to point out the homosexual undertones of Batman and Robin: ''Robin is a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. . . . He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.''
However complex he was, Wertham is now linked with his fanatical campaign against comics in 1954. ''Seduction of the Innocent'' created such a tremor that during Senator Estes Kefauver's Congressional hearings on juvenile crime, not only Wertham himself but also a number of comic artists testified. Walt Kelly, the creator of ''Pogo,'' Milton Caniff, the author of ''Steve Canyon,'' and Joe Musial, who drew ''The Katzenjammer Kids,'' went to the hearings to defend the virtue of comic strips and distinguish them from the ''bad'' sort of comics.
But it was William Gaines, the head of E. C. Comics, publisher of ''The Crypt of Terror'' and ''The Vault of Horror,'' who stole the show. As Ms. Nyberg describes it, Gaines insisted his stories were in good taste and often had an ''O. Henry ending.'' Senator Kefauver then held up a cover of Crime SuspenStories and said: ''This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?'' Gaines said yes, then explained that it would only be ''in bad taste if, for example, the severed head was held higher and blood was shown dripping from it.''
That killed off horror comics, crippled crime comics and transformed Mad from a comic book into a humor magazine. But not because the Federal Government intervened. (The First Amendment was in the way.) Instead, comic book publishers, worried about their business, began to police themselves.
In 1954 they formed a trade association, the Comic Magazine Association of America and, within that, the Comics Code Authority. They rated their own comics, giving a seal of approval only to those that complied with the code. And comic book distributors vowed that they wouldn't touch anything without the seal. Here are some of the requirements of the Comic Code, as it stood then:
''Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals. . . . Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gun play, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated. . . . If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity. . . . In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.''
Under the Comics Code, even a comic of Bugs Bunny stealing something would not fly, says Art Spiegelman, the creator of ''Maus.'' Soon after the code went into effect, only the bland survived: funny animal comics, Archie comics and tamer superhero comics like ''The Flash'' and ''Green Lantern.'' It was not until a decade later that underground comics took off.
The Comics Code is still in effect. But its rules have changed to fit contemporary standards, and now most comics slip through the cracks anyway, because the distribution practices have changed.
Are there any echoes of 1954 still rumbling in the current anger against video games and the Internet? Mr. Spiegelman thinks people have gotten wiser. ''They know it's not video games, it's also guns, the breakdown of the social fabric.'' People can see, he says, that Japan has more violent comics than we do but far less murder. They see that the causes of violence are complex. But one thing has not changed. Complexity makes people feel helpless, Mr. Spiegelman says, and when they feel helpless they look to the past, saying things like, ''Remember when comics used to be funny?'' Of course that's what they said in 1954.
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pix dump 4 merry Holidays 2007 slideshow
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