Acephalous: Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 7/09/13)

Films:

Television Shows:

Comics:

Themes:

Feb 22, 2012 3:18:24 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Alison Bechdel, Batman, Batman Begins, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Christopher Nolan, Comics, Daniel Clowes, Doctor Who, Film, Film Theory, Game of Thrones, Grant Morrison, Heroism, Literary Theory, Literature, Mad Men, Science Fiction, Scott McCloud, Teaching, The Dark Knight, Visual Rhetoric

Tuesday, 07 February 2012

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium Now Easier than Ever to Find!

It's a permanent fixture in the right sidebar now, and I'll continue to update it regularly.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a terrible cold to attend to. (Stupid midterms wreaking havoc with stupid students' stupid immune systems ...)

Feb 7, 2012 4:29:45 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Alison Bechdel, American Born Chinese, Avatar, Batman, Batman Begins, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chris Ware, Christopher Nolan, Comics, Daniel Clowes, Doctor Who, Douglas Wolk, Film, Film Theory, Gene Yang, Grant Morrison, Heroism, Historicism, History, Joss Whedon, Leverage, Literary Theory, Literature, Mad Men, Reading Comics, Robert Kirkman, Scott McCloud, Teaching, The Walking Dead, Visual Rhetoric, Watchmen

Thursday, 23 June 2011

This must be the world's way of telling me it's time to rejoin it.

They made this just for me, put it on in Los Angeles and everything, yet somehow I missed it:

Via Scott McCloud.

That's right: The Doctor as Batman via Scott McCloud.

And I missed it.

Jun 23, 2011 12:43:14 PM | Batman, Batman Begins, Comics, Doctor Who, Scott McCloud, Television

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

My students just think they're so funny...

The winner of the Caption Scott McCloud Contest is:

Well, she wishes to remain anonymous, but agreed that her brilliant interpretation of McCloud's textless panels ought to see the light of day. As I said in class: "Congratulations! I hate you! You're awesome! (Damn it.)"

Apr 13, 2011 2:44:31 PM | Academia, Comics, Scott McCloud, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric

Monday, 11 April 2011

Every quarter I present my students with five panels from McCloud...

...and have them compete to see who can come up with the most hilarious narrative. Here are the panels:

They need to add narration or dialogue (or both), as well as specify what the word-picture relations are and how the transitions between the panels work. Every quarter I learn a little something about my students with this exercise, and this quarter is no exception: I've learned that they're either high, horny, heart-broken, violent, menstruating or some combination thereof. Should be a fun class tomorrow.

Apr 11, 2011 8:43:55 PM | Comics, Scott McCloud, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric

Sunday, 27 March 2011

Archaeology of the Impossible

Given that I have all of four days to wrap up the Winter quarter and vault into the Spring, lesson-planning's taken the bulk of my time of late. I'm thinking, as per the tentative title of this post, of delving into meta-fictional accounts of the origin of comic "heroism" this quarter, and have come up with the following (largely other-side-of-the-pond) syllabus:

"The Origin of Batman" (excerpt from Batman 47) - Bob Kane

You begin with the almost-begin: this is the first time Joe Chill's mentioned, by which I mean implicated, in the death of Wayne's parents. There's an earlier reference to their murder in Detective Comics 39 (November 1939), but it's abridged in a way that makes the story itself unrecognizable. (Which is, yes, the very opposite of the point I make below about Morrison's All-Star Superman, but that's because you can't already assume an audience is familiar with a story before it's ever been told.)

Batman: Year One (comic) - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

See what I did there? In terms of comparative styles, now I can introduce Asterios Polyp. To wit, Mazzucchelli in Year One:

Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

Those aren't as different as I thought they'd be. ("I have a hole in my cape," you can almost imagine Mazzucchelli's distraught Wayne saying.) But outside the cleanliness of the lines, there's little to make you believe that the person responsible for the first image would later be responsible for the second ... and that's a belief I'm going to try to disabuse my students of.

Batman Begins (film) - Christopher Nolan

Because you think I'm capable of teaching this course without bringing up Nolan's film? I didn't think so.

Planetary/Batman (comic) - Warren Ellis

This'll be the fourth re-telling of the Batman origin myth, only this time endlessly looped. The point, rhetorically speaking, in having them encounter four versions of the same story is 1) to emphasize that there's some inherent appeal there, but 2) to demonstrate that even if a story has inherent appeal, the manner in which a given rhetor presents it actually matters. The raw stuff is all well and good, but the power's in the telling.

Planetary #1 -10 (comic) - Warren Ellis

They're billed as "the archeologists of the impossible," after all, and Ellis's engagement with both the history of the genre and its conventions could hardly find a more suitable course to be taught in.

All-Star Superman (comic) - Grant Morrison

I'm thinking of teaching only the first page of the first issue, as it's the most brilliantly compact origin story ever, and after that Morrison's metafictional games might be a bit too much for students to handle. There's a genius to its concision, i.e. the manner in which it boils down a story everyone already knows to its barest bones, and then presents them to a knowing audience in a way that is, quite frankly, moving. (Sorry, sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One (comic) - Alan Moore

Introducing students to old-school, public-domain heroism ... plus plenty of opportunities to talk with my largely Asian-American classes about how "The Yellow Peril" is depicted.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (comic) - Mike Mignola

Being an origin story that involved someone other than Batman, so the students can reevaluate their premises about mythos in American culture at the end of the quarter, etc. etc.

Hellboy (film) - Guillermo Del Toro

Etc. etc. That's quite a bit of material for a composition class, and textually speaking—i.e. despite it being all film and comics—it's historically and allusively dense to boot. But it seems doable. That said, if there's anything very obvious I'm missing, feel free to point it out ... until Tuesday, because believe it or not, that's when the Spring quarter starts.

Mar 27, 2011 7:03:29 PM | Alan Moore, Books, Comics, Doctor Who, Film, Film Theory, Heroism, Historicism, Literature, Scott McCloud, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 11/28/2011)

(For the record, many more [and all future] updates can be found here.)

By request, below are the links to all of the visual rhetoric exegeses (a.k.a. McCloud or Bordwell-inspired "lecture notes") I've produced in the past few years. I would say I'm surprised there aren't more of them, but then I remember 1) how labor-intensive they are to compose and 2) the number of drafts I've deemed insufficient for public consumption that linger unfinished in assorted folders. So here goes:

Films:

Television Shows:

Comics:

Themes:

Feb 23, 2011 9:46:49 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, American Born Chinese, Comics, Film Theory, Gene Yang, Joss Whedon, Literary Theory, Literature, Mad Men, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Kirkman, Science Fiction, Scott McCloud, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric, Watchmen

Monday, 31 January 2011

On teaching racially fraught literature in racially diverse classrooms (American Born Chinese)

The two problems that confront any author attempting to write a confessional comic are likely best summarized in these two sequences from Art Spieglman's Maus:

In short: how are painful memories and painfully stereotypical people best represented in a medium associated with childishness? I'll discuss Spiegelman's answer to this question in more detail when I teach Maus in a few weeks. For now, it is enough to pose it and identify it as a critical problem faced by all non-white authors, including that of American Born Chinese, Gene Yang. Unlike Maus, in which an already assimilated Art Spiegelman is depicting his decidedly unassimilated father, American Born Chinese is very much concerned with the process of assimilation: what is gained, what is lost, etc. For example:

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Jan 31, 2011 4:18:25 PM | Academia, American Born Chinese, Comics, Gene Yang, Race, Scott McCloud, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

"I put a zombie in his head? I can put zombies in people's heads?"

Such was the reaction of my students after I informed them of their murdering ways and asked them to tell me what happens in the gutter between the first two panels.

Needless to say, teaching The Walking Dead will be directly responsible for me hearing countless things I never thought I'd hear in a classroom.

Jan 25, 2011 7:38:42 PM | Comics, Robert Kirkman, Scott McCloud, The Walking Dead, Visual Rhetoric

Monday, 17 January 2011

On wordiness and time in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead

I'm transitioning from teaching film to comics in my unfortunately named "Slow Horror" course tomorrow and so I'm preparing to introduce my students to comic conventions using Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead. Kirkman's wordiness works to my advantage, as with duo-specific word-picture relations:

Kirkman didn't need to inform the reader that Glenn returned with toilet paper because the paper is clearly visible. Because the characters are constantly carrying on, examples of them pointing out the obvious abound. The same applies for interdependent word-picture relations:

Notice the difference between the examples McCloud used at the link and Kirkman and penciller Tony Moore's panel? The examples use textual elements in a variety ways—be it thought balloons or captioned narration—but the Kirkman and Moore panel only uses them as a means for delivering direct dialogue. It wasn't until I wrote the previous sentence that I realized the same might be true for the entire run of The Walking Dead. After I flipped through the first few issues to confirm my suspicions, I thought about why he might have chosen to eschew one of the formal properties of comic grammar that differentiates it from televisual media: natural interiority.

Unlike first-person voice overs in television and film, thought balloons and captions provide a window into the mind of character without calling attention to themselves as narrative devices. In other words, there is nothing special about the audience's access to the mind of the characters because such access is a feature of the medium so ingrained as to be beneath notice. A comic book in which such access is never granted creates characters whose motivations seem cryptic despite the fact that such access is almost never granted on television or in film. To be uncharitable: Kirkman is writing a television show that happens to be in a comic book and the fact that it was adapted is a function of its easy adaptability.

But to say that would be to miss the point, which is that the ease with which it could be adapted obscures what has been lost in the translation to the small screen: because interior access is only very rarely granted, whatever is gained by withholding it in the book is lost in the transition to the screen. The characters will no longer be ciphers whose thoughts must be inferred from their words and actions: they will merely be characters on a television show. The implications for the television show are obvious: recreating the suspicious atmosphere of the comic must be done by other means ... which I will discuss when I teach the show next week.

Returning to the panel above: the wordiness of that specific panel and the book generally creates some interesting formal difficulties, the most interesting of which relates to the disconnect between the single expression on his face and the time it would have taken him to speak all those words. As represented in that panel, time is both slowing to a halt (visually) and speeding up (verbally). Moreover, Shane's face must adequately account for all of the emotions he communicates in those text balloons because the fact that some of them are burst means that some will be more strongly felt than others.* It must account for both the double exclamation points in the first balloon and the ellipses that trail off his his quieter remarks in the third.

How did Moore accomplish this? He draws very well. How was Kirkman complicit in this? By joining the balloons directly instead of connecting them, Kirkman creates the impression that this entire speech is the articulation of a single train of thought. It clearly isn't: his fear for his life intermingles with his need for a family and those two intertwine with his desire for creature comforts, but they are all independent emotions that become entangled only when they all refer back to the same face. The wordiness works to Kirkman's advantage here: Shane becomes more psychologically complex because his single expression is associated with a host of conflicting emotion.

In short: time is out of joint and even the simplest characters seem psychologically complex simply by dint of the wordiness. The effect disorients the reader and leaves them unsure about their relation to narrative time or the characters—which is exactly the same situation in which the characters find themselves as they lose track of the days they've lived in a world in which they must suspect that the motives of everyone are more complicated than they seem.

*This and subsequent balloon images borrowed from Nate Piekos's excellent Comic Grammar.

Jan 17, 2011 7:34:22 PM | Comics, Literature, Reading Comics, Robert Kirkman, Scott McCloud, Teaching, The Walking Dead, Visual Rhetoric

Wednesday, 06 October 2010

Lesson Planning: Teaching basic film theory through Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Same as I did with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (and continue to do to Mad Men) only this time about Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The standard caveat applies.

The formal elements of the opening five minutes of Nausicaä conspire to disorient the audience. For example, the film opens with a medium close-up, i.e. one that captures the upper torso of a character in a manner that allows the audience to clearly read a character's face without making it seem, as close-ups often do, as if the camera (and with it, the audience) are violating that character's personal space. In short, a medium close-up is designed to create a sense of comfortable intimacy between character and audience, e.g.

That's obviously a terrible example, because Miyazaki's deliberately flouting film convention in order to make Lord Yupa seem inscrutable. The audience is disoriented because its members know how medium close-ups are conventionally employed (even though they might not know they do) and the violation of those conventions creates a little anxiety. If Yupa were to remove that mask, the audience would experience a slight sense of relief because the shot now conforms to their expectations. But if a director continues to confound them, the cumulative effect will create an uncomfortable audience, which is what Miyazaki wants:

First: in conventional terms, this shot sequence is backwards. Establishing shots like the one above are intended to introduce the principle elements of a location and their spatial relation to each other. They are typically framed as extreme long shots in deep focus (as it makes little sense to introduce an audience to a collection of unfocused blobs), and they typically appear before medium close-ups of the characters contained within it. Reversing the typical shot sequence, as Miyazaki does here, results in the audience being surprised by the surroundings.

This formal trick works even when those surroundings are less alien than they are here. For example, imagine a medium close-up of a couple of men standing around outside:

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Oct 6, 2010 7:41:06 PM | Academia, Comics, Science Fiction, Scott McCloud, Visual Rhetoric

Monday, 27 September 2010

Teaching Panel Transitions via Craig Thompson's Blankets

The standard caveat applies: these analyses are designed for freshmen-level composition courses. I repeat: these analyses are designed for freshmen-level composition courses. The wheel will not be reinvented here.

I begin the quarter teaching excerpts from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Making Comics not because all arguments about comic form and content end with the theories contained therein, but because 1) his terms have come to define the debate and 2) they are damn useful in setting up classroom debates. (My students don't realize that they frequently recapitulate the scholarly arguments inspired by the book, but they do.) The basic idea behind this exercise is to get them to understand that they're all murderers and the only way they'll get their heads out of the gutters is figure out how to move from one panel to the next. First I provide the McCloud:

Then I follow it with an example from their text, in this case Craig Thompson's Blankets:

You'll note that I haven't included an obvious example of a moment-to-moment transition here, but that's because I want them to understand from the get-go that this terminology is flexible. In this case, I would argue that this is moment-to-moment on two accounts: the first would be conventional McCloud, because in the gutter between the those panels the reader must imagine Phil squirm until he can spot the "sharks" on the floor beside the bed. My assumption here is that "squirming" represents "a single action" and Thompson portrays its constituent parts, but my assumption is also an assertion that students can (and tomorrow will be forced to) take issue with.

For example, it could be argued that "squirming" is an indivisible act and that, as such, it cannot be broken down into a series of moments (although the very existence of these panels would seem to indicate otherwise). Here as elsewhere, the poor fit between McCloud's term and Thompson's text works to my advantage: something cannot simply be said to be something. It must be argued. The same difficulties arise with McCloud's next transition:

The problem is right there in the word-picture relation: is the "single subject" of McCloud's panels a baseball player and a drunk ("person") or a baseball bat and a drink ("object")? It may seem like a distinction without difference until you imagine a fourth panel for each example: if the baseball player swings and the fourth panel presents him rounding the bases, the "single subject" had to be him; if the batter swings and the fourth panel presents the bat flying into the stands and injuring a spectator, the "single subject" must have been the bat. Implicit in retroactive determinations of the sort is a more complicated argument about what the meaningful elements within a panel are. Here's the Thompson I'm pairing with the above:

What is the subject of this panel? Is it Thompson or the blood on his hands? An argument can made be for either (though obviously one is more interesting the the other). I could continue in this vein, but I want my students to figure this out on their own and not simply repeat what I write on the blog. With that in mind, I will simply present the last examples (minus non-sequitur for Thompson-specific reasons I'll cover later) in the order in which they will appear on the wall. Feel free to knock them (and me) about in the comments. Here goes:

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Sep 27, 2010 7:04:08 PM | Academia, Comics, Scott McCloud, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric

Saturday, 20 March 2010

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life. That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers. The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton.

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play. That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists. Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it.

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship. They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.

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Mar 20, 2010 10:14:45 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Books, Bruce Springsteen, Cerebus, Comics, David Simon, Deadwood, Eddie Izzard, Historicism, Leonard Cohen, Literary Journalism, Literary Theory, Literature, Octavia Butler, Race, Science, Science Fiction, Scott McCloud, Television, The Wire, Thomas Pynchon, Watchmen, Woody Allen

Friday, 12 March 2010

Stuff White People Like Stealing

Considering that

two Jews from the Bronx, Bill Finger and Robert Kahn (Bob Kane) created Batman
two Jews in Cleveland, Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, created Superman
a Jew from Washington Heights, Mortimer Weisinger, created Green Arrow and co-created Aquaman
another Jew from Washington Heights, Stanley Lieber (Stan Lee), teamed up with a Jew from Brooklyn, Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby), to create the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, Galactus, Doctor Doom, and Iron Man
a few decades earlier, a Jew from Rochester, Joseph Simon, had also partnered with Kurtzberg, and together they'd created Captain America
another Brooklyn Jew, William Eisner, is possibly the most important comic artist ever (dayenu); arguably invented the graphic novel (dayenu); wrote two of the most influential theoretical books about comics (dayenu); and has the award for creative achievement in the medium named after him

would it be fair to say that white people stole superheroes from the Jews the same way they'd stolen rock 'n roll from black people?*

*Not really. This is territory is trod plenty and well, but it's worth rehearsing: Elvis Presley borrowed rock 'n roll from black people, and always returned as much of it as he could promptly and with gratitude. But he could never give it all back, because from the perspective of white America, it tainted him: anyone that the New York Times could call, as it did Elvis in 1956, a "blues shouter ... imbued with the spirit and style of those Negro singers" clearly had dangerous and unsavory associations. That same year, the Chicago Defender pushed the issue of this affinity to the fore in articles like "Arrival of Elvis Presley No Puzzle to T-Bone Fans," in which Presley's speech was rendered in Negro dialect: "Yew-oo ain't nuthin but a houn' dawg," the paper has him singing; later, he explains his style by saying "Ah'm jus' singin' the only way ah know how." Claiming, as Eric Lott did in Love and Theft, that Elvis was no better than a Nineteenth Century minstrel; or, as people generally do, that he stole rock 'n roll from black people, misses the point: many black intellectuals, following the lead of black musicians, not only praised Elvis for respecting their tradition, they loved the fact that, via Elvis, that tradition had been embraced by the sons and daughters of die-hard Dixiecrats. One editorial in the Defender (that I can't relocate at the moment) was a series of winks, nods, and nudges about ceremony in Tupelo at which John Rankin, reputed to be the last white man to utter the word "nigger" in anger at a black man on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, was forced to bestow some sort of honor on Tupelo's most famous son.**

**I'm not sure why the footnote is that much more substantial and academic than the post it qualifies, but I figure that if I can get away with it in a dissertation, I can get away with it on a blog.

Mar 12, 2010 8:10:53 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Comics, Dissertation, Grant Morrison, Historicism, Literature, Race, Reading Comics, Scott McCloud, Visual Rhetoric, Watchmen

Sunday, 07 March 2010

On the persistent metafictions of Alan Moore

(Because Amazon's taking away your almost-free books, I thought I'd offer up a free excerpt from mine. It's neither finished nor particularly good, but turning stacks of virtual notes into viable prose is a messy process and what's the point of even having a blog if you can't ask your readers to help straighten up your mess? It ends rather abruptly because I need to mark essays, but rest assured, it will arrive at the obvious destination soon enough.)

The inaugural issue of the British comic anthology Warrior, published in March of 1982, contained two stories scripted by a 29-year-old Alan Moore that could not have been more different in tone or conception. The first told the story of an attempted rape in a dystopian future: corrupt police accost a young woman, but before they can rape her, they are murdered by a man who explains, in iambs, why he came to her aid and why he is about to blow up the British Parliament. In stark contrast to the opening chapter of V for Vendetta, Moore’s second contribution comes from “an age of lingering innocence, an age of golden dreams,” and recounts how, in 1956, “the Miracleman Family” repelled the invasion of a terrorist organization from the future called the “Science Gestapo.”

These serialized stories represent two possible career paths for young Moore: he can become a writer who creates and develops original ideas, as he does in V for Vendetta; or he can become the kind of whose genius is particular to comics, i.e. one whose talent lies in the ability to transform a caricature into a character of compelling psychological depth. (Characters in mainstream comic books are, after all, a form of communal property: they belong to a company, and are subject to regular refashioning and repurposing.) Although its cartoonish art and quaint language could hardly differ more from the harsh lines and sharp tongues of V for Vendetta, the final eight panels of the Miracleman story depict the process that, over the course of the decade, will become Moore’s signature style.

Reunited after preventing the “Science Gestapo” from traveling to the past by defeating them in the future, the Miracleman clan shares a laugh: “S-so…Garrer was never here, because he never left 1981! It sounds unbelievable,” says Kid Miracleman. “Maybe so, Kid,” Miracleman responds, “But that’s the way it was…or was it?” As they laugh, the focus shifts from the family to Miracleman alone and the narrator, whose role up to this point had been providing linguistic gristle for the duo-specific word-picture relations—in which the words and the pictures say the same thing, as in books designed to teach children to read—begins quoting an ominous-sounding passage from Nietzsche:

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Mar 7, 2010 8:35:56 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Comics, Reading Comics, Science Fiction, Scott McCloud, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric, Watchmen

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
From there on out, it's all about the writing. I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera.

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

Oct 14, 2009 12:39:41 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Comics, Film, Historicism, History, Literary Theory, Literature, Reading Comics, Scott McCloud, Shameless Self-Promotion, Teaching, Television, The Dark Knight, Watchmen

Tuesday, 19 May 2009

Scott McCloud learns to follow the advice he'd later dole out.

(You stop blogging for five days and you forget how to write a draft. This was near enough to what I intended its finished form to be that I'll let it stay up. One last bit: I meant to segue that last bit into a comparison between experimental comics in the '80s and early '90s and modernist literature in the '10s and '20s. There's something in the compulsion to manifesto on the one hand and proto-structuralism on the other that warrants fleshing out.)

The last time I read Scott McCloud's Zot! must have been a few months after the final issue came out in 1991. (I made the mistake of all lame Lotharios: I lended them to a woman hoping she would be impressed by my ability to appreciate the wit of some third party and never saw my beloved books again.) Because I'm leaning on Understanding Comics and Making Comics like a vaudeville drunk on hat rack, giving McCloud's creative output a chance to work its charm on me again seemed like a good idea. So I picked up the collected Zot! in Baton Rouge and now I'm not so sure re-reading it was a good idea, because now I want to write a non-composition oriented article on the tangled relationship between aesthetic theory and creative works when they're both produced by the same person

Re-reading Zot! after having read Understanding Comics and Making Comics makes it painfully obvious that McCloud spent its run becoming the critic he now is. The early issues are clumsy combinations of manga conventions (his admission) and Hernandez brothers stylings (the unacknowledged but obvious influence). He quickly outgrew his concept but refused to abandon it, leading to a comic whose bittersweet (and before their time) coming of age stories never can quite get grounded. He stumbled onto the animating metaphor of Buffy—high school as Hellmouth—but for whatever reason couldn't bring himself to embrace it. Why not? That's unclear.

But even if we can't know the "why" readers of the originals can certainly date the "when," but because of a silly convention, those who read the collected Zot! cannot understand what the original audience knew: McCloud was the last person to realize what it was he'd become. If only graphic novels contained the letter pages that accompanied the original issues, McCloud could've spared himself the pains of sitting in judgment over his own work:

Letters like this were my introduction to theories of genre, mode and medium. I suppose they don't need to be reprinted, what with Understanding Comics and Making Comics being explicit statements about the issues raised in letters like this, but learning while being taught feels educational no matter who's doing the teaching. In the back pages of Zot! I learned without realizing I was learning, and I think stuff sticks better that way.

(Or maybe I'm just justifying using hamburgers and teaching The Dark Knight and my every last pedagogical strategy again.)

May 19, 2009 9:40:58 PM | Comics, Literature, Scott McCloud, Teaching

"Some modern travellers still pretend to find Acephalous people in America." Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, 1753