Northeast Modern Language Association 51st Annual
Convention, 5-8 March 2020
Marriott Copley Place, Boston, Massachusetts
Saturday, Mar 7, Track 18, 04:45-06:00
Location: HYANNIS (Media Equipped)
18.17 Saving the Day: Accessing Comics in the 21st Century
(Roundtable)
Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Independent Scholar,
and Carl B. Sell, Oklahoma Panhandle State University.
Chair: Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar
Cultural Studies and Media Studies & Pedagogy &
Professional
"Krazy in the Klassroom: Teaching Early Newspaper
Comics" Jonathan Najarian, Boston University
Teaching early twentieth-century newspaper comics presents a
unique challenge: not only is there an incredible wealth of content to sift
through, many of the most famous cartoon characters of the period—Krazy Kat,
the Yellow Kid, the Katzenjammer Kids—were products of a material print culture
that is quickly disappearing. This talk will sample some of the excellent
online resources available for instructors wishing to introduce newspaper
comics into their classroom, including the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and
Museum website, digitalcomicmuseum.com, and the excellent Yellow Kid website
hosted by the University of Virginia. I also plan to contrast online resources
with traditional print resources such as those published by Sunday Press and
Taschen, with an eye towards understanding how the internet has at once
facilitated and complicated how we introduce early comics to our students. For
while the internet has democratized access to many comics that would be
otherwise forgotten, it has also further removed us from the print and material
context in which this work was originally received.
Jon Najarian received his PhD from Boston University in
2019. He is currently at work on a book manuscript titled The Intermedial Era:
Literary and Pictorial Narrative from Modernism to Comics, which proposes a new
context for understanding the rise of the graphic novel by linking the
development of comics as a form to the multimedia experiments of modernist
writing. He has published articles on Thomas Pynchon, the philosophy of Stanly
Cavell, and the current state of comics studies.
"Finding Frankensteins (and Other Illustrated
Classics): Resources for Research and Teaching" Michael Torregrossa,
Independent Scholar
In 2012, I took a graduate-level seminar at Rhode Island
College devoted to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its
afterlife in popular culture. We were assigned to do a short research paper,
and, being a life-long, reader of comics I eventually settled on a paper
looking at how the text has been adapted onto the comics page. Eight years,
four conference papers, and one on-campus address later, I am still fascinated
by the vitality of Shelley’s characters in the comics medium and the variety of
forms her story has taken in comics over the course of the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. The focus of this presentation will be on the various
online tools (such as The Grand Comics Database, Comics Vine, the catalog of
Lone Star Comics, and fan-made comics resources) available for locating and
cataloging representations of Frankenstein in the comics as
well new ways (like comiXology, Marvel Unlimited, and DC Universe) to access
these texts. I’ll also comment on some of the ways I’ve used these material in
my research and teaching and additional resources for tracking discussions of
these works. All of these approaches can be applied to any literary text that
has been adapted into the comics medium.
Michael A. Torregrossa is a graduate of the Medieval Studies
program at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) and works as an adjunct
instructor in English in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. His research
interests include adaptation, comics and comic art, Frankensteiniana, monsters,
and science fiction. Michael has presented papers on these topics at regional,
national, and international conferences. He is also active in the Northeast
Popular Culture/American Culture Association and is currently its Monsters and
the Monstrous Area Chair, but he previously served as its Fantastic (Fantasy,
Science Fiction, and Horror) Area Chair, a position he held from 2009-2018.
"Pirate Booty: Scholars and Scanned Comics"
Charles Henebry, Boston University
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fan culture embraced digitization,
with the result that a wealth of rare comics became widely available, from Action Comics 1 to the full run of Alan
Moore's Miracleman in Eclipse. This has been a boon to
scholarship, since the original issues were generally scanned complete with
letters pages, editor's notes and vintage advertisements for plastic soldiers,
all elements of the historical original that tend to be left out from
reprints—as well as from official Marvel and DC online editions. This leaves
scholars in a quandary, dependent on pirated intellectual property.
Charles W. Henebry received his doctorate in English
literature from New York University in 2003. Originally a student of emblems —
Elizabethan comic-books, roughly speaking — he has for the past ten years
focused his scholarship on the four-color world of superheroes, from the
genesis of Superman’s costume change to the impact of the 1960s antiwar
movement on Iron Man. He is the author of seven articles in Greenwood
Publishing Group’s 2014 Comics Through
Time encyclopedia and long-form essays in The Ages of Iron Man, The
Ages of the Justice League, and The
Ages of the Flash—as well as the forthcoming Ages of the Black Panther.
"Affordability, Access, & Flexibility in Teaching
Comics in the 21st Century" Lance Eaton, University of Massachusetts
Boston
This contribution will explore and discuss a different
approach to considering access and pedagogy when teaching courses on comics and
other similar courses where costs to learning materials can easily
skyrocket. The approach recenters the focus of what is being taught about
comics while offering up a playlist of readings that students can choose from
to read in preparation for any given class along with clear identification of
what materials are attainable through the library. Leveraging such
communal resources means that students come to class having to demonstrate how
they take course concepts and learnings and apply them to individual readings.
While initially, it has the potential to look a bit chaotic, it also gives
students lots of opportunities to provide something unique and distinct about
their learning pathway and what they get to read and analyze, thereby
increasing their interest and development throughout the course.
Lance Eaton is an Instructional Designer and Faculty
Development Specialist at Brandeis University.
He teaches literature, popular culture, comics, and other
interdisciplinary courses at North Shore Community College and Southern New
Hampshire University. He also is the
Executive Secretary for the Northeast Popular Culture Association. He has presented at local, regional, and
national conferences on teaching and learning in online environments, hybrid
flexible pedagogy, universal design for learning, OER, and open pedagogy. He writes for several magazines and
websites. He is currently working on his
PhD in Higher Education with a focus on academic piracy of research literature.
"Graphic Medicine Online" A. David Lewis, MCPHS
University
Publications, lectures, classes, and conferences on Graphic
Medicine (i.e. the study and use of comics in terms of medical, health, or
patient experience) are amassing monthly, but less known are the number of
digital resources also growing in frequency and accessibility. First, there is
the Graphic Medicine site itself,
largely the origin point for the Anglophone contingent of these scholars,
followed by the Annals of Graphic
Medicine, original health-related comics hosted by the Annals of Internal Medicine and the American College of Physicians.
Independent online magazine The Nib produces award-winning
non-fiction comics on the state of healthcare in America, and numerous Graphic
Medicine creators (e.g. Rachel Lindsay, Dr. Mike Natter, etc.) work in digital-first
channels.
Beyond the scholarship, reportage, and new art, software
utilizing Graphic Medicine is now on the rise, with apps like Jumo Health AR
(and Medikidz), ‘Flo, and the numerous print comics repurposed (and sometimes
augmented) for smartphone and computer monitors. Gatekeepers and barriers are
becoming all the more reduced with these digital and online options; moreover,
perhaps unlike other moments in Comics Studies, the field of Graphic Medicine
appears particularly welcoming of such tech among its discourse and
implementation.
A. David Lewis is an Instructor and Program Coordinator in
the School of Healthcare Business at MCPHS University. In addition to being an
established comics writer, editor, and comics studies scholar, he is also the founder
of the Graphic Medicine library collection at his university and a national
lecturer on the topic of comics and healthcare, medical education, and patient
narratives. His 2014 book on the superhero genre and audience negotiation of
personal of identity & selfhood was nominated for that year's Eisner Awards
in "Best Scholarly/Academic Work," and his co-edited book Digital Death with Christopher M.
Moreman received the 2015 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection
in Popular and American Culture.
"Educating the Total Nerd: Resources for Using the
Products of Fandom in the Classroom" Michael Dittman, Butler County
Community College
While the popularity of comic book movies has largely
reinforced the dichotomy of the creator/reader passive relationship, educators
can enrich their classrooms by examining and integrating the active role fans
take in producing material which runs parallel in canon but sometimes surpasses
in quality. With the expansion of the comic fan base beyond the traditional
white male coded perception and the latency of the comic corporations in
diversifying their products and characters, fans have taken it upon themselves
to create representation. This idea of finding and situating one’s
identity into the larger culture through its products is a useful one to
explore, especially in the composition classroom. Educators who
familiarize themselves with the word of fan product can use these tools to help
to move their classrooms beyond the more passive classroom reading and discussion
of comics to a higher level of cognition including synthesis and
creation.
This brief, informal presentation focuses on both finding
and identifying repositories of fan product to be used in the classroom and the
resources available to incorporate the creation of fandom texts into the
classroom. Among other resources, gathering models from repositories such
as CBR’s “Comic Book Idol” and Comic Art Network, the
vast collection of fanfilms on both YouTube and Vimeo,
and the collections of fanfic on Movellas and wattpad will
be highlighted. The use of how-to guides like “FanFiction for Literacy”
and “Popculture Classroom” as well as others in curriculum planning will be
presented.
Michael Dittman is an associate professor of English at
Butler County Community College. His
comic book and comic art reviews have appeared in CBR, International Journal of
Comic Art, and others. His comic
fandom scholarship has appeared in Works
and Days and other journals. His
books include Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, Three Days in Pittsburgh, and the novel Small Brutal Incidents.
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