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Acceptance of Comics

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I woke up this morning to some interesting news via twitter. The first was a mention from Jessica Abel reminding Scott McCloud that the UK already had a studio degree in comics. Some of you may already know that I run the specialism in illustration for graphic novels at Glyndwr University. This three year degree runs as a route through the BA Design Communication. We have also recently launched our studio-based MA in graphic novels under the MA Design Practice.

A bit of investigating revealed the news that Dundee University had launched a Masters programme in Comics Studies. I find this a very exciting step forward for comics scholarship. The course is lead by Dr Chris Murray, who edits the Studies in Comics journal. Although the press release states that it is the first, it is actually quite a few years behind. Swindon College School of Art have been running a BA (Hons) in Illustration: Sequential & Narrative for some years now, and UCA have been running an MA in Graphic Storytelling & Comic Art for quite a while too. From my experience, academia has not had a problem with validating courses that specialise in comics.

This wasn’t the reason I decided to write this article though. Tom Harris, Labour MP for Glasgow South tweeted the following;

Dundee University is launching a degree in comic books. That’ll show those who say degrees are being dumbed down!

I very nearly replied to Tom through twitter, before realising that if you want to get into a very short and fruitless argument with a stranger who has already made their mind up, twitter is one of the best venues for it.

As you can see above, it is absolutely pointless to even begin arguing with a stranger on twitter. You may as well bellow your concerns into a cupboard for all the good it’d do.

Downthetubes has an account of the hot air being blown about twitter and the calm and reasoned words of Chris Murray. On the upside, I’d be surprised if the added publicity didn’t mean a bump in recruitment numbers, no publicity being bad publicity and all that.

So I decided to write a short piece on what it means to have comics as a portion not only of the creative industries (however disjointed from them comics seem to be sometimes) but also of the education system.

There are a great many problems with trying to get comics recognised as a valid area of study. I’ll discuss some of the problems from my experience of both writing and running a degree in comics;

Let’s use the word ‘outsiders’ to describe people that don’t know comics like we know comics. I think that it is important to remember that people are very often not outsiders through their own conscious decision, but through the exclusivity of the ‘insiders’. I think that comics should be easier to get into now than ever. We have excellent work, excellent events and some excellent scholarship and journalism. At present, there are more opportunities for people to engage with an ever increasing variety of comics for an ever increasing variety of audiences and purposes, and this is undoubtedly a good thing.

That doesn’t however mean that comics are easy to get in to. Many people’s current experience of the world of comics is through Hollywood. Many comicbook films are filled with references and cameos that only die-hard superhero fans will see the significance of. Every wink from Stan Lee and every teaser after the credits hints at a whole world that they aren’t a part of. This isn’t welcoming to people who are’t already in the know, and it doesn’t paint a picture of valid academic study, that’s for sure.

No matter how good comics are, if people aren’t exposed to them, there isn’t any point. There is always room for Stan Lee’s winks and large musclebound men and women doing large musclebound deeds, and I don’t argue against film or any specific genres. What I do argue against is this binary view that seems to follow comics around. If there is so much good work going on, why is it that much of these triumphs remain celebrated by insiders and not shared with outsiders? This is something that the comics industry does particularly badly in most cases.

People base their opinions on what they know, and they know what we tell them, largely. If Tom Harris believes that a comics degree is dumbing down, then who do we point the finger of blame at? At Tom Harris for not actively seeking out Maus or Scott McCloud or Asterios Polyp and dropping to his knees with the sheer academic promise of it all, or do we have to apportion at least some of the blame with us insiders?

We insiders know what comics are, what they can do and how they work. We need to remember that not everyone else does. When other people hear the word ‘comics’, they often go to their only points of reference; Superheroes, the Beano or Dandy (in the UK) or the Comicbook Guy from The Simpsons.

We know that books such as Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, Fun Home, Alice in Sunderland, Understanding Comics, Asterios Polyp — (I could go on and on, but a list like this is defined by omissions) — are excellent works that feel at times the antithesis of the brightly coloured musclemen that people see comics to be. These books, undoubtedly superb, don’t necessarily change people’s opinions. Each of the books on the list of (never to be complete or agreed upon) ‘literary comics’ is an example of the depth and breadth of what comics can do, and the vast expanses of unexplored innovation in visual communication, but it is again worth remembering that it continues to paint a binary picture of comics in which there are literate and illiterate comics; ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ comics.

What is the point of drawing a line through all comics and calling these ones ‘smart’ and the rest ‘dumb’? John Allison touched on this in a blog post today; if you tell people that something is bad, don’t act surprised when people believe that thing is bad.

We know that comics aren’t dumb, and I know from experience that a degree in comics is no easy task. The job of a cartoonist is a varied one. The cartoonist is a writer, a designer, an illustrator, a director, a character designer, a draftsperson, an artist, a typographer, a entrepreneur, a storyteller and as many other equally valid areas of study as the cartoonist’s own work leads them. As anyone that draws comics knows, the skills involved in crafting comics are transferrable to a host of other disciplines within the creative industries. It isn’t a difficult case to argue for the acceptance of comics, so why do we seem to find it so difficult?

We spend a lot of time arguing that comics should be accepted by the wider population, and spending barely any time at all doing anything about it but blowing the same arguments backwards and forwards. I’ve written about this before, and I’m sure I’ll have the opportunity to write about it again, but us insiders need to recognise that instead of arguing that comics should be this or that they should be that, we should be actively and openly demonstrating that largely, they already do. We just need to make sure that everyone else knows that too.


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