LITTLE ROCK — Like Batman takes the Joker, The Power of Comics: History, Form& Culture takes comic books seriously - as straight-faced as a college thesis.
Offered as "the first introductory textbook forcomic art studies courses," the 346-page examination is by Randy Duncan, professor of communication at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia; and Matthew J. Smith, professor and chairman of communication at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.
Duncan teaches about comics with a focus on how they work as a language of storytelling and persuasion, and Smith with an interest in comics as a broad influence on popular culture. They met at the SanDiego Comic Con, where they discovered they each had a textbook in
mind.
"Our outlines for the books were so similar, it was a natu
ral thing to collabo
rate," Duncan, 51,
says.
"I think comics are so timely, so necessary," Smith, 38, says. He recommendsthat everyone should knowsomething about comics as a way "to open their minds to the possibilities of human expression."
The writing took two years, and "I wasn't surprised at how much there was to cover," Duncan says. "I was surprised at how much we had to leave out."
They settled for just a nod to newspaper comic strips, and bring their combined research to bear on "Defining Comic Books as a Medium," "Experiencing the Story," "Comic Books and Ideology," and related chapter headings.
The result, comics historian Paul Levitz writes in his introduction, "is hardly as much fun as the best of comics," but it might lead to "better comics."
Duncan says about a third of the students who take his course on "Comics as Communication" want to write and draw. Some might enroll with the hope of an easy A, but "they don't make it past the first day when we go overthe syllabus," he says.
The teacher isn't fooling: He wrote his doctoral thesis on the "rhetorical methodology in comic books," and has been giving deep thought ever since to such things as what keeps Batman going.
(The Caped Crusader celebrates his 70th bat-birthday this year. Duncan and Smith look for "the core of the character" in Batman's origin - his vow to fight crime in the guise of something "black, terrible ... I shall become a bat!")
CAUGHT READING COMICS
The book refers to comics as part of a "new literacy." Words and pictures combine to send a different kind of message than words alone. The effect is nothing new to comics readers, but it figures more and more into everyday life.
"Our culture is shiftingfrom text to visual," Smith says.
Computer users click on icons instead of words, he points out. The screen shows little pictures of paper clips, postage stamps and light switches in place of words to explain what a button does. TV commercials that used to rely on catch phrases, flash images.
The more that language shifts to visual, Smith says, the more a knowledge of comics can help people "decipher and interpret visual clues."
"We're not backsliding," he says. "We're getting more sophisticated."
Duncan remembers the first comic book he bought as an 8-year-old with an eye for a bargain: an issue of Adventure Comics with the cover torn off, sale-priced for a nickel.
"I had a nickel," he says, and it bought him a ride with Superman up, up, into higher education.
"There was something about the form itself," he says, "the way it tells a story on paper."
The Power of Comics is all about that "something," AND! (as a comic book would punch the word) ... it comes with lightning bolts on the cover.
Style, Pages 55, 60 on 09/27/2009