Speaker sheds light on role of comics in U.S.

November 11, 2009
By Andrew Mitchell
Copy Editor

For most people, comic books conjure up images of muscled men fighting bad guys in bright costumes teaching lessons like, “Crime doesn't pay,” and, “be careful around nuclear waste.”

But for associate professor David Parker Royal, who teaches English at Texas A&M University, comics and graphic novels can offer readers deeper lessons. In his ECCE lecture, “Drawing Attention: Comics as a Means of Approaching U.S. Cultural Diversity,” Royal showed how the medium compellingly explored issues of race, identity and class conflicts in American society.

“Most people think comics are for kids [and ask], 'What kind of scholarship can you do on comics?' he said. “Quite a lot.”

Unlike regular novels, comics use both their words and images to create a visual language that inspires, “a more efficient exchange between the author and the reader,” Royal said. Furthermore, the most cartoonish and simple the drawings, the easier it is for a reader to place themselves in the story.

But simplified drawings can also lead to easy stereotypes, as seen in the exaggerated caricatures of black people, found in early comics like “Tintin in the Congo,” or in depictions of the character “Injun Joe” in illustrated versions of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.

To counter this, Royal showed pages from recent works that directly addressed issues of racial conflicts, like “Captain America Truth” by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker, in which a black version of Captain America fights crime without knowledge of his white counter part.

Royal said while some superhero comics have used ethnic characters as a way of bringing in a more diverse audience, Morales and Baker wrote the comic to make a point about the troubled history of African Americans.

He also said that by their nature, superhero comics can be used to teach lessons on diversity and acceptance. “When you're dealing with outsider status and otherness,” he said, “that allows you to raise similar questions.”

Royal also cited more titles grounded in realism, like Will Eisner's graphic novel, “Dropsie Avenue,” which tells the story of a fictional New York neighborhood throughout its history. Eisner attacks the melting-pot ideal of the city and shows how as soon as one new ethnic group enters the neighborhood, another leaves in disgust. The phrase, “There goes the neighborhood,” becomes a repeated symbol of ongoing racial tensions.

For Asian perspectives, Royal cited Adrien Tomine's, “Shortcomings,” and Gene Luen Yang's, “American Born Chinese,” which both dealt with characters conflicted about their own heritage. One of Royal's favorite graphic novels is Ben Katchor's, “The Jew of New York,” which explored the troubled history of Jews while asking bigger questions about tolerance.

The lecture opened the eyes of students with a narrow definition of what comics can do. Freshman Management major Jeff Shyong said, “To me comics are little kids stuff … he makes comics more mature.”
Shyong also said that most comics he's read offer an escape from reality's more complex problems. “In comics, it's supposed to be a harmony world. It's supposed to be good versus bad instead of ethnic conflicts.”
Royal grew up thinking the same, but now encourages other teachers to use comics to help illustrate a diversity of ideas.