Reading Comics Like a Grownup

The graphic novel is commonly thought to have matured from pulp infancy to literary adulthood. However, comic writers remain burdened by the stigma of literary illegitimacy. In his new book Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, Christopher Pizzino questions this idea that comics have "grown up" in the literary community's perception, arguing that the medium’s 

More info

history of censorship and marginalization endures in the minds of its present-day readers and, crucially, its authors. 

Christopher Pizzino is an assistant professor of contemporary US literature at the University of Georgia. We asked him to reflect on why he wrote his book.

Reading Comics Like a Grownup

By Christopher Pizzino

Some years ago, I had the interesting experience of seeing my name on a list entitled “One Hundred Arguments Against Tenure,” featured on an academic watchdog site. The reason for my inclusion on the list: I study and teach comics. The website didn’t mention which comics I studied, or the way I taught them. Apparently, teaching or studying any comics, for any reason, was out of bounds.

I wasn’t surprised or anxious to learn that someone was arguing for my intellectual worthlessness on that basis. The idea that comics don’t merit academic study is scarcely new. But over time, such experiences have made me ever more curious. Exactly how—and why—do some people continue to believe that taking comics seriously is absurd (and for the academic, something that ought to get one fired)?

The how is sometimes easy to see, and the more I’ve paid attention to it, the more stories I have to tell. A student in one of my American literature courses once stopped by my office to submit an essay. As she turned to leave, she paused in the doorway, glanced back with a strange look on her face, and blurted, “Is that a comic book?” I was, in fact, reading a volume of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s science fiction series Y: The Last Man. Flipping through its pages and quickly handing it back as if it might somehow be contaminated, the student gave me the distinct impression that she had no faith in my ability to grade her essay on Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.

This was before I became known for teaching courses on comics in my department. Many college students absorb some cultural prejudices from their parents and teachers; they assume that comics reading is something only kids do, and that to be a grownup student of literature is to leave the funnies behind. Thus, some students initially had difficulty understanding that the same professor who taught Cervantes, Austen, Woolf and Achebe in History and Theory of the Novel might, in other courses, assign books with pictures as well as words. That notion has had some time to sink in. Nowadays, for every student who seems to believe that the phrase “comics studies” is a contradiction in terms, several others are eager to study the medium, and to find out what words and pictures can do in the hands of great creators with important things to say and show.

This leads us to part of the why: often there is simply a lack of opportunity to find out that comics are not, in fact, the enemy of culture. Few adults in the US read comics—even fewer than the number who read books at all—and there aren’t many ways they can influence larger public perception of what it means for a grownup to read a comic book. This helps to explain why most adults who do read comics have stories like mine, tales of a moment when someone—a friend, teacher, fellow student, or stranger on the street—would let them know that studying comics, or just reading them in public, can be like having the word ILLITERATE tattooed on one’s forehead.

Looking Back on 50 Years of Doctor Who

The television series Doctor Who, a BBC-produced British cultural institution about a regenerating, time-traveling alien, first appeared on screen November 23, 1963. Today marks a new series, a new Doctor arrives in time for Christmas, and to celebrate, we asked Piers Britton, co-author of Reading between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner, and Doctor Who and TARDISbound: Navigating the Universes of Doctor Who, to examine what's changed and what hasn't in the Doctor Who universe.

Design in “New Who” (and “New New Who”): An Afterword to Reading Between Designs

By Piers D. Britton

Twenty-one years ago, when Simon Barker and I began research for what eventually became Reading between Designs, Doctor Who was just as much a thing of the past as the other two TV series that we featured in chapter-length case studies (The Avengers and The Prisoner). This was still true when our book finally came out in spring 2003 — though within a matter of months Doctor Who had new currency with the announcement of a Russell T. Davies-helmed revival. As it turns out, our analysis of what is now called Classic Who is largely unaffected by the arrival and breathtaking success of the new series. In design terms Classic Who remains—to use a suggestive term invented for New Who narrative—time locked. The visual style of the old series is irretrievably remote, even in this jubilee year. This is not just due to New Who’s shift in production techniques, with single- as opposed to multiple-camera shooting (and thus individual lighting of each set-up) and much more extensive post-production work than was the norm in the classic series. Nor can it simply be attributed to the improvement in production values made possible by a larger budget and by the ever-growing sophistication of the prosthetic and digital technologies on which Who so heavily depends. There is another factor, which is distinct, if not discrete, from these developments: a decisive aesthetic shift away from the kind of stylized design and experiment that justified Classic Who’s inclusion in Reading between Designs.

For at least its first five years on air New Who was strongly anchored in the visual sensibility of recent science fiction and fantasy TV made in the US, and clearly designed to meet the standards for generic verisimilitude established in these programs. The immediate context for New Who was formed by shows like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, and at slightly greater distance by The X-Files and the later television instantiations of Star Trek (particularly Deep Space Nine and Enterprise). In varying degrees these series are all marked by an espousal of what we might call SF realism, which is to say a tendency to dour, lived-in, gritty design imagery rather than operatic spectacle and flamboyance. While Russell T. Davies was show runner, this understated, borderline grungy style was the norm for the revived Doctor Who. The series aesthetic changed slightly in 2010 under the tutelage of the new writer-producer, Steven Moffat, whose “faery tale” approach to Who storytelling encouraged more whimsical and exuberant design work. Even so, the will-to-brand in New Who precluded the kind of internal variation in visual style, and thus some of the bolder innovations and deviations, which Classic Who had accommodated. For example, it’s almost impossible to imagine the new series supporting the kind of radical shift in narrative and visual tone that occurred in the midst of the eighteenth season of the classic series. Here a high-concept SF serial playing with evolutionary theory (“Full Circle”) was followed in rapid succession by a knowingly hammy vampire pastiche (“State of Decay”), a hauntingly surreal, Cocteau-esque fantasy (“Warrior’s Gate”) and a wordy, quasi-Shakespearean melodrama of court intrigue (“The Keeper of Traken”). They were all informed by radically different design concepts that served to optimize the tonal shift.