Rocco Versaci has a proposal for teachers: he asks that teachers introduce comics into

their middle and high school classroom as a means of engaging their students’ interest and

enhancing their (the students) literacy. This is a bold proposal. Comics, after-all, are still

thought by many of us as “childish,” undemanding reading material, and middle and high school

as the time and place to leave childish things behind. In order for them to become literate, many

of us likely think, young adults need to be introduced to literature, and this means reading

books--specifically, the “great” books of the English canon. But Versaci not only believes that

comic books are the ideal medium to turn adolescents onto reading, he also believes that they

constitute a form of literature. He thinks that the contemporary bias against comic books is as

unwarranted as was the previous bias against novels; and, as one whose most memorable reading

moments in his adolescence came from comic books, I applaud his attempt to redeem their value

as meaningful reading material. However, even I am not sure whether comic books get students

more interested in reading. My own suspicion that it is the graphic material (i.e., the pictures) in

comics that has the greatest impact on the reader/viewer. This suspicion--one which I believe is

shared by many--is not adequately addressed nor quietened in his essay. In fact, his most

convincing example of the sophistication of comic books, and of the complex interrelationship

between images and words that they purportedly offer, really is one in which he persuasively

demonstrates the communicative power of its visual images. Though there is much to be said for

helping students become more critical in their viewing habits, it would seem a sort of intellectual

development that ought rightly to hold a secondary and distant place in an English class to the

development of verbal literacy.

Versaci begins his article by summarizing his assessment of how most of his adult

students remember their middle and high school English classes. He tells us that most of them

were left thinking of literature as “medicinal” (61), and reading as a chore. Literature, according
to Versaci, is frequently taught with such reverence, canonized works are too often

unquestionably considered containers of great riches, that students learn or intuit that it is their

role to learn to appreciate its/their (literary books) value. Versaci believes not only that comic

books are a type of literature, but that they are ideally suited to capture the interest of

adolescents. Because “readers ‘see’ the characters through the illustrations,” comic books “‘put a

human face’ on a given subject” (62). According to Versaci, young adults find comics more

inviting and accessible than other sorts of books, but he argues that comic books need not be any

less sophisticated or demanding than other forms of literature. He suggests that the “interplay of

the written and the visual” (62) in comics means that reading them demands “an active [. . .]

participation on the part of the reader” (63).

Versaci not only hopes to convince us that comic books can capture and excite students’

interest in literature, he also wants us to believe that introducing comic books into classrooms

will help make them aware that there are “high” and “low” forms of literature. When comics are

incorporated into the curriculum, he believes that students, finding it strange that they are asked

to study and analyze comic books, are encouraged to think about the consequences of

attributions of literary worth. He clearly hopes that students will judge contemporary

designations as to what constitutes literary quality as largely arbitrary, and that they will learn to

value their own judgments of literary worth.

In order to help nurture doubt as to the value of current assessments of literary merit,

Versaci feels he has to succeed in convincing teachers to begin introducing comics into their

classes. He has a powerful “card” to play, and he plays it early in his essay--and well. Most of

us probably feel ambiguous at best about the curriculum we were required to cover in high

school. And if he is right in implying that the traditional canon persists and continues to

dominate the middle and high school curriculum, it is all to easy for us to imagine it as a source
of continued frustration for current and future middle and high school students. Versaci, then, in

reminding us of our own likely difficult encounters with intimidating works of literature, likely

prepares us to at least to listen to his argument in favour of comic books in the classroom as a

possible way to turn students onto reading.

Versaci does not try and “sell” teaching comic books in the classroom as the ideal means

to slowly introduce students to the literary canon:--comic books are not to Versaci a “stepping

stone” which lead students towards discovering the celestial riches found in true literature. This

unapologetic appreciation of the value of comic books is beguiling, but makes his task harder

than it might have been had he acknowledged the “supremacy” of books over other written

mediums. So strong is the influence of the existing assessment of comic books as juvenile

reading material that we might more readily and openly attend to an argument in favour of its

incorporation into the middle and high school curriculum had he made clear that he considered

comic books merely a useful teaching aid. Comic books as literature, comic books as different

from but equal to books, is simply a very tough sell. However, Versaci shows some skill, some

“salesmanship,” in making his case.

For example, Versaci stays very far away from the likes of Superman and Spiderman as

examples of what he would like to see explored in class. Instead, he draws our attention to

comic books such as Daddy’s Girl, which deals with an adolescent girl who has been “sexually

abused by her father” (64), and to Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and II, a series which “retell[s] the

story of the author’s father, a Holocaust survivor“ (63). Comics, he is attempting to get us to

contemplate, can be serious stuff--so serious, in fact, that they might be deemed inappropriate for

young adult readers for reasons very different from those which here-to-fore might have come to

mind. Versaci also takes care to mention the names of writers of comic book writers (such as

Neil Gaimon) who also happen to have established themselves as award winning writers of
young adult and adult fiction. The quality of the writing in theses comics, he is preparing us to

believe, can be no different from what we find in “great” literature.

Versaci also does a good job, then, in getting us to conceive of the writing in a comic

book as potentially very literate, and of its subject matter as potentially both serious and suitable

for young adult minds (though it is worth noting that he thereby supports the supposition that

literature, even if it can be expanded to include comics, must necessarily deal with “serious”

subject matter). He is also persuasive when he argues that, because young adults are not

intimidated by comic books, they therefore feel more comfortable engaging critically with them

than they do with books they recognize as part of the English canon. However, most teachers are

probably concerned that comic books are all about the pictures, that is, they likely believe not

only that there is too little writing in comic books but that whatever writing exists in comic

books will inevitably be overwhelmed by the power of the pictures that accompanies it. Versaci

begins to make an argument which addresses this concern, but ultimately ends up reinforcing our

likely belief that comic books are more accurately conceived more as a visual medium than as a

written one.

Versaci does not directly address the concern that there might be too little actual writing

in a comic book to develop literacy, but he characterizes the reading process involved in

exploring a comic book so that we are likely reminded of the one form of writing whose

sparseness is considered amongst its primary virtues--namely, poetry. He slyly suggests that

because readers of comic books must constantly relate words to images while they are reading,

that there is more going on, word-for-word, in a comic book than there is in a “traditional” book.

He writes:

Comic books facilitate [analytical and critical thinking skills] [. . .] in a way

unlike more “traditional” forms of literature because in addition to making use of

 standard literary devices such as point of view, narrative, characterization,

conflict, setting, tone, and theme, they also operate with a poetics that blends the

visual and the textual [.] 64

He certainly seems to be arguing here that comic books can be used by a teacher to develop all

the sorts of critical thinking skills that books can (as well as some they can’t), and this argument

is simply too one sided, overblown, and implausible to be persuasive.

But he makes a much bigger mistake when, in his example of how text and graphics

interrelate in a comic book, he is evidently most interested in the communicative power of the

comic’s pictures. He writes about the effects of the presentation of the character Lily in Debbie

Drecshler’s Daddy’s Girl on his students thusly:

Forced to look at a relatively confined space with such intensity, students noticed

that the panels gradually become darker as Lily’s initial enthusiasm at having a

diary is undercut by the fact that her privacy has been violated. They also noticed

how the direction of Lily’s gaze varies through the four panels and that in the

crucial third panel, where she is responding to this violation, she seem to be

looking directly at the reader. Some students interpreted this visual strategy as

Drecshler’s way of “reaching out” to readers[.] 65

Though Versaci takes care to characterize the students as readers here, clearly, in this description

of the graphic drama of Lily’s gaze, they are better and more accurately conceived of as viewers.

Versaci seems more honest in his characterization of students when he writes that “this activity

appeals to [him] [. . .] because it forces [his] [. . .] students to be more critical viewers [emphasis

added]” (65). It is undeniably a terrific thing, as he argues, in this age of “movies and television”

(65), to develop critical attention to the visual medium, but comparing comic books to movies,

television, and even to video games does not do his cause much good. Too much has been made
of getting students to read and write, too little has yet been said about the virtues of visual

literacy, that the very last thing he should have done is to have linked comic books to

predominately visual mediums such as movies and television--especially those which share their

somewhat less than reputable status.

However, simply because Versaci fails to convince me that comics do encourage verbal

reading skills as much as they do visual reading skills does not mean that he leaves me

convinced that they do not promote literacy, nor that they are inadequate material to get students

to think critically about what they read. I imagine if I was in a classroom in which some of the

students were having difficulty with the offered curriculum, and if I possessed the power to alter

the existing curriculum, that I might just introduce them to some of the comic books that Versaci

introduces us to. But I am aware, though, that there are other options. For instance, the books I

am reading for my EDCI 353, books which apparently I will have the ability as a teacher to

incorporate into my classes, may not have the graphic enticements that comic books have to

attract attention, but they likely address adolescent concerns and interests far better than the older

curriculum must have done. They have the added virtue of being--self-evidently--reading

material. In sum, there may be other sources for teachers to turn to other than to comics if Huck

Finn, Shakespeare et al. continue to bore and intimidate current middle and high school students

as much as they may have previous generations of adolescent students. And, given that he leaves

me imagining comic books as more akin to video games than to classics of literature, I’d

probably try these books out on them first.

Work Cited

Versaci, Rocco. “How Comic Books Can Change the Way Our Students See Literature: One

Teacher’s Perspective. English Journal 140 (2001) : 61-7.