Last week I attended the joint meeting of the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association, and I heard papers on topics as wide-ranging as Morrissey, fandom, and identity through to Appalachian banjo stylings, and that’s a fairly narrow sampling of the various papers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is perpetually popular, though the hot show this year seems to have been Gray’s Anatomy). The conference spans four days and has a conference program that’s about 400 pages long.
I’ve presented with the PCA before, both nationally and regionally, since for many years while I was in graduate school the Modern Language Association—the major pinnacle of conferences in my field — very much frowned on papers having to do with comics unless they had something to do with a children’s literature panel. But in the 12 years between when I began graduate school and now, there’s been a definite jump in the number of academics who teach comics, the amount of scholarship on comics (just check out ICAF, for starters), and the response to that scholarship both inside of and external to the academy. Even in the five years since I’ve finished it does seem like the proverbial tide has actually turned a bit.
For example, at this recent conference, there were lots of papers on comics. There’s a Comic Art & Comics interest group that ran programming for the duration of the conference. There were a series of panels about comics in other discussion groups, such as both the Medieval and the Composition & Rhetoric groups. There was even an entire panel organized around Sandman, dealing with Neil Gaiman’s use of myth in the series.
What particularly caught my eye, though, were the papers on webcomics. From just skimming the program (remember: 400 pages) I found two: one titled “Penny Arcade and the Manipulation of Subcultural Capitalâ€? presented by a scholar from the University of Calgary, and another, “The King of Lizards Comes out of the Closet: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Heteronormativity in Dinosaur Comics â€? by a scholar from West Chester University. And those are just the ones which name-check webcomics in their titles. There must have been others which mentioned webcomics in the body of the papers; for example, I heard a paper about “hipster librariansâ€? mention Unshelved, which makes sense given the subject matter. I know from posts on a comics scholars discussion list I’m on that there are folks worldwide writing dissertations about webcomics, which means the number of undergrad papers on them must be exponentially higher.
All of it made me return, again, to the question of context. In writing last week’s column on Minimalist Stick Figure Theater, I thought it would be a fabulous text to use in a women’s studies class. I think it’s a great webcomic, and it raises points worthy of discussion in a way that I think would be ideal for just such a class.
I know that there’s webcomics out there which poke fun at academic culture (which is great; it’s pretty goofy from time to time, and though there isn’t a secret handshake it does certainly have its own weird internal culture). What I’m wondering is if there are folks out there who have used webcomics in an educational setting, and, if so, which ones and how? How does a webcomic change when it is printed out and distributed to a class (sort of thinking about fair use and not fair use and outright theft, since that’s been the focus here for the last few days)? Is it realistic to assign students to look at websites for homework, since it’s becoming ever more rare to find students who are not online? And in ten years are we going to see the PCA flooded with papers about webcomics? I don’t know. But it’ll be interesting to find out.
Thoughts?
