Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

The oral presentation of my master's research project is tomorrow! The topic is "In Defense of Comics: Making Room for the Sequential Arts in Art Education".

Wish me luck!

Best of luck to you tomorrow.
Let us know how it goes!

MikeM

Good luck, even though I doubt that you really need "luck" for it. And, as previously said, let us know how it goes.

Abayo.....

Hello,

"In defence of ...." sounds as if comics or their educational value were under attack...What ever happened to the freedom of speech??

But I don't want to start a discussion where none is needed or in fact asked for.

Wishing you all the luck you need

Yours
Thomas

Thomas Froehling wrote:Hello,

"In defence of ...." sounds as if comics or their educational value were under attack...What ever happened to the freedom of speech??

well... there's a difference between freedom of speech and imposing your opinions onto others, which is especially important in school settings. one example is that keegstra case here in canada a while back...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._v._Keegstra

but saying comics dont have educational value is like saying books dont have educational value, it all depends on the particular book or comic.

aaaaaaaanyways...

I'm sure you'll do great andy! best of luck!

-Aidan

Thomas Froehling wrote: "In defence of ...." sounds as if comics or their educational value were under attack...What ever happened to the freedom of speech??

The influence and value of comics were very seriously attacked in the late 1940's and early 1950's by the outspokan views of psychologist Dr. Fredric Werthham, the infamous author of the book "Seduction of the Innocent" which eventually lead to the censorship of comics and the creation of the Comic Code Authority.

Check out the link below to learn more about Werthham and the "Attack on Comic Books"
http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/ina ... k4cca.html

Whew! It is over. It went well. I got an A plus and the committee told me that my district was lucky to have me!

The final paper weighed in at over 100 pages!

As I researched the use of comics in education, I discovered that in the forties there was a huge amount of interest in using comics in education. The military also used a lot of teaching material in comics form. As someone mentioned, in the fifties they came under attack. Suddenly no one would touch them with a ten foot pole in an educational journal until the late 70s.

Also, from my experience in art education, cartoons and comics have been looked down upon as an inferior art or "low art". My paper was written in defence of them as a teaching material and I was making the point that there is potential for comics to be Art "with a capital A".

I found dozens and dozens of scholarly references to comics and found that research does indeed support the use of comics to teach.

I'd be glad to share the paper, but I don't know how I would possibly post such a gi-gundus file!

Thanks everybody for wishing me luck.

Wonderful! You did a great job, Andy.

I believe Will Eisner did a lot of those war time educational comics.

Steve Hubbell wrote:

Thomas Froehling wrote: "In defence of ...." sounds as if comics or their educational value were under attack...What ever happened to the freedom of speech??

The influence and value of comics were very seriously attacked in the late 1940's and early 1950's by the outspokan views of psychologist Dr. Fredric Werthham, the infamous author of the book "Seduction of the Innocent" which eventually lead to the censorship of comics and the creation of the Comic Code Authority.

Check out the link below to learn more about Werthham and the "Attack on Comic Books"
http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/ina ... k4cca.html

It seems that this wave of censorship has been very influential in the post-war period, since we have in France a very vicious law of 1948 on the "protection of the youth" - it is still in force nowadays, and initially aimed to forbid, with an incredible prudishness, all those more or less erotic, violent or depraved U.S. comic books that attracted so much the French youth in the late 1930's.

Andy, I still can some information about this French aspect of the problem, if needed.

Yes, Eisner did a lot of them. He was a big part of my paper. He was the first to do so many things. He was one of the first to insist on retaining rights to his characters (Spirit), one of the first to open a studio, one of the first to make a Graphic novel, a pioneer in using comics to teach... Wow!

Cosmo,

Thanks for drawing attention to the "French Connection". If I ever do a similar project that would be very interesting to research!

I had assumed the French were much more open. Spiegelman and Satrapi have mentioned that a cartoonist in France is esteemed much like a movie director. In America, they say, a cartoonist is just below a plumber.

Personally, I think it's a good idea to alert parents to mature content in comics. It then falls to the parent to be responsible to monitor their children's reading material. The witch hunt of the 50s went a long way to try to make sure no comics were available to anybody!

Well, don't forget that France was a quite conservative society until the sixties or seventies. Like in the American society, religion had conserved an influence on the minds ; conservatism and patriarchism were still prevalent in society, especially under De Gaulle.

You'd be surprised to see what kind of literature was forbidden for "pornographic content" in these years. Indeed, comics were deemed as a "childish, mind-numbing distraction" and reserved - except for some famous series like Astérix or Tintin - to a very young audience.

A comic like Usagi Yojimbo couldn't have been freely available. "Too violent", "immoral"... Even for a mature audience : the Supervisory Council for the Youth Publications considered that all comic books implicitly aimed a young audience.

That led to the repeated bannings of a famous satirical magazine, Hara Kiri, whose slogans were : "the Stupid and Naughty Magazine" and "Hara Kiri costs 2 francs, if you don't have 'em, steal it !"

Actually, Hara Kiri didn't aim children at all, but published very insolent, audacious caricatures with a ferocious social commentary. The Supervisory Council was very unpleased with that, and they took the Law of 1948 on the "Protection of the Youth" as a pretext to ban the magazine.

After May 1968, French society gradually became more liberal, more progressist than American society in the same time span. People realized that after all, sequential art had gained enough respectability : Franco-Belgian comics already had a long history and lots of masterpieces and nowadays, their authors are globally as respected as they should be.

Congratulations Andy,
an A plus isn't very easy to get, I'm lead to believe...

Well, Cosmos post just reminded me of the sometimes very confusing situation in Germany; you might know that we have a law against certain fascist activities (due to our history, which I think everybody knows, even if not in detail);
Latetly (1995) there has been a police raid of a comic distributor (Packwahn), where the officals said they where looking for pornographic and/or fascistic propaganda; the police therefore confiscated numerous comic books and some computers (containing the business data of that distributor!).
Almost needless to say, the comics they took were not fascistic in any way: they took Art Spiegelmans "Maus", for example, for the sole reason that a svastika was visible on it's cover. If it wasn't so serious, you'd laugh about the sheer stupidity of the accusation.
Some of the comics, like Ralf Königs, certainly had what you would call "mature context", but the charge was something along the line of "delivering pornographic content to immature readers", which is stupid again; Packwahn distributed comics to shops and didn't have them on public display.
But although the charges were based on very thin ice (so to say), the actual tribunal took so much time (Packwahn couldn't do any distributing in the meantime!), that finally the distributor agreed to pay something as high as 15,000 DM (about 7,500 Euro) to end it all and to be able to get to work again;

http://www.xoomic.de/webneu/magazin/zensur3.html

So, we might have a very large and wide spread range of comics here in Europe, but inappropriate law enforcement against comics and/or it's distributors is not unknown here as well.
If you'd need any more information about the comic situation in Germany, feel free to ask

Wow, thanks guys. I had never thought about the comics situation in other countries. I will definitely keep you in mind if I ever tackle the subject again.

Did your research project look at the multi-literacies aspect of comics?