The Illustrated Page: Medieval Manuscripts to New Media

Gutters:  the margins between frames in comics.

Bleeding:  images or text running off the edge of a comics page. 

Introduction

The challenge:  a reading project that will engage 60 students, ages 15-21, in a shared experience.  It should keep them curious, inspire them to action, or at least thought, and help them learn and share a variety of literacy skills.  As readers they’re mostly unmotivated and under-skilled; as citizens they’re pretty disengaged, and regarding curiosity—not so much.  The solution:  March, the graphic trilogy by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell.  Its challenges and inspirations will be unexpected, as the work is cloaked in dramatic images and active dialogue.  My students—disengaged as they are—have a nose for an authentic story, and this is truly one.  If this trilogy can’t pull us together to learn and be inspired, well then, I just don’t know. . .

This unit also grew from our seminar, “The Illustrated Page:  Medieval Manuscripts to New Media” with Jessica Brantley.  In it we studied a variety of image-texts, all with varying ratios of image to text, covering centuries of Western art, history, religion, and literature in a variety of forms, from tapestry to digital-born.  One of our key questions was how does the combination change the experience of reading? In addition to the potential power of either text or image, the combination could speak to more audiences with potentially more meanings.  Key texts for the seminar included the Bayeux Tapestry, St. Alban’s Psalter,  William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (we spent a morning with original Blake prints at the Yale British Art Center), March and Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home.  

I came to this unit with a few nagging questions:  What gaps do comics bridge?  And March?  Do we think of comics for a younger crowd?  For a mostly white readership?  Mostly male?  Considering all of these questions, will my students reject the text?  Some of these answers I found while reading about the history of comics. Only recently has the exponential proliferation of comics for all kinds of content and audiences made room for all readers, it seems, so what will the outcomes be when my students find March on the menu?  The genre will be new to them as something besides simple entertainment.  While Maus and Persepolis have been taught in some Tulsa schools, my students tell me they have not been exposed to them.  However, a few students read Manga, and superhero movies “are okay.”  Comics professionals agree, though, that “comics can yield a body of work worthy of study and meaningfully represent the life, times, and world-view of its author.”¹ I’m certain I’ll find March relevant in my own classroom.