An elective? Again, sure. An elective on graphic novels as a medium ideally co taught with the Art Department would be a great senior elective. And have anyone taking it thinking “easy class, just reading some comics”, get knocked back on their ass at the rigor and challenge of the class and the material. Teach it seriously for all of what it is, not just as words and story but as a visual medium as well.
Your English class watching films not attached to the reading? That’s a lazy assed teacher getting out of work for a day. If I was a parent I’d be annoyed if not down right pissed off about that.
Well, you were required to take English credits. You just got to choose which branch of English you wanted to take. It wasn’t like it was for funsies. And the real point is you were getting English credits for doing it. If it’s worth English credit in year 12, it should be worth English credit as part of your second sophomore semester as well.
Your English class watching films not attached to the reading? That’s a lazy assed teacher getting out of work for a day.
Meh. It was usually thematically relevant to what we were doing but whatever. I personally think it’d be fine and even beneficial.
Maybe things are different now or in your school than they were for me or any of my four kids in their High School. Just looked at what is current there: the required track English classes (different levels) with Junior year either American Literature or an AP Composition and Writing class. Senior year they could take electives if their schedule allowed. Journalism was a popular one. They also offer multiple other electives (not Film or graphic novels though). The electives were not instead of the core English curriculum which includes literature from around the world and of different eras. It is after the core is covered.
My other point remains: thinking of these works as you would watching a thematically relevant movie for entertainment in the class is not giving them the seriousness they would deserve.
I read it as an adult, and it showed me what the medium can do. I love Alan Moore and I don’t want that to bias my view of whether this can be accessible to teenagers. So much about it is predicated on an understanding of the comic mythos/ethos. A lot of it went right over my head. I understood From Hell a lot better - not that I think that would fly in a classroom.**
I’m not clear on why Maus needs to be a historical document. Does Watchmen? Or Persepolis for that matter? Can’t people just make art about their experiences and other people appreciate it for what it is? (I’m also curious - what’s historically wrong about it?)
**I was perusing reviews for From Hell, which is a social and cultural critique of the Jack the Ripper mythos, and someone posted, “I was thinking of getting this for my kid. Does it have any inappropriate content?"
Lady, you’re asking if a book called From Hell has inappropriate content?
I couldn’t resist. I replied, "In the scene where Jack the Ripper is disemboweling a sex worker, her nipple is clearly visible.”
Could be! We definitely had to take English electives in senior year. They were “elective” in that you got to pick from a list but not in a “Nah, no English for me” sort of way. In fact, because I had dicked around and failed a semester of sophomore English that I never made up, I had to take three semesters of English that year (i.e., three one semester courses) in lieu of having to sit through sophomore English as a senior. So it definitely wasn’t voluntary or else I wouldn’t have been taking three classes
So, yeah, I dunno… I guess I just have a more expansive idea on what fits under “English” for curriculum purposes. I don’t say that as a value call (haha, I’m more open minded!) just that my experience makes me feel less strict on the boundaries.
I think it’s important to keep in mind how radically public education differs depending on geography. My high school was a solid C in state rankings, we had 124 students total, and had English and AP English, that’s it. The vast array of options students have been described as having in these threads are things I only ever got as a college student.
No one has mentioned Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa as an addition to the WWII milieu, but from the standpoint of someone who survived an atomic bombing? I think both that and Maus need to be taught in historical context.
You noted how your appreciation of The Watchmen required context you initially lacked. Did your teachers, at either general or AP levels, have the knowledge and skills to teach graphic novels seriously?
Would those teachers replacing some of the more traditional fare with any of the excellent works named in this thread raised your High School from its C rating? Duly noted there were books you hated, but for the purposes of the question you have the option of replacing in with another not graphic novels work you think is excellent and appropriate or one of these.
Having read Maus I and II, and Persepolis I and II, they would best be part of a history class, preferably AP history.
I actually first read “Maus” in the summer of 1991, in an elective literature class. It’s very powerful, that’s for sure, and “Maus II” came out a few months later. I remember “Entertainment Weekly” gave it an A+ rating, and I even sent a postcard to our professor (keep the times in mind) informing her of this.
Ah, this OP gives me more understanding of why you didn’t like Maus as a book to be read in high school. I should say that I read it in an English class (in college), not a history class. I guess I look at it in something of a class of its own –you’re right that it’s not something a historian has produced, but it’s sort of in-between a memoir and a fictionalized memoir. It makes me think of e.g. Voltaire’s autobiography (where I don’t think he said anything actually false, but boy wow did he slant things in exactly the way he wanted to slant them to insinuate things that might not have actually been true, especially about people he was angry with…) or Madeleine L’Engle’s “memoir/nonfiction” books which it turned out were often more than somewhat whitewashed.
…In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think one could use it in a history class that used things like Voltaire’s autobiography or L’Engle’s memoirs – or – there are a ton of unreliable memoir examples out there e.g. from the 18th century, which is the period I know best – to talk about the inherent unreliability of both memoirs and stories that were told to another person. Which I think the AP history classes do more of now than they did when I was going through decades ago.
Anyway, if I could have one graphic novel/comic/manga taught in high school it would be Fullmetal Alchemist – there are so many interesting discussions one could have about not just the plot but also all the ethical topics in it: good people following bad orders, is it okay to profit from terrible things that have happened to others if there’s no way to change what happened to them, how does one come back from doing something awful. Just for starters. But it’s like 27 volumes and more than $100 so I guess that’s not really an option.
Watchmen is also a really interesting idea, although it’s got so much sex in it that I don’t think that would fly either. But it’s also trying to do a lot of very cool things, and reacting against a whole genre up to that point, and that would be really neat to talk about.
I mean, isn’t that just a way of saying it uses fewer words? Instead of having to describe a setting/scene by describing it, draw a picture? So it is a way to use less English in English class?
It might be fewer words, but that may make it easier to illustrate fundamental storytelling concepts - and I think kids would probably be interested in the fundamentals of storytelling. Not everyone wants to be a creative but I think they’d have a lot of fun dissecting their favorite shows and movies. And if they didn’t like something they were required to read, they could have a field day tearing it apart.
Comic books are masters at storytelling because that’s all they have. They don’t have flowery prose to cover up structural weakness.
I think any use of them would have to explore what they can do that other media cannot.
My best teacher was 10th grade English. I think he could have handled it.
I would have enjoyed reading a graphic novel or two, yeah. I had no exposure to comics until my husband, and it was some years before I read Moore. I would have much preferred Maus to any of the other Holocaust books. I haven’t read Persepolis but I’d probably appreciate it.
I just want to note I wasn’t giving my school a C. The state of Michigan was.
Could say the same about the movies we watched. I think the overall storytelling and communication is still very much worth discussing. I don’t think there’s any special merit to page or word count; we also read various short stories and novellas that stayed with me longer than many of the full length novels.
I liked Watchmen but I wonder how interesting it would be to someone who hasn’t read a lot of superhero comic books. Without an awareness of the genre that is being deconstructed, I really don’t know what a non-comic book reader would get out of it.
I agree. It is a comic book about deconstructing the history of comic books through the lens of the 1980s. In its own way it is as quaint as many of the 18th/19th century novels assigned in schools.
I’d suggest, not much. I’ve read it, and it is indeed a great work, but if you are unfamiliar with superheroes on paper (i.e. not movies), it’s going to be confusing. Heck, I grew up on Superman and Batman and Spiderman comics, and I found Watchmen a little confusing on first reading.
What would anybody think about V for Vendetta? It’s not pretty, but I think older high schoolers could handle it. Yes, there is the lecherous priest with a hankering for underage girls, and Finch’s drug trip where he revisits V’s detention camp, and violence galore, but it also asks an important question: should people be afraid of their governments, or should governments be afraid of their people? And what might happen after V blows up Parliament? What kind of government will form? If students are studying civics at the same time, that should engender a lively discussion.
It’s not just knowing about comic books. I think that Watchmen was directed precisely at Baby Boomer comic book fans, who were reading silver-age reboots of golden-age superheroes. So you had the two generations of Night Owls and two of Silk Spectre, just as you had the Golden Age Green Lantern, Flash, and Hawkman and their Silver Age counterparts. But at the same time you had superheroes who continued through both times, like The Comedian. And you had the old guard who had died or retired with no successors (Hooded Justice, Captain Metropolis, Mothman) and new heroes with no earlier counterparts (DR. Manhattan, Ozymandias, Rorschach).
That whole setup really only existed in the Silver age. The Bronze age brought its own dynamics, and if Moore had written the series for a Bronze Age or later audience, it would’ve felt different.
Besides, the real-life characters of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sort of pin this down in time.
For Alan Moore, I think I’d go with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volumes 1and 2. V For Vendetta had a lot of wonderful qualities, but it occurred to me that Eve’s only direct experience with fascism was at V’s hands, not the intended bad guys’. It calls everything admirable about the titular hero into question. I hope that was Moore’s intention, but get the feeling it maybe wasn’t. With LOEG, the blurring between “hero” and “monster” was kind of the raison d’etre.
I was thinking more about the unrealistic social dynamics on display in superhero comic books right up until Moore wrote it. Where even anti-heroes like Sub-Mariner eventually toed the line in the name of whatever the flavor of the American way was at the time. Where Superman would never even think about conquering or abandoning the misbegotten people of Earth. Where every other hero puts their great responsibility ahead of their own happiness. That’s a bat-shit crazy world one has to be immersed in before they can understand what Moore was pushing back on.
If I’m remembering correctly, there is a page or two of legit comic book pornography in Volume 2. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but how does that fly as High School required reading?
