All illusions are potential ways of ordering reality. The goal of criticism should therefore be not to destroy illusions but to make us more sensitive to their workings and their complexity.
Peter Gutierrez
The Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island advances media literacy education through research and community service. We emphasize interdisciplinary scholarship and practice that stands at the intersections of communication, media studies and education.
All illusions are potential ways of ordering reality. The goal of criticism should therefore be not to destroy illusions but to make us more sensitive to their workings and their complexity.
- Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame, 1977
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Media Education Lab
Harrington School of Communication and Media
University of Rhode Island
Davis Hall
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Developed By Young Globes
Scott
As someone who fell in love
As someone who fell in love with comics in the 1970s, looked for ways to bring them into my K-12 classroom teaching when I entered the field in the late 1980s, and became a creative professional in the industry in the 1990s, I can recall that this outsider status occasionally served as a perverse badge of honor. In the long run, though, it became exhausting for me and (at the risk of making an outrageous presumption) everyone else who took comics seriously. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) crystallized many things that longtime comics readers instinctively knew while simultaneously legitimizing the object of our love to those with whom we had longed to connect—tastemakers, academics, librarians, and that most elusive demographic of all, thinking adults.
In fact, it always shocked me that Understanding Comics wasn’t immediately considered a core text of the media literacy education movement in the United States. As proof of its merit in this respect, one need only revisit how the author outlines his central questions in terms that could not be more recognizable to the media literacy crowd: “[How] do we define comics, what are the basic elements of comics, how does the mind process the basic language of comics—that sort of thing” (McCloud 1993, x). Already, by declaring such straightforward objectives, it begins—that all-important process of focusing on how a given medium actually works regardless of what it ostensibly says. McCloud describes this as the “aesthetic surgery” that is necessary to “separate form from content” (McCloud 1993, 5). Moreover, and of special cultural import in the context of comics, the notion of value-free analysis was subtly introduced: marginalized content and highbrow aspirations alike were effectively rendered beside the point. Yet that didn’t mean readers were in for an arid exercise in pure theory. No, there was fun on every page, usually multiply so.
Did I not mention that McCloud’s seminal work was itself a comic?
I guess not. Moreover, because of this, it served as a prime piece of evidence in its own argument—the medium’s unique strengths to speak engagingly and lucidly to its audience. And make no mistake: “medium” was McCloud’s word, not mine, although it speaks to a distinction that I and countless others have had to make between the defining traits of all comics and their varied manifestations, both in genre and format (i.e., graphic novel, “floppy” comic book, newspaper comic strip, etc.).