In the mid 1960’s Gary Friedrich followed fellow Missourian, Roy Thomas, to New York City to work at Marvel Comics. In the mid-70's, Roy Thomas took over for Stan Lee as Marvel’s editor in chief, while Friedrich went on to co-create the iconic Ghost Rider. In a personal interview conducted at his home in Arnold,
Missouri, Friedrich
(2010) recalled an essay
he had published in his
high school newspaper
in Jackson, Missouri,
which was reprinted in
the letters column of a
popular new comic
book, Justice League of
America #5 back in
1961.
Friedrich’s youthful support of comics and the opposition of his school administration is illustrative of a long-standing debate that has persisted throughout the history of the comics medium, one that may be instructive to current educators and decision makers alarmed by students’ fascination with the “out-of-school technoliterices” of more recent vintage (Jewitt, 2008, p. 250).
2014 marks the 80th anniversary of the comic book and the 119th anniversary of the comic strip from which comic books developed (Couperie, et al., 1968; Hajdu, 2008; Howe, 2012; Jones, 2004; Perry & Aldridge, 1967; Robinson, 1974/2011; Steranko, 1970; White, 1970). Although comics have remained a fixture of popular culture, they have gained little acceptance in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools (Haugaard, 1973; North, 1940; Norton, 2003; Wertham, 1954). While comics have been used to engage reluctant readers, the medium has only recently emerged in some academic disciplines as an independent literary form deemed worthy of serious examination.
Over the past two decades, since modern educators began to consider the effects of globalization, advances in technology, and the needs and contributions of linguistically- and culturally-diverse student populations, The New London Group’s (1996) concept of multiliteracies and the notion of critical literacy (Luke, 2012) have gained currency in discussions of literacy and classroom pedagogy. Even as the age of print on a physical page fades away, many educators have substituted children’s comic books of past decades with the multimodal texts of video games, smart phones and wireless tablets as the du jour objects of scorn and attack. Lewis and Fabos (2005) might have included comics when they announced that “literacy has always employed available technologies -- stylus, pen, printing press, and now digital code. However, once a technology becomes commonplace, people tend not to think of it as technological” (p. 475). On one hand there exists a dominant elite, that for centuries controlled the printed word; and, on
Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom:
A Review of Scholarship in the Field
Resourceful Research
by Mike Phoenix
36
They tried getting me expelled from school for writing that. It was an editorial in the school newspaper of which I was the editor. The one that got me in trouble was basically saying that comics had value in teaching children how to read, because I had learned how to read that way. We had……an English teacher who taught junior and senior high school English. Roy had been her favorite student. He had won the English Award two years in a row when he was in high school, but she and I didn’t get along at all. I was too liberal for her and when I wrote that [essay], she just went berserk and went to the principal and demanded that I be expelled for it. I showed her the letters from Roy in the comic books. She wasn’t impressed (Friedrich, 2010, p. 11).