"...the readers of Archie Comics shared a deep sense of community around their literary practice."
39
group. Botzakis demonstrated how Roger was able to use his ongoing dialogue with comics in several domains of his own life. Botzakis referenced the dialogic nature of language (Bakhtin, 1986) and noted that Roger, while unaware of Bakhtin’s writings on the dialogic nature of text, was engaging in the practice through his comic book reading. Roger reported: “They [the comics] would have stories from 20 years ago affect a story today, or vice versa. Something that happened today would go and change something that happened decades ago” (Botzakis, 2011, p. 119).
Roger found meaning in the stories that he read. There was an order and logic to the worlds he encountered in the universe of the comic books. He saw heroes act heroically and selflessly, and Roger took solace in their struggles and triumphs in the face of adversity. Roger also felt a sense of connection and validation through his involvement with comic books. In deconstructivist comics, characters stepped outside the fictional world to directly address the reader. There was dialogue between creators and fans in the ubiquitous letters pages, online message boards, and comic book conventions. There was also
the sense of community and connec-
tion Roger felt going to his local
comic book store every
Wednesday, the day the new
comic books would arrive
for the week. The data from
Botzakis’ 2011 article was
drawn from an earlier 2009
study where Botzakis conclu-
ded that, “Their reading prac-
tices provide evidence of mean-
ingful uses for popular culture
texts that might be taken-up by edu-
cators or researchers working with students using graphic novels or comic books” (Botzakis, 2009, p. 57).
Places Where Comics Literacy Is Valued/Practiced, In and Out of School
A quarter of the authors highlighted in this review are concerned with Botzakis’ suggestion: the possibility of harnessing the power and appeal of comic literacy for pedagogical purposes. The intense valuation of the comics medium practice identified by Norton (2003) and Botzakis (2009, 2011) is
brought alongside traditional school routines, physical locations and curricular goals, lever-aging students’ out-of-school literacies.
The goal is to enhance literate practice in
both the students’ personal lives and in the realm of the dominant power-structure, signified by sanctioned school literacies and classroom practice. Michael Bitz’ ground-breaking Comic Book Project (Bitz,
2004a, 2004b) brought hun-
dreds of inner-city students
alongside traditional school
literacy practice. Studies of
similar, but smaller-scale
programs (Hughes, King,
Perkins and Fuke 2011; Sabeti 2011, 2012, 2013) demonstrate deep and sustained en-gagement with complex, multimodal texts in the comics medium of a magnitude commen-surate with those advocated by school admin-istrators for the school sanctioned, print texts of the traditional classrooms.
As Norton (2003) discovered, the readers of Archie Comics shared a deep sense of community around their literary practice.
Given their marginal status in the world
of schooling, comic books may be
associated with what Finders
(1997) might call the “literate
underlife” of schools and
communities (p 25). Norton
notes that Finders’ study on
early adolescent girls Just
Girls (Finders, 1997) made
the claim that “Literate
underlife is central to the
development of the early
adolescent female…Underlife
provides an opportunity for the girls
to refute official expectations and negotiate
social rules with other powerful circles"
(Finders, 1997, pp. 25-26). Norton discovered a similar community in her study of the Archie comic book readers:
I found that Archie readers, the girls in particular, constituted an informal and loosely connected reading community in which the vast majority were introduced to Archie comics by friends. The children in the study borrowed comics from one