Giuseppe Gazzola, This Course Contains Graphic Language, or Gender and Ethnicity in American Comics
Giuseppe Gazzola taught “Gender and Ethnicity in American Comics” in the Spring of 2009, which was also his first year teaching at Stony Brook. Comics had been a favorite childhood pastime and an adult interest, and he took the opportunity to develop a GLS 102 class on comics, in which students would learn how to read comics in both semiotic and cultural contexts. While his main field is 19th Century literature, the course allowed him to develop a secondary scholarly interest in the art and semiotics of comics. He is planning to give colloquium on comics in art and publish it as a paper. I talked to Professor Gazzola in late August about his experiences with the course.
What was the topic of your course?
I taught a course in semiotics and comics, but I wanted to give it a title that was a little more captivating, because I was advised not to give semiotics prominence in the course title. It was “Gender and Ethnicity in American Comics,” [later changed to “This Course Contains Graphic Language”]. What I really wanted to do was to demonstrate that we as readers need to pay attention to the text and the text can be any kind of text, it can be comics, it could be movies, or it could be a textbook. We can read the given text in many ways, according to our intuitions. We put to the text much more than we, at first sight, would understand. I just wanted to use the most trivial way of expression in order to demonstrate that the power of the reader needs to be self-conscious, needs to be understood. Comics are very good for that.
Are comics your main scholarly interest?
Definitely not. My main field is 19th-Century Italian literature, but it needs to be interpreted, read, and understood in the same way comics do. The reason I developed a scholarly interest in comics is because my generation grew up with comics. To us, reading comics was natural, as it is for your average American citizen watching a Hollywood movie. The grammar of a Hollywood movie is natural [for them]. Once, I found something particularly interesting, and I wanted to show my mother, who is an average-educated woman who reads books for entertainment. I realized she could not read the comic book, because she did not have experience with comics. I realized what we understand as a given, the natural grammar of comics, is not necessarily something that belongs to everybody. We are trained as well as we are trained to watch a Hollywood movie. It belongs to our culture. If we watch Japanese or Korean movie, or a French movie from the Nouvelle Vague, these movies have a different grammar, and this is something that I have started appreciating. In the same way, I have started learning about the grammar of comics, and of their semiotic significance. That’s how I got interested.
What kinds of activities and assignments did you give? I read, for instance, that you have the students create their own comics.
Yes. And sometimes they happen to make very good stuff. They have to produce a comic, a story. In this case, there was a very talented student who took upon herself the whole work, but the other students chipped in with how the story would go. It happens that sometimes the results are just brilliant. This student is very well-educated in the grammar of comics, and actually here, we can see a few of the things we have raised in class: For example, introspection is represented without colors, and action is drawn in color. These are things that we learn. Obviously, the artist or the writer of the text needs to think of these things. We are the readers, and we understand it perhaps on a superficial level, but this is exactly what semiotics is: the ability of reading and some case producing a text.
This project considered the concept of closure. The closure is the white space between one image and the next. The sense in which we read a comic is not a given. If you read a Japanese manga or a Korean manhwa, they are read in the opposite direction [right-to-left], but that is not a given. It is a convention. Closure is what gives us the sense of time, the passage of time from one logical connection to the next. Again, it is not a given. We can have a closure or not. In this project, they are exploring the concept of closure and take point A and see how it can evolve into different stories. What is interesting here is not that this could mean any of these, but that what we have to fill in this space is different. This is just a [white] space, but it is a highly significant white space. We need to fill it with meaning depending on what we are given. So you see that the blank space is not a void space, but we crowd it with our interpretations, and that gives it a meaning.
What kinds of assignments worked particularly well?
As assignments, I had reading. They had a great textbook, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. It is a comic that teaches how to understand comics. It explains that there is much more than meets the eye, and this is true for any kind of comic. They also had to read quite a large number of comics. We had a project [creating a comic] as a final class assignment, in which they had to demonstrate that they understood something, that they took something from the course.
An assignment that I thought worked particularly well was giving them two different kinds of comics, so for instance an American comic and a Japanese comic to have them understand how the two texts are inherently different.
Were there other activities or assignments that didn’t quite work or things that you would do differently next time?
A few things… First of all, I thought that I could teach 2 hours for half of the semester. I wanted to do that so that I could screen a couple of movies, I ended up showing just one. I wanted to have a couple of guest speakers. The students like that. They like to have different people in class. I wanted to give them enough time. That’s why I wanted to go to the two-hour format. That did not work. The students were tired and the class was slow-moving. We had time anyway.
The other problem I had was to actually get them engaged, even though [comics were] something that supposedly would interest everybody. There were students, who by the force of their personality, would talk a lot, but it was definitely difficult for me to maintain and sustain a class discussion for two hours, showing different clips or showing them in class. I noticed that they tended not to necessarily be done with the assignment, so I had comics ready that I would show them. We would read the comic [together] in class. I had digitized it. For example, there is a Tarzan spin-off, or rather rip-off, but exactly like the Edgar Bourough-related comics. All of the women here are white, and all the villains are black. We would discuss basic stuff: Why is it so? How does ideation of the image work? What does this tell us about America in the 1950s?
What did you get out of teaching the course?
To me, it was a great opportunity to get involved with something I wanted to do, but couldn’t do in my department. Here, the department wants from me that I teach my language courses, my literature courses, my graduate courses. I cannot teach a semiotics course, because, rightly so, there are other people who teach semiotics. I could not teach a comics course either, because it’s not in the curriculum. It gave me the opportunity to pursue something seriously that I am interested in. It gave me the opportunity to buy the comic books I want without my wife saying, “Hey, you are wasting your money on something that it is not appropriate.” Well, I can say, “Well, look, I’m teaching this stuff. I have to buy the books.”
It is something that keeps me interested. It was a great course to teach, and I had a chance to learn from some of the students, who are very involved in the comics in general. So, I had a chance to learn from them. I did not know the X-men phenomenon, until a student of mine came up and said, “This is what we read, perhaps you’ll want to know about it.” So if and when I teach this course again, I will definitely put the X-men comics with it, because it is interesting. So I found something new.
What do you enjoy about teaching 102?
The freedom. The fact that I can truly do what I want. It gives me enthusiasm. There are no strings attached. It is a hobby. It is an opportunity to take seriously something that I would otherwise not have.