The Three Graphic Media

The Steerage, Alfred Stieglitz

The three graphic media of most importance to English teachers are the comics, photojournalism, and motion pictures. We have seen just enough excellence achieved within each of these media not to be taken in by snobbish cliches about these "vulgar" forms. Cartoonists Walt Kelly and Al Capp, photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, movie creators John Huston and Ingmar Bergman--to name at random from the growing roster of immortals in the graphic media--serve to remind us that these art forms have significant histories, i.e., achievements worth remembering.

The comic industry has bounced back from the panic of 1954 over imminent censorship brought on by a plethora of sadism and sex. A large and superficially impressive publicity campaign is under way now which includes a large research project at Boston University into the history of comics. In a magazine which goes to retail newsdealers appears the subtitle: "Comics: Teacher's Pet!" The article claims research conducted at Teachers College, Columbia, under Professor Irving Lorge has found: " . . . comics can give children a very sound and thorough orientation into facts of biography, the appreciation of the outdoors, understanding of science, enjoyment of a plot, or the appreciation of humor.

The amount of incidental information youngsters are likely to pick up is considerable." Some can give children, of course, is a far cry from all do give children. But such distinctions are not the kind that the pleasant blur of trade association public relations traffics in. "Educators," the trade magazine, Newsdealer, widely generalizes, "increasingly recognize that comics serve as a powerful stimulus to the development of the reading habit among the millions of young people who read them regularly.

The intense enjoyment and excitement with which children read comics, provide an introduction to the infinite world of books and magazines. For reading of comics involves application to the printed page--while other media, similarly popular among the young--TV, movies, radio--do not. Children who are avid comics readers tend toward other forms of literature as well, for the reading habit has been established in them." It then goes on to quote child psychologist Dr. David Goodman who writes in a syndicated educational column that since the comics self-censorship Code forbids horror and crime he does not think parents should object to their children reading comics. His reasoning is questionable: the more children read, the more they can read.

"The nonreader is a defeated, maimed person in our society subject to many social and psychological distresses. Anything that can make him read is all to the good. Of the various mass media, the two that appeal most to children are TV and comic books. Both supply the excitement the young crave and need. But the former calls for a mere passive attention of little profit in a child's education. The comic books help a child learn to read." (Newsdealer, July, 1960, p. 11.)

It is truly embarrassing to have such stereotypes about the intrinsic superiority of print media being presented by an educator; it merely obfuscates the public's understanding of a newer graphic form like the comics. For reading for the sake of reading is pedantic folly. The little girl who buries her nose in a book because she is afraid to face a threatening world is not growing; she is merely postponing a rude reckoning. The scholar burrowing through the Library of Congress with no important questions on his mind is reading himself into a deeper and deeper rut of irrelevance. Our criterion for every medium is simply this: Does a person grow in contact with a specific product of that medium? Does his imagination expand, his intelligence deepen, his control over himself grow?

Captain Kangaroo or Leonard Bernstein are surely more conducive to such growth than run-of-the-mill comics; and Mad magazine is more intellectually stimulating than most of the simpery teenage books I've seen. So in spite of the fact that the Chamber of Commerce gave the Comics Magazine Association of America its National Recognition Award because 90% of the publishers, distributors, printers, and engravers submitted themselves to private self-censorship (twenty years after the industry started!) we cannot be greatly impressed by their "outstanding achievement in the business and the public interest."

The only way to make English teachers applaud would be more UPA and Disney cartoons, more inspiring artists using this potentially instructive medium at a much higher level of intellectual complexity with much greater respect for quality of paper and color. Even then, because our prime commitment is to maximum individual growth and optimum social maturity, we would recommend to our students that they forgo the secondhand pleasures of, say, Disney's nature comics for the real thing. Observation, first-hand experience, careful inspection of the real world seem too easily passed by when youngsters stuff themselves greedily with stacks of poorly printed, more often than not innocuous, "clean" comics.

Our strategy should be to push the intelligent comics but promote even more a summer in the woods, a vacation in a workshop, a mind and sensibility engaged in contemplation or in activity, not one soaking up misregistered four-color pulp dreams.