Classics Illustrated: Robinson Crusoe

When The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, was published in 1719, it was received by many as a factual account. And there was good reason to do so; many sailors who had been castaways had written narratives, and in an era when not all the globe had yet been charted, there was still plenty of room for unknown "desert isles." The idea of a lone castaway, thrown on his own devices, has remained a touchstone ever since, reinforced by successors from Swiss Family Robinson, Gilligan's Island, and Cast Away. But in a way, Crusoe is the ultimate ancestor of every narrative that lives on the fine line between fiction and factuality, every novel that troubles the notion of a "true story" as its frame.

It's fitting that Crusoe was among the first titled to be adapted for Classics Illustrated, a series founded by Russian-born publisher Albert Lewis Kanter (1897–1973), who genuinely believed that great literature ought to be brought within closer reach of younger readers. Between 1941 and 1962, more than 200 million copies were sold -- quite a feat when the entire population of the United States was only 180 million as of 1960! It's fair enough to think of comics such as this being as much of a mass medium of their time as radio or television. For Crusoe, Kanter called upon the talents of Stanley Maxwell Zuckerberg, who along with his wife Lillian Chestney was a regular contributor to the series. Both had graduated from the prestigious Pratt Art Institute in the 1930's, where they met.

Zuckerberg approached this comic-book adaptation in typical "house style" -- the story was meant to be "faithfully" adapted, and, wherever possible, original dialogue and other language preserved -- but within those constraints, he had relative liberty to design each frame and page as he liked. Scott McCloud describes six kinds of panel transitions, with #1 (moment to moment), #2 (action to action), and #3 (subject to subject) being the most common. So have a read of this version of Robinson Crusoe -- and take note of its most common transitions. Does it follow the pattern that McCloud says is the most common? Are there individual pages which deviate from the pattern? You don't have to count the frames on every page or make a graph -- just make a note of the pattern you notice.

Then pick one page -- any page of your liking -- which varies from the pattern, or makes different use of the conventions of time and space. Post your thoughts on it below!

Understanding Comics

Understanding comics? At first, the idea that we would need to study and think about comics in some sort of intellectual way seems absurd. And yet, as with so many other things we're used to -- movies, television, advertisements, popular music -- we've become accustomed to their patterns without ever having had to think about them. To take a step backward, and figure out how it is we've been making sense of them all along, feels like a natural thing to do, and may bring unexpected insights. After all, it's what we've done in English classes before: taking what we do when we read, and learning just what reading actually entails.

We humans are, after all, very much dominated by our sense of sight. And while of course this sense is the one we use to read words, pictures have always had the advantage when it comes to getting the attention of our brains. In ancient times, this capacity was vital for our survival -- our other senses being far inferior to other animals, we depended on sight to perceive danger, as well as to recognize the familiar. And from a very early time, we found ways to depict these visual patterns for ourselves; 30,000 years ago we drew the images of animals -- some of them in multiple, overlapping images -- on the walls of our caves. As Scott McCloud notes, even out earliest forms of writing consisted of pictographs -- tiny pictures of things -- long before alphabetic characters came to signify just one sound at a time.

Today, we are born into a world of media. From the first board-books and picture books that are placed into our hands, or read to us by our parents, we learn to see, to recognize depictions of things around us. Words -- with labored pencils and paper -- come a little later, followed soon after by screens and keyboards. So, in some way, to return to the graphical world is to revisit those primal scenes, to once again be in a world where we take things in visually, though this time with some words in, atop, and around them.

There are many conventions for this -- talk-bubbles, thought-bubbles, boxed off sections of frames where an omniscient narrator tells us what's going on -- and as we move through these spaces, we move through time as well. At a basic level, it's like the way a typical five-year-old tells a story: this happened, and then this, and then this ... but also with detours. Do we look at a round frame surrounded by square ones first? -- or do we look at the squares? What if the page is split by a jagged line like a thunderbolt? What difference does the relative sizes of frames make?  And even within a single frame, there is a sequence to our seeing: the eyes, the facial expression, the shapes in the background. Often, our pulse quickens as we sense danger for the character we're following. And yet, as McCloud says, it's all just lines on paper ...

So grab a hold of a comic. Maybe you have some on your shelf? If not, why not try a webcomic? If comics were a part of your life growing up, track down one of your favorites. And then, having read this week's material from Scott McCloud's book, have a fresh look: what do you notice? Does the structure of the comic seem clearer to you now? Post your responses below.

A Brief History of Comics

Newspaper comics emerged just around the turn of the last century, with "The Yellow Kid," widely regarded as the first, debuting in 1895. Within a decade, comic "strips" were fast become a part of daly newspapers, including "dailies" as well as larger panels on Sundays. Most, true to the "comic" label, were humorous in nature, leading some to call them the "funny papers" or simply the "funnies." Some, however, grew a bit more serious, featuring tales of mystery, intrigue, or crime. It was from this strain that "comic books" emerged in the 1930's, when few other forms of entertainment for kids could be had for a mere 10 cents. Superman first appeared in 1938, with Batman following in 1939; that same year, Martin Goodman founded what would eventually become Marvel Comics.

The popularity of these action-hero oriented comics ballooned after World War II, with some of them branching out into "true crime" and "horror" genres. It was all, one would think, good clean fun -- until a German-American psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric Wertham came on the scene. Wertham was convinced that comics did active harm to young people; beginning with a 1947 article in Collier's Magazine -- "Horror in the Nursery" -- he launched a full-fledged moral panic over them. The result-- congressional hearings and hastily-passed censorship laws -- hit home here in Rhode Island, where in 1956 a commission was established "To study 'Comic' books, their Publication, Distribution, Etc., With Particular Reference to Minors." Lists of banned comics, collected by right-minded citizens patrolling corner shops, were soon drawn up, and there was little that local businesses could do but comply.  Eventually, the "Comics Code" was established to regulate the industry, and horror comics -- along with blood, death, bullet-holes and bad guys who got away unpunished -- were banned for decades.

Slowly, starting in the late 1980's and early 1990's, industry giants such as DC and Marvel began to quietly rebel. By publishing new titles in a bound-book format rather than the earlier "floppies," and selling them through bookstores rather than on magazine racks, they dodged the Code and brought back the darkness. With The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: The Killing Joke, Batman led the way, and over the years that followed, most of his fellow superheroes followed in his Bat-steps. It was this marketplace -- often sold in specialized bookshops -- that the fertile soil for the wider emergence of graphical tales of all kinds was first laid down. The "graphic novel" -- which had, in one form or another, been around since the 1970's, found a new home, and with stars such as Will Eisner and Alan Moore, came into its own in the '80's and '90's. When Art Spiegelman's Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the genre came into its own.

And the Comics Code? It died a slow and steady death as comic book publishers simply refused to use it; when Archie comics abandoned the code in 2011, it was essentially defunct. Its once-dreaded seal of approval is now the property of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which fights the censorship the code once embodied.

Welcome to English 122

Welcome to our Spring 2020 section of English 122, 'Literature and the Canon.'

Of course, you probably have one question: what exactly is a canon? The word goes back to the ancient history of the Catholic church, where it signified conformity to a rule or principle; Church law is known as "canon law." This sense was extended when, in the fourth century, councils met to determine which books would be considered authentic when it came to the Bible. We're not generally aware of it, but there were many candidates; in addition to the four 'canonical' Gospels, there were others -- the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and even a Gospel of Judas. The Apocalypse of St. John, now in every Bible, was one of a great many competing Apocalypses. Those others were rejected, although texts of many of them survive to this day.

In the realm of literature, a "canonical" text is one that is routinely studied, and thought of as a significant text in the ongoing timeline of literary creation and reception. The list is far from fixed, and over time new authors and texts become canonical, while others fade away. Oftentimes, the shift is due to cultural changes, along with the belated recognition of women writers and writers of color. It's led to some odd results though -- every American literature anthology today includes the poetry of Langston Hughes, for instance, but Carl Sandburg -- a once-famous poet whom Hughes credited as a major influence -- is gone.

So, unlike the Church's canon, the secular literary canon evolves, changes, alters over time -- and that's as it should be. Today, it evolves in other ways besides author and text, as new literary movements, new genres, and new media have been admitted into the fold. Science fiction and fantasy, for instance, have gained in status, with writers such as Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin now enshrined in the Library of America. Yet some newer media still stumble at the threshold of the canonical, none more so than the tradition that has gone from comic books to graphic novels and memoirs. The oldest of prejudices -- that somehow books with pictures, or consisting chiefly of pictures, are essentially more juvenile -- has not gone away.

So this semester, we'll be testing those waters by reading a number of "canonical" texts -- and a few not-so-canonical ones -- all in graphical form. Our list will include Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, George Orwell's Animal Farm, and Octavia Butler's Kindred, among others. We'll also read shorter graphical adaptations of poetry and stories, along with some critical texts that will help us understand the most effective ways of approaching this newly graphical canon.