I'm a Big Fan, Charlie Brown

Reading Cynthia Selfe's chapter on visual literacy made me think of Scott McCloud. In high school I read his Understanding Comics, largely because I was a comic book nerd. It is probably the best of the very few books written about how comics work as a medium. It's like a theoretical approach to comics.

It reminded me also of the moral panic surrounding comics in the middle of the twentieth century, a topic we discussed briefly. It would seem that the comics moral panic, as well as the hierarchy of literary taste that has always dismissed the "funnies," has clouded Selfe's perspective with regard to visual literacy. She thinks that "image-capturing software, multimedia texts, and the World Wide Web" are the only genres, or literacies or venues, that could potentially impact our approach to composition.

Why then have "new media texts" been so effective in shaking up the world of composition while "old media" such as comics have had little impact? I suspect the answer lies in the ubiquity of technology, particularly among the economic elite. As Selfe puts it, "Global communications . . . exchanged via increasingly complicated computer networks . . . increasingly involve texts that depend heavily, even primarily, on visual elements." It's more difficult to argue that there's a practical value to encouraging facility in the grammar of comics in a culture that continues to disdain the form.

But comics are universal. Consider the airplane safety cards or pamphlets we've all seen. On some level, we rely on visual literacy all the time. (The image below and others like it can be found here.)

Consider also McCloud's follow-up to Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics. In that book he makes the connection between comics and the Web, arguing that the future of comics is on the Web and that to an extent, the Web is comics. It occurs to me that a composition classroom would greatly benefit from a few chapters from one of McCloud's books. Just look at how cool this crusty old Web comics essay from 2000 is. Some of the ideas are no longer relevant, such as the concerns about scrolling and bandwidth, but McCloud's contribution to the broader discussion about the Web is really interesting.

It's not that Selfe is anti-comics exactly. She's striving valiantly to expand the palette of the composition classroom along visual lines. It's just that she ought to read Scott McCloud. Her vocabulary--"composer/designer," "reader/viewer," and so forth--seems so stiff by comparison. Why not just say "comics." And then say, "Comics probably provide the best, easiest, most intuitive, and most fun way to show how words and pictures can be combined in a way that tells a story or makes an argument." And then you could also say, "Gee, the Web is kind of like that. And kind of not. Discuss."