TEACHING THE TEACHERS

This May, I had the pleasure of participating in the 2007 conference of the International Reading Association which was held in Toronto, Ontario. This annual event is a massive symposium of educators and book publishers and is all about promoting literacy among students in North America. (For more info, visit www.reading.org) Tor, the publisher of Grease Monkey, generously invited me to take part in their own event at the IRA, a special interest group focusing on fantasy, science fiction, and graphic novels. With me were four other award-winning Tor authors who gathered to share our thoughts with an appreciative audience of over 200 attendees.

Things have come a long way since I spent my days in a classroom trying to keep my recreational reading material hidden from the teachers. A generational shift has occurred, delivering to our schools a new breed of educator who also grew up with SF, fantasy, and comics and is not only open to them but genuinely excited by what they have to offer. It’s been a year now since the release of Grease Monkey, so this was the first chance I had to talk about it in such a forum. I was overwhelmed by the warmth and enthusiasm I received in return.

Each of us on the panel were asked to talk for a few minutes about about our work and the value of our genres and formats. Here is the essay I wrote for the occasion…

SAVING THE WORLD FROM SUPERHEROES
Our Earth is the only place we will ever know from inside out rather than from the outside in. The moon is the next closest body, and throughout our entire history we’ve only known it from the outside in. To us, the Earth is a world and other places are planets. What effect does that have on our perception? We see the Earth as a limitless place that will always support us, because this is where we started out. But we’re learning very quickly these days that this isn’t true at all. If we settle on Mars one day, we’ll always see it as a planet, we’ll always see it from the outside in, and we’ll treat it differently. We’ll treat it as a planet with built-in limitations. Our survival will depend on it. I’ll get back to the subject of limitations, but first let me say all this in a much simpler way.

We all start out at a disadvantage. We’re born inside a bubble. As we grow up, it expands, but until we learn about the bubble it’s invisible to us. We have to get outside of it to see it clearly. We can judge a person’s maturity by how far along they are in this process, by how well they can see the bubble for what it is. This, in my opinion, is the great contribution science fiction makes to society, since it’s the one of the few forms of literature that by its very nature looks in from outside of the bubble and instructs a reader from that viewpoint.

Something that helps us to elevate our awareness of the bubble is our capacity for language and abstract thought. It’s a tremendous advantage. It allows us to identify and define the bubble so we can tell what’s inside and what’s outside.

The first language we learn is visual; recognizing faces, interpreting emotions, seeing depth and height and everything around us that we can interact with. It’s hard-wired into our brains by evolution and it trumps everything else. Small wonder the written word started out as pictures. Even today, kids respond to images first and words second. If I remember right, elementary school is chiefly an exercise in translating images into words that define and expand on what we see. But no matter how fluent we become, an image still communicates more than a word. In that sense, we’re all bilingual. And if images can be considered a kind of language, then we can say the same about art.

I’m not a professional teacher but I’m sure that if I was, my least-favorite hobby would be listening to teaching advice from people like me. I am a father, though, and it’s just possible that my experience teaching things to my own daughter could be helpful to consider. She’s nearly 18 now, and knows absolutely everything, but when she still listened to me I found that she could grasp a concept faster and with greater depth if I could find a way to make it personally relevant to her. I’m sure you all know that when kids are still unaware of that bubble they live in, their lives are very egocentric. Nothing is more important to them than their relationships with other people. Anytime I could invoke one of those relationships and get Socratic with it, the results were guaranteed. This is what made the difference between a lesson and a lecture.

So how does this relate to comics? Well, my graphic novel is loaded with stuff I learned from this process. The main character is a boy of 17 who steps into the minefield of the adult world for the first time and has to learn some hard lessons. My daughter first read the book just after she turned 17, and the thing she liked most about it is that it didn’t lecture her. It didn’t spoon-feed her easy answers to complex problems. In other words, she found it to be personally relevant.

I’ve always hoped comic books would bring that quality to the table, so they will eventually be seen as more than just escapist juvenile fantasy. Comics have a built-in advantage because they capitalize on visual language. Because of this, kids gravitate toward comics more than any other print media, and they can serve as an excellent gateway to other reading experiences.

Nevertheless, peoples’ opinion of comics is still pretty negative and even a bit schizophrenic. Here’s a story from my own personal experience that may illuminate this contradiction.

I was drawing a comic book one day in the early 90s when I looked up from my desk to see some neighborhood kids staring into my window like they’d just discovered the most amazing candy shop ever. I had plenty of extra copies lying around, so I handed them out and started my own little local fan club. The next day, one of the boys came back and said his dad told him to return the comic book because it had “swears” in it. I knew that wasn’t true, so I said “where?” “Oh, he looked at it and it had some words in it that I’m not supposed to hear like damn and shit.” Now this was completely false, and I didn’t want to become the neighborhood pariah, so I said “you take it back to your dad and tell him it’s OK.” I sent the kid away and immediately my wife flew into a panic. She might have been justified; we didn’t know this kid’s dad and we had no idea how he would react to such a challenge.

A few minutes later: knock knock. I open the door and the kid is there with his dad. The dad doesn’t look up right away. He’s leafing through the comic pages. About a hundred years pass, and then he finally says “I just want to apologize.”

That was a very educational moment for me. It told me a lot about the general perception of the medium I work in. Comics are widely considered to be strictly a childrens’ medium but there’s also an undercurrent of suspicion that they are out to corrupt our children. This father’s first reaction, without even seeing the inside of the book, was to condemn it. He jumped to the worst conclusion and probably didn’t even consider the alternative until he was asked to. And I’m afraid that’s true for a lot of things in American culture.

Fortunately for me and a lot of other comic book creators, Japan came to our rescue about ten years later.

I said something earlier about limitations, and I want to return to that now. I think one of the reasons American comics have always been dismissed as a medium is because of their most visible representative: the super-hero. Granted, this is a unique American concept like basketball and jazz, and it should be celebrated for that, but there’s a reason most of us lose our taste for super-heroes as we get older. When we’re young, we don’t know very much about limitations. We don’t know that we live in the bubble and so everything seems possible. We love the idea of a super-hero because like us, it has no limitations. But as we get older and the bubble starts to reveal itself, suddenly the super-hero loses relevance to our lives.

It’s the same with a lot of childrens’ entertainment, at least the modern stuff, which is usually populated by characters with unlimited resources. My day job right now is a new version of the Scooby Doo TV cartoon in which Scooby and Shaggy inherit a fortune that they can squander any way they like. It gives us a bigger toybox to play in when we work on the show, but it’s a far cry from the Scooby Doo I grew up on, where the characters had to get by on wits alone. And I have no doubt which version will still have relevance in ten years.

Which brings me to Japanese manga. I’m guessing a few of you have encountered this stuff in the classroom. Well, let me tell you why it’s so special and then I’ll wrap this up. Japan, as we know, was defeated in World War 2. That was the moment that broke their bubble. With us it was different. We had overcome huge limitations to win that war and so it was easy for us to see ourselves as a super-hero. Meanwhile, all those limitations were shifted onto their shoulders, which made them the ordinary human beings. This was naturally reflected in their pop culture. When they started creating comics, that was their reference point.

The result, even today, is a lot more realistic and a lot more relevant than the American comic book as it’s perceived by most people. For all sorts of reasons, including some that have to do with commerce, Japanese manga has caught on like wildfire and captured the attention of American kids in a way that our home-grown comics haven’t done in about 20 years. There’s been a lot of debate about this, but I’m just going to offer you my own theory.

It’s been a long time since America could seriously consider itself a super-hero. Each new generation has a few more limitations to observe and a few less reasons to consider itself the king of the world. In other words, there’s greater momentum now to grow up and be relevant. Our bubble is starting to break. Anything that keeps that process moving, whether it’s science fiction from the US or comic books from Japan, could end up saving the world from super-heroes. And what could be more heroic than that?