📚 "Comics Are For Everyone!" Will Eisner Week Event: Thoughts

For this event, the UC English Department brought faculty and graduate students from both the English Department and other departments (among them were scholars and professors from the Romance Languages, Finance, Judaic Studies, and more). 

One of the best parts of an event like this was hearing from such a diverse range of people: there were people who grew up in Costa Rica, for example, who discussed international comics that many may have overlooked. There were mostly women in attendance, too, who all had similar stories of being "locked out" of discussing comics in their youth but loving the direction comic studies have gone in that it is now a much more welcoming and inclusive space. We heard from people who loved Archie and those who loved the new X-Men series, and those who preferred the more intellectual works like Contract with God. As part of the event, I gave a short talk about my own history with comics. Below are my written notes for your perusal:

For me, I always loved comics as a kid. I grew up on Marvel comics, mostly, things like Spider-Man. Some DC, as well, like most I loved Batman. But there were other comics that snuck their way onto my radar; Mark Crilley’s books, for instance, the Akiko series, were great because I would read his books then watch his videos about drawing. And they always blew me away how he could do just about anything with a few lines.

(In the actual talk, I ad-libbed here and also discussed Bone: a very incredible epic journey that, as a child I loved, and still do, but have since re-read and realized that it was not preplanned in the slightest, which honestly captured a new magic for me as a reader.)

But it wasn’t until I took a film noir literature course in college that I truly appreciated just how artful and masterful comics could be: the professor, in addition to things like Maltese Falcon and Night of the Hunter assigned a number of graphic novels, most notably Sin City and Watchmen. It was then that I was truly impressed by the possibilities of graphic novels.

And they continue to impress me with how much they are able to convey and in such detail in such a small space: they make the page feel limitless, rather than limited. And comics are all over the map in focus—some are word heavy, some art heavy, but they all strike this interesting balance that is special to the art form.

Many people will recommend things like Maus or Persepolis—which I would as well, to be clear, I teach them myself!—but in the interest of recommending something you might not have heard of at all, I want to recommend Sheets by Brenna Thummler which is, as of last year, now the first book in a finished trilogy.

Sheets tells the story of a young girl who is trying to navigate the death of her mother and trying to save her father’s struggling laundromat. She meets and befriends a young ghost who appears as a sheet, and together they try to figure everything out. Not just about the ghost’s life, or saving the laundromat, but how to be a kid in a world where to survive you have to learn quickly how to be an adult. It’s an incredibly sweet story that I think anyone can take something from.

This event was an incredible experience, one that I will think back on in the years to come as a great bonding moment with those who love comics from all walks of life.