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February 19, 2024 New Layouts in Slumberland

According to Neil Cohn, contemporary comics viewers follow eight protocols for determining viewing paths:

  1. “Go to the left corner.”
  2. “If no top left panel, go to either the highest and/or leftmost panel.”
  3. “Follow the outer border.”
  4. “Follow the inner border.”
  5. “Move to the right.”
  6. “Move straight down.”
  7. “If nothing is to the right, go to the far left and down.”
  8. “Go to the panel that has not been read yet.”

The protocols follow a default Z-path (rows) that shifts to an N-path (columns) due to specific layout techniques:

A viewer’s eye is channeled like a marble along the horizontal gutters between panel frame edges, detouring at moments of “blockage” or “staggering” or “separation.”

But, Cohn acknowledges, viewing protocols have changed over the decades. He conducted his study in 2013, and so it included none of the original viewers of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Here’s McCay’s October 22, 1905 edition:

Cohn’s “staggering” rule sends viewers down the column, while McCay’s numbering sends them to the panel on the right:

I suspect that’s because a viewer’s eye is less like a marble and more like a panoptic watchman taking in the whole page at once. Rather than ricocheting with each gutter turn, a viewer sees the larger structure.

For McCay the larger structure is often two cascading rows. It’s one of his most repeated designs, often involving four panels in each of two rows:

Or three rows:

Or 5 panels per row:

Or even 5 panels in each of 3 rows:

McCay also sometimes combines panels, especially in the bottom row:

Less often in the higher row:

McCay includes numbers in his captions, so the intended viewing order is never in doubt — including when the order is unusual.

These next three require viewers to move once right to left:

I have a name for that.

  • Reversed path: a path that moves from a right image to the next contiguous left image.

I diagrammed three examples from Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady:

It occurs once in each of those last three McCay examples:

I introduced the term in a 2020 post about Matt Baker, and reprised it in a later post about Mike Grell’s Tyroc. My most detailed discussion though is in the essay I co-authored with Monalesia Earle, “Misdirections in Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady,” in Qiana Whitted’s 2023 edited collection Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics.

I identified a total of five misdirecting layout techniques. McCay uses another of them:

Because the rows aren’t cascading, the viewing path has to leap over two unviewed panels to start the final row.

I gave that a name too.

  • Parallel saccade: a backward but non-diagonal leap over a middle image that has not yet been viewed to reach the beginning of a next row or column.

I diagrammed three examples from Baker:

McCay doesn’t use it consistently. Here, for example, the layout could produce the same leap with the tall panel extending into a lower row:

The rows instead do follow Cohn’s protocols:

Sometimes McCay varies his rectangular panels with a central circular one:

Though the above two layouts are basically the same, their viewing orders are different:

The first is essentially three columns, following Cohn’s protocols for an N-path. But the second requires the viewer to jump over the middle panel.

I identified a version of that for Baker:

  • Segment leap: a forward leap over a previously viewed image to reach the next conceptually liner but physically non-contiguous image within the same row or column.

I diagrammed six examples:

For McCay, the leapt-over image hasn’t been viewed yet. Also, a small portion of the sequenced images do share a gutter, so perhaps technically there isn’t an initial leap?

And I’m equally intrigued by this last one:

The last panel of the cascading first row isn’t cascaded, creating a partially parallel saccade back to the second row — a saccade that leaps over two panels, first a previously viewed one and then a previously unviewed one. And then the second row abandons the cascading path and shifts to columns before the large penultimate panel and its final inset panel.

However categorized, Baker’s layouts follow McCay’s by four decades, but Little Nemo and the Phantom Lady have a lot more in common than appears from a first glimpse.

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February 12, 2024 Winsor McCay’s Comics are Formal Innovations — and also really racist

First the formalist stuff.

Bloomsbury published The Comics Form in hardcover last year and paperback last month. I hope to publish a revised edition someday, but until then, this blog is a good place to muse about revisions. Though my approach in The Comics Form is formalist rather than historicist, I worked to acknowledge scholars and artists who originate certain lines of thinking or approaches, harmonizing their ideas and terms with those that have followed. Of the many many folks I left out, Winsor McCay now feels like a significant omission.

Here’s why.

I wrote in Chapter 5 about various kinds of “juxtapostional inferences”:

“Continuous inferences provide an answer to Mikkonen’s question: ‘when can a group of images be perceived as one image?’ (2017: 12). In contrast to embedded inferences creating the perception of a single image as multiple images, continuous inferences create the perception of multiple images as one image.”

That’s because:

“Discursively, continuous inferencing produces an impression of a visual element partly obscured by a visual ellipsis. Though two lines are separated by an undrawn space, a viewer perceives them as a single line.”

What should you call that?

“This effect aligns with ‘closure’ as defined in Gestalt psychology, but because McCloud uses ‘closure’ to describe all juxtapositional relationships, using ‘closure inferences’ as a type of juxtapositional inference, while accurate, would further conflate terms. I have previously suggested omitting capitalization and using ‘gestalt’ (Gavaler and Beavers 2018: 20), but ‘continuous’ seems less likely to produce further confusion, in part because its meaning is self-evident.”

I go on to describe examples by Jessica Abel and Brecht Evens. But I should have started a century earlier with McCay. Here’s the Sunday, January 27, 1907 edition of McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland:

Look at panels 4, 5, and 6 across the bottom row. The domed ceiling, pillars, and circular staircase extend across all three panels, while the four recurrent figures repeat.

That perfectly illustrates my description in The Comics Form:

“When a visual field is partially subdivided, with some elements appearing to continue between images and some not, attention to the continuous elements will create the effect of a single, subdivided image, while attention to the discontinuous elements will create the effect of separate images juxtaposed. Both may be present simultaneously, and visual elements may be categorized by figure and ground or other dividing principles.”

In McCay’s case, the ground is spatially continuous across the two panel divisions, while the figures instead require temporal leaps. I don’t know if this is the first continuous inference in the history of the comics medium, but it’s the first I’ve encountered. I especially like the character Icicle’s comment in the middle panel. It reads to me as a quiet metafictional acknowledgment of the visual effect of stationary images appearing to traverse a background:

“Well, you don’t have to go any further if you don’t want to!”

I’m not tempted to rename the inference “Icicle Closure,” but I do wish I’d included McCay’s sequence in The Comics Form.

And now I need to pause.

On May 5, 1907, less than four months after the above Sunday edition, McCay introduced “Jungle Imp” to his series. The character is an example of the virulently racist blackface minstrel tradition that was common in comics in the first half of the twentieth century. Will Eisner’s Ebony White in The Spirit and Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski’s Whitewash Jones in Young Allies are two late examples from the 1940s. When I wrote about them in my forthcoming essay “Reading Race in the Comics Medium,” I included descriptions but not illustrations. To continue my analysis of McCay here, I need to include images of his “Imp.” I have conflicted opinions about that. If you believe that formal comics analysis is not a sufficient reason for sharing racist imagery, I have no counter-argument and encourage you to stop reading. If you believe that formal comics analysis can be a sufficient reason to share some of McCay’s 1907 racist images, then I welcome you to continue. Either way, I’ll reexamine the question at the bottom of the post.

McCay published this edition of Little Nemo in Slumberland on November 24, 1907:

The top two-panel row is another example of the continuous panel effect. If it were merely a repetition though, I wouldn’t share it. But the second and third rows do something further.

Both trigger continuous inferences, but where the four figures in the earlier example appear to be moving across a continuous space, these three figures appear to be stationary. The sequence appears to portray them incrementally sinking down to their hands and knees. But for the narrative to make sense, they must also travel further down the hallway to the next door at the center of each panel. Because McCay draws each door identically from the same angle (relative to each door), changing only the words in the signage, the continuous effect is disguised. Panel 4, 5, and 6 look like spatial repetitions of 3.

McCay created a similar effect (this time with no racist imagery) on March 22, 1908:

Based on the backgrounds, each of the four rows requires a continuous inference to bridge the middle gutter. And yet McCay draws Nemo’s seemingly stationary figure near the center of each panel, creating a visual impression that contradicts the narrative fact that he must have begun moving and then stopped moving again during the inferred temporal gaps.

Returning to the earlier adventure with the Imp, McCay included a related but distinct effect on November 10, 1907:

As with the columns in the November 24 edition, the column at the center of the page is divided in half by the gutter. In this case though, the column isn’t one column but the halves of two different columns framed to look like a single unified object.

I describe this in The Comics Form as a “semi-continuous” inference:

“The continuous impression of an interrupted line is a discursive effect. When the line is representational, continuous inferences create the appearance of interrupted diegetic content, but the interruption may be understood at only the discursive level if the diegetic content of the two images is not continuous. Semi-continuous inferences create discursive connections between discontinuous diegetic content.”

And that’s because:

“If the trajectory of a line within one image visually aligns with the trajectory of a line in a contiguous image, a viewer may experience the two lines as a single line – even though representationally the two lines are unrelated. At the discursive level, continuous and semi-continuous inferences are indistinguishable, but semi-continuous create discursive shapes across images that appear to share diegetic qualities even though the images do not exist in a story world together. Semi-continuous inferences can produce a unifying effect at the diegetic level.”

I go on to describe examples by Kevin C. Pyle and Charles Burns — but, once again, McCay was a century ahead of them. He does it again on December 1, 1907:

The apparent middle column at the center of the first three rows is again the halves of two different columns — which the final page-width panel makes explicit. The page resembles the continuous panels of November 24, but is instead semi-continuous.

This page also features an additional meta effect. While the words “Banquet Hall” on the door in the background remain consistent, the words of the strip’s title change as the characters knock them down and then eat them. In a 2014 essay, Roy T. Cook terms the metafictional effect “objectified”: a thought or speech balloon is objectified “when it is placed in such a way as to force the reader to interpret the balloon as part of the physical universe inhabited by the characters and objects depicted in a particular panel.” Like me, Cook cites two examples published a hundred years after McCay’s.

The effect is especially paradoxical because the title is continuous across the middle gutters. The words “Little Nemo” appear only in the left panels, and “Slumberland” only in the right. That fact is normally unremarkable because the words normally aren’t part of the storyword but exist only discursively as part of the layout — what I call a “secondary diegesis” in The Comics Form. The characters don’t seem to be aware that they are drawn characters in a comic strip observed by viewers. It just seems there’s paradoxical overlap of their world and the ambiguous world in which the title letters exist.

Now back to the more important question of racist imagery.

Three of the five above comics include blackface caricature. One of those three repeats the relevant formal qualities (continuous panels) of the non-racist strips; the other two display unique qualities (semi-continuous panels and objectified title letters) that are not otherwise illustrated. Does that justify including them here?

I suspect that if I actually were working on a new edition of The Comics Form, I wouldn’t include them. I know that I don’t use comics with blackface caricatures in my classes. It seems I hold a lower standard for my blog — a space I often use for initial drafts of work I later revise and publish in academic venues. And yet I know of at least once when I was careful not to share similarly racist images: during a “cancel culture” uproar over some Dr. Seuss books no longer being available in print. There the racist imagery was central. Here formal analysis is, and the racist imagery is peripheral to that analysis. Is that an adequate argument for including it? I suspect I would challenge the rationale if someone else made it, making me at best inconsistent.

I considered obscuring the images of McCay’s Imp, but decided against that. I also considered rewriting this post and avoiding the three racist comics entirely — but now I’m finding this question more interesting than the formal analysis that initiated it. I’m still debating:

What is the best way for comics scholars to treat innovative comics with racist imagery?

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February 5, 2024 Two Kinds of White (Or, Things I Learned While Drawing Pictures)

My digital art began as a byproduct of my comics scholarship and continues to weave in and out of it, with insights gained from one revealing and reinforcing lessons for the other. In this case, I can’t remember if the insight began in my writing and influenced my drawing or vice-versa, but either way, the two then moved forward in tandem.

Since images are more interesting to look at than text, I’ll start with three recent digital sketches:

My analytical focus has been on image backgrounds — the color of the paper comics are printed on or, in the above images, the white screen behind the black pixels of the digital art. The white isn’t actually “behind” the black, but by surrounding the dark marks the white encourages that visual effect. I know remarkably little about computers, but I think the white is made of individual pixels, same as the black marks, and is a combination of red, green, and blue pixels at full intensity. Whatever the technology, the drawing process imitates drawing on paper: I added black marks to a white surface.

What’s interesting to me, both analytically and artistically, is how the black marks produce two different kinds of white.

Explaining that requires a quick detour:

One of the first reviews of my most recent book, The Comics Form, said it was “virtually jargon-free” — which I took as a deep compliment. And yet I did spend most of a chapter distinguishing two central terms, that I need to distinguish here too:

  • Discourse: physical marks on paper (or pixels in screen)
  • Diegesis: the represented subject matter produced when a viewer mentally interprets the physical marks

I stole the terms from narratology, and then stipulated different (though related) meanings, which caused confusion for a different reviewer (no, this “discourse” isn’t “plot”). I find the concepts invaluable, so if you know a clearer way of presenting them, please tell me.

Now, back to white:

By adding black marks, I created two different kinds of white, discursive and diegetic.

The diegetic white occurs in the negative spaces between the black marks. I’ve drawn no marks in the area of the forehead or the nose or the cheeks, but because those white areas are interpreted as representing those facial features, the white is diegetic. I experience it differently than the white outside of the black marks, which, because the marks don’t suggest a specific background, remain “blank” and so discursively white.

I assume other viewers experience the two whites differently too, but as the person who created the image, I can also report that I experienced them differently during the creative process. I moved the black marks around (which is one of the main reasons I prefer digital art over pen and paper), experimenting with different nose lengths and cheek widths. That I experienced the white areas as a “nose” and “cheeks,” even while creating and altering them, means they were already diegetic to me.

Manipulating the two whites also revealed an ambiguity:

Even though I was the creator, I didn’t always know exactly where the discursive white stopped and the diegetic white started. Diegetically the face must have an edge, but discursively that edge is undrawn and so diegetically unspecified. I assume other viewers experience an edge, but not a precise one. That means there’s a small but intriguing area where the two whites can’t be distinguished. They merge.

Panel frames add another complexity.

Unframed, this image is similar to the first two:

But unlike the first two, the inclusion of black marks representing shoulders alters the discursive white under the chin to create the diegetic white of a “neck.” More interestingly, the lower black marks end at an abrupt and uniform horizontal edge. That edge (I assume) is interpreted discursively. The image, not the person in the image, has been cut off, because the white under the edge is experienced as discursive rather than diegetic.

Something more complicated happens when the frame edge is extended on all sides with black lines:

The black lines produce the same discursive white outside the image, but the interior white changes. While the white inside the figure is unaltered, the negative space between the black lines of the frame and the black lines of the figure are no longer discursive. At least not when I look at the image. The frame lines partition a previously discursively white area and turn it into a representational one. The figure is now standing in front of some kind of diegetic background. I can’t conclude anything about that background other than it exists. I think it exists because I experience the white as representing it. The white is diegetic.

Do framing lines always produce that effect? I’m not sure. These two figures feel different to me (independent of the abrupt change in rendering style):

The area outside the frames (including the gutter produced by their juxtaposition) is discursive white. But the two interior spaces seem ambiguous.

I experience the left figure as lying on a bed as viewed from above, and the right figure as sitting on the bed edge as viewed from a parallel angle. As the artist, I experience those impressions because I know I intended them. I expect other viewers may experience different diegetic content. Is the left figure, for example, falling? If so, my diegetic “bed” doesn’t exist in the interior white space.

I think that level of ambiguity keeps the interior white a discursive white.

What happens when there are no frame lines?

I suspect the same ambiguity remains, only now there’s no gutter. Even though the discursive white of the previous gutter was unambiguous (no viewer interpretation turned it into a representation of something other than of nothingness), merging its area with the areas directly surrounding the figures doesn’t feel that different to me.

I think that’s because I experience all three as discursive white. So there’s no diegetic-discursive tension at an unspecified edge as in the second example:

Tension occurs across the diegetic-discursive divide, not between areas of discursive white.

I think that’s because areas of discursive white aren’t differentiated. They’re just the unmarked page. But areas of diegetic white vary significantly. Notice how in the third example the white areas of the face are different from the white areas in the hair which are different from the white areas in the clothing:

I experience the white area in the hair above the figure’s right eye as “brighter” than the white of the skin, which I experience as “brighter” than the white in the clothing. Those effects are created discursively by the shapes and nearness of the surrounding black marks, but the effects are also influenced by the deigetic content: that area of hair appears “brighter” because of how it catches the light.

All three diegetic whites are also simultaneously the same discursive white — there’s no diegesis without a discourse. But when viewed, the areas of discursive white are experienced as representing different things, producing a range of different diegetic whites.

(If I write a second edition of The Comics Form, maybe this will grow into a new subsection.)

January 29, 2024 Daredevil & Black Lives Matter: the Sequel

I discussed Marvel’s representation of George Zimmerman’s 2013 trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin in a previous post. Though the KKK-based Sons of the Serpents had infiltrated the NYPD and New York judicial system, the Daredevil #28-29 story arc ends with Matt Murdock’s trust in the law unshaken.

That was before Zimmerman was acquitted.

Daredevil #31 reprises the Sons of the Serpent while again alluding to the Zimmerman trial. The issue was released mid-September, two months after Zimmerman’s acquittal. Mark Waid, now co-authoring with artist Chris Samnee, scripts Murdock’s narration in response to a live-televised verdict on a case that “has had the whole nation riveted—and sharply divided—for months.” The defendant “stands accused of following and shooting a ‘suspicious-looking’ Black teenager in her building — — who, as it turned out, was an honor-student tutor visiting a neighbor’s kid.” The defense team “built their strategy around self-defense, exploiting the fact that there were no witnesses but there were clear signs of a struggle. The prosecution, by contrast, paints her as a racist, armed vigilante who provoked a confrontation with an unarmed boy.”

Despite the change in gender, the parallels are overt. Zimmerman’s 911 recording includes his calling Martin a “real suspicious guy,” and the “honor-student” detail echoes popular descriptions of Martin. Zimmerman was acquitted on grounds of self-defense, despite the prosecution contending that he provoked the confrontation while acting against police instructions. Since Samnee’s art depicts only the courtroom, including one image of the female defendant, Waid may have updated the narration to include similarities later in the production process, since Zimmerman’s acquittal likely occurred after Waid scripted the issue and Samnee had begun penciling it.

The details serve only as a preamble to the Sons of the Serpent inserting false footage into the Black D.A.’s post-acquittal press conference, revealing the jury’s names and addresses and instructing viewers to attack them. Waid names the DA “James Priest” (possibly an allusion to Christopher Priest, one of the first Black writers and editors at Marvel in the late 70s and early 80s) and describes him as “more powerful than Al Sharpton and Cornel West combined,” making his (apparent) call to “show these repugnant cowards what justice is all about” a reflection on real-world Black activists — or at least the power they were perceived to hold.

Previous Sons of the Serpents episodes turned on a similar trope, casting a nonwhite character as a primary villain, but in this case it’s revealed that the DA had nothing to do with the doxing. Waid and Samnee also depict white police officers assaulting the DA.

Riots follow, “stoked by Serpent agitators planted city-wide.” Again, as with every previous Sons of the Serpent episode (in 1966, 1970, 1975, 1991, and 1994) Marvel is most concerned not with white supremacist violence but with the threat of violent Black protests. Waid reprises that narrative theme in the context of the early Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in the immediate wake of the Zimmerman acquittal. Though Waid’s Daredevil narrates, “I can’t tell if I just saved a responder or a protestor,” Samnee depicts a white and open-handed officer narrowly escaping a trashcan thrown by a Black figure. The same page includes a white protestor throwing a Molotov cocktail, as well as a close-up of the open fangs of two police dogs.

Daredevil narrated prior to the verdict: “I am very protective of the jury system in this country. It’s far from perfect, but it gives citizens a voice in how justice is achieved, and that voice is generally reasonable and trustworthy. And then there are days like these.” Though Daredevil is depicted as heroically opposing the white supremacists controlling the legal system, his and so the authorial critique never extends to the system itself.

A #32-33 side plot into rural Kentucky both reaffirms the Sons of the Serpent’s KKK identity and also retcons a pre-KKK history. Samne’s costume design for the leader includes a pointed hood, and historical images of lynchings include glowing snake poles instead of burning crosses. Though the organization’s 1966 appearance had been its first appearance within the Marvel storyworld, Waid now establishes that the group is a secret society with a “200-year history.” Though Waid’s Daredevil insists “there’s nothing magical about bigotry and hate,” the retconned occult organization originally worshipped the biblical serpent, with “men of power and entitlement committing unholy acts of violence and cruelty” on “a million innocents.” Merging time periods, Samnee draws an anachronistically blonde man in a toga whipping a dark-skinned man, who, despite the Greek architecture in the background, is tied to what appears to be a wooden mast. The horrors of American slavery turn out not to be American at all.

Now, as Daredevil recaps in #34, “Instead of parading through the streets in hoods and robes … … they’ve gone undercover.” Javier Rodriguez, who returned as penciller on the same issue, draws a dozen white men removing their Sons costumes, throwing them into a bonfire, and redressing as businessmen, firefighters, and police officers, before dispersing into New York streets.

To battle the Sons’ current influence, Daredevil and a colleague hijack New York’s airwaves to reveal that the city has been receiving disinformation designed to destabilize it (an allusion to two previous Sons of the Serpent plots). Waid’s Daredevil scripts an anti-rage speech:

“Let that be our job. To shoulder that rage. Because if we as New Yorkers are going to take our home back from a band of manipulative bigots, we have to rise above our anger. […] They tell us our enemies are the immigrants down the street. Or the food stamp family next door. They encourage us to turn our fear into rage …”

The referent of “we” and “us” seems to be white New Yorkers, or at least non-immigrant ones and ones not in families receiving government food assistance. That changes:

“Pay close attention to your colleagues and peers. Ask yourselves which ones are constantly telling you exactly what you want to hear about your problems — — that it’s the blacks or the wingnuts or the one percent or the have-nots out to get you — — and then decide if that anger serves them more than it serves you. The “friends” and “comrades” who make you feel like a victim? Those people. They’re the enemy.”

While animosity toward “the blacks” has no white counterpoint in the speech (“wingnuts” presumably refers to any set of seemingly crazy people), the “one percent” and the “have-nots” are oppositional economic positions, and while “friends” is neutral, “comrades” connotes leftists. Though white supremacy could attract both white working-class members and white millionaires, nothing in Waid’s portrayal suggests the organization has leftist leanings. All of these varied viewpoints are dangerous because they leave “you” vulnerable to manipulation. Waid warns against, not white supremacy specifically, but political division generally.

After he is blackmailed into defending a leader’s son, Murdock declares under oath that he is Daredevil to reveal that the two judges are vying for leadership of the white supremacist organization, causing a platoon of armed and costumed Sons to storm the courtroom in #36, the series finale. Daredevil is victorious by forcing the Sons of the Serpent into the open.

The series also forces into the open how little Marvel changed since the late 60s and early 70s when fear of Black political movements spurred the creation of the original Sons of the Serpent stories, reprising them in response to later racial conflicts, including both the Rodney King and Trayvon Martin court cases.

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January 22, 2024 The Comics Form: A Review of My Reviews

First, an enormous thank you to the reviewers of The Comics Form: Richard Reynolds, Maaheen Ahmed, Lukas R.A. Wilde, Shawn Gilmore, and Sam Cowling; and to the comics journals that published them: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Image [&] Narrative, Closure, INKS, and ImageText (forthcoming).

Being reviewed is no small academic accomplishment, and a reviewer’s careful study is a kindness. All of the reviews were in response to the hardback edition of The Comics Form published in 2022. Despite the institutional pricing, Bloomsbury sold enough copies to warrant a less expensive paperback edition, available beginning this week. I’m taking this as a moment to review my reviews, looking for shared points and possible consensus.

First, a disclaimer: Comics studies is a fairly small room. I know and like all five reviewers. But since they were writing professionally, I’ll refer to them by their last names (and with an implicit wave hello).

Also, forgive me for beginning with the praise.

Cowling writes:

“This is the best scholarly book yet written on the formal structure of comics and mandatory reading for scholars within comics studies.”

Reynolds:

“It feels as if a new phase in the formal analysis of our art form may have arrived … a sign of comics scholarship and comics studies arriving at a new level of maturity – which is a good reason to celebrate the publication of this book.”

Ahmed:

“Chris Gavaler’s The Comics Form therefore offers a welcome and original addition to the still relatively limited reflections on the visual elements of comics. […] The Comics Form is an interesting and important work …”

Wilde gives the most concise praise:

“The bar has been raised, without question.”

And Gilmore introduces some skepticism:

“The Comics Form attempts to rigorously systematize the relationships between sequenced images that exist with its definition of form. Some scholars may find distinctions here that, when applied to particular comics, help explain interesting formal and aesthetic aspects.”

Happily, all agree on the book’s primary goal, and nearly all agree on its accomplishing it. A majority also agree that, in addition to its detailed formal analysis, The Comics Form offers something of further value, its theoretical scope.

Reynolds:

“As a researcher and writer, Gavaler’s greatest strength lies in his tenacity in probing and analysing the complex tissue of existing scholarship, and this new book emerges initially as a summary and a roadmap to this sometimes confusing field of enquiry.”

Cowling:

“Alongside the theoretical toolbox Gavaler carefully assembles over seven chapters, this book accomplishes something of evident disciplinary importance: it places extant research on the comics form (e.g., regarding layout, style, and closure) in productive dialogue. Too often, formal theories of comics engage one another in glancing, anecdotal, or unproductive ways. Throughout The Comics Form, Gavaler articulates and usefully criticizes competing approaches, marking points of theoretical agreement and disagreement. So, while the novel proposals advanced in The Comics Form are substantial and capably defended, this book is no less notable for its successful critique of methodologically disparate work on the comics form by a broad range of scholars.”

Wilde:

“Chris Gavaler now presents what is probably the broadest survey of the last two decades of comic theory, in an almost obsessive quest for ever more precise ways of distinguishing and describing the narrative functions and interrelations of sequential images. […] What makes this sweeping tour as impressive as authoritative [is] the sheer number of comic-theoretical reference texts that Gavaler subjects to critical and detailed scrutiny, especially recent work from the last five years […] Rarely does one see so many threads brought together in original ways. Even authors whose works come from quite heterogeneous directions – Neil Cohn’s cognitive psychology (2013), for instance, Hannah Miodrag’s linguistic works (2013), or Barbara Postema’s semiotic orientation (2013) – are translated benevolently but rigorously into and against each other to expose ever more subtle differences which actually do make a difference! […] hardly any comic-theoretical discussion of the last decades is left out … to which the most relevant problems, classifications, and differentiations are not just concisely reflected but often also substantially expanded.”

Ahmed doesn’t evaluate the scope but does name four comics scholars (Groensteen, McCloud, Cohn, Eco) and four disciplinary theories (visual, linguistic, cognitive science, literary) discussed, adding:

“While the typological inclinations of the analytical framework can sometimes seem overwhelming, every aspect is carefully explained and often grounded in theories stemming from comics as well as other disciplines.”

Only Gilmore seemed displeased:

“Gavaler then begins itemizing the work of various scholars, citing García, Groensteen, Earle, Hatfield, Cohn, Beaty, and Hague on the first page alone, in a litany of definitional quotations, previewing the book’s approach to comics studies. Throughout, scholars and their arguments almost always appear without introduction, typically without first names or textual references to their works, which makes for a mélange of disembodied snippets, including when Gavaler assembles eighteen key definitions of comics, ranging from Waugh (1947) to Duncan and Smith (2015).”

To be fair, Cowling also called that list a “litany,” though with a positive connotation:

“Gavaler’s search for and subsequent defense of his preferred starting point is conspicuously democratic: he assembles a litany of proposed definitions of comics and notes that, if anything has claim to being the orthodox view of comics, it is that they are images in sequence. As he puts it “Sequenced images is the most common denominator of comics definitions” (2). In contrast to approaches that might hinge upon some putatively a priori principle of comics as the foundation from which to build, Gavaler’s strategy actively seeks out the limited common ground among theories of comics. There’s a laudable humility to this methodology. This ecumenical stance also ensures that the specific theses Gavaler defends in the book are of direct relevance to most approaches for understanding comics. Gavaler relies upon the same democratic approach at other points in the book as well—e.g., when carefully navigating views regarding the nature of sequences. The result is a book-length antidote to worries about the fragmentary character of theorizing about comics and the paucity of productive engagement between competing or even complementary formal investigations into comics.”

Four of the reviewers also praise the scope of examples.

Reynolds:

“Furthermore, the book also engages with a refreshingly wide range of cultural references, within and beyond comics and graphic novels.”

Wilde:

“What must be conceded with special appreciation for all of Gavaler‘s obsession with detail, the book remains virtually jargon-free and is interested in actual issues – in narrative differences – which he vividly discusses through many hundreds of current examples.”

Ahmed:

“The explanations are complemented with examples of comics and images stemming from a wide range of image-making techniques and contexts.”

Cowling praises the nature of the scope in detail:

“Crucially, Gavaler resists any view that requires images to be drawn. This is obvious enough from Gavaler’s use of photographic images throughout the book, but it should be noted that this verdict is also a direct consequence of his view of formal analysis. If the comics form is to be distinguished solely by reference to intrinsic features—roughly, those properties a thing has independently of anything else—then we cannot invoke a range of familiar and perhaps intuitively intimate properties of comics. […] The moral here is an interesting one about method: if we are concerned with the comics form rather than the comics medium and contend that the comics form is a purely intrinsic matter, certain familiar features of comics like those regarding production will soon fall outside of the scope of our analyses and definitions.”

Only Gilmore implies that the approach and resulting range is a flaw:

“The Comics Form works by establishing congruent aesthetic elements that appear in any combination of ‘sequenced images.’ This means that the specific examples presented throughout the book are mostly secondary to the configuration of formal categories and subcategories. […] This typology is primarily explained not by specific examples from comics themselves, but by pointing to examples from Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Tom Phillips, followed by an illustration of Gavaler’s own making …”

Gilmore also refers twice to the book’s “narrow scope” and “very narrow focus,” which, despite seeming to contradict the other assessments, may reveal a point of agreement.

Wilde writes:

“Chris Gavaler’s project at first seems almost modest or overambitious – depending on your point of view: it is about nothing more and nothing less than a purely formal description of comics and its resulting necessary (but also typical) means of representation. […] Thus the book may also conclude with a somewhat less than modest mic drop in the last sentence: ‘These are the qualities of sequenced images, which together explain the comics form’ (TCF, 210).”

The outlier also devotes half of their review to the introduction, which sets up the book’s formal approach in relation to other possible approaches. The others mention the introduction only briefly and positively.

Reynolds:

“a substantial ‘Introduction’ that contextualises his work within the history of the medium and existing definitions of the comics form”

Cowling:

“An introductory chapter places Gavaler’s project in relation to various approaches for analyzing the comics medium.”

Ahmed:

“The book opens with a highly useful contextualization of comics definitions across the past decades of comics scholarship. The overlapping definitions are mapped across the parameters of publishing history, style, conventions and the form of comics (3). Acknowledging that there can be no single definition to comics, Gavaler works with sequenced images as ‘the most common denominator of comics definitions’ (2).”

Wilde:

“From an initially unsurprising definition, namely sequential imagery (“both the most repeated and the least contested features in comics definitions,” TCF, 9), his introductory chapter derives a transmedially connectable and media- or form-specific understanding of discourse vs. diegesis.”

Ultimately, the dissenting review may object not to the book per se, but to formal analysis in general, preferring other areas of comics studies:

“But separating form from context, history, aesthetics, and narrative does just that, leaving this notion of comics form quite apart from much of comics studies.”

I’ll therefore close by suggesting a caveat to the first sentence cited above:

The Comics Form may be “mandatory reading for scholars within comics studies” who are interested in formal analysis.

The paperback is available January 25:

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January 15, 2024 Daredevil & Black Lives Matter

George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in February 2012 and, after a one-month trial, was acquitted of second-degree murder in July 2013, six months into Obama’s second term. In response, activist Alicia Garza posted “a love letter to black people” on Facebook and coined the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which then appeared on Twitter about thirty times daily over the next six months. Seven years later, the hashtag would appear 3.7 million times per day during the month following George Floyd’s death in 2020.

Daredevil #28 (September 2013) was published the same week as Zimmerman’s acquittal and Garza’s post. Though writer Mark Waid, penciler and colorist Javier Rodriguez, and editor-in-chief Axel Alonso were not influenced by the verdict or any of the specifics of the trial, they conceived the two-issue court-focused story while Zimmerman was awaiting trial. Issue #28 introduces Nate Hackett, a short, overweight, round-faced defendant with a scraggly mustache and chin hair—characteristics similar to Zimmerman’s, though Rodriguez’s design does not suggest an exact counterpart.

Hackett, who bullied Daredevil alter ego Matt Murdock as a child, is dislikeable, someone Murdock describes as a “professional victim” who should wear an “It wasn’t my fault!” t-shirt. Murdock grudgingly agrees to help him in court, suggesting a similar dislike but reluctant acceptance of Zimmerman’s real-world plea too.

With the racial tensions of the Zimmerman trial as his national context, Waid reprises Marvel’s KKK counterpart, Sons of the Serpent. The organization had not made a major appearance in a Marvel story in five years. As some readers of this blog are aware, I’ve been studying the white supremacist stories off and on for over a year now; the group also appeared in 1966, 1970, 1975, 1991, 1994, and 2008. Waid must have had an interest in them because they make a very brief appearance the same month in The Indestructible Hulk #11 (September 2013), which he also scripted. More significantly, Waid scripted a two-issue Sons of the Serpent 1971 retcon story in Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #8-9 (April-May 1999) — which I haven’t blogged about yet, but will soonish (it is shockingly bad in ways that I didn’t know a comic could be bad). But rather than referencing it, Waid alludes only to the 1975 Defenders story. Charged for being a former Sons of the Serpent member, Hackett sues for false arrest, arguing that his affiliation was protected as free speech and that he left before his “branch” became “political” and “terrorists.” Waid makes the KKK link explicit when Hackett explains: “I joined to light farts, y’know? Not crosses.”

Issue #28 concludes with the judge shooting Hackett — evidence that “racist fanatics have infiltrated the whole justice system,” since the bailiff, prosecutor, and court reporter collude in the attempted murder. Though all four appear white, Rodriquez’s skin color designs are not reductively Color-driven. Rodriquez assigns at least two shades for each face, creating naturalistic lighting effects that undermine earlier industry norms for designating race. Individual characters’ skin colors can change panel to panel, with members of multiple races and ethnicities sharing overlapping color ranges.

Rodriguez also establishes a multi-ethnic setting in the first scene, placing a dark-skinned janitor, two dark-skinned doctors, a blonde nurse, and an ethically indeterminate brown-haired woman in the background of a hospital scene on the second page. Two pages later, a Black food vendor and two possibly Asian pedestrians look up as Daredevil leaps across rooftops.

Since naturalistically rendered white skin is not necessarily distinguishable from Asian, Hispanic, or Black skin, white supremacists are more difficult to identify. Rodriquez exploits the ambiguity by introducing a female police officer wearing sunglasses below Daredevil’s narration: “and I don’t know who’s who.”

The officer appears Asian only after Rodriquez draws her in a close-up after she has removed her sunglasses five panels later. Rodriquez similarly undermines the race-denoting role of hair color. While some but not all of the White supremacist officers have blonde hair, a dark-skinned paramedic has presumably dyed his hair blonde. Noting their high heart rates, Daredevil’s go-to method for evaluating guilt, Daredevil accuses both the Asian officer and the Black paramedic of being Sons of the Serpent. The paramedic responds: “Do I look like a white supremacist?”

Though Daredevil is literally blind, his radar-like senses provide superior spatial awareness, lacking only in color. Rodriquez depicts his radar sense as maps consisting of parallel and evenly spaced pink contour lines giving shape to all objects which are uniformly dark blue with undifferentiated black backgrounds. Since Daredevil apparently cannot distinguish race-designating physiognomy, he is also Colorblind.

Light skin and blonde hair, however, are the most consistent markers of white supremacy. Aside from the judge, who is bald, the blonde bailiff and a later blonde officer, who attempts to murder the paramedic after the judge forces a gun into his hand, are the clearest villains. The officer also wears a blonde goatee, which, though inherently ambiguous, when combined with a baseball-style cap, short sleeves, and open collar may suggest a redneck stereotype—a kind of othered outsider in the urban context.

Ultimately, Waid’s Daredevil perceives the justice system as blameless, since the officers shooting at him were “justifiably paranoid,” the judge “was jailed” afterwards, and, he tells Hackett in his hospital bed, “we know it wasn’t the NYPD behind the false arrest, but rather the Serpents.”

According to MarvelFandom.com, October cover-dated issue #29 was released at the very end of July — two and a half weeks after a jury acquitted Zimmerman. I doubt readers shared Daredevil’s optimism about the legal system.

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January 8, 2024 What an unmade Watchmen film says about killing civilians

What do you do when your deadly enemy uses a civilian as a human shield?

  • A) Kill the civilian.
  • B) Don’t kill the civilian.

Before you answer that, let me recount an obscure little story from superhero history.

Screenwriter Sam Hamm is best known for scripting Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. The film’s success briefly piqued Hollywood interest in other superheroes, including Watchmen. Terry Gilliam was lined up to direct. Alan Moore declined Warner Brothers’ offer to write the screenplay himself, and so the job was handed to Hamm.

The script isn’t good. I got my hands on a copy back in what must have been the early 90s. (I just searched my bookshelves, but no sign of it now.) Gilliam didn’t like it either, which led to a second draft by a different writer, and then Development Hell for the project – until the unfortunate Zach Synder adaption in 2009 and then the improbably good Damon Lindelof sequel series in 2019.

But Hamm did write an inventive opening scene to explain why superheroes had been outlawed. It’s 1975 and terrorists are holding hostages in the Statue of Liberty and threatening to blow it up. Spoiler Alert: they succeed. But only after the Watchmen prevent a SWAT team from intervening and then fail to intervene themselves, barely escaping the explosion.

30. AERIAL SHOT – MOVING OVER HARBOR – A MOMENT LATER

RORSCHACH clings desperately to the metal ladder as the OWLSHIP streaks across the harbor.  Behind him is the rapidly receding figure of Lady Liberty.

Three beats later, a GAPING HOLE blows open in her midsection.

31.  INT. OWLSHIP – THAT MOMENT

A heartsick NIGHT OWL pounds the control panel in frustration.  On an overhead monitor, the upper portion of the statue is TOPPLING.

32. INT. STATUE – A MOMENT LATER

Smoke everywhere.  The COMEDIAN and SILK SPECTRE are pressed flat against a CONCRETE BULKHEAD.  An overhang protects them from falling DEBRIS — which is raining down in copious amounts.

33. EXT. FERRY – A MOMENT LATER

The furious SWAT CAPTAIN watches in astonishment as the top half of the statue disintegrates into RUBBLE and tumbles to the ground.  He turns away from the sight, shaking his head in vehement disgust.

Hamm wrote that a decade before 9/11.

It’s the Comedian’s fault. One of the terrorists he shot and assumed was dead crawls to the detonator switch. As soon as he sees the thirty-second countdown, the Comedian is the first to run, indifferent to the civilian hostages he’s leaving behind.

But incompetence and indifference are not his worst traits. Hamm already encapsulated the character from his opening shots.

12. EXT. LIBERTY ISLAND – THAT MOMENT – DAY

A HULKING FIGURE, outfitted in SCUBA GEAR, emerges from the water. There’s an evil-looking RIFLE slung over his shoulder.  As he swaggers toward the base of the statue, he peels off his wetsuit to reveal yet another gaudy COSTUME underneath.

Superhero #4: THE COMEDIAN.  He pins a BADGE to his leather breastplate; incongruously, it’s a HAPPY-FACE BUTTON — and it matches his own nasty SMILE as he marches forward into battle.

13. INT. BASE OF STATUE – THAT MOMENT – DAY

A TRIO OF TERRORISTS standing guard near the entrance in the base of the statue.  They’re holding a JANITOR at gunpoint.  One of them is fumbling with his walkie-talkie, which has inexplicably gone haywire.

TERRORIST I

Base to head.  Base to head.  Come in!

(flustered)

I can’t get shit!

TERRORIST II

What the hell is going on??

There’s a sudden metallic CLANG behind them.  They turn in unison — just as the COMEDIAN struts into frame, assault rifle in hand.

Panic.  The three TERRORISTS fall into a tight cluster at the base of a long metal stairway.  One of them grabs the JANITOR, holds a gun to his head.

TERRORIST I

I’M NOT JOKING!!

The COMEDIAN shrugs: okay.  He lifts his rifle and fires TWO SILENCED SHOTS directly into the JANITOR’s gut.  The old man’s body jerks twice and he slumps to the floor, stone dead.

The TERRORISTS stand there aghast.  For an instant they’re too stunned to shoot.  The COMEDIAN breaks into a dopey grin —

COMEDIAN

The joke’s on you.

— and opens fire with a look of VICIOUS PLEASURE on his face.  As the saying goes . . . it’s nice to see a man who enjoys his work.

Alan Moore’s Comedian isn’t quite as overtly villainous, but Hamm’s version is a fair take. Moore’s was based on the Charlton Comics character The Peacemaker, though Moore explained to an interviewer: “we decided to make him slightly right-wing, patriotic, and we mixed in a little bit of Nick Fury into The Peacemaker make-up, and probably a bit of the standard Captain America patriotic hero-type.” Add Hamm’s spin, and he’s a right-wing Captain America who happily murders any civilian who happens to be in his way.

But he’s not the most incongruous take on Captain America I’ve seen. This one was painted on the side of a building in Tel Aviv in late October:

That’s about three weeks after Hamas’s terrorist attack. At that time Israel’s counter offensive had killed about 7,000 civilians, based on a mid-December report by the BBC. Current counts are over 22,000.

Gaza has the civilian population density of London. Would Captain America shrug as he dropped tens of thousands of bombs to defeat an enemy hiding there?

It’s an absurd question because superheroes come from a world of absolute good vs. absolute evil. Their narratives are a rejection of moral complexity. The artist of the Tel Aviv Captain America was rejecting that complexity too, preferring the imaginary simplicity of a superhero world. Though Alan Moore’s Watchmen remains one of the most successful critiques of that genre assumption, I don’t know what Moore thinks about the Isreal-Hamas war (I’m afraid to google in case he’s said something). I’m pretty sure Sam Hamm has no insights on how to end it either.

I’m also pretty sure that the question that begins this post is not a morally complex one.

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January 1, 2024 Two Lines of Dialogue That Explain All Paintings

I’ve always wondered why Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte includes a monkey. According to Brittanica.com, Seurat was depicting “Parisian stereotypes. For instance, the woman standing in the right foreground, with the striking bustle, is identified by her pet monkey—symbol of lasciviousness—as a woman of loose morals.” I don’t know if that’s true — of the painting, the woman, or monkeys generally. Personally, I imagined the monkey belonged to the man standing beside her — which then triggered a two-line dialogue in my head. I now think all paintings should be interpreted through the same accusation/denial exchange, with an implicit pet monkey poised just out of frame.

I’ve added speech balloons so you can see for yourself.

Grant Wood’s American Gothic:

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes:

Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper:

Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People:

Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss:

Here, try some yourself:

It even works for single-figure paintings too. Just pair your favorites.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa:

Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and James McNeill Whistle’s Whistler’s Mother:

Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat and Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog:

John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott and Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June:

John Everett Millais’s Ophelia and John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X:

You can mix and match, and even reverse the dialogue.

Which lines do you think these paintings should speak?

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December 18, 2023 New Shenandoah Comics: Angie Kang & Robert James Russell

Shenandoah Issue 73.1 (Fall 2023) is now live. It’s the tenth issue to feature comics, and the eighth I’ve helped edit (I happily step aside for occasional guest comics editors, including José Alaniz who curated an amazing selection by contemporary Russian women last spring, and Rachelle Cruz who curated an equally excellent selection in Spring 2021).

We don’t define “comics” on our submission page, because we hope to attract as much variety as possible. When my advanced comics course recently perused back issues, they questioned whether some pieces suited any of the scholarly definitions we examined in class. Sijia Ma‘s “A Hundred Stories,” for example, is a sequence of photographs (which they decided was allowed) but none of them are juxtaposed on a shared page. Another student was happy to call Mita Mahato’s “Lullaby” a comic, but not a “poetry comic,” as it’s termed in her author note, because the “poetry” includes no words.

I don’t think any of my students would challenge the two works in our new issue, Angie Kang’s “The Birthmark” and Robert James Russell’s “How to Make a Full English,” because both share a range of conventions common in the comics medium. And yet they both push at those norms in exciting ways.

If I’d seen Kang’s before publishing The Comics Form last year, I would have included this pair of panels in my discussion of “match cut” juxtapositions:

The technique is common in film, but rarer in comics. The juxtaposition of Kang’s main character sitting in her doctor’s office and then driving is striking because her figure is drawn from the same perspective and in the same position relative to the frame. Or, since there is no sharp black line framing the panel, to the image edges.

That’s another subtle quality I enjoy about her image style, those softer edges, which reveal how the color is not added to a prior line drawing but is an organic and defining quality of the artwork. I also enjoy a quiet meta moment, when she paints an exhaled breath of smoke to resemble a speech balloon. In Italy, comics are called “fumetto,” little puffs of smoke.

Kang also uses speech sparingly, letting her images do most of the narrative work — as with this haunting dream sequence that could stand alone as an abstract comic:

She is also artful with her turns of perspective. The first image below is ocularized from the main character’s literal point-of-view, but then the angle shifts to over-the-shoulder, so no longer also literal but still focalized from her internal experience — as felt even more in the third panel’s zoomed-in intensity. Then that last panel captures her emotional experience by leaping to a detached and distant angle.

Russell explores a different set of comics qualities.

First, he establishes his own image-text format: numbered text begins above each image — is interrupted by a single tall panel — and then finishes below. The first features a double-decker bus, which not only confirms the title’s English setting, but also evokes the two-level, or “double-decker,” approach to text.

The images are simplified in a naturalistic style (comics studies really needs a term for that — I refer to it descriptively as “unexaggerated simplification” in The Comics Form), but with some subtle disruptions.

The black surrounding the next image creates a kind of matte effect that extends the frame — though it could also be interpreted literally as the darkness of the building sharpened by the contrast of the lit window. And, whether visually literal or not, it evokes the main character’s isolated emotional state:

A later panel removes visual ambiguity with a fully expressive use of background color:

And though a panel typically includes a single image, Russell plays with that aspect of the form too, drawing panels within panels:

I also really appreciate the hand-written quality of Russell’s lettering — which adds to a general feeling of memoir, while also allowing a sudden shift in emotional intensity:

And note that pleasantly unexplained shift to a painting-by-numbers conceit — perhaps because, as the rendering of the words becomes more evocative, the representational meaning of the image flattens? I’m not sure, but I love the effect.

Russell and Kang are also wonderfully different, even as they each further refine comics possibilities.

Check them out at the new Shenandoah.

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December 11, 2023 What Should a Faculty Handbook Say about Academic Freedom?

My school is beginning a process of revising our faculty handbook. The entry on “Academic Freedom” might be a good place to start.

The American Association of University Professors identifies four main elements:

  • Teaching: freedom to discuss all relevant matters in the classroom; 
  • Research: freedom to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression and to publish the results of such work; 
  • Intramural speech: freedom from institutional censorship or discipline when speaking or writing as participants in the governance of an educational institution; and 
  • Extramural speech: freedom from institutional censorship or discipline when speaking or writing as citizens. 

That seems fairly straightforward, and when I looked at my handbook, I expected to find some version of it. I didn’t.

Here’s the current entry:

There’s a lot there, so I’ll break it down sentence-by-sentence.

A faculty member “is entitled to full freedom” in two areas: “research” and “publication of the results.” Those two areas match the AAUP’s second category, “Research.” Except at my school those freedoms are contingent on other factors.

A faculty member must perform their “other academic duties” adequately. None are not named but presumably those duties include teaching. Since faculty are evaluated in three areas (teaching, research, and service), service could be another. There is no indication of how “adequate performance” is determined or by whom (I assume by the administration, but is that my chair or my dean or my provost, or all of them collectively, and so then really just my provost and president? And what if the board of trustees decides someone isn’t fulfilling their undefined “duties”?). Regardless, according to the handbook a faculty member does not have the freedom to research and publish if their teaching (and possibly their service) is not deemed adequate.

Also, you can’t make money (“pecuniary return”) from publishing. I make a pittance from my publications, but since I have no “written understanding” with my administration, I am in overt violation of the handbook policy.

What about academic freedom in teaching? The AAUP lists that first, and it’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the phrase “academic freedom.” And yet my school’s policy says not a word on the topic. According to our handbook, we do not have a stated “freedom to discuss all relevant matters in the classroom.”

A form of The AAUP’s “Speech” falls under the second part. It begins:

“Members of the Washington and Lee Faculty are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of the institution.”

In what sense am I an “officer of the institution”? And how does being an “officer” differ from my also being a “member” of the faculty? And what do those have to do with my being a “citizen.” I think the sentence might just be preamble, a sort of rhetorical clearing of the throat. Probably no need to parse the semantic phlegm further.

The second sentence begins:

“When speaking or writing as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline,”

Behaviors other than “speaking or writing” (such as, say, attending a rally) are not included. Why not? Wouldn’t something like “acting as” cover the bases better? AAUP uses the legally broad term “speech,” which is likely best.

Regardless of the actions, the phrase “as citizens” is (again) unclear. The “when” implies that there are times when faculty members are speaking or writing as citizens, and times when they are not. What is the distinction and how is it made? And why should faculty members “be free from censorship or discipline” only when acting “as citizens”?

The AAUP’s “intramural” and “extramural” is clearer. An article by Don Eron in the AAUP journal describes extramural speech as “the kind of thing we say at the city council meeting or in letters to the editor,” while intramural speech is “the kind of thing we say in the classroom, journal articles, and conference presentations.”

If that’s the distinction intended by the handbook’s phrase “as citizens,” then the policy only covers extramural speech, meaning you only “should be free from institutional censorship or discipline” when talking outside of work. There’s nothing about intramural speech – which means that at my school faculty members can be censored or disciplined for things they say in classrooms and faculty meetings.

And even freedom for extramural speech is vague, because of the verb phrase “should be.” An “is” or “will be” establishes a fact, while “should” suggests the “free from” is in some way weaker.

The rest of the sentence is strange for a policy titled “Academic Freedom”:

“but their special position in the community imposes special obligations.”

Is the “special position” distinct from being a member/citizen/officer of the institution and/or learned profession? Is that the same as the “community”? The “imposes special obligations” is rhetorically stronger than the “should be free from” of the previous sentence. And despite the brevity of the previous descriptions, the obligations receive two more sentences: First:

“As persons of learning and edu­cational officers, they should remember that the public may judge the profession and the institu­tion by their utterances.”

Faculty are again “officers,” now “educational” ones, which seems more general than “officers of the institution.” The “persons of learning” is even broader. And, although the handbook is specific to the school, the obligation is equally to “the profession.” Why? And what does “should” mean in this case?

Finally:

“Hence at all times they should be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indi­cate that they do not speak for the institution.”

Accuracy, restraint, and respect are all good things for anyone, including a faculty member of my school, to display. That they are listed under “Academic Freedom” is at best confused. This policy would be more accurately titled “Special Academic Obligations.”

Given my special position and obligations as a citizen, member, officer, and person of learning, I look forward to my school revising this and other faculty handbook policies.

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