Jason: Thank you for joining me and talking with me. I teach with comics in the classroom and continue to do that. It’s good to a kindred spirit. What was the initial draw for you with comics?
MG: Mine started when I was a little kid. My father would collect the paperback trades of newspaper comic strips, like Hagar the Horrible and Peanuts. He had those when he was young. My Dad still had all of these books that he had when he was younger. I found them and started reading them, like Mad Magazine, Don Martin books, and Sergio Argones, and I started to get into that combination of storytelling with text and images. It’s kind of how I cut my teeth as a reader. I collected Mad Magazine in my early years. I didn’t even understand a lot of the jokes in them when I was really young. As I got older, I found my way to mainstream comics, Marvel and DC, through my local library. They had those collected editions, those classic first twelve issues of titles, like Fantastic Four. They had them deep in stacks, in a small collection, and I would go there and I would read The Avengers, Iron Man, and all those original, early issues.
When I was old enough, I started taking a bus downtown to the comics shop. I would spend a whole day there on “new comic day” and I started collecting floppy issues when I was a teenager. When I was older, I decided I wanted to read comics again, and I discovered that comics had blossomed outside of the superhero genre. I started discovering things like Maus, American Splendor, Persepolis, and books that were grounded in reality. Something about that memoir-style really appealed to me, and I still loved the superhero books. So, I started to collect and dig into the trades again. I have a ton of trades in my classroom library. You can see the picture of my classroom library on Twitter, and it’s grown since that picture was taken. When I became a teacher, I decided I wanted to mesh these two components of my life: My desire to educate with my love for comics reading. I was an honors student who read comic books and I knew there was value in it. I didn’t know how to teach with them until I was older. I knew they made me a better reader, but when I was student teaching that was when I started introducing them and trying them out. That’s when I tried my first unit and it worked out really well.
When I was a kid, I had a friend who invited me over. They had stacks and stacks of magazines, and my friend said, “Michael, come over here, I want to show you something.” So, I held out my hand, and it was Superman #1. They kept it in a piano bench. So, there was this amazing, extraordinarily valuable comic, and I got to hold it for a few minutes.
Jason: Are there any titles that you find are magnetic for your students?
MG: I Kill Giants is one that I teach every year, and they love it. The teachers and students really love that book. Joe Kelly speaks to my students every year via Zoom after we read his book. He’s an amazing guy, and he’s done a lot of work. They are really into superhero books right now, so I’ve tried to populate my library with books that are tied into the Marvel properties, like Moon Knight and Vision. I have the Matt Fraction run of Hawkeye, which is popular right now. The Miles Morales Spiderman books, anything Spiderverse, including the Gwen books. When a movie is coming and is popular, like Black Panther, I buy a lot of those books. Manga is also pretty big and I’m adding more titles. They are always asking for those. I have to spend time reading those to decide which titles to add. A lot of students like Raina Telgemeier because they have all read Smile.
Jason: Any go-to strategies that you like to use?
MG: Yeah, I like an old Fisher and Frey strategy. They’ve done quite a bit of work with graphic novels and how to teach with comics. I modified the strategy slightly in using wordless comics to teach inference. I usually start there and I use Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City, which has a lot of minicomics that are wordless. We draw inferences about the character, motivations, the story, who this person might be, what we can tell from the image, what we add to it from our own perspective. I call it the OIA method, the obvious, inference, and the assumption. So, we start with what we see that’s obvious and irrefutable from the image in the comic. “It’s a person who is running. They are wearing this. They are holding this.” We start by picking apart the text as literal, and then we ask, what is implied? “Well, he’s running, so he must be in a hurry.” He doesn’t explicitly say that, but we can infer that. The last bit would be the assumption where we make our theories, our thesis about the text. “Well, he’s running, he’s moving quickly, he’s carrying an envelope. There must be something important in that envelope.” The theory is what’s in there. A rent check? A birthday card? They’re a bunch of possible answers that we can distill from what we know about the text, but you have to make your case. You can transfer those skills later into a more traditional chapter text. I always start my classes with that lesson, so we can return to the OIA method. I have to credit Fisher and Frey with that.