Reflecting on how one becomes the person she/he is offers a clarity that both brings into focus and distorts how our history shapes us. But for me, it is undeniable that who I am as a student, teacher, writer, and scholar was profoundly influenced by the coincidence of my becoming a comic book collector in the 1970s.
Directly, buying, reading, collecting, and drawing from comic books reinforced my fascination with science fiction and helped me come to recognize (after setting aside my ambitions as a comics artist) that I am a writer. The most obvious outcome of that realization is my own book on comics and graphic novels [1], but I also have introduced comics and graphic novels into the texts examined in many of my classes.
Comics and graphic novels, however, share an unfortunate problem related to terms: "comics" and "graphic." Both terms are misleading in some ways because "comics" suggests only humorous (and even childish) and "graphic" tends to trigger thoughts of "explicit" instead of "containing artwork along with text."
Yet, the mutli-modal world of text more and more confronts readers with a wide variety of purposes for works that are rightly called "graphic," such as graphic journalism—which is serious, scholarly, and critical in ways that other modes cannot be.
Dan Archer and Adam Bessie, for example, have merged the many elements I recognize in my own life and career, in fact, to highlight the graphic truth about disaster capitalism and education reform.
The Graphic Truth: Disaster Capitalism and Education Reform
"Welcome to other side of the looking glass, and into the Bizarro world of so-called 'education reform,'" Archer and Bessie explain, "an upside-down universe in which up is down, left is right and multimillionaire CEOs are civil rights heroes championing social justice, while public school teachers are corrupt fat cats, maintaining a status quo which oppresses students in poverty and racism."
In their exclusive for Truthout, Archer and Bessie invite readers to look closely and differently at the human element of being a teacher in an era of high-stakes accountability being driven by capitalism and corporate interests—lead by powerful and influential people who have no expertise or experience as teachers or researchers.
The weight of unfair and misguided accountability on the students, teachers, and administrators is powerfully reflected in Archer's graphics while the story of disaster capitalism is richly detailed in their first of three installments confronting G.E.R.M (global education reform movement).
Further, Archer and Bessie expose how Milton Friedman's free market ideology has reached from the 1950s and become the default ideology for education reform regardless of the political party in power: (1) No Child Left Behind (and Race to the Top), (2) standardized testing (and the Common Core State Standards), and (3) claims of "failing" public schools.
While Republicans and Democrats repeat the same solutions decade after decade, this graphic expose alerts readers that political and corporate leaders are also ignoring the primary problem facing U.S. society and public education: profound social inequity.
Episode I from Archer and Bessie ends with these ominous lines about New Orleans: "This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."
Everyone interested in the public good and social justice should keep their eyes and minds open to the next installment further uncovering the disaster capitalism sweeping across the U.S., not unlike when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.
With hurricanes and other acts of nature, humans can heed the warnings but do little about the coming threat. With the disaster building for public institutions and the eradication of equity for the 99%, we can do much more than prepare for the disaster; we can stop it.
[1] See also: Thomas, P. L. (2011, December). Adventures in genre!: Rethinking genre through comics/graphic novels. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(2), 187-201. And my blog related to teaching with comics/graphic novels: Adventures in Genre!: Comics and Graphic Novels. Also, Annotated Bibliography: Teaching with Comics/Graphic Novels, a Historical View.