The visual end of the literary spectrum took the limelight at Better World Books Friday evening.
There, students from Goshen College’s “Literature and Popular Culture: The Graphic Novel” May term 2008 class presented Goshen Adventure Comics, their own entry into the genre for perusal and sale. The 73-page volume includes visual, autobiographical stories from seven students.
Students Jacob Schlabach and Emily Taylor, after winning a friendly competition to create a mascot for the book with their character “Cloud,” were invited by Associate Professor of English and instructor for the course Jessica Baldanzi to be more involved.
“She asked us if we wanted to make an introduction for the book, and from there it just sort of evolved into a lot of editing,” Schlabach said.
The duo worked together to collect and compile each student’s final composition project, put the book together and deal with getting it approved by the Pinchpenny Press board. The board publishes books written by GC students, faculty and friends about five times each year.
Taylor was surprised by how much it took to go from collecting the stories to publishing.
“Honestly, editing and collecting a book for publication is a lot more difficult than it looks,” she said. “There’s a lot of communication involved.”
Dan Vader’s “My Summer Job” was one of the stories accepted by the Pinchpenny board. It tells of his job working at a small manufacturing company and the shenanigans that ensued. He enjoyed the class.
“It was really fun, I learned a lot about graphic novels as a literary art form,” Vader said. “I was kind of a casual fan, I hadn’t read a lot of comics before, but this class interested me in a lot of stuff.”
In particular, he enjoys drama and political commentary comic books like “Persepolis,” written by Iranian Marjane Satrapi about her childhood and adolescence before and after the 1979 revolution. “Persepolis” was one of nine graphic novels on the class reading list. Students presented an additional eight works by authors they favored.
“It was actually really hard to figure out what to put on the syllabus, because comics and graphic novels is a really, really gigantic topic and it’s hard to figure out how to narrow that,” Baldanzi said.
The first piece she had her students read was Art Spiegelman’s 1986 “Maus Volume 1: My Father Bleeds History.” It is a memoir from Spiegelman depicting his father’s fight to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew.
“I saw that as kind of a seminal text for the current explosion of graphic novels and the current respect for graphic novels as significant books,” Baldanzi said. “There’s a lot of history in this genre that I think people don’t realize. I think they just think about superheroes with tights and capes and things.”
Other prominent works chosen by her and her students were Dan Clowes’ “Ghost World,” Charles Burns’ “Black Hole,” Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” and the epic “Watchmen,” written by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Despite the visual nature of the genre, Baldanzi pointed out that the course was not easy.
“If you ask any of the students who were in the class, they were complaining about how many comic books and graphic novels they had to read. They were a little tired by the middle,” she said.
A few dozen people showed up for the release of Goshen Adventure Comics, including a small handful in costume for a contest held as part of the release. Marlys Weaver won the contest for dressing up as The Question, the eventual alter ego of Batman character Renee Montoya.
The Goshen Adventure Comics book is available for sale at Better World Books.
Local News
Graphic learning at Goshen College
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