If Not Superheroes, What? Part XII - Educational Comics

No study into comics genres can claim to particular breadth in the absence of an examination of educational comics, a recurring phenomenon not particularly limited to specific publishers or constrained times. Educational comics, in various ways, tell us things about the history of comics, particularly in their aspect as a reactive, rather than primarily creative, form in much of their execution. In the educational comic, we encounter a form devised to explore what conventional comics traditionally overlooked; we find a face of the medium that attempts to bring into comics the virtues of a literary and scientific culture that infrequently populate most of the comics units sold throughout the history of the format.

Collectors, often driven by the needs of filling in holes in long and interconnected story threads, frequently overlook the educational comic, which one finds more frequently in collectors who attempt to observe the medium in its entirety. Never really a crowd-pleaser, educational comics nonetheless deserve study because of several unique features. First, the form exists for purposes stretching beyond simple entertainment; second, it represents an attempt to expand the meaning of the form, an ambition that, in some ways, puts it on a higher ground not sought by most comics throughout the 20th century; and thirdly, it represents a form of comics invented by people who did not like comics. The latter point, one might note, offers the most prospects for interesting developments, for in that trait we have a comics form that attempts to fuse the virtues of comics with material drafted to the purpose of filling out, substance-wise, works frequently defined by hostile observation as trifling and without merit.

Origins, and One Degree of Frederic Wertham

The educational comic, as understood in this examination, has origins closely tied with the public scrutiny of the comics medium in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Folk history of comics likes to postulate hostile scrutiny of comics as the (perhaps sole) product of a hysterical lifelong campaign by a single demonic bogeyman in the form of the historical Dr. Frederic Wertham, and credit him with the near-destruction of the medium in the 1950s, but this distorts, oversimplifies, omits, and misrepresents a great deal about the cultural currents of the 20th century.

Comics, after all, had suffered hostile scrutiny from their inception at the end of the 19th century, and, today, in the 21st century, have never completely escaped it. Various criticisms leveled charges of insulting and demeaning content; more subtle claims argued that the very format itself, almost independently of content, worked against the formation of good literacy skills two ways. Through failure to offer challenges to the reader via excellence of language or complexity of usage, comics might impair verbal development through never really demonstrating much language-wise; and through consuming the finite amount of disposable time young readers (theoretically) could spend reading classics of literature, comics might prevent opportunities to benefit from exposure to material of (theoretically) more educational value.

These concerns, before anyone had heard of Dr. Frederic Wertham's work studying the relationship between newer vectors of popular culture and the etiology of juvenile delinquency, generated the educational comic. If the comics of today, particularly in the superhero monoculture, seem to engage in considerable navel-gazing that seldom allows more than a view into comics about comics (and sometimes comics about comics about comics), the creators of educational comics from the beginning sought a definition that precluded such potential dead ends.

The name Clara Littledale, of Parents Magazine stands out among founders of the form. Said publication had examined comics-related issues and had concluded that a comics magazine featuring historical figures deemed worthy of emulation as its heroes would bridge the gap between children who wished to read comics and parents who desired that their children read something of substance. In 1941, the first issue of True Comics appeared and sold fairly well. The notion quickly inspired imitation - one can consider mimesis a symptom of success - and in autumn of 1941 Albert Kantner began publishing Classic Comics, which adapted prose works to comic-book form. Six years later, the title of this publication would become Classics Illustrated, an imprint which would endure, if we start with its beginnings in 1941, at least through a generation.¹

Historical Stuff

In an age where history seems inclined to play the role of cojoined twin to self-loathing, the innocence (and, occasionally, smugness) of the version of American history portrayed in educational comics can sometimes startle, since it runs counter to such interpretations as contemporary ideology, fashion, and compulsion may propose. However, the history that appeared in pieces like Classics Illustrated's The Story of America contains both what the skeptical scholar would call "fact" and much of what he might call "civic myth."

For instance, consider a long sequence involving the escapades of Paul Revere as he attempts both to inform his fellow colonials about the arrival of British troops and, simultaneously, avoid the stray lobsterback he might encounter in traveling from village to village to pass this information on. Revere's importance to history derives mostly from a poem written about him which somewhat bends the facts of a night when Revere set out to warn his fellows but spent the night in jail as others, with names less suited to a rhyme scheme, went about the business of raising the alarm. None of the revealed tale of Revere's night in jail impugns his character in the way that much contemporary revisionist history intends. But one can clearly see a tendency to sacrifice fact in order to create a usable, edifying history. If much modern historical interpretation involves icon-busting and denigration, the history typical of the original educational comics involved the desire to inculcate loyalty and a heroic vision of the role of one's own society on the historical canvas.

A fundamental principle applies here as to many things, such as art, cuisine, and computer programming: Garbage in, garbage out (or GIGO). History in any format can have value only if the history itself does; whitewashed, watered-down, bowdlerized, misrepresented, censored, or inaccurate stories do not improve or worsen when rendered in pencil and ink rather than in type, the differences between media mainly becoming important because of the differing degrees of penetration which each may enjoy among prospective consumers. A history which seeks dishonestly to absolve (or, for that matter, to impugn) discredits itself with its dishonesty.

Scientific Stuff

In the west, the scientist enjoys a heroic role that often outstrips the frontiers of his character even as it attempts to place the consequences of his work in a perspective appropriate to their importance. The heroic roles of science go to the originators, promoters, or discoverers of the Vast New Idea rather than the army of graduate student drones who actually get their hands dirty doing the research. Thus, Galileo, Kepler, Watson, Crick, Pasteur, Einstein, Mendel, Newton, Gallo, Salk, and the like play roles frequently greater than what they might have expected in the eyes of posterity. Sometimes a talent for self-promotion does much to advance one's role in a Canon of Saints of Science (for instance, consider Newton's tendency to self-aggrandizement and character assassination, as well as his foundation-laying work in math and physics, as elements guaranteeing his modern fame).

If the heroic vision of science does disservice to many who actually did the work of tending cultures in Petrie dishes (or, indeed, to the entrepreneurs who may have made the research and developments possible), it nonetheless fits very well with interpretations via the medium of comics. Consider, for example, the scanned panel to the right, where a four-color Louis Pasteur begins a statement arguing against the once-fashionable notion of spontaneous generation of lower and/or verminous life forms. The development of germ theory of disease ultimately allowed strategies to control many of these diseases, and parts of the world would thus free themselves from everyday horrors like high infant mortality rates and preventable epidemics. Given the consequences of Pasteur's work, a heroic treatment - combining in his person, perhaps, the roles both of scientist and of a detective looking for a murder suspect in the victims of disease - Louis Pasteur seems a fitting subject for a thorough treatment in comics format, combining elements of period historical style, logical analysis, and just a touch of danger.

Moving beyond the history and the personalities of science, however, we come to the content itself. While definitely worth teaching, inasmuch as science details the principles of the world we must live in, finding an approach which gets the information across yet remains interesting at the same time often presents a challenge. The Cartoon Guide to Genetics, one of a series of educational and polemical works in paperback form available in the 1980s, presented an entertaining exploration into the mechanisms of cell replication. However, one need not delve into a topic quite as thoroughly or densely to get a piece of scientific lore across. Even superhero comics, much-impugned as either source or repository of many evils in the world, provide a venue through the likes of the half-page and one-page "Flash Facts" type feature that dabbled in novelties of science. Furthermore, occasionally real science would intrude into the science fantasy of Schwartz-era superhero comics, providing the solution to some impenetrable problem through deft resort to the (conveniently-) irresistable laws of physics.

As far as educational comics went, however, the approach to science often centered on the key players in uncovering the mysteries of nature, in that these provide a human face for facts and principles, and furthermore lend themselves better to a linear kind of storytelling, particularly where creators explore the advance of technology as a cumulative whole.

Classic Literature

As the comic book became evidently inevitable as a shaper (some might say, "corrupter") of youth, rational minds conceived its potential as a delivery vehicle for the kind of dense literature that concerned observers frequently felt comics-reading pushed out of the limited window that young people, in their finite leisure time, had for reading.

Great works of literature, after all, can provide vectors for the great ideas of a culture. However, the panel to the left, taken from a comics interpretation of Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment, suggests that one can replicate the very vices that got comics in trouble in other media, a fact obvious to observers circa 2001, but perhaps less than clear to those who saw in comics an important source of social pathology. Nonetheless, one notes that the lurid panel of Raskolnikov about to perform a murder seems quite suitable in content for a pre-code EC horror comic. As such, we have in this one example something of a redundant creation rather than an exploration of the things prose offers.

However, comics interpretations of prose works offers a mostly-untraveled territory in which creators can explore the conceptual elements frequently overlooked, by habit, in conventional comics. In the era of a more literary kind of comics - the age of the likes of Moore, Gaiman, and peers - it may not seem as grand a reach from comics to idea-heavy text works, but in the late 1940s (and several subsequent decades), the exploration of books of meaningful content meant an expansion of the scope of comics. And some works seemed very apt for such treatment, such as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which contained throughout an element of the fantastic very suitable for comics interpretation, and, at the same time, offered very literary insights about the limitations of human reason, intelligence, and character.

Two forces here work against one another, not really in balance. On the one hand, simple human laziness inclines students to find shortcuts to reading works which do not interest them (some, on principle, refuse to read at all). The like made Cliff's Notes and Monarch Notes viable publishing concerns even when publishing did not do well in general. A comic book interpretation offers a similar temptation to employ it as a substitute, though some greater risk of inaccurate interpretation attaches to such works. On the other hand, however, a comics interpretation of a worthwhile prose piece may stimulate the curiosity of a reader to actually explore the original, denser, work.

Exegesis, History and Polemics

Some folks might not want to include religious comic books under an educational banner, partially because the image many folks have (generally substantiated by at least anecdotal evidence) derives from the polemical cartoon tracts such as cartoonist Jack Chick has spent his life producing. Yet where would one classify material such as the Kubert-covered DC tabloid book of Biblical stories? Somewhere, though perhaps we need not stipulate precisely where - leaving enough slack in the description, hopefully, to avert offended sensibilities and jangled nerves - we could leave the various flavors of such material in a territory that borders on the historical, the religious, and the literary.

The religious comic book, after all, can take one or more forms of educational piece, theological treatise, edifying moral lesson or frighteningly bombastic screed, depending on who creates it and, perhaps, how well said hypothetical creator slept the night before. For my own part, I've seen religious comic books that attempt to warn against the various dangers that beset the unenlightened, unsaved, or uncompliant, presenting a kind of poor-man's Screwtape Letters. I've seen literalist pieces that attempt to interpret the texts of the Bible into the form of linear art without intent to elaborate or modify meaning. I've seen at least one piece that suggested the dawn-of-the-1970s comics notion of "relevance" entered into at least one religious comics creator's editorial model in a story attempting to change the setting of the life of Saul of Tarsus so that the reader saw an unlikely blond Israeli soldier named Saul become Paul the Apostle, although in 20th-century drag.

Limited resources, opportunities, and interest on my own part have prevented the examination of the possible variants that the religious comic might spawn in non-Christian cultures. Though some faiths, such as Islam, have certain principles that make a comics treatment of religious material unlikely (such as injunctions against depicting Mahomet's face, and, in some cases, representational treatments of any sort), we need not assume that a single rule applies for other faiths, some of which use humor as an educational tool and therefore imply the possibility of exploration of formats that might, to a westerner, seem unlikely. As yet, no pieces such as a comics rendition of the life of Siddhartha Gautama have come to my attention, even where they have the potential of providing a non-threatening vehicle for outsiders lightly to explore some of the concepts of an unfamiliar faith.

Enterganda and Infoganda

The inelegance of contrived terms like enterganda and infoganda belies their importance as concepts from the late decades of the 20th century forward into the early years of the third millennium (and into the conceivable future). The concept enterganda refers to the use of entertainment for political indoctrination (a tendency often flung at the ill-defined and nebulous windmill of "mass media" by critics). Infoganda, similarly, refers to supposedly informative material, like history texts or news broadcasts, that serve as well to inculcate belief in consumers.

Through the 1980s, one could find a series of softcover books called (for example) The Cartoon Guide to Marx, which took a cartoonish visual approach to leftist polemic (though one note completely definable as "comics") and dabbled in topics such as the life and work of Wilhelm Reich, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. Given the politics behind the works, one might not show much surprise that Adam Smith, Winston Churchill, or many others failed to appear in such treatment, though contemporary figures such as President Ronald Reagan did receive hostile treatments in the series. Later in their publication life cycle, these works took to a more precise approach in naming, best evidenced by The Cartoon Guide to Nuclear Power assuming the title The Anti-Nuclear Handbook.

This approach provided a more accessible way to present the credo(s) of political philosophies or movements. Consider, after all, the effort involved in each of the following activities: first, reading Das Kapital by Marx, through multiple volumes and countless pages; and second, running through Marx for Beginners, a work less than 200 pages long and containing mostly illustrations connected by text. The latter task would leave the reader considerable time afterwards in which to attempt to impress females of a similar ideological bent with the shallow veneer of knowledge available at a discount in work, while the more studious peruser of Das Kapital would spend many, many hours poring over dense text, and, perhaps, abandoning the task altogether as too difficult.

The Talent

In spite of the cumulative numbers of various educational comics works that saw print since their inception in the forties - before Dr. Frederic Wertham ever became a bogeyman or even a well-known public figure - tracking down the names of figures known as the grand names of the form presents formidable obstacles. Scholars of the obscure in comics could probably, from memory, produce a more authoritative and representative set of names than I have available from my own explorations. Nonetheless, from perhaps half a dozen pieces in my own irregular, incoherent, and poorly-organized collection, I can glean only the name of artist Rudolph Palais (whose style could vary from a kind of early Kirby in a James Fenimore Cooper interpretation to a faux-EC horror style in his treatment of Crime and Punishment).

The absence of formal credits for the pens and typewriters behind some of these works further frustrates attempts to attach names to the business, as does the lack of cultural credibility invested in material that seemed to avoid controversy or risk-taking. On the other hand, we do have as contributors, although in absentia, various prominent figures from the cultural canon as understood in the middle of the 20th century: James Fenimore Cooper, Fyodor Dostoyevski, Hippocrates, and various luminaries of science and literature. Perhaps such names can, to some degree, make up for the obvious slighting of the men and women who made prose works come alive as comics.

The more modern such pieces, at least as late as the last quarter of the 20th century, sometimes featured talents either still living or at least well known in the canon of recent comics, including names from the Silver Age and immediately after (as my own unconventional reckoning has it, which would tend to end the Silver Age almost altogether by 1974). In the 1970s, Marvel Comics explored a line of comics-interpretations of prose works featuring established and solid talent, even if the hotter talents of that decade would tend to dedicate their efforts to Marvel's superhero line or its interesting stable of black-and-white magazines. Memory serves me in recalling a Gil Kane cover on a Marvel treatment of Gulliver's Travels, the interior of which might have contained art by Alex Ni�o.

And, as a footnote, at least one interview features John Buscema lamenting the fundamental improbability of flying men in tights as a choice of subject matter to which to devote his talents. In that interview, he suggested as the dream project he might choose, given a market that allowed him to do the work he wanted to, would involve historical comics with content such as the life of Abraham Lincoln. If anyone could catch the nuances of faces such as that of the disturbing General Tecumseh Sherman, I would allow that Buscema could; and that someone so deeply connected with a vital period of comics suggests such pieces as the work to seek adds to a credibility the form could use, inasmuch as the accusation of bowdlerized content and lightweight treatment sometimes overshadow the genre as a whole.

The End

Educational comics do not have the same clear kind of ending as some other forms, partially because forces outside the market frequently bring about their publication. This factor, however, also predicts that the educational comic would not have a long and hoary history. Products that someone wants to exist do not enjoy the same viability as those things people actually apply money to acquiring, and we encounter peculiar vulnerabilities of marketing once we enter the territory of comic books, the like obviously becoming worse where a product tries to perform a function based on notions of what people should consume.

Such comics, after all, did not appear to meet an existing demand, regardless of the potentials of the form. Instead, the concern of teachers' groups, parents, dabblers in the soft sciences, and the like brought about their creation as a product many felt readers should consume; and, as such, appeared without really having a guaranteed set of dollars to attract. Someone might argue, equally convincingly, that fast-food outlets should vend more nutritious side dishes (say, brussels sprouts and succotash), but if he expected these to become high-volume sales items, we could anticipate his inevitable disappointment.

Combine the lack of a real market for comics that interpret the prose literary canon, or works of science and/or history with the lackluster approach such books often took to the material (they sought, in one stroke, to infuse educational material into the medium and to strip it of the very features that grabbed the readers' attention) and the lack of a robust market makes more sense, which we could view as a tragedy of the form, since the combination of real talent with the right material could produce pieces worth reading and collecting (for instance, the collectable comic tabloid edition of Joe Kubert's treatment of Old Testament tales).

On the other hand, such works, not having received their marching orders from the compulsion of cash on the barrel-head remain aloof from the laws of demand in a way that, as it fails to flood the market with educational comics, also fails to let their form extinguish altogether. Examples still persist in the market, circa 2001. For instance, The Cartoon Guide to Physics still crops up here and there; and certainly pieces such as The Big Book of Losers, The Big Book of the Seventies, and others in that series straddle the line between comics created for entertainment and educational comics.

The viability of the whole, perhaps, depends on a balance between the edifying elements - the educational component - and the entertaining ones, sometimes a difficult point to find. However, if the Big Book series serves as a prototype, we can assume that principles such as "Use and recognize celebrity talent," "Keep it short and to the point," "Explore the interesting," and "Make it entertaining" could allow comics of this form to survive indefinitely, even if on the margins of conventional publishing.

A Judgment of the Form

This genre, while older than many more successful approaches to comics, nonetheless has a great deal of unexplored potential, possibilities that historically it has failed to fulfill owing to an overly-cautious approach that bowdlerizes the material into uninteresting pap, the lack of first-tier talent in its execution, and an often-uncompelling selection of topics for treatment.

Textbook publishers need not fear that comic books will replace the products they know, however. Comics have some potential as an educational tool, but certain factors limit their efficiency in such a role. For instance, the form does not use page space as efficiently for the purpose of textbooks; one could pack more astronomy into a prose textbook; and no existing network of educational cartoonists exists to solicit projects to entrepreneurs. Given those obstacles, we need not even worry about the possible effect of the low esteem the average textbook reviewer might hold for comics, since we can expect few or no pieces of this sort to come up during a normal reviewer's career.

Sales, however, especially in the youth of the form, do a great deal to vindicate these works. Civic education inclined youngsters to more interest in history, for instance, inasmuch as the position of the citizen today has a more meaningful context when considered in light of history. Part of the disinterest in such civic-historical angles comes, perhaps, not from an inherent contempt for learning or of the disciplines of history and literature but from indifferent or inept education that managed to make the fascinating become the dull, the tedious, and the dreaded, all through the droning recital of rote facts devoid of context and anchors to the human condition.

Selection of material can do much to cause ears to perk up. For instance, people one might consider as characteristically devoid of historical interest might nonetheless perk up if the topic occurred in the company of something that does interest them. The Big Book of the Seventies, for instance, examined various events and cultural escapades of a currently-hip decade remembered most fondly, perhaps, by people too young to remember it at all.

The benefits of the form might justify the effort involved in overcoming the formidable obstacles to making educational comics a viable concern again. Given my own tendency, later in life, to explore things that came up in something I had read previously - for instance, to look up in an encyclopedia some widely-accepted facts about the Moro Wars after seeing a William Stout piece about historical atrocities in Bicentennial Gross-Outs. Given that the latter work belonged in the territory of undergrounds rather than educational pieces (forms which, in theory at least, could overlap), we could multiply the potential benefit by the density of interestingly-presented fact or literature.

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Email the author at [email protected].

Column 286. Completed 05-DEC-2001.

Notes

¹ Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, pp. 6-7. University Press of Mississipi, Jackson, 1998.