Every time I teach an introductory rhetoric and composition course, I struggle with what texts and assignments to do in the class. Last semester, I focused on personal memoirs, having students read Kathleen Hanna, Carrie Brownstein, Salman Rushdie, and oral interviews with individuals in Appalachia. I’ve also do Civil Rights memoirs. This semester, I’m doing comics, specifically having students look at some EC comics from the 1950s alongside some of Nate Powell’s work and Loo Hiu Phang and Hughes Micol’s Erased: An Actor of Color’s Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood. For this course, students will write fan letters and a review essay alongside their final personal identity narrative. I’ve had students make their own zines and comics, but I have never had them actually write fan letters. I’m interested to see how this will go with students. I’m excited to see how students respond to the EC comics, especially some of the science fiction ones.

Course Description and Objectives:

Why do we write? Why do we create? What purpose do these acts serve in our lives? We do this thing for multiple reasons. We do them to learn about the world around us. We do them to convey what we learn to others. We do them to help us work through our thoughts. Ultimately, though, these things help us to learn more about ourselves, forming our identities and helping us to confront our surroundings. We create to discover.

In the process of creation, we engage with our very beings as well as with the communities we inhabit and individuals we will never physically meet, conversing with them across time and space. As Lillian Smith puts it in when she describes why she wrote Killers of the Dream, a memoir where she explored what Jim Crow and segregation did to herself and other whites in the South, “I was in dialogue with myself as I wrote, as well as with my hometown and my childhood and history and the future and the past. Writing is both horizontal and vertical exploration.” Smith highlights that when we write we explore our inner beings along with our interactions with those around us, the horizontal, and the spiritual, the vertical.

To be a better writer, we must become readers, and especially critical readers. As such, in this course, we will read graphic texts to help us become better readers and writers. Why read and write about comics? Aren’t comics “low brow” or “uncultured”? in The Power of Comics and Graphic Novels, Randy Duncan, Matthew Smith, and Paul Levitz argue that “comics can accommodate content as profound, moving, and enduring as that found in any pf the more celebrated vehicles for human expression” (emphasis added). Graphic texts have increased in popularity and acceptance over the past few decades. One need only look at Art Spiegelman’s Maus winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 or Nate Powell becoming the first comics’ artist to receive the National Book Award in 2016 for his work on John Lews’ March trilogy as examples.

Published following World War II, in a time of both optimism and fear, EC Comics series such as Weird Fantasy and Shock Suspenstories went against the common comics fare of the period. William Gaines, EC’s published, leaned into the comics medium to, as Steven Spielberg puts it, “educate his audience.” They published adaptations of stories by Ray Bradbury and other influential science fiction writers, and they addressed the scientific progress and social progress of the era, both the enthusiasm and anxiety around such progress. Preachies became one of the staple of EC’s stories. These stories, as Qiana Whitted points out, “are cautionary, discomforting, and often quite grim” while conveying the hopes and anxieties of the period.

Nate Powell has, over the course of his career, published multiple books and won countless awards, including the Ignatz and the Carter G. Woodson Book Award. His collection, You Don’t Say, contains various stories, from the personal to the historical that he wrote and/or illustrated between 2004 and 2013. The stories cover everything from a woman coming terms with her mortality, the destruction of a community, interactions with celebrities, philosophical questions of existence, and more. Becky Cloonan calls Powell’s collection “[h]aunting, poetic, and visually lyrical.”

Loo Hui Phang and Hughes Micol’s Erased: An Actor of Color’s Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood details Maximus Wyld’s career in Tinseltown during the mid-1900s. While focused on Wyld’s life, Erased provides an historical overview of Hollywood during the period, as Wyld comes into contact with countless film stars, directors, and producers over the course of his career. Erased in an examination of identity and the way that culture shapes us. As Raul Peck states, “Revisiting the grand tapestry of the Hollywoodian dream from a different angle . . . lets us revisit the myths and ghosts invented in era after era for the wellbeing of a reassuring vision” of society.

Our engagement with mediums, whether textual, visual, or auditory, tells us about ourselves. The ways we respond to those products, in our writing or through other avenues, also helps us learn more about ourselves an the world around us. Over the course of this semester, we will critically engage, through our writing, with texts and learn more about ourselves and the world that we inhabit.

We will explore the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills required in the university and beyond. The course will focus on writing effective, well-argued essays. We will accomplish these objectives through in-class discussion, in-class writing, and several essays.

Primary Texts:

The EC Archives: Shock Suspenstories. Vol. 1. Dark Horse Books, 2021.
The EC Archives: Weird Fantasy. Vol. 3. Dark Horse Books, 2024.
Phang, Loo Hui and Hughes Micol. Erased: An Actor of Color’s Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood. NBM Graphic Novels, 2024.
Powell, Nate. You Don’ts Say. Top Shelf Productions, 2015.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.