Tommy Washbush
I had always, always wanted to be a cartoonist. When I was little, I thought the four greatest people on earth were God, Santa Claus, Charles Schulz and Walt Disney. Later I was disappointed. While three were creators, only two were cartoonists.
When I arrived at UW-Madison in the 1980s there was no way to study cartooning. So, to make money, I chose a related field: journalism. I haven’t regretted it, but sometimes I feel as if I’m Amish, preserving a vanishing way of life.
Meanwhile, cartoons are more popular than ever, increasing their hold on TV, movies and gaming. Gross revenue for the top 300 comic book titles is $248 million a month. Variety reports annual sales in excess of $1 billion — not including all the properties inspired by comic books (and leaving out newspaper and magazine cartoons).
And now there is a way to study cartooning at UW-Madison. A variety of wildly successful classes and workshops may in the near future be unified as a comics studies minor.
“I think the future looks very bright,” says Adam Kern, UW professor of Japanese literature and visual culture in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. “There’s such a critical mass of student interest and, as we’ve learned, faculty and community interest, that it is high time that we launch a comics studies minor.”
Technically, it would be referred to as an undergraduate certificate program. Kern plans to pitch it to UW leadership in the fall. “It takes time for something like this to go through the academic food chain.”
Susan Zaeske, associate dean for arts and humanities at the College of Letters and Science, says she welcomes the proposal, noting it will be reviewed by college and campus curriculum committees. “In fact, we have been anticipating a proposal and look forward to considering it.”
James Danky has been working toward this goal for decades. “There’s been a longstanding and continuing antipathy within academe, not just here at the UW, about anything that’s popular,” he says. “You can just hear the whispers behind colleagues saying, ‘Sure it’s really popular but is it really path-breaking?’”
Danky is a faculty associate at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, and cofounder of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America. He’s also a longtime cartoon buff, who in 2009 helped stage the Chazen Museum of Art’s Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix. He co-wrote the catalog with legendary underground publisher Denis Kitchen, who is based in Princeton, Wisconsin.
To Danky, if you teach mass communications, you can’t ignore comics. “It doesn’t matter how you feel about it personally,” he argues. “If you prefer to stay home and read Jane Austen, it really doesn’t matter, because your responsibility to the students is to discuss the whole field as it is now.”
Pioneering Wisconsin cartoonist Clare Briggs.
H.T. Webster.
It’s only natural that the state’s flagship university should take up cartoon studies. In many ways, Wisconsin has always been a pioneer in the world of cartoons.
The daily comic strip was invented in 1904 by Reedsburg native Clare Briggs (1875-1930) for The Chicago Evening American. At the height of Briggs’ success, his signature was used alone as a product imprint, for example on Briggs’ Pipe Tobacco. He sometimes worked Reedsburg into his work. In one of his later strips, a character declares, “I’m from Wisconsin, too. Old Sauk County.”
A character invented by Tomahawk native H.T. Webster (1885-1952) is now part of the dictionary. The last name of his timid, submissive Casper Milquetoast defines those attributes. Frank King, of Cashton, created a sensation by having characters age in real time. His “Gasoline Alley” strip launched in 1918 and today, continued by other hands, is the second-longest running comic strip in history.
And I have always wanted to see a life-size bronze statue of a chubby, bald boy placed next to the downtown Madison College building. While teaching a night class on cartooning there, in the spring of 1932, Madison’s own Carl Anderson (1865-1948) invented “Henry.” Quizzical Henry never spoke. It was largely a “pantomime strip,” and because of that became a worldwide phenomenon. Five years later, Henry made 40 million newspaper readers smile daily. “Henry” continues to run in around 75 papers.
Madison’s P.S. Mueller, in addition to penning a weekly panel for Isthmus, draws for many national publications, including The New Yorker. Scott Dikkers, one of the founders of The Onion, created the cult comic strip “Jim’s Journal.” I later wrote and did the pencil sketches for “Jim,” which continues in reruns.
All this history of cartooning created fertile ground for the arrival of Lynda Barry, a native of Richland Center, who — perhaps more than anyone else — has made comics respectable at UW-Madison.
Born in 1956, she developed “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” in Washington State, where she attended The Evergreen State College with Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. (Today she lives in the Janesville area.) In the 1980s her cartoons developed a rabid following in the alternative press, including Isthmus. Barry has won every top award the field of cartooning can offer, and she’s authored at least 15 books. “Comeek” was retired in 2008, but Barry remains extremely busy, teaching at the UW.
In spring 2012, she was artist-in-residence for the UW-Madison Arts Institute and Department of Art, co-sponsored by several departments, including the Center for Visual Cultures, which Kern directed at the time. Barry had taught workshops before, and she wanted to “try a semester, to see what it was like to have students for a longer period,” she says.
Barry says she didn’t count on falling in love with teaching, but that’s what happened. “I just fell. In. Love.”
“Syllabus” from UW-Madison artist/educator Lynda Barry. (Click brackets in the top right to expand)
She joined the faculty in 2013 as associate professor of interdisciplinary creativity. At the art department she teaches Making Comics, which you can follow online. Barry has also worked with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery on the other, science-y end of campus, where enhancing creativity and cross-team communication is important to research. “But creativity, unless it’s attached to an object or a thing isn’t anything,” she says. Comics provide an entrée.
One morning in the last week of the semester, Barry’s corner classroom is a cacophony of conversation and music. Some students work alone, with intense focus. Others gather in knots, swapping stories as they create. All around the room are stacks of student work on a variety of paper surfaces, in a variety of media. In one corner is a bundle of sticks from Barry’s yard. They’re used as giant pens in an introductory lesson. After that unwieldy task, drawing with pen and ink is a much lesser task. But a greater challenge is always present.
“The thing that I’ve found — and I’ve worked in a lot of different populations,” says Barry, “the hardest thing to get past is the representation of realism. Most people quit drawing at about eight, when they can’t draw a nose. Eight or nine? That’s it. Can’t draw. Can’t draw noses or hands. To this day they’ll avoid drawing noses and hands, even in my class.”
That’s missing the point. “I’ve told them to think about Charlie Brown with a hyper-realistic nose or hyper-realistic hands,” she says. “You wouldn’t want it. [Instead] it’s just a simple mark.”
By definition, cartooning is critical thought. You choose the barest minimum of lines to put your idea across. Students find it a transformative process.
“I took Lynda’s class because she’s a legend,” says Julia Levine, a Madison native who recently received her undergraduate degrees in Afro-American studies and environmental studies. “It was just one of those things that — you know, if you go to the UW or transfer here, you have to take Lynda Barry’s class. I just knew I needed to, and so I worked it into my schedule any way I could.”
Recent grad Julia Levine fell in love with cartooning while taking classes with Lynda Barry. (Click brackets in the top right to expand)
The experience was amazing, she says. And hard to summarize. “It’s an incredible mixture of using your mind in the most intensive ways possible, but using it for the pursuit of making a product.”
Recollection is a big part of the class, says Levine, whether from childhood or something mundane that happened that morning. “Making yourself a viewer of your own life like that — and attempting to get the stories — that whole process can be very therapeutic and also just fascinating.”
Emily Shetler, a graduate student in English, agrees. A former student of Barry’s, she’s taken her techniques to an interesting place: Wisconsin’s Oakhill Correctional Institution.
“They leapt right into it,” says Shetler, who plans to teach prisoners again this summer. “As students in a comics class, we have so much agency over what our comics look like, and how we present these stories that are such a part of ourselves. It was a good environment for them to be in. You can get to some of the deeper issues in this way that is really exciting.”
Instead of thinking of comics as another form of entertainment, Barry’s students often seem to describe cartooning as a foreign language, capable of nuances impossible to convey by words or pictures alone. They can be profound and deeply moving. Levine recalls a fellow student’s autobiographical work.
“I saw one comic about sexual assault,” she says quietly. “Would the written word have as much impact?”
Comics studies programs at universities are not exactly common, but they do exist at the University of Oregon, University of Florida, Penn State and elsewhere. But Kern has something different in mind for UW. Existing programs, he says, shoehorn comics into literature departments or film.
“What we want to do at Wisconsin is have a kind of comics studies that is more comparative in nature,” he says. There would be the applied side, the “how to” of comics, and also serious study of comics and their impact as a form of communication, across time and around the world.
Danky thinks Kern is just the person to take on the task of elevating comic studies at the university. “Adam is a brilliant scholar, and a wonderful teacher and someone who has mastered — what shall we say — the jiu jitsu of university bureaucracy,” he adds.
For a decade Kern has taught classes on manga, a style of Japanese comics, which always have full enrollment. This spring he taught a course in comparative literature that delved into comics across time and cultures. Its enrollment maxed out in minutes.
Jacob Copus, a senior in communication arts from Fennimore, hopes to work in the industry. He’s taken both of Kern’s cartoon courses. “I find it interesting to learn [in comp lit] how big a role and impact comics have had in shaping multiple societies,” says Copus. “It’s one of the best classes I’ve ever taken here.”
Levine, who has also taken Kern’s comparative class, agrees. “It’s a lot more philosophical than I ever could have imagined, which I think is really interesting. How you decide what is a comic?”
“Atomic Size Matters” was Veronica Bern’s chemistry doctoral dissertation. (Click brackets in the top right to expand)
More groundbreaking work is happening when it comes to applying comics to scientific and technical communications. Kern points out that molecular modeling, the double helix, and even our visual concept of an atom — all are comics. In 2015, UW-Madison student Veronica Berns received national attention when she wrote a comic book, Atomic Size Matters, for her chemistry doctoral dissertation. In science and technology this is called “data visualization.”
“That’s important for communication with the public and also for scholars and scientists at research universities,” says Kern. It’s also increasingly critical for business and, as reported in Forbes, important to “Big Data” firms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Facebook.
The groundwork for a comics minor has been laid over the past several years. A group of graduate students across disciplines, all of them former students of Barry’s, formed the Applied Comics Kitchen. With the UW’s Arts Institute and Center for Visual Cultures, they won two grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hold a series of workshops.
“We help to facilitate workshops about the use of making comics in people’s research on campus,” says Jenell Johnson, professor of rhetoric, politics and culture in the Department of Communication Arts. At the UW, comics has become pedagogy — a way of teaching. And the university is becoming known for it.
“I teach comics-making as part of the class I teach on the health humanities and health medicine,” says Johnson. She teaches many students who are pre-med. Graphic medicine is a new and real field, in which the UW already has a leadership role. It uses comics to explore the wide varieties of patient, family and clinicians’ experience of illness, caregiving and disability.
Attendees of a recent graphic medicine workshop included a hospice chaplain and practicing nurses. “One of the assignments I have students do is create an illness narrative using comics,” says Johnson. “It can be their own experiences or about patients that they know, or illustrating stories from a medical journal. People are able to communicate the complexity of emotions both on the part of the physician and the patient. I think comics do that in a way very few media get a chance to do.”
KC Councilor tells the story of transitioning from female to male in “Between You and Me.” (Click brackets in the top right to expand)
KC Councilor, a Lynda Barry alum who recently defended his dissertation in com arts, already has a tenure track position at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven.
“One of the things they were most excited about was drawing comics,” he says. “Even out there during my campus visit, the dean, the faculty, the students — they all wanted to see, like, ‘How does this work?’” says Councilor. “I can say that in many different ways, it’s what got me that job, because it’s pedagogically interesting.”
The first year’s Applied Comics Kitchen workshops, says Kern, were “used to spearhead new research and new collaborations.” And to test the waters. The second year of workshops was used to hammer out comics as a discipline.
“There were many more instructors who used comics in their teaching or their research than I anticipated,” says Kern. “If you look at the catalog, there are only three or four courses on comics, but it turns out that many faculty say, ‘Well, actually, I spend three weeks on a graphic novel.’” For example literature courses cover Maus, by Art Spiegelman, a graphic novel that tells the story of the cartoonist’s father, a survivor of the Holocaust.
“There are other UW graduate students who are doing this in our different departments,” says Councilor. “In sociology, in education, in geography.”
In addition to fostering critical thinking, Councilor says adding comics to the curriculum helps provide information on how students are faring: “I can tell when a student is not doing well emotionally, or they’re not really engaging with the class. I can tell if there’s something to deal with, through the drawings.”
Councilor used comics to work through something important in his own life. The native North Virginian felt unhappy and desperately disengaged during the 2013 winter in Wisconsin. “I wasn’t sure what I was doing here and feeling here,” says Councilor. Barry’s class returned him to the world, and more.
“It was through drawing that I was able to come to terms with something that I had been thinking about, but underneath the surface — subconscious, afraid to sort of go there,” he recalls. “But it was through drawing that I really figured out that I’m transgender and that I wanted to transition.”
Councilor tells the story of his journey from female to male in his new book, Between You and Me: Transitional Comics. (The book is sold out currently, but will be reprinted this summer.)
“I stopped drawing when I was a kid and didn’t start drawing again until I was 33 years old and brave enough to take a course with Lynda Barry,” Councilor writes on his website. “In the four years since, I have continued working closely with her, and in that time, I have quite literally drawn myself into being.”
Professional cartoonists often point back to a proud history of representative storytelling that begins with cave paintings, grows up as hieroglyphics, and graduates to fine art; in museum-talk, a “cartoon” is a real-size study for a later work, such as a painting, tapestry or fresco. Oddly, at the UW, everyone instead calls it “comics,” synonymous with “funnies.” But cartooning by any other name seems to be entering a new phase.
“There is going to be increasing serious intellectual interest and academic professional usefulness in and of comics,” says Kern. “Did you know that Harvard Business School recently started using comics and graphic novels? So it’s coming. I really want UW-Madison to be on the cutting edge of this, rather than the trailing edge.”
