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Sequential Art…Into the Future

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Sequential Art…Into the Future CONCLUSION SEQUENTIAL ART…INTO THE FUTURE Being an educator primarily concerned with literacy—and specifically critical literacy—I have created within myself a split personality. My personal literacy includes my proclivity to be a text snob, but that tendency to judge text (and other people’s tastes in text) conflicts directly with my professional and scholarly view that we must acknowledge a broad range of texts and that honoring people’s choices in text is important, especially in the classroom. During the drafting of this book, the novels and movies that have spawned from the initial Twilight book were achieving the same sort of market success, reader/ viewer fandom, and criticism that the Harry Potter works had received just before vampires became the next hot thing after sword and sorcery. I grew up a sci-fi fan and loved alls things sci-fi, especially the Star Trek series. But while I enjoyed mid-twentieth century horrors films about Frankenstein, Dracula, and the like, I have never enjoyed horror or fantasy genres. I collected Conan in the 1970s, but hold no affection for the Harry Potter books and have yet to see one of the film adaptations. I recall the Anne Rice craze during my high school teaching years, but I never read the books or saw more than a few moments of the Interview with a Vampire film. So when Twilight hit, I kept my distance, and as I had done with Harry Potter works, I was genuinely happy about and supportive of young people reading—while I usually offered my caveats about my doubts concerning the quality of the Twilight series. Just as I was coming to the end of this book’s first draft, however, I caught the first Twilight film on cable, and viewing that film (which I felt had some compelling strengths and some crippling weaknesses) forced me to discuss text and our view of quality text with two graduate courses in literacy I was teaching. Just as I admit my own difficulty with acknowledging some texts as “good,” I have been drafting a book arguing for an expansion of our understanding of “text” and for recognizing that comics and graphic novels are quality texts themselves—not a lesser text and not text suitable for weak and young readers only. So within the context of Twilight-mania, I turn in the conclusion to two final thoughts about comics and graphic novels as genres and mediums facing continued growing pains. First, comics and graphic novels represent, especially through the rise of film adaptations, the influence of the market on our perceptions of the genre/ medium and our ultimate evaluations of a text’s quality. Next, comics and graphic novels present a lingering problem with the role of women within the industry and the texts themselves—woman as comic book and graphic novel creators, the depiction of women by male creators, and the role of female characters within the superhero conventions of comics. 189 CONCLUSION IS THIS TEXT MARKETABLE?—WHEN DOLLARS DON’T MAKE SENSE The west is dominated by consumerism. While Twilight fans assemble for the third movie adaptation, iPhone customers line up outside at&t storefronts jockeying for the iPhone G4. In our consumer culture, then, does popular equal quality? Are the Twilight books and films good because they are popular? And are we even capable of evaluating their quality through the glare of success? Is that iPhone truly better than other smart phones, or is the coolness factor of iPhones blinding us to being able to tell? For comics/graphic novels, those dilemmas are significant because part of the rise of the genre/medium has been driven by market success—first with comics morphing into graphic novels in the 1980s and then with comics being adapted into film in the 2000s (and with popular novels, such as the Twilight series, being adapted into graphic novels to profit on that popularity). Since teens and young adults are often the exact customer base that drives popularity in western cultures, specifically the U.S., students are in an ideal situation to confront the relationship between popular and quality. For comics and graphic novels, the market success of film adaptations signals a double-edged sword for the genre. The success has presented a platform from which advocates can argue about the quality of comics/graphic novels. When critics acknowledge Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore as notable artists, the entire field of artists benefit indirectly. But success also breeds a dynamic whereby publishers begin to see text primarily based on marketability (publishing in a market always requires some element of profit to be considered, of course). Once something is popular, the market is flooded with similar (on the surface) works since the publishers hope to garner profit while the broader concept is hot. For example, Twilight’s success spawned a flood of vampire novels, TV shows, and movies—just as the success of films based on Batman and Spider-Man spurred superhero films. Yet, the comic book industry is all too aware of the dangers of this dynamic, as I discussed in Chapter One—the glut of the comic industry into the 1990s that brought the entire field and genre on the edge of destruction. Comics, graphic novels, manga, and films adapted from comics are excellent texts for confronting students with the role the market plays in how we approach and evaluate text. Children, teens, and young adults are accustomed to having their popular texts marginalized and even rejected by the adult world so they are probably eager to join in the debate about text quality. As I will discuss in the next section, comics/graphic novels are texts that reflect deeply entrenched cultural norms (specifically about gender). As challenging texts, comics and graphic novels already work both within and against what we tend to associate with “text,” making them rich experiences for considering also the role of the market in our consumption of and appreciation for text. As the inevitable rise and decline of superhero films occur, we are faced with how comics/graphic novels survive and thrive as a genre/medium within a fickle market. For students, the influence of that market on our consideration of quality remains an important question that helps them confront their own tastes and 190 .
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