Jumping Into Educational Comics FEET FIRST-Interview with Leonard Rifas

[Donald Jackson]

TEC TALK #13
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Jumping into Comics Education FEET FIRST - LEONARD RIFAS INTERVIEW





Just because you don’t hear of people making Comics to educate doesn’t mean they’re not out there. My guest this week has an impressive list of accomplishments in publishing his own Comics. Combining his educational background with writing and art skills, he has made Comics with a strong social conscience. TEC Talk is proud to introduce Leonard Rifas.

DJ- What are your goals with combining Comics and Education and what Comics have you published?

LR- Even though I named my company “EduComics,” my original goal was not to combine “comics” and “education” (in the sense of schoolroom learning.) I wanted to combine my love of comix with my love of nonfiction by retelling information from nonfiction books as comic book stories. I started out competing on the same racks and spinners with comix drawn for entertainment, but eventually for-classroom publications did become a larger part of my work.

I have created and self-published some comics (such as All-Atomic Comics, Food Comics and Energy Comics); I also have published some comics that other cartoonists created (Keiji Nakazawa’s Gen of Hiroshima and I SAW IT, and a comic by mothers about motherhood, MAMA! Dramas); I have created some comic books for other comic book publishers (such as itchy PLANET, published by Fantagraphics, and Corporate CRIME Comics, published by Kitchen Sink); and I created some comics that were commissioned and published by like-minded activist organizations (Food First Comics, Tobacco Comics, and AIDS News.)

DJ- Has there been much progress for the Comics medium as an educational tool since the early days?

LR- In the years since I started my company, the changes have included the rise of the “graphic novel,” kicked off by Will Eisner’s A Contract With God; comics’ breakthrough to mainstream respectability, achieved largely by art spiegelman’s Maus; the increasing numbers of college and university courses devoted to appreciating graphic novels as a form of literature (and the rise of a community of comics scholars to teach them); and the new artistic and distribution possibilities that the web and digital media have created.

Comics have matured rapidly and wonderfully in the last few decades as a medium of personal expression, including as a way for artists to express their un-fictionalized memories, perceptions and ideas.

The kind of comic that I used to specialize in - 32 page, black and white anthology comic books with slick covers - , have not enjoyed the same kind of success as the graphic novels. Personally, I have never yet had a desire to work in that longer “graphic novel” format.

DJ- Who do you think is doing anything interesting or effective with Comics as an educational medium?

LR- I am interested in just about every educational or nonfiction use of cartooning, whether I like the work or not, and whether or not I can understand the language it is written in.

Formal investigations of the “effectiveness” of comics lost steam after the American comic book industry collapsed in 1954. The educational comic whose effectiveness has been most convincingly documented in the published literature (as far as I know) was a comic book that came out some years ago to teach people in Hawaii how to avoid skin cancer.

DJ- TEC Comix now has online survey’s for our CD-ROM testers, we are currently gathering data on the effectiveness of our Comics but I think the world of academia really needs to produce more information on this. Tell us what Feet First Comics is all about.

LR- I won a grant to create a web-comic that would encourage people to choose the best mode of travel for each trip instead of jumping into their cars out of habit. There had been many educational campaigns aimed at getting commuters to carpool or use public transportation, but most car trips do not involve going to and from work.

While working on this project, I realized that the most important decision to reduce unnecessary driving does not happen when a person walks out their door and decides whether to get on a bus or behind a wheel, but when they decide where to live. The story, then, became one of a couple deciding to live in a “walkable” urban neighborhood instead of out in the suburban sprawl.

Feet First Comics (not to be confused with my earlier project Food First Comics) was the first comic I created for the web. I filled it with hyperlinks so readers could click directly to the government documents, research reports, newspaper articles, and other resources that I relied on when writing the story. (http://www.feetfirst.info/comics.)

DJ- How do you use Comics in your own teaching and what have been the results for your students?

LR- I have been teaching for about a decade now, including community college courses in Introduction to Film, Sociology of Media, and Writing for Mass Media, and also after-school, how-to cartooning courses for kids. I have not used comic books in my own classes very much yet. I have brought in cartoonists and comics publishers as guest speakers, including Roberta Gregory, Donna Barr, Ellen Forney, Nick Thorkelson, Gary Groth, and Eric Devericks. I have presented a few comics-based lectures, including one on semiotics in which I interpret the front cover of Crumb’s Zap #1 in great detail.

Each quarter, in my film class I show Keiji Nakazawa’s animated feature film Barefoot Gen, which he based on his childhood memories of the Hiroshima bombing. This last quarter, for the first time, I distributed copies of Keiji Nakazawa’s I SAW IT, his un-fictionalized, autobiographical comic book, a few days before showing the film. I’ve still got many boxes of Nakazawa’s great comic book I SAW IT to sell, so I wish I could report that the results were unequivocally positive, but it’s hard for me to say. In terms of raw emotional impact, the film seemed to hit people harder in earlier quarters, without the preparation of reading the comic first, but I do not take stirring strong emotions as my goal. The comic and film together raise many interesting questions about relations between history and historical-fiction, and the respective strengths and weaknesses of comics, live action film and animation

In terms of tangible “results,” I get terrific satisfaction from teaching people how to create their own mini-comics. After leading a series of collaborative exercises that teach the basics of cartooning, I edit and trouble-shoot their individual work and have the pleasure of watching their skills improve as they rework their drafts and pencils to make their pages more readable and powerful.

DJ- I know what you mean, I’ve been teaching Comic Book Illustration for two years. My students are mostly between 5 and 10 though, so we cannot get too complex without loosing basic structure. It’s proven to be a very popular course and unveiled a lot of hidden talents in students who didn’t think they had talent. What resources would you cite for people interested in getting Comics involved in their classes or home study programs?

LR- To pick one new title fresh in my mind, I recommend The Education of A Comics Artist, edited by Mike Dooley and Steve Heller. I’m glad to be included in its five dozen contributors. To take another example even fresher in my mind, I would send people to your own first dozen TEC Talk columns. You have been doing a wonderful job of promoting the educational uses of comics.

DJ- Thanks for the kind words and encouragement. I hope our readers will take some time to check out the TEC TALK ARCHIVES. Where can we get copies of your comics?

LR- Write to me at EduComics, box 45831, Seattle, WA 98145-0831, or rifas@earthlink.net.

DJ- http://www.TECcomix.com is also considering your Comics for our PRODUCTS section. With all the serious accomplishments and the stress of a teaching schedule, what sort of Comics do you like to read for pleasure and why?

LR- I like to read comics that make me laugh and think. I like comics that help me imagine how the world appears through someone else’s eyes. I like seeing what I have never seen before, whether it looks ugly or beautiful. I like comics with an erotic or a political edge. When I think back on this last week, though, the greatest pleasures have been in reading nonfiction books and magazine and web articles and watching movies (and in sharing meals with my wife and playing with the dogs.) I seem to have taken a short break from reading comics.

As for specific favorites, the list gets so long, I’m afraid to start naming titles. I think Fantagraphics has been doing phenomenally well as a publisher of worthwhile, path-breaking comics. I think the website “Lines on Paper” has assembled the names of some fantastically talented creators – many of my favorite artists. You can also see my self-portrait on the “Lines on Paper” site. (http://www.linesonpaper.com/card31.html)

DJ- I’ve been meaning to look into Fantagraphics more ( I’m addicted to Super Heroes! ) I’ll have a deeper look. What would you like seen done in the future of both Comics and Comics in Education?

LR- To advance comics and education, I would like someone to publish some refereed experimental research that further clarifies the advantages and disadvantages of comics in relation to other educational media, such as unadorned text, video, and interactive multimedia. Which medium communicates complicated information with the greatest speed and accuracy? Which medium best provokes people to ask their own questions and come up with their own ideas?

I would like to see more and more cartoonists, professional and amateur, use comics as a tool for understanding and communicating about the dangers and opportunities of our multi-faceted global crisis. Twenty-five years ago, someone wrote to me and suggested that I create a comic about global warming. I did not get around to it, but why – as far as I know - has no one else in the world done a nonfiction comic book about global warming in all that time? Dear TEC talk reader, why not you?

Thanks for sharing your insights Leonard. I encourage our readers to check our his links and be part of the Comics In Education Revolution.

Donald Jackson
teachers@TECcomix.com
http://www.TECcomix.com

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TEC Comix: Interactive Edu-tainment produces interactive multi-media Graphic Novels on CD-ROM with built in functions for Teaching English Comprehension. Visit us online today.

[Andrea Speed]

Nice interview, Don. And I think I have a corporate crime comic!

[Donald Jackson]

You DO?! Cool- who is it from? What's the title?

[Andrea Speed]

I can't remember!

I'm afraid it's in one of my big box o' comics (and since I've been doing advances, the boxes are soon going to force me to find a new home - help me! I'm drowning in comics, and I can never find the damn one I'm looking for!), but I believe the story was about a large corporation illegally dumping toxic waste. Ring any bells?

[Ronée]

I recently did an interview with Buzzscope and plugged Tec Comix... thought you might like to see it DJ.

http://www.buzzscope.com/features.php?id=1048

[Donald Jackson]

Thank you for mentioning me in this panel discussion- you are keeping really good company with this group. Great subject to discuss as well!!
I'm looking at that article as research material- great points of view from a diverse group. http://www.TECcomix.com is in touch with New York State officials on standards and testing now, this is one angle that I didn't see in the article and one of my key missions with TEC TALK - that is to bridge educators and the world of Comics. What I don't see being done in Comics is recognizing the world of education, the educational process and needs of administrators and teachers. It's fine to publish a book that is age appropriate but how does it FUNCTION in the classroom?? That's where my experience as a teacher gets combined with the Comics I make.

I'm trying to contact Jim Salicrup since we had a really great conversation at a Comic Con in NYC a ways back and now I see he is taking the educational approach. I think we could do some great things together.

Thanks again Ron'ee!!!
- Donald