Tights Were Harmed in the Creation of This Comic:

Surveying Female Heroics in Intermediate and YA Graphic Novels

Superhero Comics

• The rise of the superhero comic in the 20th century included an emphasis on male heroics that remains pretty much intact to this day.

• Of course, not all boys and men fit the superhero stereotype…

Superhero Wannabes…

Most of us fantasize about having superpowers….

Text Only Vs. Image/Text

• Narrative that is driven by images forces us to confront the visual representation of women and girls.

• How comfortable are we with the visual depiction of ordinary women and girls?

But just as power is complicated for boys and men…

• It is also complicated for girls and women.

• Is this vision of womanhood the only one that leads to power?

Tales of a Third Grade Nothing

A Distant Ideal…

DC’s Reboot of Starfire points to a trend

Visual Representation: Who Reads Comics?

Jennifer K. Stuller on Visual Representation of Women in Comics

• “The powers that be in the comics industry assume that girls don’t read superhero comics, because they don’t typically buy superhero comics, and therefore publications in that genre aren’t typically made for girls.” (2).

• The result? Visual depictions are still primarily focused on “the male gaze.”

What is “The Male Gaze”?• In a 1975 essay entitled “Visual

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey observed that mainstream films and periodicals were created under the art direction of men and assumed an audience of primarily male viewers. As such, women were typically portrayed as objects of desire, rather than as active subjects – or as desiring subjects. Mulvey termed this practice “the male gaze.”

Visual Depiction of Girls

Hermione as I imagined her Hermione as Hollywood imagined her

Of course, some authors and artists are bucking the trend…

Shifts in Heroics

• To me, though, beyond the surface of how female superheroes look, the question of what superheroes do becomes really important.

• Ideas about what constitutes heroic behavior are beginning to change, and I would argue that these changes are also apparent in Intermediate and YA literature.

Adolescent Literature: The Early Years

• Teenagers conformed to conventional behavior

• Adults were shown to be wise, seemingly infallible authority figures

Adolescent Literature: 1970s Upheaval

• Judy Blume, Paul Zindel, Robert Cormier, and others advocated for a more realistic portrayal of pre-teen and teenage life to which actual readers might relate.

Superhero Ideal• The entire concept of

superheroes had been called into question by texts like Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen and Miller’s The Dark Night, that pose questions about the corruption and violence that can come with the sort of power glorified in traditional comics

1980s/1990s Convergence

• Superhero Comics– Moral ambiguity– Complex definitions of

heroism– Greater diversity in

depiction of female characters

• Adolescent Literature– Realistic depiction of

adolescence– Adult authority

diminished or hidden– Focus on inner growth

Adolescent Literature

Superhero Comics

New definitions of heroism

21st Century YA Comics

Establishes questions that focus on female agency and heroism.

The New Heroism• Pointing to the Harry Potter

series as an example, Berndt and Steveker argue that “heroism in the twenty-first century challenges stereotypical notions of a courageous, valiant and somewhat simplistic masculinity” (2).

• They also suggest that “compassionate empathy” may be the central quality to contemporary heroism.

Defining the “New Heroism”

• Heroic acts are achievable by ordinary people, who develop their inner strengths, rather than necessarily relying upon super powers.

• Heroes need not support the status quo; in fact, heroes may be different and may advocate difference.

• Failure, which used to be an unthinkable component of an heroic narrative, might be a valuable and necessary part of the hero’s journey.

Barry Deutsch’s Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword (2010)

• Set in an orthodox Jewish community in the US

• Mirka’s heroism is derived from lessons she (reluctantly) learns from her stepmother and via the memory of her mother

Depicting the way a girl might negotiate gender norms within a traditional community

Deutsch’s challenges

• How can one show a young woman trying to define herself within a traditional community in such a way that she is not shown to turn her back on the community entirely?

• How to make a story that has a very specific setting and cultural origin resonate well beyond that community?

Another Challenge, Involving Audience

• Whenever an author understands that her reader may not have a great deal of information about the culture that she is depicting, that author has to find a strategy for both underscoring commonalities…and emphasizing differences.

Marjane SatrapiPersepolis

First and Second Panels Together

Hereville is set in modern times…

in a community of people who practice Orthodox Judaism

• “Jews make up 2.2 percent of the American population, a percentage that has held steady for the past two decades. The survey estimates there are 5.3 million Jewish adults as well as 1.3 million children being raised at least partly Jewish” (“Poll,” NYT 2013).

• “Reform Judaism remains the largest American Jewish movement, at 35 percent. Conservative Jews are 18 percent, Orthodox 10 percent, and groups such as Reconstructionist and Jewish Renewal make up 6 percent combined. Thirty percent of Jews do not identify with any denomination” (“Poll,” NYT, 2013).

Judaism and the Enlightenment

• Judaism is the first recorded monotheistic religion, which had its origins in the region of the world referred to contemporarily as Israel and its surrounding nation states.

• In 18th and 19th century Europe and North America, as Enlightenment era ideas about the place of the individual in the larger world began to move towards a more secular view, persons of all religious faiths had to consider whether or not to alter their beliefs.

Three Strands of U.S. Judaism

• Reform Judaism: “Reform Judaism made changes in liturgy, then in doctrine and in the Jewish way of life. More significantly, perhaps, it recognized the legitimacy of making changes and regarded change as reform—hence its name” (“Judaism,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2008).

Three Strands of U.S. Judaism

• Orthodox: “A reaction to Reform Judaism, Orthodox Judaism was in many ways continuous with traditional Judaism, but in other ways it was as selective in its adoption of elements of traditional Judaism as was Reform Judaism. Orthodox Judaism denied the validity of change, and held that Judaism lies beyond history; it is the work of God, and constitutes a set of facts of the same order as the facts of nature” (“Judaism,” IESS, 2008).

Three Strands of U.S. Judaism

• Conservative: “…positive Historical Judaism, known in America as Conservative Judaism, occupied a middle position between the two other new Judaisms. This Judaism maintained that change could become reform, but only in accordance with the principles by which legitimate change may be separated from illegitimate change. Conservative Judaism would discover those principles through historical study” (“Judaism,” IESS, 2008).

Barry Deutsch• Barry Deutsch, a person

raised in a reform Jewish family, writing Hereville gave him the chance to learn more about Orthodox Jewish communities and their practices.

• He is an advocate of putting forward female heroism in contexts where readers might not expect to see them.

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, 1993

• Comics: “Juxaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9). Emphasis mine

Comics Terminology

• Comics is the medium.• A text such as Hereville is called a long-form

comic by visual theorists, but the terms “graphic narrative” and “graphic novel” are commonly used by publishers, critics, and English studies scholars.

PANELBUBBLE

TEXTBOX

GUTTER

Comics Grammar• The Panel. The basic unit of a comic.• The Bubble. Spoken or thought text within or across panels.• The Gutter. The space between two contiguous panels.• The Text box. Narration placed in the gutters or in the panels.• The Page. A single page of panels.• The Spread. Two pages of panels that are joined in the

middle with binding.• The Breakdown. The manner in which the panels are set out

in terms of size, shape, and relationship on a page. And within an entire comics text, the way that the entire comic is set out.

Discussing the Panel• Within an individual panel, there are a number of factors to

consider in order to understand how the scriptwriter/artist creates meaning.– Style

• Line• Color• Shading

– Shape– Layout– Placement of elements– Framing – or lack of framing– Relationship between image and text

Discussing the Page

• According to Scott McCloud, there are six potential relationships that can occur between contiguous panels.

• Let’s take a look at the handout.

Reading the Entire Comic as a Whole

• Understanding the relationship between contiguous panels marks only one of literally thousands of relationships that can occur as the panel comes into dialogue with every other panel in the comic.

• For this reason, it is useful to think of a comic as existing on a horizontal plane stretching from the first to the last panel. Yes, page breakdown is important, but so is the breakdown of the entire comic.