By Kent Worcester

For the MoCCA Art Festival 2009

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When Karen Green announced she was organizing a roundtable on "The Graphic Novel and Academic Acceptance" at this year's New York Comic Con, I figured she'd be lucky to attract twenty-five people. Once the NYCC organizers banished the session to the lonely Friday evening timeslot, I assumed the seven panelists would be speaking to an empty room.

I was wrong. An overflow crowd listened attentively as Gene Kannenberg, Jr., Peter Kuper, Dean Haspiel, Bill Savage and their co-panelists recounted the process of teaching "how to tell a story and…how to read the story that's told," as Karen Green later put it in her comiXology column. Judging from the turnout, the audience's questions and the informal conversations that followed, a massed cadre of teachers, librarians, graduate students and academics are reading, assigning, writing and thinking about comics. The sense of buzz was palpable. That rapacious beast, higher education, has jumped on the comics bandwagon.

Signs of burgeoning scholarly interest in comics are everywhere. When the University Press of Mississippi started publishing comics-related titles in the mid-1980s, they had the field to themselves. In the past couple of years, however, high-stakes players such as Yale, Chicago, Michigan and Toronto have released books on cartoon history and theory. A proliferation of print and online periodicals, such as Image & Narrative, Signs: Studies in Graphic Narratives and the ,i>International Journal of Comic Art, are devoted to comics, while several peer-review journals, from Modern Fiction Studies and American Periodicals, to SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture and PS: Political Science and Politics, have recently published symposia or special issues on comics. Meanwhile, the Comics Scholars Listserv sends regular updates on research grants, book projects and upcoming conferences to scholars around the globe.

Until recently, undergraduate courses on comics were mainly offered at specialized art programs, such as Manhattan's School of Visual Arts (SVA) and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). The innovative Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) in White River Junction, Vermont, founded in 2005, builds on this tradition but is centered on comics rather than visual media more generally. At the same time, comics and graphic novels have been turning up on reading lists for courses in history, biography, literature and communication arts as well as on comics per se. Type "comics course syllabi" into a search engine and you will find required texts and assignments for dozens of courses on "The Graphic Novel," "The History of the Comic Book" and "Comics as Literature." Given how few courses were being offered on comics only a decade or so ago, the fact that a current thread on the Comics Scholars Listserv addresses the question of how to put together a Comics Studies minor is a telling sign of the times.

Certain kinds of academics, such as professors of education and psychology, have been writing on comics for decades. The bibliography to The Funnies: An American Idiom (1963) cites numerous articles in specialist journals such as the Review of Education Research, the Journal of Pediatrics, School Management and the Wilson Library Bulletin. While some mid-century researchers disdained comics, not all peer-reviewed scholarship hoisted the anti-comics banner. Titles listed in The Funnies include "Comic Books are Serious Aids to Community Education" (1953), "Case for the Comics" (1944) and "Use Comic Magazines as a Learning Tool" (1947). The bibliography's earliest entry, "The Compensatory Function of the Sunday Funny Paper," appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1927. Social scientists have been grinding comic strips and comic books in their methodological mills for quite some time.

That said, the scale of contemporary scholarly interest is unprecedented, and the wave has not yet crested. Unlike in the mid-century period, much of this interest is rooted in the humanities rather than the social and behavioral sciences. More courses on comics will be offered across the country in Fall 2009 than were offered in Fall 2008, and the same will be true in 2010. Deans and provosts, perpetually fearful of losing the storyline, may start to wonder why their campus hasn't done something in this area. The fact that the New York Times, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books have all seized on the graphic novel as a medium of creative expression adds leverage to those who want to teach, study and talk about comics. Also, from a research perspective, comics is an infinite canvas. Given the sheer variety of cartoon formats, the global reach of cartooning, the unexplored byways of comics history, the knotty formal issues, the range of artistic styles and the multiplicity of genres it seems unlikely that even an army of tenure-hungry junior faculty could drain the pool of compelling topics.

Much of the best writing on comics, of course, is by freelance critics, full-time cartoonists and other non-academics. Comics is sometimes described as a democratic medium, and the same holds for comics criticism. A few academics may try to convince themselves that only academic criticism matters, but they are whistling Dixie. In particular, the number of cartoonists who have written with insight on comics history and theory is mind-boggling. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another art form whose practitioners have played such a prominent role in conceptualizing their own activity. Organizing a credible undergraduate syllabus exclusively around cartoonists on cartooning would be a cinch. The last thing academics should assume is that the comics world is an isolated tribe that has no awareness of itself as an object of inquiry.

Which brings us to the famous limitations of academic discourse. The incentive structure of the modern academy favors conventional thinking, hyper-specialization and productivity for the sake of productivity. No matter what the topic, a certain percentage of academic writing is likely to be formulaic, unimaginative, narrowly framed, humorless and/or poorly executed. Academic prose is often self-referential; more attuned to disciplinary trends and finely sliced theoretical preoccupations than to reaching an informed and broad readership. In the case of the new comics scholarship, there has been a tendency to prematurely canonize a small number of titles at the expense of the grand sweep of comics history. In addition, comics scholars have fixated on definitional issues to a degree that is mind-numbing. On the other hand, the best of the new scholarship sparkles. There are even academics whose work on comics can be read for the sheer pleasure of it – Charles Hatfield, who will be talking about his forthcoming book on Jack Kirby as part of this year's Art Fest program, is one of them. Academics are to be tolerated as long as they have something to contribute. All that really matters is comics.

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bio: Kent Worcester is the coeditor (with Jeet Heer) of Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (University Press of Mississippi, 2004) and A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2009).