The difference between a mild-mannered comic-book reader and a comics scholar is like Clark Kent and Superman - both the same guy, but one is super-powered.
The scholar typically muscles up with a college degree and academic publications. Comics scholar Randy Duncan has a doctorate from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.
He just plain likes comics, too - from the time he could read. Worked in a comics shop, and he started writing about comics in little fan magazines that connected him with other comics fans.
“I think the way most comics scholars start,” he says, “is by wanting to talk to other people.”
Duncan got serious about comics as a graduate student. In film class, he wrote a paper on the film noir-like shadows and sharp angles that writer-illustrator Frank Miller brought to Marvel’s Daredevil series.
Duncan’s professor not only accepted the comparison of comics to filmmaking, but also encouraged him to go flame-on for the higher degree.
In 1992, Duncan co-founded (with Peter Coogan of Washington University in St. Louis) the Inkpot Award-winning Comics Arts Conference, now part of San Diego Comic-Con International. Scholars gather to present such papers as “Monsters, Somnambulism and Anarchy: Romantic Vertigo in the Modern Age.”
Want to make a mighty leap from gosh-wow comics fandom to comics scholarship? Duncan recommends a serious look at these classics:
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Speigelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story of mice and the Holocaust.
Watchmen, writer Alan Moore’s and artist Dave Gibbon’s consideration of what it means to be a superhero.
Sandman, writer Neil Gaiman’s epic of dreams and mythology.
“Comics scholar wanted” might never be a newspaper job listing, Duncan says. But as any space hero knows, the work is out there.
“At this point,” he says, “as long as comics exist, they will continue to be studied on the university level.”
Style, Pages 33 on 04/22/2014