ARKADELPHIA - Batman goes back to the Batcave, Superman to his Fortress of Solitude, and comics scholarship finds a haven at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia.
Comics are the entire subject of some classes, and several members of the faculty go deeper than Aquaman into the kind of reading that once sold for a dime.
“We’re becoming more and more a visual culture,” says Henderson State professor of communication Randy Duncan.
Comics are a way of interpreting visuals - the picture language of computer icons, for example - and “express things you couldn’t in any other medium,” Duncan says. “Also, I think they’re worth studying as an art form in their own right.”
Izhar Buendia, 24, came to Duncan’s graphic novel class with the idea that comics are children’s books. “I think differently now,” he says.
HSU nestles in a town that could double for Superboy’s Smallville, population 10,800. About 3,500 students attend classes on this 124-year-old wooded campus of stately mansion-like halls of academia.
Arkadelphia has crafts and antique shops, no comic-book store.Henderson State began as a teachers college, and teachers used to confiscate funny books as forbidden reading.
But the secret is out. Caped wonders all over the sky know that Henderson is the place to concentrate on comics. The university’s Huie Library devotes a study room to its ever-growing collection of more than 1,500 graphic novels and books about the medium of words-and-pictures.
The collection started with a couple feet of shelf space, library access service coordinator Lea Ann Alexander says. Before long, “it seemed like the library was growing something, and why not be more concentrated about it?”
Besides books, the holdings include Swamp Thing artist Stephen R. Bissette’s donation of correspondence, sketches and drawings.
Tour groups come through, Alexander says, “and when I ask, ‘Do any of you like to read comics and graphic novels?’ their eyes just light up.”
National attention came with Duncan’s The Power of Comics: History, Form & Culture (2009, co-written with fellow comics scholar Matthew J. Smith of Wittenberg University in Ohio). Theirs was the first college textbook on comics, and the co-authors have been as busy as the Avengers ever since.
They published Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods in 2011, and their two-volume, 920-page Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman in 2013.
Meanwhile, back at Wayne Manor, Henderson psychology professor Travis Langley answered the Bat Signal with his study, Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (2012).
The book evolved from using comic-book characters to teach such hard-to-approach subjects as law and criminal minds in forensic psychology, Langley says.
“Lessons about real world crime can be so disturbing that some students might turn away and miss the point,” he says. “But I can apply what we know about real people to a fictional story, and they’ll pay attention.”
Langley expects to write more about comics - a project as hush-hush as the Joker’s next scheme. Other works in progress include a comics how-to guide based on the class that faculty colleagues Duncan, David Stoddard and Michael Ray Taylor team-teach: “Creating Comics as Journalism, Memoir and Nonfiction.”
Art professor Stoddard defines his subject as “whatever someone puts their heart into to communicate visually. Are comics art? I think yes.”
Communication professor and journalist Taylor credits Duncan for “writing academic papers on comics 20 years before it became cool.” He rates the library’s graphic novel collection “one of the best in the country.”
“Simultaneously, the world began taking comics more seriously,” Taylor says. “The stars have aligned perfectly for comics at Henderson.”
STRANGE VISITOR FROM ANOTHER PLANET
Duncan, 56, from New Orleans, came to Henderson in 1987. Comics were in the midst of a shake-up that would “change the course of comics” to this day, he says.
Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets had proved an adult audience for comics. Frank Miller had reinvented a meaner Batman with his series, The Dark Knight Returns.
Duncan’s job was to teach rhetoric, persuasion and critical thinking, still the main part of his classroom responsibilities. But like Doctor Strange, he had a trick in mind.
Once settled, he took the idea of a comics class straight to the department chairman at the time: himself.
“I asked myself if I wanted to do this,” Duncan says. “And it was a big thumbs up.”
Comics had shaped this thinking from childhood through his doctorate dissertation on “Panel Analysis: The Rhetoric of Comic Book Form.”
“I was 8 years old when I got my first comic,” he says: Adventure Comics. The “voracious reader” had found his literature of choice.
“My mother was very dubious [of comics] at first,” Duncan says. “She would read them before she let me read them. I think she determined pretty quickly they weren’t going to corrupt me, and I was actually learning something.
“Big words that I used correctly probably came from the comic book, Thor,” he says. “Thor was pretty lofty.”
Lofty such as this speechification from The Mighty Thor: “Thunder god, why hast thou come before Mimir, fiery guardian of the well of wisdom?”
Duncan filled the well at Henderson by inviting a series of comics artists and writers to speak on campus, starting with Will Eisner.
Comics fans revere the late Eisner for his masked crime-fighter, The Spirit.Comics and Sequential Art (1985) is Eisner’s analysis of the form, based on his teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Here he was, in 1993, teaching at HSU.
Other comics professionals to visit the campus include Understanding Comics author Scott McCloud, and this month’s scheduled guest, The Vampire Diaries artist Colleen Duran.
“I want to expose my students who take a comic book class to a range of possibilities,” Duncan says.
“We’re still not to where a comic book is on a par with writing a great novel,” he says. But among those possibilities: Why not?
IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME
Duncan’s students say he runs as tough a course as Professor X of The X-Men.
Comics class might sound as easy as web-slinging for Spider-Man, but, “No, not at all,” says Andi McLeod, 22, in Duncan’s classroom.
“I was surprised at the work level,” she says to the agreement of Morgan Acuff, 26, and Ashley Loftin, 21.
Loftin, who writes memoir comics for the campus newspaper, The Oracle, counts Duncan’s class among the most challenging on campus.
Duncan’s text, The Power of Comics, offers questions for readers who would like to join the discussion, such as:
“If you could have one superpower, what would it be?”
“Take another, more careful look at a comic book or graphic novel you read recently. Do you find significant diegetic or hermeneutic images you overlooked on your first reading?”
“What do you think will be the defining characteristics of the next era of comic book history?”
There will be a test.
Style, Pages 28 on 04/22/2014