As I was writing about last week, this fall I’ll be teaching ENGL 251 at Concordia, a lower-division English survey course on comic books (technically, the class is titled “The Graphic Novel,” which will be a fun debate all its own in the lecture, I’m sure). I’ve been struggling with just what texts to put on the syllabus and just how to structure the course. While I have TA’d English classes in the past few years, it’s been quite a while since I had my own undergraduate experience, and one of the biggest challenges is going to be finding the right level of discourse between material that’s too difficult and material that doesn’t really give the students anything of substance to chew on. For example, when I first started fantasizing about teaching a comics course (how nerdy are my fantasies?), I pictured putting the occasional bit of theory on the syllabus. I wanted to throw more high-level thinking about what comics are and how they function at my students than Understanding Comics, because, ya know, there’s a lot more out there–stuff like Beaty and Groensteen, Rifas and Meskin and Postema. One of the reasons there’s not a lot of recognizable names on the list of comics theorists is because little theory ends up being taught. This, I’m beginning to realize, is because not a lot of upper division or graduate courses specifically on comics exist, and you just can’t throw a lot of semiotics and art theory at a bunch of 18 and 19 year old kids. There’ll be plenty of students interested in what you’re getting at, but theory as a practice and field of study really starts a year later–at least in English lit (maybe if I was teaching in art history or comms this could be different? I don’t know).

I guess part of my fantasy about teaching this course was really teaching a graduate course where I could assign 300 pages of reading a week. Maybe it’s not so much about difficulty but density. One alternative route might be to only have one comic on the entire syllabus, and then different theoretical and critical readings every week that we can try to apply to said comic. But that’s gonna make for one miserable semester for both me and the poor students unlucky enough to be in my section. Anyways, I’m now trying to find just the right level of challenging theory to throw into the course readings–shorter articles that deal generally with what comics are (even though it’s not really about what comics are, but how we talk about them). Beyond that, I’ll try to point to theory and theorists in lecture, so those who want to read farther and go deeper will at least have some signposts.

My tone here may betray me, so let me be clear: I’m not disappointed about the absence of my fantasy, but rather invigorated by dealing with the nuances of the reality. I’m still excited about teaching this course, and something tells me I won’t have too hard a time building an interesting and challenging syllabus. I’m prepared for some things to fail, some students to feel talked down to and others to feel out of their depth no matter how much I try to strike a balance. It’s my first course. At the risk of sounding very cheesy, everywhere I screw up, at least I can learn something for the next time.