This blog post will address each of the following topics:
1. Comic book superheroes in the High School American Literature classroom.
2. Comic book superheroes in the College Composition classroom
Both unit ideas are born from a quote from the essay “The Subjective Politics of the Supervillain” by Chris Deis from the the book of essays What is a Superhero? published by Oxford University Press and edited by Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan.
“Because their abilities are so out of the ordinary, they are able to represent and embody deep truths about the human condition, truths that cut across culture, nation, and time. By implication, the superhero genre is about a great deal more than just guys and gals who wear tights and capes: these characters tell readers something about a given society’s values, struggles, and beliefs.”
Other resources:
1. This project can be an essay, or a slide presentation, or both. It can be entirely multimodal or monomodal. Ask students to choose a super character. This may be either a hero or a villain. The students must research where the character originated and must analyze their story the way one might analyze a literary character. Not only must they introduce the character and review their origin, they must consider what deep truth about the human condition their character embodies. I have used segments from the PBS documentary and related readings from the essays in What is a Superhero? to show how one may answer these questions.
For instructive purposes you could use a character like the Punisher. The Punisher represents our human craving for a simple black and white answer to difficult, or even unanswerable questions. In this way he shows us something about the human condition as well as American values. We often want our pursuit of the abstract ideals we attempt to realize to be simplified, which is perhaps why we have an opioid epidemic where there was once a pursuit of happiness, and we have Watergate, the Kent State shootings, the lack of verdict in the Rodney King trial and outcome of the OJ Simpson verdict scarring the beautiful face of Lady Justice.
After students view the segment on the Punisher from the PBS Documentary Superheroes: A Never Ending Battle they understand that the Punisher was born from the writers’ (Gerry Conway et al.) anxieties from living in pre-Giuliani New York City where street crime and the seedy underbelly of the permissive 1960s continued to fester resulting in an environment in which frequent muggings and shootings created widespread fear of simply walking down the street or catching a transfer on the subway. Further the Punisher is born from the anxieties created during the Watergate scandal where our notions of right and wrong were turned on their head, and Americans began to realize that they cannot trust even their leaders to follow the law. Students could even connect him to the ongoing debate over the death penalty, or the ethics of warfare and police protocol.
Finally, for more critical thinking, ask students to connect their character to a piece of classic American literature. If you have a classroom textbook encourage students to use it as a resource, and perhaps rather than leading them on an aimless path through the history of American Literature, students will come to view classic pieces with new eyes when asked to consider the works through the superhero lens. The Punisher could relate to Moby Dick in the sense that Ahab and Frank Castle are both monomaniacs seeking vengeance against that which has wronged them.
I have had the pleasure thus far of seeing students connect Deadpool to Yossarian in Catch 22, Batman to Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Thanos to Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” and even Miraculous Ladybug to Walt Whitman’s “Miracles.”
Other resources:
War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film, by Mark DiPaolo
Collegiate Academic Databases
2. I use superheroes in the college composition classroom a bit differently. Though the model I suggest above is not without a critical thinking element, I believe the critical thinking should be at a higher level in the college classroom. So, for an explanatory synthesis essay, students have to choose a character and study that character across at least three iterations while considering “how and why have the deep human truths this character embodies as well as the values, struggles, and beliefs changed or remained constant over time?” Answering this question requires a bit more research not only into the character, but into the society at large. Students are encouraged to focus on some thematic concern to narrow their thesis. Students may be attracted to more modern heroes, such as Deadpool, but I find that older heroes like Wonder Woman and Spider-Man provide not only more iterations, but more social factors to consider. For instance post 9/11 Captain America’s opinions about superhero registration in the Civil War storyline reveals a very different character than 1941 Captain America as a propaganda piece punching Hitler in the jaw... which forces the student to consider whom or what is the “Hitler” of 21st Century America, and why? How has Superman emerged as a champion of the oppressed and how has he continued that role into the 21st Century? Further, how has Wonder Woman sustained or not sustained her feminist message across the decades? If the Punisher was a manifestation of our conservative urges to clean up the streets and punish the guilty in Reagan's America, then what does he represent in 2018 in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Baltimore and St. Louis? Could we imagine an African American Punisher? If so, whom would he find guilty?
What results from these questions are mature pieces of academic scholarship that synthesize at least three primary and three secondary sources into a measured look at how culture reflects societal change or the need for social change through comic books.
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