Comic Book Confidential Review
"Comic books finally get the respect they deserve." This is certainly the case with the CD-ROM, Comic Book Confidential. This CD-ROM provides endless information on comics, including a ninety-minute movie about the history of the comic book. Other goodies include collections of comics, artist bios, and suggested reading lists for further research. This CD-ROM proves itself invaluable as an educational tool in the classroom. It can literally be used for any grade and has interdisciplinary uses as well.
The history of the comic book is told through a ninety minute comprehensive video, which includes interviews and excerpts from actual comics. This would be a great introduction to a unit that features comic books. I would show this before actually getting into the analysis of individual comics only because it provides a brief overview of the historical and social implications comics have. I would also give students some guided questions to answer, and then dive into the social and historical reflections within individual comic books.
Comics are wonderful texts, and can be used to reinforce certain themes which surround a given unit. I would use the comic collection and choose certain comics that dealt with a particluar theme that I was teaching. For example, Will Eisner's "The Spirit" and Willaim Gaines' "EC Comics" are great texts to use side by side with a unit on racism. In Eisner's "The Spirit", we see a superhero who fights crime with his trusty sidekick. This is no ordinary sidekick, though. This sidekick is a chimpanzee, one who "Sure drives well" and constanly craves watermelon. He also talks in a broken dialect, replicating the dominant ideology of all African Americans of the particular time period. This would be a great text to be read alondside such novels as The Color Purple and Native Son. Other media texts that I would incorporate are the old Amos 'N Andy shows, which were blantantly racist in their content.
To engage students critically and get them past the initial resistence of studying something as "juvenile" as a comic book, I would present students with a series of questions such as, What are the motivations of the characters? What does each character represent? How do other characters from other texts we are reading relate? What type of society does this text present us with? These same questions hold true for William Gaines "EC Comics." The "EC Comics" adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story presents us with two parralel societies, seperated only by color. This blunt statement of racism can be used with the Eisner text or by itself. Either way, they are great texts to include in your text set.
There are abundant interdisciplinary possibilites as well. By taking the publishing date of each comic, you could team teach with a social studies teacher and dissect the historical events that were happening at that time and examine them for their social and political aspects. For example, the "EC Comics" were published in the 1940s and 50s, a time when our nation was divided racially. You can talk about historical figures like Rosa Parks, and tie them to the segregated ways of the blue and red robots in Gaines comic. In one particular panel, Gaines actually makes a direct reference to the Rosa Parks incident. These characters can all be used as allegories and reflections of our history. Another use for this CD-ROM in the Language Arts and Social Studies classroom is for a unit centering around censorship. You can incorporate a study on the Constitution and generate a discussion on the reasons for banned novels such as Huck Finn by tying it to the birth of the Comics Code, which began the censorship of comics in the 1950's.
Overall, I highly recommend this CD-ROM. It's a great tool that is, at first, extremely awkward to students because it is the farthest thing from a conventional textbook. The curiosity and confusion over this non-typical "book" will grab students attention and widen their defintion of text as well.
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Comic Book Confidential Overview
Windows or MAC Interactive version of the entire 84 minute movie, featured artists' digitized works, interviews & more. Comic books finally get the respect they deserve. Ron Mann's Comic Book Confidential, from Voyager combines interviews, historical footage, animation, and montages to trace the development of the comic book from the very first (Funnies on Parade) in 1933, through '60s counterculture favorites like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, to the 1980s revival, as exemplified by Batman (The Dark Knight Returns). This witty, incisive movie features interviews with influential authors of commercial, alternative, and underground comics, such as William Gaines, Sue Coe, Art Spiegelman, Al Feldstein, Lynda Barry, Will Eisner, Shary Flenniken, Frank Miller, Dan O'Neill, and R. Crumb, with many of the artists reading from their own works. Stan Lee brings Spiderman's money worries to life, Charles Burns becomes Big Baby, Jack Kirby reenacts the birth of Captain America, and more. The only comprehensive documentary on the subject ever made, Comic Book Confidential contains rare historic footage: Congressional hearings from the '50s "proving" the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, expert testimony from anti-comic book advocate Dr. Fredric Wertham, and reformed youths gleefully getting ready for a (comic) book-burning. Ron Mann's Comic Book Confidential also showcases over 120 pages of comics by the film's featured artists, plus their biographies and publishing histories.
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