Category Archives: Guest Writers

Last semester, I taught an advanced course on children’s comics and picture books, one of those courses we find ourselves teaching because we have more questions than we do answers. From years of studying critical commentaries on the form of comics and the form of picture books, I had arrived at a very respectable, highly informed position from which I could no longer say anything coherent on the subject. Naturally, that meant I was ready to teach it.

Our readings that semester were far-ranging, and I will maintain to my dying gasp that our great breadth of inquiry was the result of our eclectic thirst for knowledge, not because the captain had been clinging to a broken rudder since the moment his ship set sail. As a result, we covered territory I found familiar as well as territory I was still trying to map. And not surprisingly to anyone else who has ever tried this “strategy” of teaching, it was while we were crisscrossing what was, to me, the familiar and the unfamiliar that one of my many excellent and engaged students, a young man named Tyler Brown, pointed out that there were hidden depths in one of the most well-charted areas.

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Once upon a time (in the 1970s) there were two little boys, both named Jonathan; one lived in St Louis, Missouri, the other in Brooklyn, New York. They both liked comics. Readers of Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem know these general facts because both authors have written prolifically on their own pasts through essays and articles. We know they like comics because both authors have written substantial essays framing comics as important cultural objects in their childhood and adolescence. These essays are: Franzen’s ‘Two Ponies’ from The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2007); and Lethem’s ‘Identifying with your Parents, or, the Return of the King’ from The Disappointment Artist (2005). They were published by two established, critically acclaimed and lauded authors, either approaching, or in, their middle-age. The essays differ: Franzen’s is formally traditional, Lethem’s more experimental—with sections that write text in panels, and conspicuously hail comic book characters. But both are long mediations on the role of comics in the lives of their adolescent and childhood selves—the strip Peanuts for Franzen, and Marvel’s Silver Age for Lethem; both write about comics as formative, biographical encounters that have left an indelible trace.

Essay writing is a different discipline to writing fiction. No less driven by narrative, representation or interpretation it is also tethered to recollection, re-inscription and remediation—of knowledge and information—appearing through something other. In the reflexive and reflective essay, ‘The White Album’ (first published in 1979), Joan Didion meditates on the form:

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