At the City College of San Francisco, two professors have employed their enthusiasm for comics in an innovative approach to teaching. In their course Comics, Power and Society, Arthur Nishimura and Louis Schubert use a variety of comics and graphic novels as a creative and engaging way to introduce students to the social sciences. We were fortunate to get an interview with Schubert and Nishimura about how they use graphic novels and comics in this course.

BookShelf:  What is the primary aim of Comics, Power and Society?

A.N & L.S.: The course is designed as an introduction to the social sciences at the freshman college level. It introduces social sciences themes and methods.

BookShelf:  What is your background in terms of education, comics and social science?

A.N. & L.S.: We are both social scientists by training. Art has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington and Lou’s Ph.D. is in Political Science from the University of Southern California. We are both comic fans since childhood. Additionally, Lou was a comic book back issue show dealer for over 20 years, having done conventions from Honolulu to London.

BookShelf: What informs your choices about which graphic novels and comics to include in your class?

A.N. & L.S.: The comics we choose for the course must feature the social science variables we are looking for in each unit, so for example Don Rosa’s Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck brings various ideas of economic development in American history as well as key social concepts in economics like the Protestant Work Ethic. We choose based on appropriateness for the course, then the merits of a comic as a comic.

BookShelf: You approach comics in several different ways in your class: as texts, as cultural artifacts, and as illustrations of different social science concepts. Could you explain a little bit about each approach?

A.N. & L.S.: Social sciences normally examine “reality”. For us, comic books become vast troves of data at multiple levels. The stories themselves use ideas from social science, for example we talk about the sociological concept of social stratification through Spider-man and Will Eisner’s Contract with God, which have specific narratives and settings that speak to social status. Comics as objects function as cultural artifacts with their thing-ness as well as content reflecting the society that produces them. As far as we know, other college courses about comics are in the humanities: art and/or literature.

BookShelf: How do you explore the culture surrounding and supporting comics? Your class includes discussion of fandom and comic book conventions – in what ways does this treatment of how comics are read and received inform your topic?

A.N. & L.S.: Comic fandom is the nucleus of the role of comics in America. We see this at the largest level when Hollywood goes to Comic-con to find out what’s cool. Comic fans are a studied subculture (see Matthew Pustz’s Comic Book Culture (1999, University of Mississippi Press) and so we send our students on field research to Wondercon or a comic shop on Wednesday afternoon. Our students are about one-half comic fans and the other half are just interested. The fans find it amusing to analyze themselves, the others see it as a fun new subculture to explore.

BookShelf: Comics, Power and Society is a class in American Studies, but you also work with graphic novels that were originally published in other countries, such as France (Persepolis) and Japan (Ranma 1/2). How do these help to inform your subject?

A.N. & L.S.: A good social scientist will use the comparative method to control for cultural bias, so we can test if comics reflect America by seeing if the same if true for other counties’ comics. We do a major section on manga and look to Japan as our main point of comparison to the U.S.Persepolis wasn’t chosen because it’s French (we would have gone with Asterix on that) but because it’s about seeing how a culture changes in Iran.

BookShelf: How long have you been teaching this course, and how have you changed it along the way?

A.N. & L.S.: This is our third outing with the class, and we assume it will always be a work in progress. So far, it has been the standard growing pains of adapting lectures, assignments, and exams to the individual classes.

BookShelf: Could you see this approach – framing a discussion of the social sciences through comics - working with other subjects?

A.N. & L.S.: We see this approach as a fine template that could be applied to other areas, similar to the “(fill-in-the-blank) and Philosophy” book series: serious methodology and scholarship, fun topics.

BookShelf: What advice would you give to other educators who are interested in using comics in the classroom?

A.N. & L.S.: Comics are an exceptional educational tool. They can be used in a myriad of different ways depending on the course. For example, Lou assigns the graphic novel adaptation of the 9/11 Report in another class because it’s massively more readable than the original government document and a text students read beats one they don’t crack open. A regular graphic novel can be read in an hour or so, and comics can be used to efficiently provide different voices in the classroom (for example, using Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese as a quick lesson-level introduction to another perspective, shorter than a novel and accessible to all, or maybe using the current run on the X-Men as basically a discussion of gay rights).