Close Reading Comics - MK Czerwiec

Teachers often ask how to engage their students in critical close reading of graphic novels. Others have written on this as well, but my answer almost always seem to involve getting them to draw. Over the last fifteen years of teaching with comics, I’ve used several techniques. Here are five – and I welcome hearing some of yours.

One: Draw a panel that could appear in the gutter between two panels.

Those of us who teach using comics are always talking about how the gutter, the space between two panels in a comic, implies time. Brian Fies (Mom’s Cancer) has pointed out that in making comics we become the masters of space and time. So the amount of time that transpires between two panels in a comic can vary widely, from one second to years. Much action that is implied, or assumed to have happened, happens outside the frames of our story. So this exercise gives students the opportunity to explore what we don’t see but must assume has occurred in the narrative. This fosters the kind of imagination Rita Charon calls for in her description of close reading above.

For example, these two panels appear in my book, Taking Turns.

In using this close reading exercise with her students, Esther Saltzman reports that a student created this lovely panel to fit in the gutter. In it, the student uses their empathy and imagination to draw a moment I left out – my patient’s internal dialogue in which he decides to stay in the hospital to die before asking his doctor if that would be possible. Redrawing the character, their setting, and the details of the scene (shiver lines from chills!) all clearly demonstrate close reading, critical thinking, imagination, and empathy.

Two: Annotate a page

This is not my invention, but described and demonstrated by Nick Sousainis on his rich site, Spin Weave and Cut. Nick is an incredibly talented thinker and artist and I eagerly borrow from his work here. Click through to his site for a full description of this method. Page annotation has proven to spark a great deal of discussion with students.

Three: Choose one panel that ends a scene and show that scene going in a different direction.

In this panel from Mom’s Cancer, Brian Fies is showing his annoyance with the doctor’s insincere smile, behaving in an unsympathetic manner, dismissing his mother’s concerns. This is the final panel about a clinical interaction that does not attend to the patient’s expression of frustration.

Starting with that scene’s last panel, drawing a few more panels to propose an alternative narrative is an excellent close reading exercise. While students worked in class recently, I created this page to demonstrate the exercise. This exercise opens up possibilities and aids in improving communication skills, particularly for future health care practitioners.

Four: Draw a panel from the perspective of a different character in the book.

It is the nature of graphic memoir to share the book’s story solely through the perspective of their creators. The people that populate the lives of the authors also have agency, and the actions of the narrator and events of the story impact them as well. Students often express empathy for the characters who surround the narrators. Drawing a scene from a graphic memoir from the perspective of another character in the book can give students the chance to “play out” these reactions. I noticed this when teaching Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant. Students empathized with Chast’s parents as well as Roz herself.

(drawn example pending)

Five: Add one or two more panel(s) to a page

When talking about his experiences with interviews, Studs Terkel reported that his narrators often said the most interesting things once he turned off his recording device. He also noted that people tend to tell stories in ways that they had previously rehearsed to be funny or moving, without challenging their endings, often omitting important information the reader/listener might desire. So when a narrator delivered the punchline to finish a story he suspected they had been telling for years, he would ask, “And then what happened?”

Therapists call this a “door handle moment” – when patients are on their way out of the office, grabbing the door handle to leave, they can make a comment that opens a can of worms unexplored during the session.

Linda Raphael has written about resisting closure in graphic medicine texts. She discusses it in this interview we did for the graphic medicine site back in 2012. (Also relevant here is this piece she wrote for the AMA Journal of Ethics on the ethics of illustrations in graphic medicine texts.)

This exercise is intended to challenge their imposition of closure on graphic medicine stories. It challenges students to imagine unaddressed futures of the characters, questions unasked or left unanswered in the text.

Have students draw a few panels that they imagine might come after the ending of a graphic memoir that illustrates the questions or concerns they have as readers, or like our previous exercise explore alternative narratives for any of the characters.