Brandons's Column -11/26/02
The year is 1985-the year I saw my very first movie (Back To the Future; a WAY cooler sci-fi movie that any of you Jedi bastards have come up with), and the year that my scatter-brained mind finally entrusted me with the memory of the greatest storyteller I'd ever come to know: one Mr. Claude Noel.
Grandpa Noel always let me have coffee in the morning, Planters & Cheese Balls and Diet Rite soda before my nap, and Rainbow Sherbet before bed in the evening. That alone cemented his lifelong influence on my sugary and impressionable tiny brain. But it wasn't just the fact that the man carried hard candy in the glove box of his car EVERY SINGLE DAY, and that I could eat as much of it as I wanted, whenever I wanted...it was the way he put over a story. He always told it calmly, with a grin and a chuckle; kinda the way Stan "The Man" Lee might've done with a young, skittish child on his lap. Oh, I could go into the story about him working several different jobs in one town, meeting up with a wealthy older woman who offered him a well-paying but secretive gig, and traveling thousands of miles with said wealthy older woman only to find that the lucrative job proposal was none other than the dreaded "stud" (male hooker, that is...and yeah, he ran the other way).
I could go on happily about several more stories he told me, but I haven't really even gotten started on the point here. Well, this story that I'm about to tell you, that he told me, has always bugged me, and here it is:
Grandpa Noel didn't go to school for very long. Like most children in his time, most of the strong male students left school to work on farms when they were old enough and able. What he did remember about one particular incident during school is a very unfortunate happenstance that I tend to think might have deprived 1940's America of a storytelling talent with genius on par with none other than the great Ernest Hemingway. Or, maybe even Bill Finger and Bob Kane. Grandpa loved comic books as a child. Now, he bought his driver's license for a quarter; I know that much. I don't know how much he paid for comics, so to say something about him buying comics at a corner dime store would be a little off the beaten path, since they were probably less than a dime. So he would go to corner store of some kind and buy comic books every week. He always liked war comics, and he said when the winter came, and the town would be too far under the snow to go for comic books, he'd lay awake at night, drawing out conclusions to his beloved war stories on bleached moose hide. Then, as soon as the snow blanket was melted from the town, he would race to the store and get all the war comics he'd missed and see if any of the stories he wrote matched the comics. He did this very frequently in the summer before his last year in school. During that last school year, Claude told a few of his friends about his stories, and they insisted that he bring in the moose hide comics that he'd drawn. After a little reluctance, young Mr. Noel gathered his parched drawings and flattened them down with a rock, and put them inside his math textbook. He took the drawings to school the next day, and in his excitement to share his stories with the other kids, his teacher, Sister Agnes, saw the comics, and thinking them tools of juvenile delinquency, as teachers thought then, decided to make an example of her foolish pupil. She marched sturdily over to Claude's desk, grabbed the comics from his textbook, and proclaimed them vulgar and crude, ripped them up in front of all his classmates. Claude would never bring himself to believe that his comics were any good, because Sister Agnes non-intentionally made him feel as is it was his inadequacy as an artist that made the comics so terrible. He said that, later in life, he figured out that she didn't know the comics were his creations, but by that time, he had four daughters, and didn't have the time to "mess around with comics anymor".
Because comics were looked upon with such distain, my grandfather never did embark upon a journey that could've let him into the halls of literary accomplishment. He was, and still is, the greatest storyteller I have ever met. I will give a close second to Eisner Award Winning writer Greg Rucka, who was fascinatingly animated while having dinner with the Samurai Bullpen on our Grand Opening weekend (that's right-and Greg and I even own the same Powers lighter-even though he gloated that legendary cult hero Brandon's favorite comics scribe Brian Michael Bendis gave him his!). Anyway, after years and years of wondering what kind of wonderful tales my Grandpa might've spun for millions to enjoy, comics are now being welcomed, with open arms, into the classroom.
The New York City Comic Book Museum, the only museum in the US dedicated to the art of the comic book, recently launched an educational program called ?Challenging Objective Minds: an Instructional Comicbook Series?-the C.O.M.I.C.S. Curriculum (makes more sense than S.H.I.E.L.D., doesn't it?).
The C.O.M.I.C.S. Curriculum is the first museum-approved program designed to bring comic books into the classroom; the idea is that comics will tremendously help encourage reading, writing, listening and speaking, as well as structure and creative skills.
The program consists of eight lessons, designed by New York City public school teacher Dan Tandarich along with educators and professionals working with the NYCCBM. Goals included other than the aforementioned reading, writing, and so on, were to raise interest in sequential art and to provide detailed, interesting information about the medium itself. In short, the curriculum works like this:
The first four lessons provied warm-ups, activities, and lessons that instruct students on the basics of reading comics, the history of comics, and the art of comics.
The final four lessons guide students though a simple process that consists of (man, I wish they had this thing at my school) creating their own comic books with their own characters, plots, settings, and dialogue.
This fantastic program comes as a kit that teachers receive, and includes a guidebook that helps lesson planning, a comic book vocabulary guide, and a bibliography listing age-appropriate comic books. Currently, the book being sent out with the C.O.M.I.C.S. Curriculum kit is Fantastic Four #60, with a huge contribution of the books from Midtown Comics.
So there it is. Finally, my grandfather's memory can be sated in the knowledge that creativity such as his in today's classrooms will not be ignored or misinterpreted because of a comic book, but rather recognized positively and encouraged. Hooray!
Now, over fifty schools have signed up for the program, and the numbers will continue to rise, as children respond to this approach to fun-driven learning, rather than strict fact-driven learning. That's where you and I come in. I'm bringing the information to you, and I plan on following the following suggestions as well. Here's what you can do to help: Contact the school you went to as a child. Contact your high school. Contact your children's high school. Go to www.google.com and search the Internet for one of the schools; most places of education have accessible sites within which you can contact the right people about the C.O.M.I.C.S. Curriculum.
In fact, how about a link to the press release so you can simply copy and paste it into the e-mail? Go here: FANTASTIC FOUR GO TO SCHOOL
NYCCBM launches C.O.M.I.C.S. Curriculum and that'll provide you with a nice description of the program that is appropriate and the point. Take a look at the museum's website, as well: www.nyccomicbookmuseum.org. There is tons of interesting information about comics, and you might want some more details about the program for yourself and the school you choose, as well. You may even decide to join the NYCCBM as a volunteer; I'm hoping to submit this column to see if they can use a freelance journalist as a volunteer.
Thanks for reading...you see, in comics, we're not peddling wares that people need; if we don't make every attempt to educate those who are oblivious to how important an art-form comic books are, have been, and will be, then we can't settle for continuing to appeal exclusively to a specific audience that doesn't expand but simply grows older. Not as professionals, not as retailers, and not even as readers. |