One measure of the continued growth in the popularity of comics and graphic novels has been the parallel growth of serious academic programs at the college level focused on training a new generation of comics artists. PW Comics Week spoke with administrators at five programs—School of Visual Arts, Minneapolis School of Art and Design; Savannah School of Art and Design, Center for Cartoon Studies and Memphis College of Art—about the history, development and future of their programs and comics pedagogy.
All the schools PWCW spoke to pointed to a growing and more diverse student body—especially a strong influx of young women into a profession long dominated by men—with more varied interests and goals in the comics profession. Indeed over the last 10 years, the School of Visual Arts cartooning department, “has become more gender balanced and more culturally inclusive; not [purely] based in classic adventure comics,” explained Tom Woodruff, chair of the Illustration and Cartooning Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Of all the schools profiled in this article, SVA has the richest history and the longest running cartooning program. The SVA cartooning program has 600 students, according to Woodruff. (Full disclosure: I am a 2008 graduate of the SVA cartooning department.) SVA was originally started as a cartooning-specific school in the late 1940’s under the G.I. Bill by Silas Rhodes and Burne Hogarth, the artist who drew the Tarzan comics strips. Indeed the cartooning faculty includes some of the most famous cartoonists working today. Keith Mayerson, the cartooning advisor and a professor at SVA, said the school has the “the best faculty and with publishing centralized in NYC; we have a legacy.”
The school’s faculty has a legacy of excellence that includes such legendary figures as Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman and Art Spiegelman, who taught earlier in the school's history, to such contemporary figures as David Mazzucchelli, Gary Panter, Jessica Abel, Matt Madden and Becky Cloonan among many others who are teaching there now. SVA’s graduates are just as impressive and include such highly regarded artists and former students as the aforementioned Clooney, Dash Shaw, Raina Telgemeier, Pascal Dizin, Joe Flood, Hilary Florido and many more. SVA’s legacy of extraordinary teachers extends itself into more recently developed cartooning programs which have cropped up over the last couple decades. Indeed James Sturm, who started the Center of Cartoon Studies in Vermont, and Joel Priddy, who is in charge of the fledgling cartooning program at the Memphis College of Art, both attended SVA’s graduate program.
“The biggest thing that separates us from other schools is [that CCS] only lets in 20 students [a year]. We invest in and work with students, in a way that is impossible at other schools,” said Sturm, the critically acclaimed author of The Golem's Might Swing and director of the Center of Cartoon Studies. “It’s more of a graduate level program,” he said. CCS is a 2-year program; students with an undergraduate receive a Masters, while students without an undergraduate receive a certificate. Among the faculty members are Alex Longstreth, creator of the Ignatz award winning comics book Phase 7, and Jason Lutes, author of the acclaimed graphic novel series, Berlin. At the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Sequential Art department, started in 1993, the focus is not only on comics, but also on the general application of visual storytelling, including children’s books, storyboarding, or concept art.
The Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s Comic Art program was started in 1996, because students were “showing strong interest in more formal study of comics,” according to Barb Schulz, comics artist and a member of the faculty of the Comic Art Department at MCAD. With 40 to 50 students (nearly 10% of the entire school), according to Schulz, they are “much more concerned with creating the next generation of fabulous comics storytellers.” The young Memphis College of Art Sequential Narrative program will graduate their first class at the end of this year; students will get a degree from the Design Arts department “with a concentration in comics,” explained Priddy. Priddy said at this point, “It’s a matter of making more classes and enough students to fill them.” As the reputation of comics grows as a serious artistic study, more small programs like Memphis are likely to pop up.
Girls Want To Make Comics
While most of the schools PWCW spoke with reported a small drop in admission during the height of the recession, Mayerson said that, nevertheless, “it feels more full than ever.” At MCAD, Schultz said, “the overall numbers have remained consistent, there might be a slight increase this fall. “In terms of overall number of students, this incoming year is larger than the previous 5 years,” Woodruff said, although he noted that, “students require more scholarship and financial aid.”
The growth of these programs is largely driven by changes within the student population, which mirrors changes in the comics industry and comics market overall. And as these new courses attract many young women, the focus of the curriculum has moved beyond mainstream superhero and adventure comics to a wide range of genres. SVA’s Mayerson pointed to the “manga revolution and the graphic novel revolution” and the growth of sales graphic novels and manga beyond the comics shop market and into the general book trade in the early 2000’s. “More and more students started [coming] inspired by manga. In the early 90’s, [we attracted] mostly guys from Long Island who wanted to do mainstream [superhero comics], one woman, and one long haired individual doing crazy stuff,” explained Mayerson. “Simultaneously, there were more and more viable [trade book] publishers interested in publishing graphic novels in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. More graphic novels in Barnes & Noble helped inspire people to believe that, if not a viable career, [comics] was an artistic pursuit.”
This change can be seen across the board at cartooning programs. “There are more women than men among the incoming freshmen” said Woodruff, “I’m not certain, but it’s pretty much equalized now which is really exciting.” At MCAD, Schulz also took note of this gender shift in applicants, “60% of our students are women. When I started teaching in a class of 18, there were 2 girls. Now we’re outpacing the boys.” Sturm said the class this year is “50/50 boys and girls.” SCAD has about 436 students enrolled in its Sequential Art program. Anthony Fisher, head of the Sequential Art program at SCAD, said, “At SCAD there seems like quite a few more females than past. We’re trying to have a more diverse minority population as well, even international students. Given that most superhero comics are made up of white men, it’s really nice to see this change and I expect more of this.”
Teaching the Basics and Much More
All the schools have, as Priddy described it, “basic comics classes, the formal storytelling of juxtaposing one image next to another.” Students begin taking comics’ classes in the freshman second semester to sophomore year. MCAD’s Schulz said, "The first year there is a strong foundation in drawing and design; in the second semester of the first year is an intro to comics.” She went on to detail classes in writing, storytelling, and character and environment development. At SVA cartooning classes start in the sophomore year with the core-required classes of Storytelling and Principles of Cartooning. The freshman year at SVA, Mayerson said, has a broader focus with basic drawing, painting, computer, and humanities classes. Woodruff said, there is an effort to integrate “not just cartooning, but graphic design and photography” into freshmen foundation classes. “Freshman year, the second or third term students start squential art classes,” SCAD director Fisher said, and described a line up of classes that included storytelling, a materials class and history of cartooning.
Outside these basic required foundation classes, however, the schools are expanding their curriculum to include, according to Mayerson, “more ideas and genres. We are hopeful we are providing a comprehensive curriculum with all kinds of narratives and appeal.” An example of this effort at SVA is the Senior Series, a selection of semester long electives to be taken during a students’ senior year that “samples a lot of things, Japanese animation and other more specialized classes to cater to interest,” Mayerson told PWCW.
Fisher also listed an extensive list of classes, explaining, “Should one want to do children’s books, a student can take classes that align with those goals. People who want to do manga or just concept art, or quite a few students focus on storyboarding for film, television, and animation, choose their particular classes.” Other electives Fisher mentioned were “mini comics, hand-lettering, alternative comics, political cartooning, webcomics, and vector comics (creating comics using the Illustrator software application).” In the sophomore year at SVA there is also a selection of technique driven electives such as computer coloring, inking, and hand-lettering.
Additionally, each program had some class focused on the business of comics, or “how to survive as an artist and find a job,” Schulz said. The MCAD business of comics class helps “students assess their own desires,” said Schulz, and teaches them how to find “publishers and editors and create a contact list.” Schulz said the class also covers, “how to write a resume, put together a portfolio, how to talk to people at cons, and grant writing.” MCAD students are also required to do an internship.
At CCS’s professional practice class, “We do everything from build a website to book proposals. I want them really out there promoting their work and networking,” Sturm explained. However, opinions on business-focused classes were mixed. “A lot of schools promise you jobs; I didn’t want to do that. Making art is its own reward,” Sturm said. While SVA offers a class called, “The Big Bad Cartooning World,” taught by comics critic, historian and independent comics publisher Dan Nadel, Woodruff described his thoughts on business of comics classes as, “complex,” and said, “Too much focus on business [takes away] from work. It doesn’t matter how much you know about the business if the work isn’t there.” Sturm said that he wanted his students “to dig deep with the work, and become intimate with the process; too often people want to make their mark, and rush out,” emphasizing that students work will get noticed if they do the work necessary to master their craft.
Teaching Comics in a Fast-Changing Industry
Woodruff also expressed concern that “the cartooning world is changing so quickly, if we have a 15 week course, we have to keep changing it.” To stay current, SVA’s seven-week “Big Bad Cartooning World” class includes a variety of guest speakers. “Dan brought in different people from publishers, different creators who have been successful, web people,” and more Mayerson said. The CCS visiting artist class runs on a similar principle, in which a different working cartoonist or editor comes every week—Sturm mentioned Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley and Kate Beaton, creator of the Webcomic, Hark! A Vagrant, as recent guests. In addition, Woodruff said the students’ choice of their Senior Portfolio teacher is essential to their education about the business of comics. “[If they pick] Mazzucchelli, his business ideas are different than Becky Cloonan and Gary Panter’s. Part of the fourth year training is teaching how to go out into the world.” The main focus of the Senior Portfolio class is a long-form project of the students choosing.
“The last year is an in-depth, long-form project. The students get to direct the project; a faculty member is there to guide them, and the student chooses their own mentor, ” said Schulz. However, at SVA, students complete their first long project in their junior year Thesis class. “Under Tom Woodruff the idea was to assign the long form project as if it were an assignment from a publisher, and it deals with adaptation,” said Mayerson. Each year the Thesis project revolves around a specific theme (one year was “Character as Location,” another was “Man Made Monster”) and students create a project that adapts a pre-existing work into comics based around that theme.
“The theme based project is assigned in the junior year and students do research with pre-existing themes and ideas that they can build on in their senior year,” Woodruff explained. “The reason students get jobs right after graduation is because they have already done extended projects and research,” Woodruff said. The Thesis project teaches students “how to reach a deadline, be reliable, not be trouble, and do what needs to be done,” he said emphasizing that these lessons are as important to the curriculum “as learning to ink or drawing a six-pack on a superhero.”
Asked about goals to improve their programs, many of the schools were quick to point out the need to “stay as current as possible with computer classes,” Mayerson said, as well as other emerging technologies. Schulz said, “webcomics almost seem old now. I’d like to see more of a web presence [for the program] and study up on when we can get [students’] comics on the iPad.” Mayerson pointed to a continuing emphasis on diversity in the students in accepts as well as in the kind of genres they are encouraged to work in. “In the future, we need to put more focus on cartooning history and comics as literature. I think [also] more women teaching and people of color,” Mayerson said. Woodruff emphasized this as well, “I’d love to have more women on faculty, but I try to have prominent figures in the field, so I [may] have to wait for the next generation to grow up.”
While there are only a few of these programs at present, their rapid growth matches the growth and development of the comics category and industry overall as the medium comes to be to be recognized as a legitimate creative discipline. “We want to get out there and legitimize sequential art as academic—not to say it isn’t,” Fisher told PWCW, “It’s not just something that appeals to juvenile delinquents. What we do is academic.”
