Because It's Fun: Comics, History, and Knowledge

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Imagine you are writing your Master’s dissertation on comic book superheroes and how they uphold the righteousness of the current war against terrorism. You argue that superheroes like Captain America and Nick Fury (apparently his superpower is never growing old) return to their war metaphors, the ones they upheld as heroes of the Second World War and the Cold War respectively, to ask readers to view the present, the contemporary, through their wars. You would say post-9/11 America is too much a grey area of contention and meaning and that superheroes could ease that shade of thought into a simpler yet more dangerous vision of an America still defined by the idea that war is good, fair, and necessary…just like World War II.

      In the process you read comics, a couple of books on historical theory, and actual history books on the wars your superheroes act through. All throughout you constantly feel like an innovator and you realize that in writing history through comic books you are actually having fun! You connect the popular to the academic and it feels like the topic can really resonate within a discipline that holds too dear to traditional primary sources. The kind of history that is being produced cannot be so specifically defined, if anything it might resemble something close to a history of mentalities rooted in the world of 9/11, but it is still an analytical record of what comic book creators and people could have thought on upon reading the comics of that era. Who said old documents and newspapers were the only ways one could reconstruct the past? Aren’t comic books, film, literature, and other works of art representative of their time periods and the things that were contemplated in them?

      So, the dissertation written, you prepare to present your investigation and in comes another realization: what if the academic universe accepts your findings as anything but history? You panic and reread. It comes down to double checking you punched the academic ticket by establishing historiographical precedence, gave your shout out to the classics in cultural theory and discourse and ideology, and included the ever necessary justification on comic books being an actual historical source. Neglecting one of these points can land you in a tough spot when presenting the dissertation, leaving yourself wide open for criticisms that can derail the discussion into areas more traditional than you expected, and sometimes unrelated to the nature of your work. Then you go back to square one and that sense that you created something necessary and spectacular dives into frustration. It becomes an insisting needle in the eye that keeps the investigation outside of academia’s limelight while also questioning its degree of accessibility to a more general public. You wrote this for a university, remember? 

   All of a sudden everything seems far away from fun. Instead the feeling is more akin to being stuck in a sort of limbo that keeps you far from actually contributing to the creation of knowledge, much less it being useful and helpful in understanding the contemporary. Relentlessly, the following question arises: why did you write this? But the answer is simple. Because it was fun.

      The answer is valid. It is also deceiving. Fun is necessary for keeping interest alive in producing any kind of work, but it must be met with the assurance that knowledge can be extracted from the endeavor fun is to reside in. Comic books can balance this necessity just fine. They keep us enthralled in the fantasy that goes with reading about gods and super beings fending off alien invasions, especially if they do so with the force of American history backing them up. In their simplicity we find ideologies that seem innocent but that dig deeper in creating ideas that keep war a rational and often just and necessary action.  And it seems to come casually, not imbued in the seriousness of academic writing. This, evidently, should be studied.

      Matthew Pustz, in his anthology Comic Books and American Cultural History, argues that casual learning (meaning that knowledge can be extracted from more popular productions of fiction given a wider exposure of the product and its appeal) can bring about something we cannot lose sight of: “that the past is worth knowing about and that doing history can be fun.” This is where academic history has trouble keeping up. Somewhere along the road, academic historians lost touch with the possibility of knowledge being popular and common (in the best possible way). And it comes down to a matter of accessibility, something the academic culture is short on. 

     Consider the following situation: the current price for a Captain America or Nick Fury comic book stands between $2.99 and $3.99, much less than the $19.99 and up price range set upon books and academic journals and magazines. The American Historical Review journal, for example, requires paid membership to the American Historical Association which costs $40.00 if you are a student. If you are not a student then prices go up. The journal, as it stands, is published five times a year while comic books publish their continuing stories either biweekly or monthly (almost never outside that timeframe). Accessibility is key in terms of relevance and interest and it seems that comic books here have the upper hand. Academic historians cannot compete in attractiveness and persuasion with beings draped in the colors of the American flag wielding unbreakable shields or beings camouflaged in military fatigues aiming down sights trained on Third World dictators (labeled as such by the characters themselves).

     This is one of those ‘for better and worse’ scenarios. On the one hand we have academic journals too detached from the common reader to become appealing or even be considered as necessary readings in a more general and popular sense. On the other we have comics that too freely justify war (in the cases of Captain America and Nick Fury more intently) and do so in spectacular fashion. The good here is that both are capable of shedding much light on our current military and political predicament. Now, they can do better to up accessibility for a wider range of readers or to be more mindful of the symbols their stories uphold. It can be argued that fiction is not bound to the responsibility of being either pedagogical or informative on the history it uses. And yet readers expect certain degrees of faithfulness to the past and are quite eager to accept it at face value. And writers know this all too well. If anything, it should be noted that with much fun comes great responsibility. 

     In the end it is all a matter of balance, something the academic world is severely lacking. Comic books might use history too loosely, but academic history is too serious about it. And that takes away from its appeal and the possibility of being integrated into the popular arena of the common reader. Academic history cannot remain within the consensus of its tradition in terms of sources and methodology. It will lose readers and remain a thing restricted to the college world, whereas comics are rising in popularity. Superhero stories often become gateways to history much like war movies and historical dramas do. Movies such as Saving Private Ryan became for the history of the Second World War what Gangs of New York became for the history of the city of New York, gateways to common knowledge. Forrest Gump, a favorite amongst history teachers, became the equivalent of a general American history book, over in 142 minutes. The reason why they stay within popular culture and cycle through repeat viewings? Because they are fun to watch. Because, whether we like it or not, we learn from them, casual though the knowledge in them may be. Comic books do the same thing. They introduce readers to history, become gateways to the past. And they let us know that history, while important, can also be fun.