Comics and Community: Exploring the Relationship Between Society, Education, and Citizenship

Introduction

Society in the 21st century is volatile, complex, visual, and fluid to use a few descriptors. The point is, scholars and students need tools that match this volatility. Comics may provide such a tool. Over the last two decades scholars have examined how the comic form can be used in a variety of disciplines, fields, and areas such as journalism, history, social studies education, psychology, leadership, literacy, disability studies, queer theory, linguistics, ethnography, and feminism to name a few (Alaniz, 2016; Brown, 2012; Cohn, 2013; Duncan, et al., 2015; Frey & Fisher, 2008; Letizia, 2020; Nyberg, 2012; Ricca, 2012; Queensbury, 2019; Saraceni, 2016; Stuller, 2012; Zullo, 2020). Scholars have examined the art, the text, storytelling and the interaction between text and visual elements in relation to their disciplines. This present work is situated in this growing corpus of literature.

Through its many features, the comic medium offers myriad ways for readers to engage with characters, reflect on their decisions, and ponder the characters’ relationships with the broader social contexts in which they live. By analyzing these features specifically through the prism of superhero comics, this chapter aims to highlight ways these features have implications for thinking about the relationship between society, education, and citizenship. At a general level, citizenship can be defined as a set of rights and obligations that people who live in a nation-state possess (Banks, 2008). However, a more robust and contextualized conception of citizenship is put forth in the chapter. In addition to focusing on superhero comics, a common thread throughout the chapter will be the examination of a specific category of superheroes: superheroes who appear to live within a social or societal context, an “imagined community,” that itself can be viewed as its own character within the narratives. Moreover, these superhero narratives will be explored by centering the role of setting, text, and form within the comics medium.

Anderson (1983/2006) developed the concept of the imagined community to describe nationalist movements in the late twentieth century. In response to previous research that thinks of nations as the imagined state of numerous genuine communities, Anderson argues that all communities, large or small, are imagined (1983/2006). Every community conceives of itself as a deep, horizontal comradeship, distinguished by languages, performances, and technologies that are real (i.e., they are enacted), yet believed into existence. This belief extends from the “imaginary,” narratives that inculcate cultural norms and values into a group of people. Anderson notes that novels and newspapers (i.e., narrative forms) provide “the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (2006, p. 25). Like the literary forms used in Anderson’s analysis, the authors argue that the comic provides a field for analyzing imagined communities. Within comics there are ways in which societies re-present themselves, imagining social contexts that reflect sociological, educational, and citizenship realities.

Specifically, this present chapter investigates the imaginaries present in comics from three distinct disciplines/fields and respective comic features: sociology (setting), psychology (text), and citizenship education (form). In the first three sections, the authors examine comic narratives from their various disciplines. Killian connects Hell’s Kitchen (Daredevil) to theories of urban sociology. Next, Martin discusses Black Panther narratives within a moral psychology framework. Then Letizia highlights the connections between citizenship education and lessons from Gotham City.