Hey Kids! Learn History with Comics!
Warren Ellis’s Crecy and Trevor R. Getz’s Abina and the Important Men as Classroom Resources
For the first few years of my history teaching career, I actively shied away from even thinking about using graphic novels in the classroom. The closest I came was assigning some chapters of Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in my class on America in the 1950s or showing some panels of Captain American punching Hitler as an example of wartime pop culture. I certainly never thought about using historical works as secondary sources. Two books, in very different ways, have begun to change my mind. Warren Ellis’s Crecy and Trevor Getz’s Abina and the Important Men are not the first historical graphic novels. They may not even be the best historical graphic novels. They are, however, inspiring, albeit in different ways
To begin, I’ll briefly describe the works. Crecy is the story of the eponymous battle between the French and the English during the Hundred Years War. Abina is the graphic novelization of a court transcript involving an enslaved West African woman suing for her freedom in the Gold Coast region of 1876. That they are both graphic novels dealing with the past is, perhaps, their only similarity. I first learned of Ellis’s 2007 Crecy on his BAD SIGNAL email list and, as an Ellis fanboy, was was instantly enthralled by what might appear. I learned of the 2011 Abina and the Important Men from the Oxford University Press textbook catalog. Crecy was aimed at comic fans while Abina‘s publishers targeted educators. It’s easy (too easy, as I found while writing this) to get caught up in the many, many superficial differences between the two–color vs black and white; comics publisher vs. academic publisher–and lose sight of what I have come to see as differences which are more significant and, in a way, illustrate two of the potential approaches for teaching a history survey class. These two books treat history in a subtly different way.
Since not everyone in the room (maybe nobody in the room) is a historian, I want to take a minute or two and talk about teaching history and how that can be done. Broadly, we can describe two types of resources that are essential to teaching history survey classes. These resources, of course, are not mutually exclusive and can co-exist quite comfortably. The first is the primary source—artifacts, documents, or other items direct from the past. Often, college survey classrooms are the first place students have experiences with primary sources. More often, students in their high school history careers are much more familiar with secondary sources—syntheses of primary sources into a (usually) clear narrative. Things such as textbooks, documentaries, and monographs are examples of secondary stories. Primary sources are snippets and need context. Secondary sources, on the other hand, are brought to life by the raw material provided by primary sources.
Crecy is narrated by an English everyman-type archer who describes the weapons, tactics, and geopolitics of the Hundred Years War in a way that provides a broad overview. It is very much a secondary source; an attempt to synthesize historical sources. It is not a historical source in itself. Abina is based, largely, on a primary source—in this case, a court transcript. The process of translating the court record into a graphic novel, however, required the writer and artist to interpret the source, and provide context to the court proceedings in a manner which places the work in a middle ground between primary and secondary source.
A second key difference between Crecy and Abina is their sense of scale. Crecy, while narrated by one soldier, is the story of two armies—and two nations—at war. The scope of Crecy is necessarily massive, for Ellis is telling a story that illustrates changes in warfare at the end of the Middle Ages. The battle, which forms the climax of Crecy, highlights the importance of England’s masses of commoner longbowmen who defeated France’s armored, mounted, aristocratic cavalry. Ellis’s treatment of the battle highlights the class differences present and, in doing so is ill-suited for engaging distinct individual characters. His generic Englishman provides an ideal window into the development of war and society in the fourteenth century.
Abina and the Important Men also deals with a massive landscape and topic—British imperialism in Africa and, by extension, the nature of 19th century colonialism in general. Unlike Ellis’s generic narrator, Trevor Getz uses the personal experiences of an historical figure. In a “Letter to the Reader”, Getz and artist Liz Clarke introduce the central figure, Abina Mansa as “representative of the largest group of our human ancestors: those who left little but physical evidence behind to help us remember them” [1] Abina’s voice comes down to the authors, and from them to us and our students through court proceedings. Through Abina’s story, we catch a glimpse of the larger world of the 19th century Gold Coast and how the machinery of colonialism affected the colonized differently depending on such factors as class and gender.
Beyond the two books’ methodology and approach to the histories they tell, Abina and Crecy educators have to examine the utterly prosaic question of how well the books work as classroom resources. Crecy was conceived of and executed as a product for direct market comics outlets and the dedicated fans who frequent them and published by Avatar Press, a fine publisher, but not one of the three or four “big names” in comics. This certainly does not disqualify Crecy from being useful in the classroom. It does, however, make it less likely that history instructors will know about the book in the first place, unless they’re fans of Ellis’s work or Avatar’s output. Abina and the Important Men, on the other hand, is published by Oxford University Press—a veritable behemoth—and was backed by (what seemed to me at least) a massive marketing campaign supplemented by free sample copies and the type of personal outreach that can only come with an army of dedicated traveling sales reps.
So, there I am, with two graphic novels which each do what they set out to do well. Which was is more appropriate to my courses and for my students? There are a number of things I considered when I was choosing texts for this semester.
When discussing appropriateness for the classroom, there is also the issue of potential stumbling blocks to student learning. My students—I teach at Mott Community College, an open-admissions school in Flint, Michigan—tend to have two distinct reactions to material which could be regarded as prurient (language, imagery, etc). One group of students finds it inappropriate and is very uncomfortable discussing such things. The other group gigglingly focuses on the most outrageous passages or items to the exclusion of almost all else. I worry that this would be an issue with Crecy that I would not have with Abina.
The scope and content of a work has another impact on decision making. When choosing resources for a course—especially a World History survey—one has to ensure that the materials used fit with the overall coverage needs of the course. For the course where I considered Crecy as a potential assignment, I had 15 weeks to cover the history of the entire planet from the beginning of time to around 1500 CE. Assigning Crecy meant that I would be devoting a disproportionate amount of time not just to the Middle Ages, not just to Europe, not just to England and France, not just to one war, but to one battle. The question this leads to is, “what will I have to leave out to use this book?” Africa? Asia? Indigenous cultures in the Americas? On the other hand, in the class where Abina is a potential text, I cover five centuries, from 1500 to the present. The issue of imperialism looms large over the whole semester. Abina provides and opportunity to make comparisons between different eras of African history and between different eras of colonialism and imperialism. It simply fits better in the flow of my course.
Regarding the utility of these two books for the history classroom there is also the issue of ancillary materials. Crecy has nothing—historical notes, background reading, or anything else. And, let’s be honest, there’s no reason why it should. Abina contains a wealth of information between its covers, including the text of the transcript on which the graphic novel is based, background reading, maps, time-lines, discussion questions, homework questions, a glossary, and a bibliography. What’s more, there’s an extensive set of web resources at abina.org. The disparity of resources between the two books is unrelated to the quality of the writing or art of the works themselves but they do have an impact on the way the books are used in the classroom—especially with regard to the amount of “groundwork” I need to do in class before students begin reading the book.
In the end, I chose Abina and the Important Men as the best choice for my class and my students. In either case, or in the cases of the dozens of other historical graphic novels, from Maus to Nat Turner to Stuck Rubber Baby, comics and graphic story telling provide a way forward that reaches students and connects them with history in a way that plain text may not. We hear a lot about different styles of student learning—auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and so on. Graphic novels bring text to life and put faces to stories, whether archers or slaves, knights or lawyers. Graphic novels help us tell the story of humanity and if that’s not the history teacher’s job, I don’t know what is.
[1] Trevor R. Getz and Liz Clarke,Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, xv.
