George Rikakos, associate professor of law at Carleton, recently released the first of four volumes of his comic book adaptation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s The Communist Manifesto. With this adaptation, Rikakos says he hopes to contribute to and inspire more alternative forms of school texts and learning aids.
It’s hard to imagine how the short, dense book that revolutionized the way people think about politics can be translated into images and short texts in a comic book. But it works extraordinarily well because it is simply another refreshing medium that utilizes the text’s visual aspects and makes it more appealing to an audience.
It’s high time people started taking comic books as seriously as they do other medium of art and communication.
Rikakos’ visual adaptation of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto is just the latest comic book to prove itself more than capable of exploring social, political and historical issues, putting it on the same shelf—literally—as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a searing chronicle of the Holocaust, and Alan Moore’s anarchist work V for Vendetta.
Though the comic medium has been historically seen as juvenile by mainstream critics and popular audiences alike, this perception can no longer reasonably persist.
As well, graphic texts like Rikakos’ adaptation may be more appealing to students who are visual learners. Rather than reading traditional course texts and trying to comprehend its content, they could refer to the comic books as an alternative way of learning. It’s a great way to expand and diversify classic texts of our time into different mediums for different audiences.
If scholars and audiences shrugged off the ingrained and inaccurate prejudice against comics, there would be a greater opportunity to consume and discuss alternate and inventive modes of expression in a university setting.