The elusive components of creativity—inspiration, imagination and technique, to name a few—are remarkably evident in the classroom laboratory of The Graphic Novel course. Working in small clusters, students script and sketch their ideas until each drawing emerges as a panel to a story and each word bubble fulfills a plot point. At those moments, the artistry comes into focus by acclamation: Yes, that's it, that's it. The thought's been caught and locked on paper.
"Some people will jump in headfirst, and others will hesitate," says lecturer Tom Kealey, who with lecturer Adam Johnson co-teaches the course, now in its third year as part of Stanford's creative writing program. "Eventually, almost all will buy in."
The course has several distinctive qualities, not least its incipient tradition of producing fictionalized history. The inaugural class extrapolated a story titled Shake Girl from accounts of acid-throwing attacks on girls and women in Cambodia. And last year's class constructed Virunga, a many-faceted tale about conflict and distress in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, prompted largely by concern for the country's Virunga National Park, home to a large percentage of the surviving mountain gorilla population. Both classes self-published their work—each novel is 224 pages in black and white—and printed 800 and 1,000 copies. Distribution was largely within the Stanford community, with a few hundred books going outside to interested circles, including publishers.
This year's class, the first to stretch over both the winter and spring quarters, decided to take its cue from the life of Japan's Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who died January 4. He was the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both World War II atomic bombings, the first in Hiroshima and the second three days later in Nagasaki. The working title: Pika-Don ("Flash-Boom").
The course's basic challenge is to be inventive with the graphic novel format—simply defined, a long-form comic book. Devotees will argue about factors such as how literary or mature the content must be, but the genre has been growing in stature, in part because of the innovative ways different artists and writers blend the drawings and the text.
In Stanford's course, the process entails some extra intensity because of class size. Creative collaboration can be stressful enough among a handful of people, but a dozen students are trying to make it work this year (down from 18 in 2008 and 20 in 2009). Completing each graphic novel has been a bear of a task, and a core of students wrapped up the final stages of the first two projects on a voluntary basis after the course ended.
"I didn't know if we'd be successful," says Johnson, who proposed the course. "I had no sense if students could draw that amount of material."
For Lauren YoungSmith, a freshman and prolific sketcher, the teamwork has been gratifying, especially after having created her own graphic novel as a high school sophomore. "Really great," says YoungSmith about her first weeks in the class. "It's less lonely than working on your own."
Christopher Lin, '09, who's also busy completing his coterm computer science degree, says the creative energy is electric. "It's a manic process. I like the manic."
The fervor can spill over emotionally, notes Kealey. One student started crying when Pika-Don was selected as the current project over her favorite idea, a story based on the Baghdad Burning blog about life in Iraq.
The final result of everybody's contributions, predicts Kealey, will be special. "We get this sort of amalgam, this sort of rainbow effect, this sort of choir."
