Do You See What I See? A Call for a Class on the Bande Dessinée
When I was young, I remember staring at a book's pictures for hours. I wanted to memorize every detail, every line, every color. So much so, that when my mother taught me to read she wouldn’t let me see the pictures of the story until I had sufficiently sounded out the words. That’s how much power images held for me as a child. Today, our society is bombarded with images everywhere: billboards on the highway, posters on the street, memes and photos on social media platforms. According to a 2019 Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience journal article, it is reported that 65% of our population identifies as visual learners. Images, then, play a powerful role in how we understand the world around us.
Image credit: Gray family photo archive
Fast forward to myself now, a graduate student in communications. In many of my classes, we focus our discussion on the role of the producer in the process of image construction. This is all well and good, but it misses out on addressing the crucial problématique of how people consume images. I think we often assume that people understand exactly what they’re looking at when they see a picture. How hard can it be, right? I would argue that it is actually quite hard. The increasing frequency with which we are exposed to imagery requires a certain level of media literacy. In order to develop this, I believe that studying the bande dessinée, or BD, as a medium of communication can be helpful because of its natural relationship between words and images. And as a leading institution within the field of Communications, I believe that the American University of Paris (AUP) has a responsibility to engage with this problématique and should offer a course on the BD.
Not only is AUP a training ground for future communications professionals, but it is also strategically located as a higher education institution in France and provides an excellent foundation on which to build such a course. BDs are a quintessential icon of Francophone culture and represent popular French ideologies that can enrich the student experience here. Students could also have the opportunity to bring their classroom study to life with a possible cultural program trip to visit the annual Festival de la Bande Dessinée d'Angoulême that happens in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Since cultural programs are one of AUP’s key selling points as a university, this course would fit right in here. Students would be able to engage experientially and practically with the cultural study of comics.
Image credit: Aditi Partha
In his book Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art, the prominent American comic artist and theorist Scott McCloud writes: “Every act committed to paper by the comics artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as the reader.” Our role as readers is just as important as that of the artist. We pick up, interpret, and extrapolate upon what we see based on our lived, personal experiences. Consequently, we must first acknowledge how this fragmentation of our different perspectives as readers creates different ideologies. The bande dessinée could allow students to further elaborate on what variables are at stake in the process of image consumption.
AUP professor Waddick Doyle, who founded both the undergraduate and graduate programs in Global Communications, emphasizes the underlying power dynamic between image producer and consumer. In his 2019 book chapter on brand communications he states the “process of encouraging identification with brands through stories and symbols establishes social relationships and distinctions [...] these distinctions are made not only through things but also through stories, ethical discourses and symbols with which consumers identify.” Visuals are a powerful influence on the way we interact with the world around us and how we identify ourselves.
Image credit: Twitter/@scottmccloud
The bande dessinée can be a powerful counter-tool to this power dynamic. Comics require the reader to critically engage with his or her relationship between image and text. In order to understand the story, we have to read between the lines. A class on how to do that could encourage creative strategies for interpreting the nuanced relationship between image producer, intention, and consumption and how it can be manipulated for certain purposes. Such a course could push students to evaluate how we can create strategies to teach media literacy.
The landscape of communications is changing. As I think back to the powerful visuals in my childhood, before the internet, I cannot even begin to imagine how children of this generation are navigating the world now. Easy to read and beloved by all, the BD is a valuable tool for people of all ages to become better readers that should no longer be underrated. It's time for AUP to maximize the medium’s dynamic potential in order to help construct a more informed future.
