by Vera J. Camden and Valentino L. Zullo
At a recent American literature conference, a creative writing professor told us he was using comics in his classroom. As two English professors who have taught comics for many years, we were intrigued and asked him, how? He explained that his students used generative AI to create images paired with typed text. We demurred and asked what the point was of making AI-comics in the classroom when for us, creating comics has always been about reconstituting the mind/body connection and about using one’s hands (our first tools) as a “way of thinking” (Chute 2019, 629). Our colleague’s response was: “Hey, this isn’t an art class!” It seemed clear that, for him, hand-drawing was for children, maybe for artists, but that for “critical-thinking” adults AI was the way to go.
We beg to differ and hope here to explain why! We contend that writing and drawing by hand is a human privilege and that, akin to psychoanalysis, it can be an invitation to self-reflection. We dread the prospect of a world in which generative AI turns the work of making into something done for us, and not by us. Whatever pedagogical applications AI may eventually have, no technology should alienate students from their embodied creative capacities, beginning with the use of their hands.
Making comics in classrooms has never been about cranking out perfectly finished products. Although comics now might be recognized as a legitimate artistic medium—as the recent special exhibit “La bande dessinée au Musée” (2024), at Paris’s Centre Pompidou attests—comics needn’t aspire to be “high” art. Instead, we take inspiration from cartoonist Lynda Barry, who asks in her book, Making Comics, “How old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?” (Fig. 1). The accompanying drawings—one by a toddler, the other by an older child—are both haunting and needn’t be judged primarily in aesthetic terms.
For us, making comics in the classroom isn’t about good or bad art but about the human capacity for storytelling. Combining writing and drawing—which have little distinction for us as children—helps us connect thoughts and feelings, experiences and reflections, body and mind. Makers of comics ask us to see the world by way of their hands. If we allow generative AI to do the work of making for us, we risk losing certain self-expressive capacities. Generative AI cannot, for instance, replicate the experience of a student who starts to use the long-neglected colored pencils that were given to her by her grandfather but went unused for years until she was ready to hold them and use them as disinhibiting tools of self-discovery and self-expression. We well remember her tearful story of surprise at how making comics helped her reconnect to a feeling buried deep inside her.
Some readers might not know that there are gatherings of comics fans, teachers, scholars, creators, and medical and clinical practitioners of all specialties—including psychoanalysis—where such matters are considered in earnest. This past summer we attended the annual “Graphic Medicine” conference in Athlone, Ireland, where the theme was Draíocht, the Irish word for “magic.” Centering on the magic or “alchemy” of joining image and text, medicine and graphic narratives, we found that in making comics we also remember ourselves.
Our panel presentation highlighted the forthcoming special issue of the journal American Imago, called “Comics on the Couch: Graphic Medicine and Psychoanalysis.” This special issue—the sequel to our 2020 special issue, “Comics on the Couch”—brings together scholars and creators to consider the question: “What are the benefits of bringing together psychoanalysis and graphic medicine?” This project builds on Rita Charon’s efforts, in her edited collection (with Peter Rudnytsky), Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine (2008), to launch a new field that owes much to the legacy of psychoanalysis and to its storytelling genre, the case history.
Our fellow panelist, New Yorker cartoonist and best-selling author Suzy Becker, presented her visualization of the companionate relationship between comics and psychoanalysis through original cartoons to be published in the forthcoming issue. One of these (see Fig. 2) shows the true discoverers of the unconscious, Sophocles and Shakespeare, analyzing Herr Doktor Freud himself! With Suzy we “felt the alchemy” of collaboration in focusing on what comics and psychoanalysis can do together, as they facilitate fresh accounts of human experience.
We began our presentation with D. W. Winnicott, who sounds much like a cartoonist when, in Playing and Reality, he says that
what I am referring to is universal and has infinite variety. It is rather similar to the description of the human face when we describe one in terms of shape and eyes and nose and mouth and ears, but the fact remains that no two faces are exactly alike and very few are even similar. Two faces may be similar when at rest, but as soon as there is animation, they become different. (1971, xvii)
Winnicott points here to what comics creator Scott McCloud refers to as “amplification through simplification” (1993, 30). McCloud himself uses drawings of the human face to show that the less detailed an image is the more it represents to us; that is, the less detailed something is the easier it is to find ourselves in it. McCloud reminds us that humans tend to see faces everywhere: in odd shapes and scrawls, in clouds, wall outlets, automobile grills, and all sorts of other non-human features of the world that spur human associations. We’re reminded of Winnicott’s own squiggle game, meant to spur mutual associations for its participants. And in one of the panels from Making Comics (see Fig. 3), Barry tells us that “the exercises in this book take advantage of a basic human inclination to find patterns and meaning in random information” (2019, 10). The apparent “randomness” of Winnicott’s squiggle game and Barry’s exercises finds its meaning first in the unconscious. The hand may tell a story that words can’t yet find. And for those of us who aren’t trained or professional artists, these “random” manipulations of line and shape can help us access what might otherwise remain repressed or dissociated.
Generative AI can make connections and associations, too, of course. But it can’t make them for us—not in a way that fosters self-understanding and healthy development. We should be wary of outsourcing our own spontaneity. Generative AI’s encroachments on human agency are often cloaked in the guise of assistance and even education. But in our classes we seek to facilitate human agency and attendant self-understanding through many types of manipular creativity, such as collage, scrapbooking, woodworking, music-making, and various multimedia formats—including comics. We like Barry’s quite psychoanalytic idea: to consider that which we knew how to do before we were taught how to do it. We tell our students, that will be your (self-)access point, and we’ve witnessed students access themselves through making in all sorts of ways: coming to terms with loss, imagining their futures in new ways, learning to find joy in the everyday.
In making comics, we make ourselves. Barry asks: “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?” (2002, 7). This panel from One! Hundred! Demons! (Fig. 4) has helped frame discussions of comics in our classes for decades, and it seems more pertinent than ever today. As Christopher Bollas (following Winnicott) states: “Illusion is the foundation of belief” (2024, 50). Illusion and fantasy are essential to our psychic well-being. The fantasies that patients share in psychoanalytic treatment are generated by the same sort of image-making freedom that can be expressed in comics. Bollas remarks that “in analysis we get the feeling that the patient is creating us, inventing us, and generally enjoying the invention of this companion that is the analyst” (2024, 51). One might say the same thing about students and teachers, who also make one another up as they go about the work of teaching and learning. Our classroom engagements with the new field of Graphic Medicine help bring comics and psychoanalysis into a fruitful pedagogical partnership.
The field of Graphic Medicine helps us as teachers to tap into the power of comics—a vibrant medium that stands like a wise fool against the increasingly alien and impersonal world of contemporary medicine. Ever since its founding, psychoanalysis has drawn from literature and the arts. Comics are simply the most recent, popular medium for psychosocial development. Art Spiegelman has called comics “one of the last bastions of literacy” (1995, 61). Our sense is that making comics might be one of the last bastions of creative activity in the contemporary classroom (and beyond)—as long as we don’t abandon its potential to the lure of generative AI.
The authors would like to thank the organizers of the 2024 Graphic Medicine Conference for hosting our panel, “Comics on the Couch,” and Jane Hanenberg, editor of American Imago, for giving us the opportunity to edit our forthcoming special issue, “Comics on the Couch: Graphic Medicine and Psychoanalysis.”
Works Cited
Barry, Lynda. 2019. Making Comics. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly.
—. 2002. One! Hundred! Demons! Seattle: Sasquatch Books.
Camden, Vera J., and Valentino L. Zullo, ed. “Special Issue: Comics on the Couch: Graphic Medicine and Psychoanalysis.” American Imago (forthcoming 2025).
Bollas, Christopher. 2024. Essential Aloneness: Rome Lectures on D.W. Winnicott. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chiang, Ted. 2024. “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art.” The New Yorker, August 31, 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art.
Chute, Hillary. 2019. “Drawing Is a Way of Thinking.” PMLA 134.3: 629-637.
“La bande dessinée au Musée.” Exhibit. Centre Pompidou. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/PqDlAKL
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press.
Rudnytsky, Peter L., and Rita Charon, ed. 2008. Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Spiegelman, Art. 1995. “Interview with Gary Groth.” Comics Journal 189: 52-106.
Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. New York: Penguin.