Teachers Take Note: One of Nation's Largest Literacy Events Happening This Week -- San Diego Comic Con 2015

Recently, some of the Badass Teachers (BATS) have caught on to a frustrating occurrence I've noticed over the last decade or so as well when it comes to superhero properties. Specifically, Marvel Comics characters, or perhaps the folks responsible for bringing them to life, don't always seem to hold public education in high regard. 

BATS have taken to twitter to criticize Marvel and Netflix for depictions of teachers and their unions.

BATS have scrutinized the Netflix Daredevil series for its depictions of public schools and teacher unions, for example. In 2012, I worried when I noted that Miles Morales, the new Spider-Man, won a lottery to attend a special charter school in the first few issues of his first series, Ultimate Spider-Man. Indeed, most troubling was that in the series it seemed Morales had no chance of making anything of himself until he was able to escape his crumbling public school. For a story featuring a new wall-crawler, that plot element feels ripped directly from the propaganda film Waiting for Superman.

More recently, I asked G. Willow Wilson about Kamala Kahn's learning institution. Willow writes Ms. Marvel. Kahn, the new Ms. Marvel, is one of Marvel's most exciting characters to emerge in recent years. She attends Cole Academic High School, an analogue of the quite real McNair Academic High School in Jersey City, NJ. If students at McNair don't meet academic demands, they're shipped back to their district schools. So, it appears if the analogues are pure, Kamala Kahn doesn't attend a traditional public school either. 

Some of this does not surprise me, a lifelong comics reader. Most super-hero teen characters "escape" a public school education in some way or another, and that has been the trend in comics since the 1970s. The X-Men, the New

Mutants, Avengers Academy members --  the list goes on. Public school just isn't equipped for mutant teens or inhuman teens, it seems. And, having to deal with pesky teachers does seem to limit a character's ability to go on interstellar space missions to fight dimension-spanning evils after all. 

So, much of the treatment of traditional education in super hero comics can be forgiven. But not all of it. BATS and others are smart to look at representations of public schooling in comics and all popular media. That said, Stan Lee and other early Spider-Man writers, and even Willow herself, have written about school-life balance in teen super heroes. It can be done. One of my favorite new teen heroes, DC Comics' Jaime Reyes (The Blue Beetle) attended El Paso High School, a traditional public institution if based on the actual EPHS in Texas. The latest teen version of Marvel's Nova attends Carefree High School in Arizona. As far as I can tell, CHS is a typical public high school. Indeed, the faith and trust in America's public schools as seen in 1960s Spider-Man comics versus in the Morales series and other current comics can make for intriguing reading and a timeline that might very well mirror the American public's thoughts on education -- or at least certain powered parties' desired  public view of schooling.

All this said, teachers and teacher educators have more to celebrate regarding comics and comics reading than they do to critique, whether they are staunch Common Core supporters or corporacratic education reform resistors like me. 

Take, for example. San Diego Comic Con, which kicks off this week. SDCC is, to this teacher's mind, one of the largest and most exciting literacy communities filled with some of the most savvy readers and consumers of literature, pop culture, and mass media.

Memories of my last Comic-Con from 2012 loom large. Attending this event, which, this year, will most-likely attract over 100,000 enthusiastic readers and viewers of popular culture, is an astounding experience. Educators at all levels should recognize comic conventions for what they are: Literacy events for reading communities.

Here's to San Diego Comic Con, all comics conventions, and the eager, critical, engaged, smart, savvy readers and fans who make them authentic literacy events worthy of educators' admiration and respect.

Seriously, you've never seen a deep reader if you've never experienced a conversation about what that one artifact in the corner of Uncanny X-Men #238 might signify. You've never met an informed, critical reader like the fangirl who can tell you ever reason Carol Danvers rocks and exactly how creators have mishandled her character throughout the years and exactly how  Kelly Sue DeConnick got her right.