In early 1966, Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee received a letter from William David Sherman, an English teacher at State University of New York in Buffalo, which also contained three dollars in cash. “Please send me 25 copies of Fantastic Four issue number 46,” Sherman wrote. “I wish to use them in my course on contemporary American Literature – I know my class will dig them, and I hope that in them they will see various archetypal and mythological patterns at work which would give them better insight to where things are today.”
William David Sherman was not the only academic during the 1960s who recognized the value of comic books in the classroom. The September 1966 issue of Esquire magazine, for instance, spotlighted eight additional college professors who declared their love for Marvel comics, while the April 1, 1965, edition of The Village Voice noted that an unnamed physics professor at Cornell University likewise utilized comics in his classroom. Even Stan Lee himself gave recognition to the trend at the time, declaring that “more than a dozen college professors now use Marvel mags in their English Lit courses as supplemental material.”
While there is no doubt that comic books were invading college classrooms during the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1972 that an entire accredited course was dedicated to the study of the medium. Comic book fan Michael Uslan was a junior at Indiana University when the school announced a new program in which any student or professor could pitch a new course as long as it was backed by one of the departments of the University. A panel of deans and professors would then consider the proposal and, if approved, it would be taught the following semester.
Uslan had already been teaching a non-accredited course on comic books as part of an Indiana University experimental program and immediately jumped at the chance to develop it into a legitimate class. Taking his original syllabus, he quickly expanded it into five sections.
“The first academic discipline would be art,” Uslan says in his 2011 memoir The Boy Who Loved Batman. “Comic books constitute a true American art form, as indigenous to this country as jazz. Next was anthropology. Comic books and the superheroes are our contemporary American folklore, our modern-day mythology. My pitch would be that the gods of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome still exist, although today they wear spandex and capes. After all, the Greeks called him Hermes, the Romans called him Mercury, and we call him the Flash. The Greeks called him Poseidon, the Romans called him Neptune, and we call him Aquaman.”
Michael Uslan’s third discipline was sociology and argued that because comic books had been published every week since the mid-1930s, they represent a “mirror of our society, reflecting the changing American culture.” His syllabus was then rounded out with comic books as literature and an examination of how the medium has had a psychological impact on its readers.
With his syllabus finalized, the next step for Uslan was to find a university department that was willing to back him. Folklore professor Dr. Henry Glassie looked over the proposal and immediately agreed with its premise.
“He concurred that the plots, motifs and conventional stock characters found in traditional folklore are exactly the same as the ones found today in comic books,” Uslan recalls. “At the end of the day, it’s still stories of heroes versus villains, dragons, monsters and sorcerers, with damsels not-so-much-in-distress-as-before. The stories now were merely cloaked in contemporary drapings.”
Now that Michael Uslan had completed all of the preliminary steps, his last obstacle was convincing a panel consisting of an academic dean and various professors on the educational value of his proposal. It immediately became obvious to Uslan as soon as he stepped into the room that it would be an uphill battle, however, as the dean simply snarled, “So you’re the fellow who wants to teach a course on funny books at my university?”
Uslan briefly outlined his proposal, but after only a few minutes the dean cut him off. “Oh come on!” he exclaimed. “Comic books as mythology? Superheroes as folklore? Really, Mr. Uslan, give me a break. What comic books are… are cheap, maybe lurid entertainment for kids. Nothing more, nothing less. I read comic books when I was a kid. I read every issue of Superman I could get my hands on. But it’s nothing but kid’s stuff, and I reject your premise.”
Michael Uslan, however, was not willing to concede defeat just yet. He asked the dean two questions, the first being to summarize the story of Moses. The dean explained how an Egyptian Pharaoh had ordered that the first born of any Hebrew be put to death. To protect their child, Moses’ parents placed him in a wicker basket and sent it adrift on the Nile River. An Egyptian couple then found the basket and raised the child as their own. Moses eventually learned about his actual heritage and went on to become a hero to the Hebrews.
Uslan then asked if the dean could recite the origins of Superman. “The planet Krypton was about to explode,” the dean began. “A scientist and his wife placed their infant son into a little rocket ship and sent him to Earth where he was found by the Kents, who raised him as their own son. When he grew up and learned of his true…” At that point the dean simply stopped and stared at Michael Uslan for a few moments before declaring, “Mr. Uslan, your course is accredited.”
Having successfully had his proposal accepted by Indiana University, Uslan decided to take it a step further. Almost immediately after being given the green light, he called the local office of the United Press International. Feigning anger, he anonymously confessed his dismay that a state university would ever stoop so low as to allow a course on comic books to become part of its curriculum.
The reporter he spoke to took the bait, and a few days later tracked down Michael Uslan for an interview. The subsequent article filled an entire one-third of a page in the Bloomington Daily Herald-Telephone and was immediately reprinted in newspapers across the country. By the time the actual class was taught, Uslan had been interviewed numerous additional times, including on television and radio talk shows. The NBC Nightly News had cameras present at the first class, meanwhile, and later classes were filled with reporters from Family Weekly and Parade, as well as Penthouse and Playboy.
The publicity did not go unnoticed at both Marvel and DC comics. Stan Lee himself called Uslan and told him, “Mike, everywhere I turn, I’m seeing you on TV or reading about you in a magazine. What you’re doing is just great for the entire comic book industry! How can I be helpful?”
Sol Harrison, vice president of DC Comics, took it even further. “Our president, Carmine Infantino, and myself have listened to you quite a bit on the radio and read about you in a lot of newspapers, and we think what you’re doing there at Indiana University is so wonderful for the whole comic book industry. We’d like to meet an innovative young man like you and were wondering if we could fly you to New York to discuss ways we can work together?”
The subsequent visit allowed Michael Uslan to craft a career in the comic book industry, from summer consultant while attending Indiana University to eventually becoming a producer for every Batman movie, from Tim Burton’s initial release in 1989 through Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night Trilogy twenty years later.
Michael Uslan’s memoirs, The Boy Who Loved Batman, was published in 2011 and is far from the story of a kid who read comic books, instead relating how a childhood fascination eventually legitimized the medium as a tool for education – and expanded its dominance from print to screen in the process.
Anthony Letizia