Instructor Spotlight: Rafi Abrahams
Tell us about your background and what inspired you to teach this course
After graduating college I became a preschool teacher, and it was a formative experience for me. I learned that I love leading a classroom and that I love drawing bright, colorful pictures of people and animals and food. In my day job, I am a History PhD Candidate at Brandeis. By night, I draw diary comics about my life in which I am always green. I feel so lucky to teach this course because it’s like preschool for adults: we read and discuss comics together, and draw pictures and share them with one another.
What is your favorite comic you are teaching this semester?
My personal favorite comic on my course syllabus is Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man by John Porcellino. This comic proves the power of simple drawings to convey rich and beautiful life experiences. Through mosquito abatement, Porcellino matures as an artist and as a person. May we all be so lucky!
What kind of tools do you need to get started drawing comics? Can anyone do it? Could I?
Great question. The only tools you need to draw comics are a writing utensil and a piece of paper. You can do it on your computer, but I think it’s valuable to log off and spend time in the material world and feel the force of your body flake the graphite off of the tip of your pencil. I think the comics come out looking better when they are drawn by hand, too. Anyone can draw comics. Not only that, everyone already has drawn comics. Those pictures you drew as a child that your mother hung up on the fridge– those were comics! So now that you know that about yourself, you can try to remember how and do it again.
What makes comics better or worse than other media when it comes to capturing reality?
Comics scholars praise autobiographical comics for their ability to convey “emotional truth.” While photography might be better at creating a realistic visual representation of a certain event (though, as I always tell my students, the concept of photorealism is fraught in itself), comics provide the reader with a unique insight into the mind and heart of the artist. A comics artist can speak to the reader on multiple levels simultaneously: through text and through images, through captions and through speech bubbles, through realism and through abstraction, through the present and through the past. Because anyone can create a comic, and because an artist can recall a memory long after the event actually occurred, comics can provide a much broader and deeper representation of reality than other media can.