Christina Blanch (that's her on the left, in between Captain America and Deadpool) is an anthropology professor at Ball State University who incorporates comics into her classrooms in a unique and special way. I first met Christina last summer at San Diego Comic-Con, where she discussed how she taught both The Walking Dead and Y: The Last Man in her courses as examples of cultural anthropology. With The Walking Dead TV series about to debut this Sunday on AMC, I was excited to speak with her about how the graphic-novel series can be used to teach us about ourselves and humanity at large.

 
Let’s start off with your background. Tell me a little bit about how you came to Ball State.
I started teaching at Ball State University my last year of graduate school. They were short an instructor and so they asked me. Of course I accepted, thinking, “How hard can this be?” The answer was “very hard,” but it was also wonderful. I never really wanted to be a teacher, but once I did it, I fell in love with it. Plus, you learn so much when you teach. The next semester they needed someone again, so they asked me to teach two classes. After I graduated, they put me on contract.
 
I started off specializing in archaeology. One of my professors told me that although I was a great archaeologist, I would be a better cultural anthropologist. I just laughed at him. Now, as I teach cultural anthropology and am specializing in comics in the classroom and the culture of comics, he just laughs at me and tells me that he told me so. I teach Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology, Women and Anthropology, and, hopefully soon, a course on Comic Culture. I am getting my doctorate in education, specializing in using comics as teaching tools in the higher education classroom.
 
When did you start incorporating comics into your classroom?
I began using comics over a year ago in my Introductory to Cultural Anthropology class. I was talking to my comic guy, Jason from Alter Ego Comics (an awesome store in Muncie, Indiana!), and told him that I am dying to use The Walking Dead as a textbook in my anthropology class. He said that before I decide, I needed to read Y: The Last Man. So I read it and it screamed ANTHROPOLOGY to me! So, I started off with Y: The Last Man and I am presently using The Walking Dead. I plan to use many more in the future.
 
The course that I currently use comics in is taken by Anthropology majors and minors, but it is also a general class that a lot of students take to fulfill a requirement. Most people come into the class thinking, “Let’s just get this over with.” This is one of the reasons that I thought, “Use comics!” I try to bring things into the classroom that the students can relate to and things that are out of the norm. I use episodes from Star Trek to teach language and we use items from YouTube to discuss culture a lot. I want the students to be engaged in learning, realize that learning doesn’t have to be boring, and I also want them to relate what we are learning to their life outside the classroom. Using comics does all these things and more. When people ask me, “Why comics?” I just answer, “Why not comics?”
 
What does your current anthropology course entail, and what are the course books you use for the class?
My Introductory to Anthropology course is aimed to introduce the diversity of humans as it is shaped by culture. We discuss social and political organization, types of subsistence, social stratification, kinship and marriage, language, belief systems and the supernatural…basically anything that has to do with culture. We learn how anthropologists gather this information and how they analyze it and do cross-cultural comparison. We learn all this through lectures, reading, films, and activities. For example, to learn how anthropologists gather information, my students had to use participant observation (the main “tool” of anthropologists to gather data) in Humans vs. Zombies, a game played in the fall on campus.
 
Every semester, I usually switch books around. This semester we are using a Cultural Anthropology textbook, a great book called Shane, the Lone Ethnographer, which explains ethnographic methods in comic book form, and then the first four trades of The Walking Dead.
 
What do both Y: The Last Man and The Walking Dead teach about anthropology?
What DON’T they teach about anthropology? Both series are all about culture. One of the big characteristics of culture is that if one thing changes, it affects everything else. In both series, there are pretty drastic changes that happen. Watching how culture is reformed and what people choose to keep and what they change is so interesting. By reading about this in the format of a comic book, it really drives a lot of the concepts that I am teaching about home to the students.
 

 
How do you teach these books?
When I first used Y: The Last Man, it was really a learning experience for me. I really didn’t know how it would work. So, after teaching all about the characteristics of culture the first three-quarters of the semester, we then read the first trade of Y: The Last Man. Their assignment was to explain how culture would change with (spoiler alert) all of the males except Yorick and Ampersand dying. They had to take the different things we talked about, like language and kinship, and explain how they would be affected. For instance, would a manhole still be called a manhole? What about kinship—would it still be all biologically configured or would culture play a bigger part now? After they wrote about that, they had to then think globally. How would this affect different cultures like the Yanomamo in the rainforests of South America or the Dobe Ju/’hoansi in the Kalahari Desert of Africa? Since Y: The Last Man focuses mainly on American culture, especially the first trade, this is something the students really had to think about. Then finally, they had to write about how they thought the series would end.
 
The timing for this semester worked well. Zombies are big. I mean, they are everywhere! So, in addition to The Walking Dead, which I tell my class isn’t really about the zombies, I am incorporating lectures about the cultural construction of zombies. What constitutes a zombie? Why are they so popular at different times in our culture? What do they represent? Are there real zombies? As for The Walking Dead books, the assignment is similar to the Y: The Last Man one. In The Walking Dead, there are great scenes regarding division of labor and social organization. The assignment is slightly different as we are reading the first four trades as opposed to just one. Now the students can see how different groups in this apocalyptic situation organized differently and figure out why.
 
What stands out for you, in an anthropological sense, about the two series?
When I first read both series, all I could think about was culture, culture, culture. It’s one of the curses of being an anthropologist. My best friend Libby, another anthropologist, and I talk about it all the time: how nice it would be to look at the world normally again instead of always thinking about culture. But in this case, the series are all about having an established culture and then everything falling apart and having to rebuild that culture. But it can never be the same. I mean, just look at Carl in The Walking Dead. He was born into one culture where he was a thriving young boy and now he doesn’t even know how to act like his dad wants him to. Rick wants him to be like he used to and Carl doesn’t even know what that is. We live what we learn, we are enculturated a certain way. Both of these series are great in that we see culture being reborn.
 
Both of these series are near-apocalyptic. What does it say about us that we are drawn to how humanity would deal with extinction-level events?
Culture is around us every day and has such a great impact on everything that we do and we hardly ever think about it. When a near-apocalyptic event occurs, we tend to realize how much we depend on what we know. We also realize what we miss in our culture that we took for granted. I think that they ultimately make us feel better. Apocalyptic series like this give us hope—hope that the human race will survive and flourish under any odds.
 
In a series like The Walking Dead, what do you “agree” with? That is, do you think this is a realistic depiction of how people would really react to a situation as dire as this?
I think it’s probably pretty close. I think some groups would be nice, some would be evil, some would be somewhere in the middle. I think it would be hard to trust anyone. There were scenes in the series where I was so nervous and would think, “Why would they do that? They wouldn’t do that!” But then I would think more and more about it and I would finally conclude that they might have done that. Humans are really hard to figure out and they don’t do things logically. Vulcans would be much easier to study. I don’t think I would really trust anyone in a zombie apocalypse except my family, a few friends, and my boyfriend. And for the record, yes, we do have a plan.
 
Conversely, is there anything you strongly disagree with?
Not really. Like I said before, humans are not logical and will do just about anything. The one thing I think about is that I don’t think I would ever, ever put down my machete in that situation. Ever. But Robert Kirkman is such a great writer that there are times in the book where he makes the reader believe that it is safe. You think it’s okay now, they can put their weapons down—it’s safe. But then he goes and does things like kill the baby.
 
What do your students react to most about the series?
This semester it hasn’t technically been assigned yet. I mean, they have the books, but we start reading them next week. However, many of them have read them. In fact, several students have read all the trades already! I think a lot of the students react first to the fact that it’s a comic book. I asked my class on the first day who had read comics before and only two out of 80 students said they had. I know that a lot of students were leery about reading a comic because comics have the reputation of being for kids. From interviewing students about using comics in the classroom, I found out that some were intimidated because they didn’t really know how to read a comic. So, this year I am teaching them how to read a comic. I teach them there are really two storylines happening, one in words and one in pictures. We do a couple of activities and use a lot from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Plus, this year I have a comic writer coming in to talk to them about reading and writing comics—I’m really excited about that.
 
So, back to the question. I am getting more and more emails every day now from students who have started reading the comic and that they love it and they can’t put it down. They seem surprised that they are enjoying it so much. I always love that. There are people who think it’s just silly and they don’t want to read it and then when they do, a whole new world is opened up to them. They realize that different media can be used to teach. I actually can’t wait to talk to the students after they read the series. I am looking forward to that so much. With Y: The Last Man, the students were actually engaging in conversation outside of the classroom about the book and discussing what was happening and how they thought it would end. It was amazing to see them actually engaged in learning.
 
What can we learn about human nature through series like The Walking Dead and Y: The Last Man?
Again, I think it all goes back to the idea that people are a product of their culture. Different cultures and even people in the same culture who are enculturated otherwise are going to react differently in situations. Yet, there are certain things that happen when groups of people get together. In small groups, even with everybody being equal, there is a division of labor. As groups grow in size, there has to be more organization and leadership of some type. How that leader is chosen depends on the group. As new people are incorporated, there is stratification—some people become more important than others and have more privileges. All of these things happen in culture and are so well reflected in both of these series.
 

 
Will you be incorporating the TV version of The Walking Dead into your classroom as well?
Absolutely! The timing worked out well for this class. However, I have informed the class that the series will be different from the comic books, so they HAVE to read the books. And I mean, really, who wouldn’t want to read them anyway! They didn’t have the premiere date set when I created the syllabus, so we are just rearranging some things and watching the first episode in class on November 1. Though of course we are watching it from an anthropological perspective!
 
The only drawback to the television series is that I was hoping to get Robert Kirkman as a guest speaker as he is only a state away, but with the popularity of the series and all his duties with the television show, he is so busy now. I’m so glad for him, though. He really deserves the success.
 
What other comics and graphic novels have you seen that would work as anthropology texts to study?
There are so many I want to try out! Just the other day, one of my students sent me an email asking me if I had ever thought about using Watchmen in a class. Of course I have, but my department was unsure about me using any comic, so I tried to start off with something not quite so “in your face.” I would love to use Watchmen and Promethea by Alan Moore, Speigelman’s Maus, Empire and Kingdom Come by Mark Waid, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang—there are just so many. I would love to work a Deadpool comic or something like Birthright in there somewhere.
 
While using comics in my classroom, I am also trying to encourage others to do so. Presently, a colleague of mine has also used Y: The Last Man and several comics written by Native Americans for her anthropology courses. Another anthropology instructor is using Persepolis. A friend who teaches the history of animals is using Morrison’s Animal Man as optional reading.
 
 

-- John Hogan

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