The Figure of the Teacher in Comics: A Psychoanalytic Study of Immaterial and Fragmented Education, David Lewkowich, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2024

On the cover of Archie series’ Laugh No. 287 (from February 1975), high school students Archie, Betty, and Jughead sit in the front row of a classroom, facing a teacher who’s seated at her desk, bent over a stack of notebooks, grading. Behind her, pinned neatly to a bulletin board, are pictures of students. The large print above the pictures indicates these are “Students I have flunked!” Seeing this, Archie, with a look of worry on his face, whispers to Betty, “I think our new teacher is using psychological warfare on us!” His words are contained in a speech bubble and “psychological warfare” stands out in a large, red, thick font. This issue of Laugh is one among a handful I found at a garage sale recently. Flipping through its pages now, as I wonder where my childhood collection of Archie comics ended up, I am also thinking about what David Lewkowich would say about this scene. I understand he would analyze the scene without taking any of its formal and narrative elements for granted, to study what the figure of this stern, unnamed teacher reveals not only about Archie’s world but about our own shared fantasies, fears, and unconscious beliefs about teachers. To gather his “figures” while confined to his home during the pandemic, Lewkowich searched online archives for English-language North American comics where a teacher was present. Over two years he compiled a database, he writes, “bursting with more images and short sketches of teachers in comics (hundreds upon hundreds of characters) than I ever thought it would be possible to encounter” (p. 41). While the collection varies in style and genre, and spans decades of publications, his boundaries limit the study mostly to mainstream printed comics. Although this leaves out webcomics and forms from an underground comics scene, this aligns with his focus on fictional representations with wide cultural circulation that have a “normalizing power” (p. 14). While gathering his database, he saw that teachers “crop up in the most unexpected of places” (p. 41). He writes, “I noticed what the lack of attention given to teachers in comics might reveal about what and who we take for granted, and how amending this gap might cultivate new forms of understanding about the unspoken fantasies undergirding educational life, as well as research related to it” (p. 42). After laying the groundwork for his analysis, in chapter two we are taken to a most troubling place. This chapter deals with the traumatic effects of schooling and the adolescent student’s unconscious aggression, revenge fantasies, and parricide directed at teacher figures. Lewkowich tends to this topic with care, showing how these widespread graphic representations of fantasies are not just gratuitous, they serve a psychic function: the students are playing out a developmental necessity, however cruel and aggressive. The students must use their teachers in this way, during a volatile time; and the comic provides a form for acknowledging the school as a site of trauma and suffering. Still, it is a challenging chapter as Lewkowich works to understand the symbolic meaning of these representations while reckoning with the problem of actual violence directed at real teachers. In the third chapter, Lewkowich challenges a conventional reading of a common “grammatical device of cartoons and comics” (p. 97): the thought bubble. Lewkowich considers what these devices reveal about the teacher’s relationship to thought, asking, “What kind of thought is thought in the thought bubble?” (p. 104)? We also learn that this device that uniquely provides access to characters’ internal, often conflicted lives, appears to be on the decline in contemporary comics (Camden, 2020). …