Going Local

This essay explains what happened when I began to pay attention to comics culture in the region where I live. Through conversations with students and with area artists, I learned that a massive printing facility that generated millions of comics and other texts used to occupy the land across the street from my university. In addition to helping me understand my surroundings in a new light, my forays into local history and comics studies have sent me back to medieval studies with a renewed sense of purpose. In response to corporate and institutional pressures to adopt new technologies uncritically, we humanities scholars need to foreground the collaborative processes by which both medieval and contemporary texts are made, distributed, consumed, and revised. We should emphatically and persistently explain why it is important for students — and indeed, for all of us — to communicate fluently, creatively, and independently.