In February 2018, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a Civics for All initiative for New York public schools. “We’ve got to prove to our young people that they’ve got the power to change the world around them,” the mayor said as part of his State of the City address. “When people feel empowered, they participate. When they can see the impact they’re making, they come back for more. So starting next school year, public school students will learn how to stay civically engaged and to fight for the future they believe in with our Civics for All initiative, and they will learn in a hands-on way by putting their skills to the test right there in their own school building.”
The task of turning Bill de Blasio’s Civics for All initiative into reality was led by Jenna Ryall of the New York City Department of Education and a group of staff members that included social studies instructional coaches Brain Carlin and Joe Schmidt. During the 2021 and 2022 New York Comic Cons, members of the Civics for All team held panels on their efforts, which included incorporating graphic novels and specially-created comics book into school curriculums.
“I spent many years teaching and many years reading comics, but I never actually made the conscious choice to bring comics into the classroom because to me they were two separate things,” Brain Carlin explained during the 2021 panel. “As we created an entire comprehensive K through 12 social studies curriculum, one of the things that we started to look at was, what about this medium? What about comics? Why aren’t we using it? And Joe was the one who introduced me to some great comics and I thought, wow, maybe we should bring these into the classroom, with one of them being John Lewis’s March.”
John Lewis was a Civil Rights icon from the 1960s who led the “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington that is best remembered for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The three-volume March is thus part memoir, part-history of the Civil Rights Movement in a graphic novel format. Brian Carlin and Joe Schmidt spoke to Lewis about incorporating the graphic novels into their curriculum when he visited Columbia University in 2019. Shortly thereafter, New York became the first school district in the United States to use March as a teaching tool. It would not be the last.
“To have March in the curriculum for New York City unleashed this wave,” Andrew Aydin – who shared writing credits with John Lewis on the graphic novels and served as a congressional aid during Lewis’s time in the House of Representatives – said at the 2022 New York Comic Con. “It was like the dam breaking. It was three months after that Atlanta announced. It was three months after that San Francisco announced. And within four years of their move, March became one of, if not the most, widely taught graphic novel series in America.”
The New York public school system does not mandate specific curriculums, instead allowing each school to craft their own. The role of the Department of Education is thus to create resources that the various schools can pick-and-choose from for their individual programming. Between the success of March being incorporated into the school system and the NYCDOE’s mission of creating resources for classrooms, the Civics for All team found themselves in the unique position of commissioning tailor-made comic books under a Civics for All Comics Group banner.
To get the ball rolling, they approached writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey about creating the first Civics for All comic. The pair had published an Action Philosophers comic book – chronicling the lives of various philosophers in a historically accurate but humorous way – in 2005, followed by eight additional issues, a series of Action Presidents graphic novels, and a Comic Book History of Comics.
“We had a lot of crazy ideas,” Brian Carlin said of the subsequent discussion. “They had to talk us down from some of them. But we pitched some ideas, we collaborated together, and wound up with the first volume of Action Activists.”
The twenty-page comic book opens with the story of the 1964 New York City school boycott – a massive protest against segregation in the public school system – before explaining how government works and the ways to become an activist, with a talking squirrel and pigeon keeping the overall narrative flowing. A second Action Activists quickly followed, discussing the underground railroad in New York City during pre-Civil War America, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 and resulting labor movement, the Young Lords of Spanish Harlem and their 1969 Garbage Offensive, and Occupy Wall Street.
In addition to Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, the NYCDOE also partnered with Andrew Aydin and Good Trouble Productions for an original comic book on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age in the United States to eighteen. Entitled Registered, it was written by Aydin (with assistance from Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction, who have worked for both DC and Marvel) and illustrated by Val De Landro – the first in what is hoped to be a long-term relationship.
“If we’re going to reach young people with the truth, we have to do it in their language,” Aydin said at the 2022 New York Comic Con. “This generation grew up on the Internet, sequential narrative is their language, whether it’s a meme, a tweet, a Facebook post, whatever it is. Sequential narrative is this long-standing language that goes back thousands of years, and if we’re going to bring them the truth and if we’re going to bring it to them quickly and efficiently, comics is the way to do that.”
Fred Van Lente had a similar, albeit more expansive, viewpoint. “Anyone – I know we’re focused primarily on children, but I’m talking about literally anyone who can read – I think their knowledge of a subject is going to be improved by getting it in comics form,” he said. “You think in pictures, and so when you combine the visual images in comics with the words, you’re really simulating the way all of our brains process information. None of us has this just continuous kind of Kafka-esque monologue going through our heads at all times. It’s always this mush of images and words.”
He then added, “I actually feel bad for my teachers that they didn’t know that they had this incredible resource available to them.” Thanks to March, Action Activists, and other historically-based graphic novels and comic books, the word is getting around.
Anthony Letizia