UH-Downtown professor blends comics, criminology
Colorful books help students absorb theories, techniques
When Krista Gehring started teaching criminology, she realized how difficult it was for students to connect with the material.
Now an associate professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, Gehring thinks she’s found a solution with the help of a medium known for everything from superheroes to science fiction to romance.
Instead of just using classic books, filled with blocks upon blocks of text on crime theories, she also has her students read comic books — ones she’s penned herself.
“I was thinking, how could I make something so that my students were engaged?” Gehring said. “I called (the illustrator) Mike and I said, ‘I have this idea to write criminology comic books.’”
“He said, ‘I think this is what we were meant to do.’”
Since 2016, Gehring and artist Michael Batista, who studied together in graduate school, have published five “CrimComics” books detailing the main theories and players in the history of criminology. Eight more of the peer-reviewed books are in the works, scheduled to be published under Oxford University Press.
“It’s a new medium,” Gehring said. “We’re all conditioned to think that in order to convey information it has to be in paragraph form in a textbook. But for me, having it be in comic book form, it definitely requires a bit more active reading.”
Gehring knows she’s on to something with the comic books. Teachers, especially in middle and high schools, are increasingly using them as textbooks and as ways to get younger children interested in reading, said Tracy Edmunds, an educational consultant based in southern California.
Comic books are especially effective in teaching science and history, Edmunds said. And several studies have shown that combining text and images increases reading retention.
“It’s that thing with comics where you have to read the words and pictures and figure out how they go together,” Edmunds said. “That’s the magic.”
Gehring’s issues, small and bound in bright colors, each center on a family of criminology theories. The characters are famous criminologists or theorists who present the material through dialogue, set in their respective historical eras.
The first book, “Origins of Criminology,” features characters who were prominent in creating the founding theories of the study. One of those is Cesare Lombroso, who believed that criminals are born as such and don’t evolve like normal human beings.
One panel shows a stern-faced Lombroso in Pavia, Italy, in 1874, physically examining the corpse of a criminal on an operating table. He holds a large tool and looks down on the criminal in a heavily shaded laboratory, sketched in black and white.
Some of Gehring’s students have found the books have helped them better understand the traditional textbooks, which are still required in her classes, she said.
Andre Cunningham, a junior in Gehring’s intro to criminology class, said he’s both a visual and verbal learner, but gets tired of reading chapter after chapter of textbooks in different courses.
“It can be a little bit draining,” Cunningham said. “I am a little bit more engaged with the class with this type of material. It sticks with you.”
Heineka Cruz-Culler, a senior at UH-downtown who is in Gehring’s class, said she’s found the material much easier to digest — and she gets to color in the pages.
“I freaking feel like I’m smashing it,” Cruz-Culler said. “It’s so easy to just adapt to what’s going on.”
Outside of her own books, it’s clear that Gehring has an appreciation for comics. She got into the medium in her mid-20s, drawn in by the superheroes that she watched on TV during her childhood.
She has since amassed a collection of comic book and horror-related items. The office in Gehring’s northwest Houston home is filled with stacks of books and lined with artwork, action figures and other memorabilia. Wonder Woman sits on her desk, and Hellraiser stares at her from the wall.
Gehring and Batista bonded over comic books while studying for their master’s degrees in Boston. The two had always talked about collaborating on a series, but had they known then that it would actually happen, they would have been ecstatic, Batista said.
“We just would have been over the moon,” he said.
Batista, a freelance artist who is based in Connecticut, said the response has been better than they expected, especially for such a “pie in the sky” project.
“They’re not just floating around out there — we know that people are actually using them,” he said. “To have it received in that capacity, we’ve just been running on those fumes ever since.”