Jeffrey Brown started his career as a sort of autobiographical indie phenom, making comics like Clumsy in which he portrayed himself as a sort of maladroit and lovelorn loser; his book Every Girl Is the End of the World For Me could be read as a case example of a thousand uncomfortable crushes by turn-of-the-century would-be emo lotharios. Which is to say that those autobiographical books are very good.
But as Brown got older – and as he became a father – he turned his now less desperate energies to creating funny books for kids, making an adorable father/son tale with Darth Vader and Son, a sort of wholesome and hilarious “what if” exploration of what a relationship between Vader and his child-age son, Luke Skywalker, might have looked like.
In the years since, Brown has kept both his creator-owned/original ideas (Incredible Change-Bots, Once Upon a Space-Time) and his licensed works (further Star Wars fare, Batman and Robin and Howard) afloat. He’s a prolific creator in the realm of YA graphic novels, and each of his works is as delightful and funny as the one before.
Brown returns to the Marvel Universe with Hulk Teach!, out this week from Scholastic’s Graphix imprint. It’s got a zany setup, like you might expect from him: the Hulk, having caused trouble, is forced into a sort of public service in which Bruce Banner is forced to teach a science class to ‘problem’ students.
Marvel
For all its Marvel weirdness – the book is presented by two Watchers, Uanu and Edmu, and features plenty of appearances by the rest of the Avengers – what Hulk Teach! does best isn’t satirize superheroes, it’s spotlight educational hurdles facing those students today. Brown is quick to illustrate how minor the ‘problems’ with the students are: for the most part, they have various symptoms of ADHD, a half-dozen of the myriad hurdles that illustrate how uncompromising the rigid education system is. Kids who might benefit from alternative teaching methods or who might freeze up in the face of standardized testing are often made to feel ‘bad’ or somehow unworthy of a proper education.
The students in Hulk Teach are very much in that camp – they know that they are the problem classroom, and show signs of having internalized their perceived ‘badness’. Banner is just one of many teachers who have come in to teach them only to fail; it’s the intervention of a zany, childlike Hulk that prevents Bruce from failing himself.
The Hulk is a perfect, relatable character for an ADHD brain: impulsive, unable to control himself, the Hulk’s destructive tendencies are here illustrated as misunderstandings rather than vindictive or angry. He is a character who would suffer under the rubrics of contemporary education, and his commitment to his students sways Bruce from giving up on them.
There’s a lot of Brown’s indie-outsider empathy to the book; he’s spent his career portraying the lovable bumbler with the tarnished heart of gold. His characters inherently understand how hard the world can be, particularly for those who others might look down on. Hulk Teach! celebrates differences, lifts up students who are struggling, and shows that, just because you might not learn the way schools want you to, that doesn’t make you (or the Hulk) bad.
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