Dying and Exacting Revenge “On the Plane of Psychic Action”: From the Student’s Humiliation to the Teacher’s Death

This chapter begins by theorizing the developmental moves and impulses of adolescence, especially those involving an aggressive rejection of adults’ interests. Posing the question of how teachers can adequately address such rejection, this chapter explores a particular hatred directed at teachers in comics, eventually culminating in the teacher’s murder through circumstances of revenge. Noting that such events are more likely describing the materialization of revenge fantasies instead of actual murders, the narrative tendencies in such comics, which move predictability from student experiences of humiliation to revenge, are here considered through a psychoanalytic focus on intergenerational murder, parental substitution, parricide, abjection, and the teacher’s looming fear of uselessness. Drawing from multiple comics, this chapter describes the alternative discourse on education that such texts offer, and how experiences of schooling, despite teachers’ best efforts, often leave traumatic effects. Despite these dire conclusions, however, the prevalence and persistence of student revenge fantasies also suggest precisely what teachers need to recognize to confront their students’ murderous emotional lives.