On the Uses of Thought Bubbles: Materializing the Teacher’s Thinking Beyond the Façade of Surface Appearance

This chapter works with a psychoanalytic theory of thinking to conceptualize a grammatical device fundamental to comics art: the thought bubble. Concerned with narratives of teaching, where personal desires may stand opposed to those presumed of professional identity, this chapter considers how thought bubbles work to give substance to various forms of thinking (encompassing memories, dreams, magic, phantasy, disavowal, etc.) that teachers in comics might potentially use their thoughts to do. The teacher’s relationship to thought is shown as often conflicted, contradictory, and torn—between desire and compliance, personal and professional needs, ambivalence and devotion, conscious and unconscious psychic content, and past, present, and projected versions of self.