The other day I learned that Donald Ault died in April at 76. Sad to hear it. Among my college professors, he was one of the more interesting.

Besides being a William Blake scholar of renowned, Ault also had an early academic interest in comics, especially the work of the talented Carl Barks. Most of the rest of the VU English Department didn’t think much of that — comics (and balloons) is for kiddie-winkies, after all — and a few years after I took his class, Donald Ault was off to the University of Florida. That was a better fit for him than Vanderbilt, where he had come to from Berkeley.

Ault said so himself in a short memoir republished by the International Journal of Comic Art blog. An appreciation for Ault by another former VU student is here, better than anything I can write about him.

Ault taught the last English class I took at Vanderbilt, in the spring of 1983, whose formal title I don’t remember. But I do remember an assignment for that class that had me write an interpretation of a Carl Barks’ Donald Duck story. Out of a number of ideologies to choose from in doing the paper, I picked a Marxist interpretation. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember having fun with it.

We also watched some videos — items in those pre-Internet days that were hard to find. One in particular was J-Men Forever, an insane romp of a thing put together by a couple of members of Firesign Theatre. As it happened, I’d heard of Firesign because a couple of their records were floating around my freshman dorm hall, but I’d never heard of J-Men Forever.

RIP, Dr. Ault.