On the Difficulty of Spiegelman

I've just come from an evening with the e398 class (the pedagogy and practice class for grad TAs, in case you didn't know), and one of our conversations was about the difficulty (and necessity) of teaching difficult texts. Daniel Gross led us through a brief narrative of his experiment teaching a particularly thorny text by Judith Butler (I believe the piece he gave them was Excitable Speech -- I might not be 100% correct on that).
Some of the important ideas we discussed was the need to set up the students for a difficult text so that it doesn't seem, well, like just a lot of hard, unsatisfying work. Instead, we need to prepare them for hard, satisfying work -- to get excited about it and then feel that the work brought them to a new place that has value to them. I don't think I did a very good job in preparing the student for In the Shadow of No Towers -- but, to be honest, I didn't anticipate just how hard or inaccessible it would be for them.
One of my 9-11 colleagues created a good vocabulary list for the students, and I wish I had give them the vocabulary sooner. This may be part of the solution -- to have them look up the references before they read the piece, so that as they read, they have a richer, more empowered experience.
I also admit that I have a group of students for whom this medium is befuddling and inaccessible. Only one or two of my students self-identified as readers of comics or graphic novels, and they found the format and style hard to understand. As a result, they seem to look at the pages as if it's in another language, and I can see the disconnect in our discussions.
United 93, while more difficult for other reasons, was easier for them to discuss. This makes sense for two reasons: one, film is a language they are more familiar with, even if they don't know all of the complexities of the medium; two, the emotional buttons that the film pushes gives them an immediate jumping off point. (As I said in my first point, it's important to get them to jump, so they're not left wallowing, but I won't belabor that point here.)
I guess what I'm trying to work through, here, is how to do this better next time -- how to get them ready to discuss In the Shadow of No Towers, to get them ready for the hard work...