We want to explore the full range of different uses which have been made of this medium. While we will deal with many of the dominant figures of historical and contemporary comics, we will not necessarily observe proper boundaries (between high and popular art, between independent and mainstream comics, between historical and contemporary comics, between American and international comics). Our approach is emphatically exploratory. In this class, we will take apart Pekar's core claim about the nature of his medium. You can do anything with words and images" - Harvey Pekar
JOUR 499 Special Topics: Comics and Graphic Storytelling At the moment, I have probably pushed this past the breaking point and I am most likely stripping down some of what is currently listed, but having pulled together such a rich list of materials, I figured why not share them with my readers.
As a consequence, the most valuable thing we can do as teachers is to expose them to as many comics as it is humanly possible to read in a semester and to diverse ways of reading and discussing what they are reading. I've found in the past that undergraduates often know a pretty limited sample of comics - sometimes the mainstream super heroes, sometimes independent titles - but they lack a depth of historical perspectives and a mental model of a full range of what comics can and are doing. Today, I thought I would share with you the basic blue print of this class, which is designed to expose students to a range of different methods for studying the medium and to as broad a sample of (primarily) American comics and graphic storytelling as I could cram into one subject. As it happens, I am putting the final touches to a syllabus I have been developing for a Comic Studies course which I will be teaching in the Spring here at the University of Southern California, one which makes extensive use of that collection. Last week, I featured an interview with the editors and contributors to a new anthology, Critical Approaches to Comics, suggesting that it signaled the solidification of Comics Studies as a field of academic research.
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