to English 333:
Comics and Graphic Novels!
A heads-up from Prof. Charles Hatfield
__________
English 333 is a university course I designed for CSU Northridge. It was offered in an experimental capacity annually from 2005 to 2008, then made a permanent part of the CSUN catalog in 2008. This coming semester, Spring 2010, the course will be offered for the sixth time.
The following is directed at my students in the course:
Hello!
Over the fifteen or so weeks of the Spring 2010 semester, we’re going to explore together that form of communication and artistic expression generally known to readers of English as “comics” or “comic art.” That name is just a convenient tag, and in fact across the world the form has many other names, for example manga, manhwa, bande dessinée, fumetti, quadrinhos, and historietas. We’ll call it comics.
333 is not the “ultimate” course on comics. Frankly, the field of comics is too wide and diverse to cover adequately in one course. An entire major could be built around comics and still we would be forced to exclude some aspects. Out of necessity, then, 333 is going to focus down on just one strand of comics, namely, book-length comics in English. More precisely, we’ll be focusing on the comics album or comics novel, what we in America typically call the graphic novel. In order to explain how graphic novels came to be, we’ll also look at two antecedent genres, the American-style comic book and its parent, the newspaper comic strip. We’ll read a number of comic book stories and, sadly, only a very few comic strips. (I’d like to teach a whole class about nothing but comic strips, but, hey, that’s for another time.)
Note that, while the label “graphic novel” is American in origin, the genre itself is international. In the USA, graphic novels are the offspring of comic books, but in other cultures they have other origins. Our textbooks will include several translations of graphic novels from other languages and cultures, because such imports are a very important part of the American comics scene today.
Be ready for hard work, and for some surprises.
Now, there are many different ways to understand comics. In fact courses about comics are taught from many perspectives. I have colleagues in Art and Design, Communications and Media, Film Studies, American Studies, History, and Anthropology who do research and teach courses on comics. In 333 we’re going to take a literary and cultural studies perspective, since, after all, this is an English class. The focus of 333, then, will be on comics as a form of visual literature and sequential art.
Visual literature refers to (a) literary works in which visual elements play a vital part in shaping meaning, such as illuminated books, picture books, or visual poetry; or (b) works by visual artists that invite literary interpretation, such as artists’ books; or (c) a critical point of view that finds meaning in the usually-neglected visual elements of literature, such as typography and text design. More generally, you could say that visual literature is a perspective that refuses to give an easy answer to the question, “Is this thing that I’m looking at visual art, or is it literature?” The term visual literature has been promoted by such scholars as Eric Vos and Richard Kostelanetz, and, more recently, has been usefully applied to comics by Gene Kannenberg, Jr. and others. Today the study of visual literature plays a key part in the multidisciplinary field of word and image studies. Calling comics visual literature means, potentially, comparing them to other artifacts that mix (or blur the distincti0n between) text and image, such as concrete poems, children’s books, or digital hypertexts. We can call such artifacts (after W.J.T. Mitchell) imagetexts.
Sequential art means visual art that tells stories (or presents situations or ideas) via successive still images in series. This term was coined by the late cartoonist and teacher Will Eisner and popularized in his classic instructional book, Comics and Sequential Art (1985). Today sequential art is widely accepted as either a synonym for comics or a larger umbrella term under which we can put comics.
So, visual literature and sequential art. What we’re doing in 333, then, is breaking ground in a fairly new academic field. Until recently, critics of literature and art have tended to dismiss comics as an embarrassing species of pulp fiction, or at best as a naïvely revealing mirror in the funhouse of Pop Culture. Over the past twenty to twenty-five years, though, comics have been earning new kinds of critical attention; more and more, they’re being recognized as a complex, dynamic form and a deep, rich tradition. We’re just now in the process of putting together a critical toolbox for analyzing and evaluating works in this form. This means our class is on that legendary “cutting edge” so many of us dream of being on.
Studying comics may mean getting out of your usual habits and trying on some new ways of reading. After all, comics by their nature frustrate attempts to put them into a pigeonhole (are they pictorial narrative? visual poetry? graphic design? all of the above?). They’re tough to pin down. Yet working to build a toolbox for comics study can help us interact with the whole swirling kaleidoscope of our visual culture more critically, and more appreciatively. Analyzing comics can help us tune up our minds so that we can more productively approach all sorts of imagetexts, from Web pages to experimental poetry to billboards by the side of the road. Most importantly, studying comics brings us face to face with some of the most provocative work contemporary storytellers and artists have to offer. Simply put, there’s some wonderful work in this field.
The specific objectives and requirements of 333 will be detailed in our (forthcoming) course syllabus. For now, we can say that the goals of 333 are:
- to explore (and practice using) the distinctive formal qualities of comics;
- to survey comics history, especially the last forty years or so, in order to understand how comics have come to be recognized as a literary genre;
- to read some of the best that contemporary comics have to offer, with emphasis on graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Hernandez, Marjane Satrapi, and Rutu Modan.
How will we reach these goals? Via discussion, lecture, and varied class activities; reading, research, and writing; and interactive work online, via our class’s Moodle website (pending). Note that we’ll do a lot of analytical writing, and so completion of CSUN’s lower-division writing requirement is prerequisite to being in the class.
Welcome aboard, 333ers! I hope you find the course stimulating, challenging, eye-opening, and enjoyable.
This page is maintained by Charles Hatfield. Last updated on 8 Dec. 2009.
