Non-Fiction Comics

 

Panel from Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza

This week we are considering the issues and ethics of representation especially in relationship to non-fiction comics, when real people and real historic events, whether personal or public, individual or community, must be represented as honestly and accurately as possible while still retaining the aspects of style and visual narrative to be good comics.

The featured reading for this week is March the story of the civil rights movement in the United States as told through the life of John Lewis. There is also an entire range of non-fiction, long form comics from which to choose alternative readings or extra credit for this week linked on this week's activity page. I have also linked several nonfiction animated features to the Activity Page as well. You can earn a point for everyone you watch and write about in your blog.

Click Here to Go Directly to this Week's Activity Page

Week Seven: Maus and the Legitimization of the Graphic Novel

Cover of Maus by Art Spiegelman

The assignment for this week is to read Maus and to post an extended response on your blog. This is required reading for all students in the class. Maus is the watershed work that brought the graphic novel into the mainstream of the literary marketplace. It was reviewed by book reviewers from major newspapers and magazines, it was sold primarily in bookstores and not comic book shops, it was embraced by teachers who put it on reading lists. This constitutes the process of legitimization which, in this case, helped to create the new literary genre of the graphic novel. Spiegelman's work is representative of the movement from underground comics to literary or "art" comics. This new generation of comics looked to tell longer stories to adult readers on a wide range of topics. These topics included subjects traditionally associated with the novel such as the experience of time or the nature of memory. The unique way that the graphic novel addresses such subjects is to the heart of what we are discussing in this course.

Here is a link to an interview published a few days ago of Art Spiegelman in The Guardian.

If you have read Maus recently than you can read something else this week.  Alternatives are listed on the Activity Page. In class we will watch the entirety of Barefoot Gen a feature length animation .

Click here to go directly to the Activity Page for this Week

Post for the Midterm

Midnight, Friday Oct. 23 is the deadline for posting all your work before Mid-term grades.  I will be reading your bogs and assigning letter grades this weekend.  Before Friday night please post on anything you have read or viewed for this semester.  To complete your preparation for mid-term evaluation please post as the most recent addition to your blog, a post that counts all your points accumulated so far this semester.  Relate the number of points you feel you have earned from your reading and viewing.  List a point for every zoom class you attended, list any extra points (for example points earned by cosplay) and please list the number of classes you have missed so far.  I will then read your blog and see if I agree with your point count based on what I read that you have posted.  I will then post a letter grade for you which will be released at the mid-term and which represents the grade that, if you continue at the current rate of reading and writing, you should achieve by the end of the course.  

Email me with any questions.

Week Six: Underground Comics



Cover from Cheech Wizard by Vaughn Bode

Underground Comics originated in the campus humour magazines of the early 1960s and were given popular exposure in the alternative newspapers that grew up in most cities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Just as the comic strips of the early part of the 20th century helped establish the readership of mainstream newspapers, underground comics had a similar symbiotic relationship with underground newspapers, helping to create a wider and regular readership for alternative papers like the East Village Other, The Berkeley Barb and the Los Angeles Free Press. When excess capacity was available on the printing presses that were used to print rock posters, the opportunity arose for the creation and distribution of underground comic books. The primary distribution system for underground comics was the networks of head shops that grew up around the country in response to the spreading youth counter-culture of the early 1970s. With the enaction of anti-paraphernalia laws and the suppression of the "head" shops in the late 1970s and early 1980s, underground comics began to morph into the alternative comics and art comics movements that established new channels of distribution in comics collectible shops and mainstream bookstores. The underground comics helped create an audience for adult storytelling in graphic narrative which led directly to the development of the graphic novel and literary expectations for long-form comics.
For this week's class read from the underground comics on the Course Resources page. We will be discussing the work of Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky Crumb and a number of other important underground comics and comics artists especially Mr. Natural,  Zap and Air Pirates Funnies. Listen to the appropriate soundtrack while reading the Underground Comix for a more virtual 60s experience.

As stated in class, most underground comics are by definition offensive, they are intended to offend and to push the borders of taste and propriety.  You will find nudity, sex, violence, racism, sexism, pretty much any and all offensive material you can imagine represented here.  For those who wish to limit the offensive material they encounter might try the following suggestions, these works are related to underground comics but don't directly feature sex, nudity, drug use or significant violence:

Howard the Duck
Barefootz by Howard Cruise
Yellow Submarine
Comics by Basil Wolverton

click here to go directly to this week's Activity Page for resources and a more detailed explanation of this week's assignment

 "If you feel safe in the area that you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in; go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting."

David Bowie as quoted by Eric Stephenson

Week Five: Body Talk: Eisner and Thompson

Self Portrait by Will Eisner

Will Eisner's theory of graphic narrative emphasizes the conveyance of mood, emotion, and state of mind of a character by use of the language of the body. Everything in Eisner's rendering of a character is designed for a clarity of emotion. At times in Eisner's panels it is as if we are looking at key frames of a movie and yet many of the visual effects and organizations of information would be impossible in a movie. In Craig Thompson's Blankets we can see the same devotion to clarity, although the narrative itself is often soaked in ambiguity--ambiguities about time, memory, belief. For me there is a striking similarity in the narrative approach of these two creators.

Before Zoom Class: This week we will consider Eisner and his contribution to comics and to the emergence of the long form of comics, the graphic novel. We will also consider Eisner's contribution to educational comics and the graphic narrative as an information medium. Please read at least one of Eisner's graphic novels, such as A Contract With God and earn 3 points. Also read Craig Thompson's Blankets and earn another 3 points when you write about what you read for this week.

Writing Assignment: Do you see anything similar in Eisner's approach to graphic storytelling and Thompson's?  As a possible topic for your blog this week, describe the similarity and comment on how it affects the reading of the works. In another approach you could simply describe how something in one of the works affected you at the personal level. Describe the affects and what produced them during your experience of the text.

There are more details and links to resources on the Activity Page for this Week.  Click here to go the activity page or use the schedule to get there.

Next week we will look at the explosion of possibilities for content brought about by the emergence of underground comics. There are a number of underground comics available to be read on the password protected course website. There are also links to appropriate soundtracks with which to read these comics. These comics were almost always read to accompaniment of music of the period.