Serious Comics: When Art Spiegelman’s Maus was first published, it provoked skepticism: “What, a comic book about the Holocaust?” Now it is considered a masterpiece, and an inspiration for a generation of cartoonists and graphic novelists. Marjane Satrapi, for instance, blends autobiography and history in her book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran, while Keiji Nakazawa turns to comics to recount the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath. Even our textbook, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, is itself a comic book. This Autumn Term course has two main components. First, we’ll study major examples of serious cartooning, learning to analyze the complex and powerful relationship between words and images. Second, we’ll let these books inspire us to try out new ways of recording of our own personal and collective pasts, by creating comics using your own drawings or found images (no drawing experience expected or required!).
- Enseignant: Jared Stark