FYS 1255 - Comics & Graphic Novels

Credits: 4
Are graphic novels literature or art? Answer: Yes, both! What they are not: just for kids. Today’s graphic novels and manga tell serious—and seriously fun—stories that deserve space in any course on contemporary literature. In fact, the medium is sophisticated enough to present rich adaptations of literary classics and to produce compelling stories for TV, animation, and liveaction films. We will study some of those adaptations in this course, but our main focus is the printed medium. What happens when comics artists create autobiography, journalism, sci-fi, and dystopian fiction in comics form? Are the capes and masks and flashy colors all gone? And what role to the pictures have in the ways we analyze narratives? Among other topics, we will see how the drawn body becomes a language of intersecting spiritual, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identities. (Some books address mature themes.) As a bonus: Although like any literature course we focus mainly on text analysis, some projects can be tackled through comics-creating … no super art skills required!
Students are not required to suscribe to ComiXology (an Amazon company), but some will find this to be a good way to access texts.

McDaniel Plan: First Year Seminar; Creative Expression