Skip to content

The Patron Saint of Superheroes

“Chris Gavaler Explores the Multiverse of Comics, Pop Culture, and Politics”

December 4, 2023 Teaching Comics (Theory)

This is the final week of my advanced special topics course on graphic novels. By “advanced” I mean it’s a 300-level literature course taken primarily by English majors. I taught it previously at the introductory 200-level which attracts students from across the college. I had intended to maintain both courses, but our administration recently announced what they termed a teaching “reduction” (we will teach one fewer courses every two years but those courses will be larger so that we still teach the same number of students). Since I need to maintain my two other advanced courses (fiction writing and contemporary fiction), this semester’s advanced comics turns out to be a one-off.

I’m still thrilled I taught it – and not just because I got to invite Qiana Whitted to campus for my department’s annual guest lecture and retreat. Working with a small seminar of mostly department majors and minors (plus one Art History student writing a senior thesis on Magneto) has been amazing. And, while I brought in a range of secondary readings in earlier iterations of the course, the 300-level designation allowed me to double down on theory.

When I first had to redesign from a Tuesday/Thursday 90-minute format to a Monday/Wednesday/Thursday 60-minute, I divided a given week’s primary reading between Monday and Friday and moved any secondary reading to Wednesday. That worked surprisingly well. We would devote a whole period to breaking down new theoretical concepts and applying them to the first half of that week’s graphic novel – and then continue the application on the second half during the following Friday discussion.

I kept that structure for the 300-level, doubling the Wednesday reading. Actually, I tripled it and then went back and (reluctantly and often at the last minute) trimmed. In the 200-level, I assigned almost half my own writing – which felt narcissistic, but (I rationalized) it’s the same as giving a lecture. Also, my chapters often summarized and harmonized other scholars, which my students said made the concepts easier to understand. This round, I still included plenty of my own work, but only if it contained some key point not made elsewhere.

The essays vary in length (the bracketed numbers in the list below are the number of pages for each), but density and difficulty are harder to gauge and account for. Sometimes the scholars agreed or expanded on a shared point, but just as often they presented contradictory opinions, requiring students to figure out their own. Jargon is a problem, especially in a multi-discipline area of studies like comics. So on day one, I projected two lists of terms that cluster around the two most central concepts for comics analysis.

Diegesis (diegetic):

  • Narrative
  • Story
  • Storyline
  • Storyworld
  • Sequence (of events)
  • Mental model
  • Schema
  • Spatiotemporal
  • Fabula (Russian)
  • Linear, linearly
  • What images “show”

 Discourse (discursive):

  • Ink on paper, pixels on screen
  • Physical object of the comic book
  • Artist’s marks
  • Style
  • Sjuzhet (Russian)
  • Tabular, tabularly 
  • Symbols that “tell”
  • Surface

On the first day I also asked each student to give a working definition of “comics” – a topic we returned to on the last week. The weeks between I divided by formal concepts and paired them with graphic novels. Some of the pairings felt ideal (how can you teach Beautiful Darkness without applying Witek’s comics modes?), while others felt a bit arbitrary, since essentially every graphic novel displays and benefits from the analysis of all of the formal concepts. Still, they all worked, with Thorogood capping the semester as a kind of formal tour de force.

My graphic novel selection changes each time I teach the course, and while still overall balanced, this semester ended up unexpectedly international and heavy on French authors — which wouldn’t bother me so much if I could pronounce French names more plausibly in my western Pennsylvania accent.

During the semester, students wrote two open-topic essays, pairing any two novels for each, plus two short final exam essays, and lots and lots of daily assignments (all of which I’ll include below).

Here are the weekly reading units:

1. Secondary readings on FORMAL OVERVIEWS:

  • Charles Hatfield, “The Art of Tensions” (p32-67), Alternative Comics (2005) [30pp] 
  • Pascal Lefevre, “Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences” (2011) [17pp]

Paired with Nora Krug’s Belonging. Additional sources:

2. Secondary readings on STYLE:

  • Mort Walker, Chapters 2-4 (pp 26-65), The Lexicon of Comicana (1980)
  • Joseph Witek, “Comics Modes,” Critical Approaches to Comics (2012) [13pp]
  • Pascal Lefèvre, “No Content Without Form: Graphic Style as the Primary Entrance to a Story” (2016) [16pp]
  • Andrei Molotiu, “Cartooning” (2020) [16pp]
  • Chris Gavaler, “Modes,” (pp39-44), Chapter 2: Image Narration, The Comics Form (2022) [5pp]

Paired with Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s Beautiful Darkness

3. Secondary readings on LAYOUT:

Paired with Adrian Tomine’s Killing & Dying.

4. Secondary readings on WORDS:

Paired with Ronald Wimberly’s Prince of Cats. Additional sources:

5. Secondary readings on IMAGE RELATIONSHIPS:

  • Scott McCloud, “Blood in the Gutter,” Understanding Comics, (1993) [34 comics pp]
  • Ann Miller, “5.1.3.1 Tressage (Groensteen’s ‘general arthrology’ code),” Reading bande dessinee (2007), p. 95-97 [3pp]
  • Thierry Groensteen, “The Art of Braiding” (2016) [10pp]
  • Neil Cohn, “Visual Narrative Structure” (2013) [18pp]
  • Chris Gavaler, Chapter 5: “Juxtapositional Inferences,” The Comics Form (2022), pp 113-127 [14pp]

 Weng Pixin’s Let’s Not Talk Anymore. Additional sources:

6. Secondary readings on VIEWPOINT:

  • Laura Mulvey, “Woman as Image,” from “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) [5pp]
  • Randy Duncan, “Image Functions: Shape and Color as Hermeneutic Images in Aesterios Polyp,” pp 43-54, in Critical Approaches to Comics (2012)
  • Silke Horskotte and Nancy Pedri, Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics, Chapter 1 (2022) [27]
  • Gavaler, “Focalization,” pp 55-59, in Chapter 2, The Comics Form (2022) [4]

Paired with Jul Maroh’s Blue is the Warmest Color. Additional sources:

7. Secondary readings on ONE-PAGE COMICS:

  • Summerfield Baldwin, “A Genius of the Comic Page” (1917) [6pp] http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2012/04/genius-of-comic-page.html.
  • Umberto Eco, “A Reading of Steve Canyon” (1965) [6pp]
  • Umberto Eco, “On ‘Krazy Kat’ and ‘Peanuts’” (1985)
  • Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik, “How to Read Nancy” (1988) [7pp]
  • Roy T. Cook, “Why Comics Are Not Films?”, from The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (2012)

Paired with Pascal Jousselin’s Mister Invincible: Local Hero

and

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, 1916-1920 Sunday selection from  https://joel.franusic.com/krazy_kat/.

8. Miscellaneous secondary readings:

Paired with Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth.

9. Secondary readings on DEFINITIONS:

  • Scott McCloud, Chapter 1: “Setting the Record Straight,” Understanding Comics (1993) [22pp comics]
  • Neil Cohn, “Undefining Comics” (2005) [11pp]
  • Aaron Meskin, “Defining Comics” (2007) [11pp]
  • Roy Cook, “Do Comics Require Pictures?” (2011) [12pp]

DAILY ASSIGNMENT:

For each reading, select 3 passages of interest to you.

  • For each passage, include an excerpt/photo, page number, two analytical questions, and related pages list.The first question should focus on just the passage.
  • The second question should address an overarching issue or pattern that relates to other textual moments.
  • Include page numbers for at least two of those related passages for the second question.
  • Written responses to the questions are not required, but be prepared to lead discussion and introduce your own insights.

PAPER TOPICS:

Monday:

  • Create a combined document that includes:
    • all of your daily question assignments and
    • my Canvas comments after each assignment.
  • Read the whole document and list ideas that repeat across multiple assignments (those could be the start of paper topics).
  • Select and expand on 3 potential topics, each combining any two of the graphic novels. Write an involved paragraph for each potential topic. 
  • List 5 of our secondary sources to use as tools in your analysis. Write 2 sentences for each explaining the specific analytic tool.

Wednesday: Partial draft (minimum of 4 complete pages or 1,200 words)

Friday: Complete draft (minimum of 8 complete pages or 2,400 words)

FINAL EXAM:

The final exam is take-home and open-book. It consists of two 1,000-word essays (each must fall between 900 and 1,100 words). Works Cited lists are necessary, but are not part of the word count. Each essay requires six secondary sources; no more than two may overlap between essays, so you will use a total of at least ten different secondary sources. You will have until the end of the exam period to upload your essays in a combined document on Canvas. You should devote roughly the equivalent time and effort that you would to prepare for a traditional, closed-book exam, and then to take an exam during a three-hour exam period. 

ESSAY ONE:

Select a comic to analyze. The comic cannot be one of the four you’ve written about in your two major essays. Analyze the comic using six different works of comics scholarship that we studied during the semester. The essay does not need to present a unified argument. You are instead demonstrating your ability to apply tools of comics analysis to a comic we have not studied together. Be sure to briefly cite elements of the scholarship in your essay using internal citations. Quote with precision. Also include screenshots of your visual examples.

ESSAY TWO:

Develop an argument that relates six scholars from six secondary readings.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,