FILMEDIA 114Q: Reading Comics
General Education Requirements
Not currently certified for a requirement. Courses are typically considered for Ways certification a quarter in advance.
Course Description
Comics have come out of hiding and seem to be everywhere these days (perhaps hiding behind the term “graphic novel”). Remarkable work is being produced in all styles and formats, and lavish reprints are introducing readers to some of the finest works in the medium’s history. Long derided as neither literature nor art, comics, with its complex juxtapositions of word and image, and of images with one another, are increasingly understood as a unique, sophisticated mode of communication and expression. This course will provide an historical and stylistic overview of the comics medium. The treatment of time, rhythm, and tempo will be considered alongside explorations of the panel, the sequence, the page, the story, and seriality. To grasp the flexibility of the medium, we will explore comic strips (humorous and dramatic), superheroes, undergrounds and independents, political satire and pedagogy, autobiography, experimental works, and children’s comics. To keep things manageable, emphasis will be on North American comics and comics culture. We will read both critical texts and plenty of comics.
Meet the Instructor: Scott Bukatman
"My work explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. I often describe my approach as 'taking unserious things seriously without forgetting their unseriousness.' In other words, Superman is not King Lear, and doesn't need to be—there are still interesting questions to ask and answer. I stress our experience of media more than the ostensible 'meanings' of texts—not because texts aren't meaningful, but because there are so many scholars whose work already contends with meaning, and I want to tell a different story. I've published on science fiction film, Jerry Lewis, comic strips, superheroes, cartoon physics, cyberspace, and My Fair Lady. My most recent book is on the Marvel movie, Black Panther!”
