Reading & Composition
Beyond the Page: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Comic Books and Graphic Novels
In this course we are going to explore the world of comics and graphic novels from their origins in the 1930s to the present day. Comics and graphic novels will open us up to a series of broader questions: what happens when divergent media are united (image with text)? How should we think about the figure of the author and artist (and the attendant legal category of creative copyright) within a context of collaboration (a writer working with an illustrator, or many writers with many illustrators), not mention amid the pressures of a publishing industry? What are the intellectual challenges, as well as the benefits, of moving between (or uniting) fandom and dispassionate critical analysis?
In our focus on reading analysis, our approach to these questions will be interdisciplinary and perhaps even unconventional in that we are going to let two novels serve as our guides: Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which fictionalizes the early days of the superhero comic industry and the Jewish-American immigrant artists of its inception, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, whose self-proclaimed “ghetto supernerd” protagonist obsessively immerses himself in comics, graphic novels, manga, as well as high fantasy, sci-fi, etc. But the content of these novels is only the beginning; their narratives will open us up to a comparative, interdisciplinary and multimedia study of not only comics and graphic novels, but beyond that film adaptations, reboots and spinoffs, and visual art objects that both influenced and were influenced by the comic book world.
Major course readings include:
Lynd Ward. Gods’ Man: A Novel in Woodcuts
Art Spiegelman. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Vol I. My Father Bleeds History & Vol. II. And Here My Troubles Began)
Michael Chabon. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Alison Bechdel. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Junot Diaz. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Héctor Germán Oesterheld & Francisco Solano Lopez. The Eternaut
To enroll: go to summer.berkeley.edu