Goblin from Arthur Rackham illustrations for Rosetti's Goblin Market

Comics and Animation: Course Overview

We will examine comics as they operate as verbal-visual hybrids or imagetexts. This course will trace some of the forms, fields and movements within the medium of comics, as well as read a series of texts that call upon both verbal and visual rhetorics to construct meaning(s). In studying comics in general, we will specifically study the relationship of comics and politics. Working from Art Spiegelman's claim that comicsoperate under the critical radar, we will examine popular comics and their subversive potential, webcomics, underground comix, nonfiction comics, comics as propaganda, and more.

All of the work for this class will be posted online in order to aid in building comics resources and comics scholarship. We may utilize a number of resources for this including blogs, wikis, Google Groups, and webpages. This experimental course will provide:

• an introduction to a selected history of animated cartoons, comic strips and comic books (with a glance at movie serial and perhaps live-action versions of comics)
• a consideration of theoretical implications (Lacanian, Marxist, phenomenological, etc.) of the relations and disjunctions between these fields of “representation”
• an emphasis on American productions—especially the EC Comics horror and non-horror lines, women's comics, and superhero comics—as central to the theoretical problems addressed in the course

Some specific issues to be addressed:

What perceptual processes are involved in reading comic strip and comic book narratives?
What perceptual processes involved in viewing comics and animation (and live action), especially in different formats (animation in 16mm, video projection, video monitor; comics in original issues, in reprints, in slide projection, on the web) and conditions of reception (in a theater, at home, in the classroom)?
What are the differences in narrative possibilities and limitations of comics and animated cartoons (and live-action), especially in relation to technological innovation (for example, what kinds of possibilities were abandoned with the emergence of synchronized sound and color cartoons?)?
How are narrative possibilities altered when characters are translated from one medium to another?
What happens to narrative and perception when verbal/visual dimensions of texts are reorganized?
What are the ideological, psychological, etc., functions of such perceptual narratives?
What kinds of cultural work do animated cartoons and comics perform-especially Disney productions; how does this problem relate to work emanating from other animation studios such as Warners, Fleischers, MGM, Van Beuren, Iwerks, etc.?

Texts & Requirements

Required texts:
Coursepack with readings from Action Chicks, readings by Donald Ault, Susan Napier, WJT Mitchell, Charles Hatfield, Julian Wolfreys, Will Eisner, M. Thomas Inge, David Kunzle, Dorfman and Mattelart, primary texts on course reserve, and others.

Texts in the coursepack may specifically include:

• Antonio Gramsci, "Americanism and Fordism"
• Franklin Rosemont, "Surrealism in the Comics"
• Lawrence Abbott, "Comic Art: Characteristics and Potentialities of a Narrative Medium"
• Donald Ault, "Comic art and how to read it," "Visual Narrative in 'Vacation Time'"
• Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image,"The Third Meaning"
• Leslie Fielder, "The middle against both ends"
• e.e. cummings "A Foreword to Krazy"
• Umberto Eco, "The Myth of Superman"
• Roger Hagedon, "The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation"
• Hodge and Kress, "Social Definitions Of The Real"
• Art Spiegelman, "Commix: An Idiosyncratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview"
• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
• Dave Wagner, "Donald Duck: An Interview"
• Dorfman and Mattelart, How To Read Donald Duck
• David Kunzle, "Introduction to the English Edition of How To Read Donald Duck"
• David Kunzle, "Dispossesion by Ducks: The Imperialist Treasure Hunt In Southeast Asia"
• Martin Barker, "Deconstructing Donald"
• Donald Ault, "The Mental Travellers," "Educating the Imagination," "Considering the Aesthetics of Underground Comics"
• Wolfgang Faust, "Comics and How To Read Them"
• William Nericcio, "Artif[r]acture:Virulent Pictures, Graphic Narrative and the Ideology of the Visual"
• Donald Phelps, "Segar as Storyteller, Popeye as Hero"
• McDonnell, O'Connell, deHavenon, Krazy Kat, The Comic Art of George Herriman
• Robert Crumb, The Complete Crumb Comics, Vols. 3,4; R.Crumb Sketchbook, Vols 4,5.
• R.C. Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book
• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
• Mark Estren, A History of Underground Comics
• Roger Sabin, Adult Comics, An Introduction
• Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History

Requirements:
Short essays which will be posted online (these will include book reviews on current books on comics and on current graphic novels), active seminar participation, and a final paper/project of publishable length and quality, which will be part of a larger class web project on comics.

Tentative Schedule

Although we will not be proceeding strictly chronologically, a likely scenario of how we might proceed is:

• Weeks 1-2: Theoretical and practical problems in analyzing comics and animation
• Weeks 2-4: Animation to comic strips and comic strips to animation (and serials)
• Weeks 4-6: Animation in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s
• Weeks 7-12: Disney animation to comic books and back: (Barks, Gottfredson, Rosa, Egmont)
• Week 13: Comic books: animation and live action
• Weeks 14-15: Manga and Anime; translation and importation
• Week 16: More recent developments in comics and animation, including web comics and Flash animations like HomeStarRunner.com and MakingFiends.com

We will be viewing video projections of animated cartoons and comic book pages, covers, and related images.

Some examples of possible writing assignments include:

1. Analysis of the reader's letters sent to the various permutations of EC Comics.
2. Analysis of the differences between a single artist's articulation of his or her characters in comic book stories.
3. Analysis of how the cutting up of the comic book page is related to Lacan’s categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, and/or to the way time and space operate in the visual narrative of a particular artist's comic book stories.
4. Analysis of the visual layout of the page, including the visual roles of the verbal aspects of the page, with special attention to oppositions (vector/directional forces, etc.).
5. Analysis of issues of series, seriality, and sequence in comics narratives and worlds;
6. Analysis of aspects of the comic page such as:
1. the relations between the verbal and visual aspects of the page;
2. the use of icons, fonts, and ballon and gutter shapes to create the verbal/visual layout of the page;
3. changes and consistencies with digital comics versions;
4. the relations between these visual/verbal features and what the plot seems to be "about" in terms of conventional narrative and political/economic/psychoanalytic content;
5. how all of these features exist in terms of oppositions, contradictions, or contradictory forces, both within the layout and between the layout and the plot;
6. the extent to which these contradictions (both in form and content) are resolved or not resolved on the page and in the story as a "whole" (the structure of oppositions on the page may not coincide with the structure of oppositions in the plot as a "whole").

Back to top