My favorite course this semester is undoubtedly Graphic Novels, taught by my brilliant and wonderful advisor Kate. I took this class because over the past two years, I’d become very interested in rhetorical study of comics (I did my entire senior seminar about depictions of clinical depression autobiographical web comics). I wanted to read books I hadn’t read, like Ghost World and Watchmen and revisit old favorites, like Maus, Blankets, and Fun Home. I also wanted to take another class with Kate before I graduated.
We kicked off the semester by reading autobiographical graphic novels, which included the aforementioned Maus, Blankets, and Fun Home as well as Persepolis and comics by Lynda Barry. During this time, I wrote a paper on the creation of queerness in Fun Home, drawing on sources about queer theory and semiotics to articulate my ideas.
Then we moved on to fiction, reading Watchmen, volume 2 of The Sandman, Duncan the Wonder Dog, and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. I’m currently writing a paper about the effects created by different typefaces and lettering choices in Jimmy Corrigan. I think it’s going to be really interesting!
Most recently, we did a unit on manga. I hadn’t read any manga before and I haven’t watched a lot of anime, so this was very new territory for me. Everyone read Clover, about a magical girl who has to be transported to an unknown location for reasons that are not immediately clear. I wasn’t a big fan of this one. For our next class meeting, we divided into four groups that each read one of four other manga books. I read the first two volumes of Ranma 1/2, a lighthearted series about a boy, Ranma, who changes into a girl whenever he comes into contact with cold water. The characters are constantly getting into physical fights, but it’s quite comedic — this book was much more my speed than Clover was.
We’ll be rounding out the semester by looking at how comics are adapted into other mediums and how other mediums are adapted into comics. We’ll watch the movie adaptation of Ghost World once we’ve read it and we’ll read a comics adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
Graphic Novels has been incredibly fun. Using graphic novels to reexamine concepts I’d explored in other classes and learn about things I hadn’t yet encountered in my education has been very interesting and rewarding. If I didn’t already feel this before, I certainly feel now that I will be a comics reader for life.
Learn more about the Graphic Novels course.
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