Course Description

We tend to think of graphic novels and comic books as kid's stuff: brightly colored pictures telling fantastic stories about radioactive spiders, mutants, and super-powered aliens.  If this is true, how do we then explain the endurance of the form, the fact that comic book-reading kids grow into comic book-reading adults, the fact that a significant number of comics feature no superheroes at all?  In this course will consider the graphic novel as a long-form comic that aspires not only to narrative coherence and closure, but to formal complexity and psychological depth.  In other words, we will consider the graphic novel as literature. Will Eisner's and Scott McCloud's definitions of the genre will frame the course.  In addition to reading graphic novels about superheroes, folk heroes, immigrants, war, and teenage angst, we will also look at the ways this comic form has been used in film.