Modern Comics Exploration
Read your way through the recent history of comics
The comics that we read have a way of insinuating themselves into the work that we make. Whether it's your childhood love of Peanuts or your teenage obsession with Batman, the themes, characters and page dynamics return to us.
In Modern Comics Exploration, develop a critical eye and practice the language of comics through weekly readings, online discussions and responses to questions about the unique art and literary form that is comics!
6 Weekly Zoom calls on Mondays, 8 pm Eastern:
Weekly critical and creative readings
Weekly Zoom call, archived for reference
Online discussion forum
Direct feedback and engagement from Instructor
Course details
Introduction to Modern Comics Exploration
What is a Graphic Novel by Jessica Abel
How to Read Nancy
How to Make Comics and Cartoons by Liana Finck
Scott McCloud - Stories for Humans
Writing about Comics and Graphic Novels
Keyword of the Week - PANEL
Week 2: Autobiographical Comics: How True is Truth?
One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry
Coyote the Beautiful by Coyote Shook
Keyword of the Week - MEMOIR
Week 3: Manga Aesthetics
Keyword of the Week - MANGA
Week 4: Webcomics
Keyword of the Week - WEBCOMICS
Week 5: Combatting Marginality
Chan Chau: Parts of Us
Nivedita Sekar: Your Heart is an Apple
The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town
Keyword of the Week - RACE
Week 6: Drawing Space and Time
On a Sunbeam PDF
Keyword of the Week - GRAPHIC NOVEL
Final Assignment - Session 2 - An Image in a Ruin
Instructor Bio:
Ayanni C. H. Cooper is a graduate of the English doctoral program at the University of Florida, where she specialized in comics and visual rhetoric. Her research interests include monster theory; gender & sexuality; science fiction & fantasy; multimodal texts, like podcasts; and erotica studies. She explored many of these themes in her dissertation project, “We Live in a Time of [Sexy] Monsters”: Exploring Erotic Monstrosity in Contemporary Visual Media. (To put it simply, she’s curious why so many folks are attracted to monsters. It’s a very important research question!) Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing games with her family, finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats. You can find more information about Ayanni, including her publications, at ayanni.com.
Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing Destiny with her family (#TitanMain), finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats. She lives with her husband Andrew and their chonky cats, Chloe and Grey Ghost, in San Antonio, TX.