Welcome!

Welcome to ENGL 3084, Comics and Graphic Novels!  I'm excited to work with you this semester in this online course devoted to thinking about the ways in which words and images work together to make up the medium we call comics.

To get us started, we will start by reading Scott McCloud's germinal work, Understanding Comics.  Understanding Comics is dated in some ways--it was published during the 1990s and it seems like it. You can almost imagine it being carried to the coffee shop under the arms of flannel-shirt-wearing, grunge-listening 20-somethings. Still, I think it explains what comics are (or maybe what they're not...) better than many more recent publications do.  And, if nothing else, it will set the stakes and the vocabulary for much of what we will discuss subsequently.

Here is some more McCloud to help set the scene! 

I'll make a subsequent post with more resources about comics if you are interested in reading more about their origins and about graphic novels (we will talk more during the semester about the "graphic novel" and whether, as a category, it really suits what we're discussing).

For more about the format of this course, see the links under "course information" to your right!  These links will give you information about assignments, the reading schedule, and--MOST IMPORTANTLY--how and when to post to the blog.