I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Last Semester: Comics Across Cultures

I didn't have the time to write about this at the time, but thanks to a last-minute schedule adjustment I had the opportunity to teach a second class on comics and graphic novels last spring. This one fell under the category of a "Fiction Across Cultures" class, giving me the opportunity to teach comics from around the world--even if about half of them aren't fiction. Here's the reading list:

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta
Art Spiegelman, Maus I and II
Joe Sacco, Palestine
Rutu Modan, Exit Wounds
Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin vol. 6 (Calculus Affair, Red Sea Sharks, Tibet)
David B, "The Armed Garden" and "The Veiled Prophet"
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Osamu Tezuka, Phoenix vol. 3 (Yamato/Space)
Moto Hagio, "Bianca," "A Drunken Dream," and "Hanshin: Half-God"
Yoshiharu Tsuge, "Screw-Style"
Guy Delisle, Pyongyang

Plus the usual assortment of reserve readings, including comics (Chris Ware's "Thrilling Adventure Stories/I Guess," Richard McGuire's "Here," Alan Moore and Rick Veitch's "How Things Work Out") and comics criticism (Bart Beaty, Jonathan Frome, Dylan Horrocks, Maggie Gray, R.C. Harvey, Joseph Witek, Adam Rosenblatt and Andrea Lunsford, Ariel Kahn, Jean-Marie Apostolides, Hillary Chute, and Paul Gravett).

It's a shame I wasn't able to write about these classes week by week--I thought they were even more successful than the American comics class last year. Then again, with Hergé, Tezuka, Sacco, Rutu Modan, and David B on the syllabus it's hard to go wrong.

No idea when the next comics class will come up, but with two in two years I'm not complaining.

Yes. It is happening.

Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics will be published this December by the University Press of Mississippi.

From the catalog:

One of the most eclectic and distinctive writers currently working in comics, Grant Morrison (b. 1960) brings the auteurist sensibility of alternative comics and graphic novels to the popular genres--superhero, science fiction, and fantasy--that dominate the American and British comics industries. His comics range from bestsellers featuring the most universally recognized superhero franchises (All-Star Superman, New X-Men, Batman) to more independent, creator-owned work (The Invisibles, The Filth, We3) that defies any generic classification.

In Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, author Marc Singer examines how Morrison uses this fusion of styles to intervene in the major political, aesthetic, and intellectual challenges of our time. His comics blur the boundaries between fantasy and realism, mixing autobiographical representation and cultural critique with heroic adventure. They offer self-reflexive appraisals of their own genres while they experiment with the formal elements of comics. Perhaps most ambitiously, they challenge contemporary theories of language and meaning, seeking to develop new modes of expression grounded in comics' capacity for visual narrative and the fantasy genres' ability to make figurative meanings literal.

 More to come in the months ahead...