Breaking Radio Silence: What's Been Up With Research and Teaching

It's been a great while since I've posted to this blog, but I'm back and hope to be consistently posting once again. I did manage to get a lot of comics-related work done this summer, both on the Marvel 1976 project and on an essay called "More at Stake: Vampires and the Comics Code." That work and the current work I'm doing on The Electric Company and their partnership with Marvel in the 1970s (remember Spidey Super Stories? Spider-Man's recurring appearances on the television show?) really seem to be swirling around the same ideas regarding multimodal literacy that I've been developing over the last several years. So, over the last few months, the larger project has been becoming more coherently articulated in my head and that's been very exciting. I'll try to spin out some of these ideas and the relationships I see between them over the next few months.

The other pressing issue right now is book orders for next semester's Contemporary Graphic Novels seminar. Here's my mostly finalized list (in no particular order). Any comments would be much appreciated.

Fell: Feral City (Ellis/Templesmith)
Batman: Year One (Miller/Mazzucchelli)
DMZ: On the Ground (Wood/Burchielli)
Fables: Legends in Exile (Willingham/Medina)
Swallow Me Whole (Powell)
The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard (Campbell/Best)
The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (Gaiman/Russell)
Exit Wounds (Modan)
Nat Turner (Baker)

There you have it. I'll likely be having the students in the seminar blogging here about graphic novels in the collection at UW's Leddy Library, so stay tuned for that beginning in January. And I promise not to take six months between posts again. No, really.

Graphic Novels Seminar: Supplementary Readings

As promised to the students in the Graphic Novels Seminar and for anyone else who is interested, here are links to some supplemental readings for the last half of the course. In addition to these four books, we have The Other Side (Aaron and Stewart) and Ghost Stories (Lemire) left to read.

City of Glass (Karasik and Mazzucchelli)
The Poetics of the Page: City of Glass, the graphic novel (Kuhlman)
"Paul Auster's City of Glass: The Graphic Novel" (Coughlan) - MFS Modern Fiction Studies Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 832-854 (Available through Leddy Library through Literature Online)

The Tale of One Bad Rat (Talbot)
Panel Borders Interview with Bryan Talbot

Funhome (Bechdel)
"An Interview with Alison Bechdel" (Chute) - MFS Modern Fiction Studies Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 1004-1013 (Available through Leddy Library through Literature Online)

The Fate of the Artist (Campbell)
Tom Spurgeon Interview with Eddie Campbell
Gutter Geek Review of The Fate of the Artist

Comics Autobiography
"Autographics: The Seeing 'I' of Comics" (Whitlock) - MFS Modern Fiction Studies Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp. 965-79 (Available through Leddy Library through Literature Online)

Contemporary Graphic Novel Seminar: Reading List

As I mentioned already, starting next Monday, I will be teaching a 4th year seminar called Words and Pictures: The Contemporary Graphic Novel here at the University of Windsor. Before the class gets started, I wanted to post the list of primary texts (which consists of both graphic novels and trades) for the course; in addition to these texts, we'll be reading a lot of comics theory. Anyway, here's the list:

Aaron, Jason and Cameron Stewart. The Other Side.

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.

Campbell, Eddie. The Fate of the Artist.

Ellis, Warren and Ben Templesmith. Fell Volume 1: Feral City.

Karasik, Paul and David Mazzacchulli. City of Glass: A Graphic Mystery.

Lemire, Jeff. Essex County Volume 2: Ghost Stories.

Morrison, Grant and Frank Quitely. All Star Superman Volume 1.

Seagle, Steven and Teddy Kristiansen. It’s a Bird.

Sturm, James and Guy Davis. Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules.

Talbot, Brian. The Tale of One Bad Rat.