Non-Canonical Graphic Novels

Catalog description

Comics: they’re not just for kids anymore. There was a time when comic books were synonymous with innocence and youth, with escapist fantasy and simplistic black-and-white morality. Comics were, quite simply, “funny books”: bright, colorful, and inconsequential. And some still are. But comics also bleed…and explore issues of identity, personhood, morality, sexuality, racism, politics, and religion. The sky’s the limit, not only for Superman, but for the very medium that spawned him. And that’s perhaps as should be, considering the marginalized space that the genre (and its creators) first occupied. This course will thus survey superhero comics, sequential art biographies, four-color fantasies, and genre-bashing graphic novels from under-represented creators/positions as we attempt to understand how this historically non-canonical medium continues to grow and influence popular culture and literary studies. Excelsior!