Comics, Disability and Illness

Catalog description

This course explores the use of comics and graphic novels to tell stories about disability and illness. Students will be introduced to both recent and historically significant comics about disability and illness. Our goals are to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between image and text in sequential art, to explore and utilize the core elements of graphic novels (such as image and text, panels and pages, language and rhythm, character, plot, point of view), and develop the ability to critically analyze graphic novels that deal with complex and sometimes challenging subject matter. What are the ethical and methodological issues that arise when constructing sequential narratives of disability and illness? What are the comparative strengths and differences between such narratives that are autobiographical, documentary or fictional? Is there something unique about the format of graphic novels that enables artists to tell a different kind of story than filmmakers, musicians or performers? How do comic books circulate culturally, and how might this expand or limit their ability to inform our understandings of disability and illness? Wewill explore these questions through close readings, robust discussions and careful written analysis of well-known graphic novels by Ellen Forney, David Small and David. B, as well as comics by Kimiko Tobimatsu, Christian Ryan, Thersa Wong, Kristen Radtke, Mikaël Ross, Matt Freedman, Sarah Leavitt, Nate Powell, Takehiko Inoue, Laura Lee Gulledge and Peter Dunlap-Shohl.