Lecture (LEC)

• COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inq
• IUB GenEd S&H credit

• Above class open to undergraduates only
• IUB GenEd S&H credit
• COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

This course will survey the formal and social history of the comic-book format in America from its rise in the early 1930s to the present. We will focus on how the format created narrative challenges and conventions of its own, different and sometimes more complex than those in comic strips, and how it developed particularly close connections to certain types of subject matter, such as superheroes (in mainstream comics beginning with Action Comics no. 1 of 1938), romance (beginning with Young Romance, 1947), the counter-culture and sexuality (in the underground comics of the late 1960s) and autobiography (in alternative comics of the 1980s and 1990s). Other genres studied will include horror, science-fiction, war, and humor. We will also study the institutional history of the comic-book format, with particular focus on the comic-book panic of the early 1950s and the hearings of the Senatorial Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Comic-book artists and writers studied will include Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Steve Ditko, Harvey Kurtzman and the "usual gang of idiots" at EC Comics/Mad Magazine; R. Crumb, Victor Moscoso, and other underground cartoonists; Jim Steranko, Jim Starlin, Frank Miller, Alan Moore and other more recent mainstream comics creators; and alternative cartoonists such as Julie Doucet, Gabrielle Bell, and others.