Seminars

This seminar is devoted to the medium of comics, across multiple languages and (trans)national cultures. The “comics medium” can refer to many historical forms, which conventionally feature some of the following elements: hand-drawn and hand-colored imagery; hand-written or typographic text; and a sequential narrative composed of several frames, arranged into rows on a larger panel. Research includes familiar forms like comic books or graphic novels, as well as precursors in popular print culture, like serial engravings, caricatures, broadsheets, the Imagerie d’Épinal—and so on. It also touches on early iterations (comics supplements, wordless novels, etc.), popular veins (editorial cartoons, adult comix magazines, and webcomics), and non-fiction forms (graphic memoir, comics journalism, graphic medicine, etc.). Comics are not only central to various national cultures (like manga to Japan or bandes dessinées to Belgium and France) but in the last half century, have increasingly been accepted as a legitimate 9th art. Beyond the works of legendary comics creators like Winsor McCay or Hergé, or the sheer staying power of multimedia conglomerates like Marvel or DC, the artform has achieved its iconic status through the graphic novel. If comics studies have long been an interdisciplinary field—originally housed in art history and popular culture studies—it now reaches comfortably into multiple humanistic fields (like new media studies, language pedagogy, narrative medicine, etc.) and into various subfields (like queer, disability, memory, or Black studies). Columbia University has a long history of supporting, teaching, and legitimizing scholarship in comics studies. Our unparalleled collection of graphic albums, curated by Karen Green since 2005, includes over 19,000 titles in two dozen languages. This seminar envisages future partnerships with publishers, non-profit organizations, and institutions throughout New York City and the tristate area.