Topics in Sequential Art: Understanding Comics: Introduction to Sequential Artistry

3 units

Comics are a medium of their own-words and pictures, but more than that. Comics rely on the reader decoding and connecting a multilayered series of relationships. But even more than that, comics are a visual language. As Neil Cohn says, Just as words in sequence are used in spoken language, sequences of images can create a visual language. In this course, you will learn to read that language, and to see how it operates and can be used across visual media and visual culture as a medium of visual communication, particularly our multimodal digital culture. Understanding comics can work as a base for interrogating how other forms of visual culture use sequence to create meaning, including through visual rhetoric. This course covers how to read comics, how sequential artistry creates meaning in comics, and how comics are constructed via a range of artistic, commercial, industrial, and cultural conversations between creators, producers, and audiences. The course offers (but does not require) opportunities to create expository sequential artistry-to write paper in comics form. Texts include works like Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, Watchmen, Asterios Polyp, When I Am King, and visual journalism such as Welcome to the New World.