For much of their history comics have been viewed as disposable entertainment rather than enduring aesthetic achievements, low popular culture rather than high art. The narrator of Daniel Clowes’s 1991 comic “Art School Confidential” warns readers to “never mention cartooning in art school because it is mindless and contemptible and completely unsuitable as a career goal!” However, comics in the form of “graphic novels” have found cultural legitimacy as a literary art form. Yet comics are visual as well as verbal, made of images and text. In this course we will examine the relationship between comics and fine art, and we will read comics, as well as histories and theories of comics, as we consider whether, and how, we might see comics as art and analyze comics as visual culture.

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