Comics might be defined as a hybrid word and image form in which two narrative tracks, one visual and verbal, register time spatially. By considering the medium of comics, this course seeks to explore what cartoonist Art Spiegelman and cartoonist-theorist Scott McCloud have both referred to as “the secret language of comics.” How does the form work? How do we talk about comics as a storytelling form, and describe its difference from other kinds of narratives? What constitutes this “picture writing,” as Spiegelman calls it, or in Marjane Satrapi’s terms, “narrative drawing”?This course will examine the formal language of comics, including the panel, the sequence, the page, the story, and seriality, as well as the treatment of time, rhythm, and tempo. To grasp the flexibility of the medium, we will explore comic strips, superheroes, undergrounds and independents, political satire and pedagogy, autobiography, experimental works, and children’s comics. We will also probe the connections between today’s robust comics field and the medium’s earlier histories and incarnations, a history encompassing moments of aesthetic and commercial innovation in the 19th and 20thcenturies such as Töpffer’s 1830s histoires en estampes, McCay’s turn-of-the-century Sunday newspaper strips such as Little Nemo, “wordless novels” of the 1920s and 30s, and the taboo-breaking American “underground comix” canon of the 1960s and 70s.

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