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First Week of the Summer Term

5/31/2015

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It's been a gratifying and invigorating first week in the new summertime version of English 333. I'm working with (now that the dust has cleared) twenty-one students, which is down from our usual Fall/Spring number of about thirty-five. This week saw the launch of our Moodle site and syllabus, discussion of these things in class, and analysis of several comics, including our first major reading, Keiji Nakazawa's memoir I Saw It (1972; trans. 1982). We had two class sessions, on Tuesday the 26th and Thursday the 28th. The roster settled, I gave out tons of handouts, most everyone got scheduled for their discussion leading dates, and we all started to get to know each other. We filled a Moodle forum with conversation about Nakazawa, which led to lively discussion on Thursday, and I gave out the first cartooning homework based on Ivan Brunetti's textbook Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice (2011).

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On our first day, Tuesday, we began with what will be a custom for us, the drawing of attendance cards, that is, cartoon self-portraits on index cards (an idea I lifted from Lynda Barry's splendid book about teaching, Syllabus). I then dove into a Pecha Kucha-style lightning talk designed to introduce (or reintroduce) students to the comics world. From there, students took turns introducing one another: I asked everyone to supply a dialogue balloon for a classmate's self-portrait, and then to interview that person and tell us briefly about them). We then analyzed, at length, a classic Calvin and Hobbes Sunday by Bill Watterson, from August 1988 (the same one I discuss in my first book, Alternative Comics). That led to analysis of the following classic Cul de Sac Sunday by Richard Thompson, from 2007:

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This meta-strip seems to lend itself to analysis of the form (though of course there's always the inevitable danger of breaking the butterfly of art on the wheel of criticism, sigh). I presented the class with a "diagrammed" version of the Cul de Sac strip, as well as a number of other diagrams of the comics page, including examples from the books Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (2008) and Panel Discussions: Design in Sequential Art Storytelling by Durwin Talon (2003) as well as self-made ones like this:
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A classic mid-1980s Love & Rockets page, taken from one of our required books, Jaime Hernandez's The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. (2007). Ugly annotations by CH.

I also shared Talon's glossary of comics terms, and gave out a self-made handout I call The Comics Toolkit, which is basically the précis for a textbook I hope to write in the next few years. All of this was by way of equipping my students with some basic formalist terms they can use throughout the course. 
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On Thursday, besides the usual attendance cards and other icebreaking stuff, we discussed the syllabus somewhat, particularly the Moodling requirements. Then we delved into I Saw It, building on the online discussion of the previous two days. After a bit I asked the class to divide up into four groups so that each could discuss a particular question about I Saw It and report back to us. (To break the class into groups, I used randomly distributed panels from comics pages that I had cut up, jigsaw-style, and asked students to group with other students who had panels from the same page. They had to reassemble the page, so to speak; that's how we formed the four groups.) The four questions I pitched were:
  1. How does the style of I Saw It affect your response to the subject matter?
  2. Is I Saw It a children's comic? Why or why not?
  3. Why do you think I Saw It is framed by thoughts of Keiji's mother?
  4. What is the significance of cremation in I Saw It?
We discussed these questions, in some cases perhaps without consensus but with many thought-provoking observations (I would have liked to debate the question about children more vigorously!). I tried to tie in the discussion to the Toolkit introduced earlier. We also discussed issues such as numbing or desensitization, PTSD, and whether I Saw It is an anti-American text. I ended with a slideshow designed to contextualize Nakazawa (and postwar manga generally), partly based on one kindly given to me by I Saw It publisher Leonard Rifas. Wish we could have spent at least another hour with I Saw It!
(Interestingly, one member of our class is an international student from Japan, who remembers reading I Saw It as a required school text when she was ten. Good to hear about Nakazawa's work and reputation from that angle!)
What a week! The readings for next Tuesday are the first four "weeks" of Brunetti's syllabus-in-book-form, Cartooning, alongside a selection of Peanuts strips by Charles Schulz from the 1950s and 60s (including the first week of Peanuts ever, from October 1950, the introduction of Lucy in 1952, the strange continuity in 1954 where Lucy competes with grownups in a golf tournament, and the classic 1961 continuity where Lucy buries Linus's security blanket). In addition, students are to do the following cartooning exercise lifted from Brunetti's Week 1:
...Pencil out a grid (or grids) in your sketchbook, enough to contain 100 small drawings. Now, spending no more than 5 seconds per drawing, let your stream of consciousness guide you, drawing whatever word comes to mind (do not stop to think about it). Examples: persons, places, objects, occupations, concepts, emotions, etc. You should, at the end, have a little system of pictograms. (Exercise 1.3, pages 26-28)
Looking forward to next week! As if the above wasn't enough, we'll have our first student discussion leaders come Tuesday, and by Thursday we'll be into Art Spiegelman's fabled Maus.
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RIP David Beronä, a wonderful colleague 

5/27/2015

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David A. Beronä, an important historian, curator, and critic of visual narrative, has died. This fills me with sadness. David was a colleague, a bright, inspiring man, and a warm and generous presence. His broad smile, kind and affirming ways, and boundless enthusiasm were both a joy and a lesson. I had the pleasure of meeting David at several conferences over the years, including the OSU Festival of Cartoon Art and International Comic Arts Forum, and at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. I also had the honor, thanks to David's generous invitation, to co-present with him at Reading Pictures: The Language of Wordless Books, a panel at the American Library Association conference in 2008. This panel, organized by the Association of College and Research Libraries, also included scholar Perry Willett and artist Eric Drooker. I count it as a highlight of my conference presenting career. Here's an admittedly blurry picture taken at that panel, showing (from left) me, Eric, Perry, David, and organizer Juliet Kerico:

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I always be grateful to David for that wonderful gig, which opened doors for me and introduced me to some great people.
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David was not only a generous colleague but also our foremost historian of wordless visual narratives in book and comics form, including, for example, the early 20th century woodcut novels of artists like Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. He curated two exhibitions and several editions in that field, doing more than any other scholar to bring that extraordinary work back to public consciousness. His historical anthology, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (2008), is the single best source for introducing readers to that area. And he did still more: over the past twenty years, David spearheaded the republication of key works, wrote introductions to a dozen volumes, including a remarkable run of eight books published by Dover from 2005 to 2011, assembled anthologies of work by artists Eric Gill and Baron Hans Henning Voigt (a.k.a. Alastair), contributed chapters to the books Critical Approaches to Comics (ed. Smith and Duncan, 2011) and The Language of Comics: Word and Image (ed. Varnum and Gibbons, 2001), reviewed comics and scholarly books continually, and spoke at myriad conferences and in classrooms, museums, and galleries. He was a busy, and happy, scholar, one who enabled the work of others.

David was a scholar, librarian, and teacher with a multifaceted  professional life. Until his retirement last year, he served as Dean of the Library and of Academic Support Services at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, and before that (2005-2009) as Plymouth State's Library Director. A native Ohioan, David earned his B.S. at Wright State in Dayton, his Masters in LIS at Simmons College in Boston, and a Masters in Liberal Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Before Plymouth State, he held positions at UNH (1999-2005), U of New England in Maine (1996-1999), and Westbrook College in Maine (1990-1996). His CV shows a remarkable record of professional service, which his website could only hint at. The breadth and depth of his accomplishments are humbling.

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I feel very fortunate to have known David Beronä and benefited from his scholarship. He was a good soul and a good scholar and he made a difference. My condolences to his loved ones and colleagues everywhere; his stay was too short, and we are poorer without him.

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ICAF 2011: CH (right), David (center) and our colleague Corey Creekmur
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The New 333 (Summer Term 2015)

5/25/2015

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CSUN Prof. Charles Hatfield here. The CSUN Summer Term is upon us—which means that English 333: Comics and Graphic Novels begins again tomorrow, Tuesday, May 26! I've been eagerly prepping the class syllabus, Moodle pages, and other materials, and look forward to our first meeting tomorrow evening.

As part of my prep, I've updated this site's informational page on 333 to show what we'll be doing this term. From that page you can follow links to pages that set out the course requirements and textbooks.

So, if you spend a few minutes with this site, you can find out about the history of 333, its aims and rationale, and its place in the world of comics studies, as I see it. Note that there's even a PDF of the syllabus that you can print out and read ahead of time!

Students, I'm looking forward to meeting you and to our shared work together this term. See you tomorrow!
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    Prof. Charles Hatfield of CSU Northridge, author of Hand of Fire (2011) and Alternative Comics (2005) and co-editor of The Superhero Reader (2013)

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Banner image: detail from The Eternals #18 (Dec. 1977), by cartoonist Jack Kirby, inker Mike Royer, and colorist Glynis Wein. © Marvel Comics.
Digital treatment by Matthew Howard at marswillsendnomore.wordpress.com.