Comic Books as Literature

This is the wiki page for LITT 200, an academic course on comics currently being taught at Lewis and Clark Community College.

I'm the instructor of the course, Steve Higgins, and I am serious about advocating comics. It is my belief that comics are a worthy subject for academic discourse because they are a form of literature unlike any other, pulling in the best aspects of the mediums of film and novels and combining them into something new. In my class, then, I promote this attitude by encouraging my students to get involved in the in-class discussion of the various graphic novels that we read as a class. This page will be used over the course of the semester to record and catalog that class discussion for posterity, so that we may capture that moment in time and come back to it in the future and so that we may share our experiences with others more readily. 

Also, midway through the course, the students will each read a different graphic novel on their own and present on it in class. They will summarize the content of the book and then evaluate it, filling in their fellow classmates on whether the book is worth reading in their estimation and why they feel that way. The students will also be posting encapsulated reviews here so that they might reach a wider audience.

Finally, on Friday, April 4, two guest speakers came to talk to the class. These speakers are professional comic creators and they lectured on some of the behind-the-scenes aspects of what goes into making a comic. Their names are B. Clay Moore and Jeremy Haun. The content of that lecture will be shared with the general public on this wiki at the Guest Lecture link. 

Only students enrolled in LITT 200 can update the wiki. However, it is viewable by anyone, so feel free to share this link with anyone you know to continue the discourse on the legitimacy of comics' place in an academic setting.

The class begins with a brief dissection of the medium of comics and then is broken down into five genre units, for which we read one graphic novel each. These genres are: 

superhero (Watchmen)

Crime (Sin City: The Hard Goodbye)

Realism (Jar of Fools)

Science Fiction (V for Vendetta)

fantasy/horror (Sandman: Season of Mists)

Look for individual pages for each of these units to open up over the next few months!

And if you're having difficulty navigating the wiki, please go to the instruction page for more information.