Author: David

Last week of classes before spring break!

This week we’ll finish reading and discussing Sabrina. As I said in class yesterday, as you move into the second half of the book, pay attention to whether there are signs of healing in the book. We’ve spent a lot of time this semester talking about trauma and difficult moments, but where do we see growth and recovery as well? If you see signs of recovery in Sabrina, how do they compare with what you saw in Stiches and Fun Home?

If you haven’t already published your Tracing Pages assignment, please be sure to get in touch with me and let me know when to expect it. You should publish your literacy narrative comics this week too. Do glance ahead at the sketch 8 prompt so you can begin planning for it and start collecting data as soon as you get back from spring break.

Note that I have tried to front-load your work this semester as much as possible, which is why there’s this crunch before spring break. Once we get back from spring break, you’ll still have reading and sketches to do but only one more major project — your halfa kucha presentations in class — before we wrap up your portfolios for the semester.

For the sketch assignment this week, you simply need to combine two photos together to create a new thing. This is an exercise in inductive thinking, which we talked about when we discussed Randy Olson (thesis + antithesis = synthesis). There is no need for fancy photo editing. Simply crop two photos into rectangles and line them up with each other. The photo editing skills are *very* minimal. However, what this sketch really asks of you is to think visually and creatively. Give yourself some time to find photos that you can combine.

Here are two examples from students in past classes, in case the ones in the sketch assignment prompt seem too fancy to follow.

This week, we’ll dive into Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel. Particularly for our first class discussion, pay attention to similarities and differences between this book and Stitches. Remember our discussion of how David Small introduced setting and characters? How does Bechdel do that? How would you describe the similarities and differences in the visual and narrative tones in the two books?

For the sketch assignment on 2/13, you’ll make a comic strip with a beginning, middle, and end. Have you noticed the pattern of progression of the sketch assignments from avatar to combophoto to triptych?

Note: I moved back the deadline for the literacy narrative part 2. But you should be working on your comics drafts!

I hope that those of you who are traveling to return to campus are doing so safely and without too much tumult and stress. I look forward to seeing you all in person on Tuesday for our next class.

We’ll meet in the Callaway Building room S103 (here’s a link to that building on the official Emory map and here’s a link to that building on Google maps). Note that the Callaway Building is kind of confusing — it used to be two different buildings that were combined together and that history lives on in the room numbering. The S in the room number means it’s on the south side of the building so our classroom is in the section of the building that is located right along the quad, not on the side of the building that is closer to the Modern Languages building, Tarbutton Hall, and beyond those over to Woodruff gym (rooms on that side of the building are marked with N for north).

In the meantime, you should be creating your visual notes for sketch 3 this weekend. We’ll talk a bit about the upcoming combophoto assignment in class this week.

For Tuesday, you have a short chunk of Stitches to read. We’ll spend a lot of class on Tuesday discussing Hillary Chute’s chapter “Comics for Grown-Ups.” Chute is probably the foremost academic authority on comics these days — she’s the Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University in Boston and has published six volumes of criticism on comics as a medium. The first twenty pages of her article provide a very useful overview of the history of comics with lots of useful information in it. But in class on Tuesday, we’ll focus most of our attention on the last 10 pages of the essay, the section called “Reading Comics,” which provides us key terms and a theoretical framework for understanding how comics works and how to read and analyze them.

We’ll spend most of Thursday diving back into Stitches. Scott McCloud’s Making Comics should be really useful for you as you begin to think about revising your literacy narratives into comics literacy narratives. We’ll spend a bit of time talking about it, especially paying attention to the 5 aspects needed for clarity in your writing, but mostly I see that chapter as a resource for you as you go about designing your own comics that doesn’t really need to be unpacked in class discussion. If you have questions about the text, then please do raise them though.