WHAT'S QUEER ABOUT COMICS?

Course Description

In their introduction to a special issue of American Literature entitled Queer about Comics, Ramzi Fawaz and Darieck Scott suggest that comics are formally queer: “the formal character of comics—the idea that you can have infinite iterations of a given story that never reproduce a single trajectory—helps clarify the ways that fabulation underwrites our realities, in decidedly queer ways” (202). They go on to explain that comics create a visual fabulation, or “open mesh,” that “underscores the limitless differences produced between an ever-expanding range of images and the figures and worlds they represent” (203). Comics help make visible fluid, overlapping, and diverging possibilities in their very form. This course explores how comics represent varying and multiplicitous aspects of queer identity, community, and desire. We will traverse a variety of genres—from coming out and coming of age narratives to horror, western, and sci-fi comics—to explore how queer comics artists experiment with and within the boundaries of form to represent complex queer subjectivity. Alongside these comics and graphic narratives, we will read queer theory to historicize and contextualize these narratives and comics theory to build our reading and writing practice through critical and creative modes. Ultimately, this course is a provocation to explore what is queer about comics as a medium.

Required Text

Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style Chamberlain Bros 2005
Meg-John Baker and Jules Schelle, Queer: A Graphic History Icon Books 2016
The Nib, Matt Bors, Matt Lubchansky, Sarah Mirk, and Eleri Harris, Be Gay, Do Comics IDW 2020
Maia Kobabe, Gender Queer: A Memoir Oni Press 2019
Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Fantagraphics 2017
Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam First Second 2018
Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Yona Harvey, Alitha Martinez, and Afua Richardson, Black Panther: World of Wakanda Marvel 2017
Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine DeLandro, Bitch Planet Vol. 1 Extraordinary Machine Image 2015
Tina Horn, Michael Dowling, and Alejandra Gutierrez, SFSX (Safe Sex) Vol. 1 Image Comics, 2020

Optional Text

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art William and Morrow 1994
Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist 2008 edition, W. W. Norton and Company 2008