Friday, January 8, 2016

Module 1 Example: Now Paging, Comics!

So for the first post on this blog, students should be exploring the following questions: 
  1. What popular culture are you drawn to and why?  
  2.  Why is it important to you and what value do you get from engaging in it?   
  3. What do you anticipate you will learn about that particular form of popular culture in this course?
  It's a little bit different for me since I've already taken this course, but I can speak to my own journey of learning with comics. 

 I started reading comic books in middle school in the early 1990s.  I would spend much of the money I earned from my paper route at the local comic book store.  I read mostly Marvel Comics (they publish Avengers, X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four), and just really enjoyed the adventures and the super-powers.  Pretty straight-forward.  However, my comic-reading continued on and off through high school and college.  
Cover to Whiz Comics #31 from https://archive.org/details/fawcett_Whiz_Comics_031
Cover to Whiz Comics #31
It was something I did for entertainment, until I got to graduate school, wherein I learned that two very important lessons.  The first was that comics could contain serious and legitimate content.  Herein, I was introduced to powerful works like Maus, Persepolis, Understanding Comics, Watchmen and many other popular and powerful graphic novels.  The second thing that I learned was that I could study comics and write about comics from an academic point of view.  This blew my mind and got me really excited.  So I began to read, research, and write a lot about comics--eventually--getting the opportunity to teach this course.  

 Studying comics has been a great experience for me.  It has not only taught me more about comics--a form of entertainment, I greatly enjoy--but it has made me think differently about how we communicate, symbolism in images, how I make sense of story-telling (be it in comics, film, novels, or radio/audio), and a better appreciation of the arts as a whole.  Comics have introduced me to some of the most amazing and skilled people in the abstract (that is, I'm not aware of certain artists' work) and in the concrete (I've met many artists through my interest).
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9 comments:

  1. UnknownJanuary 20, 2016 at 8:43 PM

    I have never personally read a comic book but I know a lot of people who do. I have always been interested in other things. In terms of popular culture, I am drawn to why our society today is infatuated with certain celebrity's (Kim Kardashian) who have done nothing to earn their fame.

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  2. UnknownJanuary 20, 2016 at 8:43 PM

    I have never personally read a comic book but I know a lot of people who do. I have always been interested in other things. In terms of popular culture, I am drawn to why our society today is infatuated with certain celebrity's (Kim Kardashian) who have done nothing to earn their fame.

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  3. UnknownJanuary 20, 2016 at 8:44 PM

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  4. Lance EatonJanuary 21, 2016 at 5:30 AM

    Thanks Cooper--well, good news---in this course, you will get to read a comic book as it is part of one our modules later on. You'll have to let me know what your initial experience is like!

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  5. UnknownJanuary 21, 2016 at 11:11 AM

    Hello - I am actively trying to figure out this blogging portion. Unfortunately I don't take well to 'threading' and 'posting' on platforms similiar to anything like Twitter.

    I recently purchased Comic #'s 1,2 and 4 of Thor Girl. I am interested to see where Marvel is going with their female version of the Avengers. I have always been intrigued with the fantasy of super human powers in any light whether in a movie, tv show or comic book. Archie was my first comic strips and books that I ever delved into. Wonder Woman was my hero as a child and Sarah Connor is my modern day superhero that holds her own special powers. I have always translated Sarah as a child into who I wanted to be as an adult..somehow I just found a piece of me in her and it has always stuck. Needless to say I am happy to see her legacy continue with the Terminator sagas in the movie theater...I didn't get into the tv Chronicles. Perhaps that is alot of what Popular Culture is where do we find ourselves trickled within it? How are we defined by it and how do we define it?

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  6. UnknownJanuary 22, 2016 at 10:49 AM

    Similar to Cooper, I too and interested as to why America is so obsessed with useless celebrity's. Why is the richest group in America fueled by our need to be entertained by some artificial tv screen? When did things start to change and children became less interested in bugs and dirt and more interested in iPads and computers? and will things ever go back to "normal" like how I grew up?

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  7. UnknownJanuary 22, 2016 at 5:51 PM

    I have never read comic books and don't even know anybody who does it. It is just because I lived in Russia where such things or something like this existed only in a form of children's magazine. I read this analog of comic book regularly and liked it until 7 or 8. It means that now I just try to understand some parts of pop culture with the help of this course and people who take part in it.

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  8. Javas VenkJanuary 23, 2016 at 2:01 PM

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  9. UnknownJanuary 24, 2016 at 8:31 PM

    I can also say that I agree with Cooper. As a kid I was never one to watch cartoons on TV or read comic books. I don't not like them, I just never really had an interest in them. I think that the idea of comic books is cool, but I couldn't get interested in them. i am more of a person who reads non fiction books and watches action movies.

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