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

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).