With Chester Brown’s historical graphic novel Louis Riel selling more than 20,000 copies, Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking work Fun Home becoming Time’s Book of the Year and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis adapted into an awardwinning animated film, it seems the time is ripe for the academic community to embrace graphic novels as a mainstream subject of serious study.
This year U of T’s English department at St. George Campus debuts a course surveying the graphic novel medium, touching such varied topics as travel, religion, war, faith and mental disease. Sure to be up for discussion: comics as a appropriate platform for social criticism; the popularity of autobiography as the subject of graphic novels; and the controversy between the two terms comic books and graphic novels among fans and authors alike.
Among the required texts for this course are Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Craig Thompson’s Blankets the former a definitive guide to deciphering the format of graphic novels and the latter an acclaimed example of the medium’s capacity to express deep themes.
The Graphic Novel is taught by Professors Andrew Lesk and Jeff Parker in both the fall and winter semesters at University College and Sid Smith.
