Comics Perspectives: Manga (2024FA)

Manga, or comics from Japan has contributed immensely to visual storytelling all over the world. This course focuses on the history and cultural context of manga through assigned readings, lectures, in-class discussions, and both in-class and out-of-class assignments.

This class is focused on the history, creative and business ecosystem of manga publishing in Japan, and how manga creators learn their craft, and create stories and characters that keep readers coming back for the latest chapters every week/month. We'll also discuss how you might apply some of these techniques to your comics, even if you don't draw in a "manga-influenced" style.

Comics Workshop: Memoir, Non-Fiction, & Journalism (2024FA)

Comics Workshop: Memoir, Non-Fiction and Journalism is a project-based course in which students will produce a series of nonfiction comics about real places, times and people. This course is focused on the power of comics as an explanatory tool–how to use the medium to communicate a vast amount of real-world information in a concise way that leaves a deep impact on the reader. There will be reading assignments and discussions of works in nonfiction comic genres such as memoir, history and journalism.

There will also be a lot of comics-making, which will produce things you can hold and share. This course will take us from scratch to several publishable minicomics.

Foundations in Comics & Visual Storytelling (2024FA)

Comics Writing Workshop: Scripting (2024FA)

Writing for comics requires a number of techniques such as scripting, thumbnailing, visual storytelling, page layouts, and more. And of course this is all on top of the basics of telling a good story!