While browsing the support forums on SourceForge for Wikindx, I came across a thread on an Online-Bibliographie zur Comicforschung (Online Bibliography for Comics Research).
In fact, it’s not the only online bibliography of research into comic books. There are three more which are linked to from that site: ComicsResearch.org, comics research bibliography, and Sekundärliteratur zum Comic (German). To my knowledge, nothing similar even exists for quantum computing.
In a related note, the University of Waterloo once offered a course, ENGLISH 760, called “American Comics and Graphic Novels”. The course description is as follows:
In this course we’ll read and study contemporary American “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce and aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud), i.e., comics. We’ll take a look at the history of American comics — and comics in general — and think about the structure, function, and rhetorical potency of this genre of literature, which relies (usually) on an especially rich correlation of text and image. To help understand that correlation, we’ll draw on the work of visual language theorists, social semioticians, and comic artists themselves, such as Scott McClud [sic] and Will Eisner. Among the comic artists we’ll likely study are Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Frank Miller, Joe Sacco, Art Speigelman, and Chris Ware. Course work will include a presentation, an essay, and a short comic (no drawing skills required). For more information, please follow this link: http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~amcmurry/comicgradcourse.pdf
Students in the class don’t even have to draw! I actually sat in on a few lectures.
Incidentally, Scott McCloud, the author of “Understanding Comics”, gave a talk on comic books at TED 2005, which is worth watching if you’re both a scientist and a fan of the medium.
It’s because of things like this that I sometimes question whether I was in the right academic field for my graduate studies.
– davinci 11781
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