Instructor: Charles Hatfield
Location: Los Angeles, UCLA
Mode: In-person
Dates: July 28–August 1, 2025
Tuition: $1200

Description

Popular yet personal, branded as trivial yet rich with meaning, comics are more than cultural scraps or leftovers. They can be many things: art objects, storying machines, readable games, tools for making knowledge, and platforms for worldbuilding and political argument. And they are everywhere, moving through the world and gifting readers with resources for making meaning. This workshop will study comics as both historical artifacts and works of art, delve into the processes (both social and material) of their production, and consider how we, as teachers, researchers, and creators, can use them.

Comic art has a complex social life. Comic books, graphic novels, strips, and cartoons come in varied material (and now digital) forms and reach diverse readerships. Many are ephemeral, yet many last. Comics history endures despite its seeming ephemerality, archived by collectors, fans, and, increasingly, archiving professionals and research libraries. Conserving, organizing, and accessing these artifacts can be a challenge but also a profound pleasure; comics offer us opportunities for creative engagement as well as deep research. Our workshop will study how comics come to be, how they circulate, where and how they are archived, and how we may teach with them.

We will focus on comics’ physical materiality, on firsthand experience and “show and tell.” Our hands-on sessions will mix varied forms of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century comic art, from newspaper pages to comic magazines, from graphic novels to minicomix, zines, and webcomics. Drawing on nearby libraries and archives, we’ll explore the material and social histories of comics, the idiosyncrasies of comics production, and how comics have been shored against time by collectors. We’ll consider comics as products of various industries, cultures, and social scenes—at once historic artifacts and urgent dispatches from the here and now.

• the distinctions among various genres of comics (including comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, webcomics, and minicomics) and how they look and feel
• various ways comics are produced and circulated, by whom, and under what conditions
• how to find and access comics in archives
• how we can deploy comics in teaching
• how comics can elevate marginalized and minoritized identities and serve as vehicles for social protest and transformation
• overall, how comics move through and “trouble” the world, in the best sense of that word.

Requirements

I will share a list of pre-readings with participants prior to the course. We will read further materials during our week together. In addition, everyone should prepare a brief (one or two-page) written or comics-style introduction to themselves, to be shared no later than our first meeting. Expect to participate in class discussions, take part in various site visits, and interact with, and prepare questions, for our guest speakers (comics and archiving experts). Sketchnoting or keeping a comics diary will be encouraged.

Feel free to email me with questions at (Enable Javascript to see the email address). 

Offered

2025, 2023

Credit

Completion of this course helps to meet credits for one of the following certificate requirements:

• 1 of 2 elective credit courses for Certificate in Rare Books and Manuscripts, or
• 1 of 2 elective credit courses for Certificate in Librarianship, Activism, and Justice