Comic Studies & Higher Education
Mixing Pop Culture & Social Science at Southern Oregon University
After teaching a course in Comic Studies in the Honors College at Southern Oregon University in 2017, Associate Professor Erik Palmer reinvented the course for a general student population in 2021.
The result: the Communication Program’s debut section of COMM218 — Comics: Culture & Politics, taught via remote instruction for 36 students in Winter term. The course fulfills the F-Strand (Social Science) requirement in SOU’s University Studies curriculum, and will next be offered in Spring, 2022.
COMM218 provides a holistic take on comics scholarship, embracing interpretive methods consistent with disciplines such as art history, literary studies and Cultural Studies, and also surveying a diversity of approaches within the domain of Communication Studies and the social sciences. These include media effects, audience reception and political economy.
This section of COMM218 is more about the study of comics than the production of comics, and few of the students rate themselves as strong artists or illustrators. But inspired by the visual scholarship of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening, students stepped up boldly to use the visual language of comics to express complex ideas, shared via Mural’s virtual whiteboard application.
The students created narratives that help to reframe the formal structure of comics from something they read about to something they do. Physically drawing comics also involved the students in the practice of autobiography, a topic that the course interrogated even more deeply when reading Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and John Lewis’s March this term. The course also welcomed a virtual visit from March publisher Ted Adams, an SOU alumnus.
COMM218 also drew the attention of local media, as journalist Ryan Pfeil featured the course prominently on the pages of of the Medford Mail-Tribune and the Ashland Daily Tidings.
Stay tuned via the Communication Program’s social media feeds on Facebook and Instagram as we showcase comics created by the students all the way through Spring Break.
