The following syllabi by Alfred Bendixen (Princeton University) provide excellent text pairings and additional teaching materials. First, Graphic America: Comics, Graphic Narrative, and American Culture focuses on texts ranging from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Craig Thompson’s Blankets to Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. The Graphic Memoir covers texts from American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese traditions, focusing particularly on the intersection of “visual and verbal constructions of identity.” Graphic Novels and Comics again provides an excellent range of texts that concentrates on narrative form. In addition, this syllabus includes brief overviews of accompanying assignments, including one to create a comic of one’s own. Lastly, Contemporary Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction traces the morphology of science fiction over the past fifty years, again including both analytical and creative assignment options.

Graphic America:  Comics, Graphic Narrative, and American Culture

The Graphic Memoir

Graphic Novels and Comics 

Contemporary Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction

Introductory description: Katherine E. Bishop, Miyazaki International College, Japan

Course syllabi: Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University