The Art of Comics: Hart and Corman
At the annual comics conference at the University of Florida held earlier this spring, Stephanie Boluk spoke with two of the guest artists.
“Understanding comics is serious business,” Scott McCloud writes in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (197). Published in 1993, McCloud’s groundbreaking “comic book about comics” was one of the first attempts to create a cohesive theoretical approach to studying comics. Since the book’s publication, the field of comics studies has grown rapidly. Many universities now offer courses and even graduate degree programs on comics, and scholarly articles about the medium are published regularly in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Several comics scholars have even composed dissertations and monographs in the form of comics, including Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening and Jason Helms’s open-access book, Rhizcomics.
The University of Florida’s English Department features one of the largest comics studies and visual rhetoric programs in North America. Many of the department’s graduate students and professors regularly research, teach, and even create comics, graphic novels, and zines. Their work is aided by the University of Florida Smathers Library’s extensive comics collections. The department also houses the ImageTexT Journal and annually hosts the UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels.
The rapid growth of comics studies at the University of Florida and other institutions in the last twenty years has undoubtedly been fueled by the rising popularity of the medium in mainstream American culture. Sales of print and digital comics exceeded $1 billion in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Superheroes have also gained prominence in popular culture, with blockbuster films like The Avengers and Black Panther earning over $1 billion at the global box office. And the superhero trend won’t end anytime soon – over 30 superhero films are scheduled to be released between 2018 and 2022.
– Brianna Anderson
At the annual comics conference at the University of Florida held earlier this spring, Stephanie Boluk spoke with two of the guest artists.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Comics-Code.mp3 Author Stephanie Boluk Air Date 6/21/2007 Comics Code Authority Seal The Comics Code Transcript You may be surprised to learn that comics, not film, not TV, or even video games, have been subject to the strictest self-imposed censorship of any media industry. Between the 1930s and 1950s, comics — […]
At our annual conference on comics at the University of Florida, Recess cartoonist Stephanie Boluk spoke with the artist Dylan Horrocks.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Brian-Selznick-and-Hugo-Cabret.mp3 Author Susan Raab Air Date 4/24/2007 Brian Selznick and Hugo Cabret Transcript Earlier this spring, Susan Raab caught up with the artist Brian Selznick and talked with him about his latest picture book/graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. This innovative work has been the talk of the children’s book […]
It’s a wonderful coincidence that one of the early practitioners of the comic strip, Richard Felton Outcault, should have been born on the same day, today, in 1863, on which The Simpsons animated television show would premiere, over a century later, in 1990.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/EduComics.mp3 Author Stephanie Boluk Air Date 11/30/2006 EduComics Transcript “It takes practice to learn to ignore the news.” This is what the apathetic father of a young girl trying to figure out the cause of global famine says when she asks him why people go hungry. Unsatisfied by this reply, […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Superman-Returns.mp3 Author Stephanie Sullivan Lytle Air Date 6/27/2006 Superman Returns Transcript Born in the weary depths of the Great Depression, turned down by all but one comics publisher in the country, Superman hit newspaper strips and comics in 1938, becoming the first superhero with his own comic book by 1939. […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Jeff-Smiths-Magnum-Opus-Comic-Bone.mp3 Author Stephanie Boluk Air Date 6/15/2006 Bone Transcript Like many children, one of the things I enjoyed doing when I was young was inventing characters — and even more fun was creating the stories they inhabited. So what happens if you grow up and never stop dreaming up adventures […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Cartoonists-Day-and-Front-Street-Books.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 5/9/2006 Cartoonist’s Day Transcript The funny line drawings that we today refer to as cartoons have been with us for probably as long as people have drawn on the walls and floors of caves or in the wet sand of beaches. The name actually […]
Walt Kelly was one of the masters of American nonsense. His much loved, hilariously cryptic Pogo comic strip first appeared in 1949 and was in American papers even after Kelly’s death in 1973.