“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
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Cartoonists-Day-More-Little-Lit.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 5/3/2002 Cartoonist’s Day Transcript While you’re spreading the newspaper this Sunday to finally catch up a little on your painting around the house, and you catch a glimpse of the comics underneath that gallon of pistachio green paint, remember that it’s Cartoonist’s Day, in […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/11.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 3/11/2002 Comics and 9/11 Transcript It’s six months since September 11th, and as though to mark that tragic anniversary, there is a commemorative energy that has been generated in what may at first seem like a surprising place: comic books. There are a number […]
It’s the birthday today of Marjorie Buell, the creator of one of the first comics about an empowered little girl, the incomparable Little Lulu, who has Shelley Fraser Mickle remembering.
Author John Cech Air Date 5/4/2001 Some Books for Cartoonist’s Day Transcript It’s Cartoonist’s Day tomorrow, and if there’s a young Charles Schultz or Lynda Barry in your household, you might want to surprise them, for a birthday or as a sign of your solidarity, with two new books about cartoons — books that you’ll […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/I-love-ya-tomorrow-Annies-Anniversary.mp3 Author John Cech (read by Heather Tomasello) Air Date 4/20/2001 Tomorrow and Tomorrow Transcript Today marks the anniversary of the Broadway debut of the musical Annie. As a kid, I was introduced to this scrappy orphan not through the play but the 1982 movie version, with the unforgettable Carol […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Little-lit.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 1/9/2001 Comics and Fairy Tales Transcript I can’t think of a better combination of favorite things than folk tales and comics. Enlist some of our more intriguing cartoonists and illustrators like Walt Kelly, Bruce McCall, William Joyce, and Harry Bliss to adapt one of […]
Read more "Comics and Fairy Tales: Art Spiegelman’s Little Lit."
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Ripleys-Believe-It-or-Not.mp3 Author Shelley Fraser Mickle Air Date 12/13/2000 Believe It or Not Transcript Believe it or not, here’s Shelley Fraser Mickle with a remembering about Robert Ripley: In 1913, Robert Ripley was hired as a cartoonist for the New York Globe. Five years later, he was worrying about coming up […]
Here’s John Cech with some thoughts about the various media incarnations of Buster Brown.
