Art and Design Commons^™

Dragon's Lair, Julie Cheung

Student Sequential Art and Comics

An 8 page zine that goes through two characters exploring a cave that is the dragon's lair.

The Adventures Of Ice The Penguin, Quentin Perry

Student Sequential Art and Comics

The adventures of ice the penguin

Junie The Fox, Joseline Tejada-Aragon

Student Sequential Art and Comics

A comic about my original character Junie the Fox. In this comic Junie is introduced and a story is told of is conflict with a cat named Bug.

From Panels To Shelves: The Evolving Intersection Of Comics And Italian Libraries. History, Issues, Perspectives, Andrea Tosti

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Despite comics' popularity and cultural significance in Italy, its integration into Italian libraries has been slow, problematic, and uneven. This is reflected in the scarcity of academic research on the topic, which demands further in-depth exploration.

In the context of Italian libraries, characterized by chronic underfunding and staffing shortages, comics might be perceived as a low priority. However, as essential cultural institutions, libraries must strive to reflect both the contemporary era and the evolving reading habits of their audience. Comics, in this regard, could prove to be – and in part already are – a critical resource, a 'booster' for …

Jurgen Comics Contest Newspaper And Artwork - Fall 2023, Julia Martinez

Jurgen Banned Art Comics Contest

Digital edition of the Jurgen Comics Contest broadsheet newspaper celebrating the Fall 2023 Contest winners. The newspaper design and supplemental artwork were created by contest student editor Julia Martinez. Supplemental promotional materials include a poster for an online information session.

The Fall 2023 Jurgen Comics Contest invited VCU students to explore a specific historical incident of censorship or suppression of visual art, books, music, film or performance.

A View Of Black Speculative Past And Future: An Interview With Tim Fielder, Julian Chambliss

Third Stone

No abstract provided.

Exiles: Trauma, Art & Design, Edwin Lew-Højbak Paquette

University Honors Theses

A BFA thesis about the researching, writing, illustrating, and printing of a graphic novel. The story, an auto-biographical exploration of trauma using magical realism, is based on the Jungian psychology concept of shadow work and Internal Family Systems (IFS).

Perils Of The Heroine: The Historic Role Of Woman In Comics, Britain Bray

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

Now more than ever the comics industry is welcoming diversity in its creators and stories, but with its historically misogynistic past, what legacy are creators inheriting? This essay seeks to explore that history, delving into the various eras of American Comics and how sexism shaped them. From the earliest heroines of the 40s, the ground-breaking feminist indie comics of the 70s, and the rampant female sexualization of the 90s, examples of brilliance and drudgery will be investigated in order to gain a better understanding of how comics became what they are today.

Shambles & Crowley: Autobiographical Fiction In Four Panels, Shumyle Haider

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This paper explores the development of Shambles & Crowley, a collection of autobiographical fiction comic strips featuring Shambles, a burnt-out boy, Crowley, a loudmouthed crow, Franz Kafka, a silent companion, Saadat Manto, a prankster, and God, an overbearing authority figure. Drawing inspiration from comic strips such as Peanuts by Charles Schulz, Calvin & Hobbes by Will Waterson, and shows such as Louie by Louis C.K, and Mr. Robot by Sam Esmail, the stories explore the inner conflicts of Shambles, which are induced by struggles with love, loneliness, depression, and faith.

Archi-Comics, Timothy Gatto

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Humor in architecture is not at the forefront of architect’s minds, this comes from architects need to be deemed serious. This way of thinking is what has backed architects up into a corner banal and stagnant architecture. Architecture is the art of context, everything in architecture is referential. Humor is foundationally the exact same way, the incongruity theory makes humor possible by putting a concept into context with things and finding contradictions in the process, thus developing a joke. Each of these arts, humor and architecture, are that of context and when architecture is delivered like humor, it points out …

I Come Creeping: Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain In Graphic Narrative, Ellie James

Senior Honors Theses

Between August 24 and September 4 of 1921, approximately 10,000 West Virginia coal miners marched to Blair Mountain in Logan County in a militant stand for their right to unionize. Despite its status as the largest labor uprising in United States history, few know or understand the impact of the Battle of Blair Mountain today, even within the borders of West Virginia. This creative project aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to memorialize this period of the West Virginia Mine Wars through the creation of a 10-page comic, titled I Come Creeping, which depicts and is informed by the …

Questions Of Canon In Gilbert Hernandez's "Palomar" Comics, Martin Dolan

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

While questions of misrepresentation are starting to be addressed in academia — acknowledging racial, cultural, gender, and artistic diversity — there is still much work to be done to close the gap between the literary canon and what contemporary literature actually looks like. These efforts have been a step in the right direction, but representation of unconventional literatures is often spotty, boiling down entire literary scenes into one book. This is especially true for those that offer formal or structural challenges – including multilingual and graphic narratives that don’t easily fit into a canonical “box.”

Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar comics, serialized …

Pondering Pauses: Experiencing Stillness In Scrolling Webcomics, Moira Dewey

Honors Projects

This paper examines the evolution of comics and its form, and how this changing format influences how the reader experiences the narrative, specifically in moments of stillness. Webtoons, a specific scrolling format for webcomics, have unique tools at their disposal due to their form. These prompt the reader to pause, allowing them to practice being still in order to experience the surrounding world, even if that world is fictional. After going through a brief history of webcomics and webtoons, this paper analyzes two specific webtoons, Green & Gold and Seasons of Blossom, to take a closer look at how …

Storytelling For A Changing World: Comics As Agitprop, Kruttika Susarla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay imagines fictional storytelling and urban practices of maintenance, repair, and care as interrelated to one another. They are both practices engaged in building a better world. Urban scholars like Gautam Bhan, Shannon Mattern, and David Harvey propose the city as a space for envisioning the kind of community we want to be—a space for working towards our collective future. By engaging in fictional storytelling, I argue, we are doing the same thing: the dual work of taking from fact and representing it to an audience while also engaging in imagining and world-building. This is also a practice of …

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

The Precarity Of Images: Sci-Fi Worldbuilding And Its Uses In Agitprop, Noah Jodice

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

“The Precarity of Images” examines how theories of worldbuilding common to the science fiction genre are applied to the making of agitational propaganda for liberation movements. In doing so, it questions how both explicit and implicit political images—posters, games, comics, illustrations, social media posts—either light a pathway for making a more just world or limit our ability to imagine alternate futures.

Following the ethos of Steven Jackson’s essay “Rethinking Repair,” the paper takes the “breakdown, erosion, and decay” of images as a starting point. Images change meaning over time as our cultural connections to them shift. Strategies of decoding and …

Gumball Astronauts: Establishing A Space-Time Vocabulary For Genre Bending In Picture Stories, Henry Uhrik

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This paper attempts to redefine genre as a set of bodily experiences rather than a collection of thematic objects. Beginning with the western genre as a whole and ending with my own comics work, I pull apart elements within specific narratives and analyze them as mechanical divides that disrupt the reader’s experience of time and space. This paper explores these generic arcs that branch from film to comics to video games. The first section of the paper pulls apart the approach I take when looking at genre, one that is influenced by Bahktin’s idea of the chronotope, a time-space defining …

Everybody Is A Critic: A Guide To The Critical Evaluation Of Visual Media For Generation Z, Cody Alexander Rusk

Masters Theses

The youth of today, especially Generation Z, lack the ability to think critically. An area that seems to be especially difficult for Generation Z to critically evaluate is visual media. This is an issue because visual media has an influential hold (both emotionally and mentally) over this generation and is a key factor in swaying the opinions and behaviors of these young minds. Visual media is a powerful tool that. should continue to be used by future generations, but with the knowledge that there will always be potentially negative influences, and more importantly, ways to identify and defend against them. …

The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that war has been the greatest catalyst for the American comic book medium to become a socio-political change agent within western society. Comic books have become one of the most pervasive influences to global popular culture, with superheroes dominating nearly every popular art form. Yet, the academic world has often ignored the comic book medium as a niche market instead of integrated into the broader discussions on cultural production and conflict studies. This paper intends to bridge the gap between what has been classified as comic book studies and the greater academic world to demonstrate the …

The Joy Of Cooking With Ots: A Visual Guide, Sarah Baker

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Access to the full guide found here: https://mixam.com/share/60bf9e1ed250502f2e67534e

Occupational therapy (OT) is an allied healthcare profession that is uniquely situated at the intersection of art and science. OT seeks to improve quality of life by addressing occupations, or daily activities that are meaningful and purposeful (Nelson, 2014). In order to accomplish these goals, occupational therapists (OTs) must use design thinking through the lens of evidence-based practice. This artistic creativity paired with well-researched scientific findings mimics the visual nature of this guide, which prioritizes this need for alternative representation of the sciences.

This visual guide focuses on the interconnectivity of culture, …

Bully Me: A Graphic Novel; The Return: A Graphic Novel; Comakademix: A Comics Anthology; Leadbetter: A Comic; Laundry: A Minicomic -And- The Erotics Of Comics: An Exegesis, Bruce Roberts Mutard

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Beholding a comic is ideally, a pleasure. The work informs, entertains and stimulates the mind in some way. There is no gainsaying which works will affect which beholders howsoever it does, yet the expecta­tion of pleasure from a work of comics makes behold­ers seek it. Making the comic is also a pleasure, even if the process can be long-winded, winding and dif­ficult. The maker wants to give others the same plea­sure they drew from beholding comics, but in their way, making their vision of Batman, Lieutenant Blue­berry or, their own story worlds. What this research seeks to explain are many …

Storytelling Through Comics: An Animated Reflection, Skylar Kaster

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

For my Honors Senior Capstone Project, I am exploring the methods of 1970s -1990s newspaper comics, focusing specifically on the comics “Calvin and Hobbes”, “The Far Side”, “Garfield”, and “Cathy”. I present and engage with these comic artists’ opinions, methods, and experiences. Additionally, I delve into my personal experience and motivation behind comics. My final product culminating these findings is a 2D Whiteboard Stop Motion animation approximately 8 minutes long, accompanied by a voiceover and script.

The Transformation Of R.A. Kosasih's Mahabharata Wayang Comics Design: Comparison Of The 1955 Version With The 1975 Version, Iwan Gunawan

International Review of Humanities Studies

Mahabharata was an epic Hindu story that has been adapted to comics for so many times, by many comic artists. R.A. Kosasih, was one that was known for his mastery in creatingWayang Comics, and Mahabharata was his best creation. He created two versions of Mahabharata comics. The first was in 1955, published by Melodi and the second in 1975, by Maranatha. The storylines were basically the same, but there were differences not only in formats or spelling system, but in the visual narratives. The pictures in Maranatha version were designed in a more up dated style in comics. In the …

"Here In The Western World": A Comparison Between Japanese Manga In America And American Comics, Daniel Feathers

English Student Work

This project, “Here in the Western World: A Comparison between Japanese Manga in America and American comics”, examines the structural and compositional differences between Japanese Manga and American comics. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which the two similar mediums split from each other in the early 60’s to become two distinct “genres” in the comic book world. The project examines the effects of the “localization” of Japanese manga to fit more “western” sensibilities regarding both art and content on the integrity of the work. Methodologically, it draws from a range of comic-book scholarship including Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics.” …

Existence Stories, Althea Keaton

Masters Theses

Existence Stories is an interactive activist art project that gathers personal narratives from people about the ways in which their lives have been impacted by the current political climate in the United States, particularly surrounding the 2016 Presidential election and its aftermath. The project harnesses first-person narrative and audience participation as tools for humanizing the “Other” and building connections between people through the act of sharing stories. As the project has progressed over time, it has evolved in multiple directions and come to incorporate a variety of media, primarily comics, animation, printmaking, and zines. The roles that reproduction, distribution, and …

Animal Heads: Exploring Christian Themed Solutions And Mental Health Through Comics, Mariannette Oyola-Perez

Masters Theses

The second leading cause of death for the ages of 10-24 is suicide, a statistic that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows has steadily risen since 1999. Although it is seldom spoken about in mental health circles, an enmity seems to exist between Christianity and modern psychology in regards to mental illness and how it should be treated; this enmity could be preventing helpful Christian-based principles from being shared with the at-risk population while simultaneously excluding Christians from a conversation they need to be a part of.

Interestingly, further research shows that the at-risk demographic overlaps significantly with …

Comics In The Evolving Media Landscape, Sarah Russell

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

The Sandman: The Artifice Of Comics And Power Of Dreams, Nathan Teft

Masters Theses

Neil Gaiman’s Vertigo Series The Sandman is an exceptional artistic endeavor. From “Preludes and Nocturnes”(1988) to “The Wake” (1996), Gaiman worked alongside a team of talented artists and graphic designers to produce an indelible work of revisionist mythology. This thesis will attempt to establish the framework by which our modern literary canon has celebrated classical Western myths while relegating graphic or visual forms of literature or outright neglecting comic myths altogether. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics will frame the discourse for pictographic analysis of Neil Gaiman’s mythological revisionism of Milton’s Paradise Lost in Season of Mists, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities …

De-Stigmatizing Mental Illness Through Graphic Medicine, Megumi Tsuda

Phase 1

Graphic medicine - or the communication of health-related narratives through images and texts, such as comics - has been increasingly recognized as a powerful educational tool. My project investigates the value of integrating graphic medicine to medical education, specifically to improve mental health literacy and de-stigmatize mental illness. As a medical student, I have encountered several instances where fellow medical students and even doctors casually throw around diagnostic terminology, especially those used to describe mental health disorders, in a colloquial and insensitive manner that seem to indicate that they do not take mental illness seriously, or even ignorant of what …

Crafting Comics: My Journey Through The Creative Process, Carrie Hill

Honors Theses

When I was 12 years old, I drew a short, goofy comic book that followed the adventures of Carrie Hill and her wacky friends. Now as a 22-year-old graphic design student, I've continued to draw comics because they can tell stories with great depth using only a sequence of images. Whenever I read Ben Hatke's Zita the Spacegirl or Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant, I dream of publishing a graphic novel or comic strip. This dream prompted me to create several comics for my thesis, exploring different genres and styles. My original intention was to develop several 10-page comics, …