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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design
Exiles: Trauma, Art & Design, Edwin Lew-Højbak Paquette
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
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.
Archi-Comics, Timothy Gatto
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 …
Pondering Pauses: Experiencing Stillness In Scrolling Webcomics, Moira Dewey
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 …
A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak
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
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 …
The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus
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 …
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
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 …
Existence Stories, Althea Keaton
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 …
Comics In The Evolving Media Landscape, Sarah Russell
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
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 …
Crafting Comics: My Journey Through The Creative Process, Carrie Hill
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, …
The Living Chain: An Applied Exploration Of Mythological Narrative And Traditional Printmaking Techniques, Jordan M. Gillenwater
The Living Chain: An Applied Exploration Of Mythological Narrative And Traditional Printmaking Techniques, Jordan M. Gillenwater
Undergraduate Honors Theses
The Living Chain is a body of work built to apply and analyze mythological narrative and traditional printmaking techniques. The work is a collection of prints telling an original narrative that derives much of its visual and thematic style from the works of the Baroque and Medieval periods, as well as significant influence from the prints of Gustave Doré. The purpose of this paper is to explore the ideas, mythologies, histories, and symbols found in and inspiring the work, in order to better understand the work’s purpose and its technical challenges. Additional focus is given to the historical significance and …
Oronyms, Arianna Cozart
Oronyms, Arianna Cozart
Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects
There are many ways of creating understanding; art is one of them. When there are misunderstandings created through a combination of art and oronyms, however, that is where the real fun begins. Oronyms are similar to homonyms however, instead of the same word being spelled in different ways, oronyms are usually composed of multiple words used together that cause confusion in the brain.[1]
An example would be the phrase, “Have you seen me at my darkest,” being misconstrued as, “Have you seen me in my carcass.” This creates an oronym which could be illustrated as two individuals, one envisioning …