Art and Design Commons^™

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.

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 …