On the wake of the Ohio State University Festival of Comic art comes the announcement that two new courses on the topic of comics will be offered in the spring. The classes are offered through the English department and are entitled, “Pictures That Tick ? Difficult History in Comics” and “Comics & Time”.
From the description of Pictures that Tick:
The best artists working in comics right now tackle our skepticism towards comics?and towards drawn images generally?head on, posing a set of fascinating and bizarre questions, such as:
- How do you tell a story from Auschwitz using funny animals?
- Why draw war journalism when the war will be over long before you?ve finished drawing?
- What color is your father?s death?
In this class we will seek to understand the varied and formally inventive answers artists have provided to those questions, and more importantly how those answers make us rethink not only artistic form, but also the ways in which we come to know history. New histories demand new forms for telling history, and the works we will look at in this class demonstrate a wide range of experiments in telling.