You know, when all is said and done, what a great class this was. When will we ever get a chance to study comic books for a whole semester in our journeys toward scholar-hood. Most likely never again. I have had several of my friends come up to me and roll their eyes at the subject material for this course. At first all I had to defend myself was throwing out nifty, trivial pursuit-like facts about comics like the man who invented Wonder Woman graduated with a Ph.D. from Harvard and invented the Lie Detector machine, or some man named Thomas Nast created the images of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam.
That was fine and all, but that did not convince my friends to believe in the credibility of American Graphic Media. Much time has passed since then, and now I fell more prepared to face the challenging assumptions the course still has. Now I can talked about how the Nuclear age of the 1950s was reflected in comic books with stories of the ill-fate Atoman, and Captain Marvel's nuclear holocaust story from Comic Book Nation. Or I can talk about Race and Racism in comics like the story of mistreatment Christopher Priest dealt with by being the first black editor at Marvel. I have found that whenever I discuss this with my friends they are drawn more closely to what I have to say when I talk about Race in comics instead of who invented Santa's image.
As far as the photo essay goes... I had fun making it. It was nice to flex my creative muscles and get credit for it. Would I recommend this class to someone? Sure. I don't think I'll ever read comics or watch their film/television adaptations the same ever again.
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