ENGL 228
Graphic Storytelling Spring 2010
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Telling stories in pictures, rather than words, is a persistent interest in all cultures at all times, but technological innovation has allowed picture storytelling to blossom in the last 300 years or so, producing the image and video-saturated world we live in today. The various forms of picture-storytelling have arguably displaced written words as our dominant storytelling mode. In this course we will focus on storytelling in pictures, through both historical examples and contemporary examples. We will consider older forms of picture-storytelling in paintings and engravings; the birth of the modern comic-strip and also its ubiquitous descendent, the comic book, along with their upscale and even snooty relative the “graphic novel;” and we will consider video storytelling, along with animation. We will energize our thinking through steady comparison to storytelling in words, and through critical and theoretical readings.