Were you forbidden to have comic books when you were a child? Did you find clever ways to violate this well-intentioned parental prohibition? Did you survive with mind and character intact? Does all this make you curious about the emergence in the ‘90s of the graphic novel? Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis takes us to revolutionary Iran, through the eyes of a clever, confident young girl. Art Spiegelman’s Maus tells the story of the Holocaust through the dual perspectives of the artist son and his father, a survivor. We will read these along with Jason Lutes’ magisterial Berlin, twenty years in the making and set during the later years of the Weimar Republic, and Lynd Ward’s Vertigo: A Novel in Woodcuts, a celebrated 1930s precursor of today’s graphic novels.

But what does it mean to “read” a graphic novel? What are the design features of “sequential narrative art,” arguably with roots not only in the comics tradition, but in all visual storytelling, whether cave paintings or church stained glass windows? When reading “novels in words” we take for granted such conventions as paragraph breaks, quotation marks, and omniscient narrators. Do we respond as seamlessly to the ways graphic novels tell the tale? For instance, what is the effect of how panels flow on the page? Of the varieties of “word bubbles,” or the montage of words and images? As we share our responses to these graphic novels and their distinctive elements, we may gain new insights into other forms of fiction.