This course offers a close study of visual narrative through the exploration of graphic novels and comics.  Students will analyze and evaluate how visual storytelling can act as a window and mirror for all learners.  By senior year, students have been practicing their Language Arts skills for three years in high school, and this provides all learners, especially visual learners, with the opportunity to apply those skills to a new and contemporary medium: graphic novels and comics. Students will: 

• Work with a variety of styles, topics, and structures while also analyzing the impact of those choices and how the forms have evolved over time

• Apply their knowledge of craft, structure, voice, and form by creating their own visual narrative

• Understand how to interpret both the art and the text in graphic novels

• Analyze how the art works with and enhances the text

• Analyze how specific choices contribute to characterization, plot, motifs, and themes

• Analyze how authors have developed their own voice through their style, form, structure

• Understand how texts are a result of the social climate of the time, and how the form continues to evolve in order to reflect new issues that become a part of the mainstream discourse

• Examine how archetypes appear in visual texts and graphic novels, how they’re reinvented, and how they’re rejected, and the implication of archetypes on the reader and society.

• Examine how graphic novels and comics have had an impact on today’s mainstream media.