 Hi everyone and welcome to this course preview on comics and American culture. This is an online course that's going to be taught this fall at North Shore Community College. So let's take a look at this course because you might be asking, you know, of course on comics, what's that all about? Well, I'm glad you asked that. This course actually covers some really great topics relating to comics. So we look at things like the history of comics, how comics communicate, what is literary art in comics, and why people study comics. So then you might also be asking, what are we reading a course like this? Well, just comics, right? Not quite. I mean, we do read a decent amount of comics, and we do read a decent amount of graphic novels, but we also read academic research on comics. What has been written by scholars about comics and how can that inform what we see and what we read in comics? It's really fascinating to see how comic scholars have influenced and made us think differently about comics. And then we also read a variety of material that you yourself are going to reach out into the world and find and bring into the course. I should also mention that this course does not require book purchases. Instead, what we'll have you doing is requesting books through interlibrary loan through the North Shore Community College Library. I bet you didn't know, but our North Shore Library has, is able to use other libraries on the North Shore and really bring in, I mean, you can get access to thousands of graphic novels, all for free. I bet you didn't know that about our libraries, that you could get that. You can read all the graphic novels you want because our libraries on the North Shore all have them. All right, so the next question is probably going to be what kind of work is involved, right? Because it's a course on comics, and you're not quite sure what work looks like. We have a variety of really cool and interesting assignments, and I'm going to list them here, and it's not that you do all of these assignments. In fact, any of the assignments with an asterisk is an assignment you have choice over that. You get to choose many of the assignments that you get to do in this course. So the first assignment is online discussions. Everybody does that. There's no way around that. And that's okay because we, this is a classroom, and we want to have those discussions. But there's a listing of all these other assignments, many of which are optional. Many of which you'll get to choose whether you want to do one over the other. So there's a great opportunity here to really kind of play around with the different assignments to show what it is that you're learning in this course. Now, the next question people typically have is, so what's in it for me? Like, what do I get out of this course? And I like to think that this course can equip you with what I would consider superpowers, abilities to do things you weren't able before you stepped into this course. So the first is a developed and nuanced understanding of comics. I kind of think of this as like telepathy, right? You're able to really get in there and really be able to change other people's minds about comics. You'll get into discussions, oh, comics aren't important. And you'll be able to have a very, very clear conceptual understanding of why they are. You also get analytical skills to navigate different interpretations of comics. I kind of think of this as like, you know, your flash speed. That is, you're able to jump into a comic and really start to understand it on a deeper level. And that's actually really cool, too, because you can have more sophisticated conversations about meaning and purpose within the art or within the narrative. You also end up with appreciation of comics as a medium for communication and a form of literary art. So I kind of see this like your X-ray vision, right? You can see through comics. You can see through, you know, a lot of the poor arguments that are put out there about comics and really talk about their value and their importance. You also get the history of comics and it's a place with a larger property of our culture. That right there is your ability to time travel, right? To top in that DeLorean and go into the past and say, here's where and why comics are important. You also get a contextual sense of comic scholarship. So I imagine this is kind of a vortex where you're able to kind of move through space, right? You're here in one area, but you're able to leap into another and bring those arguments of comic scholars into your discussions. You also end up with an ability to critically evaluate other media. And I see this as your ability to phase through, right? You're in one area and you phase through into another. You're able to talk about comics, but that also gives you skills to talk about film, to talk about literature, to talk about art. So something like this gives you that kind of ability. And then finally, I consider improved communication and comprehension skills. That's your super strength, right? You come out of this course and you're able to think about how words and images communicate better and utilize those for your own improvement. So this is what a course can do for you. It can really ramp up your superpowers, can really make you a much stronger student as you go into other forms or other courses here at North Shore or anywhere else. So thank you for watching. I hope you find this course potentially interesting. If you have questions about it, we want to learn more about it. My email is up there. And I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much.