Welcome to OPIRG Kingston

Mark Streeter presents “Panel Discussion: The Art of Comics” in Dunning Room 12.

Don’t let that new “Graphic Novel” section in your local bookstore fool you: we’ve been using sequential art to talk to each other for at least a thousand years. Comic narrative is a system of communication that represents time and space on the one-dimensional surface of the page. It is appropriate, then, that comics predate most modern languages, and are read and understood in virtually every part of the world. The way we move through a comic narrative is so intuitive that it can be difficult to recognize the incredibly sophisticated process of negotiation we are carrying out — not only with regard to space and time, but also between words and images, concrete objects and abstract concepts. This lecture will outline some of the basic formal properties of comic narrative, and trace the evolution of the comics medium up to the present day. We will spend most of our time looking at North American comics from the beginning of the Twentieth Century onward, a period in which comic literature has been explicitly bound up with the economy of mass culture, and we will consider several titles — everything from the “classics” to the obscure and forgotten, from the wildly popular to the staunchly independent.

Biography: Mark Streeter is PhD student in the English Department at Queen’s University. As a young person, he wrote and drew his own superhero comics. Later, when he became an adult who still wrote and drew like a six-year old, he decided to criticize comics instead of trying to make them. His current project involves the figure of the vigilante in Modern American literature and early comic book superheroes.