Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment

Sketching Out A Route To Becoming A Professor In Comic Books

Published Tue, 02 Feb 2016 01:00:18 -0600

Mace & Crown, a news service based at Old Dominion University, Virginia, has been looking at one of the University's graduates, Sarah Glaser, and her intention to carve out a doctorate in Comic Studies at the institution.

Especially since Glaser created a comic strip for Mace & Crown as an undergraduate.

And it's all down to reading League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a comic book and discovering it was better than the film. And then taking apart what made it – and other comic books – work as a narrative.

But it seems her friends just wanted to know who was stronger, Hulk or Thor.

She just gave up on talking to her friends about comics. She started researching comics and came to find out that there is a social group for her interest in the Hampton Roads area called "757 Comic and Cartoon Creators." The group holds bi-monthly meetings at Panera Bread (formerly the Selden Arcade before the recent incident), to talk about each other's projects, critiquing each other's work and just hanging out and talking about their common interest.

And so she has created her own major in the subject at the university, through the humanities department, rather than literature studies.

"I was attracted to the humanities department because both humanities and comic studies are interdisciplinary and in a world that's connected in new different ways across discourses, being interdisciplinary should be one the most important things."

And after she has her masters degree, she is planning to travel across the pond to the University of Dundee in Scotland, to study comics at a doctorate level, aiming to teaching courses as a professor of Comics Journalism. But she's keeping up the evangelism.

After taking on the role of a graduate research assistant recently in the Department of Humanities, she has decided to share her love for comics with her colleagues and passersby, by posting a weekly comic on her door every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. on her door on the 3rd floor of the Batten Arts and Letters building.

A limited but loyal following….