Zap! Crumb! Splat!: Underground Comix + Alternative Visions

Sabin, "Going Underground" from Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art
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Sabin, "Alternative Visions" from Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art
(please note that the images included in this chapter are offensive, crude, anarchic and disturbing as comix are known to be; also, be aware that the files are quite big and might take a little time to load)

Fantagraphics this past year released a 6 volume 'Complete Zap Comics' for the modest price of $500. Good thing for us that they have also released a 60 page excerpt chock-full of comics by many of the artists that have graced R.Crumb's publication. Included are also an introduction by Crumb himself and a 'For Adult Intellectuals Only: A Zap Oral History' by Patrick Rosenkranz. Find it all here in PDF format (now fixed/click-through; nb. it's a big file, wait for it to load).

Construction and Performance II: Masculinity

Eminem, Lose Yourself

Jackson Katz, "Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity: From Eminem to Clinique for Men"

Gail Dines, "King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity"

That James Dean vs That Daydream Nation Look: Taylor Swift covered by Ryan Adams and Gendered Media Spaces

Here's a nice press review of the discourses surrounding the Ryan Adams/Taylor Swift operation. I've also included a few articles from the past past, mainly Taylor Swift profiles from mainstream magazines like The New Yorker and New York Magazine. Make sure you all read the Tavi Gevinson article linked to at the bottom of the post in .pdf format. I've also included a recent article from The Atlantic about authorship in pop music and the strategies of record companies to downplay the 'outsourcing' of pop hit manufacturing. Enjoy.

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the Vindication of Taylor Swift

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift

No Blank Space, Baby: Taylor Swift Is The Soul Of Ryan Adams

Ryan Adams isn’t revealing something ‘good’ about Taylor Swift’s ‘1989.’ The album was already great.

Platinum Underdog: Why Taylor Swift Is the Biggest Pop Star in the World

You Belong with Me

How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire.

Taylor Swift Is Confusing

Haters Gonna Hate: Listening to Ryan Adams’s “1989”

The Reinvention of Taylor Swift

Flavorwire Interview: Talking Taylor Swift With Tavi Gevinson

JUST KIDDING, LOVE SUCKS

NOTES ON TAYLOR SWIFT

The complete version of this article by then 16-year old Tavi Gevinson published in The Believer in 2013 is below in PDF. Tavi Gevinson started the Style Rookie blog when she was 12. Rookie Mag below is a treasure of 'readings' of Tween/Teen culture from a non mainstream perspective --with all of its exhilaration and limitations.

Tavi Gevinson, JUST KIDDING

Rookie Mag 

Why must we hate the things teen girls love?

Hit Charade: Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.

The Spirit!: Short Writing Assignment #1

As already mentioned in class this first writing assignment revolves around Will Eisner's The Spirit. For this short exercise (3-5 pages) you should first of all read a number of The Spirit stories as they appear in The Best of Spirit anthology which is on reserve in the library (below you will also find four more Spirit stories in digital format --however, as I said in class, you should read this particular text 'the old fashioned way', on paper). 

For your actual writing assignment you should first of all offer a historical contextualization of Eisner's work: where does The Spirit fit into the history of sequential art in general and of comics in particular. Secondly, you should choose two pages in one of the stories (try to choose the two pages that you find are most interesting in terms of their encapsulation and layout --there are plenty of these in Eisner's work and don't be afraid to move deep into The Best of Spirit anthology to the late 40s material) and simply describe the particularities of The Spirit's stylistic features. Please note that I am not necessarily looking for any particularly deep analysis. What your paper should end up being is a simple description of encapsulation, panel to panel relations, full page layout, use of color, line and text, insets, etc. What this should end up being, more than anything, is an exercise for applying and using comics terminology and an excuse to encourage you to look at an example of comic art closely and attentively.
I'm including here, along with the already mentioned extra Spirit stories, an issue each of DC's Action Comics and Detective Comics so that you can use these as comparative texts to Eisner's technique in The Spirit.
Finally, as a conclusion to your short paper remark what, if anything and in your opinion, makes The Spirit such a standout example of comic art. Enjoy.

Will Eisner, The Spirit
DC's Action Comics #1 (1938)
DC's Detective Comics #27 (1939)
Please refer to Andrei Molotiu's essential "List of Terms for Comics Studies". Use the illustrated examples as a guideline.
There's also this Comics Terminology Graphic 1 & Graphic 2 (from Abel & Madden, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures)

**In order to overcome the technical issues we might have with the .cbr extension  I have renamed all linked comic books with a .zip extension. As mentioned in class zip and cbr files are the same thing, the only difference being that the .cbr extension allows your Comic Book Reader application to open and display the images in the zipped folder as a paginated book. All you need to do, after you've downloaded the files to your computer, is change the file extension from .zip to .cbr. Have fun.

Text and Context: Political Economy and Reception

David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"
Janice Radway, "Women Read The Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context"

Jan Nederveen Pitersem, "White Negroes"
Sut Jhally, "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture"

EXTRA READING:
Stuart Hall, "Encoding-Decoding"

Opening of the 2011 Emmy Awards: "To men, you're womanish, to women, you're mannish."

From Superheroes to the 'Seduction of the Innocent'

from Comics Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America
Wright, "Confronting Success: Comic Books and Postwar America, 1945-1950"
Wright, "Youth Crisis: Comic Books and Controversy, 1947-1950"

Wertham, "Seduction of the Innocent"
+ Self-Regulating Codes of the Comics Book Industry

from Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comics
Gabilliet, "Calls For Censorship"
+
Gabilliet, "Production"
Gabilliet, "The Business of Comic Books"

Bonus Read:
Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965)
Part1 + Part2

Sunday Newspaper Supplements: Auteurs.

Winsor McCay, Little Sammy Sneeze

As promised here are some of the pages we saw in class. Enjoy.

Richard Outcault, The Yellow Kid

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo In Slumberland

George Herriman, Krazy Kat & Ignatz

Frank King, Gasoline Alley

Textuality: Semiotics

To complement the other readings, here are three different discussions of 'semiotics' and semiotic analysis and their use for cultural studies and the analysis of media representations. These are not required readings if you have encountered 'media semiotics' before. I would however suggest, to those of you who are encountering 'semiotics' for the first time, to treat these readings as required readings: your work in class, your ability to grapple with the other required readings and your final project would certainly benefit from a familiarity with the concepts presented here.

Mieke Bal, Semiotics for Beginners
Scott McCloud, from Understading Comics: Chapter 2, Semiotics
Jonathan Bignell, Media Semiotics: Introduction + The Cinema

Ritual vs. Transmission?

from Kenneth Anger's 'Scorpio Rising'

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" from Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)

**Reading Media Theory Table of Contents for Presentations**

Construction and Performance I: Privilege and Representation

Power, Privilege and Discrimination

Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

Cultural Studies & Representation
Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture"
Sanjukta Gosh, "'Con-Fusing' Exotica: Producing India in US Advertising"

Ideology and Hegemony
Stuart Hall, "The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media"
James Lull, "Hegemony"

all readings (except the online Peggy McIntosh) are from Dines and Humez (eds), Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader; 2nd Edition(Sage, 2003)

Comics? Comics!

Here are a couple of examples of comics that we can use to continue our discussion of what comics are and what they are not. It is also a good excuse to test out your comic book readers (.cbr and .cbz). Let me know if you encounter any problems reading these files.

Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy, selected Sunday Comics, 1941 (Click through to Save)

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905-1914 (Click through to Save)

Robert Sergel, "Up Up Down Down" from Eschew 2011

Bonus reading: from Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics Chapter 1: "What Comics Are and What They Aren't"

*Bonus Bonus: Andrei Molotiu's essential "List of Terms for Comics Studies"
nb. At the bottom of the linked post you'll find a link to the illustrations. In any case, here.

from Sigmund Freud's notebooks: Comics as dream work

Welcome To Fall 2015

Post-Rock, Subcultures and the End of Authenticity + Second Paper Prompt

Here is the prompt for your second short paper. Paper is due on Friday. Enjoy.

Assuming that at this point you should be on your way to completing the Garofalo textbook, here are the final reading for the session --readings in bold are required; readings in italics are highly recommended.

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.

On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts"
Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file --nb. skip the initial Sara Cohen article.



On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.

The Ramones, "Blitzkrieg Bop" Live in Rome, 1980



On sampling, mash-ups and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"
Negativland, "from Wired: Negativland Interviews U2's The Edge"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

For Those About To Rock: Return of the Aura

Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart

"I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

-Jack Kerouac

-Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

Here are a couple of articles to integrate Keightley's Reconsidering Rock article. The first Frith article is required; the second article is a highly recommended read. Enjoy the Lester Bangs reviews from Creem. Reebee Garofalo's article on Soul ("Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement") is required.

Simon Frith - "Rock and Popular Culture"
Simon Frith - "The Magic The Can Set You Free": The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community
Paul Clarke - "'A Magic Science': Rock Music as a Recording Art"
Lester Bangs - Various Record Reviews from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Reebee Garofalo - Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement

Also, here is Andrew Chester's "For A Rock Aesthetic", Richard Merton's response, "Comments" and Chester's response to the response, "Second Thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band". It's all here at this link --the whole epochal exchange in one handy location.

Please read in 'Rocking Out' up to and including Chapter 8.

AC/DC, Let There Be Rock (1977) 

Reverend Bon tells you all about it. As you can see the 'aura' is back around Angus' head.

The In-Between Years (or The Empire Strikes Back)

The Folk Revival:

The Kingston Trio - Tom Dooley
Pete Seeger - Turn Turn Turn!
Joan Baez - Silver Dagger
Bob Dylan - Masters of War
Lyrics here.

Surf & Hot Rod Combos:

The Beach Boys - Surfin USA
Dick Dale & The Del-Tones - Miserlou
Link Wray & His Ray Men - Rumble (Outtake)
The Stingers (Jack Cole) - Mustang

Uptown R&B from Motown/All songs by Holland-Dozier-Holland:

Martha & The Vandellas - Nowhere To Run
The Four Tops - Reach Out I'll Be There
The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love
Marvin Gaye - How Sweet It Is

Girl Groups/Phil Spector Wall of Sound/Songs by Weill & Mann:

The Ronettes - Be My Baby
The Crystals - Then He Kissed Me
The Crystals - Da Doo Ron Ron

Cynthia Weill & Barry Mann songs NOT produced by Phil Spector:

Lesley Gore - It's My Party

The Wall of Sound in full-effect:

Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep, Mountain High

The Righteous Brothers - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling

Readings:
Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

nb. You will not be responsible for this reading for the midterm. We will discuss the issues and concepts raised in it after the exam. I do however urge you to read it as it offers a lot of points that would help your review of material that will actually be covered on the midterm.

In Garofalo you should read up to and including Chapter 6.