This course focuses on the social context of communication
(artist-text-audience) and such regulating agencies as the Comics Code
Authority. Cultural critics have only recently accorded comics any status
as an art form. How can we understand and read comics as a unique American
art form? The approach that this course uses to find answers to such
questions is broadly that of narrative semiotics which allows for both
ideological and formal analysis of comics as modern American folklore and
myth.