Comics and Graphic Narratives
I love comics. Beyond my research and teaching, I have also dedicated much of my time to highlighting artists and fostering conversation about this extraordinary medium.
With my colleague and co-conspirator, Angela Becerra Vidergar, at "Draw 'Til You Crawl," a comics reading we curated at Litcrawl San Francisco, 2014.
As a special correspondent for The Human Angle, a web-series and humanities outreach project based at Stanford, I interviewed Ricardo Padilla, founder and director of the Latino Comics Expo, for this episode, "The Rise of Latino Comics in America."
Graphic Narrative Project
Graphic narratives, in the form of comics, graphic novels, animation, and other popular incarnations, are a quickly emerging field of study, whose terms are still in the making.
As the 2012-2015 coordinator for the Graphic Narrative Project , a Geballe Research Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, I have actively contributed to its building.
Our Events
As part of our event series, we have hosted a slew of talented graphic narrative artists, authors and scholars, such as Scott McCloud, Joe Sacco, Gene Luen Yang, Hillary Chute and myriad others. Our annual symposia have included Moving Pictures: Latino/a Comics, From Sunshine State to Fog City: Asian American Comics in California, Secret Identity Politics: Superhero Studies and Comics Scholarship and Alternative Comics: Through the Eyes of the Hernandez Brothers.
Alternative Comics: Through the Eyes of the Hernandez Brothers
In 2014, I organized a symposium at Stanford celebrating the decades-long careers of alternative comics legends Los Bros Hernandez. Renowned for their comics series Love and Rockets, which has spanned some thirty years, Jaime, Gilberto and Mario Hernandez came to Stanford to discuss their life, work, inspirations and craft over two days.
Read some media coverage of the event here.
Moderating a discussion of comics and craft with the Hernandez Brothers and aspiring student artists. Photo by Veronica Marian.
Video of the entire panel discussion from "Alternative Comics: Through the Eyes of the Hernandez Brothers," featuring Professors Scott Bukatman and Ramon Saldivar, as well as moderator Angela Becerra Vidergar.