This series of linked assignments allows you to engage more deeply with the ideas we have been discussing in class. You will choose a comics work or a graphic narrative (see the list below of suggested texts) and produce a sequence of linked assignments—1.) a project proposal, 2.) a text + image deconstruction draft, 3.) an annotated bibliography, 4.) a sentence outline, 5.) a final essay draft, and 6.) a final essay revision—each designed to help you practice academic thinking, planning, research, and writing skills. For this project, you will:

• practice close reading;
• plan and design research questions;
• navigate the resources to conduct research in the HWS Library;
• practice properly quoting, paraphrasing, and citing outside sources;
• draw together threads of preliminary reading/research into a coherent and detailed outline;
• and write up your research in a paper of 2100–3000 words (roughly 7–10 pages).

Book list: Choose any graphic narrative on the syllabus or any graphic narrative from the list below; otherwise, propose an alternative (which must be approved by the professor). You must read the entire text that you choose. All the texts discussed in class or listed below will be “researchable,” so choose based on your own interest. Texts should be longer works or compilations but may be a comic book if you read at least three to five in a series.

David B., Epileptic (Pantheon Books, 1996)—compilation of 6 volumes about growing up with an epileptic brother

Cece Bell, El Deafo (Amulet Books, 2014)—the memoir of a girl who views her hearing impairment as a superpower

Charles Burns, Black Hole (Pantheon Books, 2005)—the story of an STD in mid-1970s Seattle

Daniel Clowes, Ghost World (Fantagraphics Books, 1997)—darkly written tale of two best friends, cynical hipsters, adrift after high school

Howard Cruse, Stuck Rubber Baby (Paradox Press, 1995)—a white southern man comes to terms with being gay at the same time as he becomes politicized as an activist in the 1960s Alabama civil rights movement

Julie Doucet, My New York Diary (Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 1999)—about one woman's move to New York

Will Eisner, A Contract with God (Baronet Books, 1978)—four interlinked immigration narratives set in the Bronx

Mat Johnson, illustrated by Warren Pleece, Incognegro (Vertigo, 2008)—truth-based tale, part mystery, part exposé of black journalists covering lynching cases in the south

J. Maroh, Blue Angel/Blue Is the Warmest Color (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013)—a love story of two girls, set in France

David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon Books, 2009)—story of an architecture professor's retreat to middle America

Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (1982–89; reprint, Vertigo, 2008)—a young woman and shadowy anarchist join forces against a fascist regime; set in a dystopian future Britain

G. Neri, illustrated by Randy Duburke, Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty (Lee and Low Books, 2010)—aimed at teens, story of gang violence in 1994 Chicago

Josh Neufeld, A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge (Pantheon Books, 2010)—series of nonfiction vignettes about surviving Hurricane Katrina

Ed Piskor, Hip Hop Family Tree (Fantagraphics Books, 2015–16)—comic encyclopedia of hip hop history

Mimi Pond, Over Easy (Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2014)—fictional retelling of 1970s California counterculture

Elizabeth Swados, My Depression: A Picture Book (Seven Stories Press, 2015)—memoir about clinical depression by a musician and theatre director

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2011)—autobiographical novel on growing up in Osaka after World War II

Craig Thompson, Blankets (Top Shelf Productions, 2003)—coming-of-age in an evangelical Christian family, first romance

Adrian Tomine, Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly Publications, 2009)—narratives of young Asian-American male experiences, set in San Francisco and New York City

Alissa Torres, illustrated by Sungyoon Choi, American Widow (Random House, 2008)—an account of the aftermath of the 2001 World Trade Center bombings

Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon Books, 2000)—a lonely everyman’s late-in-life reunion with his father

Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (First Second Books, 2006)—stories of a boy negotiating his American identity and his Chinese heritage

graphic novels or series aimed specifically at tween or younger readers, e.g.,

• Victoria Jamieson, Roller Girl (Dial Books for Young Readers, 2015)
• Raina Telgemeier, Smile (Scholastic/Graphix, 2010), Drama (Scholastic/Graphix, 2012), Sisters (Scholastic/Graphix, 2014), Ghosts (Scholastic/Graphix, 2016), Guts (Scholastic/Graphix, 2019)
• Dav Pilkey, The Adventures of Captain Underpants (Scholastic, 1997)
• Tom Angleberger, The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (Amulet Books, 2010)
• Lincoln Peirce, Big Nate series (1991–present; HarperCollins, 2010–16)

Note: depending on the text/author you choose, you might choose to read more than one volume (if it is one in a series), and/or look at adaptations of the text in other media (for example, film, television, or web versions), and/or consider the text in comparison/contrast to similar narratives circulating around the same historical period.

PART 1: Project proposal (5% of total grade for the course): due Thursday, Oct. 3, 11:59pm via Canvas.

Produce a formal proposal for a research paper on your chosen graphic narrative. This proposal must consist of the following:

1. the text you will be working with;
2. a clearly stated topic explaining how your text relates to a larger context;
3. a list of 2–3 major research questions you hope to answer;
4. and a list of 5–10 keywords you plan to use when searching databases to find sources.

Some guidance on narrowing your options:
Picking a great text and topic is key for producing a great paper (and enjoying the process). Spend a lot of time to get the right topic, or the right angle on the topic. That up-front time pays off. You should not be bored by your own paper. Choose a topic and text that truly intrigues you.

Pick your top three possibilities from the book list: read around on each. Look at them online if possible. Choose the ones that you feel curious about, that seem to be a good “size” for the assignment, that you would enjoy not only reading but also researching.

Research questions could address the following topics (although others are possible too):

• what the text reveals about, or how it relates to, aspects of history, society, and/or culture;
• how the text fits into the history of graphic narratives;
• how the text fits into a genre of graphic narratives;
• how the text fits into the authors’ body of work.

Keywords should be somewhat specific so that you can actually find information about your text when you use them in searches. For example, you should not use “narrative” or “comics” as stand-alone keywords, but using them in combination with authors’ names or titles or genres may be a good idea.

PART 2: Text + image deconstruction draft (5% of total grade for the course): due Thursday, Oct. 17, via e-mail to Writing Colleague Isabel Parker with a copy to me via Canvas.

In this assignment, you will choose one page of your graphic narrative and do a “close reading” of it, discussing in detail how the panels work alone, work together, and work in relation to the larger narrative. You will be writing up these ideas as a draft of 600–900 words (roughly 2–3 typed, double-spaced pages).

As we have learned, comics involve panels, gutters, speech or thought bubbles, line and shade, color and contrast, sound effects, closure, and conceptual spaces, all of which convey meaning in different ways. This assignment asks you to deconstruct, or analyze, how that meaning occurs, using methods of literary and visual analysis. This draft will not only help you practice college-level writing, but will help you practice decoding the ways of making meaning that exist all around us: the internet, multimedia, newspapers, TV, film, etc. You will receive feedback on your critical thinking and your writing.

To “deconstruct” the page thoroughly:

• Use Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (an assigned textbook) to trace specific strategies that the author employs as a comics artist.
• Use Hillary Chute’s “Comics as Literature” (2008; an assigned supplementary reading) to begin thinking about what elements are important to graphic narrative.
• Use vocabulary and notes from class lectures and readings to discuss how images and text work together on the page.
• Determine where and how the individual frames link to specific elements of the narrative (theme, character, setting, point-of-view, for example).

Some questions to consider in your close reading:

• What moments or events are the pictures on your chosen page representing? How do they work in the narrative as a whole?
• What visual cues does the artist use to convey dialogue, tone, and mood?
• How do the angles of viewing affect your perception of the scene?
• How does realism or the lack of it play into the message?
• How does the drawing style affect the story? Would a different style create a different effect?

When writing up your ideas, organize them in an essay format:

• In the first paragraph, clearly identify and introduce the page you have chosen, and include a thesis statement that explains what the author communicates in this page and/or how the page relates to the larger narrative. Include a picture of the page in your paper.
• Present the specific visual or textual evidence for your thesis in multiple body paragraphs. Each of these paragraphs should focus on one specific idea that is clearly stated in a topic sentence and relates back to the thesis statement.
• Write a concluding paragraph that sums up your findings and reiterates your thesis (but please make sure to rewrite the thesis statement).
• Document your evidence using in-text citations or footnotes in the body of the paper, and a Works Cited list at the end of the paper. You may use either MLA or Chicago-style citation.

You will need to set up a meeting with Writing Colleague Isabel Parker to discuss the draft.

Works Cited:

PART 3: Annotated bibliography (10% of total grade for the course): due Thursday, Oct. 31, 11:59pm via Canvas.

An annotated bibliography is a bibliography of outside sources with annotations written for each. An annotation is a short paragraph with a few sentences that summarize the source’s content and then a few sentences that analyze the source’s strengths and weaknesses for your purposes. Your annotated bibliography must include at least ten (10) sources relevant to your chosen graphic narrative.

Format:
At the top, write your working title and a one or two-sentence summary of your paper project. Then:

1. include ten bibliographic entries, in MLA or Chicago style, listed in alphabetical order by author, using hanging indentation.
1. write an annotation for each of those entries (see below);
2. include a sample quote from each source, with the correct citation in footnote or parenthetical reference form;
3. paraphrase the sample quote in (b), with the correct citation in footnote or parenthetical reference form.

Process:

1. Find sources for your paper using the HWS Library.
1. Locate books and articles through SingleSearch, linked from the Library’s home page. Either the question mark ? or asterisk * wildcards seem to work.
2. Locate books, articles, and some archival materials through WorldCat (under Find Materials | WorldCat)—this library database (https://hws.worldcat.org/) lists sources held in library collections throughout the world, and the results pages indicate which materials can be found in the HWS Library. Either the question mark ? or asterisk * wildcards seem to work; you can limit by type of material (books, articles, etc.) and by language.
3. Explore the A–Z database list, linked from the Library’s home page, for book chapters, journal articles, and newspaper articles. You can select database types to focus on, including “Books,” “Scholarly Articles,” and “Newspapers,” among others.
2. Choose ten (10) sources for your paper. These should be clearly relevant to your topic and must show a range of kinds of sources. Please use a variety of types of sources, as follows:
1. at least one must be a book (single-author book, edited collection of essays, etc.);
2. at least one must be an article or essay from a peer-reviewed academic journal;
3. at least one must be a newspaper source (using library newspaper databases or other sources); and
4. at least one must be a source that helps you to contextualize your text or is more broadly related to your text. For example, if you are working on a graphic narrative set during the civil rights movement, it could be a history or documentary about the movement. If you are working on a manga text, it could be an academic article about manga in general. If you are working on a text in translation, it could be an encyclopedia entry on comics or graphics in the country of origin. If you are working on a youth/kids series, it could be a news article on publishing/sales trends for tween readers of graphic narratives more generally. If you are writing on a fairly obscure memoir, you could look at scholarship or theory of memoir-writing.
3. Document the details. For each source, jot down all the bibliographic information you will need right away. Use the Purdue OWL website or the Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide to type up a correct bibliographic entry using MLA or Chicago-style documentation.
4. Browse the source: skim, spot read, look even at the notes on the author and the preface/acknowledgements, look at how the text has been categorized/indexed (a history book? an article from a popular magazine?) until you’re ready to compose an annotation for each one.
5. Avoid plagiarism. As you read and take detailed notes, always be careful to put quotation marks around direct quotes or highlight, put in bold, or otherwise signal material you drag/drop or cut/paste from web sources. Keep track of what is your language and what is not. Note sources, including page numbers for quotations taken from books, journals, or newspaper articles.
6. Write an annotation for each source. What is an annotation? An annotation is a one paragraph “note” to yourself about the contents of your source. Begin with a few sentences summarizing the kind of information you found in this source, and what you’ve learned about your topic from this source. Then, write a few sentences analyzing the possible limitations of the source: what kind of information is missing from this source? When was it published, and does that matter? What kind of genre or field is the source coming from? What can you find out about the author that might reveal any limitations? (For example, is this a distinguished historian from an Ivy League college, or a 12-year-old posting something up on the web?)
7. Choose a sample quotation from your source, citing it in MLA or Chicago-style format. (It doesn’t have to be a quotation that you are going to use in your paper.)
8. Rewrite the sample quotation from no. 7 as a paraphrase, citing it in MLA or Chicago-style format. A paraphrase conveys information from the source in your own words. It does not have to be a full rewrite of the entire quotation; scholars often use paraphrases in order to present information in a way that makes sense as they support their arguments.

PART 4: Sentence outline (10% of total grade for the course), due Tuesday, Nov. 7, 11:59pm via Canvas.

Working from your paper proposal and annotated bibliography, produce a detailed “sentence outline” for your paper. Use the following information for guidance.

Using outlines:
Writing without an outline is like driving to Iowa without a map. An outline *always* helps improve the structure, transition, and flow of an essay. It can be personalized—use bullets or asterisks or dashes rather than numbers. It can occur at the beginning or in the middle of the drafting progress. But always try to use one. Integrate outlines into your writing process every time you write.

What is an outline?
An outline is a general plan of the material. The outline shows the order of the various topics, the relative importance of each, and the relationship between the various parts.

Order in an outline:
There are many ways to arrange the different parts of a subject. Often, a chronological arrangement works well. At other times, a topical arrangement is best suited to the material. Regardless, within each section you should go from the general to the specific: begin with a general idea or claim, and then support it with specific examples.

Working thesis:
An outline should begin with a thesis statement or summarizing sentence. Your thesis presents the central topic of the paper and states the position you are taking on that topic. It must be a complete, grammatical sentence that is specific, brief, and arguable.

You have to do some reading, thinking, and writing to come up with a working thesis. Don’t expect one to just hit you like a bolt of lightning. Trying to do this in your head just leads you to procrastinate. Do it on paper or in a Word file, and save everything you write—it might come in handy later!

• Put your favorite topic at the top of the page or a screen, and brainstorm questions you have about it. Choose the best, most original, toughest or most intriguing question(s) as your focus. The answer to that tough question will be a working thesis.
• Try mapping/clustering. Put the general topic in the center of a page and circle it. Put sub-topics of the paper around it, and circle these as well. Attach sub-topics of those subtopics to the outer circles with lines, like spokes off a wheel hub. Study the map you’ve made of the topic. Depending on the size of the assignment, choose the subtopic with the greatest number of “spokes” as a more focused paper topic, or collect related subtopics together for a broader one.
• Try “looping”: freewrite for 5–10 minutes on the topic or question at hand. Stop. Underline the “center of gravity” sentence. Put that sentence at the top of a new page, and freewrite on it for 5–10 minutes. Stop. Underline the “center of gravity” of this new paragraph. Is it a thesis? Focused, arguable (not a “duh” thesis, not something that is just a statement of fact), and convincing (supportable with evidence)? Does it answer a critical question—Why? How? To what effect? If not, keep “looping.”

When you get to a fairly strong thesis, even if you're still not sure it’s defensible, that’s good enough to start. Give yourself permission to use this as your “working thesis,” one which you might revise, depending on what the evidence and conclusions of your paper look like.

Types of outlines:
The two main types of outlines are the topic outline and the sentence outline (see examples below). In the topic outline, headings are expressed in single words or brief phrases. In the sentence outline, headings are expressed in complete sentences, which can be statements or questions. Sometimes questions are useful as main topics, then sub-topics can be sentences which pose answers.

The sentence outline sets you up to write much more effectively than the topic outline does. A sentence outline gets the ball rolling, encourages analytical writing full of confidence and depth, and helps reduce writer's block. The topic outline can exacerbate your writer’s block and invites broad, vague ideas.

For this assignment, you will submit a sentence outline, not a topic outline, because composing sentences forces you to begin the process of making points and arguments, rather than simply making lists or descriptions.