Making the Graphic Novel

October 26, 9:00am - 12:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Krauss Hall

Based on Hillary Chute's deep experience with cartoonists, “Making the Graphic Novel” will focus on how today’s most noted artists go about producing comics—and how their different approaches, practices, and attitudes matter to the meaning of their comics. It will also explain some of the recent trends in the field—and how comics are emerging in all sorts of spaces, from the classroom to the museum wall to the covers of magazines such as The New Yorker.

Hillary Chute Biography

Writer, professor, and editor Hillary Chute has worked extensively with today’s most famous graphic novelists. She is associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s award-winning MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (Pantheon, 2011), for which she collaborated closely with Spiegelman—arguably the world’s most acclaimed cartoonist—over a period of 6 years. In 2011, she and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic; Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama) won a Mellon Award to teach a class together on comics and autobiography at the University of Chicago. Her book Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia 2010) examines the graphic narrative work of five authors, including Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi, arguing that the medium of comics has opened up new spaces for nonfiction narrative—particularly for expressing certain kinds of stories typically relegated to the realm of the private. Chute’s book Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists is set to appear in 2014; it includes her interviews with figures such as Lynda Barry, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, and Joe Sacco.

Her current book project, “Disaster is My Muse: Visual Witnessing, Comics, and Documentary Form," deals with comics as documentary, and looks at the post-World War II environment in which Art Spiegelman in America and Keiji Nakazawa in Japan concurrently developed comics as a form for addressing the fallout of war, as well as exploring current graphic reportage by figures such as Joe Sacco on the Balkans and the Middle East. The Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in English at the University of Chicago, she has written for such publications as The Village Voice, The Believer, and Poetry.


Ticket Information
$50, pre-registration required

Event Sponsor
Outreach College / Pacific New Media, Mānoa Campus

More Information
808-956-8244, http://www.outreach.hawaii.edu/pnm

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