Read Together: Monsters Remixed with Ayanni Cooper
Starting August 8, 2024
Ayanni Cooper Brings You 4 Weeks of Intensive Comics Study
At A Glance
Take a guided deep-dive into comics that use monstrous figures to explore what it means to be human in this 4-week course taught by comic scholar, Dr. Ayanni Cooper.
Each week, we will focus on a different text that uses monsters in a non-horror setting—including print and webcomics—and discuss how different cartoonists deploy color, dialogue, character design, and other tactics to weave their narratives.
Through close consideration of these different comics, students will uncover approaches related to different modalities, page construction, and narrative pacing that they can deploy in their own creations.
Please be aware that there will be some content that readers may find unsettling. Please be sure to look into the individual texts featured for appropriate content warnings.
In Detail
Week 1: Nimona (2015) by ND Stevenson -Thursday August 8, 2024 7PM to 9PM Eastern/4PM to 6PM Pacific
Week 2: The Devil is a Handsome Man by Hello This is Angle, Chapters 1-10 (2018) Thursday August 15, 2024 7PM to 9PM Eastern/4PM to 6PM Pacific
Week 3: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) by Emil Ferris
Thursday August 22, 2024 7PM to 9PM Eastern/4PM to 6PM Pacific
Week 4: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) by Emil Ferris (cont)
Thursday August 29, 2024 7PM to 9PM Eastern/4PM to 6PM Pacific
Calls will include live discussion and exercises. Class videos, audios, chats and transcripts will be saved and archived. This course includes a Mighty Network component for students to join conversation outside of live calls.
About the Instructor
Ayanni C. H. Cooper is a graduate of the English doctoral program at the University of Florida, where she specialized in comics and visual rhetoric. Her research interests include monster theory; gender & sexuality; science fiction & fantasy; multimodal texts, like podcasts; and erotica studies. She explored many of these themes in her dissertation project, “We Live in a Time of [Sexy] Monsters”: Exploring Erotic Monstrosity in Contemporary Visual Media. (To put it simply, she’s curious why so many folks are attracted to monsters. It’s a very important research question!) Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing games with her family, finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats. You can find more information about Ayanni, including her publications, at ayanni.com.
Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing Destiny with her family (#TitanMain), finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats. She lives with her husband Andrew and their chonky cats, Chloe and Grey Ghost, in San Antonio, TX.
