COMIC BOOK METROPOLIS: HOW NEW YORK CITY

This course explores how New York City didn't just host the American comics industry—it shaped what comics looked like, how they were sold, and what stories they told. We'll trace how the city's newspapers, newsstands, subway cars, tenement buildings, and even its crime waves left their mark on the page. We'll move chronologically from the 1890s to today, looking at moments when the city and the comics it produced were tightly linked: early newspaper strips born in the era of “yellow journalism”; the Golden Age publishers clustered in Midtown offices; the censorship battles of the 1950s; underground cartoonists working out of East Village apartments in the ’60s and ’70s; and the rise of graphic novels in bookstores and museums. Along the way, we'll ask: Why did superhero comics look the way they did? How did economic pressures shape page layout? What happens when the same city produces both blockbuster superhero titles and experimental art magazines?

Readings range from early Sunday pages (the Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay) through Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Frank Miller’s Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns, to Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine, Ben Katchor’s urban wanderings, Roz Chast’s New Yorker cartoons, and contemporary mainstream works like Hawkeye’s “Pizza Dog” issue. Famously, Eisner drew on his Bronx childhood to create A Contract with God, while Miller’s work channels the gritty, anxious New York of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But we’ll look at the full range of what the city made possible, from newspaper syndicates to underground comix to today’s independent publishers.

You’ll learn to read comics closely by analyzing how panel grids, gutters, shadows, and perspectives work and by connecting those choices to the real-world conditions in which they were made. Optional Saturday field trips include Newspaper Row/City Hall Park (early press and Sunday pages), an East Village Underground walk (East Village Other/Gothic Blimp Works sites), and a visit to the Society of Illustrators/MoCCA (exhibition and archives orientation).

Course assignments combine analytical writing, archival engagement, and original digital scholarship. In addition to two short close-reading essays, there is a final project that takes the form of