For Tuesday, you have a short chunk of Stitches to read. We’ll spend a lot of class on Tuesday discussing Hillary Chute’s chapter “Comics for Grown-Ups.” Chute is probably the foremost academic authority on comics these days — she’s the Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University in Boston and has published many books of criticism on comics as a medium.

The first twenty pages of her article provide a very useful overview of the history of comics with lots of useful information in it. But in class on Tuesday, we’ll focus most of our attention on the last 10 pages of the essay, the section called “Reading Comics,” which provides us key terms and a theoretical framework for understanding how comics works and how to read and analyze them.

On Thursday, we’ll focus on the beginning of Spinning, starting off that discussion by comparing Walden’s graphic narrative to David Small and to Allie Brosh.

Tillie Walden won the very prestigious Eisner Award for Spinning when it was published in 2018, when she was 22 years old. Spinning, which again was published when she was 22 years old, was Walden’s fourth graphic narrative book. In the five years since Spinning was published she has published eight more books (to be totally fair, two of those are forthcoming later this year). You can read all of her fifth book, On a Sunbeam online here — it’s worth at least glancing through some of those pages to get a sense of where her style has gone since Spinning.

We’ll start with how Walden establishes character and setting compared to Small and how her tone/visual style is similar and different to Small’s. How does Walden use the page, panels, and gutters in comparison to Small? Note that there is one small moment in Spinning where Walden shows herself holding a copy of Stitches, so she has signaled for us that Small’s text is an influence for her — how has it influenced her as a writer?