Comics aren't just for kids

The upcoming release of the new Spider-Man movie has excited fans, both young and old. Brad Prager, assistant professor of German Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has found that comic books are not just a kid’s fascination. They also can be interpreted on multiple levels.

"People use comics to tell stories about their own lives," said Prager who uses comic books in a seminar class he teaches dealing with the Holocaust and World War II in contemporary culture. He and his students discuss the problem of how the sublime horror of this war could be represented in comics, films and photographs.

Prager has been exploring Chris Ware’s quasi-autobiographical, graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth from the perspective of the protagonist’s ongoing family drama in relation to American cultural history. He presented a paper about this research on the panel, "Comics and Autobiography" at this year’s Modern Language Association conference.

Prager’s interest in comic books stems not only from his teenage fascination, but also from his ongoing works in the area of visual studies. He earned his doctoral degree from Cornell University in 1999 and is working on a book about German Romantic Art and Literature. Prager’s teaching and research interests include German idealism and romanticism, film history, and theory and literature after 1945.

2002

Additional links:

Brad Prager
Department of German and Russian Studies

Modern Language Association

Chris Ware and Jimmy Corrigan

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