Essays
Here are some selected essays that I have written. I hope you find them interesting. While I don't anticipate there would be any circumstances that these papers could be swiped, as they are fairly narrowly-focussed/obscure, plagiarism is a serious offence that you should really try to avoid.
The Fourth Estate and the Ninth Art
Written for a grad seminar in popular culture, this paper is an examination of Joe Sacco's nonfiction comics. My thesis is that, though often referred to as "comics journalism", this work bears a closer resemblance to the documentary tradition of filmmaking. Sacco's unique case opens up the more general problem of defining the boundaries between journalism and documentary as interrelated but distinct genres of nonfiction reportage.
I had wanted to do a whole section on Sacco's work as a form of ethnography as well, but ran out of room and time.
Special thanks to my friend Bethany Lindsay, who shared with me the transcript of a recent interview she conducted with Sacco. It was a great help.
The Symbolic Canadian (pdf)
This paper, written for my communication theory survey course in the fall of 2004, is an examination of the work of cartoonists Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt in the context of the "loser cinema" of Canadian film. Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon come along for the ride.
Untangling Comics (html)
This paper was my undergraduate honours thesis, written under the supervision of Prof. Blaine Allan of the Dept. of Film Studies at Queen's University. It attempts to explore connections between film theory and comics theory by applying the apparatus theory paradigm from film to comics. I'm looking at how comics is different from film, how we can go about analysing a comics page, and how the nature of comics as a medium affects the reading experience.
Part of this project involves the development of a dimension model for diagramming panel relations, which I demonstrate with exerpts from Chester Brown's Louis Riel: a Comic-Strip Biography, Dylan Horrocks's Atlas #1, and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.
Finally, the use of apparatus theory behooves me to address some of that tradition's primary concerns: the linguistical system of comics, how identification functions, and what effects in the field of ideology that the way comics works might have.
Images of the North: 'Borealism' and Identity in Canadian Comics (pdf)
This paper attempts to examine the way that Canadian culture -- using Canadian super-hero comic books as an example case -- appropriates images of the North. By synthesizing some of the work of Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, and Ian MacKay, I arrive at the descriptive model I have called "Borealism".
Hulk Smash Puny Apparatus? Perceiving a Comic Book Cinema in Ang Lee's Hulk (html)
This is a close analysis of a scene from the film Hulk. It attempts to explore Lee's use of multiple images within the cinematic space in that film through the lens of the apparatus theory paradigm.
Ghost World as Dialectic (pdf)
Written for a class on Hollywood melodrama from the 1950s, this paper attempts to place Terry Zwigoff's film Ghost World within the taxonymy of that genre. It has some characteristics of a classical melodrama, but also some that belong to the anti-melodramatic tradition. I argue that the juxtaposition of these two modes makes Ghost World a "synthetic melodrama," produced by the dialectical conflict of melodrama and anti-melodrama.
