Z604/Z672 Comic Books and Their Readers

Digital and Empirical Methods for Studying Readership and Fandom
Spring 2023

12:40 - 15:45 Wednesday, Ballantine Hall (BH) 118

Instructor: Associate Professor John A. Walsh, jawalsh@indiana.edu.
Office Hours: Monday 3pm - 4:30pm and by appointment.

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Tales from the Crypt

This assignment is based on similar assignments given in K-12 and college-level history classes. In these history assignments, students choose a name from a local cemetery, conduct research to find out as much as they can about that individual, and write a report telling that individual’s story. You will do something similar, but instead of choosing a name from a local cemetary, you will choose a name from an old comic book document (for example, a comic book fan letter, a contribution to a fanzine or prozine, or a document from a comic book convention). You should use a pre-Internet source, from the 1980s or earlier. Obviously, the more you know initially about the person, the easier it will be to find more information. You may go through a lot of individuals and reach dead ends before you find one about whom you can find a reasonable amount of information.

One purpose of the assignment is to test and challenge your research skills, so you must research a relatively obscure person and avoid extremely famous people comics fans like Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, or Roy Thomas. You can use the Internet, library, social media, and any other resources for your research.

You will submit a report about the individual whom you researched. The report should include or quote from the comics-related documents in which you found the person, describe the person’s relationship to comics, and as much of the story of the person’s life as you were able to learn from your research. It will be wonderful if you are able to discuss how the person’s relationship to comics, pop culture, and fandom influenced his or her life, but such influence will not be present or detectable in every person’s story.

Tips:

• Choose someone with a fairly unique name, i.e. not John Smith or Mary Johnson.
• Choose someone for whom you know a street address, city, and state.
• Choose someone from Indiana (a nearby county) for whom you could do research at a local courthouse or historical society.

Submission

You will submit a report, approximately 300-600 words, describing the methodologies and sources you used for your research and your findings about the subject(s) of your research. In addition to this report, include documentation from your research. This documentation might include:

• a copy of the comics or fandom source where you discovered the individual
• photographs
• obituaries
• Facebook or LinkedIn profiles

Your submission should be professionally formated, with name, date, title, page numbers, captions for figures and images, etc. Submit document as a PDF or Word document.

Examples from prior semesters:

• tales_from_the_crypt_sampleA.pdf
• tales_from_the_crypt_sampleB.pdf