Disillusioned superheroes, Wild Things, and a young girl growing up with an abusive father – these are some of the characters you will encounter in this course on image‐text interactions in (1) children’s picture books (2) comics, and (3) graphic novels. Using works from these three genres, the course will explore the nature of words and images, how they create meaning separately, and how they interact in complex ways to tell a story. Do images have a ‘language’ and can the text sometimes function as an image? Do words often seem to colonize and dominate images? And can images function as a subversive element in the book, telling a very different story than the ones told by the words? How do we “read” not just the black marks inside the book but the book itself as a visible, material, object? These are some of the questions we will ask in this course as we consider the aesthetic, socio‐historical, and thematic aspects of works such as children’s picture books, superhero comics, and graphic novels. To aid in our exploration of these imagetexts – works that use pictures as well as words to tell a story – we will use recent scholarly theories about visuality and textuality, breaking down the divisions between “highbrow” and “low” or “popular” literature. In addition to reading, you will also learn writing skills – conducting research, identifying the audience for your writing, and using persuasive strategies to shape your research for that particular audience.