News and Events
R.C. Harvey is Guest Speaker at Cartoon Symposium
Harvey lectured on Milton Caniff, a 1930 graduate of Ohio State, and the subject of Harvey's most recent book, Meanwhile…: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. The lecture marked the beginning of the Project Narrative Symposium, the 2007 Festival of Cartoon Art, held in downtown Columbus, and the centennial year of Caniff's birth.
Caniff was well known for elevating the status of the comic to that of art and adopting cinematic techniques in strips, such as panning and close-ups. He also adopted the use of chiaroscuro—the technique of using deep shadows to define objects in a drawing. Caniff was also one of the first cartoonists who made character development an essential driving force in the narrative of the comic strip.
The event kicked off the Project Narrative Symposium, a three-day conference which brought together scholars working in narrative theory with those working in U.S. ethnic and postcolonial literary studies, and aimed to explore how "scholarship that has up to now followed two separate critical paths might enrich understanding of both once put into formal dialogue." The conference was deliberately limited to fifteen speakers, with no concurrent sessions. Revisions of the presented papers will be published in a forthcoming collection of essays.
For more information on upcoming Project Narrative events, visit projectnarrative.osu.edu.
For more information on Caniff, see the recent Cnn.com article, 'The Rembrandt of the Comic Strip.'
