Reading between the panels

“We often think about comics as something in the newspapers for children,” said Associate Professor of English Margaret Galvan, “but you can do really powerful things in this format with image and text.”

That shift in perception, from disposable entertainment to powerful storytelling medium, defines the modern history of comics. At the center of that transformation stands the University of Florida, the first institution in the United States to offer advanced graduate study focused on comics. Examining how meaning is created through images as well as words, this academic framework has been essential for understanding comics as literature.

In Gainesville, comics are no longer confined to panels on a page. They live in classrooms, archives, conferences and student organizations, forming one of the most dynamic and influential comics studies communities in the country.

A storied history

The roots of comics stretch back far beyond the modern comic book. Scholars often point to early forms of sequential art such as ancient wall paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs and medieval illuminated manuscripts. These works combined images and narrative in ways that mirror the structure of modern comics.

In the late 19th century, modern comics began to take shape in newspaper comic strips. These panels introduced recurring characters and visual humor, quickly becoming a popular feature in American newspapers. By the 1930s, publishers began compiling and distributing these strips in standalone comic books. Cheap to produce and easy to distribute, comic books became a staple of popular culture.

Superheroes, crime dramas, Westerns and science fiction captured the imagination of readers, particularly young audiences. Characters like Superman and Batman became cultural icons. Yet even as these characters became icons, comics themselves were often dismissed as trivial, and in some cases, dangerous.

That stigma reached its peak in 1954 with the publication of “Seduction of the Innocent,” in which psychiatrist Fredric Wertham argued that comics corrupted youth. The backlash led to Senate hearings and much debate. As a result, the comics industry self-imposed the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s, which enforced strict censorship on the medium for decades … but comics continued to evolve.

From underground to center stage

By the 1970s and 1980s, underground comix (small press) and independent creators began pushing boundaries, using the medium to explore politics, identity and personal experience. Then, in 1992, Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for “Maus.” By depicting the Holocaust through the lens of a personal narrative, “Maus” demonstrated that comics could tell the story of history and trauma in profound ways. The message was clear: Comics were not just entertainment. They were literature.

Scholars and cartoonists such as Scott McCloud began developing frameworks for analyzing sequential art. McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” argued that comics are a distinct visual language, one that blends text and image into a unique narrative form, and the role of the reader was to find meaning between the panels.

As comics gained literary recognition, their market began to evolve as well. In the United States, the industry has grown into a multi-billion-dollar sector. The market generated about $2.1 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach roughly $2.6 billion by 2033. Globally, that number is significantly larger thanks to Japanese manga and South Korean webtoons. This growing legitimacy is reflected in higher education, where comics have moved from the margins to the center
of scholarly inquiry.

A pioneer in comics studies

Arriving to UF in 1988, the late Donald Ault was instrumental in establishing the university as a hub for comics studies. A scholar of both literature and visual narrative, Ault helped legitimize comics within academic spaces and fostered a generation of scholars who approach the medium with the same rigor applied to traditional literary forms. His work contributed to a broader shift in how universities teach and analyze visual storytelling in the 21st century.

“Don was responsible for introducing comics to academia long before comics studies became an established discipline in the United States,” said Associate Professor of English Anastasia Ulanowicz. “Just as surely, he ensured that the University of Florida would become a central location for the scholarly study of visual rhetoric.”

While at UF, Ault was largely responsible for founding one of the first graduate programs in comics studies in the U.S. In 2004, he helped found ImageTexT, which initially served as a venue for publishing he proceedings from the annual comics symposium, Today, ImageTexT serves as a dynamic hub for exploring the relationship between visual art and written language. As an online peer-reviewed journal supported by the Department of English, ImageTexT reflects the strong tradition UF has built in studying comics, animation and other forms that blend images and text.

That tradition continues with Margaret Galvan, who came to UF in 2017 to help lead the next phase of comics studies. First encountering comics as a child through X-Men, Galvan was drawn to their rare portrayal of powerful women and diverse identities. Galvan’s work in comics, visual culture and storytelling builds on UF’s established reputation in the field while bringing fresh energy to the ways comics are studied, taught and understood. Galvan and other scholars like Ulanowicz further the belief that comics belong at the center of literary conversations.

The next generation

Part of what makes comics so powerful and so misunderstood, is how they work.

“Comics can be a simple mode for storytelling but are often dismissed; they have always been an important and powerful mode for expression layering both image and text,” Galvan said. “But there is complexity in the simplicity and that is what we teach.”

Unlike traditional prose, comics require readers to actively construct meaning, interpreting not only words but images, layouts and even the silence between panels.

That process, what McCloud calls closure, turns reading into an act of participation. And it’s exactly what draws undergraduates like Em Petlev, a third-year student studying English and history and women’s studies as a triple major, to the field.

“Studying comics means interpreting both images and text at the same time. It really expands how you think about analysis,” they said.

That dual literacy extends beyond literature. Petlev notes it improves their ability to analyze maps, graphs and historical documents, skills that carry across disciplines. What initially feels accessible becomes complex. What seems simple becomes sophisticated.

A surprising scholarship

For many students, comics studies begin with surprise. That was the case for Karen Libby (BA English, ’20, Ph.D. ’25), now a visiting assistant professor at the University of Tampa. When she arrived at UF, Libby expected to study traditional literature. Comics were not on her radar.

“I wasn’t really into comics before … but then I took a class, and that completely changed what I thought they could be.”

What she encountered was not a superhero universe, but a world of independent, queer and small-press comics that reflected lived experiences often excluded from traditional literary canons.

“We read a lot of queer and independent comics … seeing those perspectives reflected was really engaging.”

That shift from mainstream to marginal voices, is one of the defining trends in comics studies today. At UF, students are not just reading comics. They are engaging with them as cultural artifacts that reveal structures of power, identity and history.

“Students don’t expect to read a comic in a writing class, so it becomes really refreshing for them,” Libby said. “You can’t just read the words or just look at the images. You have to put them together.”

Libby now incorporates comics and zines into her own teaching, using them to make writing more approachable. Zines are small, self-published booklets, often handmade or independently printed. They share personal stories, art or ideas that are not usually part of the mainstream media. Zines offer a creative outlet for their authors that may not otherwise be available.

That’s why the study of comics really stretches the critical thinking muscle for students, according to Libby.

“All of that critical thinking is often subconscious, and students don’t realize it until we talk about it in class,” she said. “But they’re building those skills and can then translate that to other areas of communication or critical reading and thinking.”

Comics community

For Raisa Karim (BA Political Science ’20, MBA ’21), comics were never just an academic subject. They were a way of life. Born in Bangladesh and raised in Florida, Karim grew up reading comics before she could speak English. At UF, she transformed that passion into action by founding Gator Comics, the university’s first comic book club.

“I was really surprised to find out that there wasn’t a comic book club, so I started it,” Karim said.

What began as an informal gathering quickly became a lasting community in the form of the Gator Comics Club. Through meetings, workshops and visual storytelling, the club creates a space to share work and collaborate.

“The first few meetings were definitely not sanctioned, but people showed up,” she said.

Today, Karim is finishing up her second master’s degree and pursuing a career in political psychology. For her, that spirit of grassroots creativity continues to define UF’s comics culture. Students don’t just analyze comics, they make them, share them and build communities around them.

“Dr. Galvan’s classes and Gator Comics were really what helped me through freshman year,” she said. “They made me realize that I have passions for political science and English that I want to maintain, and they also reinforced my belief that liberal arts are very important in the education of young people.”

More than a program

For graduate students like Thomas DeGroff, that environment is transformative. DeGroff, who currently serves as president of the Graduate Comics Organization, traces his own interest in comics to earlier studies of visual literature, including William Blake and medieval manuscripts. At UF, he found a community that treated those interests as central rather than peripheral.

“Comics were the big reason I came to UF,” DeGroff said. “I knew I wanted to study comics and I was looking into different graduate programs that took comics seriously, and UF is the one that stood out.”

As president of the Graduate Comics Organization (GCO) at UF, DeGroff also served as the chief organizer for the 22nd annual Gator Comics Event. This year’s event was held April 11 at the Gainesville-based Sequential Artists Workshop and was part of the Gainesville Arts and Zine Expo (GAZE). GCO’s programming during the one-day event brought together award-winning cartoonists and comics scholars from across the country to reflect on the history and future of newspaper comics.

“The Graduate Comics Organization is one of the oldest comics organizations around,” DeGroff said. “The community here celebrates comics.”

And while the UF comics community thrives on campus, its reach extends well beyond Gainesville. The Comix-Scholars Discussion List serves as an academic forum for discussion of all aspects of comics and cartooning. It is open to academic scholars, professionals in a range of institutional settings and independent researchers from across the globe.

Today, comics occupy a unique position in the cultural landscape. They are both an art form and an industry. Their history reflects a long struggle with recognition, while their current market demonstrates their widespread appeal.

What began as a marginalized form of entertainment has become a central part of contemporary storytelling. Comics now challenge traditional definitions of literature by combining image and text in ways that demand active participation from readers. They invite us to see stories not just as sequences of words, but as dynamic interactions between visual and verbal language. In this sense, the rise of comics is not just a story about a medium gaining respect. It is a story about how literature itself is changing.