phd in comic books

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Julia Powles

PHD comics' Jorge Cham on misery, hope and academia

Jorge Cham, creator of the cult comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper , or PHD, is probably the most gut-achingly funny/tragic counsellor you could recommend to a PhD student -- or to any confounded friend, lover, or parent trying to understand what he terms, with some flourish, the "global misery phenomenon" of graduate school.

Cham is a full-time cartoonist, but the deep scars wrought by a PhD programme (in robotic engineering) remain his constant muse.

His webcomic has been running since he started grad school in 1997, is syndicated worldwide, and attracts a loyal following among that peculiar breed of poorly-paid, slightly masochistic overachievers, bravely hunting the frontiers of knowledge, free food, most random societies on campus, and unrequited supervisor approval.

PHD follows the travails of four main characters in grad school: the nameless, hapless hero that bears considerable resemblance to Jorge; Cecilia, the reluctant geek constantly frustrated by undergraduates; Tajel, the free-living social sciences student always willing to rally for a cause; and Mike Slackenerny, that person -- every research group has one -- who has been there longer than anyone can remember. The students' harried encounters with the demanding, loveless Professor Smith and absent-minded Professor Jones form the foundation for many priceless recurring gags, poking fun at the lows of grad student life.

Recently, Jorge was in the UK on an academic world tour , talking about 'The power of procrastination'. His thesis has something for all of us -- grad students and otherwise.

The power of procrastination

"The first thing to note", says Cham, "is that procrastination is not the same thing as laziness. Laziness is when you don't want to do anything. Procrastination, its close but distinct cousin, is when you don't want to do the one thing you really ought to be doing, right now. It's not that you don't want to do it, it's just that you find doing everything else possible, from some completely obscure hobby to categorising the entire internet, like the Yahoo dudes did when their supervisor was on summer break, more appealing."

How much time do you spend on a given comic?

I doodle and brainstorm on a notebook I always carry with me. It can take anywhere from five minutes to eight hours to work out a comic. Drawing it on the computer (using a Cintiq) usually only takes one hour.

Simon Singh has written a whole book about mathematics and The Simpsons . Have you got some examples of deep-coded nerd gags in your comics?

I always try to generalise things because my audience spans so many disciplines, but I do have a running gag that pi/2 is always the answer, and I've lost count how many times I've hidden 1.57 into my comics over the years.

Can you give away anything about your characters?

Increasing the ratio of female professors is a big topic I hope to address in the future. The nameless grad student was given a name in The PHD Movie (the film adaptation of the comics), but it's not clear yet whether that's canon or not.

The comics will eventually follow the characters to the completion of their time in grad school. One graduated several years ago (and is now a Post-doc), and I think another will graduate in the next year or two.

Andy Greenberg

Steven Levy

Matt Reynolds

Jeremy White

You mentioned The PHD Movie . I've heard there's a sequel in the pipeline. Tell us about it.

Yes, we're trying to make a sequel to The PHD Movie ! A few years ago we made what I think is the first independent movie adaptation of a webcomic, and it was a great success in the academic world. It screened at over 500 universities and research centres worldwide (including Antarctica) and got great reviews.

Recently, I've gotten a lot of inquiries whether we're going to make a follow-up so I decided to give the fans a chance to make it happen by launching a Kickstarter . What's different about these movies is that they involve real scientists, researchers and staff members at a real top university (Caltech) in the acting and producing roles.

Part of the message we want to convey is that people in academia are not robots, that they have different passions, talents and even a sense of humour. So, the movie is in the hands of the internet to make it a reality.

Do you have a favourite PHD series?

I started listing out some of my favourite series, but then I realised another reason it's great to be a creator online is that it sort of doesn't matter how many people appreciate any particular piece of work you do. As long as you create something that has meaning to you, you will most likely find others who also connect with it, and the connection will probably be deeper than if you tried to create something that you think everyone would like. It's also easier to take risks because if people didn't particularly like something you did, you have your whole archive there for people to also sample and find something they like.

Is there one comic that stands out as particularly special to you?

One particular comic I've done that comes to mind is a version of Alice in Wonderland where Cecilia gets pulled through her monitor into Thesisland, as a metaphor for her feeling lost on her research. It's a series of comics I feel that works on different levels (character, arc, story, artwork, punch-lines). I also wrote and drew them during the first few weeks my son was born, so it's special also because I was somewhat inspired by that. It's not one I'm particularly famous for, but every once in a while someone will come up to me to say it's their favourite too.

You can see the 11 part series online, starting here and ending here .

The PHD Movie is available to watch for free all this month . You can fund the sequel through this Kickstarter campaign

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

Amit Katwala

Reece Rogers

Angela Watercutter

Jennifer M. Wood

• Jorge earned his Bachelor's of Science from Georgia Tech.
• In 2009, he was awarded the 2009 NSF/AAAS International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge First Place in Informational Graphics with his collaborator Dwayne Godwin, a professor of Neuroscience at Wake Forest University. Their comics about the brain appeared in Scientific American Mind from 2010-2017.
• In 2011, PHD Comics was adapted into a feature-length film called " The PHD Movie ", which screened at over 500 locations worldwide, including all 7 continents. A sequel titled, " The PHD Movie 2: Still in Grad School " was produced in 2015 and also screened worldwide. Nature Journal called the movie " Astute, funny " while the New York Times wrote, " Well, Postdocs think it's funny. "
• To date, he has delivered over 400 invited lectures internationally on his experiences in academia and being an independent artist and science communicator.
• The PHD Comics website has been visited by over 60 million visitors in the last 10 years.
• Six book collections of his comics have been published (available in stores and online ).
• " We Have No Idea ," his book co-written with physicist Daniel Whiteson was published May 2017 by Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House and was a Der Spiegel Best-Seller. The book won the Wenjin National Book Award in China.
• His animated explanations of the Higgs Boson and Gravitational Waves went viral and have been viewed millions times.
• He was the subject of a question in a British Quiz Show .
• He lives near Los Angeles, CA with his family.
• He was named one of Los Angeles' most interesting people of 2013.

• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Comic Strips

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PHD Comics 20th Anniversary Book: The 6th Piled Higher and Deeper Comic Strip Collection Paperback – September 29, 2018

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• Print length 200 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Piled Higher and Deeper Publishing, LLC
• Publication date September 29, 2018
• Dimensions 9 x 0.5 x 7.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0972169563
• ISBN-13 978-0972169561
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Piled Higher and Deeper Publishing, LLC; Anniversary edition (September 29, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0972169563
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0972169561
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9 x 0.5 x 7.25 inches
• #1,472 in Comic Strips (Books)
• #18,324 in Humor (Books)

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Ph.D. in Batman? First doctorate in comic books to be awarded

When Michael Uslan was a boy, he watched the stuff that dreams are made of literally go up in smoke.

A friend’s father, who shared the dim view of comic books most grown-ups held in the 1950s and ’60s, burned his son’s collection in his fireplace as young Michael watched in horror. Uslan estimates that the comics he saw consumed in flames that day, which included Spider-Man’s first appearance, would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars today.

“There were comic book burnings in various towns,” Uslan told TODAY.com. “In postwar America, comics were blamed for juvenile delinquency and, my favorite, asthma, because comic book readers stayed indoors to read instead of playing outside in the fresh air.”

Story: DC do-over: Superman and friends start over from scratch

Despite all that, Uslan grew up to not only write comic books, but become the originator and executive producer of the “Batman” film franchise, which has brought in nearly $1.9 billion at the box office since 1989. But soon he will receive vindication that, if possible, may actually be sweeter: On Oct. 10, he’ll receive the world’s first fine arts doctorate in comic books, conferred by Monmouth University, a stone’s throw from where he grew up the son of a stonemason in New Jersey.

That degree will close a wide circle for Uslan, who in 1971 taught the world’s first accredited college course in comics, at Indiana University.

“One of my life’s goals is to make the world aware that comics are an indigenous American art form, as legitimate as jazz,” he told TODAY.com. As the modern equivalent of ancient mythology and a mirror to society, he maintains, comics are “contemporary American folklore.”

But reaching for that goal has been no easy task. “When I first got out to Hollywood with Batman, I was rejected by every single studio,” he told TODAY.com. “The prejudice was incredible.”

That changed with the release of “Batman” starring Michael Keaton in 1989. Uslan feels “the first film by Tim Burton was revolutionary” in conveying the original vision of Batman as a dark avenger of the night, not the campy buffoon who cavorted on TV in the late 1960s.

Gay characters take center stage in comic books

And that vision, he believes, culminated in the three Christian Bale Batman films directed by Christopher Nolan (“Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight” and this year’s “The Dark Knight Rises”). “What Chris has done has been to elevate the comic book movie,” Uslan said. “People say ‘that was a great film,’ not ‘that was a great comic book movie.’”

So, in homage to his hero, will “The Boy Who Loved Batman” (as Uslan’s memoir is titled), dress up like the Dark Knight to collect his degree?

“They’re putting me up there in the black robe, and I’m hoping it will be pointy like Batman’s cape,” Uslan said with a laugh. “If not, maybe I can wear Batman Underoos underneath.”

By Debbie R on Flickr, creative commons license

New research networks to study comics

A new research network about comics and graphic novels has been set up by The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH).

Called ‘Comics and Graphic Novels: The Politics of Form’ , the network will look at questions like why comics are not deemed ‘academic’ and whether traditional critical approaches to literature can be applied to comics.

Dr Dominic Davies, a British Academic Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Faculty, has founded the network. He answers our questions about comics:

Have comics been overlooked in academia? Why do you think this might be?

Yes, comics definitely have been overlooked by many academics. This is in part because, by their very nature, they don’t fit easily into the disciplinary structures that we have today. Are they art? Of course, they certainly are, but because they’re usually collected together in strip or book form, circulated in newspapers or sold in bookshops, rather than hung in museums or galleries, it means they’ve often don’t get the attention of art historians and art theorists.

Conversely, are they literature? Many comics look like books, and there are lots of self-labelled comics short stories and ‘graphic novels’. They have a beginning, a middle and an end, and most of them contain text that drives the narrative forward. But they are, also, fundamentally, groupings of sequential images as well as words. The field of literary studies might have the tools to deconstruct comics’ narrative dimensions, but how can literary academics presume to analyse their visual materials? This is one reason that, in its early incarnations at least, comics studies has mostly been located in media studies departments, sometimes even film studies departments.

However, probably the real reason for the slow uptake of comics by academia is that comics have traditionally been seen as a ‘low’ cultural form, one that is filled with coarse language, silly jokes and subversive sentiments and thus not worthy of critical attention. This is especially the case when they are contrasted with the notion of literature, say, as a ‘high’ cultural form with moral worth. This division still haunts comics, even as they have been embraced by academics in recent years, and causes much self-reflexive debate. It was only with the publications of longer comics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendour, or Joe Sacco’s Palestine, which move away from conventional superhero stories and tackle complex and serious issues (Spiegelman’s comic is about his father’s time in Auschwitz, for example) that academia started to take them seriously.

So these longer, more obviously ‘serious’ comics, have gained the form recognition in academic circles, and even today academics still tend to focus on them.

Are comics taught in schools and universities? If not, should they be?

Comics mostly aren’t taught in schools. In the U.S., throughout the latter half of the twentieth century when comics production really began to surge, comics were seen not as a medium to help children with their studies, but as distractions—and definitely not something to be studied. This prejudice lingers in education syllabuses today. But there are always exceptions—a comic about anti-apartheid activism is read in schools in Cape Town to educate students about South Africa’s history, for example. And we are seeing comics-only modules cropping up in higher education now.

But this is in large part dependent on whether there is an academic in an English Literature department who happens to have an interest in comics, and the energy to build and offer these modules. One good example is Dr Paul Williams, who has set up a comics-only module at the University of Exeter, and who is coming to give a seminar at our TORCH Network.

As to whether or not comics should be taught in schools and universities, I think the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. The form is so rich, it does so many things that literature or art, as separate mediums, cannot. Indeed, in recent years, there’s been a surge in the kinds of stories that comics are being used to tell—there are now sub-genres within the field, such as autobiographics (autobiographical comics) and comics journalism—and in the popularity of comics, as more and more people find stories they can relate to.

Is there a difference between ‘comics’ and ‘graphic novels’?

That depends on who you ask. As comics have been deemed worthy of academic attention, the term ‘graphic novel’ has become more widely used. This is definitely related to the issue of ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of culture I mentioned above. The term ‘comics’ is still associated with short strips in newspapers, or superheroes, and these still aren’t really taken seriously. The term ‘graphic novel’ has come to be used by academics to refer to the longer form comic, usually published all in one go as a book – and that is somehow a ‘higher’ cultural form.

It is the term ‘graphic novel’ that high street bookshops such as Waterstones and Blackwell’s use to categorise the comics they sell, and again I think this is related to the idea about what is ‘serious’ literature and worthy of being read by the kinds of people who frequent those stores. While the distinction between the terms ‘comic’ and ‘graphic novel’ has a certain usefulness, there’s a great deal of academic debate about its implicit politics. Graphic novels are still comics, and owe their existence to long histories and rich traditions that extend back into the twentieth century and earlier. Their relabelling as ‘graphic novels’ dismisses this history. Some critics even see the term as being cynically deployed just to make comics more palatable to middle class readerships, academics, and university English departments.

There are numerous other labels that can be used to describe the comics form. I prefer to use the term ‘long-form comics’ rather than ‘graphic novels’ when talking about book-length comics, because it means that we don’t forget the form’s long and valuable history. But it’s important to remember that even under the umbrella term ‘comics’ is a huge diversity of different kinds of reading experience, some of which bear little resemblance to one another.

Discussions around terminologies and definitions have always been at the centre of academic criticism on comics, and these debates are still ongoing, so there’s still no straightforward answer to this question. This Network will include seminars about ‘comics’ and ‘graphic novels’, but will remain self-aware and open to thinking about how these terms are used and what the implications of this usage might be.

Can you apply traditional critical theories to the comic form?

Comics can be analysed with the critical theories that art historians might use, or with other tools from the broader field of visual cultures, such as W.J.T. Mitchell’s work on ‘picture theory’. But since they’re also narratives, literary criticism’s numerous theories such as narratology and discourse, not to mention other fields such as feminist or postcolonial criticism, have a role to play here.

Though comics haven’t had the attention that they deserve from academia, the relatively few critics who have written monographs on them and, in the occasional case, devoted their entire careers to them, have come up with some really sophisticated theories specifically designed for reading comics.

And comics are inherently interdisciplinary, so the tools needed to read them are also interdisciplinary. So it’s really important that our network creates a space for conversations to take place across the traditional disciplinary divides. We’re trying to bring literary critics into dialogue with visual cultures scholars.

And given that the comics and graphic novels we’ll be discussing in the seminars cover such a range of topics, it’s also really important that we welcome historians, geographers, and politics students into the conversation as well. There are also comics being produced in a number of different languages, and so we have committee members from modern languages departments.

How can people get involved and what can we look forward to?

Because the history of comics criticism has always been practiced as much by artists themselves (Will Eisner, Scott McCloud) as it has by academics, we are going to alternate visiting academic speakers with visiting artists to learn more about how actual practitioners go about writing and drawing their comics. So in Michaelmas Term 2016, we have Dr Helen Iball from the University of Leeds talking about autobiographical comics, and Dr Charlotta Salmi from the University of Birmingham presenting some of her recent research on protest and graphic novels in the Middle East.

But we also have some artists coming to present their work and offer their reflections, such as Karrie Fransman, who did a TEDx talk on comics quite recently, and Samir Harb, a geography PhD student at the University of Manchester who is also a published comics artist.

The seminar will run every two weeks throughout term time, and each of these speakers and artists will circulate some comics for participants to read in advance. It’s really important that the Network gets people to actually start reading some comics as well as simply talking and hearing about them.

In addition to the bi-weekly seminars we’ll also have one-off events, in collaboration with other TORCH Networks or other seminar groups based at the university. For example, Jennifer Howell, author of The Algerian War in French-Language Comics (2015), is coming to give a one-off seminar in November 2016.

All will be welcome to attend any of the seminars and talks we’ll be putting on, and we’ll be advertising each event through TORCH, the English Faculty, and various other mailing lists and outlets. In addition, we are currently building up a mailing list of our own, to which you can subscribe by emailing [email protected] or [email protected] . We’ll also be active on social media, so people will soon be able to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, and we’ll feature regular blog posts about comics-related topics on the TORCH website as well.

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The latest news and views in the arts, humanities and culture at Oxford University. Curated by Sarah Whitebloom, Media Relations Manager (Research and Innovation).

Contact: Sarah Whitebloom, [email protected]

Current PhD Research – Comics Research Hub

Current phd research, gareth brookes.

My practice based PhD focuses on materiality in comics, specifically material processes that challenge the page as representative surface. My aim is draw from the methods and theory of artist books and craft based practices to open up alternative sequential structures in comics.

Barbara Chamberlin

Barbara is a part-time doctoral student at Central Saint Martins, supervised by Roger Sabin and Ian Horton. Her research is situated in Comics Studies, and is about representations of folkloric or historical British witches and folk horror, using walking and psychogeography to create an anthology of short comics. The creative practice-based part of her work is done through collaboration with an artist, thus enabling each story to be a negotiated construction that fuses multiple responses to the witch narratives and the walking experiences that frame them.

Thomas Gebhart

My PhD research will primarily take a qualitative approach to develop a critical, empirical study that will explore the potential for UK digital comics to take advantage of digital technologies and the digital environment to foster inclusivity and diversity. On top of embracing technological change, digital comics have the potential to reflect, embrace and contribute to social and cultural change in the UK. Digital comics not only present new ways of telling stories, but whose story is told. My thesis will explore whether the ways UK digital comics are published and consumed means that they can foreground marginal voices. Comics scholarship has focused on the technological aspects of digital comics, meaning their potentially significant contribution reflecting and embracing social and cultural change in the UK has not been explored. I will establish whether the fact digital comics can circumvent traditional gatekeepers means they provide space to foreground marginal voices. I will also explore the challenges and opportunities digital comics might present for legal deposit collection development policy.

Comics And Transmedia: Doctor Doom In The Marvel Age

Mark hibbett.

My research seeks to show that the shared universe of Marvel comics in the period 1961-1987 was an early example of the shared-world multiple author storytelling which has become the source material for the hugely successful Marvel Cinematic Universe of the 21st century, and that Doctor Doom’s largely unsupervised transmedial and transtextual wandering through this storyworld make him an early example of what Jan-Noel Thon has described as a “Global Transmedia Character Network” – a linkage of all versions of a character collected from single and serial works across media types.

Paul Jackson

My PhD project explores the creation of an interface that sits between forms of narrative drawing and theoretical approaches to world making. Principally, it will question what an interface is in relation to the experiential and intertextual framing of worlds, with a theoretical approach grounded in storyworld and narrative discourse. The interface itself will be explored and created through drawing practice. My working hypothesis is that interface theory offers a new way of framing the process of image- and world-making in drawing practice.

The Third Hand in Creating Comics: A Practice-Based Study of Writer-Artist Collaboration

Ahmed mauroof jameel.

My PhD project, titled ‘The Third Hand in Creating Comics: A Practice-Based Study of Writer-Artist Collaboration’, investigates whether collaboration in comics effectuates renegotiations of artistic identity, and is an intervention to deeply ingrained auteurist views and practices in comics cultures. I explore the social reasons behind the prevalence of auteurism and relate this to the politics of avant-garde art movements through modernism and postmodernism. Avant-garde collaborative experiments in artistic identity crystallised in results and behaviour incongruous to the rest of the individual artists’ oeuvres and histories, conceptualised as a ‘Third Hand’ in these creative relationships. After identifying where the ontological boundaries and affects of creative partnership are occluded enough to facilitate ‘the Third Hand’s’ occurrence, I use autoethnography to examine collaborative experience from within to illuminate this area and generate insight into the possibilities of meta-authorship.

Comics in the age of mechanical colour separation

A text-based thesis, looking at the emergence of the US comic strip as a new mass medium (1890s), the creation of the comic book (1930s), and its mid-1950s decline; focused on printing and colour separation technologies. Comics printing during this time has been understood as the continuation of a uniform practice; four-colour letterpress printing on newsprint paper. I demonstrate that it can be divided into three periods, when different colour separation methods were predominantly used: Ben Day (1890s-1930s), Craftint (1930s-1950s) and acetate (1950s-1980s). I use diagrammatic reconstructions to explicate these ‘lost’ technologies in detail. Examples from the archive demonstrate their distinctive contributions to the appearance of the printed image. Whether this technology was incidental to the development of comics, or of more fundamental importance, is considered using cultural sociologist Richard A. Peterson’s ‘production of culture perspective’.

Memoirs of my Vulva: An exploration of female genitalia as characters within autobiographical graphic narratives

My practice-based research is focused around two aims: 1. To use the vulva as the main character in graphic narratives to investigate perceptions of female genitalia. 2. To create new insights by applying female genitalia to characters in graphic narratives and challenge both the erotic and taboo stereotypes of vulvas in graphic images. This research contributes to challenge the stereotype of the vulva’s historical, symbolic representation in graphic images and awaken the consciousness of female self-acceptance through directly visualising the vulva character. The relevant comics of my PhD project include: Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical comic ‘Goldie: A Neurotic Woman (1972)’ is an example of such work and represents her own experiences of sex giving me an initial understanding of feminist graphic narratives ‘Fun Thing to Do with The Little Girl (1987)’ by Phoebe Glockner depicts her experiences of being raped by her mother’s boyfriend (Figure 7), graphically representing the girl’s body and her precarity Julie Doucet’s autobiographical dairy comics “365 Days” which records Doucet’s daily life with full of insecurities, to-do lists, doodles, accounts of dreams, bad news, etc. I will also use the UAL archives Comic Book Collections to explore the following categories: narratives method, graphical characters, comics aesthetics and the application of symbols in feminist comics, by examining existing graphic narrative works.

Tobias J. Yu-Kiener

Tobias J. Yu-Kiener’s PhD research is concerned with the current boom in biographical graphic novels about iconic visual artists, their supporting national, international and transnational networks, and their connections to established art museums. In drawing from Art History, Comics Studies, and Cultural Studies, and looking at theories of political economy, (trans)national identity, museology, and (museum) branding and marketing, the project aims to determine where museum-backed graphic novels about iconic painters are to be located between serious artists’ biographies, comic books, history books, merchandise products, public relations and marketing strategies, and state, city and museum branding. The main methods of the project include semi-structured interviews, archival research, textual and visual analysis based on the close reading of a carefully chosen corpus of graphic novels.

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Edit locked.

The comics depict the typical life of graduate students in Stanford University: how they obsess about ever getting their theses completed, struggle to make ends meet with their meager stipends, wonder why life is passing them by, and slack off while their supervisors aren't looking.

Contains examples of:

• Absent-Minded Professor : Almost all of the Research Advisors introduced. They can barely remember the students' name, and hardly ever bother to read their thesis draft.
• Adaptation Name Change : Cecelia's advisor Professor Jones is named Professor Chu in the movies.
• All Issues Are Political Issues : Tajel often carries protest signboards for various causes.
• Ambiguously Brown : Dee's friend has a dark skin, but he has no name or distinctive features to determine his actual race (unlike Tajel, who we know is half-Indian from her mother).
• Batman Gambit : During Cecelia's thesis defense in the second film, her advisor Professor Chu gets an adversarial committee member to endorse her thesis by agreeing with him that an additional year of work is needed, knowing that he will change his mind to be Commander Contrarian .
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs : The "How You Spend Your Time" pie chart has a Sports & Leisure section which consist of surfing the internet, doing sports, and reading about sports while surfing the Internet.
• Call-Back : Mike teaches the protagonist how to distract with graphs, which unfortunately doesn't work too well for him. Mike himself does it over a year later, with more success.
• When we see Tajel interact with Prof. Rivera for the first time, he was lamenting her lack of apparent seriousness in her studies, especially when she chose to write about "The Grad student of Academia" for her research topic. Nowadays, their dynamics are reversed, as Rivera becomes the most egregious example of Absent-Minded Professor who never reads Tajel's draft and gives her useless advice, while Tajel desperately tries to get his support in writing her thesis.
• Professor Smith changed too. Originally he was The Faceless , then started to become more of an Absent-Minded Professor who tries to blend in with the students despite being clueless of their trends. Later, he just became a professor with a serious Lack of Empathy .
• Chekhov's Gunman : Early in the second movie, Allison points out Dr. Dukosky as the founder of their field, but the latter is surrounded by other conference attendees at the time and cannot be seen. Later during conference presentations, the Nameless Hero has a casual conversation with an old lady who turns out to be Dr. Dukosky, and she provides him with helpful advice in a subsequent scene.
• Child Prodigy : Professor Jones's daughter is only a first year in elementary school, but is intelligent enough to fix Mike's research data.
• Comic-Book Time : Every year, the strip features the characters celebrating birthdays, summer vacations and various holidays, but despite their constant complains that they're never graduating, they never seem to actually age. Cecelia lampshades this in one of her birthday strips, in which she decided that the time she spends in grad school doesn't count to her age, because it's basically living in a vacuum.
• Cool Old Lady : The second movie has Dr. Dukosky, the highly respected founder of the Nameless Hero's field of study, who takes the time to strike up a friendly conversation with him and offers him advice.
• Scott all but disappeared from the storyline after he broke up with Cecilia.
• Played for Laughs with Gerard, the token Humanities student, who was told by the PHD Comics management that he should either change his major or leave the comics altogether. He was then forced to attend a hearing to justify his existence, and had not appeared ever since.
• Creative Closing Credits : The first film overlays the credits on top of academic paperwork, accompanied by sketches of the cast and crew in the art style of the comics.
• Cuteness Overload : Most of the campus faculty practically melts at the sight of Mike's baby daughter, Sophy. He exploits this to distract them while he steals food from associations he doesn't belong to.
• Demoted to Extra : In the first film, Mike and Tajel were important supporting characters who gave guidance to the Nameless Hero and Cecelia respectively. In the second film, their roles are diminished, only getting some token lines and scenes that for most part don't directly affect the main plot.
• Divergent Character Evolution : In the earlier strips , all the University professors were portrayed as a collective group of sinister, faceless Hive Mind who goes out their way to make the students' lives more difficult, especially during Quals. Now, they're mostly given distinct appearance and personalities: Professor Smith is still the mean Stern Teacher , Professor Jones tries to be helpful but is often scatterbrained, Professor Rivera is very flippant and easygoing, but doesn't really pay attention to what his students are doing.
• Education Through Pyrotechnics : The machines used for experimental research frequently blow up in people's faces.
• The Faceless : Most of the research advisors don't get drawn in the comic panels, at least in the earlier strips. No longer the case since the 2003 strips.
• Failure Is the Only Option : To keep going, the series needs the characters to remain grad students, meaning they have to postpone the completion of their respective theses indefinitely. Mike ultimately subverts this; having been the oldest grad student for several years, he finally manages to finish his dissertation after years of procrastination and graduate, but stays anyway as a member of the teaching staff.
• Fourth-Wall Observer : Tajel takes this role in the movies. She addresses the audience at the end of both films, and refers to herself as a "secondary character" in the first movie.
• Gag Series : The main point of the strips are to make jokes about the life (or lack thereof) of a grad student, and make fun of the research advisors and Academia in general. When the strips go for more detailed plot and character development, some readers actually complain.
• Ignored Aesop : A Smithmas Carol ends with Smith reflecting on his life's journey and concluding with this: Prof. Smith: Eh, who cares? I've got tenure.
• Limited Wardrobe : Probably justified considering how cash-strapped the characters are. In any case, they are almost always depicted in the same outfits.
• Living Prop : Discussed in-universe regarding the status of grad students. Apparently, the faculty would be more likely to notice an actual missing furniture than they would a missing student.
• Meta Guy : Gerard, the Humanities student Recurring Character , only exists to represent another Grad School department apart from engineering. He's definitely aware of this, and most of his appearances have him address the readers in some way.
• Misery Poker : A humorous variation took place during the PhD widows meeting between Scott and Jenny as they ranted on their respective partners, Cecelia and Mike. Scott: Cecelia seems to have lost her way... She has a lot of work ethic but lacks purpose. Jennifer: My husband, on the other hand, has a baby on the way, but his work is pathetic and slacks on purpose.
• Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher : Cecelia's teaching style has shades of this in the first movie; she prepares baked goods for her students and comes up with an interpretive dance (complete with props and rhymes) to introduce the course material to them. She is eventually discouraged from doing this by the undergrads' seeming apathy, but returns to it enthusiastically once she gets out of her funk.
• Named by the Adaptation : In the movies, the Nameless Grad Student's name is given as Winston.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat : Faced by Mike when submitting his thesis (he has to come back because the layout isn't in perfect conformity with university rules), by Tajel when applying for a visa, and by the main character when trying to get reimbursed for travel.
• Promoted to Love Interest : The second film pairs up Cecelia and Winston (the Nameless Grad Student), though this is only revealed to the audience at the end .
• Recurring Character : Scott. He's Cecelia's boyfriend, but since he's not a Stanford student, he is actually featured less frequently than the nameless Living Props that are the Engineering Grad students. Lampshaded by Tajel when he suddenly shows up after a long absence. "Scott? I feel I haven't seen him in years
• Relationship Reveal : Throughout the second film, Cecelia and Winston (the Nameless Grad Student) are both shown receiving texts from an unrevealed party. It is revealed at the end that they had been texting each other and are romantically involved, following a Ship Tease at the end of the first film .
• Rhymes on a Dime : A lot of the comics' punchlines come from characters bantering with each other in rhymes. One example is the Misery Poker mentioned earlier, and another is the following exchange between Cecelia and her advisor. Cecelia: I have to reference... without deference? Prof. Jones: That's the preference.
• Rhyming Title : Several strips have titles such as "Webcam Labcam" and "What is... a Thesis?"
• Right in Front of Me : Upon meeting Khumalo, Tajel starts chatting him up without realizing that he's her new professor.
• Running Gag : π/2
• Sequel Hook : Near the end of the first film, Mike learns that his wife is pregnant. A sketch of their baby daughter is shown in the end credits, with "Sequel!" written next to her. She does end up appearing in the second film, though only for a brief moment in the opening montage.
• Skewed Priorities : Mike can remember "important stuffs" like who is the colorist for a particular X-Men issue, but forgets to take Quals, which he needed to graduate.
• The Slacker : While several characters are slackers to some extent, Mike Slackenerny stands head and shoulders above the rest in this regard. An eternal student, he's the PhD answer to Doonesbury 's Zonker Harris.
• She also accidentally spurts her drink on Scott when the latter mentioned that he had a job offer in London.
• Starving Student : All of the students, who live off instant ramen, and spend a lot of their time scavenging for free food.
• Mike finally graduated from his Ph.D, but he continues to stick around the campus as a Post-Doc whose activities mostly involve sleeping, napping and scavenging for free food.
• Prof. Rivera left Stanford for a position in another University, but continues to serve as Tajel's adviser. Since he barely communicate with his student or give her useful advice anyway, his departure has no virtually effect to her thesis.
• Still Got It : Prof. Smith when he finds out he can still take a nap balanced on a chair, as he used to do as a grad student.

• Though the supposed take that at Mythbusters makes it abundantly clear that he's never actually watched it and doesn't think about what the actual purpose of the show is (not to prove that something always happens, but to prove if it could happen somehow).
• Two Scenes, One Dialogue : In both films, there's a scene in which Cecelia and the Nameless Grad Student receive the same advice simultaneously from different parties at a pivotal moment. In the first film, the advice is respectively given by Tajel and Mike. In the second, it's given by the emeritus professor on Cecelia's thesis committee and Dr. Dukosky.
• Vague Age : No one really knows how old any of the characters are, since most of them are grad students who have spent countless of years in their program and not showing any signs of graduating soon, despite their constant lament that they're getting older and older as the years goes by. And given that Mike's baby daughter visibly ages over time, the setting probably doesn't run on Comic-Book Time .
• PhD - Episode 1 is based on The Phantom Menace .
• What is... The Thesis? is from The Matrix .
• Raiders of the lost dissertation is Raiders of the Lost Ark .
• Yank the Dog's Chain : During the credits of the second movie, a montage is shown of Mike's attempts to land an industry job during the conference. He is eventually offered a position... only for the employer to retract the offer when Mike starts gratuitously celebrating on the spot.

Alternative Title(s): Piled Higher And Deeper , Piled High And Deeper

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• Print length 200 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Piled Higher & Deeper Pub
• Publication date 29 September 2018
• Dimensions 22.86 x 1.27 x 18.42 cm
• ISBN-10 0972169563
• ISBN-13 978-0972169561
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Piled Higher & Deeper Pub; Anniversary edition (29 September 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0972169563
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0972169561
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 363 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 22.86 x 1.27 x 18.42 cm

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Asian Scientist x PHD Comics: Where Art & Science Collide!

Are you tired of being a starving grad student and wondering if it’s possible to be a non-starving artist?

Here’s your chance to meet Jorge Cham, the brains behind PHD Comics , a wildly popular comic strip about life (or the lack thereof) in academia.

Jorge, who has a PhD in robotics from Stanford University, will be speaking at a public masterclass on science communications on 8 July 2017, from 2 to 4.30pm at Singapore Management University’s Ngee Ann Kongsi Auditorium.

Brought to you by Asian Scientist Magazine , the talk will cover the following:

• • How Jorge broke out of academia into the world of comics, books, online TV and movies.
• • How to turn doodling not just into a viable career, but a media empire.
• • How to effectively communicate challenging, technical concepts to a layman audience.
• • How science needs art, and vice versa.

If you’ve ever read PHD Comics and said, “that’s me!” or secretly pined for a life outside the windowless lab, come attend Jorge’s first-ever public talk in Singapore.

Geeks and non-geeks alike are welcome!

Date : 8 July 2017 Time : 2:00 to 4:30 PM Venue : Singapore Management University, Ngee Ann Kongsi Auditorium, 60 Stamford Rd, Singapore 178900

Get your tickets now: http://peatix.com/event/266027

#PHDComicsSG #AsianScientist

• iSchool Connect

Comics Connection

Associate professor Carol Tilley on Wonder Woman, public libraries vs. drugstores, and our very visual culture as told to Mary Timmons

I teach graduate students who are going to be working with young people in school and public libraries. This includes a readers' advisory course on helping library patrons of all ages find comic books they might enjoy or find rewarding.

I also teach an undergraduate honors course on comics. Most of the students are studying engineering, science and business. Many of them come in thinking that the class is going to be fun and lighthearted. They're surprised at how the production and distribution of comics have changed, how the industry's economics have changed, and how the representation of certain racial and gender identities have changed, but that there are still these “kernels of ick”—for lack of a better term. These include the hypersexualization of female characters like Power Girl, Catwoman and Wonder Woman, and a tendency to relegate non-white characters to sidekick, background or villainous roles.

When I became a librarian, I started thinking about why, as a kid, I had to go to a drugstore to get some of the things I wanted to read most. It hasn't been until the last 15 years or so that public libraries and school libraries have started collecting comics widely. And we're still working with the prejudices and stereotypes of the 1940s and 1950s that comics are for people who are illiterate or uncultured or unsophisticated.

One of my students alerted me recently that I made an appearance in Cat Kid Comics Club Influencers , the newest Dav Pilkey comic. While the comic doesn't name me, it depicts my archival research on psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.

Wertham was at the head of the anti-comics movement in the U.S. during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He published a book about the dangers of comics called Seduction of the Innocent , and he was a witness at U.S. Senate hearings about comics and juvenile delinquency in 1954. In 2010, his papers were finally made available at the Library of Congress. I went to do research in those papers, and I found that Wertham had done a lot of misrepresentation of what kids had told him. He had done a lot of cherry-picking and fabrication. He also had made up some stuff.

Comics remain successful and relevant because we like to look at pictures. We are a very visual culture. They tell all kinds of stories. They tap into our hopes and dreams as a society. Comics help us to imagine different futures.

Edited and condensed from an interview conducted on Nov. 15, 2023

• faculty news

Why in the world can’t I get people to RSVP?

Plus, i can’t afford children’s books for a baby shower on top of gifts from the registry..

I organize a monthly lunch for 20 or so friends. We are all in our 70s. I request an RSVP to determine the head count for the restaurant. Some people never respond, even when I send reminders, though they’ve attended in the past. Why is it so difficult to send a simple response? My impulse is to confront what I consider rude behavior and/or delete them from future invitations. However, this seems contrary to the goal of comity inherent in our monthly gatherings. Frustrated, I seek your advice.

M.C. / Newton

It just is that difficult to send a simple response sometimes, whether it seems like it should be or not, and unfortunately, the RSVP situation is unlikely to improve. Your friends aren’t trying to make life harder for you; life has gotten harder for them along with everyone else. Communications fall between the cracks, last-minute contingencies arise, and people who plan events — from international conferences to neighborhood book clubs — need to factor that annoying reality into those plans.

I applaud what you’re doing in getting your group together regularly! We need people like you who do things like that, so very much. But you need to simplify the monthly plans so that a precise head count isn’t as necessary. Instead of lunch, what about a morning or afternoon coffee shop get-together? You could even do it semimonthly. Or you could gather in a food court, or outdoors as the weather gets nicer, or have potluck or takeout dinners at someone’s home. Your friends want to be together; the venue itself isn’t that important. I’m sure they’d be more than willing to help you brainstorm a better, easier way.

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I have been invited to several baby showers that ask guests to bring books instead of cards. I am on a pretty tight budget and would rather get them something significant from their registries than spend on books (which all seem to be $10-$15). Usually, I make my own cards. I could deduct the cost of the book from my gift budget, but I’m afraid my gift will look skimpy. Or, should I go without the book, and spend the full amount I intended on the gift?

Anonymous / Boston

But you make your own cards! That changes everything. The parents who request books aren’t trying to sneak in another gift grab. People who dislike cards generally see them as impersonal and wasteful and yours are the very opposite of that. I think it’s fine to continue as you have been. If you do want to give a book, used ones in good condition — e.g., not chewed — are fine for the “substitute card” purpose. (And secondhand children’s books not in good condition might be entertaining collage material for your cards — I do multimedia art and trawl Little Free Libraries for such treasures all the time.)

Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a writer with a PhD in psychology.