New semester – new classes – new syllabi! While I’ve been drawing all my syllabi for years now, this is the first time I’ve made a mini-comic as a syllabus (and only my second mini-comic – the first is here). It’s the Liberal Studies capstone (not a comics class) and I made the focus around education and exploring how we own our own learning – subject matter that was the heart of my own doctoral studies and Unflattening. It also includes a brief statement about Ai in the classroom (and creative work more generally). All versions of it are available here as PDFs. And more generally, all my syllabi, resources for classes, examples, and such live on my site here. Also, down below, see a blurb for a public talk I’m doing in SF 8/28, if you happen to be in these parts. – Nick

Here is the above Ai statement as a PDF – download and use and share (with credit) as you wish. Appreciate hearing how it goes over. [There was a typo in one of the pages in my original post, I’ve corrected and replaced all the files with the error. If you downloaded any of it before, you may want to do again for the corrected version. – N]

Download the minicomic here as a foldable with the back info page – this is the ONLY version that can be folded and made into a mini-comic! So if you want your own booklet, use this one! Go here for just the front in sequence in one sheet (not able to be made into a booklet), and as the 8-individual pages here. And if you want the whole syllabus, with the text version too – that’s available here. Updating more as I can… – N

Oh, if you’ve never folded a mini-comic before, I gave instruction for it on the only other mini-comic I made – see that here. And for resources on making mini-comics, all on my site here. (Down at the bottom, I put the entire process images for making this from loose sketches to drafts)

This is the complete text for alt-text for the mini-comic (I need to format this with page descriptions when I can, but for now, it’s simply the words…)

Text of comic:

We may have come to expect teaching to be explanations delivered from on high. But, students aren’t empty receivers waiting to be filled with instructions… Instead, consider teaching as arming you with tools for navigation, offering approaches and examples – ways to look at things – guidance – to help you go yourself, on your own two feet.

Nothing can do this for you – for that robs you of experience and conflates answers with learning. Rather, it’s all the decisions you make along the way, the mistakes, struggles, and surprises! These pathways you create – this is learning. As a teacher, I want to provide spaces for you to try things, establish structures to play in, and constraints to propel your explorations in unexpected directions, all so you find your own way.

You will ask questions, follow where your curiosity leads, and, by connecting ideas across disciplines and modalities, you will make things! Even as each of you explores on your own, we do so in community – to raise everyone up through our shared learning. For democracy to thrive, we need diverse perspectives from curious, critical, creative, informed thinkers, who actively participate in and contribute to our public discourse – that means you!

And BONUS – now in Portuguese, via my Brazilian publisher Rogério de Campos! Download the minicomic version here, the in sequence 1-sheet here, and the AI statement standalone here.

Here are the PDF syllabi for my Making Comics intro course, and Comics & Culture – intro to comics studies (w/making!). Again, all my syllabi and resources that go with them, live on my site permanently here.

Finally, I’m doing a rare public event in San Francisco (usually I have to go globetrotting for such things…). It’s with Profs & Pints – and seemed like a potentially fun way to share the work with a different audience and not have to travel too far. Event is Thursday August 28, 2025, at 6pm at Bartlett Hall Brewery. 242 O’Farrell Street in San Francisco. There’s a charge: Advance tickets: $13.50; Door: $17, $2 off w/ student ID. More details here.

Here’s the description:

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “Thinking in Comics,” a revolutionary discussion of the importance of visual thinking and the limitations of the written word, with Nick Sousanis, award-winning comics author, associate professor of interdisciplinary studies, and founder of the Comic Studies program at San Francisco State University.
Western culture has along assumed the primacy of written words over images when it comes to conveying meaning. But what if our reliance on words limits our thinking, and knowledge constructed visually through images is inextricably linked to—and every bit as important as—knowledge conveyed verbally through words?
Nick Sousanis does not just assert such an idea, he staked his doctorate on it, producing his doctoral dissertation entirely in comic form. Eventually published as the 2015 bookUnflattening, that bold work earned him an American Publishers Association Humanities award for Scholarly Excellence and a Lynd Ward prize for Best Graphic Novel. Reviewers praised it as insightful, far-reaching, and a persuasive call to rethink how we perceive and teach about the world.
Join Dr. Sousanis at San Francisco’s Bartlett Hall Brewery for an evening in which he’ll challenge the forms of learning traditionally found in academic settings and demonstrate the importance of visual thinking in both the teaching and learning processes.
Drawing extensively from visual examples from his own work, he’ll discuss diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology and show you how perception is an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. He’ll help you rethink how you go about looking at the world and see the importance of producing knowledge in both verbal and visual forms.
Whether you’re a student seeking to learn better, an educator seeking to teach better, or simply someone open to new ways of thinking, you’ll emerge from the talk with a new perspective on the world.
Finally, finally – process sketches from making the mini-comic. from start to finish…