Office Number and Phone:
237 Sanford / (828) 262-2325

Fall 2007 Office Hours:
Monday, 1-2pm
Tuesday and Thursday, 9am-12pm

Fall 2007 Classes:
English 2170.103, Introduction to Film: Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-1:45pm.
English 2170.104, Introduction to Film: Tuesday and Thursday, 2-3:15pm.
English 4170, Film Theory and Criticism: Monday and Wednesday, 2-3:15pm.

Biography:
Craig Fischer is an associate professor in the English Department at Appalachian State University. He has served on the Executive Committee of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the editorial board of Cinema Journal, and the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum at the Library of Congress. Currently, he is a senator in Appalachian’s Faculty Senate, and the departmental advisor for Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society. His current research projects include an article on post-WWII film exhibition in Boone, a study of the comic book The Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and a book titled The Abe Fortas Film Festival.

Education:
B.A. in English, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1985.
M.A. in English, University of Illinois, 1989.
Ph.D. in English, University of Illinois, 1998.

Recent Publications:

“’Worlds Within Worlds’: North American Comics Discourse and The Jack Kirby Collector,” forthcoming in the online journal Transatlantica [http://www.transatlantica.org].

“‘It’s all a part of clarity’: An Interview with Ben Towle,” forthcoming in the first issue of the magazine Stay Tooned (January 2008).

A review of the Masters of American Comics Exhibition at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, The International Journal of Comic Art, 9.1 (Spring 2007): 512-515.

“In the Details [Reviews of John Hankiewicz’s Asthma and Roz Chast’s Theories of Everything],” The Comics Journal #281, February 2007: 122-124.

“Experimental Film,” “Maya Deren,” “Stan Brakhage” and “Andy Warhol,” entries in The Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film (Scribners / Twayne, 2006).
(Available on the web at http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Experimental-Film.html [.] )

A review of 50 Reasons to Stop Sketching at Conventions by Stuart Immonen, The Comics Journal #280, December 2006: 111-112.

“The Fifth Annual Fluke Mini-Comics Festival / Dear Diary,” The International Journal of Comic Art, 8.2 (Fall 2006): 420-422.

A review of Midnight Sun by Ben Towle, The Comics Journal #279, November 2006: 124-125.

“The Straw Man [A review of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls],” The Comics Journal #278, October 2006: 136-138.

“Charmageddon! Or, the Day Aleister Crowley Wrote Wonder Woman [A review of Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III’s Promethea), The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (Fall 2005): 122-127. (Available on the web at www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/comics/fischer.htm [.])

A review of R. Crumb: Conversations, Ed. D.K. Holm, The International Journal of Comic Art 7.2 (Fall 2005): 401-404.

“NBC White Paper , Cortile Cascino, and the Assault on the Familiar,” in Robert M. Young: Essays on the Films , Ed. Leon Lewis (McFarland Press, 2005): 43-57.

A review of Real Stuff by Dennis P. Eichhorn and “A Host of Artists,” The Comics Journal, February/March 2005: 62-64.

Teaching and research specialization:
Film history, film theory, experimental and art cinema, comics and graphic novels, popular culture.


My Top Twelve Movies of All Time (in alphabetical order, and subject to continual revision):

Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wei, Hong Kong, 1994)
The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2000)
A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, France, 1956)
Menilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, France, 1926)
Nashville (Robert Altman, USA, 1975)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1954)
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, USA, 1924)
Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, USA, 1986)
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1953)
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967)
Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, USA, 1959)
Zorns Lemma (Hollis Frampton, USA, 1970)


What I’m Reading Now:

I’ve been reading several of Ross MacDonald’s novels about detective Lew Archer. I especially liked Black Money (1966). I’d put MacDonald in the second tier of noir novelists—he lacks the psychopathology that makes reading Jim Thompson so bracing—but his plotting is tight and his prose is spare. He’s the Hemingway of hard-boiled.

I’m a big fan of books published by PictureBox, like the massive Brian Chippendale art/comics book Ninja and the comics by the Paper Rad Collective. I also love PictureBox’s Wunderground, a graphically-intensive survey of the 1990s rock and art scene in Providence, RI.

It’s the best of times to be a comics reader. The best comics of the past continue to be reprinted in upscale formats; The Complete Peanuts project, for instance, has reached 1965-66, the years when Charles Schulz was one of the greatest artists in America. And some of the new “graphic novels” take the medium even higher. Kevin Huizenga’s “Jeepers Jacobs,” published in his collection Curses, is a remarkable examination of religious faith, and Anders Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, a scrapbook/memoir/comic about the death of his fiancée, is maybe the best book I’ve read in the last couple of years.

I’m looking forward to reading The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta, Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis, and Poetics of Cinema by David Bordwell.