Back to school with comic book studies

As the summer winds down, thoughts turn to that overused (and sometimes dreaded) phrase — Back To School. When it comes to learning more, have no fear, because there are choices aplenty to keep the love of comic books and graphic novels alive well beyond the hazy, lazy days of summer.

Here are just a few of the many study options for comic books and graphic novels in Canadian institutions for the coming school year. Program descriptions have been reproduced here for authenticity. Note that this list is by no means complete nor comprehensive. If a course is missing, please send along the update by email to John@TrueNorthCountryComics.com

Alberta University of the Arts

Comic Book Basics
Create unique comic characters through a series of thumbnail sketches that you develop into final drawings for a comic book or graphic novel. Develop a personal style that becomes identifiable with you as you hone your drawing and communication skills. Use a variety of media, including pen and ink, marker, pencil, and water-based colour to complete your comics.
https://www.auarts.ca/comic-book-basics

Survey of Comics LITR 206
This course demonstrates and develops the analysis of comics from a variety of theoretical perspectives. It situates the development of North American comics in historical and cultural context from the nineteenth century to the present day. The course will also draw upon comics from beyond North America for the purposes of contextualization and comparison. Students will explore and consider the opportunities and limitations of comics expression with consideration given to a variety of formats from the comic strip to the graphic novel.
https://www.auarts.ca/sites/default/files/2025-06/AUARTS%20-%202025-2026-Academic%20Calendarv4.pdf

Algonquin College

Illustration and Concept Art
The two-year Illustration and Concept Art Ontario College Diploma program prepares you for the field of illustration and the discipline of concept art. As a student, you develop skills in digital and traditional media. While enhancing your drawing skills, you learn about potential career avenues in industries. In this program, you develop problem-solving methods, drawing techniques and production methods for the magazine, graphic novel or entertainment industries. Learning opportunities with industry partners allow you to apply the knowledge and skills you have developed and also offer networking opportunities. With in-class discussions and hands-on learning activities, you develop your style and expand your portfolio. The faculty include award-winning published artists that will share their abundance of knowledge and experience.
https://www.algonquincollege.com/mediaanddesign/program/illustration-and-concept-art/#overview

Banff Center for Arts and Creativity

Comics and Graphic Novels 2025
Comics and Graphic Novels is a self-directed residency that considers how creatives use this unique media as a place for personal narrative, memoir, and exploration. The residency provides writers with the time and space to delve deep into their creative project away from the constraints of everyday life, take advantage of an artistic community of peers, and consult with experienced faculty. 
https://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/literary-arts/comics-and-graphic-novels-2025


Camosun College

Comics & Graphic Novels, Certificate
Learn the art of visual storytelling and create comic books, graphic novels, webcomics, and comic strips in any genre, as well as storyboards for gaming, film, video, and animation. You’ll also study creative writing and character design, to the essentials of publishing.
https://camosun.ca/programs-courses/find-program/comics-graphic-novels-certificate

Carlton University

Comic Books and Graphic Novels COMS 3110
The history, political economy, and culture of comics as a distinct medium of communication, and the relationship between comic book publishing and other cultural industries.
https://calendar.carleton.ca/pdf/UNOFFICIAL%2025-26%20Carleton%20University%20Undergraduate%20Calendar.pdf

Centuri Arts

Comic Book Creation, In Studio
https://www.centauriarts.com/academy/toronto/schedule/

Cestar Collège – Syn Studio

Intro to Cartooning
In this class, you will learn the constructive drawing techniques behind some of the greatest draftsmen of animation and comic art. Through a combination of lectures, demonstrations and practice sessions in each class, this course will help you understand the ins and outs of the cartooning process.
https://synstudio.ca/online-art-classes/intro-to-cartooning/

City of Nanaimo

Comic Book Development for Kids
If you have a passion for cartoons or comics, this class is tailored for you! Throughout this course, we will delve into the art of crafting concise comic strips, creating delightful illustrations, and developing captivating characters. Students will be motivated to discover their own distinct artistic style while drawing inspiration from the masterpieces of renowned cartoonists and illustrators. The projects will be adjusted to accommodate the skill level of each participant.
https://cityofnanaimo.perfectmind.com/Contacts/BookMe4LandingPages/CoursesLandingPage?courseId=373fa9af-78f7-4ac9-8790-2f651ccbef0a

Edison College Canada

Applied Arts Illustration Diploma Program
This Applied Arts Illustration Diploma Program is a one-year comprehensive program that prepares students for a career in illustration. The program utilizes both analogue and digital techniques, allowing each student to hone their unique skill, develop a marketable style, and strengthen their creative voice while learning the ins and outs of the illustration industry and how to thrive in it.
https://edisoncollege.ca/program/applied-arts-illustration/

Emily Carr University of Art + Design

The Graphic Novel CSIL 113
n this course, you will learn the necessary tools to tell great stories in the medium of graphic novels, such as character development, narrative structures, body language, passage of time, flow, perspective, and composition. You will learn to develop your own ideas from concept to final product and have the beginnings of your own graphic novel on completion of the course.
https://www.ecuad.ca/academics/continuing-studies/topic/illustration/graphic-novel

George Brown College

Illustration and Cartooning Program
Our Illustration and Cartooning Program both develops your drawing and communication skills and exercises your imagination. Learn professional techniques and explore a variety of media while working on detailed projects such as character and environmental design, single-panel cartoons, comic strips, comic book pages, editorial cartoons, and spot illustrations. Learn about the industries that use commercial cartooning and illustration services as well as their expectations and requirements. Become proficient in a variety of techniques and media while producing a portfolio of original material.
https://coned.georgebrown.ca/courses-and-programs/illustration-and-cartooning-program

George P. Vanier Secondary School

Graphic Novel and Comic Illustration 11
This course is for students interested in exploring art making through the lens of comics. Students will engage in the creation of print-ready comics, cartoons and graphic novels. Areas of study will include anatomy, layout, character and environmental design and narrative illustration. Students will employ a variety of two-dimensional media to explore the production pipeline from penciling through inking and color and on to final production. This rigorous course is intended for students with a background in art and illustration who are self-motivated and able to work independently toward hard deadlines.
https://www.comoxvalleyschools.ca/gp-vanier-secondary/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2025/02/2025-2026-Course-Selection-Guide-2.pdf

Humber Polytechnic

Creative Book Publishing 12251
Turn your love of books into a career in publishing with our intensive, fully online program, which combines creativity and entrepreneurship with the only opportunities in Canada to specialize in literary agenting/rights management and publishing technology. Upon graduation, you will be ready for a range of publishing and publishing-related opportunities including contracts, design and editorial, entertainment/copyright/intellectual property, literary agenting, sales/marketing/publicity, and self publishing/publishing technology. You will learn all facets of modern publishing, from acquisitions to sales and digital rights, before embarking on a capstone project that will give you a real taste of life in the publishing industry and applicable experience with which to launch your career.
https://mediaarts.humber.ca/programs/creative-book-publishing.html

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

The Graphic Novel and Comic Book Literature (Gavin Paul) ENGL 2345
The Graphic Novel and Comic Book Literature – Heroes and Ghosts. Comics have become undeniably popular, but how do they work, and what does it mean to read them closely? Our task is to confront the interpretive challenges of graphic novels and develop a skill set for reading material that is becoming increasingly sophisticated not only in its formal presentation, but also in its representations of history, subjectivity, and memory. We will reflect on the unique ways that graphic novels can represent the heroic and the ghostly (nostalgia, mourning, trauma). From familiar super-heroes to poignant memoirs, what kinds of distinctive spaces do comics create for social critique, imaginative narratives, and personal expression?
https://www.kpu.ca/arts/english/future-course-offerings

McTavish Academy of Art

Comic Book Character Design & Sculpting
Learn the basics of storytelling with these creative drawing and comic classes! We will cover foundational skills such as shapes, proportion, perspective, inking, colour, and shadow, with a focus on using those skills to draw comics. Students will start by creating short comic strips and may progress to longer stories if they desire; students will take home comic strips, perspective drawings, paintings, a sculpture, and a mini-zine.
https://mctavishacademy.ca/product/create-comic-book/

Memorial University

Comics and Their Networks ENGL 7337
The comics theorist Thierry Groensteen coined the term “arthrology” to describe comics as a narrative network or system of interrelated parts. This course will approach comics with this basic understanding but will also think of networks that extend beyond the text proper, both in terms of comics’ intertexts (the networks of cultural texts they announce and imply) and in terms of their production (networks of artists, editors, publishers, printers, and distributors, not to mention paper mills, printing presses, computers, and so on). Although our focus will be on recently published comics, we’ll try as much as possible to sustain an understanding of the form that spans the full two centuries of comics’ production in America, avoiding the myopia that sees “sophisticated” comics as an invention of the 1980s.
https://www.mun.ca/english/programs/graduate-/graduate-course-offerings/

Introduction to Comics ENGL 3843
Will familiarize students with the study of comics. This course will examine a large selection of comics and current theoretical debates surrounding the relation between word and image, in general, and the workings of graphic narrative, in particular.
https://www.mun.ca/university-calendar/st-johns-campus/faculty-of-humanities-and-social-sciences/16/7/#d.en.366840

Mount Royal University

Analyzing Comics ENGL 2294
This course analyzes comic books from a variety of different approaches including as a mass market cultural object shaped by contemporary events, audience responses, and the economics of its production. It will also look at the comic in terms of its relationships with other media including television, film, and the graphic novel.
https://catalog.mtroyal.ca/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=36&coid=57051

Comics as Literature ENGL 2294
This course examines the comic book as modern folktale, told in words and pictures, and as mass market literature, shaped by contemporary events, audience response, and the economics of its production. It will also look at the comic in terms of its relationships with television, film, and the graphic novel.
https://catalog.mtroyal.ca/preview_course_nopop.php?catoid=7&coid=9501

MTM College

Illustration & Sequential Arts Program
The four-year Illustration & Sequential Arts Program is focused on elevating each student’s individual style to a professional level. Constructed by both comic industry veterans and current working professionals in comics and illustration, the program will teach students all parts of comic production and publishing as well as freelance illustration.
https://mtmcollege.ca/illustration-storytelling-sequential-arts-diploma/

Queen’s University

Comics and Graphic Novels ENGL238
Are graphic novels “literature”? Can comic books be art? Can they teach us something? The answer to all of these questions, obviously, is “yes.” This course will look at comics and graphic novels from their origins to the present day spanning different genres and themes. We will look at how they work, why they work, and why we read them.
https://www.queensu.ca/english/undergraduate/courses/engl-238

Seneca Polytechnic

Illustration (ILS)
This two-year creative diploma program combines traditional and digital illustrative media with freelance business skills to help you succeed as a professional illustrator. Throughout the program, you will build your visual art skills through drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpting and digital media. The program’s specialties include children’s book illustration, comics, editorial illustration and concept art for film and game animation. At the same time, you will learn how to run your own small business as an entrepreneurial artist with innovative courses exploring website development, accounting, marketing and revenue-generating skills.
https://www.senecapolytechnic.ca/programs/fulltime/ILS.html

Sheridan College

Honours Bachelor of Illustration
Illustration students at Sheridan explore both material and digital media. You’ll also develop a visual philosophy to go along with your technical mastery. This broad-based approach will enable you to apply your Illustration degree across a wide range of career paths, while preparing you to adapt to exciting developments in visual communication. Illustration technology is constantly evolving, but the core skill — the ability to tell stories and communicate ideas visually — never changes. In Sheridan’s Illustration bachelor’s degree program, you’ll learn to create images with a purpose that stand out and make an impact.
https://www.sheridancollege.ca/programs/bachelor-of-illustration

Simon Fraser University

Special Topics in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies – Comics/Graphic Sex – GSWS 321 B100
From the newspaper funny pages to the graphic novel Fun Home, comics are a pervasive and popular art form read by audiences of all ages. The unique combination of text and image in comics provides a rich visual language for exploring the lived complexities of embodied experience and the larger social and political contexts that shape our identities. What might we learn about how social norms are produced and transformed through the stories portrayed in Marvel superhero comics, from the disability politics of the Hawkeye to the gender politics of Miss Marvel? How do the stark lines and sharp visual contrasts in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis add another dimension to her story about gender and religion in the context of the Iranian Revolution? And how might putting our own experiences into graphic form help us to think in more nuanced and unexpected ways about how formations of gender and sexuality are at play in our own lives? This course is designed to teach students how to read and interpret comics, how to analyze and theorize the play of gender and sexuality in graphic narratives – from superhero comics and manga to underground comix and graphic memoirs – and how to visually think, theorize, and communicate by creating our own drawings.
https://www.sfu.ca/outlines.html?2025/spring/gsws/321/b100

Toronto Metropolitan University

Comics ENG 402
he Comics medium is notable both for the way it employs a sophisticated “visual vocabulary,” and for how the interplay between text and image allows for the presentation of time and space in unique ways. Students explore how comics challenge the conventions of narrative and artistic medium, and how the term “graphic novel” itself has sparked a contentious debate about their positioning relative to the distinction between “high” and “low” culture.
https://www.torontomu.ca/calendar/2025-2026/courses/english/


Trent University

Reading and Making Comic Strips
In this course, we will learn how the comic strip developed and how scholars have come to study this multimodal literary art form. By reading and analyzing comic strips from Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, and The Far Side, we will learn about the attributes of the comic strip and how text and illustration work together to create a humorous narrative. In the last portion of the course, students will apply what they have learned about story, space, time, action, balloons, captions, emanata, layouts, panels, gutters, lettering, and illustration in a creative, hands-on way: they will create their own comic strip!
https://www.trentu.ca/conferences/sites/trentu.ca.conferences/files/2025-01/2025%20Trent%20Enrichment%20Course%20Book_updated.pdf

University of Northern British Columbia

Comics and Graphic Novels Studio
In this interdisciplinary workshop series for writers, artists, and designers, students will experiment with the comic medium as they explore the interplay between image and text, form and content. Drawing cues from historical and contemporary examples of textual/graphic work, students will conceptualize comic projects in various forms, constructing compelling narratives through dialogue and visual representations.
https://www.unbc.ca/continuing-studies/courses/comics-and-graphic-novels-studio-0#

University of Regina

Comics and Cartoons ENGL 387AK
This course explores comics and cartoons as literature. Topics explored will include interaction between word and image, form and content, and participation of comics in literary, historical, social, and philosophical movements

World Comics ENGL 387AI
Students will analyze comics as a literary genre and as a cultural vehicle after being introduced to the history and the artistic techniques of the medium. Particular focus will be placed on Francophone “bandes dessinées”, but North American comics and Japanese manga will also be included.
https://banner.uregina.ca:17023/ssbprod/bwckctlg.p_disp_course_detail?cat_term_in=202520&subj_code_in=ENGL&crse_numb_in=387AI

University of Toronto

Comics and the Graphic Novel ENG235H5S
The graphic novel, comic books, sequential art — whatever its name, this popular but long-marginalized art form has been rapidly gaining cultural respectability. Over the past twenty years, artists and writers in this medium have departed from its traditional subject matter to create graphic autobiographies, journalism, political analyses, philosophical arguments and histories, as well as revisiting, critiquing and reinventing such familiar subjects as magic, science fiction and the superhero. This course will examine the range of the current graphic novel, focusing on the medium’s rhetoric, narration and socio-political range.
https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/english-drama/courses/2025-2026-english-courses-and-descriptions#ENG235H5S

The Graphic Novel ENG235H1
An introduction to book-length sequential art, this course includes fictional and nonfictional comics, with a focus on formal properties such as narrative layout and text/art hybridity. Themes vary but may include superheroes; auto/biography; the figure of the outsider; women in comics; alienation and youth; and war reporting.
https://artsci.calendar.utoronto.ca/course/eng235h1

Wilfred Laurier University

Cartoons and Comics KS205
A study of cartoons and comics from the 18th century to the present, addressing such issues as the history of the genre, and its various roles from the political to the popular.
https://academic-calendar.wlu.ca/course.php?c=75469&cal=1&s=1151&y=92

Graphic Novel EN282
An introduction to the history, development, and forms of graphic narratives (non-fiction and fiction) with close attention to the relationship between image and text. Students will learn basic terminology from comics studies and read examples of genres of long- form graphic novels, such as documentary, autobiographical, pathographic, Bildungsroman, queer memoirs, and YA lit.
https://academic-calendar.wlu.ca/course.php?c=75565&cal=1&d=3079&s=1151&y=92

York University

Comics and Cartoons I AP/EN 2176 3.00
From the Yellow Kid to Captain America (1900-Cold War) this course explores the growth of comics and cartoons: creative conflicts, contexts and themes (outsiders, war, ethnicity), Bugs Bunny, Superman, superheroes and Disney, and how they account for their times.
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/en/course-description/ap-en-2176-3-0-comics-and-cartoons-i/