This course introduces students to the comics medium and encourages them to develop an understanding of comics and graphic novels through critical analysis and personal observation. First, it examines how comics work (linearity/tabularity), how to close-read the comics page and how certain elements relate to literary tropes. The second part of the class examines several comics with particular attention to (post)colonial aspects. After a historical, anthropological and sociological contextualization of the Congolese situation, and an introduction to postcolonial studies (Fanon, Césaire, Mudimbé, Mbembe, a.o.), we analyze how recent comics adaptations of Conrad’s famous Heart of Darkness address the colonial ghosts of Belgium’s past. Beyond studying the engagement of comics in issues of caricature, stereotype and representation, we discuss the processes of (de)fictionalization (short story, novel, graphic novel, reportage, non fiction, testimony) and ideologization at the core of these texts. Our class addresses debates in the dynamics of cross-cultural representation and explores how comics provide a particular optic for the analysis of (neo)colonial exploitation.