Far from being dismissed as mass entertainment, comic books have long advanced to mature forms that not only undermine any facile division into high and low culture, but also challenge conventional ways of storytelling. This course will provide a general introduction on how to read and understand comics – and especially, their more refined variants typically referred to as graphic novels, as they hover between fantasy and memory culture, and are situated between the modes of history writing, narrative fiction and life writing. A special focus will be given to transcultural negotiations in a world-literary space.