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When English professor Andrew Loman pitched a comics course during a job interview, the visibly unimpressed interviewer said, "Oh, that misogynist shit."

"I wasn't offered the job," said Loman, laughing. "I thought, 'Well, I'll never mention this in future job interviews.'"

This dismissive attitude was nothing new. In fact, Dr. Loman had sold his entire comics collection during his undergrad years so he could focus on the "canonic texts."

"When I was living in Kingston and doing my graduate school, there were a couple of comic book stores in town, and I wouldn't even go near them for fear of being polluted by association," he said.

But times have changed, and Dr. Loman—who is trying desperately to rebuild his collection—now teaches Introduction to the Graphic Novel with Nancy Pedri at Memorial University in St. John's, Nfld.

The course, which Drs. Loman and Pedri launched last year, is one of many of its kind that have sprung up in Canadian universities over the past few years.

Loman attributes this to a shift in how people perceive comics.

"Suddenly, there were a number of important works that had managed to achieve a degree of media attention, and graphic novels were also becoming one of the few areas in publishing where there was continued growth," he said.

"You started see graphic novel sections at libraries, whereas before they'd be on racks at the front of a 7-Eleven."

This shift also came from within.

"A generation of graphic novel readers . . . were starting to emerge and gain tenure-track positions, and from their own past as readers, understood that the form had more to it than the people who stigmatized it as sub-literate junk would allow. They were able to start creating a space for academic study for it."

English professor Marni Stanley, who developed a Graphic Narrative class at Vancouver Island University last year, is one such pioneer.

"A few of my colleagues made little jokes about comics, but nothing offensive and fairly warm-hearted," she said.

The growth in comics studies Canada can be attributed, at least in part, to Bart Beaty, who teaches Comics: Art and Media Systems in the University of Calgary's communications department.

"I think there was a sense from some of the faculty that I'd be insane and I'd never get a job. In my entire academic career, I've never once seen a job listed saying that they want someone who's an expert in comics," said Dr. Beaty, who studies comics not as literature, but as significant pop culture and a form of communication.

Dr. Beaty's work has affected comics scholars in many fields. His translation of Thierry Groensteen's French comics theory, and his own books like Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, have been influential.

"He's probably the most important comics person in Canada," said Dr. Stanley. "As much as we have a comics theory establishment in Canada, he's it."

But he's a big fish in a small sea. The few universities that offer comics courses don't often boast more than one class, and usually only at an introductory level.

"You really have to think that this is something you desperately want to do if you're going to go into graduate school and study comics, because it's a narrow field and it's a rough time in the academic job market right now," said Dr. Beaty. "It's something that I've been working on . . . establishing the kind of institution that universities will recognize as a direction they can go in."

The success of classes like Dr. Stanley's and Dr. Loman's, both of which filled up in their first semester, could provide a foundation for that institution.

Dr. Loman says students are thirsty for something new.

"There are always new ways of looking at texts, but there's certainly enormous critical literature to wade through and to situate your work in relation to, and you don't have that with graphic novels," he said.

While there are more than 100 years of critical writing about novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, compared with maybe 100 peer-reviewed articles about Art Spielgalman's Maus, this emerging field already faces the danger of becoming too cluttered.

Ironically, the same books that helped legitimize the medium—Maus, an acclaimed book about the Holocaust, or Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, an autobiography about growing up during the Iranian revolution—might prove responsible for its stagnation.

"I do worry sometimes that comic studies is just going to settle into focusing on about a half dozen authors and those people will be seen as really important and everyone else will be seen as nothing," said Dr. Beaty.

"When you divorce something like Maus or Persepolis from the tradition of all other comics and try and say this is a unique case, well, you lose a lot in your analysis, because you're not really sure where these people come from."

Dr. Loman and Dr. Stanley both try to tackle a wide range of comics in their courses.

"There's tons and tons of really good writers and artists on whom there's almost nothing and who are well worth a serious look. I think that's exciting for students," said Dr. Stanley.

Special to The Globe and Mail