NORTON - A solo lecturer at Wheaton College this week enjoys working in panels.

Paul Karasik tells stories in the form of graphic novels that he writes and draws.

Although graphic novels are traditionally associated with comic books and superheroes, Karasik says the format is useful for telling traditional stories, such as autobiographies.

"A page of comics is a construct," Karasik said. "Everything - every mark - the cartoonist puts on that page is a conscious choice. If you make a conscious decision about everything, then you're in control of the ultimate outcome."

Karasik will present a lecture, "The Language of Comics," from 4 to 5 p.m. Wednesday in the May Room of Wheaton's Mary Lyon Hall. Wheaton computer science professor Mark LeBlanc invited Karasik to campus.

Students in LeBlanc's first-year "storytelling through computer animation" seminar are reading "The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister's Memoir of Autism in the Family," which Karasik wrote with his sister, Judy.

LeBlanc has his 13 students writing and drawing computer-animated 3D stories using storytelling techniques they're learning from comic book greats, such as Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman.

"We are all storytellers. We just need a shot in the arm and a little encouragement," LeBlanc said.

Although Eisner is perhaps best known for his two-fisted crimefighter, the Spirit, LeBlanc's students are reading the creator's semi-autobiographical "A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories."

"I'm sitting in a room with a bunch of 18-year-olds, and we're having the most scholarly discussion about 'Contract With God,'" LeBlanc said.

Karasik studied with Eisner, Spiegelman and Harvey Kurtzman at the School of Visual Arts during the early 1980s, "the perfect alignment of planets" that put him with "three of the greatest living cartoonists."

Back then, Karasik was doing graphic design, "selling some kind of garbage that I didn't give a damn about."

Three weeks after meeting Spiegelman, who wrote and drew the Pulitzer Prize winning "Maus," a memoir of his father's struggle during the Holocaust, his wife hired Karasik as associate editor of RAW, their international comics and graphics review.

"That's when I decided that maybe I could be a cartoonist," Karasik said. Spiegelman taught him "how comics work. How they're constructed, and the language of comics and how it can be manipulated," Karasik said.

Karasik said he plans to introduce Wheaton students to "these building blocks that the cartoonist has at his disposal."

Those tools are "quite a bit different" from "a movie, a radio drama, a book of fiction," he said.

Karasik and artist David Mazzucchelli went on to adapt Paul Auster's novel "City of Glass" into a graphic novel. The work was acclaimed by Newsweek, and named by the Comics Journal as one of the 100 best comics of the century. It has been translated into French, Italian, German and Japanese.

Karasik recently won an Eisner Award for "Best Archival Project" for his book, "I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks," a collection of stories by one of comics' earliest and most obscure creators.

He's currently writing and drawing an eight-page story about psychologist Eric Erikson for a non-fiction anthology.

"I'm scanning every panel and cleaning up every pixel," Karasik said.

Thirteen first-year students at Wheaton are discovering how he feels.

MICHAEL GELBWASSER covers Norton for The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0439 or at mgelbwasser@thesunchronicle.com.