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In: Calls for Papers, Uncategorized

The Forum for Comics and Graphic Narratives seeks proposals for a guaranteed special session at the Modern Language Association annual conference to take place in Philadelphia from January 4-7, 2024. During the pandemic, a number of comics appeared that documented individual and collective experiences of COVID while also critiquing the governmental, economic, and social structures that determined such things as access to care and the regulation of bodies. Kendra Boileau and Rich Johnson’s Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology (2021) and Thi Bui and Sarah Mirk’s  In/Vulnerable: Inequity in the Time of Pandemic (2020) captured examples of such work, and showed how comics could not onlyRead More →

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In: Calls for Papers, Uncategorized

NOTE: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO Monday, March 27, 2023 The Forum for Comics and Graphic Narratives seeks proposals for a non-guaranteed special session at the Modern Language Association annual conference to take place in Philadelphia from January 4-7, 2024. Recently comics challenges have been in the news, as school boards and politicians have banned comics like Maus and Gender Queer from library shelves.  Such efforts to curtail comics circulation are not new to comics culture, nor are they limited to the United States.  Given the role of such curtailing in global comics history, comics challenges (calls for a ban), bans (removal of books from shelves), and censorship (editing content orRead More →

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In: Calls for Papers, Uncategorized

Spanish and Iberian Comics/Graphic Narratives This is a proposal for a collaborative session, jointly organized by the Forum Executive Committees of Comics and Graphic Narratives and 20th and 21st Century Spanish and Iberian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Comics and other forms of graphic narrative have been central to Spain’s popular culture for much of the nation’s modern history, including a wide variety of formats such as the nineteenth-century aleluya; political cartoons of the War of 1898; tebeo comics of the mid-twentieth century; the outpouring of political and counterculture comics of late Francoism, the transition to democracy, and the 1980s cultural explosion of the movida; asRead More →

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In: 2023, Calls for Papers

Call for papers for a guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 5-8, 2023, in San Francisco, California. This panel is sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narrative Forum. What can comics tell us about accessibility and visual media? This panel invites papers that consider a range of topics and approaches relating to accessibility and graphic narrative: access needs of comics’ artists and audiences, disability as identity, and the framework of universal design. Universal design, a concept based in architecture and adapted for education, requires that creators begin with the assumption that users have varied access needs rather than makeRead More →

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In: 2023, Calls for Papers

Call for papers for a non-guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 5-8, 2023, in San Francisco, California. This panel is sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narrative Forum. San Francisco, the site of next year’s convention, has figured prominently in both queer and comic book history, and has been one important site where these histories have intersected. Bay Area comics and cartoonists have been active in LGBTQ activism. Strip AIDS USA (1988) raised money for the Shanti Project in support of people with AIDS. Cartoonist Leslie Ewing organized with the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and the 1993 MarchRead More →

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In: 2022, Calls for Papers

MLA 2022 Non-Guaranteed Session CFP: Comics on the Border (DEADLINE: 3/15/2021) Call for Papers for a proposed non-guaranteed roundtable sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum to be held (if accepted) at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Jan. 6-9, 2022, in Washington D.C. Comics are defined by borders in formal representation and structure, in the boundaries between word and image and generic categories, in the networks and communities of mainstream and alternative production and circulation. Beyond questions of form—borders created by panels and gutters—and audience—borders around communities of readership—borders materially contain, constrict, and dominate identities.  In Disaster Drawn, Hillary Chute considers theRead More →

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In: 2022, Calls for Papers

MLA 2022 Collaborative/Non-Guaranteed Session CFP: Reading and Translating Comics in Two Directions (DEADLINE: 3/15/2021) Call for Papers for a proposed special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Jan. 6-9, 2022, in Washington D.C. This collaborative panel is jointly sponsored by the Arabic Forum and the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum. The 2022 MLA Presidential Theme calls us to look at “multilingual US,” and “make language a tool of inclusion rather than exclusion.” Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and the “Maghreb” are the main producers of comics and graphic narratives today. Comics have become very popular among Middle Eastern writers and artists, such as: ZeinaRead More →

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In: 2022, Calls for Papers

MLA 2022 Guaranteed Session CFP: Manga’s Global Influence (DEADLINE: 3/15/2021) Call for Papers for a guaranteed roundtable panel sponsored by the Forum for Comics and Graphic Narratives at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, January 6-9, 2022 in Washington, DC. Though conversations about comics have frequently replicated the silos of the academy by discussing one national tradition at a time, scholars have begun paying attention to how, as print and digital objects, comics readily cross national borders. The tradition of manga in Japan is one of the oldest and largest comics traditions, encompassing a multitude of genres and audiences, and this status has ledRead More →

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In: 2021, Calls for Papers

New Flashpoints in Comics History Call for Papers for a guaranteed roundtable panel sponsored by the Forum for Comics and Graphic Narratives at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, January 7-10, 2021 in Toronto, ON. “For all the vibrant scholarship emerging around comics today, the medium remains a largely unplumbed and uncanonized field of texts you’ve never heard of.” —Ramzi Fawaz, “A Queer Sequence: Comics as a Disruptive Medium” (2019) Certain moments in comics have been regarded as pivotal in our histories and often bear repeating in scholarship, including R. Crumb’s shaping of the underground and subsequent movements through publishing Zap Comix in 1968;Read More →

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In: 2021, Calls for Papers

Decolonizing Comics and/as Activism Call for papers for a non-guaranteed proposed session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 7-10, 2021, in Toronto, Canada. This panel is sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narrative Forum. Academic histories of comics are too often colonial, in their focus on America, France, and Japan and in the aesthetic criteria they favor. Yet, when we tell history in this colonial, Eurocentric way, we leave out many perspectives, particularly those of colonized and indigenous peoples. Ken Coats defines global indigenous people through their activism when he says indigenous groups have a history of “participating in protests organizedRead More →