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 →

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 →

Comics and Graphic Narratives for Young Audiences This panel explores intersections between children’s literature and comics (including manga and graphic novels). All periods and nations welcome. Call for Papers for a proposed special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 7-10, 2021 in Toronto, ON. This collaborative panel is jointly sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum and the Children’s and Young Adult Literature Forum. Children’s comics and graphic novels have emerged as the dominant commercial force in the industry, with authors like Raina Telgemeier and Dav Pilkey selling millions of books. Yet comics studies still pays relatively little attention to comics for children.Read More →

Call for Papers for a proposed guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 9-12, 2020, in Seattle, Washington. This roundtable panel is sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum. On the ten year anniversary of panels sponsored by the MLA Forum for Comics and Graphic Narratives, this roundtable asks established and emerging scholars to reflect on the history, the present, and the future of the field of Comics Studies. We seek narratives on the formation and early years of the Forum, as well as perspectives on where the field and the Forum are headed. This intergenerational conversation explores developmentsRead More →

Call for Papers for a proposed special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 9-12, 2020, in Seattle, Washington. This panel is sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum. Webcomics are arguably the form of comics with the broadest reach, but scholarship on the subject has been sparse.  As a form that both takes advantage of the representational affordances of comics and the opportunities provided by the connectivity and lack of gatekeeping in the digital realm, webcomics present a rich source of possibility for comics scholars and digital media scholars alike, particularly when considering marginalized creators and characters. This panelRead More →

Call for Papers for a proposed special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 9-12, 2020, in Seattle, Washington. This collaborative panel is jointly sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum and the Screen Arts and Culture Forum. Comics and graphic narratives have long explored the nonhuman as allegorical representatives of the human experience. This panel examines the difference medium makes in adapting comics and graphic narratives for the screen, and how transmedia narratives of the nonhuman represent/challenge our understanding of humanity, for example: How does the change from drawn representations to human actors affect conceptualizations of the non-human? IsRead More →

DEADLINE: 3/15/18  Comics have been involved in a wide variety of “textual transactions” at least since the 1890s origin of the comic strip. Yet comics fandom evolved in the ‘70s and ‘80s as a site of mostly straight, white, adult and male-dominated “textual transactions,” practiced in non-inclusive venues like the comics convention and the comic book store. Alternative spaces for comics fan practices have always existed. But thanks to developments such as the Internet, superhero films, graphic novels, and social justice movements, comics fandom is now undergoing a historic shift as new audiences demand inclusion in historically exclusionary comics fan communities. This panel seeks papersRead More →

Over the past several years, making comics in pedagogical and scholarly contexts has been flourishing as an area of inquiry within the larger field of comics studies, as seen through special issues of journals—Critical Inquiry’s “Comics & Media” (2014) and DHQ’s “Comics as Scholarship” (2015)—alongside the rise of academic venues devoted to comics as scholarship like Sequentials. This attention builds on the growth of teaching comics making as a distinct area of study—through the establishment of programs within academic institutions as well as the creation of new centers devoted to comics. Given this growing interest, we invite the question—how do comics operate as a meansRead More →

Call for Papers for a proposed special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Jan. 3-6, 2019, in Chicago, IL. This collaborative panel is jointly sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum and the Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum. The 2019 MLA Presidential Theme calls us to look at “textual transactions,” or “the mutually constitutive engagements of human beings, texts, and their contexts.” Critical scholarship in the field of Graphic Medicine has been flourishing, but, as evidenced by the pivotal text in the field, The Graphic Medicine Manifesto, the contextfor Graphic Medicine is predominantly health professions education. In what other contexts do graphic medicine’sRead More →

This panel seeks papers that address graphic narratives by/about Arabs, and how they are taught or not taught today in the US. Some of the topics may include: circulation, translation, critical/pedagogical reception, aesthetics/politics of representation, gender, counternarrative, figurations of history, occupation, the status of refugees, and states of belonging. Genres to consider may include satire, memoir, fiction, journalism, or alternative formations. Possible comics may include the website PositiveNegatives, the zine Tok Tok, and the series The 99. Possible creators to consider may include Joe Sacco, Toufic El Rassi, Riad Sattouf, Farid Boudjellal, Magdy El Shafee, Zeina Abirached, Leila Abdelrazaq, Marguerite Dabaie, Nicole Georges, and Jana Traboulsi, among others. The organizers hope to collectRead More →