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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 →

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 →

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 →