Comics and Graphic Narratives MLA Forum

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 →

Drawing from art theorist André Malraux’s observation that “The museum invites comparison of each of the expressions of the world it brings together, and forces us to question what it is that brings them together,”­ what indeed brings comics and museums into dialogue and/or dispute about/over exhibitionary spaces and praxis? If we consider that recently there has been a surge of comics exhibitions worldwide in both government-sanctioned museums as well as the privately-owned art galleries, what do we make of this long and fraught relationship between art and comics worlds today? In our examination, we must also keep in mind comics scholar Bart Beaty’s analysis aboutRead More →

In contemporary America, popular culture has become one of the primary spaces in which political debates are enacted. The Gamergate movement in video game criticism, which helped lead to the rise of the “alt-right,” demonstrates how popular culture not only comments on America’s cultural and political divides but is itself a site of political contention. This is just as true of comics as of other cultural forms, as suggested, for example, by the South Carolina government’s retaliation against universities that selected Fun Home as a common book, or the respective use of Ms. Marvel and Pepe the Frog as anti-Islamophobic and racist symbols. We solicit papers onRead More →