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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 →

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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 →

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Panels run by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum Thursday January 4 Connecting the Dots: Museums and Comics 7:00–8:15 p.m., Sutton Center, Hilton Presiding: Nhora Lucia Serrano, Hamilton C “At Home in the Museum,” Catherine Labio, U of Colorado, Boulder “Paracomics: Art as Comics,” Vasilios Kartalopoulos, New School “Tintin in the World of the Artifact: Authenticity and Artifice, Colonialism and Copyright,” Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, Palomar C “‘There’d Be a Hanging’: Community as Art Gallery, Comic as Museum in Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism,” Osvaldo Oyola, New York U Friday January 5 Teaching Global Arab Comics in the United States 5:15–6:30 p.m., Concourse G, Hilton Collaborative session—GS Comics andRead More →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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Saturday, 7 January 581. Alien Lines: Science Fiction Comics 1:45–3:00 p.m., Grand Ballroom Salon A, Philadelphia Marriott Program arranged by the forums GS Comics and Graphic Narratives and GS Speculative Fiction Presiding: Aaron Kashtan, Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte 1. “Don’t Let Them Touch and Despair You: World Construction in the World of The Wrenchies and It Will All Hurt,” Phoebe Salzman-Cohen, Penn State Univ., University Park 2. “‘This Is How an Idea Becomes Real’: Bodies in Saga,” Daniel John Pinti, Niagara Univ. 3. “‘I’m Getting Too Good to Ignore’: The Feminist Politics of Sharon Ruhdal’s Dystopian Comics,” Margaret Galvan, New York Univ. 4. “Feeling The Puma Blues: The DilutionRead More →

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  Drawing the Line: Comics and Adaptation While comics adaptations have frequently been derided for “dumbing down” great works of literature through adaptation, recent movie adaptations of comics have conquered the box office and brought new attention to the medium. These intriguing developments beg the questions—How might comics be transformed by such adaptations? What is the potential for comics in reworking other forms? Recent books, such as Stephen Tabachnick and Esther Bendit Saltzman’s anthology Drawn from the Classics (2015) and the University of Leicester Conference (2015) on “Comics and Adaptation in the European Context” indicate growing academic interest in issues surrounding comics adaptations. This roundtableRead More →

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Graphic Narrative, Comics, and Temporality Whether we consider the fragmentation of time in the Dr. Manhattan chapter of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, or Art Spiegleman’s intermingling of his father’s WWII past with his present as narrator in Maus, rendering time as space has been one of the most unique and commented upon formal aspects of the graphic novel. More recent, innovative graphic narratives that deliberately foreground time include Richard McGuire’s Here and Chris Ware’s Building Stories. This panel seeks new scholarly work on the representation of temporality in comics and graphic narratives, with a particular attention to the formal qualities of comics. PapersRead More →

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Alien Lines: Science Fiction Comics The medium of comics—often dominated by genres bound to contemporary concerns or enduring conventions—remains marginal in the study of science fiction. Likewise, the oldest questions driving science fiction scholarship—identity and difference, self and other, chance and futurity—have not been central to comics studies. In short, we have rarely asked: how do the central projects of science fiction manifest in comics form? The Forum on Speculative Fiction and the Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives therefore invite papers that explore this question. We especially desire proposals focused on the ways difference, otherness and futurity manifest on the comics page. How doesRead More →