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We, the MLA Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives, are proud to announce our sessions for the 127th Annual MLA Convention, to be held 5-8 January 2012 in Seattle, Washington. See below for the lineup in brief—or click here to read the full abstracts for all sessions! Besides the sessions we’re sponsoring, there will be several others in Seattle dedicated to comics. Comics studies activity within the MLA, to our continuing delight, keeps growing! We’ll identify these in a future post. Please bookmark this blog and check in the weeks to come, as the Seattle meeting draws nearer! Note: Only a limited number ofRead More →

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Session 371. The Material History of Spider-Man (A 50th Anniversary Observance) Friday, 6 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m. Room 606, Washington State Convention Center Presiding: Jonathan W. Gray, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY … 1. Written in the Body: Spider-Man, Venom, and the Specter of Biopower Ben Bolling, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Psychoanalytic readings of the Spider-Man mythos may be augmented by considering the nervous preoccupation with biopower that undergirds the Wall-crawler’s fifty-year transmedia history. Considered within the frame of Foucault’s biopolitics, Peter Parker’s famous encounter with the irradiated spider leads not to his individual empowerment, but rather to the co-opting of hisRead More →

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Session 399. How Seattle Changed Comics Saturday, 7 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m. Room 303, Washington State Convention Center Presiding: Hillary L. Chute, University of Chicago … 1. Ernie Pook and the Emerald City: Lynda Barry’s Seattle Susan E. Kirtley, Portland State University Lynda Barry moved to Seattle from Wisconsin as a child, and though she has said she “never was happy” there, she returns to the city time and again in her work, particularly in her long-running strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek and her semi-autobiographical collection One Hundred Demons. This paper explores how Barry chooses to render Seattle through her comic art and how the city influencesRead More →

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  Session 579. Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books Saturday, 7 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m. Room 303, Washington State Convention Center Presiding: Charles Hatfield, California State University, Northridge; Craig Svonkin, Metropolitan State College of Denver Session jointly arranged by the MLA Division on Children’s Literature and the MLA Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives … Both picture books and comics participate in children’s culture and literacy learning; both build narratives visually. Yet their kinship is obscured by different ideological frameworks: picture books are generally seen as empowering young readers to take part in a social structure that prizes official literacy; comics, in contrast,Read More →

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Preparations are well underway for the 127th Annual MLA Convention, to be held 5-8 January 2012 in Seattle, Washington. We of the Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives, after a very successful slate of panels at the 2011 convention in Los Angeles, are in the thick of planning for 2012—do check out our Calls for Papers for Seattle: Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books (deadline March 12, 2011) The Material History of Spider-Man (deadline March 5, 2011) How Seattle Changed Comics (deadline March 12, 2011) Feel free to post comments to this blog or to email Charles Hatfield @ charles[dot]hatfield[at]gmail[dot]com if youRead More →

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How Seattle Changed Comics Call for Papers for a proposed panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, 5-8 Jan. 2012, Seattle, Washington. Sponsored by the MLA Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives. The proposed session would explore how Seattle and its institutions—seminal publisher Fantagraphics; The Comics Journal; independent and minicomix scenes—have transformed contemporary comics and the cultures surrounding it. Discussion: Seattle is arguably the city that has shaped US comics the most over the past thirty years. The influence of independent publisher Fantagraphics is enormous: Fantagraphics has disseminated the work of many of the world’s most famous contemporary cartoonists, discovering and nurturingRead More →

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The Material History of Spider-Man: A 50th Anniversary Observance Call for Papers for a panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, 5-8 Jan. 2012, Seattle. This panel will be sponsored by the MLA Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Spider-Man’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, this session wishes to examine the histories imbricated in this iconic figure. From his Cold War origins in 1962, to his emergence as a symbol of the counterculture, to his commemoration of indelible moments in 21st-century America (e.g., Amazing Spider-Man #477—the 9/11 issue, or Amazing Spider-Man #583—the Obama issue), Spider-Man’sRead More →

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Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books NOTE: The deadline for this CFP has been extended to 12 March! Call for Papers for a proposed session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, 5-8 Jan. 2012, Seattle, Washington. Jointly sponsored by the MLA Children’s Literature Division and the MLA Comics and Graphic Narratives Discussion Group. This panel will explore the possible relationships between comics and picture books, two imagetext genres implicated in children’s literacy learning which, despite overlapping formally and aesthetically, nonetheless stand apart socially and culturally. The potential application of picture book theory to comics, and, conversely, comics theory to picture books,Read More →

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In: 2011, Other Comics Events @ MLA

In addition to the three panels sponsored by our Discussion Group, there are many other events on the MLA 2011 program relevant to comics studies. Notably, there are two special sessions, that is, independent panels, in the comics field: 175. Narrative Imag(in)ing and the Comics of the Hernandez Brothers Friday, Jan. 7, 8:30-9:45 a.m., Olympic III, J. W. Marriott Presiding: Jennifer Glaser, Univ. of Cincinnati 1. “Serialization, Character Dynamics, and Narrative in Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets,” Christopher Gonzalez, Ohio State Univ., Columbus 2. “Strategizing Popular Genre in the Works of the Hernandez Brothers,” Derek Parker Royal 3. “Emotion, Cognition, and Race in Los BrosRead More →

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The Modern Language Association (MLA) Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives will host its first panels ever this coming weekend, Thursday through Sunday, January 6-9, at the MLA’s 126th Annual Convention in Los Angeles. The Convention (for an overview of which, see here) will take place in downtown LA at the Convention Center and the nearby J. W. Marriott hotel. This year’s Convention boasts an unprecedented level of activity in comics studies, including the following three panels sponsored or co-sponsored by the Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives: 312. Comics and Conflict in the Middle East Friday, Jan. 7, 1:45-3:00 p.m., Room 407,Read More →