Comicgesellschaft

Call for Nominations: Martin Schüwer Publication Prize 2024

Call for Nominations:

Martin Schüwer Publication Prize for Excellence in Comics Studies

Annual award for the best article by an early-career scholar, organized by the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM)

The German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) are announcing for the sixth time in 2024 the Martin Schüwer Publication Prize for Excellence in Comics Studies. The prize has been awarded annually since 2019. It supports scholars who, regardless of their actual age, do not yet hold a permanent academic position. By honoring outstanding publications in the field of interdisciplinary comics research, the award aims to create more visibility for comics-related research, promoting and communicating its importance to a wider public.

The prize is named after the late Martin Schüwer, a scholar of English Literature and Culture who specialized in comics studies and who, very unfortunately, died at a far too early age in 2013. His dissertation Wie Comics erzählen (2008), published 16 years ago, has opened up new ground for narratological comics research and has become a standard work in German-language comics studies. With this and his other works on comics as well as on the didactics of English literature, Martin Schüwer set valuable standards regarding the excellence, accessibility and range that publications in our fields can achieve. Both as a comics researcher and as a person, Schüwer had a distinct way of talking to people, characterized by his open-mindedness and a genuine interest in others. Talking to and with others, he aimed to advance comics studies. We dedicate the award to him and this very goal.

Submissions and Nominations:

Accepted for nomination are published articles of chapter length. They may have appeared in anthologies or journals, as chapters, or within longer monographs, but also as essays and other text forms of similar length. The submitted and nominated texts may have been written by one or more authors. All authors must not hold a permanent academic position at the time of nomination.

Contributions nominated for the Martin Schüwer Prize 2024 must be published in German or English between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2023. Texts yet in print or only accepted for publication cannot be considered. Repeat submissions are not possible. Also excluded are complete monographs and unpublished qualifying publications. The editorship of anthologies or journal issues is not eligible for nomination, but individual contributions in these collections are.

Nominations are to include the recommended text as well as a short substantiation (300-500 words). Self-nominations are possible and welcome, the jury would also particularly like to call for third-party nominations of impressive texts. Deadline for all submissions is April 30, 2024. Please send your nominations as one complete PDF to schuewer-preis@comicgesellschaft.de.

Prize and Award Ceremony:

The official announcement of the award winner will take place during the annual conference of the German Society for Media Studies (September 25.–28., 2024; Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz ). The award ceremony with an invited lecture by the award winner will take place at the annual conference of the German Society for Comic Studies (October 23.–25., 2024; University of Groningen, Netherlands). The laureate will also receive the prize money of 1000 €, will not have to pay the membership fee of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) for one year and will become an honorary member of ComFor for life.

Call for Nominations as Pdf

18th ComFor Annual Conference 2023: „What was, is, becomes comics studies – for us?“

From December 11-13, 2023, the 18th annual conference of the Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) will take place at the Stiftung Akademie Waldschlösschen in 37130 Gleichen. The event will be organized by Christina Meyer, Vanessa Ossa, and Lukas R.A. Wilde.

On the occasion of ComFor’s upcoming tenth anniversary as a registered association, this timespan will be subject to a critical reflection: How has comics studies developed and changed over the past ten years? Which recurring, but also new questions and research perspectives have we been dealing with since 2014? Which disciplinary shortcomings or desiderata do we need to address more precisely together in the future? „What was, is, becomes comics studies – for us?“ quite literally addresses our institution as well as the biographically shaped perspectives of our participating members.

Individual seats to participate in the lectures and panel discussions are still available, inquiries can be sent informally to vorstand@comicgesellschaft.de.

Read more: Full program

CLOSURE #9.5 / ComFor-Comference 2021 »Coherence in Comics. An Interdisciplinary Approach«* published

CLOSURE #9.5A special-themed issue #9.5 of Closure: Kieler e-Journal für Comicforschung, edited by Elisabeth Krieber (Salzburg), Markus Oppolzer (Salzburg), and Hartmut Stöckl (Salzburg), has just been published: »Coherence in Comics. An Interdisciplinary Approach«. The issue represents the proceedings of the 16the annual conference of ComFor (October 2021, Salzburg). It contains contributions by ComFor-members Elisabeth Krieber, Markus Oppolzer, Lukas R.A. Wilde, Barbara M. Eggert , and Stephan Packard:

Elisabeth Krieber, Markus Oppolzer, and Hartmut Stöckl:
Coherence in Comics. An Interdisciplinary Approach: Über diese Ausgabe

Lukas R.A. Wilde:
Essayistic Comics and Non-Narrative Coherence

Barbara M. Eggert:
Comics as Coherence Machines? Case Studies on the Spectrum of Functions that Comics perform in Museums

J. Scott Jordan und Victor Dandridge, Jr.:
Invincible: Multiscale Coherence in Comics

Mark Hibbett:
Image Quotation of Past Events to Enforce Storyworld Continuity in John Byrne’s Fantastic Four

Amadeo Gandolfo:
Do The Collapse: Final Crisis and the Impossible Coherence of the Superhero Crossover

Stephan Packard:
Inferential Revision in Comics Page Interpretation: A Hermeneutic Approach to Renegotiating Panel Comprehension

Continue to CLOSURE #9.5: »Coherence in Comics. An Interdisciplinary Approach«

*Die ComFor-Redaktion bedauert den Mangel an Diversität in dieser Publikation. Wir sind bestrebt, möglichst neutral über das Feld der Comicforschung in all seiner Breite zu informieren und redaktionelle Selektionsprozesse auf ein Minimum zu beschränken. Gleichzeitig sind wir uns jedoch auch der problematischen Strukturen des Wissenschaftsbetriebs bewusst, die häufig dazu führen, dass insbesondere Comicforscherinnen sowie jene mit marginalisierten Identitäten weniger sichtbar sind. Wir wissen, dass dieses Ungleichgewicht oft nicht der Intention der Herausgeber_innen / Veranstalter_innen entspricht und möchten dies auch nicht unterstellen, wollen aber dennoch darauf aufmerksam machen, um ein Bewusstsein für dieses Problem zu schaffen.

Conference “Comics, the Children and Childishness”

Termin:
2023 09 18 - 2023 09 19

On September 18/19, 2023, the conference “Comics, the Children and Childishness”, will take place in presence at KASK. It is one of the culminating outputs of the ERC project “Children in Comics: An Intercultural History (1865-)”, led by Prof. Maaheen Ahmed at Ghent University. The project aims to reconstruct a cultural history of European comics, particularly focusing on comics from Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Italy.

The conference is organized by Maaheen Ahmed und ComFor-member Giorgio Busi Rizzi (Ghent University). It aims to further deepen the interests and achievements of the ERC project, with the goal of opening a crucial forum for dialogue between European and international researchers, focusing on a distinctly international corpus, covering comics not only from the dominant areas of Western Europe and North America, but also from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. In this way, the conference aims to inspire further research in this neglected but crucial aspect of comics studies.

The complete program can be found here. Among the contributors are also other ComFor members besides Rizzi (Benoît Crucifix, Jaqueline Berndt, Eva Van der Wiele). Those interested in attending the conference can register here. Please address any questions to comics@ugent.be.

Call for Nominations: Martin Schüwer Publication Prize 2023

Martin Schüwer Publication Prize for Excellence in Comics Studies

Annual award for the best article by an early-career scholar, organized by the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM)

The German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) are announcing for the fifth time in 2023 the Martin Schüwer Publication Prize for Excellence in Comics Studies. The prize has been awarded annually since 2019. It supports scholars who, regardless of their actual age, do not yet hold a permanent academic position. By honoring outstanding publications in the field of interdisciplinary comics research, the award aims to create more visibility for comics-related research, promoting and communicating its importance to a wider public.

The prize is named after the late Martin Schüwer, a scholar of English Literature and Culture who specialized in comics studies and who, very unfortunately, died at a far too early age in 2013. His dissertation Wie Comics erzählen (2008), published 15 years ago, has opened up new ground for narratological comics research and has become a standard work in German-language comics studies. With this and his other works on comics as well as on the didactics of English literature, Martin Schüwer set valuable standards regarding the excellence, accessibility and range that publications in our fields can achieve. Both as a comics researcher and as a person, Schüwer had a distinct way of talking to people, characterized by his open-mindedness and a genuine interest in others. Talking to and with others, he aimed to advance comics studies. We dedicate the award to him and this very goal.

Submissions and Nominations

Accepted for nomination are published articles of chapter length. They may have appeared in anthologies or journals, as chapters, or within longer monographs, but also as essays and other text forms of similar length. The submitted and nominated texts may have been written by one or more authors. All authors must not hold a permanent academic position at the time of nomination.

Contributions nominated for the Martin Schüwer Prize 2023 must be published in German or English between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2022. Texts yet in print or only accepted for publication cannot be considered. Repeat submissions are not possible. Also excluded are complete monographs and unpublished qualifying publications. The editorship of anthologies or journal issues is not eligible for nomination, but individual contributions in these collections are.

Nominations are to include the recommended text as well as a short substantiation (300-500 words). Self-nominations are possible and welcome, the jury would also particularly like to call for third-party nominations of impressive texts. Deadline for all submissions is March 31, 2023. Please send your nominations as one complete PDF to schuewer-preis@comicgesellschaft.de.

Prize and Award Ceremony

The official announcement of the award winner will take place during the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft GfM (German Society for Media Studies) (September 27-30, 2023, University of Bonn). The award ceremony with an invited lecture by the award winner will take place at a separate date. The laureate will also receive the prize money of 1000 €, will not have to pay the membership fee of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM) for one year and will become an honorary member of ComFor for life.

Conference Proceedings “Comics and Agency”

The proceedings of the 15th ComFor Annual Conference (2020) on the topic of “Comics and Agency” have now been published. Edited by Vanessa Ossa, Jan-Noël Thon, and Lukas Wilde, the 350-page volume contains 15 essays by ComFor members and internationally renowned authors.

“Comics & Agency:
This volume aims to intensify the interdisciplinary dialogue on comics and related popular multimodal forms (including manga, graphic novels, and cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. To this end, a theoretically and methodologically diverse set of contributions explores the interrelations between individual, collective, and institutional actors within historical and contemporary comics cultures. Agency is at stake when recipients resist hegemonic readings of multimodal texts. In the same manner, “authorship” can be understood as the attribution of agency of and between various medial instances and roles such as writers, artists, colorists, letterers, or editors, as well as with regard to commercial rights holders such as publishing houses or conglomerates and reviewers or fans. From this perspective, aspects of comics production (authorship and institutionalization) can be related to aspects of comics reception (appropriation and discursivation), and circulation (participation and canonization), including their potential for transmedialization and making contributions to the formation of the public sphere.”

The volume also kicks off De Gruyter’s new “Comics Studies: Aesthetics, Histories, Practices” series, edited by Jaqueline Berndt, Patrick Noonan, Karin Kukkonen, and Stephan Packard.

The volume can be found here.

New Publication: Studien zur Geschichte des Comic

Studien zur Geschichte
des Comic

Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff, Dietrich Grünewald (eds.)

published by Ch. A. Bachmann
442 pages
numerous illustrations
language: German
ISBN 978-3-96234-069-8
publisher’s website

We are glad to announce that the second volume of the conference proceedings from the  10th Annual ComFor Conference 2015 in Frankfurt is finally available now, edited by honorary ComFor members Dietrich Grünewald and Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff. After the first volume investigated the representation of history in comics, the second volume is focused on the history of comics themselves.

Publisher’s blurb:

“Die hier versammelten Studien zur Geschichte des Comic umfassen unterschiedliche Facetten historisch orientierter Comic-Forschung im weitesten Sinn. Neben Überblicksdarstellungen zu Epochen und längeren Zeiträumen finden sich Beiträge zu einzelnen Autorinnen und Autoren, Werken und Serien. Untersuchungen zu Frühformen haben ihren Platz neben Längsschnitten durch Entwicklungen der jüngsten Zeit. Gattungsent­wicklungen, Thematiken, Medien und Märkte sowie Schnittstellen der sequenziellen Bildgeschichte zu anderen Formen des erzählenden Bildes werden ebenso diskutiert wie Vermarktungsweisen und dezidiert antikommerzielle Tendenzen sowie Positionen der historischen Comic-Forschung selbst.
Die Beiträge bieten sowohl Neuentdeckungen von Werken und Details der Geschichte des Comic, wie die Herstellung von historischen Zusammenhängen. Sie geben Einblicke in neuere Comic-Kulturen – auch osteuropäischer und fernöstlicher Länder – und deren Bezüge zu internationalen Entwicklungen. Der Band bietet Ansichten einer zunehmend vielgestaltigen Welt der Grafischen Literatur, innerhalb derer einige der bislang aus der Sicht der westeuropäischen und US-amerikanischen Forschung eher randständigen Gebiete gegenüber den Zentren hervortreten.”

Contents:

  • Dietrich GRÜNEWALD: “Zur Frühgeschichte des Comic:
    Von der Illustrationsfolge zur autonomen Bildgeschichte”
  • Bernd DOLLE-WEINKAUFF: “Zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte der sequenziellen Bilderzählung in Deutschland 1835–1860”
  • Christian A. BACHMANN: “Transatlantische Motivwanderungen am Beispiel von Traumdarstellungen:Ein Beitrag zur Thematologie des frühen Comics”
  • Benedikt BREBECK: “Beiträge deutscher Zeichner zur Entwicklung des frühen Comic Strip in den USA”
  • Michael F. SCHOLZ: “‘Comics and Their Creators’ (1942) -Zu den Anfängen der amerikanischen Comicforschung”
  • Nicolas SCHILLINGER: “Grenzen des Zeichenbaren: Geschichte und Comic in China nach 1949”
  • Jessica BAUWENS-SUGIMOTO: “A Short Overview of the History of Japanese Boys’ Love and Yaoi Manga”
  • Marie SCHRÖER: “Autobiografie im Comic: Geschichte/n, Varianten, Potentiale”
  • Véronique SINA: “‘It Ain’t Me Babe …’:Zur Geschichte und Entwicklung feministischer Comics”
  • Nina MAHRT: “Mit allen Mitteln: Kriegsreportagen als Comics”
  • Hartmut BECKER: “Werbecomics der 1950er-Jahre: Eine Revue der Konsumwelten der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft”
  • Guido WEISSHAHN: “182 Variationen über ein Thema:Die Comicserie Knote und Karli als Beispiel für Zeitungscomics in der DDR”
  • Anna STEMMANN: “‘Der Schrecken, der die Nacht durchflattert’:Darkwing Duck als Superheldenparodie”
  • Elizabeth ‘Biz’ NIJDAM: “From Posters to Panels and Panels to Posters: Fluidity of Form in Feuchtenberger’s Comics and Graphic Art”
  • Arno METELING: “Der Vertigo-Effekt: Melancholie, Horror und Britishness in US-amerikanischen Comics um 2000”
  • Kalina KUPCZYNSKA: “Geschichte des autobiografischen Comics in Polen”
  • Brett E. STERLING: “Jenseits des Mainstreams: Zur Entwicklung der deutschsprachigen Comic-Produktion und ihrer avantgardistischen Strömungen seit 1980”
  • Lehel SATA: “Tendenzen im ungarischen Comic nach der Jahrtausendwende: Themen, Gestaltungstechniken, Wirkung”
  • Marco PELLITTERI: “Abriss einer Geschichte der Etablierung des Manga-Markts in ausgewählten europäischen Ländern”

Members Bibliography 2020 & 2021

To provide an overview of our members’ research, we compile an annual bibliography of monographs and edited volumes by ComFor members. As this is the first time we publish it, also some titles from the previous year are included.

Are you interested in reviewing any of these books? Write an email to redaktion@comicgesellschaft.de and we will forward information on review copies to you. Reviews can be published as guest contribution under the respective reviewer’s name on our website, also those written by non-members!


Ahrens, Jörn (Hg.). Der Comic als Form: Bildsprache, Ästhetik, Narration. Ch. A. Bachmann, 2021.

Domsch, Sebastian, Dan Hassler-Forest und Dirk Vanderbeke (Hgs.). Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives. De Gruyter, 2021.

Eckhoff-Heindl, Nina, und Véronique Sina (Hgs.) Spaces Between: Gender, Diversity and Identity in Comics. Springer VS, 2020.

Etter, Lukas. Distinctive Styles and Authorship in Alternative Comics. De Gruyter, 2021.

Frahm, Ole, Hans-Joachim Hahn, Markus Streb (Hgs.). Beyond MAUS. The Legacy of Holocaust Comics. Böhlau 2021.

Giesa, Felix und Anna Stemmann (Hgs.). Comics & Archive. Ch. A. Bachmann, 2021.

Giesa, Felix, Markus Engelns und Ulrike Preußner (Hgs.). Comics in der Schule: Theorie und Unterrichtspraxis. Ch. A. Bachmann, 2021.

Grünewald, Dietrich. Abstrakt? Abstrakt! Abstraktion und Bildgeschichte. Ch. A. Bachmann, 2021.

Gundermann, Christine (Hg.). Zwischenräume: Geschlecht und Diversität in Comics. Ch. A. Bachmann, 2021.

Hausmanninger, Thomas. Religion als Kultur: Das Judentum und die jüdische Identität bei Joann Sfar. Ch. A. Bachmann, 2021.

Kupczyńska, Kalina, und Renata Makarska. Handbuch Polnische Comickulturen nach 1989. Ch. A. Bachmann, 2021.

Oppolzer, Markus. Reading Autobiographical Comics: A Framework for Educational Settings. Peter Lang, 2020. Open Access.

Palandt, Ralf (Hg.). Anne Frank im Comic. C.A. Bachmann, 2021.

Pohl-Otto, Karoline. Comics in Schule und Religionsunterricht: Vielfalt adressieren, Kompetenzen fördern, Unterricht verbessern. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021.

Rauscher, Andreas, Daniel Stein, und Jan-Noël Thon (Hgs.). Comics and Videogames: From Hybrid Medialities to Transmedia Expansions. Routledge, 2021.

Stein, Daniel. Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. Ohio State University Press, 2021.