About the ComFor

The “Gesellschaft für Comicforschung”, Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) supports research into comics in German-speaking regions as well as international co-oparations. ComFor aims to further communication and mutual insights as well as shared projects among comic scholars and researchers; organizes conferences, panels and courses; supports projects with advice; publishs comics research; and represents comics studies and their results in academic and popular media. ComFor welcomes comics studies from all disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary and international exchange.

ComFor organizes annual academic conferences on various topics within the field of comics research and publishes specialist literature. This website offers public information on Calls for papers, conferences, publications, and news from our field. A bi-monthly English summary can be found in our column at the British Comics Forum (comicsforum.org). The internal newsletter collects further information on recent research, teaching, and exhibitions. ComFor also supports the Bonner Online-Bibliography for Comics Studies (www.comicforschung. uni-bonn.de).

ComFor was first founded on February 11, 2005, at Koblenz. The Society was reconstituted as “ComFor e.V.” on April 11, 2014, at Frankfurt am Main.

ComFor invites everyone interested in comics studies to join as an active or supporting member. The membership mostly converses in German. Comics researchers and scholars can apply for active membership by submitting a quick overview of completed and planned research comics to the presidium (info@comicgesellschaft.de). The
annual dues are € 25,-. Everyone not engaged in comics research, but willing to support comics scholarship and wanting to keep up to date on results and events within the field is invited to join as a supporting member for annual dues of € 50,- . For further information on memberships, please see our statutes (Satzung)

Introduction of the new ComFor Managing Comittee

During ComFor’s online members’ meeting on 31 July, 2020, the new managing comittee that had previously been elected via postal vote was confirmed.

The previous comitee members Stephan Packard (president since 2013) and Véronique Sina (vice president since 2018) did not run for another term. We would like to thank both of them for their dedication and the many valuable contributions they have made!

The new managing comittee consists of:

President

PD Dr. Christina Meyer has been a ComFor member since 2010. She is an American Studies scholar with a research focus on American newspaper comics of the late 19th century. She is currently visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the FU Berlin. In November 2019 her monograph Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid was published by the Ohio State University Press (see publisher’s website), which was nominated for the 2020 Eisner Award in the category “Best Academic/Scholarly Work.” She is co-editor of New Perspectives on American Comic Books and Graphic Novels (a special issue of the journal Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2011) and Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (2013). For more information, please see her ComFor profile page.

 

Vice President

Dr. Lukas R.A. Wilde has been a ComFor member since September 2012 and was in charge of the coordination of the ComFor website for many years. In 2018, he first joined the ComFor managing comittee as treasurer. He works in the field of media studies at the University of Tuebingen, where he submitted his Ph.D. thesis on the ‘mangaization’ of public spaces in Japan and the implementation of transmedial figures (kyara) in functional communication (Im Reich der Figuren, Cologne 2018), which was honored with the Roland-Faelske-Award. Moreover, he supports Eve Jay in the organisation of Comic Solidarity (see Website) and is one of the initiators of the German Inclusive Comic Award of the Independent Scene GINCO (see Website). Together with Vanessa Ossa and Jan-Noël Thon, he organizes the 15th annual ComFor conference (8-10 Oktober, 2020) on „Comics and Agency“. For more information, please see his ComFor profile page.

 

Treasurer

Vanessa Ossa has been a ComFor member since 2017, and has been responsible for the website category “Call for Papers” as part of the online editorial team since 2019. Together with Jan-Noël Thon and Lukas R.A. Wilde, she organizes this year’s annual conference “Comics & Agency: Actors, Publics, Participation.” She concluded her doctoral thesis “Sleeping Threats—The Sleeper Agent in Post-9/11 Media” at the collaborative research center “Threatened Order—Societies under Stress” at the university of Tuebingen in 2019. The thesis covers the figure of the ‘sleeper’ in US cinema, serial television, and comic books. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department for Media Culture and Theater at the University of Cologne. Her most recent research interests include comic book fandom and participatory practice as a part of comic book culture. For more information, please see her ComFor profile page.

Summer Break and Initiative for more Diversity in the Field of Comics Studies

The ComFor‘s web editorial team will take a break over the summer months. Therefore, there will be no regular posts on the website until 30 September 2019. We will, however, keep updating the sections on ongoing calls for papers and on exhibitions.

But before we say good bye, we would like to announce the formation of a new committee within the ComFor, the Committee for Diversity, an initiative instigated by ComFor Vice-President Véronique Sina.

The aim of this committee is to contribute to an equal, gender-neutral research culture by promoting the visibility of non-hegemonic, queer-feminist research and researchers, both within the ComFor as well as in the comics studies community in general. The initiative is a reaction to a lack of diversity that characterises the field of comics studies in many ways, for example in terms of methodological approaches and the canon of works as well as the research community in general. To counteract these excluding mechanisms of representation, the Committee for Diversity aims at establishing a more inclusive research environment and introduce new academic impulses.

Last year’s annual ComFor Conference, which was dedicated to topics relating to intersectional gender and diversity studies, showed both the great necessity of and interest in queer-feminist questions and perspectives in the field of comics studies. But it also clarified the desideratum and the gaps that need to be explored to arrive at a critically reflexive and interdisciplinary engagement with comics.

With the foundation of the Committee for Diversity, the ComFor takes an important step to fill these gaps and to send a clear message against any form of discrimination and exclusion.

Currently the committee is in the planning phase,  but during this year’s annual ComFor Conference at Schwarzenbach, a constitutive meeting will take place on 10 November, 2019, during which the committee‘s approach and line of work will be decided.

For further information, contact the Committee for Diversity via email: AGDiversity@comicgesellschaft.de

For now, we wish all of our readers a nice summer and look forward to once more keep you posted with regular news on comics studies in early autumn.

All the best,

Robin-Martin Aust, Katharina Serles, and Natalie Veith

on behalf of the web editorial team

ComFor’s New Managing Committee:

As of April 27, 2017, ComFor has elected a new Managing Committee for the next two years.

After four and a half years, Dr. Catherine Michel and Dr. Felix Giesa had decided to conclude their tenures. Both our colleagues have supported and contributed to the reform of ComFor, newly founded as a public society in 2014, as well as to the decisive expansion of ComFor’s projects and services during that time. All of ComFor’s members owe them a great debt of gratitude; Stephan Packard, their colleague in the steering committee, would like to extend his special thanks for the productive and friendly work we did together.

The new management includes:

President:

Prof. Dr. Stephan Packard joined ComFor in 2008 and has been its President since its new establishment as a public society in 2012. He organised and edited several of the society’s conferences and publications. He is a founding member of the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) as well as a Consultative Committee Member for the journal European Comic Art. His PhD thesis Anatomie des Comics was published in 2006. Further research interests include transmedia narratology, political uses of comics and other media, and the study of censorship. Packard holds the Professorship for „Popular Culture and Its Theory“ at Cologne University. Read more at his ComFor-profile page.

Vice President:

Dr. Véronique Sina has been a member of ComFor since July 2010. She is a media studies scholar at the University of Cologne and specialises in Gender and Queer Studies, Intersectionality, Intermediality, and Identity Studies. She received her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees as well as her PhD at Ruhr University Bochum. Her dissertation at the Department of Media Studies was published as Comic – Film – Gender. The (Re-)Mediation of Gender in Comic Book Movies (transcript, 2016). She is Co-Founder of the Committee for Comic Studies (AG Comicforschung) of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM), for which she also serves as Chairwoman and as organizer of numerous workshops and events. For ComFor, she appears in 2018 as a co-organizer of the 13th Annual Conference on comics studies, on „Spaces Between – Gender, Diversity and Identity in Comics“. More information at her ComFor-profile page.

Treasurer:

Dr. Lukas R.A. Wilde has been a member of ComFor since September 2012, and he has been coordinating ComFor’s editorial work online ever since: ComFor’s homepage underwent a major transformation during this time, and ComFor’s online magazine has become a steadily growing contact point and a source of information on conferences, publications, CfPs and other news from our field. In this context, Lukas Wilde also manages ComFor’s mailing list and the online profiles of its members. He is a media studies scholar at the University of Tübingen, where he received his PhD in 2017 through a dissertation on the ‚mangaization‘ of Japanese public spaces and the implementation of transmedial ‚characters‘ (kyara) within functional communication (Im Reich der Figuren, Cologne 2018). Together with Vanessa Ossa and Jan-Noël Thon, he will organize ComFor’s planned 15th Annual Conference in 2020 on „Comic/Mediation: Actors, Participation, and the Public“. Read more at his ComFor-profile page.