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.