We are delighted to announce the winners of the seventh Martin Schüwer-Publication Prize for Outstanding Comics Research 2025!

Since 2019, the Martin Schüwer Prize for Excellence in Comics Studies has been awarded annually by the Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (AG Comicforschung, GfM). It promotes the work of researchers who, regardless of their age, do not yet hold a permanent academic position as tenured faculty. Honoring outstanding publications in the interdisciplinary field of comics studies, the Martin Schüwer Publication Prize 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 (2006) 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 has 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.

This year, the Martin Schüwer Publication Prize for Outstanding Comics Research is awarded to Charlotte Johanne Fabricius for “Drawing in Circles: Feminized labour in autobiographical comics and cartoons on Instagram.” The article was published in the journal Studies in Comics 15.1–2 (2025). On behalf of ComFor and AG Comicforschung, this year’s jury congratulates Charlotte J. Fabricius on her incisive contribution to the field of comics research. The honorable mention is awarded to Andrea Hoff & Wanda John-Kehewin for their dialogical contribution “Unraveling Time: Reading Temporal Shifts as Intergenerational Narrative Weaving in Wanda John-Kehewin’s Vision of the Crow,” published in the journal Inks 8.3 (2024).

Laudatio for Charlotte Johanne Fabricius

In her article “Drawing in Circles: Feminized labour in autobiographical comics and cartoons on Instagram,” Charlotte J. Fabricius focusses on the highly topical and socio-politically relevant digital autobiographical comics publications on Instagram that address and are shaped by the conditions of care work and feminized labor. Methodologically, Fabricius closely followed 70 creators on Instagram over the course of two years, focusing on women and femme-identified non-binary creators who post comics regularly in a diary style series. In her interdisciplinary approach, Fabricius productively and exemplary combines comics studies perspectives with Marxist feminist theories, and applying among others Colin Beineke’s concept of comicity and Groensteen’s braiding, to digital comics on social media platforms.
Fabricius rightfully identifies digital comics on Instagram thus far as mostly ignored in academic discourses and approaches them both via their formal and narrative media “specificities” as well as via the “overlap with social issues of creative work and feminized labour” (both p. 14). With Lisa Adkins and others, Fabricius asserts that creative work has been feminized by the inclusion of women in the workforce as well as shifts towards “higher degrees of service work, emotional labour and other traditionally ‘feminine’-coded tasks,” concluding:

“As creative work is feminized, it takes on the historical associations with being overworked and underpaid, constantly cycling between productive labour in the workplace and reproductive labour in the house.” (both p. 16)

Circulation and repetition are structures that Fabricius discovers as recurring patterns in creative processes, forms and media-specificities of these digital comics phenomena that link working conditions of feminized labor and care work, narratives of the autobiographical diary comics, the aesthetics of the drawings, as well as the publication rhythms on social media pladorms. With Audre Lorde, Fabricius argues, that the drawings are “never-ending circles” (p. 19) in “scrappy lines” (p. 24). Therefore, emphasizing the fact that the qualities of the comics are conditioned by feminized work and care work in terms of line work, materials and techniques used as well as the narrative structures represented. Formal choices are read by Fabricius as both socially conditioned necessities and aesthetic choices (cf. p. 17) that can be attributed to the comics form of “drawing variations of an image over and over again to create meaning” (p. 28). Fabricius achieves a balanced interpretation of the socio-economics of feminized working conditions that show benefits and opportunities without withholding criticism towards the heightened precarity of comics creators (cf. p. 16) and the monetization of identities and personal experiences (cf. p. 29), concluding that these digital comics artists are at the “mercy of algorithmic precarity and late capitalist self-exploitation” (p. 29).

Fabricius argues that, while the late capitalist context of the comic artists sharing their work via an algorithmic media platform would situate the artists as solo entrepreneurs, they in fact find in Instagram a platform to collectively express their feminized working conditions. Fabricius carefully examines the Instagram format and explains, how the way that single images and image sequences are presented to the user on the platform influences the narratives created. She differentiates the comics that she examined clearly from the common webcomic format, in which the strips are presented in a format not dissimilar to the printed page. In contrast, Instagram cartoonists often utilize a square grid, arranging their comics in the so-called carousel function provided by the platform, so that users can swipe to follow the sequence of images. Another format she examines is the story-format in which the comics remain online for only 24 hours. Fabricius shows how the artists use the conditions of the platform to try and ensure that their comics will be presented to other platform users, through the nebulous system of the algorithm, which is impossible for the artists to master (cf. p. 29). Fabricius thus utilizes her careful observations to present us a snapshot of a moment in time. Platforms change quickly and studies like the one Fabricius undertook ensure that analysis of ephemeral online cultures remain accessible to the academic discourse.

Fabricius’ outstanding analyses of the digital comics phenomena skillfully combine form, content, and genre/medium. Her observations are careful and considerate. In summary, the paper is an impressive analytical intertwining of gendered socio-economic conditions (feminized work, care work), techniques (drawing in notebooks and on sticky notes), genre and medium (digital comics), and distribution (Instagram). Fabricius’ approach to comics studies is exemplary in how to combine practice-based comics research and theoretical thinking about media, form, aesthetics, and sociological conditioning and can be used as blueprint on how to viably think comics in the future.

Laudatio for Andrea Hoff & Wanda John-Kehewin

This year’s honorable mention is awarded to Andrea Hoff’s & Wanda John-Kehewin’s dialogical paper “Unraveling Time: Reading Temporal Shifts as Intergenerational Narrative Weaving in Wanda John-Kehewin’s Vision of the Crow,” published in the journal Inks in 2024. The experimental form of the paper puts the academic and artistic speaker perspectives into the spotlight and hence focusses productively on agency and (self-)representation – especially concerning marginalized groups – in comics as well as in academia. The jury congratulates Charlotte Johanne Fabricius, Andrea Hoff & Wanda John-Kehewin on their outstanding work.

Jury of the Martin Schüwer Publication Prize 2025
Helene L. Bongers
Iris Haist
Katharina Hülsmann
Myriam Mycé
Martin Wambsganß