Comparative Aspects in Comics Studies:
Translation, Localisation, Imitation, and Adaptation
Juliane Blank, Stephan Packard, and Christian A. Bachmann (eds.)
Christian A. Bachmann Verlag
März 2025
286 pages
36,00 EUR
ISBN 978-3-96234-087-2

Another new edited collection has just been published by Christian A. Bachmann, which ComFor has been looking forward to for a long time. It goes back to the 14th ComFor-Jahrestagung in Schwarzenbach an der Saale brings together not less than 12 essays reflecting translation, localisation, imitation, and adaptation in comics.

Blurbs:
“This volume reflects upon comparative aspects within the study of comics. It explores phenomena that cross boundaries between cultures, languages, economies, and media formats, paying special attention to translations, localisations, imitations, and adaptations that transport some aspects of one given material into a new shape or matter. Topics range from the direct translation of a given comic for a different audience through considerations of claims to translatability and untranslatability to naturalizing or alienating effects of translation, and on to emendations in cases of censorship or broader forms of media control, editorial interventions, revisions by original or new artists, as well as parodies and piracies. The interplay of aemulatio and imitatio, of purely imitative and rival imitation, gives way to the large field of media translation.”

Contributions:

Christian A. BACHMANN, Juliane BLANK, and Stephan PACKARD
Comparative Aspects of Comics Studies: Introduction

Lynn L. WOLFF
Self-Translation in Nora Krug’s Transcultural Graphic Memoir Belonging/Heimat

Yun-Jou CHEN
Popalania, the Perfect Country: Revisiting Bo Yang’s Taiwan Translation of Popeye Comic Strips (1967–1968)

Alexandra HENTSCHEL and Gerhard SEVERIN
Localizing Duckburg: How Translator Erika Fuchs Moved Duckburg to Post-War Germany

Romain BECKER
Possibilities and Strategies of Scanlations: How Fan-made Translations of Manga Contrast with Official Ones (and Inspire Them)

Nathalie MÄLZER
Comic Adaptations as Intersemiotic Translation: Asterix – Der Seher (1975)

Olga KOPYLOVA
Transformations of Style in Manga-To-Anime Adaptations: A Formal Analysis

Elisabeth KRIEBER
Queer Autographics on Broadway

Markus OPPOLZER
Van Gogh’s Pictorial After/life: A Look at Biopic as a Transmedial Genre

Dietrich GRÜNEWALD
The Art of Adaptation: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

Marina RAUCHENBACHER
Who (and Where) is *Alice*? Anke Feuchtenberger’s Feminist-Disruptive Identity Criticism

Keren ZDAFEE
Egyptianizing Mickey and Minnie?

Publisher’s Page

Der Comic und das Populäre
Rolf Lohse and Joachim Trinkwitz (eds.)
Christian A. Bachmann Verlag
January 2025
360 pages
39,90 EUR
ISBN 978-3-96234-090-2

A new edited collection has just been published by Christian A. Bachmann, which ComFor has been looking forward to for a long time. It goes back to the 12th ComFor annual conference in Bonn and brings together not less than 14 essays reflecting the difficult tensions between comics and their popularity.

Blurbs:
»Der Comic und das Populäre« klingt für viele Menschen nach dem berühmten ›weißen Schimmel‹. Doch das Verhältnis der Kunstform zu der ihr quasi angeborenen Popularität hat sich im Lauf ihrer Geschichte als spannungsvoll erwiesen. Die Kritik kultureller Institutionen und tonangebender Kreise stieß sich immer wieder auch an der immensen Popularität des Comics. Zum Teil wird das Medium noch heute als minderwärtig betrachtet und ihm eine problematische Wirkungen unterstellt. Erst vor einigen Jahren wurde er als Graphic Novel gesellschaftsfähig, allerdings unter weitgehender Ausschluss seiner populären Anteile. Inwieweit prägt das spannungsgeladene Verhältnis des Comics zwischen high und low nach wie vor seinen Platz in Kultur und Gesellschaft? 14 Aufsätze belichten unterschiedliche Aspekte dieser grundlegenden Fragestellung.”

Table of Content:

Joachim Trinkwitz und Rolf Lohse:
Der Comic und das Populäre – einführende Überlegungen

Jörn Ahrens:
Der Comic ist das Populäre
Zur populärkulturellen Gestalt eines Mediums der Massenkultur

Ole Frahm:
Proletarität statt Popularität
Eine kleine Kritik der Rede über Comics

Mario Zehe:
Das Popula(e)re und das Signifikante
Der Comic als Antwort auf die Krise liberaler Erzählungen?

Joachim Trinkwitz:
»Auteur«-Serien im Comic
Prestigeprobleme eines populären Erzählverfahrens

Daniel Stein:
Batmans queere Popularität
Eine serienpolitische Dialektik

Véronique Sina:
»Comickeit is Jüdischkeit«
Populärkultur, Performativität und kulturelle jüdische Identität(en) in den Comics von Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Harvey Pekar und Art Spiegelman

Lukas R.A. Wilde:
Diesseits und jenseits der Diegese
Populäre, partizipatorische und transfiktionale Facetten der gezeichneten Figur

Dietrich Grünewald:
Grenzgang
Comics zitieren Kunstwerke

Rolf Lohse:
Museum und Magie
Das Populäre des Comics und die Kommunikationsstrategie des Louvre

Kirsten von Hagen:
Tintin und die Recherche
Von der Ligne Claire Hergés zu den synästhetischen Traumsequenzen bei Heuet

Markus Oppolzer:
Der Fluch der Graphic Novel
Ein kritischer Blick aus (sprach)didaktischer Sicht

Daniela Kaufmann:
»A Study in Black and White«
Die Signifikanz der Farben »Schwarz« und »Weiß« in Cartoons und Comics von George Herriman

Zita Hüsing:
Being and Nature
The Significance of the Southern Space of the Swamp in Alan Moore’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing

Publisher’s Page

The ComFor editorial board regrets the lack of diversity in this publication. We endeavour to cover the entire spectrum of comics studies, report in a neutral way and keep the editorial selection process to a minimum. But we are also aware of the problematic structures that shape our academic research environment and that frequently lead to a lower visibility of female comics scholars as well as those with marginalised identities in general. We know that this imbalance is often not intended by the editors / organisers and we do not want to imply this in any way. But nonetheless, we would like to draw attention to it to raise awareness for this problem..

International Public History: Teaching History Through Comic Books

Einleitung by Amie Wright and Christine Gundermann
De Gruyter
2024
ISSN: 2567-1111

Christine Gundermann and Amie Wright have co-edited this new special issue on “Teaching History Through Comic Books” and have contributed and supervised numerous articles that attempt to present comics research and the use of comics as broadly and interdisciplinarily as possible. Some contributions are already open access, others are yet to be released as such:

Introduction by Amie Wright and Christine Gundermann

“The Graphic Anne: Anne Frank Comics as Transnational Lieux de Mémoire” by Christine Gundermann

“Illustrating History: April 25th and Its Legacy in Portuguese Comics” by Alexandra Lourenco Dias

“Teaching History Through Comic Books: New Opportunities for Public and Visual History” by Amie Wright

Visualizing the ‘Godmothers’ of the First World War: About the perks of writing a hybrid theses in image and text” by Aliénor Gandanger

Roundtable Conversation – ‘Making the Invisible and Private Seen and Public: On the Potentials of Graphic Medicine for Public History’, a discussion by Matthew Noe, Ian Williams, Soha Bayoum and Eugenia Garcia Amor

Graphic Collections and Resources

• Katharina Hülsmann: Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subcultures
• Barbara Margarethe Eggert: nextcomic Festival (Austria)
• Felipe Gómez-Gutiérrez: Latin American Comics Archive (LACA) – Carnegie Mellon
• Felix Giesa: Comic Archive at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Institute of Children’s and Young Adult Literature Research
• Astrid Böger: The Center for the study of Graphic Literature @ University of Hamburg
• Graphic Medicine Collection – Harvard Medical (Boston, USA)

Continue to Publisher’s Page

Comics | Histories: Texts, Methods, Resources

Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Felix Giesa, Christina Meyer (eds.)
Rombach
September 2024
259 pages
eBook ISBN 978-3-98858-056-6 (Open Access)
Print ISBN 978-3-98858-055-9

The first volume of Rombach’s new comic studies research series “Comics | Histories” has just been published under the same cover title, edited by Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Felix Giesa, and Christina Meyer. The publication with a total of 10 articles in the sections “Re-Reading Punch Magazine”, “(Re-)Productions”, “War [in] Comics”, and “Periodization, Canonization, Digitization” can now be ordered free of charge as an open access download.

Blurbs:

“This edited study is the first book in a new series of publications which aims to revise the wide spectrum of what are now regarded as comics (including caricatures, cartoons, graphic novels, etc.), broadening the view of Comics Studies, not only retrospectively but also prospectively at a time when modern media identities are dissolving. While there are already significant numbers of publications that foreground representations of history in comics, our edited study (and the new series) seeks to highlight contributions to history by comics in particular. In addition to that, the book (and the series) aims to address comics from a transnational, yet culturally situated, perspective, without privileging national histories of the medium in the narrower sense, i.e., as confined to the North American, Franco-Belgian or Japanese publication markets. The contributions to this first book in the series not only address questions relating to practices of canonisation, periodisation and digitisation, but also provide historical perspectives on a variety of humorous magazines and newspapers and deal with issues relating to adapting and revising comics in different parts of the world and in different cultures. The contributors to this book include a number of international scholars working in different areas and disciplines, such as literary and cultural studies, me-dia studies, history, children’s and youth literature research, computational studies and digital humani-ties. The book is divided into four parts, entitled ‘Re-Reading Punch Magazines’, ‘(Re-)Productions’, ‘War [in] Comics’ and ‘Periodization, Canonization, Digitization’ respectively. The editors of the book hope that the collection of (ongoing) research projects will spark readers’ curiosity and ignite their ambition to ex-plore comics|histories in multifarious ways. The newly launched series is looking for future projects that will also focus on the historiography of Comics Studies, in other words, inter- and transdisciplinary research on comics as objects of analysis in themselves. Multidisciplinary assessments of the field and its practices in terms of research and publishing and author- and editorship promise new insights into processes of knowledge formation, as well as the power relations involved.”

Publisher’s page

Comics & Intersektionalität

Anna Beckmann, Kalina Kupczyńska, Marie Schröer, and Véronique Sina (eds.)
De Gruyter
September 2024
337 pages
eBook ISBN 9783110799385
gebunden ISBN 9783110799293

Volume 3 of De Gruyter’s new Comic Studies series has just been published under the title “Comics & Intersectionality” [Comics & Intersectionality], fortunately also directly as open access. The editors are Anna Beckmann, Kalina Kupczyńska, Marie Schröer, and Véronique Sina. The contributors include also many other ComFor members such as Daniel Stein, Sylvia Kesper-Biermann, Ole Frahm, Marina Rauchenbacher, Katharina Serles, Dorothee Marx, Annemarie Klimke, and Katharina Hülsmann.

Blurbs:
“This volume expands on existing approaches in German-language comics studies by taking a deliberate intersectional perspective. The thematic core of the volume is a scholarly, interdisciplinary exploration of various forms of multidimensional discrimination and exclusion in the comic medium..”

Publisher’s page

A 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.