In the winter semester starting next week, Daniel Stein is organizing a lecture series in Siegen together with Jens Aspelmeier and Jana Mikota on the topic of “Learning about the Shoah through Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling – Transnational Remembrance in Graphic Literature”. It will focus on comics and graphic literature, but also on children’s books. Other ComFor members such as Ole Frahm and Ralf Palandt will also be giving talks. All sessions take place on Tuesdays from 6-8 pm. If you are interested in attending individual sessions or the entire lecture series digitally, you are highly welcome to do so by registering through e-mail at mikota (ät) germanistik.uni-siegen.de.
Conferences
Guest Lecture (hybrid) Siegen by José Alaniz: “Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature”
On Monday, June 17 2024, José Alaniz (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) will give a guest lecture at the University of Siegen (English Department), for which attendance via WebEx is possible. If you are interested, please register at stein [ät] anglistik.uni-siegen.de to receive the link.
“Comics of the Anthropocene:Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature”
How have comics artists depicted the human-caused destruction of the natural world? How do these works resonate with the ethical and environmental issues? How have comics mourned the loss of nature over the last five decades?
José Alaniz’s lecture explores the representation of animals, mass extinctions and climate change in the era popularly known as the Anthropocene in (mostly) US comics, primarily since the first Earth Day in 1970.
Key words: Critical Animal, Studies, Environmental Humanities, Affect Studies, Comics Studies
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein, Svitlana Stupak
ComFor-panel at the 21st Comic-Salon 2024: “Das Stigma des ‘Anderen'”
As in many previous years, the International Comic-Salon Erlangen 2024 (May 30-June 2) will once again feature a series of lectures by the Society for Comic Studies (ComFor), which Clemens Heydenreich has once again put together and will chair. In 2024, the nine lectures will be entitled “Das Stigma des ‘Anderen’: Klischees und Zuschreibungen im Comic” (The Stigma of the ‘Other’: Clichés and Attributions in comics).
Friday, May 31, 2024
11:00
Barbara M. Eggert (Linz): „Completely dotty“? Zur visuellen Umsetzung von nicht-normativen psychischen Zuständen in Elisa Macellaris Kusama (2020)
11:30
Myriam Macé (Bremen): „Ça devient rare comme race“ – Eine autobiographische Spurensuche in Lebensborn (2024) von Isabelle Maroger
12:00
Iris Haist (Plauen): “Alien in New York”. Die Darstellung des “Anderen” in Nnedi Okorafors LaGuardia
Saturday, June 1, 2024
11:00
Hanspeter Reiter (Landsberg/Lech): Gendern in Comics – wie kann das (an)gehen?
11:30
Jörn Ahrens (Gießen): Othering und Kolonialismus: Atar Gull und die Rache der Sklaven
12:00
Dietrich Grünewald (Reiskirchen): Das Judenbild im Comic
Sunday, June 2, 2024
11:00
Thomas Sähn (Paris): (De)Konstruktion des Andersseins als inhärenter Bestandteil erzählerischer Bildsprache
11:30
Martin Frenzel (Darmstadt): Über MAUS hinaus. Judenhass, Shoah und Israel im Comic. Von Krigstein über Kichka bis Joann Sfar
12:00
Katharina Serles (Wien): „Kauf dir mal ein Buch. Loser!“ Klasse, Körper und Kanon in Eva Müllers Scheiblettenkind (2023)
Zur Veranstaltungsseite für alle Abstracts (weiter auf “Filter” –> “Vorträge/Präsentationen”)
Roundtable discussion (online): “Birgit Weyhe’s ‘Rude Girl’: Comics, Blackness, and Translation Dialogue”
Next Friday, ComFor member Elizabeth ‘Biz’ Nijdam is organizing and chairing a panel discussion at the Goethe-Institut Montreal for the German Studies Association’s Comic Studies Network with comic artist Birgit Weyhe and Dr. Priscilla Layne (UNC-Chapel Hill) about their recent collaboration on Rude Girl (2022). Involved are also the UBC Comic Studies Cluster and the Department of Classics, Modern Languages, and Linguistics at Concordia University. For those interested, online registration and participation is possible.
More information:
“In 2018, Birgit Weyhe joined a room of German comics scholars at a GSA (German Studies Association) panel on diversity and inclusion in German-language comics to bear witness to a presentation by Dr. Brett Sterling that openly criticized her graphic novel Madgermanes (2016) for its representation of Blackness and cultural appropriation. While this commentary was far from welcome, it marked the start of the author’s journey in revaluating her power and privilege as a comics artist. Soon thereafter, Weyhe met Dr. Priscilla Layne, an Associate Professor of German Weyhe und Layne in MontrealStudies at UNC-Chapel Hill with Caribbean roots. Over the course of the next few years, Weyhe and Layne collaborated on the graphic novel Rude Girl (2022), which explore Layne’s life growing up in Chicago, experience of racism, and path to German studies, all the while interrogating what it means for a White artist to represent Black lives.
This panel will take the form of a conversation with the co-creators of Rude Girl, discussing Layne and Weyhe’s collaboration and the role of comics in intersectional explorations of Black identity.”
Conference “Comics, the Children and Childishness”
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.
Program of the ComFor Annual Conference 2021: “Coherence in Comics”
The ComFor web editorial team is back from its summer break with an announcement on its own behalf: the 16th annual conference of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) will take place from 14-16 October 2021!
Announcement:
“The 16th Annual Conference of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) approaches the topic “Coherence in Comics” from an interdisciplinary perspective. We seek to not only negotiate and explain meaning-making across panel borders and semiotic modes, but also across disciplines, seeking commonalities, shared interests and points of contact. […] We are looking forward to keynotes by Janina Wildfeuer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Information Studies at the University of Groningen, Barbara Postema, author of Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments, and Charles Forceville, Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam (Department of Media Studies). Apart from the conference’s central focus on coherence, ComFor aims to promote interdisciplinary cooperation and dialogue across all areas of comics research. The 16th Annual Conference will therefore continue the tradition of an open workshop format that allows researchers to present and gather feedback on various projects within comics studies, without any thematic restrictions. We are also excited to announce a comic reading (in German) by Vina Yun as part of this year’s program, arranged by the Austrian Comics Society (OeGeC – Österreichische Gesellschaft für Comic-Forschung und -Vermittlung).”
Registration:
The conference will be held online via WebEx; there is no conference fee; registration by email to comfor2021@sbg.ac.at is requested.
Organisators:
- Elisabeth Krieber (Universität Salzburg)
- Markus Oppolzer (Universität Salzburg)
- Hartmut Stöckl (Universität Salzburg)
Programme:
Thursday, 14 Oct., 2021
10:30 – 11:30 – Members’ Meeting of the Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) (in German)
11:30 – 13:00 – Lunch Break
13:00 – 13:15 – Conference Opening
13:15 – 14:15 – OPEN FORUM I
Mihaela Precup and Dragoș Manea – “The Overfamiliar Perpetrator: Hipster Hitler, Transcultural Memory, and the Banalisation of Genocide”
Pedro Réquio – “Revolutionary Comics/Revolutionary Politics: Portugal in the 1970’s”
14:15 – 14:45 – Break
14:45 – 15:45 – OPEN FORUM II
Ahlam Almohissen – “Multimodal Humour in Cartoons: Social Semiotic Perspective”
Xiaolan Wei – “Coherence Constructed through Comics and Spoken Language in Chinese College Students’ Five Minutes English Academic Speech”
15:45 – 16:15 – Break
16:15 – 17:30 – KEYNOTE Janina Wildfeuer
“Demystifying the Magic. A Multimodal Linguistic Approach to Coherence in Visual Narratives”
17:30– 18:00 – Break
18:00 – 19:00 – AWARD CEREMONY
Martin-Schüwer-Publication Prize 2021 for Excellence in Comic Studies
Friday, 15 Oct., 2021
09:00 – 10:30 – PANEL 1: FORMS AND AESTHETICS OF COHERENCE (Panel Chair: Stephan Packard)
Elisabeth El Refaie – “A Tripartite Classification of Visual Metaphor as a Basis for Studying Coherence in Comics”
Martin Foret – “‘Like a Speech’ or Searching for Coherence between Codes Used in Comics: The Interplay of Various Codes within the Specific Complex Code (or Better Meta-Code) of Comics”
Lukas R.A.Wilde – “Essayistic Comics: Non-narrative Coherence and Pictogrammatics with Schlogger, Sousanis, Barry”
10:30 – 11:00 – Break
11:00 – 12:30 – PANEL 2: COHESION IN COMICS: MULTIMODAL AND PRAGMATICIST APPROACHES (Panel Chair: Janina Wildfeuer)
Chiao-I Tseng – “Structures of Cohesion in Comics”
John Bateman – “Nonlinear Coherence? Steps Beyond the Sequence in Sequential Art”
Stephan Packard – “Cohesion in Panel Graphs: A Psychosemiotic Approach”
12:30 – 14:00 – Lunch Break
14:00 – 15:30 – PANEL 3: IN(COHERENT) SPACES AND NARRATORS (Panel Chair: Mihaela Precup)
Barbara Margarethe Eggert – “Comics as Coherence Machines? Exemplary Observations on the Functional Spectrum of Museum Comics”
Martha Kuhlman -“Comics and the Miniature: Thinking Inside the Box”
Elizabeth Allyn Woock – “The Graphic ‘I’ in Academic Comics”
15:30 – 16:00 – Break
16:00 – 17:15 – KEYNOTE: Charles Forceville: “Visual and Multimodal (Meta)Representation of Speech, Thought, and Sensory Perception in Comics”
17:15 – 17:30 – Break
17:30 – 19:00 – COMIC READING (in German)
presented by the Austrian Comics Society (OeGeC Österreichische Gesellschaft für Comic-Forschung und -Vermittlung)
Vina Yun: Homestories
Saturday, 16 Oct., 2021
09:00 – 11:00 – PANEL 4: Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches to the Visual Language of Comics (Panel Chair: Neil Cohn)
Neil Cohn – “Grammar of the Visual Language of Comics”
Irmak Hacımusaoğlu – “What Are Motion Lines Anyways?”
Bien Klomberg – “Calvin the Elephant: Resolving Discontinuity through Conceptual Blends”
Lenneke Lichtenberg – “Understanding Lightbulb Moments in Comics: The Processing of Visual Metaphors that Float above Characters’ Heads”
11:00 – 11:30 – Break
11:30 – 12:45 – KEYNOTE Barbara Postema – “Narrative Structure in Wordless Comics”
12:45 – 14:30 – Lunch Break
14:30 – 16:00 – PANEL 5: FRACTURED BODIES AND IDENTITIES (Panel Chair: Barbara Margarete Eggert)
Tina Helbig – “Frames as Skin and Comic Book Pages as a Fractured Bodies in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and in Emily Carroll’s Short Horror Comics”
Carolina González Alvarado – “A Perverse Beauty and the Mechanisms of Control over the Body: An Analysis of Helter Skelter by Kyoho Okazaki”
Rita Maricocchi – “(In)coherencies in the Manifestations of German Identity in Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes”
16:00 – 16:30 – Break
16:30 – 18:00 – PANEL 6: COHERENCE IN SUPERHERO NARRATIVES: THE CHALLENGES OF SERIALIZATION AND WORLD-BUILDING (Panel Chair: Lukas R.A. Wilde)
Mark Hibbett – “Image Quotation of Past Events to Enforce Storyworld Cohesion in John Byrne’s Fantastic Four”
Amadeo Gandolfo – “Do the Collapse: Final Crisis and the Impossible Coherence of the Superhero Crossover”
Scott Jordan and Victor Dandridge Jr. – “Invincible: The Many Shapes, Forms, and Sizes of Coherence through Comics”
18:00 – 18:15 – Conference Closing
Further information and a detailed programme can be found on Event website.
Comics|Histories – International Conference
The international Conference “Comics|Histories” is organised by ComFor members Jaqueline Berndt (Stockholm University, Sweden), Felix Giesa (Goethe University
Frankfurt, Germany) and Christina Meyer (TU Braunschweig, Germany).
Description of the conference by the organisers:
“Comics Studies are on the rise, but the bulk of comics research prioritizes contemporary productions, whereas comics’ histories and genealogies, or preconditions of what appears as comics and the forms of graphic narratives today, remain understudied. To fill the gap and to map as yet unknown territories, a new book series will be launched soon by academic publisher Rombach Wissenschaft, and this conference, organized by the series editors, is intended as a kick-off event. The book series and conference aim to revise the wide spectrum of what is now regarded as comics (including caricature, cartoons, graphic novel, etc.), broadening the view of Comics Studies not only retrospectively, but also prospectively at a moment in time when modern media identities are dissolving.
We welcome in particular contributions that engage with both theories and methods employed in Comics Studies so far, and crucial disciplinary concerns of history (as specified in literary, cultural, media, or art history, and so on). While there is already a significant amount of publications that foreground representations history in comics, our conference seeks to highlight comics-specific contributions to history. In addition to that, we invite papers that address comics from a transnational while culturally situated, perspective, without privileging national histories of the medium in the narrower sense, i.e., as confined to North American, Franco-Belgian, or Japanese publication markets. Last but not least, we call for papers that put the spotlight on the historiography of Comics Studies, in other words, the inter- and transdisciplinary research on comics as an object of analysis in itself. Multidisciplinary assessments of the field and its practices of research and publishing, authorand editorship promise new insight into processes of knowledge formation, as well as the power relations involved.”
Registration is open until July 15th via comicshistories@uni-frankfurt.de.
The conference takes place online via ZOOM from July 16th to July 17th; the ZOOM link will be sent out to registered participants.
Schedule for the Annual ComFor Conference 2020: „Comics & Agency“
15th Annual Conference of the German Society for Comic Studies:
Comics & Agency: Actors, Publics, Participation
Online | Live via Zoom
Registration:
There is no conference fee, but in order to participate you will need to register by sending an email to comfor@comicgesellschaft.de no later than 5 October 2020.
Organisers:
Vanessa Ossa (University of Cologne)
Jan-Noël Thon (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Lukas R. A. Wilde (University of Tuebingen)
Schedule:
| Thursday, 8 October 2020 | |
| 13:30 CEST | Welcome and Introduction: Christina Meyer (Free University Berlin), Vanessa Ossa (University of Cologne), Jan-Noël Thon (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Lukas R. A. Wilde (University of Tuebingen) |
| Panel 1: Digital Agency | |
| 14:00 CEST |
|
| 15:30 CEST | Coffee Break |
| Panel 2: Intermedial Agency | |
| 16:00 CEST |
|
| 17:30 CEST | Coffee Break |
| Keynote 1 | |
| 18:00 CEST | Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California): Comics and Stuff |
| Award Ceremony: Martin-Schüwer-Preis 2020 | |
| 20:00 CEST | Dorothee Marx (University of Kiel), Daniel Stein (University of Siegen), and the Winner of the Martin-Schüwer-Preis |
| Friday, 9 October 2020 | |
| Panel 3: Authorial Agency | |
| 11:30 CEST |
|
| 13:00 CEST |
Lunch Break |
| Panel 4: Editorial Agency | |
| 14:00 CEST |
|
| 15:30 CEST | Coffee Break |
| Panel 5: Distributional Agency | |
| 16:00 CEST |
|
| 17:30 CEST | Coffee Break |
| Keynote 2 |
|
| 18:00 CEST | Mel Gibson (Northumbria University): Librarians, Agency, Young People, and Comics: Graphic Account and the Development of Graphic Novel Collections in Public Libraries in Britain in the 1990s |
| Virtual Comic Museum Erlangen | |
| 20:00 CEST | Lisa Neun and Ralf Marczinczik |
| Saturday, 10 October 2020 | |
| Open Forum | |
| 11:30 CEST |
|
| 13:00 CEST |
Lunch Break |
| Panel 7: Fan Agency (Part I) | |
| 14:00 CEST |
|
| 15:30 CEST | Coffee Break |
| Panel 8: Fan Agency (Part II) | |
| 16:00 CEST |
|
| 17:30 CEST | Coffee Break |
| Concluding Discussion: Where Do We Go from Here? | |
| 18:00 CEST | Vanessa Ossa (University of Cologne), Jan-Noël Thon (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Lukas R. A. Wilde (University of Tuebingen) |
Download schedule as PDF file.
Workshop “Practices of Reading Comics” in Berlin
Termin:
2019 11 29 10.00 - 2019 11 30
The Cinepoetics – Center for Advanced Film
Studies and the Committee for Comics Studies
(AG Comicforschung) of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) are inviting to their workshop “Approaching the Practices of Reading Comics: Perspectives from Phenomenology and Interface Studies”
Date: 29th/30th of November 2019 (Friday/Saturday)
Location: Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe Cinepoetics,
Grunewaldstr. 35, 12165 Berlin
Participants are kindly asked to register with bjoern.hochschild@fu-berlin.de or lukas.wilde@uni-tuebingen.de.
Program:
Friday, November 29:
10:00 Welcome and Introduction
10:45 Phenomenological Approaches (Simon Grennan)
12:30 Lunch Break
13:30 Analytical Discussion: Jordan Wellington Lint with Brief Approaches to Analysis (Björn Hochschild)
14:45 Short Break
15:00 Kafka’s Narratives Intertwined: First Data of a Qualitative-empirical Study with Students of Higher Classes (Caroline Bader)
15:45 The De-Digitalization of Manga for Non-Japanese Audiences: Research Problems and Questions of Methods
(Natalia Samutina)
15:30 Conclusion
Saturday, November 30:
10:00 Welcome
10:15 Interface-Studies – An Overview (Christoph Ernst)
12:00 Lunch Break
13:00 Analytical Discussion: These Memories Won’t Last with Brief Approaches to Analysis (Lukas R.A. Wilde)
14:15 Short Break
14:30 »Made of pure internet«: Metamedial Engagement and Technostalgia in Homestuck (Tim Glaser)
15:15 Conclusion
Description: Continue reading
„COMICS/POLITICS“-Conference in Toronto
From July 25 to 27, the 2nd Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society (CSS) will take place at Ryerson University in Toronto/Canada. We are happy to announce that there are several members of the German Society for Comic Studies (ComFor) and the AG Comicforschung among the contributors (see below).
This year‘s topic will be „COMICS/POLITICS“ and co-chairs Candida Rifkind and Andrew O’Malley have compiled a schedule consisting of academic presentations, roundtables, workshops, and an extensive cultural program. Special mention should also be made of the international campaign #womenonpanels, which advocates a better representation of women and people of marginalized gender identities in the field of comics studies. #womenonpanels successfully raised funds for two travel grants for female-identified or non-binary emerging scholars.
Selected presentations:
- Daniela Kaufmann (Independent Scholar, German Society for Comic Studies): ”‘A Study in Black and White’ – Color Change and Gender Fluidity in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat” (27. 7., Panel “In/Visible Race and American Comics”; 11:30-12:45)
- Biz Nijdam (University of British Columbia):
- “Preserving the Preservation of the Past: Comics in Archives and Archives in Comics” (25. 7., Roundtable „Archival Anxieties“; 11:30-12:45)
- “Embodying feminism: Anke Feuchtenberger’s comics at the intersection of art and methodology“ (27. 7., Roundtable „A Multidisciplinary Investigation of Feminist Comic Art in the Baltic Sea Region“; 14:00-15:45)
- Marina Rauchenbacher (University of Vienna): “Bringing Viewpoints to Mind: German-language Comics on Flight and Migration.” (26. 7., Panel „Border Crossings“; 11:30-12:45)
- Katharina Serles (University of Vienna): „‚Nothing Left Out‘? Canonical Images and The Politics of Cosmogony-Comics.“ (26. 7., Panel „Religion and Comics“; 14:00-15:15)
- Véronique Sina (Cologne University): “’I am not these feet’: Representations of the ‘dis/abled’ body in Kaisa Leka’s autobiographical comic” (26. 7., Panel “Auto/biography and the Embodied Self”, 15:30-16:45)
Please find the detailed program here: http://comicssociety.org/conference/program/