CFP: Representations of Disability in Science Fiction
CFP: Comics and Education
CFP: Remembering Catastrophe
CFP: Happiness and Culture
CFP: Libraries, Archives, and Librarians in Graphic Novels, Comic Strips and Sequential Art
Black Lives Matter in the German Society for Comics Studies
The German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) is in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Our members_ share values of the movement and the sorrow, horror and resolute political and personal resistance against the violent racism that has recently become visible once again. We also oppose the structural injustice and discrimination that people of colour face in all communities and institutions where our members live and work. Equality, diversity, and human rights obligate our actions and the way we deal with our roles in scientific networks, in our critical research, and in public.
Structural and systemic racism affects our entire society and thus also the ComFor. Therefore, simultaneously with this statement, the ComFor publishes a mission statement for diversity in the ComFor as well as a first version of “Best Practice” guidelines (German version only) to promote diversity and to reduce structural disadvantages and mechanisms of exclusion. We appeal to all our members to actively support these measures.
Journal Monitor 08: New Publications on Comic Books
The Journal Monitor is a subcategory of the regular Monitor. It is an irregularly published overview of issues of international journals on comics studies as well as special issues on corresponding topics. The introductory texts and/or tables of contents come from the respective websites.
Do you have suggestions or information on new releases that have been overlooked and should be introduced on our website? Please let us know via email: redaktion@comicgesellschaft.de.
→ See previous Monitor posts.
Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 4.1
online (via subscription)
Website
- Neal Curtis: The Specters of Captain America: Time and the Haunting of American Politics
- J. V. Miranda, Joseph Turner: Watchmen and Speculating on the Future of the Humanities
- Layli Maria Miron: No Reclaimed Homeland: Thi Bui’s Postcolonial Historiography in The Best We Could Do
- Adrienne Resha: The Blue Age of Comic Books
- Rebecca Wanzo: Identity Temporalities and American Born Chinese
- Dale Jacobs, Heidi Jacobs: Comics and Public History: The True Story of the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars
Imagetext 11.3
Special Issue: ImageTech: Comics and Materiality
online (open access)
Website
- Madeline B. Gangnes, Megan Fowler, Jaquelin Elliott: ImageTech: Comics and Materiality
- Madeline B. Gangnes: Introduction
- Aaron Kashtan: Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom
- Mita Mahato: Material Comics
- Anastasia Salters: #NostalgiaGate? Comics as Battleground in Transmedia Networked Publics
- Claudia Maria Acosta: Print_and_PDF Culture: The Transmediation of Public Intimacy, Allied Readership and Feminist Collage by Millennial Zinesters
- Allison Bannister: A Fairytale Box of Thermochromic Fragments: Comics Materiality, Theory and Praxis
- Carolina Martins: Extending Realities, Expanding Readings? Spatial Reconfigurations and Activated Presence in XR Comics’ Experiences
- Elaine Sponholtz: Object Lessons: Comics Creators Roundtable on Materiality and Comics
- Tomasz Żaglewski: The Unwrapped Editions: Searching for the “Ultimate” Format of Graphic Novels and its Limitations
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
online (via subscription)
Website
- Aneurin Wright: Shame, sexuality, mental health and comics
- Sam Hester: Indie comics in Alberta: two stories from the field
- Matt Reingold: Israeli graphic novels & the second Palestinian Intifada: ‘Jamilti’, Exit Wounds & Mike’s Place
- Samantha Golding, Diarmuid Verrier: Teaching people to read comics: the impact of a visual literacy intervention on comprehension of educational comics
- Loren Barbour: ‘Nemeses! Dragons! Symbolism!’: queering the fantasy hero narrative in Nimona
- Debra Dudek: Silent sequences and ontological entanglement in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and Pat Grant’s Blue
- Anne Rüggemeier: Transformative list-making: challenging heteronormativity and ableism in Ellen Forney’s somatographies
- Gonzalo M. Pavés: The discreet charm of the butterfly pierced by a pin. Federico Fellini, Milo Manara, and the comic book
- Olga Michael: PTSD and female sexuality in the aftermath of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse in Una’s Becoming Unbecoming
- Meg-John Barker: Plural selves, queer, and comics
- Ivo Jirásek: Holistic leisure education through the Czech Rapid Arrows comics
- Bruce Mutard: Vita Longa, Ars Breva
- Sydney Phillips Heifler: Romance comics, dangerous girls, and the importance of fathers
- Benjamin Fraser: Tactile comics, disability studies and the mind’s eye: on “A Boat Tour” (2017) in Venice with Max
- Cara Gormally: The baby-making black hole
- Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad: Child soldiers in transatlantic graphic narratives of war
- Fionnuala Doran: Alone amidst X-men: Rogue, sexuality, and mental illness
- J. Andrew Deman: Busting Loose: Ms. Marvel and post-rape trauma in X-Men comics
- Pfunzo Sidogi: (South) Africa’s online animation revolution: the case of Jonas Lekganyane’s The adventures of Noko Mashaba
- Jillian Fleck: A stranger heritage: Canadian identity in the comics of Michael DeForge
- Vlad Beronja: Twilight zones of history: Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia and the Serbian alternative comics of the 1990s
- Giorgio Busi Rizzi: Immigrant song: nostalgic tensions in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival
- Maria Pagès: The spreading of technical knowledge in post-Civil War Spain: the example of Josep Escobar
- Tomasz Żaglewski: From white eagles to turbopoles. The specifics of superhero narratives in Polish comic books
- Tomasz Żaglewski: The Impossibles revived: Hanna-Barbera’s superhero universe in TV and comics
- Camilla Baasch Andersen: Musings on the comic book contract project and legal design thinking
- Paul Mountfort: Tintin, gender and desire
- Keith Friedlander: Beyond alternative: Michael DeForge and the new grotesque
- Delilah Bermudez Brataas: Gods and monsters: authorial creation in Gaiman’s Sandman and McCreery and Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare
- Leonie Brialey: Varieties of sincerity and irony in the work of Michael Leunig and Mary Leunig
- Paul Uhlmann: Lines of doubt, fear and tenderness in the work of José Luis Cuevas and Tommi Parrish
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.
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.