for Excellence in Comics Studies
The Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) present an annual award for the best article by an early-career scholar.
In 2025, the prize will be awarded for the seventh time.
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 (GfM). It promotes the work of emerging scholars, i.e. researchers who, regardless of their actual 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.
Previous Laureates:
2024:
Bruce Mutard: “From Giotto to Drnaso: The Common Well of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics”.
Honourable Mentions for
Helene Bongers: “Frauendarstellungen in Catherine Meurisses ‚Moderne Olympia‘: Eine bande dessinée als feministische Kunst-Geschichte”.
→ Continue to detailed laudations of the jury 2024
2023:
Anna Beckmann: “Strategies of Ambiguity: Non-binary Figurations in German-language Comics”.
Honourable Mentions for
Christian Alexius: “Comicforschung und Filmwissenschaft: Wechselwirkungen ausgelassene Pfade und mögliche Wege in eine gemeinsame Interdisziplinarität”.
as well as
Johannes C.P. Schmid: “Cultural Genocide in Joe Sacco’s Paying the
Land“.
→ Continue to detailed laudations of the jury 2023
2022:
Felipe Gómez: “Will it be possible? Apocalypse and Resistance in Latin American Graphic Novels”.
→ Continue to detailed laudations of the jury 2022
2021:
Benoît Crucifix: “Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing”.
Honourable Mentions for
Anne Rüggemeier: “Transformative List-making: Challenging Heteronormativity and Ableism in Ellen Forney’s Somatographies”.
and
Lukas R.A. Wilde: “Material Conditions and Semiotic Affordances: Natsume Fusanosuke’s Many Fascinations with the Lines of Manga”.
→ Continue to detailed laudations of the jury 2021
2020:
Gesine Wegner: “Reflections on the Boom of Graphic Pathography: The Effects and Affects of Narrating Disability and Illness in Comics.”
Honourable Mention for
Joanna Nowotny: “Repetition oder Revolution? Posthumane Identitätsentwürfe im Superheldencomic der Gegenwart.”
2019:
Dorothee Marx (née Schneider): “The ‘Affected Scholar’. Reading Raina Telgemeier’s Ghosts as a Disability Scholar and Cystic Fibrosis-Patient.”
Honourable Mentions for
Nina Eckhoff-Heindl : “Opazität und Transparenz: Überlegungen zum poietischen Potenzial in Chris Wares Comics und Animationen”
and
Lukas Etter: “Visible Hand? Subjectivity and Its Stylstic Markers in Graphic Narratives.”