Tag Archives: ComFor

Program of the ComFor Annual Conference 2021: “Coherence in Comics”

Termin:
2021 10 14 - 2021 10 16

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.

Publication: “Producing Mass Entertainment. The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid”

We are happy to announce the recent publication of the monograph Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid by ComFor member Christina Meyer:

 

Producing Mass Entertainment. The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid

Christina Meyer

278 pages, 35 illustrations

ISBN 978-0-8142-1416-9 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5560-5 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-8142-7746-1 (eBook)

Publisher’s website

 

Official blurb:

“Emerging mass culture in nineteenth-century America was in no small way influenced by the Yellow Kid, one of the first popular, serial comic figures circulating Sunday supplements. Though comics existed before, it was through the growing popularity of full-color illustrations printed in such city papers as Inter Ocean (Chicago) and the World (New York) and the implementation of regular, weekly publications of the extra sections that comics became a mass-produced, mass-distributed staple of American consumerism. It was against this backdrop that one of the first popular, serial comic figures was born: the Yellow Kid.
Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid offers a new take on the emergence of the Yellow Kid comic figure, looking closely at the mass appeal and proliferation of the Yellow Kid across different media. Christina Meyer identifies the aesthetic principles of newspaper comics and examines the social agents—advertising agencies, toy manufacturers, actors, retailers, and more—responsible for the Yellow Kid’s successful career. In unraveling the history of comic characters in capitalist consumer culture, Meyer offers new insights into the creation and dissemination of cultural products, reflecting on modern artistic and merchandising phenomena.”

Workshop “Practices of Reading Comics” in Berlin

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

Announcement of the laureate of the first Martin-Schüwer Prize 2019

We return a few days earlier  from our summer break on the occasion of the announcement of the laureate of the Martin-Schüwer Prize 2019. The prize is a joint venture of the ComFor and the Committee for Comic Studies (AG Comicforschung) of the German Society of Media Studies (GfM) and is this year awarded for the first time. Among a total of 14 submissions from the field of interdisciplinary comics studies, it was the contribution of Dorothee Schneider (now Dorothee Marx), “The ‘Affected Scholar’. Reading Raina Telgemeier’s Ghosts as a Disability Scholar and Cystic Fibrosis-Patient”, that stood out the most, earning her the first Martin Schüwer Prize for Excellence in Comics Studies! The essay was published in Closure 5 (2018).

In addition to Marx’s submission, the judges also made special mention of two more shortlisted essays that struck them as particularly interesting: “Opazität und Transparenz: Überlegungen zum poietischen Potenzial in Chris Wares Comics und Animationen“ by Nina Eckhoff-Heindl and „Visible Hand? Subjectivity and Its Stylstic Markers in Graphic Narratives” by Lukas Etter.

The official award ceremony will take place on 09 November, 2019, as part of the Annual ComFor Conference 2019 where  Dorothee Marx is going to hold a special lecture entitled “Approaching Ghosts – Creating affected scholarship”.

We congratulate the laureate Dorothee Marx as well as the shortlisted authors Nina Eckhoff-Heindl and Lukas Etter on their outstanding contributions!

The judges were:
Stephan Packard
Véronique Sina
Lukas R.A. Wilde

Summer Break and Initiative for more Diversity in the Field of Comics Studies

The ComFor‘s web editorial team will take a break over the summer months. Therefore, there will be no regular posts on the website until 30 September 2019. We will, however, keep updating the sections on ongoing calls for papers and on exhibitions.

But before we say good bye, we would like to announce the formation of a new committee within the ComFor, the Committee for Diversity, an initiative instigated by ComFor Vice-President Véronique Sina.

The aim of this committee is to contribute to an equal, gender-neutral research culture by promoting the visibility of non-hegemonic, queer-feminist research and researchers, both within the ComFor as well as in the comics studies community in general. The initiative is a reaction to a lack of diversity that characterises the field of comics studies in many ways, for example in terms of methodological approaches and the canon of works as well as the research community in general. To counteract these excluding mechanisms of representation, the Committee for Diversity aims at establishing a more inclusive research environment and introduce new academic impulses.

Last year’s annual ComFor Conference, which was dedicated to topics relating to intersectional gender and diversity studies, showed both the great necessity of and interest in queer-feminist questions and perspectives in the field of comics studies. But it also clarified the desideratum and the gaps that need to be explored to arrive at a critically reflexive and interdisciplinary engagement with comics.

With the foundation of the Committee for Diversity, the ComFor takes an important step to fill these gaps and to send a clear message against any form of discrimination and exclusion.

Currently the committee is in the planning phase,  but during this year’s annual ComFor Conference at Schwarzenbach, a constitutive meeting will take place on 10 November, 2019, during which the committee‘s approach and line of work will be decided.

For further information, contact the Committee for Diversity via email: AGDiversity@comicgesellschaft.de

For now, we wish all of our readers a nice summer and look forward to once more keep you posted with regular news on comics studies in early autumn.

All the best,

Robin-Martin Aust, Katharina Serles, and Natalie Veith

on behalf of the web editorial team

„COMICS/POLITICS“-Conference in Toronto

Termin:
2019 07 25 - 2019 07 27

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/