Comics Studies at UF!

A large and growing group of students and professors are studying and teaching comics at the University of Florida, and these pages link to some of our resources. In addition to the information on these pages, UF currently hosts an annual conference on comics and the ImageTexT journal, as well as the Comix-Scholars list-serve.

All of these resources are provided to encourage comics scholarship and to share resources with those already studying comics.

The 10th UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, "A Comic of Her Own," will be held on March 15-17 2013.

"A Comic of Her Own" Conference Website

CFP: A Comic Of Her Own:
Women Writing, Reading, and Embodying in Comics

10th Annual UF Comics Conference in association with ImageTexT
March 15-17, 2013

New Deadline: February 3rd, 2013

NEW! Keynote Speaker: Jeffrey A. Brown
Keynote Speaker: Trina Robbins
Guest Artist: Leela Corman
Guest Artist: Megan Kelso

Trina Robbins' A Century of Women Cartoonists responds to a comics history which often forgets women. In the past few years, interest has grown around women working in the comics industry, perhaps best exemplified by Hillary Chute's 2010 Graphic Women. Similarly, academia has made many inroads into comics and gender through scholarship on superheroines in mainstream comics. Mike Madrid's 2009 The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines and Jennifer Stuller's 2010 Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, not to mention works by Trina Robbins and Lillian Robinson, attest to this growing interest in the representation of women in comics. However, these two scholarly fields rarely engage in meaningful dialog, despite their mutual interest: the examination of women in comics, whether behind the scenes or on the page. This conference hopes to facilitate this dialog and foster the scholarly exploration of intersections between women's writing in comics, women represented in comics, and the women who read them. To accommodate this goal, the conference will feature a mixture of formats: keynote lectures, workshops with guest artists, Q & A sessions, panel discussions, and traditional academic conference presentations.

We encourage scholarly submissions on any one of these topics, as well as proposals for papers that explore the apparent gaps between them. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Superheroines in comics—how super are they, really?
  • Good Girls vs. Bad Girls in mainstream comics
  • Women's writing as autobiography
  • What women want—explorations of titles that are popular with female readers
  • Queer women in comics
  • Girly men and manly women in comics—how is gender drawn?
  • Feminist readings of mainstream comics—are women still in the refrigerator?
  • Monstrous women in comics—sexed/gendered readings of monstrous, radioactive, and generally othered bodies in mainstream comics
  • Female sexuality in comics—from mainstream sex goddesses to queer alternatives
  • Studies of work by particular women writers and/or artists
  • Challenges to the "graphic women" canon
  • Girls in children's picture books and children's picture books "for girls"
  • Adaptation of comics superheroines to the big screen—representational differences and challenges in media adaptation
  • Women in animation—the female form in motion

Please send 250-word abstracts to imagetext@english.ufl.edu by February 3rd, 2013.

Press Release: UF Graduate Comics Organization Announces 10th Conference, Online Innovations

Gainesville, FL — 6 December, 2012 — In 2013, the University of Florida's Graduate Comics Organization will celebrate its decennial Comics Conference: "A Comic of Her Own," March 15 - 17. This event continues our tradition of hosting scholars, artists, and professionals for a weekend of discussion, recognizing scholars and artists from across North America and in our own community.

Community is the essence of any conference. Conferences provide peers and colleagues an all-too-infrequent opportunity to meet in person, to socialize, and to share their ideas, knowledge, and inspiration. Through this interaction, we enrich one another and sharpen our focus on the deep horizon of our field's future.

The UF Comics Studies Program currently extends these connections amongst scholars through ImageTexT, our interdisciplinary comics scholarship journal, and through the ongoing and open discussion on our Comix Scholars e-mail listserv. Now, the Graduate Comics Organization will push the boundaries even further. We're now on Facebook (The Graduate Comics Organization) and Twitter (imagetextfan). In the coming year, we will develop these presences in social media networks to better follow and disseminate comics news and research, simultaneously developing ImageTexT as a resource hub for comics scholarship. We will, of course, still maintain it as an online, open-access journal. And, as ever, it will remain completely free and publicly available to the worldwide comics community.

The 10th Annual UF Comics Conference will face an issue perpetually smoldering in popular and scholarly politics: Gender. "A Comic of Her Own" will explore the presence and representations of women in comics, comics production, and comics studies. The field is no stranger to such concerns, and our conference promotes this extensive exploration and intensive interrogation of the topic. Like past Comics Conferences, "A Comic of Her Own" aims to establish a productive discussion of comics across disciplinary and professional boundaries, to host a diverse and balanced range of concerned scholars, and to provide a venue for the necessary scrutiny of pressing issues in popular visual/verbal culture. Look for the forthcoming CFP.

Will Eisner, the honoree of our very first UF Comics Conference, called it "the Manhattan Project of comics studies." A decade later, the Graduate Comics Organization continues to innovate as we celebrate the women and men who have made comics studies what it is today, who continue to develop and expand it, and who will revolutionize it in the future. We welcome all to join us.

The Graduate Comics Organization (http://www.english.ufl.edu/comics/) comprises masters and doctoral students dedicated to the cultural and aesthetic values of sequential art. It operates under the auspices of the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. GCO organizes the annual Comics Studies Conference and operates ImageTexT (http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/), an interdisciplinary comics studies journal.

Tamar Ditzian
President, Co-managing Editor
tamar@ufl.edu

Najwa Al-tabaa
Treasurer, Co-managing Editor
naltabaa@ufl.edu

Katherine Shaeffer
Production Editor
khshaeffer@gmail.com

Melissa Loucks
Review Editor
mloucks@ufl.edu

Anthony Coman
Social Media Coordinator
awcoman@ufl.edu

Kayley Thomas
Publicity Coordinator
kjthomas@ufl.edu

Events

The 10th UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, "A Comic of Her Own," will be held on March 15-17, 2013.

The 9th UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, "Monsters in the Margins," was held on 13-15 of April 2012. See the website here and the call for papers here!

The 8th Annual UF Comics Conference, ImageNext: Visions Past and Future, was held on March 26 and 27, 2010, in Gainesville, FL.