ImageTexT Special Issues and General Submissions

Currently, ImageTexT is soliciting articles for forthcoming general and special topic issues. For general submissions, see the Submissions Page. For special issues, see below.

ImageTexT Special Issue CFP

Comics And Childhood

The "Comics and Childhood" special issue of ImageTexT is accepting paper submissions that address the theme of comics and childhood, particularly the use of image and text in the hybrid forms of comics and children's literature.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• History and evolution of the comics in relation to children's literature.
• Cross pollination between comics and children's literature authors and artists (Ian Falconer, Neil Gaiman, Berkeley Breathed, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, William Steig).
• The Comics Code for comic books and regulations involving animation because they were viewed to be children's works.
• Disney's role in comics and in making comics into children's texts.
• Rising circulation in the USA of anime and manga for children (including translation of anime and manga for American audiences, and for children).
• Significance of regulation and awards for recognizing 'quality' works, including the importance of the Comics Code seal of approval, the Caldecott Award and Honor Emblems, the Eisner Award, and others.
• Synthesis of comics and children's literature with comicesque works for children like Mo Willems' works, picture books that could be classed as comics, as with Gaiman's "Stardust," and with works like Jeff Smith's "Bone," which is now being distributed by Scholastic.
• Animation being treated as a 'children's form', often being embedded in other children's programming like "Sesame Street" and "Pee Wee's Playhouse" as well as being often used to present children in non-children's shows (the focus on children characters in "The Simpsons," "South Park," "Family Guy," and others).
• Subversive workings of comics and children's literature due to their marginalized positions and due to difficulties in regulating hybrid forms.
• Revisionist traditions in comics and children's literature, particularly comics that revise children's literature works and children's literature works that revise comics ("Castle Waiting," "Fables," "Courtney Crumrin," "Nightmares and Fairytales," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Classics Illustrated").
• Cultural translation with animation, anime, comics, and children's literature (manga and anime being rewritten to be less violent for US viewers and readers).
• Big Little Books and Better Little Books.
• Issues of archiving and access in regards to comics and children's literature as it relates to their changing, mutable, and often ephemeral forms.
• Questions of audience with original comic strips at turn of century for mass audiences and children's literature seen as 'for all ages.'

Please send completed papers in MLA citation format to cmartin [at] english.ufl.edu by October 15, 2006.

Articles submitted should usually not exceed 10,000 words including notes and should be presented to generally accepted academic standards. Please submit all articles by sending an email with the submission attached (including images, video etc.) If you cannot send attachments of this size please send a copy of your article to the address below. All postal mail submissions must include a copy of the article in electronic form on either a floppy disk or a CD along with 3 print copies of the article. Articles should be submitted preferably in HTML, or as Microsoft Word, StarOffice, or OpenOffice documents. Webbed essays are encouraged.

Alternatively, send hard copies to:
Cathlena Martin
Department of English
Univ. of Florida
4008 Turlington Hall
P.O. Box 117310
Gainesville, FL 32611-7310

Guest editors for the special issue are Charles Hatfield and Cathlena Martin. If you have any questions, please email cmartin [at] english.ufl.edu

ImageTexT (http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/) is a web-based journal published by the University of Florida, committed to advancing the academic study of comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. Under the guidance of an editorial board of scholars from a variety of disciplines, ImageTexT publishes solicited and peer-reviewed papers that investigate the material, historical, theoretical, and cultural implications of visual textuality. ImageTexT welcomes essays emphasizing (but not limited to) the aesthetics, cognition, production, reception, distribution and dissemination of comics and other media as they relate to comics, along with translations of previously existing research on comics as dimensions of visual culture.

CFP: The Comics Work of Neil Gaiman (6/1/06; journal)

ImageTexT is pleased to announce an upcoming special issue on the work of Neil Gaiman. ImageTexT is a web-based journal published by the University of Florida, committed to advancing the academic study of comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. Under the guidance of an editorial board of scholars from a variety of disciplines, ImageTexT publishes solicited and peer-reviewed papers that investigate the material, historical, theoretical, and cultural implications of visual textuality. ImageTexT welcomes essays emphasizing (but not limited to) the aesthetics, cognition, production, reception, distribution and dissemination of comics and other media as they relate to comics, along with translations of previously existing research on comics as dimensions of visual culture.

For this issue, we are particularly interested in papers that help move beyond the core of well-rehearsed cliches that make up scholarship on Gaiman. Innovative and inventive approaches to the subject matter are greatly preferred to retracing the role of the mythic in Sandman, or discussing Dream in terms of Freud. Being a comics-centered journal, we are most interested in treatments of Gaiman's work in comics, although we use the term in the broadest sense, including Stardust and his children's picture books, and will certainly welcome treatments of Gaiman's non-comics work alongside his comics work.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The portrayal of stories and art in the work of Gaiman as contrasted with his British contemporaries (Moore, Morrison, etc)
• Gaiman and his collaborators (especially Dave McKean): research on their subject status, influence and any tensions they bring to 'his' work, including issues of the auteur, polyvocality and seriality.
• Sandman's relationship to different readerships, including how the books are viewed by the goth/punk community (also: relationship to music), academics, fantasy authors and readers, and the series' peculiar relationship to mainstream comics (also: consideration of superheroes and the superheroic in Gaiman's work).
• Comics and (non-)illustrated Texts: theoretical approaches to, issues and effects of Gaiman's writing moving between these contexts.
• Gaiman's conception of superheroes, as well as the ambiguous role of superheroes in Sandman.
• The role of British history, culture and education in Gaiman's work and/or that of the American immigrant, including considerations of him alongside non-immigrant British comics writers and in the context of immigrant and postcolonial writing and authors.
• The role of theology and the sacred, secular and profane in Gaiman's work, particularly that of Judeo-Christian divinity relative to the profusion of finite divinity.
• Children and childhood in "children's" and "adult" stories by Gaiman, including issues of children's literature, bildungstromen, narratology, psychology and memory.

Texts that we would be specifically interested in papers dealing with include:

• Sandman (Including Dream Hunters, Endless Nights, and the Death miniseries)
• Violent Cases and Mr. Punch
• Signal to Noise
• The Vertigo Tarot
• The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls
• Mirrormask
• Black Orchid
• 1602
• Superman and Green Lantern: Legends of the Green Flame
• Gaiman's work on Spawn
• Marvelman/Miracleman
• Books of Magic
• Harlequin Valentine
• Creatures of the Night
• Murder Mysteries
• The Last Temptation
• Stardust
• Princess Mononoke
• A Short Film About John Bolton
• Any of Gaiman's short comics works or uncollected runs on titles

Please send completed papers in MLA citation format as attachments to sandifer@english.ufl.edu by March 1, 2006.