ImageTexT posts news and updates relevant to our issues, CFPs, and the comics program at UF. We also publish CFPs, event announcements, and book notices of interest to the comics studies community.To stay updated, subscribe to an RSS feed (learn about RSS), or sign up to receive announcements by email. To see your announcement here, please contact us.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
THE JOHN A. LENT SCHOLARSHIP IN COMICS STUDIES,
INTERNATIONAL COMICS ARTS FORUM
The International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) is proud to announce once again the annual John A. Lent Scholarship competition. The Lent Scholarship, named for pioneering teacher and researcher Dr. John A. Lent, is offered to encourage student research into comic art. ICAF awards the Lent Scholarship to a current student who has authored, or is in the process of authoring, a substantial research-based writing project about comics. (Preference is given to master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, but all students of comics are encouraged to apply.)
“Reclaiming the Comic Book Canon”
Panel Chair A. David Lewis
40th Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Feb. 26 - March 1, 2009
Hyatt Regency - Boston, Massachusetts
After years on the burgeoning fringe, comic books – better known as “graphic novels” up in the ivory towers of academia – are now mainstream U.S. properties. No longer exclusively the realm of fanatic collectors, outcast misfits, or sneering speculators, the medium is now entering art galleries, multiplexes, and book clubs. But when they become the lucrative, marketed, popularized property of all, what gets lost? With its audience now spread across a widening demographic, what happens to the focus of the works? Or the risks?
Boston University is hosting a conference addressing the theme of religion in comics. From the website:
From the performance of religion in comics, to religious or mythic traditions among the elements of various works, to the use of comics by religious practitioners themselves, the relationship between comics and religion is dynamic and evolving. Given the increasing seriousness with which the public has come to view comics as an art form and Americans' fraught but passionate relationship with religion, "Graven Images" will provide an opportunity for discussion of cutting- edge artistic and social issues by exploring the roles of religion in comic books and graphic novels. This event is free and open to the public.
The event is being organized by Christine Hoff Kraemer and A. David Lewis. For more information, including a schedule of speakers and events, visit the conference webpage.
The University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the 2008 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels: "ImageSexT: Intersections of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality," which will be held in Gainesville, Florida, on March 21-22, 2008.
ImageSexT: Intersections of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
This year's conference will focus on issues of representation in the most literal sense: that of the image on the page (screen, monitor, etc.).Presentations will move beyond facile reiterations of identity politics to explore the complexities and complexes of bodies and desires for artists, writers, and readers of comics. Here we are using "comics" in its broadest sense, to include animation, manga, anime, graphic novels, webcomics, political cartoons, and even some "fine art."
Guests for the 2008 UF Conference on Comics include Phoebe Gloekner, Gail Simone, and Sally Cruikshank. Two dozen academic presentations will explore the boundaries of sex, gender, and sexuality.
View more information at the conference website including the program and presentation abstracts.
The SUNY Press has recently published Gema Pérez-Sánchez's Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture as part of their series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture. From the back of the book:
Gema Pérez-Sánchez argues that the process of political and cultural transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain can be read allegorically as a shift from a dictatorship that followed a self-loathing "homosexual" model to a democracy that identified as a pluralized "queer" body. Focusing on the urban cultural phenomenon of la movida, she offers a sustained analysis of high queer culture, as represented by novels, along with an examination of low queer culture, as represented by comic books and films. Pérez-Sánchez shows that urban queer culture played a defining role in the cultural and political processes that helped to move Spain from a premodern, fascist military dictatorship to a late-capitalist, parliamentary democracy.
If you are interested in reviewing this book for ImageTexT, please contact our Book Review Editor, Tof Eklund.
The University of Alabama Press has recently published Reading Network Fiction by David Ciccoricco. From the website:
With the recession of hypertext theory's utopianism and the varied claims of liberation and democratization it fed, it is now possible to ask, with more perspective and precision, not what digital media will mean for narrative literature, literary study, and reading itself, but what it has already meant. This is the task set by Reading Network Fiction, which resists the rush of techno-culture and indulges in that age-old pleasure of making time for a good story – except that the stories it examines are all written, paradoxically, on and for the computer screen.
Learn more at the website created for the book.
If you are interested in reviewing this book for ImageTexT, please contact our Book Review Editor, Tof Eklund.
The animate! project has recently published a collection of essays: The animate! Book: Rethinking Animation. From the book description:
animate! is a groundbreaking commissioning project established by Arts Councile England and Channel 4 to support risk taking and experimental animation works for television. Exploding the traditional preconceptions of what animation is and could be, animate! exists to break down barriers and challenge expectations. The animate! book explores the vibrant discourses round the project, taking it as a jumping off point for a wide ranging exploration of the relationship between art and animation and the place of animation and its concepts in contemporary art practice.
The book also includes a DVD containing 10 films commissioned by the project. Learn more at the animate! website.
If you are interested in reviewing this book for ImageTexT, please contact our Book Review Editor, Tof Eklund.
Over the course of the past two years, there has been a marked increase of academic interest in comic books and graphic novels, from a cultural theory perspective as well as from the fields of media studies and literature. However, there have been surprisingly few book-length studies on this topic published from any of these disciplinary perspectives. Hence, while Scott McCloud’s groundbreaking book Understanding Comics raised public and academic interest in this under-theorized and challenging medium, and helped to theorize the medium-specific qualities of sequential pictorial narratives, his book suspends the question of how specific disciplinary perspectives might be engaged.
Intellect books has recently published a book on French-language comic strips, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip:
The increasing popularity of bande dessiné , or French-language comic strip, means that it is being established on university syllabuses worldwide. Reading Bande Dessinée provides a thorough introduction to the medium and in-depth critical analysis with focus on contemporary examples of the art form, historical context, key artists, and themes such as gender, autobiography and postcolonial culture.
'Reading between the Panels', a special issue of SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture.
Edited by:
Can Yalcinkaya : canyalcinkaya@yahoo.com
Dr Steve Collins : scollins@scmp.mq.edu.au
Comic books have been often treated deridingly as a hybrid of art and literature, but ultimately a product of low culture. Works by artists, writers and scholars including Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Scott McCloud, Will Brooker and Danny Fingeroth have forced a reappraisal of the space occupied by comic books. Over the last two decades comic book stories have diverged from hero-centric mythologies to more broadly explore areas such as the full gamut of the human psyche, sexuality, and politics. Beyond the stories themselves, the comic industry and economy has expanded to encompass underground, adult and alternative productions as well lucrative movie adaptations. This issue of Scan Journal invites submission on areas dealing with comic books and graphic novels that include, but are not restricted to:
Panel for the 2007 Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association Conference in Cincinnati, OH, October 3-5
Panel Title: 'Heroes (not Superheroes) in Contemporary Comic Books'
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2008
This panel is interested in the describing representations of identity outside the mainstream superhero comic books industry. In particular, this panel seeks to work with prominent authors such as Will Eisner, Harvey Pekar, Gilbert Hernandez, Marjane Satrapi, Chris Ware, and others. Identity can be defined in a number of ways with models that range from the archetypal hero who lives within an epic story to the existential protagonist who is lost within a deconstructive narrative.
6-7 June 2008,
The School of Arts, University of Northampton, UK,
Keynote speakers: Professor Julian Wolfreys.
The term 'graphic novel' is an intensely contested term that covers the pop zeitgeist of American superhero comics to high conceptual art. Just how to define the genre is only one a series of critical conundrums that Samuel R. Delany's term 'paraliterary' scarcely addresses, but offers a starting point for reconsideration. Alongside the complexity of definition comes the problem of critical vocabulary and approaches. That language and methodologies used to discuss prose, film, and non-narrative visual art sometimes fit, but often don't, is part of that issue. Just how are we to discuss an art form that has in the last 25 years gathered an increasingly serious readership and seen the emergence of many major new artists and writers, but struggles with critical credibility? It is, undoubtedly, a genre greater that the sum of its aesthetic parts incorporating drawing, narrative fiction and, perhaps, cinema, into an integrated, fully realised, artistic form that matches any other in terms of its expressive possibilities.
The deadline for the 2008 UF Comics Conference, "ImageSexT: Intersections of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality" has been extended to December 16. Please send abstract submissions to lyndsayb at english dot ufl dot edu.
The University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the 2008 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels: "ImageSexT: Intersections of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality," which will be held in Gainesville, Florida, on March 21-22, 2008.
The sixth annual conference on comics will focus on issues of representation in the most literal sense: that of the image on the page (screen, monitor, etc.). We are interested in papers that move beyond facile reiterations of identity politics to explore the complexities and complexes of bodies and desires for artists, writers, and readers of comics. Here we are using "comics" in its broadest sense, to include animation, manga, anime, graphic novels, webcomics, political cartoons, and even some "fine art." Theoretically grounded work is preferred, but we also have an interest in archival, historical, and creative papers. The goal of this conference is to encourage interdisciplinary discussion incorporating diverse approaches to the comics representation of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Confirmed guests for this year include Phoebe Gloeckner (Diary of a Young Girl) and Gail Simone (Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman); invited guests include Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets).
On behalf of Donald Ault and the Editorial Staff of ImageTexT, I am pleased to announce that ImageTexT Volume 3, Issue 3 is now available: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/
Volume 3, Issue 3, a special issue devoted to "Comics and Childhood," is edited by Cathlena Martin and Charles Hatfield. It seeks to examine the intersection of comics and childhood from several vantages, including comics and children's literature, comics and education, comics and publishing, and comics and revisions of literature.
This issue features essays from Gorg Mallia, Daniel Yezbick, James Bucky Carter, Philip Sandifer, Veronique Bragard, Cari Keebaugh, Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark D. Arnold, as well as original art by Sam Hester. This special issue includes several ImageTexT firsts. The journal's first roundtable links scholars Meredith Collins, Tof Eklund, Charles Hatfield and Kenneth Kidd in conversation about Lost Girls. And we have included Jesse Cohn's translation of and commentary on Benoît Peeters's "Four Conceptions of the Page," we hope the first of many such new translations of important comics theory and criticism previously unavailable in English.
On behalf of Donald Ault and the Editorial Staff of ImageTexT, I am pleased to announce that ImageTexT Volume 3, Issue 2 is now available: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_2/
Volume 3, Issue 2, a special issue devoted to "William Blake and Visual Culture, " is edited by Roger Whitson and Donald Ault. It seeks to challenge divisions existing between comic, visual, and Romantic studies. The issue features essays from Arkady Plotnitsky,Nelson Hilton, Ron Broglio, Donald Ault, Esther Leslie, Matthew Ritchie and Roger Whitson, as well as original art by Joel Priddy and John Coulthart and an interview with Bryan Talbot.
The 5th Annual University of Florida Conference on Comics (March 3 ? 4, 2007) and the 3rd Annual University of Florida Games and Digital Media Studies Conference (March 1 ? 2, 2007) are accepting submissions. The two conferences will be held back-to-back, and will address the common theme of "World Building" with the Comics Conference focusing "World Building: Seriality and History" and the Game Studies Conference addressing "World Building: Space and Community." For more information about both events, please see the main website at www.english.ufl.edu/worlds/.
On behalf of Donald Ault and the Editorial Staff of ImageTexT, I am pleased to announce that ImageTexT Volume 3, Issue 1 is now available: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_1/
This issue features critical essays on topics ranging from illustrated editions of Jules Verne to representations of desire in Jaime Hernandez' Love and Rockets. It also features reviews of books including Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans, Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, as well as a review of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's brand new graphic novel Lost Girls.
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.
The Abbey Library of St. Gall, with more than 100 medieval and early Renaissance illuminated manuscripts already available on line, offers free access to scholars at www.cesg.unifr.ch.
Editors:
Vanessa Raney, Southern Connecticut State University
Peter F. Coogan, Fontbonne University
One can locate scholarship on the ideological and mythic status of superheroes in which the social and fantastic collide to offer interesting but primarily theoretical constructions on the privileging of norms in society. Our book collection hopes to contribute to this burgeoning field by examining more closely the role of trauma in the superhero saga, especially the ways that it gets encoded, transcribed, and received. Thus, we seek submissions focused on Marvel and DC style superheroes (that is, protagonists of the superhero genre only, not all super heroes: ordinary heroes who are super or superior like the way firefighters and policeman were depicted after 9/11) and trauma.
On behalf of General Editor Donald Ault and the Editorial Staff of ImageTexT, I am pleased to announce the publication of _ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies_ Volume 2 : Issue 2 (Winter 2005).
http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v2_2/This issue features an original animation, critical essays, and a series of reviews:
INTERNATIONAL COMIC ARTS FESTIVAL (ICAF)
October 12-14, 2006
The Library of Congress, James Madison Building, Washington, D.C.
The International Comic Arts Festival invites scholarly paper
presentations for its eleventh annual meeting, to be held at the
Madison Building of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., from
Thursday, October 12, through Saturday, October 14, 2006. We welcome
proposals from a variety of disciplines and theoretical
perspectives. All proposals should address the history, aesthetics,
cultural significance or critical reception of comic art (including
comic strips, comic books, albums, graphic novels, political cartoons,
other panel cartoons, caricature, or comics in electronic media).
Proposals will be refereed via blind review.
"Speak: Nine Cartoonists"
January 20 -- February 25, 2006
Opening reception: 6-8 p.m., January 19, 2006
Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011
Gallery hours: Tuesday . Friday, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.
NEW YORK, N.Y., December 20, 2005 -- Pratt Manhattan Gallery will present an exhibition that celebrates the current golden age of North American comics titled "Speak: Nine Cartoonists" from January 20 through February 25. The exhibition and opening are free and open to the public.
The diverse group of comic book artists represented will include Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Jaime Hernandez, Gary Panter, Seth, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. The exhibition will feature preliminary doodles and sketchbooks; finished artwork for major sustained sequences; complete stories; covers; and printed comic books.
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.
Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal will provide the first cohesive
international refereed publishing platform for animation that unites
contributions from a wide range of research agendas and creative practice. The
first issue will be published in July 2006.
Journal Announcement.
We are pleased to announce the release of ImageTexT, Volume 2, Issue 1. The issue features several articles and several reviews. The articles range from analyses of textual forms as they combine image and text in James McDougall's study of Blake's and Pound's texts as image-texts, studies of comics as a medium in Alevaro Aleman's article, and studies of the social and cultural significance of comics in Bianca Isaki's reading of Adrian Tomine's "Summer Blonde."
Please see the issue online:
http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v2_1/
27th Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
March 15-19, 2006
Wyndham Ft. Lauderdale Airport Hotel
Dania, Florida
Guest of Honor: Charles Vess
Guest Scholar: M. Thomas Inge
Special Guest Writer: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Deadline for Submissions: November 30, 2005
The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held each March in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is a gathering of scholars, editors, writers, artists, and poets interested in discussion of fantasy, science fiction, and horror in literature, film and television, and other forms of popular culture. The conference is sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, an academic association with members from many different countries.
The focus of ICFA-27 is on the fantastic in media other than the written word or film, including comics and graphic novels, web design and photo manipulation, cover art and illustration, picture books and pulps, film posters and CD covers, trading cards and tarot cards, cityscapes and landscapes, maps and tattoos and costuming, not to mention the stuff you hang on walls.
Examine the role of art and artists as subjects of the fantastic, or the influence of the fantastic, written or filmed, on the world of art. Explore the construction of race and gender in images of vampires, elves, and aliens.
In addition, we look forward to papers on the work of Guest of Honor Charles Vess, Guest Scholar M. Thomas Inge, and Special Guest Writer Kathleen Ann Goonan.
W.J.T. Mitchell and the Chicago School of Media Theory announce a pair of Medium Theory resources, The Media Theory Keywords Glossary, and Media Taxonomy Models.
ImageTexT's content is now being indexed in the MLA Bibliography.
On June 9, HUEMERESQUE - a retrospective of my Dick Huemer's
career in animated films, will be showing in the Glendale Central
Library, 222 East Harvard St., Glendale, CA, starting at 7pm.
See the poster for details
Tenth Anniversary Conference to be Held at the Library October 13-15, 2005
WASHINGTON, D.C.--The International Comic Arts Festival (ICAF) is
proud to announce it will hold its tenth anniversary conference at
the Library of Congress in 2005.
ICAF is an international summit for scholars, creators, and enthusiasts
of comics and cartoon art. The three-day event includes academic papers,
chalk talks by distinguished cartoonists, and lectures by scholars
from around the globe. While ICAF has been held in the Washington,
D.C. area since its inception in 1995, ICAF 2005 marks the first time
ICAF has joined with the Library of Congress.
ICAF 2005 will take place from Thursday, October 13 through Saturday,
October 15, at the James Madison Building of the Library of Congress,
with the generous support of the Library?s Prints and Photographs
Division and the Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation for Caricature
and Cartoon. The Swann Foundation, administered by the Library of
Congress, supports the study, interpretation, preservation and appreciation
of cartoon art from around the world, and has frequently sponsored
lectures and exhibits related to comics. (For more on the Swann Foundation,
please consult its Web site at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/.)
On Friday April 8, Sol and Penny Davidson will be speaking about their work in comics at the UF Special Collections Library (Library East) in the second floor reading room.
On behalf of Donald Ault, and the entire editorial and production staff, it is my pleasure to announce that the second issue of ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is now available.
[http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/]
Overview:
The objective of ImageTexT is to advance 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.
Dr. Charles Hatfield is teaching "Comics as Literature" at at California State University, Northridge and the syllabus is online. Please email the editors if you have a class on comics so we can post the information here. We're also looking for articles on teaching comics, please email us if you're interested in submitting an article.
Panel for the 2005 Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association Conference in St. Louis, MO, October 14-16.
Panel Title: "The Superhero Revised in Comic Books, Film, and
Television"
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2005
From the time of their advent in the comic books of the 1930's, superheroes have been a distinctive part of the American experience. Some critics have suggested that the enduring presence of superheroes in comic books, film, and television grows from the desire to retain the classic heroic archetypes. Others have suggested that superheroes are extremely malleable commodities that easily reflect and reinforce culture. With these ideas (and others) in play, this panel will explore the changes made to the superhero in general and particular throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
With a legacy in the West dating to the Middle Ages, book illustration is deeply rooted in tradition. At the same time, artists, beginning with William Blake, began to rethink and expand the relationship between words and the images they used to accompany them. Proposals exploring the relationship between text and illustration, especially those concerned with artists illustrating the texts of others, are invited for a session at the Modernist Studies Association annual meeting to be held in Chicago the first weekend of November, 2005.
Please send a one- to two-page abstract for a 20-minute presentation together with a brief CV to Michelle Kaiserlian at the following email address by February 11, 2005. Electronic submissions only.
Michelle Kaiserlian
Indiana University
mkaiserl@indiana.edu
Editors Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey seek proposals for a new collection of original articles to be published by State University of New York Press that address the role of visual rhetoric and picture theory in understanding the construction and contestation of space, place, nature, and environment. This collection will consider how and what imagesnmental rhetoric, and visual rhetoric to more fully develop theories of ecosee. Growing from M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer's attempt to understand "the relationships among language, thought, and action in environmental politics" as expressed in their landmark book Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America, Ecosee moves to take into consideration a crucial facet of environmental rhetoric: ecosee, the visual (re)presentation of space/environment/nature in photographs, paintings, television, movies, video games, computer medias, and other forms of image-based media.
Dr. Michael Pemberton is teaching "The Comic Book in American Culture" at Georgia Southern University. The syllabus is online. Please email the editors if you have a class on comics so we can post the information here. We're also looking for articles on teaching comics, please email us if you're interested in submitting an article.
For the MLA's Options for Teaching series, the Publications Committee has approved development of the volume Teaching the Graphic Novel, edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick. As currently projected, the volume will be aimed primarily at nonspecialists --those who occasionally teach a graphic novel or wish to do so--as well as at those who already teach courses in the graphic novel.
The volume will include sections on 1) theoretical and historical issues, 2) aesthetic issues, 3) social issues, 4) course contexts, and 5) teaching specific graphic novels or graphic novelists. The book will also offer a bibliography and list of resources for further study. Given the interdisciplinary and international nature of the graphic novel, submissions are welcome from faculty in diverse fields (e.g., literatures in English and other languages, film, art, graphic design, philosophy, history and political science, among other fields).
One-page abstracts should be emailed to stbchnck@memphis.edu by 1 May 2005, although the editor encourages contact with him well before the deadline. Abstracts can also be mailed to Stephen Tabachnick, English Department, Patterson Hall Room 467, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152-3510.
All content is (c) ImageTexT 2004 - 2006 unless otherwise noted. All authors
and artists retain copyright unless otherwise noted.
All images are used with permission or are permissible under fair use. Please
see our legal
notice.
ImageTexT is published by the Department of English at the University of Florida.
