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.
The University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the 2010 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, "ImageNext: Visions Past and Future," which will be held in Gainesville, Florida on March 26 and 27. Guest speakers will include UCLA's David Kunzle (The History of the Comic Strip, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer), John Porcellino (King Cat), Molly Kiely (Diary of a Dominatrix, That Kind of Girl) and University of Iowa’s Corey Creekmur (Director of the Institute for Cinema and Culture).
ImageTexT is pleased to announce an upcoming special issue on the work of Alan Moore and adaptation. Throughout his career, Moore has displayed a willingness to adapt and appropriate the plots, characters, settings, and themes from traditional narratives and the works of other authors into his own writing. Additionally, Moore's work itself continues to be the focus of adaptation, typically in the form of big-budget Hollywood films. We are seeking articles that deal with the work of Alan Moore and adaptation in any and every sense, whether that means analyzing the transitions of comics like Watchmen and V for Vendetta into film or analyzing the incorporation of folk tale and literature elements in works like Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
For nearly thirty years the Hernandez brothers (Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario) have created comics that have expanded beyond superhero and sci-fi, bringing so-called “alternative” comics to the fore. Their fictive worlds are as sprawling and complex as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, and more scholars are beginning to take a closer look at their comics, specifically Love and Rockets. In keeping with this interest, ImageTexT will devote a special issue to the works of the Hernandez Brothers. This volume will seek to explore a multitude of theoretical perspectives that may further illuminate the brothers’ oeuvre.
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?
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.
'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).
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/.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Image Events: From Theory to Action (edited collection)
Eds. Joe Wilferth and Kevin DeLuca
In a world awash in images, in a culture wherein images constitute the most influential form of public discourse, constructing image events (namely staged acts of protest designed for media dissemination) has become a crucial rhetorical strategy for corporate hegemony and citizen resistance. Such events, as has been demonstrated by Greenpeace, by PETA, by the Truth campaign against big tobacco and so many more, aim to heighten public awareness and affect cultural or mainstream ideographs.
The editors of a new collection on image events and visual rhetoric invite colleagues (graduate students included) from both English and communication studies to contribute original work on image events, on visual rhetoric, and on the rhetorical analysis of those events/rhetorics. Specifically, the editors invite submissions for three main areas of the collection: 1) theory, 2) analysis (i.e., individual cases and analyses according to a specific method of rhetorical criticism), and 3) pedagogy/action.
All content is (c) ImageTexT 2004 - 2009 unless otherwise noted. All authors
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All images are used with permission or are permissible under fair use. Please
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ImageTexT is published by the Department of English at the University of Florida.