Please note: This is a proposed, not a guaranteed, session, co-sponsored by the forum on Comics & Graphic Narratives and Adaptation Studies for MLA 2026. It is contingent on approval by the MLA Program Committee. All prospective presenters must be current MLA members by April 1, 2025.

Comics have a long history with the transformative practices of adaptation. The medium’s earliest years saw characters like Krazy Kat, the Shadow, and Superman hurling from the pulps to comics to animation, radio, and film. Meanwhile, long-running comics series such as Classics Illustrated, and recent graphic novelizations of popular fiction and educational material continue to extend the reach of canonical works into comic book shops. 

This panel invites proposals about comics that approach adaptation as an opportunity to reimagine, rewrite, and supplant existing texts and forms. How have comics reworked the tropes and traditions of the medium to put forth new perspectives and to consider the consequences that earlier narratives overlooked? How do comics adaptations challenge our understanding of audience, particularly during a moment when the surge in YA graphic novel adaptations has been accompanied by an increase in book challenges? What do resistant or oppositional adaptations look like when comics are involved? We invite papers that respond to these and other questions from a variety of periods, theoretical approaches, and adapted media. 

Potential topics could include:

  • Comic books’ relationship to the literary canon
  • Challenges in adapting other forms to graphic narrative
  • Graphic adaptation and specific genres (memoir, science fiction, superhero, etc.) 
  • Adaptation for specific audiences and contexts
  • Political debates concerning adaptations of literary works through comics
  • Historical correctives and thought-experiments in comics adaptations
  • Representations of comics within other literature and media

Send 250-word abstracts and short bios (in English) by March 15, 2025 to Robert Nguyen nguyen@lycoming.edu and Qiana Whitted (whittedq@mailbox.sc.edu).