The Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum will be sponsoring three panels at MLA 2026: 180. Adaptation and Opposition through Comics; 246. Canadian Comics, and a Just-in-Time session on Comics in Times of Genocide. Also, check out all the other comics-related panels at this year’s conference.

Just in Time: Comics in Times of Genocide

Thursday, 8 January 2026
7:00 PM – 8:15 PM
Virtual Session

Presiders:
Adrienne Resha, U of Virginia

Presentations:

  • “‘In Their Relentless Foregrounding’: Comics for Palestine”
    Adrienne Resha, U of Virginia
  • “‘Are You Really Seeing Us?’ Drawing, Witnessing, Seeing in the Age of Digital Interconnectedness and Blindness in Mazen Kerbaj’s Gaza in My Phone”
    Alexandra Gueydan-Turek, Swarthmore C
  • “‘The Horrors of Today Could Not Be Conveyed through Words Alone”: When Comics Came to the United Nations”
    Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, U of Oregon

Click here to access abstracts for this panel’s presentations.

180. Adaptation and Opposition through Comics

Friday, 9 January 2026
8:30 AM to 9:45 AM
MTCC – 715A

Presiders:
Chase Gregory, Bucknell U

Robert Nguyen, Lycoming C

Presentations:

  • “I Must Have Your Land: Indigenous Dispossession in Manga Shakespeare’s King Lear”
    Jarrod DePrado, U of Connecticut, Storrs
  • “John Jennings, Archival Speculation, and the Graphic Afterlives of Race”
    Kiana Murphy, Brown U
  • “‘Monstrous Legacies: Comics Adaptations as Resistance, Reinvention, and Reclamation”
    Nicholas Dertinger, Northern Illinois U
  • “Gendered Narratives and Cultural Inheritance: Race and Gender Bending in Comic Book Adaptation“
    Harry Foster, Michigan State U

246. Canadian Comics

Friday, 9 January 2026
12:00 PM – 1:15 PM
MTCC – 709

Presiders:
Paul Humphrey, Colgate U

Presentations:

  • “Land and Community in Essex Hill and Ducks”
    Joceyln Sakai Froese, Wilfrid Laurier U
  • “Canada Customs and the Censorship of Queer Comics”
    Margaret Galvan, U of Florida
  • “‘The Resistive Power of Translanguaging: Countering Linguistic Hegemony in Indigenous Canadian Comics”
    Sayanti Mondal, Ithaca C
  • “Tragically Necessary in the 1990s: An Exploration of Violence in Comely’s Captain Canuck Comics”
    Jasmine Redford, U of Saskatchewan