January 4, Friday, 7pm – Free Event Drawing in the Imagination: The Power of Image and Text It was a hunting accident—that much Charlie is sure of. That’s how his father, Matt Rizzo—a gentle intellectual who writes epic poems in Braille—had lost his vision. It’s not until Charlie’s troubled teenage years, when he’s facing time for his petty crimes, that he learns the truth. Matt Rizzo was blinded by a shotgun blast to the face—but it was while participating in an armed robbery. Newly blind and without hope, Matt began his bleak new life at Stateville Prison. But in this unlikely place, Matt’s life andRead More →

012: Comics Fandom in Transition 12:00 PM–1:15 PM Thursday, Jan 3, 2019  Hyatt Regency – Roosevelt 3 1: Fandom as Import and Export in the Digital Age: Dojinshi, Comiket, and Fujoshi around Latin American Boys’ Love Camila Gutierrez, Penn State U, University Park 2: Hi-Diddly-Ho, Tetsuo! How Bartkira’s Fandom Reimagined and Remixed Akira and The Simpsons Charles Acheson, U of Florida 3: ‘The Concrete Representation of Our Most Subtle Feelings’: Comics Fandom in the Digital Era Jaime Weida, Borough of Manhattan Community C, City U of New York 4: The Hybrid Lettercol: Ms. Marvel and #KamalaKorps Leah Misemer, Georgia Inst. of Tech. Presider Aaron Kashtan, U of North Carolina, Charlotte   528: MakingRead More →

About comics 076: The Graphic Novel in Spain https://mla19.org/event/member/522500 166: Archives of Images, Archives of Texts: Comics as Sources for Historical Research https://mla19.org/event/member/522388   231: Visual and Literary Intersections of Chicanidad https://mla19.org/event/member/522671 307: Image-Text Encounters in South Asian Graphic Narratives https://mla19.org/event/member/522552 322: Visual Translations of Early Japanese Literary Texts https://mla19.org/event/member/522779 363: Production as Reception https://mla19.org/event/member/522553   697: Graphic Narratives of Disability as Multisensory Transactions https://mla19.org/event/member/522658 722: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Postcolonial Graphic Narrative https://mla19.org/event/member/522459 Featuring papers on comics 154: Race, Nation, and Empire in Southeast Asian Life Writing https://mla19.org/event/member/522800 288: “Fiction Is Powerful Truth”: Truth, Power, Ethics, and Response-ability in Indigenous Narrative https://mla19.org/event/member/522359 422: Diasporas,Read More →

DEADLINE: 3/15/18  Comics have been involved in a wide variety of “textual transactions” at least since the 1890s origin of the comic strip. Yet comics fandom evolved in the ‘70s and ‘80s as a site of mostly straight, white, adult and male-dominated “textual transactions,” practiced in non-inclusive venues like the comics convention and the comic book store. Alternative spaces for comics fan practices have always existed. But thanks to developments such as the Internet, superhero films, graphic novels, and social justice movements, comics fandom is now undergoing a historic shift as new audiences demand inclusion in historically exclusionary comics fan communities. This panel seeks papersRead More →

Over the past several years, making comics in pedagogical and scholarly contexts has been flourishing as an area of inquiry within the larger field of comics studies, as seen through special issues of journals—Critical Inquiry’s “Comics & Media” (2014) and DHQ’s “Comics as Scholarship” (2015)—alongside the rise of academic venues devoted to comics as scholarship like Sequentials. This attention builds on the growth of teaching comics making as a distinct area of study—through the establishment of programs within academic institutions as well as the creation of new centers devoted to comics. Given this growing interest, we invite the question—how do comics operate as a meansRead More →

Call for Papers for a proposed special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Jan. 3-6, 2019, in Chicago, IL. This collaborative panel is jointly sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum and the Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum. The 2019 MLA Presidential Theme calls us to look at “textual transactions,” or “the mutually constitutive engagements of human beings, texts, and their contexts.” Critical scholarship in the field of Graphic Medicine has been flourishing, but, as evidenced by the pivotal text in the field, The Graphic Medicine Manifesto, the contextfor Graphic Medicine is predominantly health professions education. In what other contexts do graphic medicine’sRead More →