On Saturday, January 7, from 7-9pm, the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum will be hosting a free event at Silver Sprocket, a local indie comics publisher (1018 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110)! Award-winning cartoonist and educator Justin Hall will be speaking about his work-in-progress, a graphic novel weaving together memoir and queer San Francisco history, to be published by Abrams Books in 2024. Combining comics readings, storytelling, and ruminations on LGBTQ culture, the nature of memoir, and the challenges of historical comics, this is a unique look into the process behind creating a big, gay, graphic novel. Following his talk, we will have timeRead More →

In addition to the three panels that the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum will be sponsoring at MLA 2023, there will be a number of other comics-related panels at the conference. We will also be hosting an event featuring acclaimed cartoonist Justin Hall at local indie comics publisher Silver Sprocket on Saturday night! Comment on this post if you have any sessions to add. Featuring Papers on Comics Thursday, 1/5 17 – The Queer Posthuman in Speculative Fiction from the Asian Diaspora 112 – Medical Humanities in Contemporary Iberian Studies 140 – Labor in Lusophone Literatures and Cultures Friday, 1/6 211 – Pandemic Childhoods 227 – Gothic Now: Gothic FormsRead More →

The Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum will be sponsoring three panels at MLA 2023, 48. Comics and the Making of Queer Communities, 332. Comics and Accessibility, and 738. Comics and Poetry. We will also be hosting an event featuring acclaimed cartoonist Justin Hall at local indie comics publisher Silver Sprocket on Saturday night! Also, check out all the other comics-related panels at this year’s conference. 48 – Comics and the Making of Queer Communities Thursday, 5 January 20231:45 PM – 3:00 PMMoscone West – 3012 (Level 3)Panelists consider how queer comics have been important vehicles for producing queer communities, examining how comics create community byRead More →

Call for papers for a guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 5-8, 2023, in San Francisco, California. This panel is sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narrative Forum. What can comics tell us about accessibility and visual media? This panel invites papers that consider a range of topics and approaches relating to accessibility and graphic narrative: access needs of comics’ artists and audiences, disability as identity, and the framework of universal design. Universal design, a concept based in architecture and adapted for education, requires that creators begin with the assumption that users have varied access needs rather than makeRead More →

Call for papers for a non-guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention on January 5-8, 2023, in San Francisco, California. This panel is sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narrative Forum. San Francisco, the site of next year’s convention, has figured prominently in both queer and comic book history, and has been one important site where these histories have intersected. Bay Area comics and cartoonists have been active in LGBTQ activism. Strip AIDS USA (1988) raised money for the Shanti Project in support of people with AIDS. Cartoonist Leslie Ewing organized with the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and the 1993 MarchRead More →