Today I’m delighted to announce the latest initiative in Comics Forum’s ongoing efforts to promote and develop comics scholarship in the UK and around the world: our new affiliated conferences programme.

Under this programme, the Comics Forum website will host documentation, promotional materials and papers from other conferences and events on comics, thereby providing an online archive of scholarship available to download for free.

To launch the programme, we’ve teamed up with Ariel Khan, Paul Gravett and Alex Fitch of the Comics & Conflicts conference taking place at the Imperial War Museum on Friday the 19th and Saturday the 20th of August. You can find out more about the conference in this article by Paul Gravett. Full details and ticket prices are available here. Once the events have been wrapped up, we’ll be providing an online archive of the conference papers for download from our new Comics & Conflicts page, accessible here and through the links at the top and side of the site. The conference poster is already available to download, and the programme will be up shortly. Be sure to head along to the conference if you can, and keep an eye on the blog for updates regarding the availability of new papers!

We are actively seeking to expand the affiliated conference programme and develop it as a useful ongoing resource for scholars, readers and creators of comics. If you are involved in organising a conference or similar event and would like to feature the conference papers and other materials for open access download via the Comics Forum website, please email us at comicsforum@hotmail.co.uk and let us know!

Similarly, if you were a speaker at a previous Comics Forum and would like your paper to be made available in our digital archives, do get in touch.

[UPDATE 19/08/2011: The Comics & Conflicts programme is now available from the conference page.]

Ian Hague

Director of Comics Forum