The Comics & Conflicts (2011) page of the Comics Forum website has now been updated with additional resources from the conference, which took place at the Imperial War Museum on the 19th and 20th of August this year.

First up, we have Nina Mickwitz’s paper ‘Displacing the Heroic Soldier in Emmanuel Guibert’s Alan’s War’. Here is the abstract:

Emmanuel Guibert’s Alan’s War (FirstSecond, 2008) renders the account of one man’s remembered experiences during WW2 in Europe. Arriving in France on the 19th of February 1945, the young G.I.’s experience of war is one dominated not by fierce battle but auxiliary deployments, the strategic importance and aims of which often remain hazy to the men in the platoon. Instead interpersonal relationships, chance encounters and incidents form the thread of the narrative. The small scale and mundane turns and events are recollected with clarity and brought to the fore, undermining the mythology of heroic warfare as a dramatic event. In addition, several incidents foreground the disparity between experience on the ground and administrative agendas, whether strategic or in the construction of authoritative versions of events.

This paper aims to highlight the double displacement performed through Alan’s story; war through the eyes of a young soldier whose deployments take him through foreign countries while often only partially aware of the exact whys and wherefores, and the discrepancy between official versions of history and the lived experiences which are subsumed by such accounts.

We also have the following six podcasts available for download, courtesy of Alex Fitch:

Panel Borders: War (comic), what is it good for?

Panel Borders: Garth Ennis’ Battlefields

Panel Borders: Exploring War in popular comics

Panel Borders: Children of the Atom

Panel Borders: War – The Human Cost

Laydeez do podcasts: Female Publishers and their work

To access these resources or for more information, click here.

Further papers and podcasts will be added to the page as they come in.