Today’s short update begins a new column at Comics Forum: Every two months, one of the comics scholars in the German Society for Comics Studies, the Gesellschaft für Comicforschung or “ComFor”, will give a brief overview of recent activities and developments from the German comics studies scene as well as an outlook at upcoming events that might be of interest to an international audience. We’re grateful to Ian Hague for the opportunity and will try not to bore readers too much with local issues. These updates will probably draw mostly from the contents of our website, selected, refocused and translated into English.
2014 is ComFor’s ninth year. The society was founded on February 11th, 2005, in Koblenz; its goals continue to be the coordination and promotion of comics scholarship in German (about comics in any language). Since 2006, ComFor has organized yearly academic conferences at various universities and has published near-yearly volumes of the research presented there. Our popular panel at the Erlangen Comic-Salon, the largest German comics exhibition and convention, has become a recurrent institution as well. ComFor also supports the Bonn Online Bibliography on Comics Studies, and is driving plans towards a German Journal for Comics Studies. The main purpose and function of the society, however, remains the advancement of communication and collaboration among comics scholars, whose field is subject to a high degree of dispersion in German-speaking countries: At its best, it produces encounters between scholars from vastly differing disciplines that are brought together by their common interest in comics and continue to learn from one another. At its worst, it can lead to mutual isolation of parallel lines of research – this is what we’re trying to work against. In the last few years, the field of German-speaking comics studies has grown, and grown more densely connected; a process from which the society profits greatly, and that we hope we have supported in our own way.
Comics Forum 