RSS

Author Archives: Comics Forum

Comics Forum 2011 Audio

16 Dec

Audio files from Comics Forum 2011 are now available for download in MP3 format.

Graphic Medicine: Visualizing the Stigma of Illness

Ian Williams’ introduction to Graphic Medicine: Visualizing the Stigma of Illness is available for direct download as an MP3 here (07:26, 6.9MB (right click and ‘Save target as…’)). Online streaming and alternative download formats are available here.

Sarah Leavitt’s talk ‘Documenting a Family’s Struggles with Alzheimer’s Disease: Using Comics to Break Through Stigma and Silence’ is available here (35:08, 32.2MB).Online streaming and alternative download formats are available here.

New talks will be added to the Comics Forum 2011 conference archive as they are released, and you can also subscribe to the Graphic Medicine podcast to receive all episodes of the series directly through iTunes here.

Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics

The second keynote session from Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics is available for direct download as an MP3 here (01:10:48, 64.9MB). Online streaming and alternative download formats are available here.

This talk featurs keynote speakers Tim Dant, Matthew Sheret and Tom Humberstone, and is introduced by Ian Hague. There are also contributions from Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Dominic McNeil, Padmini Ray Murray, Hannah Wadle and others.

There is some background noise and music on this file due to the location of the recording, however, the speakers remain audible throughout.

The manifesto entitled ‘Declaration of The New Vague’, which was included in the first issue of Solipsistic Pop and is discussed by the speakers is available to read online here.

IH

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 2011/12/16 in Comics Forum 2011, Graphic Medicine, Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics

 

Comics Forum 2011: Full Programme

08 Dec

The full text of the Comics Forum 2011 programme is now available for download from the Comics Forum 2011 archive.

You can download it directly here.

This version of the booklet has been updated since the printed version that was given out at the conference. It includes an abstract and biography for Aneurin Wright, who stepped in to give a paper at the last minute, a biography for replacement chair Simon Grennan, and some other minor corrections and updates. Hyperlinks have also been incorporated.

Comics Forum 2011 has been discussed by Ian Williams, Katie Green, Andrew Godfrey and John G. Swogger. If you wrote on the event and would like your post to be linked to in our archive, get in touch at comicsforum@hotmail.co.uk and let us know!

IH

Comics Forum 2011 was supported by Thought Bubble, the University of Chichester, the Henry Moore Institute, Dr Mel Gibson, Routledge, Arts Council England, Intellect and Molakoe Graphic Design.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 2011/12/08 in Comics Forum 2011, Comics Forum Archives, Graphic Medicine, Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics, Sculpture and Comic Art

 

Comics & Conflicts 2011: New Paper

02 Dec

Isabelle Delorme’s paper ‘The first Afghanistan war through the glare of the Photographer and Emmanuel Guibert’ is now available to download from the Comics & Conflicts (2011) page here on the Comics Forum website. Here is the abstract for the paper:

The Afghanistan war (1979-1989) is not the subject of the graphic novel : The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders but it is the thread of this comic, which was published in France between 2003 and 2006, then in United States in 2009, and which has received many prizes, especially the Will Eisner Awards in 2010. Didier Lefèvre, the photographer, has been send in 1986 to follow a three months mission of Doctors Without Borders, in North Afghanistan, including two months of a dangerous trip in moutains. The story is told with photographs comic-book style, with the texts and the illustrations of Emmanuel Guibert. In this graphic novel, halfway between comics and photojournalism, by juxtaposing vignettes and hundred of photographs, with various shapes (contact sheet, full page photography, retouched photos etc…), is it an original approach to History and War or is it a standard treatment in comics ? How does Emmanuel Guibert represent Man coming to terms with war in this graphic novel ? Is it possible to distinguish between individuals behaviour (the photographer, members of mission like medical personnel, guide or interpreter, Afghans) and collective behaviour (mission of Doctors Without Borders, civil population, mujaheddin)? How can the fact that two of his major works The Photographer and Alan’s War, The Memories of GI Alan Cope, take place in war-torn countries, unless war be the topic of the graphic novel? Paradoxically, is Emmanuel Guibert interested in War?

Click here to be taken directly to the paper.

Links

Also, a couple of links we were too busy to mark up in the run up to Comics Forum 2011:

Firstly we have this article by Fredrik Strömberg, which provides an overview of the first NNCORE meeting in Odense, Denmark. This is a very exciting new initiative that promises to produce a wide range of outcomes for scholarship and is definitely one to watch!

Secondly, a radio interview with Roger Sabin and Charles Hatfield is now available for streaming here. The interview was recorded at the recent highly successful conference in Alcalá de Henares (Spain), which was organised by Esther Claudio Moreno (who wrote this article for us back in June this year), co-founder of the Comics Grid and a team of others.

IH

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 2011/12/02 in Affiliated Conferences, News, Scholarly Resources

 

Beyond Our Borders: Mapping the Space of Comics by Benjamin Woo

25 Nov

In a recent essay on the state of comics studies, Charles Hatfield notes comics scholars’ tendency to begin their contributions with an “attempt at definition”—that is, an effort to identify comics’ unique formal properties as a means of legitimating them as an object of scholarly (and also private) interest (¶10). He’s not the first to notice the mania for definitions that grips the field.

But this strategy begs the question: Attempts to define comics as a medium or form assume we already know what it is we’re trying to describe. That may seem like a pedantic point, but it’s actually a significant theoretical and methodological problem. Any description of the object of study presupposes some knowledge of it, which in turn rests upon our ability to classify examples as belonging (or not) to the relevant corpus. If our commonsense notions are in some ways skewed, biased, or even flat-out wrong, then our formal definitions will suffer, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
3 Comments

Posted by on 2011/11/25 in Guest Writers

 

Tags:

Comics Forum 2011

21 Nov

Running across three days, featuring over fifty speakers and hosting more than one hundred and ten delegates overall, Comics Forum 2011 was our biggest event yet. Barring a few minor technical hitches things ran smoothly, and we enjoyed a wide range of very high-quality papers from speakers from around the world. We also saw some wonderful keynote presentations and discussions from Daryll Cunningham, Posy Simmonds, Tim Dant, Matthew Sheret and Tom Humberstone. A big thank you to everyone who came along and helped to make the event a success!

The 2011 page of the website has now been moved into the Comics Forum archive. The full text of the conference programme will be available to download from there shortly, and we also hope to be able to feature downloadable conference papers (subject to authors’ permissions). Watch this space for updates.

Comics Forum is now on Twitter, and the 2011 conference was live-tweeted by our very own Hattie Kennedy. You can follow Comics Forum at @ComicsForum to stay up to date with all the latest developments.

Comics Forum 2012 is in the works…

IH

Comics Forum 2011 was supported by Thought Bubble, the University of Chichester, the Henry Moore Institute, Dr Mel Gibson, Routledge, Arts Council England, Intellect and Molakoe Graphic Design.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on 2011/11/21 in Comics Forum 2011, General, Graphic Medicine, Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics, News, Sculpture and Comic Art, Thought Bubble

 
← Older posts
Newer posts →