Category Archives: ComFor Updates

By Julia Ingold

Finally, spring has arrived in most parts of Germany, and with it some exciting events. The summer term has just started and on our website we have again put together a list of most classes related to comics studies taught at German-speaking universities in various fields like history, literature or didactics. ComFor’s President Stephan Packard and the Comic Studies Working Group’s speaker Véronique Sina, for instance, are organizing a series of lectures at Cologne University under the title “Aktuelle Perspektiven der Comicforschung” (“Recent Perspectives in Comics Studies”). They compiled a broad program to shed some more light on the ever-expanding diversity of the field as an interdisciplinary practice. The speakers are from all different realms of the humanities (and even beyond), such as semiotics, media studies, linguistics, childhood studies, digital humanities, fan studies, sociology, narratology, political science, intersectionality studies, postcolonial studies and Japanese studies. The program intends to give students insights into the flourishing domain of comics studies and to teach them about methodology in media studies in general. For more information on this promising project visit our website.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Lukas R. A. Wilde

It might be a little late to open the 2018 installments of our column with a “happy new year”… but nevertheless: happy new year! As usual, ComFor‘s 2018 started off with our edited lists of international comic book reading recommendations from some of our members. This time around, the participation was exceptionally high, with more than a dozen seasoned scholars, junior researchers and prolific journalists involved.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Stephan Packard

For comics studies in the German speaking parts of the world, the last two months of this year were dominated by two major conferences.

On the one hand, the annual ComFor conference took place in early December. Hosted for the first time at Bonn University, the conference focused on Comics and their Popularity. With this topic, organisers Joachim Trinkwitz and Rolf Lohse brought the continuously expanding discussion in the German Society for Comics Studies back to some aspects that had almost been neglected in several years of research, as the discipline had moved towards perspectives on advanced, avant-garde and aesthetically unique comics. This year returned our attention to the art form as a decisively popular genre and thus revisited questions of seriality, popularity, ideology and culture industry. Beginning with the by now traditional open workshop for planned and ongoing research, the conference then moved on to discussing practices of identity, political and ideological aspects, discourses of cultural legitimacy, facets of authorship and finally the concept of the popular itself. In their keynote lectures, Julia Round (Bournemouth) and Martin Lund (Växjo/New York) discussed canonicity and aestheticism in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the popular propaganda of Jack T. Chick’s ‘chick tracts’ respectively.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Laura Oehme

After a short holiday break, the ComFor editorial team is back on track and it is my pleasure to fill you in on what happened since Lukas’ last update in July. Although, three months have passed, this update is rather brief as comics studies events were expectedly scarce over the summer. The new semester, however, promises to be packed with stimulating conferences, exhibitions, publications and festivals. As ComFor editorial team, we decided to kick off the season with a post that compiles all university classes in Germany that relate to comics in the upcoming winter semester 2017/18.

Read the rest of this entry »