Category Archives: ComFor Updates

If the last weeks of winter and the early days of spring were any indication, the coming season should prove highly interesting for Comics Studies. As Stephan Packard did in February’s column for the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor), I will try to give a brief overview on recent developments in the German-speaking fraction of the world. Certain overlaps with Martin de la Iglesia’s News Review column cannot be wholly avoided, but I will try to keep those to a minimum.

While Stephan Packard mentioned the ComFor’s general aim to advance plans for a German Journal for Comic Studies only two months ago, the Institute for Neuere deutsche Literatur und Medien (Current German Literature and Media) at Kiel University pushed forward and announced plans to launch the first issue of CLOSURE – the first German E-Journal for Comic Studies – no later than October 15th. Named after Scott McCloud’s term for the principal cognitive operation bridging sequential ‘gaps and gutters’, CLOSURE is going to combine peer review with open access to provide a platform for a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches. Abstracts for contributions to the journal’s first issue, which will not yet be restricted to a specific topic, are very much welcome up until May 16th (in German, though). In addition to CLOSURE, plans for another independent online-magazine specializing in comic book culture were announced by ComFor’s founding member Martin Frenzel: Comicoskop follows a more journalistic approach, however, intending to engage with a much broader audience on reviews, interviews, and cultural discussions. Plans aim the launch somewhere towards June.

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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.

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