One year ago today, comicsforum.org launched with this introductory post. Today I’m pleased to present a look back at the past year of articles by major comics scholars from around the world, and a look ahead to what’s coming next for Comics Forum, including our annual conference.
Category Archives: General
Call for Papers: Rummaging Around in Alan Moore’s Shorts
Guest Editor: Maggie Gray
One sign of the rude health of comic book studies is the growing body of scholarship that focuses on, encompasses, or takes as its starting point, the work of acclaimed and prolific British comics writer Alan Moore. However, while Moore scholarship has moved on from an almost exclusive focus on landmark comic Watchmen to encompass overlooked or less popular works like A Small Killing or Tom Strong, and even unfinished epic Big Numbers, it still concentrates overwhelmingly on what Charles Hatfield calls ‘comics in the long form’, major ongoing serialised comics and self-contained graphic novels. [1]
Yet this means that the wealth of Moore’s ‘short form’ works has been overlooked. These include the underground and newspaper strips, cartoons and illustrations with which he began his career as a freelance cartoonist; the back-up features in 2000AD and Marvel UK anthologies where he claims he learnt the craft of comics writing; one-off collaborations with figures like Peter Bagge, Bryan Talbot, Hunt Emerson, Richard Corben, and Harvey Pekar; contributions to fanzines, benefit anthologies, annuals and spin-offs; and even diffuse work in other media (short prose stories, poems, essays and articles, pin-up art, CD covers etc.).
Looking more closely at such works not only enables us to plug gaps in Moore scholarship and flesh out our understanding of his career, ideas and practice, but also to challenge the privileging of the long form in comics scholarship in general.
In this spirit, we are looking for succinct contributions of 1,000-1,500 words, for a series of Comics Forum blog articles on Moore’s shorts to be published throughout September 2012 on the Comics Forum website (http://comicsforum.org).
If you are interested in contributing, please email a brief abstract (c.100-200 words) and a short biography of yourself (c.50-100 words) to Maggie Gray at: comicsforum@hotmail.co.uk. The deadline for abstracts is June 1st 2012, and you will receive notification of acceptance or rejection by June 18th.
Click here for a copy of this call for papers in PDF format.
Comics Forum is supported by: Thought Bubble, Dr Mel Gibson, the University of Chichester, Arts Council England and Molakoe Graphic Design.
[1] – Hatfield, C., 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp.4-6.
Scholar Directory
Today sees the launch of a new resource on the Comics Forum website. The scholar directory provides information on the biographies, research interests, conference papers and publications of scholars from around the world. The hope is this will be useful in helping scholars to make connections, see where people are studying and what they’re interested in, and increase the accessibility of comics scholarship for everyone.
Until today the directory has been running in a limited pilot phase, with invited parties submitting their data for inclusion so we could work out how to build the pages and structure the system. Many thanks to all those who agreed to take part in this trial run. Now, I’m delighted to invite all comics scholars to fill in our data form and submit it to comicsforum@hotmail.co.uk for inclusion in the listings. Any queries about getting listed can also be directed to this email address.
Click here to be taken to the scholar directory.
Click here to download the data form.
IH
Comics Forum 2011
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.
Comics Forum 