At the University of Lincoln, Professor Jane Chapman and her team of researchers have been funded by the AHRC to explore the cultural impact of comics produced during and about the World Wars. Two exhibitions are planned – one on World War One comics in 2014 & one on Second World War comics, 2015, both at London’s Cartoon Museum – as well as two monographs on the subject. Other outcomes already include conference papers and journal articles published in Australia and the UK (see below for links). In addition, further funding was secured from the AHRC’s International Placement Scheme for the project’s two PhD students to spend six months each at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, where they were able to utilise the library’s extensive comics archive material.
Category Archives: Guest Writers
The Death of the Cartoonist? Working on Living Creators by Barbara Postema
Comics studies is a young field in more than its academic standing. With the flourishing of comics production at the moment, it is also young in terms of its texts and its creators.
Many of the texts we work on are less than thirty years old, and in the case of my research they are often less than fifteen years old. With the obvious exceptions of certain established creators, for many of these texts the list of secondary works discussing them is quite short. There are countless comics to choose to write about, and it is easy to find comics that have never been discussed in an academic publication before at all. While comics studies has in many ways been reluctant to establish a canon of the comics we should all know, due to the choices scholars make in the texts they write about, if we were to gauge worthiness or canonicity by what is most often discussed, that canon is quite clear: a quick look at the comics and graphic novels most often discussed in journal articles and books shows the same names cropping up again and again–most notably Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, and the British auteurs Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. In the case of newer artists, the only secondary literature available is most often interviews with the cartoonist, writer, or artist in venues like The Comics Journal. But even in that department, the lists of interviews will only be more impressive for established cartoonists.
Using Comics to Teach Philosophy, Inclusively by Joyce C. Havstad
As an educator, I’m always looking for new ways to engage students. As someone who teaches philosophy at a large state school—in fact, at a prototypical American Research University—I’m always trying to convince college students that my subject matter is truly relevant, to their lives and to their budding careers. At the very least, I try to make philosophy fun. And one of the tools that I have developed to help achieve these goals is to use visual arts, especially non-traditional arts like comics, in the classroom.
So, the rest of this post is going to be about what I’ve observed from using comics in the classroom. I’m going to focus on two main things: one positive, and one less so. I think that both of these observations are worth taking seriously.
Comics and Cultural Work: Conclusion by Casey Brienza
As I wrote in my introduction to this Comics Forum Special Theme Month on Comics and Cultural Work:
[R]esearch into cultural work has thus far been broadly concerned with the following two questions: 1) Is cultural work distinctive from other forms of work? and 2) Is it exploitative? I will not rehearse the debates around these two questions as they have been performed in the study of other cultural sectors, from Hollywood to handicrafts, at this time. Instead, I ask you to watch this space and commend you to the thought-provoking contributions of Benjamin Woo, Paddy Johnston, and Tom Miller, which will be posted in the coming weeks. Each of these scholars has, each in his own way as researcher, reader, or cultural worker, begun to grapple with precisely these two questions.
(Brienza 2013)
My Brief Adventure in Comic Book Retail by Tom Miller
I distinctly remember, on September 11th 2001, driving to the empty store in Oakville, Ontario that would be my comics and used book shop, and hearing a report on a Buffalo radio station about the World Trade Center towers falling. I was convinced, for the majority of my very short commute, that it was a joke. But when I reached the shop and went in, there had been no punch line. I turned on the radio in the store and listened, as I laid tile and patched holes, to the horrific tale unfolding many hundreds of kilometers south of me. I stopped work early that day, gathered with friends and family, and we watched, on television, the disaster unfold.
I really should have known, right then, what to expect.
Comics Forum 