Comics Forum 2024 | 14-15 November | Leeds Central Library (UK)

The thirteenth Comics Forum will focus on themes of embodiment within comics and Comics Studies across cultures, disciplines, and forms. 

Embodiment is the process through which both individual and cultural ideas and beliefs become material. Embodiment generates an emerging challenge to and within Comics Studies that scholars such as Eszter Szép and Scott Jeffery have begun to explore within the field. Through themes of embodiment, we hope to call attention to how comics are a deeply embodied medium. Comics become embodied when they are made, through the movement of the body to draw, write, and make comics; when they are read through the readers’ bodily responses; when they become bodies of work or story. Comics themselves embody ideas and narratives through their lines, colours, layouts, speech balloons, visual and narrative styles, publishing formats, and sizes. 

As an embodied medium, comics can re-affirm or unsettle the boundaries of dichotomies, such as the embodied Self/Other; the individual/collective; the objective/subjective; the fictional/real; the powerful/powerless. We are particularly interested in work that moves away from or challenges Western hegemonic forms and practices of embodiment in comics and graphic narratives.

Comics Studies attempts to situate itself between these cultures, bodies of work, creators, and readers. We are therefore also interested in how Comics Studies is embodied in the academy. What might Comics Studies, as an embodied methodology, bring to other disciplines or fields? Comics Forum 2024 therefore invites participants to consider embodiment through or within any new, developing, or previous work in the field. Subjects for discussion may include, but are not limited to: 

• Comics as archival bodies 

• Embodiment in comics industries 

• Embodiment of Comics Studies in the academy 

• Embodiment in Comics Studies’ research methodologies

• Possibilities of disembodiment in comics

• Embodiment in/of/through comics forms 

• Embodiment and biopolitics in comics

• Embodied identities and positions in comics 

• Negotiations of embodied boundaries in comics 

• Interaction between comics and bodies of comics creators/readers/scholars

Comics Forum welcomes speakers from a diverse range of backgrounds, ranging from students to senior academics, practitioners and beyond. No particular academic disciplines are preferred, and we are open to proposals on comics and related forms from any part of the world. Proposals of up to 250 words for papers of 20 minutes in length are now being accepted at: comicsforum@hotmail.co.uk. Alternative formats of presentation, such as workshops or roundtable discussions, are welcome but must fit within the same 20-minute time limit. If you are proposing an alternative format, please indicate this in your proposal. 

The deadline for submissions is the 31st of August, and you will be notified of acceptance by or before the 13th of September 2024. Please include a short (100 word) biography with your proposal. We look forward to seeing you in Leeds!