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Comics Forum 2012: Registration Open

10 Sep

Registration for Comics Forum 2012 is now open. The conference will take place at Leeds Central Library on the 15th and 16th of November, and is themed around ‘Multiculturalism and Representation’. We have a fantastic line up of speakers from around the world coming to speak on a huge range of topics (see below for a full list).

Tickets are priced as follows:

1 day pass (15th or 16th): £10

2 day pass (15th and 16th): £20

4 day pass (Comics Forum 2012 & a two day Thought Bubble convention pass): £30 (save £10 on the cost if bought separately)

To register, email comicsforum@hotmail.co.uk and let us know how many tickets you want. Payment will be taken in cash on the day. Booking early is strongly recommended. Ticket prices include light refreshments but not lunch.

The full list of speakers and titles is as follows (this list is subject to change):

Maaheen Ahmed: The mutability of the line and its tendency towards monstrosity: Otherness of and within comics Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru: Narrative Exploration against Mentality Issues: Indirect Education for Multiculturalism in Tintin Anya Benson: A Door to Anywhere: The Multicultural Visions of Doraemon Jacob Birken: Set Pieces. Is eclectic imagery in Manga “Othering” or practised Polyculturalism?  Frank Bramlett: The role of culture in comics of the quotidian Michael A. Chaney: Graphic Adaptations of Black Style: Converting Zora Neal Hurston’s Narrational Dialect into Comics Corey K. Creekmur: Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture: Racial Difference in Underground Comix Umar Ditta: Controversial representations of cultures and relations between cultures Harriet E. H. Earle: Multiculturalism Vs Melting Pot in 9/11 Charity Comics Elisabeth (Lisa) El Refaie: Shape-shifting as a metaphor for multiculturalism in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese Cameron Fletcher: Spiderman: Manhattan to Mumbai; Crossing more than timelines to make a Global Icon a Glocal Hero Michael Forbes: Truth, Baldwin, & American National Symbols William H. Foster III: The Changing Image of African American Women in Comics Lina Ghaibeh: Covering Wonder Woman’s nakedness: on the modification of comics imported to the Arab world Mel Gibson: ‘We don’t need no steenkin’ badgers!’ Talbot’s Grandville, anthropomorphism and multiculturalism Lily Glasner: Have you no manners? A Little Girl’s Gift to Her Majesty Simon Grennan: Empowerment requires power: absence, equilibrium and the capacity to influence in comics representations of cultural difference Brenna Clarke Gray & Peter Wilkins: An Innocent at Home: Scott Pilgrim and its Canadian Multicultural Context Sarah D. Harris: The Monster Within and Without: Spanish Comics, Monstrosity, Religion, and Alterity Paul Harrison: Land of Denial – Egypt in Comics Ian Horton: Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others: Stereotype and Narrative Form in British Adventure Comic Books Harriet Kennedy: The confused nationalisms of Bojoual: le huron-kébékois Alex Link: Negotiating Multicultural Transnationalism and Assimilative Globalization in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet Anna Madill: Caucasian, Japanese, or What? Visual Representation of Race in Boys’ Love Manga Paul M. Malone: Multikulti Manga in Germany; or, Why Frau Merkel Should Read More Comics Andy Mason: The Presidential Penis and Other Scandalous South African Satires: Race, ethnicity and representation in South African comics and political cartooning, from the early 20th century to the present Ana Merino: The Impact of the Latino Identities on the Alternative Landscape of Comics: Thirty Years of Love and Rockets Dana Mihăilescu: Oy, Gevalt, Meydele! The Lower East Side as Mishmash of Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images in Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn Joseph North: Volti nascosti: cultural diversity in the Italian fumetto Hannah O’Connor: Sapphic Supervillains and Dynamic Dykes: Lesbian Heroism and (In)Visibility in Mainstream Graphic Literature Pre- and Post-9/11 Emma Oki: Representations of Asian Americans in Selected Works by Adrian Tomine Mihaela Precup: The Image of the Foreigner in Communist Romanian Comics Ethan Rubin: Robots are People Too: Webcomics and the Social Standing of “Everyday AI” Rebecca Scherr: Framing Subjects: the politics of representation in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza Staci Strobl & Mary L. Tabakow: Representations of Asian Guest Workers, Expatriates, and Male/Femaie Omani Nationals in Royal Omani Police Comic Strips John G. Swogger: Palauan Storyboard: Comics and narrative context in archaeological fieldwork Marina Cavalcante Vieira: Migration and city image in light of Chicago School Sociology theories: assimilation and melting pot cities in the earlier Batman and Superman Asta Vrečko: ‘No one thinks of winter when the grass is green’ Keina Yoshida: Graphic fiction, visual narratives and international criminal justice

Comics Forum 2012 is supported by Thought Bubble, Arts Council England, the University of Chichester, Dr Mel Gibson and Molakoe Graphic Design.

 
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Posted by on 2012/09/10 in Comics Forum 2012, News, Thought Bubble

 

‘Will You Listen to That!’: (Dis)Ability in Moore/Willingham’s ‘In Blackest Night’ by José Alaniz

07 Sep

‘In Blackest Night’, a perversely clever short story by Alan Moore and Bill Willingham, featuring Katma Tui of the Green Lantern Corps, allegorizes two pillars of disability theory: the social model and accommodation.[1] Seeking to recruit a new Green Lantern in a lightless void called the Obsidian Deeps, Tui befriends the native silicone life form Rot Lap Fan and offers him membership of the Corps. But there is one big problem.

To her shock Tui discovers that, living in an abyss, Fan has no eyes – therefore the concepts of light and color hold no meaning for his species. Consequently, the translator function of Tui’s power ring utterly fails to convey the phrase ‘the Green Lantern Corps’ into Fan’s language, rendering it ‘the (untranslatable) Corps’ (3). Similarly, it turns the Green Lantern oath, with lines such as ‘brightest day’ and ‘escape my sight,’ into an incomprehensible mass of ‘(untranslatable).’ ‘Mmm,’ responds a bemused Fan to Tui’s futile efforts, ‘Perhaps it loses something’ (4, emphasis in original).

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Posted by on 2012/09/07 in Guest Writers, Rummaging Around in Alan Moore's Shorts

 

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Doctor Who and the Genesis of Alan Moore by Lance Parkin

05 Sep

Doctor Who fans encountered Alan Moore at the beginning of his career. In June 1980, when his first strip for Doctor Who Weekly, ‘Black Legacy’, appeared, Moore’s body of published professional work consisted of a handful of magazine illustrations, and regular strips in the music magazine Sounds and local newspaper the Northants Post. His Doctor Who work predates his 2000 AD debut by a month, and represents his very first published comics work – amateur or professional – solely as a writer.

Marvel UK had launched Doctor Who Weekly in October 1979 as a virtual carbon copy of their popular Star Wars Weekly. Both comics were black-and-white, aimed at a young readership, their 28 pages filled with three comic strips and a variety of text articles, interviews, a letters page, pin ups and puzzles. The key difference was that Star Wars Weekly ran mostly reprinted American material, whereas the Doctor Who strips were new, and created in Britain. There were two: one featuring new adventures for the Doctor, and a back-up strip featuring monsters from the show [1].

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Posted by on 2012/09/05 in Guest Writers, Rummaging Around in Alan Moore's Shorts

 

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Rummaging Around in Alan Moore’s Shorts by Maggie Gray

03 Sep

The growth of academic work concerned with prolific and iconic British comics writer, Alan Moore, has been indicative of the wider growth and consolidation of comics studies as a field. Scholarship has moved from a near-exclusive focus on deconstructive superhero title Watchmen in the context of the mid-1980s adult revolution (Sabin), to encompass a broader range of Moore’s works. Alongside the ubiquitous Watchmen, comics such as From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta have been the subject of numerous journal articles (in ImageText, the International Journal of Comic Art, Image & Narrative, Studies in Comics and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics to name only a few), as well as featuring on both undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists. Moore’s importance within UK comics studies was signalled by the one-day conference ‘Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore’ that took place at the University of Northampton in May 2010. [1]

There have equally been a growing number of publications that confront Moore’s career as a whole, ranging from George Khoury’s extended interview collections to the annotated bibliographies of Lance Parkin and Gianluca Aircardi, alongside Gary Spencer Millidge’s richly illustrated survey Alan Moore Storyteller and charity tribute volume (with smokyman) Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman. To date the most significant of these monographs has been Annalisa di Liddo’s Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, which critically analysed not only those of Moore’s works that have become canonised, but also more academically disregarded series such as The Ballad of Halo Jones, unfinished works like Big Numbers, and production in other disciplines including multimedia performances and prose novel Voice of the Fire.

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Posted by on 2012/09/03 in Guest Writers, Rummaging Around in Alan Moore's Shorts

 

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Comic (Book History): towards a new methodology by Padmini Ray Murray

24 Aug

The prevalent academic approach to the study of comics and graphic novels might be understood as one that defines itself by negation; scholars have focused on those formal qualities that differentiate sequential art from poetry or prose in order to create a theoretical vocabulary that might serve the discipline. However, for a scholar such as myself coming to comics studies from a different disciplinary background – that of book history and publishing studies – such a valorisation seems intriguing in the face of the form’s insistent materiality, especially in the commitment of this approach to structuralist readings of image and text. Examining this tension becomes particularly crucial at a time when new technologies and digital transformations are challenging the very notion of the book, for two specific reasons. Firstly, the attachment to the codex form, which I call “container nostalgia,” has interesting ramifications for comic book culture, given that part of the enthusiasm of the comic book reader has been, historically, embedded in the collectability and rarity of the comic as artifact as well as for its content. Secondly, the rapid pace of digital developments means that the “basic elements” of the form are thrown into exaggerated relief – as Jenkins and Thorburn put it: “What is felt to be endangered and precarious becomes more visible and more highly valued” (4) – presenting a unique opportunity for comic book scholars to reflect on how to define their objects of study. In this article, I’d like to suggest that this self-reflection might be enriched by using methodologies from the fields of book history and publishing studies to study comics, graphic novels and their contexts. In order to do so, it might be instructive to present a brief history of book history itself, and the circumstances out of which it emerged [1].

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Posted by on 2012/08/24 in Guest Writers

 

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