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Comics Forum 2011 by John G. Swogger

13 Feb

Surely writing a review of a comics conference is on par with dancing about architecture? Text seems such an impoverished medium now – unequipped to condense three days into anything like a reasonable representation of the event. As unaccompanied text, “diverse”, “exciting” and “passionate” sound somewhat fatuous – the reviewer’s equivalent of multiple exclamation marks or a string of emoticons. A series of comic-panel vignettes really would be so much better.

If I did this review as a comic, “diverse” would be replaced with pages showing the work of artists like Karrie Fransman, Elodie Durand and Ian Kirkpatrick. In a comic, “exciting” would be replaced by quick-cut series of panels of Daniel Merlin Goodbrey flicking through a stream of digital-format comics, each one more inventive than the last. In a comic, “passionate” would be replaced with speech-bubbles from the intense, disquieting, sometimes overwhelmingly honest talks by Andrew Godfrey, Paula Knight and Katie Green.

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Posted by on 2012/02/13 in Comics Forum 2011, Conference reports, Graphic Medicine, Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics, Sculpture and Comic Art, Thought Bubble

 

The visualization of anger in comics by Charles Forceville

10 Feb

Ensuring readers’/viewers’ continued interest in a story requires that they are aware of the goals of one or more protagonists, and make an emotional investment in their success or failure; we hope that the hero or heroine will succeed, and fear that the villain will. We thus empathize with the story’s good guy(s)/girl(s) and antipathize with its bad ones. Of course goodness and badness can be complicated affairs, and we may end up having mixed feelings about characters.

Empathizing and antipathizing inevitably involve our awareness of the emotions felt by the characters themselves. We co-suffer in the sense of the luxurious substitute emotion evoked by fiction that Noel Carroll calls “art-emotion” (1991: 143 et passim) when the hero is wounded or loses his best friend; we rejoice if the heroine is proud to have saved the prince or the planet.

Comics have means for conveying characters’ emotions that partly overlap with those of other media and that are partly unique to the medium. In this short paper I will review some studies I have done on the representation of anger in comics (see also my students’ work as summarized in Forceville 2011a). My original framework was conceptual metaphor theory/CMT (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; for the current state of affairs, see Gibbs 2008, Kövecses 2010). Within this framework Zoltán Kövecses (1986, 2000, 2005) has systematically discussed the way emotions are metaphorically conveyed in language. Since anger is the emotion he has written about most extensively, this has become the paradigm emotion that others in CMT have decided to focus on. That is what I did when I tried to apply Kövecses’ theories to the visual realm, more specifically to comics (Forceville 2005). But this practical reason for privileging anger should ideally serve as a launching pad for broadening the discussion to the representation of emotion in comics in general.

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Posted by on 2012/02/10 in Guest Writers

 

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Anthropology goes Comics by Hannah Wadle

03 Feb

While film and photography have fallen on fertile ground from the early days of Anthropology and moulded the sub-discipline of Visual Anthropology, comics has not yet become an equally respected and applied ethnographic methodological tool and format of presenting anthropological knowledge. There are a few individual artists-anthropologists, who contribute to a discussion on comics and anthropology, but thousands of anthropologists returning from fieldwork, with their numerous little diaries, filled not only with written notes, but also with sketches and drawings, leave their graphic work behind and begin with their “real work”, the writing, as soon as they are back in their home universities.

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Posted by on 2012/02/03 in Comics Forum 2011, educators, Guest Writers, Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics

 

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Where did the ‘Stan Lee Excelsior Award’ come from? And where is it going? by Paul Register

27 Jan

Left to Right – Bryan Talbot (writer/artist of Grandville, Alice in Sunderland, The Tale of One Bad Rat, etc.), Theodore Adams III (Chairman of the Stan Lee Foundation) and Paul Register (award founder and organiser)

In presenting a study of the background of the award, it is probably worthwhile having a very brief look at the background of its organiser too. My name is Paul Register. I’m 41, have a degree in English Studies and a long-standing love of comics, in all their myriad forms. As a young child, my mother fed me a steady diet of classic humour comics like Whizzer & Chips and Plug and British reprints of American superhero comics like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men, etc. I have been the Learning Resource Centre Manager (I prefer good, old-fashioned ‘Librarian’ as a professional label personally) at Ecclesfield School for the last three years and did a similar job at a school in Rotherham for eight years before that. That was preceded by a couple of years working for the bookstore chain Ottakar’s (before it was gobbled up by the retail giant that is Waterstone’s and slowly assimilated). That’s enough about the award’s organiser and founder though. This project has never been about self-promotion and never will be. The focus always has to be on the reading. The overall success of the award has to be gauged by the amount of reading it facilitates. That is its raison d’etre.

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Posted by on 2012/01/27 in Guest Writers

 

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A Reply to Simon Locke by Casey Brienza

20 Jan

It is both an honour and a privilege to have been invited to respond to Simon Locke’s article on Comics Forum. Many thanks to Ian Hague for this opportunity.

In ‘Constructing a Sociology of Comics’, Simon accuses me of a ‘retrograde’, ‘stultifying focus on production’. As methodological debates are one of the academe’s favorite pastimes, I am not at all surprised he has chosen this direction for his reply to my work. However, I am very disappointed by what is clearly not a particularly nuanced reading of it, for Simon vastly overstates the ambition of the argument of ‘Producing Comics Culture: A Sociological Approach to the Study of Comics’. Note that I in fact chose the subtitle of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics article deliberately; the text summarizes ‘a’ sociologically-informed methodological approach to the study of comics. I never claim that it is ‘the’ only one. I do not even, for that matter, claim that it is the best one. The following quote is taken directly from the original article:

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Posted by on 2012/01/20 in Guest Writers

 
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