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Comics Forum 2025: Call for Contributions

03 Jul

13-14 November 2025, Leeds Art Gallery and Central Library (UK)

When David Kunzle asserted in his 1973 magnum opus The Early Comic Strip, that it was by definition ‘a mass medium,’ he pointed to comics’ industrial and mechanical foundations, arguing that: ‘The comic strip is, and can only be, the product of the printing press’ (3). Although experimental comics challenge the idea that mechanical reproduction is a defining characteristic of comics, and the notion of the comic book industry as a coherent entity has been questioned, it is undeniable that comics have been greatly influenced by the industrial contexts in which they are created and circulate. These contexts include the companies that are well known for creating comics, such as publishers and retailers, but also less publicly visible but vitally important industries: printers, distributers, marketers, translators and more. Technology platforms and other media industries that connect to comics through branding, cross-promotion and trans- or multimedia forms also play important roles.

Comics Forum 2025 will explore the theme of industry, broadly conceived, in relation to any form of comics (i.e. including bande dessinée, manga etc.). Proposals are welcome from academics, and from industry participants (in any role). Topics may include:

  • Historical and/or geographical comics industries
  • The economics of comics and related industries
  • Models for studying comics as industrial forms
  • Anti- or non-industrial comics production
  • Digitisation as an industrial shift 
  • Representations of industries in comics narratives
  • Agency, authorship and alienation within industrial contexts
  • Industrial relations, labour movements, precarity, collectivisation 
  • Disruption in comics’ industrial contexts
  • The ethics of comics’ industrial practices
  • Comics as part of a broader media ecosystem
  • Future(s) for comics as industrially produced mass media
  • Challenges facing comics industries in the 2020s and 30s

We recognise that artificial intelligence (AI) is a key point of concern across a range of fields, and proposals on this topic are welcome, but we encourage applicants to think broadly about technology and manufacturing.

Submissions will be considered in any of the following three formats:

  • Paper: 20-minute paper on a focused topic
  • Panel: 1-hour structured discussion between three or more participants
  • Workshop: 1-hour interactive, collaborative session

Proposals of up to 250 words in length are now being accepted at this link: SUBMIT NOW. The deadline for submissions is the 31st of August and you will be notified of acceptance by or before the 12th of September. Please include a short (100 word) biography of your speaker(s) with your proposal. We look forward to welcoming you to Leeds!

 
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Posted by on 2025/07/03 in Comics Forum 2025, News

 

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FRAME:WORKS Symposium 2017 – An Illustrated Report

19 Mar

Authors: Mark Hibbett, Guy Lawley, Tobias J. Yu-Kiener

Images: John Miers.

FRAME:WORKS was a one-day symposium on comics held at Central St Martins (CSM) on Friday, June 16th 2017, funded by University of the Arts London (UAL) Communities of Practice as a UAL Comics Studies Network event. It was organised by Mark Hibbett, Guy Lawley and Tobias J. Yu-Kiener, with sketch-noting by John Miers.

The symposium was devised to bring together a mix of comics academics, practitioners and professionals. Grouped into four thematic sessions, the speakers discussed the nature of working within frameworks, whether artistic, conceptual, professional or legal. The organisers envisioned that the term ‘framework’ could be perceived both negatively, as limitation and restriction, and positively, as a guiding and framing structure to a project. This idea was picked up by the speakers and carried on into the chaired discussions that concluded each panel.

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Posted by on 2018/03/19 in Conference reports

 

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The Comics Arts Conference and Public Humanities by Kathleen McClancy

22 Feb

Comics studies has come a long way in the past few years. Scholarship centered on sequential art is no longer considered beyond the pale of the academy; academic conferences and journals focusing on comics studies are multiplying; more and more books are being published that take a scholarly approach to the medium. The Comics Arts Conference, one of the first academic conferences dedicated to the study of sequential art, has been instrumental in encouraging this recognition within the academy. By providing a home for comics scholarship, the CAC not only created a forum where individuals scholars could connect to become a larger field, it also helped to grow the profile of comics studies on the academic stage. Today, being a self-described Batman scholar is no longer cause for derision. Or at least, not from fellow academics.

Unfortunately, the legitimacy comics studies has gained inside academia does not seem to be replicated outside it. An obvious recent case-in-point would be Alan Moore’s treatment of Will Brooker in what may or may not be his last interview. Not only does Moore not name the mysterious “Batman scholar” who has questioned the representations of race and gender in his comics, he dismisses those concerns as essentially the whining of an emotionally stunted idiot who can’t understand anything without a caption box. He goes on to imply that comics scholarship as a whole displays a lack of rigor at best and is a waste of time at worst. Of course, Moore’s public persona is famously a curmudgeonly old fart, and Moore could certainly be exaggerating for emphasis here, but I don’t want to dismiss his reaction as extraordinary; instead, it seems to me that Moore’s belittlement of the highly regarded Brooker is emblematic of a larger trend in the public at large to consider scholarship on sequential art dubious and even ridiculous.

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Posted by on 2014/02/22 in Guest Writers

 

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The Death of the Cartoonist? Working on Living Creators by Barbara Postema

24 Jan

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.

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Posted by on 2014/01/24 in Guest Writers

 

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Some thoughts on an Emerging Field: Connections, Transitions and Looking Ahead by Nina Mickwitz

29 Oct

Over the past three years the Transitions symposium at Birkbeck College has established a presence in the annual events calendar of UK Comics Studies. For an excellent description of how this came to be, the rationale behind the event and of the collaborative DIY-ethos that continues to characterise Transitions I’d like to refer you to ‘The indisciplined middle space’ by Tony Venezia. What Tony wrote a year ago is as relevant now as it was then.

The organisation of this year’s event has been a team effort involving a small group of PhD students at both Birkbeck and the University of East Anglia. Our aim has been to provide a continuation of Transitions, and to maintain the attitude and character of what originated as Tony’s brainchild. We hope that the diverse and promising programme of papers will offer the opportunity to trace some of the current directions as indicated by new research, with the proviso that this selection should be seen as loosely indicative rather than necessarily representative. This year’s keynote, by Chris Murray and Julia Round, will provide insights into the current challenges and opportunities of teaching and researching comics in the academic context. In addition, a roundtable discussion will provide a chance to reflect on the shared scholarly context we inhabit, as constituted by networks of practices and initiatives.

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Posted by on 2012/10/29 in Guest Writers, Scholarly Resources

 

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