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Comics Studies in Greece by Lida Tsene

08 May

The relationship between comics and Greece is a rather interesting one. Having a tradition in political cartooning and with influences from Europe and the US, during the 80s we observe the first steps of the creation of a small local scene that seems to be growing each year. Nevertheless, the road to this growth wasn’t easy at all

Comics reached the Greek audience pretty late and that’s one reason why many Greeks have a specific, and often incomplete, understanding of them. In fact, the first comic series that reached the Greek market were mostly superheroes and Disney stories and that led to the perception that comics are just for kids, naive and funny stories. The frequent publication by religious and educational groups of critical reviews and statements about the bad influences comics presented also contributed to this idea.

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Posted by on 2012/05/08 in Guest Writers

 

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What is the Philosophy of Comics? by Aaron Meskin

26 Mar

There are lots of ways philosophy and comics might be related. There are comics about philosophy and philosophers (Action Philosophers, Logicomix); other comics might be said to address philosophical issues without really being about philosophy or philosophers (Dinosaur Comics is sometimes like this); there is philosophy through comics — philosophical works that use comics to popularize philosophical ideas (see the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series); there are philosophically minded comics authors (Moore, Morrison and Ditko come to mind); and of course there are philosophers such as myself who like comics. (Philosophers in my department are well-known in the Leeds comics shops!) The philosophy of comics is something entirely different from all of these – it consists in the investigation of the philosophical questions raised by comics themselves.

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Posted by on 2012/03/26 in Guest Writers

 

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Beyond Our Borders: Mapping the Space of Comics by Benjamin Woo

25 Nov

In a recent essay on the state of comics studies, Charles Hatfield notes comics scholars’ tendency to begin their contributions with an “attempt at definition”—that is, an effort to identify comics’ unique formal properties as a means of legitimating them as an object of scholarly (and also private) interest (¶10). He’s not the first to notice the mania for definitions that grips the field.

But this strategy begs the question: Attempts to define comics as a medium or form assume we already know what it is we’re trying to describe. That may seem like a pedantic point, but it’s actually a significant theoretical and methodological problem. Any description of the object of study presupposes some knowledge of it, which in turn rests upon our ability to classify examples as belonging (or not) to the relevant corpus. If our commonsense notions are in some ways skewed, biased, or even flat-out wrong, then our formal definitions will suffer, too.

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Posted by on 2011/11/25 in Guest Writers

 

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Comics Studies in Germany: Where It’s At and Where It Might Be Heading by Daniel Stein

07 Nov

Whether Comics Studies exists in Germany depends on our definition of the term. If we define it as “Comic-Wissenschaft” in analogy to Literaturwissenschaft (Literary Studies) or Kulturwissenschaft (Cultural Studies), then the answer might be a hesitant “no.” As Ole Frahm wrote in 2002: ‘Comics Studies doesn’t exist.’ [1] Taking into account the quantitative and qualitative increase of German comics scholarship over the last decade, however, we might come to a more positive conclusion. In fact, I would side with Martin Schüwer’s assessment that we are currently witnessing ‘islands of activity […] at the borders of different academic disciplines.’ [2] Thus, once we define “Comics Studies” as a conglomeration of increasingly networked research activities, the answer to the question of whether “Comics Studies” exists in Germany must be a tentative “yes.”

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Posted by on 2011/11/07 in Guest Writers

 

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The Indisciplined Middle Space by Tony Venezia

27 Oct

We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris, when “Bothered Blues” peaked on the charts, when a teenaged Elvis, still dreaming of his own first session, sat in the Sun Studios watching the Prisonaires, when top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world in an instant, when schoolyard turntables were powered by a cord run from a streetlamp, when juice just flowed […] A middle space opened and closed like a glance, you’d miss it if you blinked.

Jonathan Lethem [1]

Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, a novel of friendship, family, music and comic books, concludes with an enticing and affective vision of an imaginative ‘middle space.’ Dylan Ebdus drives home with his father through a snow-storm listening to the swirling soundscape of a Brian Eno tape, invoking the aforementioned ‘middle space […] conjured and dwelled in’ (p. 509). The novel artfully weaves a highly personal story out of a pop culture collage of science fiction art, forgotten soul singers and New York superheroes, acknowledging the complexities of comics’ continuity as so much essential cultural history. The novel is itself something of a middle space where lines and boundaries are productively blurred.

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Posted by on 2011/10/27 in Guest Writers, Possibilities and Perspectives: A Conference on Comics (2009)

 

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