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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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Learning from Film Studies: Analogies and Challenges by Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith

15 Jul

The most recent issue of Cinema Journal (50:3) features a special section edited by Bart Beaty and devoted to “Comics Studies: Fifty Years after Film Studies.” Therein Beaty notes “the current state of the scholarly study of comics is strikingly akin to that of film in the 1960s” (106). That article punctuated ruminations that the two of us have had since we began collaborating with one another, first in authoring a textbook for the comics studies classroom and now in producing an anthology presenting a host of critical methods utilized in the field.

As the Cinema Journal contributors point out, we in American Comics Studies seem to be making up for lost time. Of course, comics studies have marched on apace elsewhere, particularly in Europe. High profile events like the Angoulême International Comics Festival and a healthy slate of regular publications contribute to a profile of legitimacy that those of us practicing American comics scholarship long for. Meanwhile, our colleagues in Film Studies have enjoyed a largely recombinant international relationship, with American and European scholars regularly and vigorously exchanging ideas with one another, offering a model of dialogue for America’s comics studies to emulate. And yet a major stumbling block to our own development is, alas, a lack of multilingual scholars on this side of the pond, which leaves us largely ignorant of the fields progress abroad and “reinventing” concepts that have already been expressed in French or German. The situation is improving. Recent translations by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen have already enlivened the scholarly dialogue at American comics conferences with the ideas of Thierry Groensteen and Jean-Paul Gabilliet.

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Posted by on 2011/07/15 in Guest Writers

 

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Comics Scholarship 2.0 by Ernesto Priego

03 Jun

At the cusp of second decade of the 21st century, if the word “webcomics” still sounds strange to some, it is clear the reason is not the prefix web. It is the word “comics” that is problematic for several reasons. In spite of their ubiquity in the mainstream cultural landscape, comic books are still the object of a widespread prejudice that has two main expressions. One is the debatable disqualification of any texts addressed or appealing to children as lacking “seriousness”. The “infancy/maturity” binary set is a recurring topos of comics scholarship, explained amongst other reasons by the field’s struggle to convince the general public that “comics are not just for kids”. Echoing Bart Beaty’s assessment of “contemporary comics scholarship” (2004) , Craig Hight writes:

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Posted by on 2011/06/03 in Guest Writers

 

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Genre Conventions by Clark Burscough

20 May

Mention the term “comic convention” to your average man or woman on the street and certain stock images will instantly spring to mind. Many of these will have been gleaned from the less than glamorous portrayal of cons in the popular media, and some may be downright fabrications, but there is a certain stigma attached to these events by the public. Were these the bad old days of terrible events simply designed to prise cash from the hands of hardcore fans you could forgive this lack of acceptance, however, the modern iteration of the humble convention is, at its best, an entirely different animal. A quick glance across the pond to established titans, such as Toronto’s Comic Arts Festival and the New York Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s Festival, demonstrates that quality events attracting a diverse audience are not mere flights of fancy.

Since its expansion in 2008, Thought Bubble has referred to itself as a “sequential arts festival”, an admittedly verbose term, but an accurate one nonetheless. As an organisation we are dedicated to promoting comics, animation, and other types of illustrated storytelling as an important cultural art-form, aiming to cater to both long-time fans and those who are completely new to the medium. Part of this involves putting on free workshops and other such events to try and engage with young people who may be interested in comics, but don’t know where to start; and the other is bringing a variety of events to the general public to showcase as many of the different faces of sequential art as we possibly can. This year we’ve expanded the festival to run for a week in November (14th – 20th), devising a programme which will include workshops, exhibitions, book give-aways, screenings, academic talks, and a “traditional” comic convention – all for the cause of promoting funny books as a legitimate art-form.

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Posted by on 2011/05/20 in Guest Writers, Thought Bubble

 

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