DAY 1/2
by Eva Van de Wiele and Dona Pursall
The digital symposium Sugar and Spice, and the Not So Nice: Comics Picturing Girlhood was launched on 22 April 2021 with a profound and personal keynote by Mel Gibson. Using herself as a case study she reflected on being a reader, a librarian, a scholar and an individual who, in a variety of fields, has represented non-standard notions of ‘girl’. In workshops for librarians, teachers and scholars, Gibson uses comics for object elicitation, allowing her to encourage others to reconsider themselves as child comics readers and the complex ideologies knotted up in this experience. Gibson’s work provokes the notion of the individual as a role model, a unique and precise representation with particular qualities, interests and passions. Using restorative nostalgia entails not just reflecting back on but, also, resisting shame and embarrassment, forgiving and accepting ourselves as the child readers we were. Gibson shows a respect for the powerful and evocative materiality of comics and offers a compassionate model for identity. Whilst speaking personally about comics reading, Gibson engaged with discourses of hierarchy, child development and affect, interrogating the simple truth that what we read is part of making us who we are.
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Tags: access, adventure, aesthetics, affect, agency, autoethnography, biography, body, censorship, Child characters, child development, children readers, comics, COMICS project, coming of age, curiosity, dance, disability, disobedience, economics, Emmanuel Guibert, empathy, Escape from Syria, ethics, Europe, exploration, family, feminism, Gender, gender roles, genre, girl protagonists, girlhood, Giulia Pex, gutters, hierarchy, Hilda and the Black Hound, identity, independent women, insecurity, isolation, Italy, Jeg rømmer, Joann Sfar, Khalat, Lars Horneman, liberated women, Luke Pearson, Lumberjanes, Mari Kanstad Johnsen, Marvel, materiality of comics, Mirabelle, mobility, Mophead, Morten Dürr, neurodiversity, news narratives, nostalgia, objectification, operationalised invisibility, oppression, otherness, Pacifica youth, parenthood, queering, reader response, refugee experiences, representation, resistance, Samya Kullab, Sardine, second wave feminism, Selina Tusitala Marsh, shame and embarrassment, silence, social commentary, societal rules, song, status and authority, subjugation, Syria, Sıdıka, teenage culture, The Unstoppable Wasp, trauma, Turkey, twentieth century, Valentina Mela Verde, values, vulnerability, women’s magazines, working young women, Zenobia
by Erika Chung
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics/La Société canadienne pour l’étude de la bande dessinée 2020 conference was cancelled. In its place, a series of online symposiums were organised to bring comic scholars together throughout the 2020/2021 academic year. Participants accepted to the conference and CSSC/SCEBD members in good standing were welcomed to participate in the online symposiums. In an effort to maximise the flexibility of the online Zoom space, the symposiums did not replicate in-person panel presentations. Instead, panellists’ research was shared with spectators in advance of the scheduled symposium session and, on the day of the symposium, researchers participated in a roundtable discussion. The goal was for panelists to engage in greater dialogue with their research and each other. Panelists and spectators met on Zoom and a moderator helped guide the roundtable discussion. Moderators introduced each speaker and prepared discussion questions. Panelists were also welcome to ask one another questions. In total, the online symposium series consisted of four sessions and featured researchers from the UK, India and across Canada.
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Tags: Amar Chitra Katha, androids, Asian representation, Austria, Bitch Planet, Canada, Canadian Comics Scholarship, Captain Marvel, charity projects, colonialism, community, Condo Heartbreak Disco, CSSC/SCEBD, disability, Domino, education, Eric Kostiuk William, femininity, film, friendships, Gender, graphic novel, identity, In a Queer Time and Place, India, Indian Comics, Jack Halberstam, Marjorie Liu, Martian Manhunter, Monstress, monstrosity, nationalism, political cartoons, post-war period, racism, Sana Takeda, science fiction, sexuality, sound, stereotypes, superheroes, the abject, UK, white gaze, women’s comics
José Alaniz
University of Washington, Seattle
Note: all translations are the author’s own.
Corrections Class (Klass korrektsii, d. Ivan Tverdovsky, 2015) is a hard-hitting film about disability in Russia. In one scene, a mother, Svetlana Viktorovna (Natalya Pavlenkova), struggles to push her paraplegic teen daughter Lena (Maria Poyezhayeva) in her wheelchair up a two-track cement ramp outside her high school. But the ramp, which we had seen in the process of construction earlier in the movie, has a fatal flaw: a gap of several inches between it and the sidewalk – too wide for a wheelchair to overcome. Worse than useless, the ramp is a spit in the face, a bureaucratic nod to inclusivity with no actual follow-through. It drives Svetlana Viktorovna, who has more than enough troubles in her life, to hiss with rage: “Thank you very much, my dears. Great job.”[1] Equal parts maudlin melodrama, documentary exposé and black farce, the scene is not exactly fiction (though the film is). It had a real-life basis.
In the fall of 2012, a popular series of memes emerged on the Runet (Russian internet): pictures of the many inaccessible spaces for wheelchair-users in Russian cities, turned into absurdist set decoration by ramps built impossibly steep; ramps with trees and other objects blocking the way; broken ramps with wide cracks; and ramps leading to/from nowhere (e.g., into walls). “The inaccessible-ramps meme gained popularity not as [a] representation of the problem of disability inclusion in Russia,” wrote anthropologist Cassandra Hartblay, “but as a joke about the country’s infrastructure, ironic evidence of dysfunction in Russian daily life” (“Good”: 3).[2] Hartblay goes on to call the ramps “an overdetermined symbol, or a red herring for access” in postsocialism (“Good”: 4).
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Tags: Bubble, disability, mainstream, Russian comics, superheroes
Comics Forum 
Symposium Report: Sugar and Spice, and the Not So Nice: Comics Picturing Girlhood
DAY 1/2
by Eva Van de Wiele and Dona Pursall
The digital symposium Sugar and Spice, and the Not So Nice: Comics Picturing Girlhood was launched on 22 April 2021 with a profound and personal keynote by Mel Gibson. Using herself as a case study she reflected on being a reader, a librarian, a scholar and an individual who, in a variety of fields, has represented non-standard notions of ‘girl’. In workshops for librarians, teachers and scholars, Gibson uses comics for object elicitation, allowing her to encourage others to reconsider themselves as child comics readers and the complex ideologies knotted up in this experience. Gibson’s work provokes the notion of the individual as a role model, a unique and precise representation with particular qualities, interests and passions. Using restorative nostalgia entails not just reflecting back on but, also, resisting shame and embarrassment, forgiving and accepting ourselves as the child readers we were. Gibson shows a respect for the powerful and evocative materiality of comics and offers a compassionate model for identity. Whilst speaking personally about comics reading, Gibson engaged with discourses of hierarchy, child development and affect, interrogating the simple truth that what we read is part of making us who we are.
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Posted by Annick Pellegrin on 2021/06/14 in Conference reports
Tags: access, adventure, aesthetics, affect, agency, autoethnography, biography, body, censorship, Child characters, child development, children readers, comics, COMICS project, coming of age, curiosity, dance, disability, disobedience, economics, Emmanuel Guibert, empathy, Escape from Syria, ethics, Europe, exploration, family, feminism, Gender, gender roles, genre, girl protagonists, girlhood, Giulia Pex, gutters, hierarchy, Hilda and the Black Hound, identity, independent women, insecurity, isolation, Italy, Jeg rømmer, Joann Sfar, Khalat, Lars Horneman, liberated women, Luke Pearson, Lumberjanes, Mari Kanstad Johnsen, Marvel, materiality of comics, Mirabelle, mobility, Mophead, Morten Dürr, neurodiversity, news narratives, nostalgia, objectification, operationalised invisibility, oppression, otherness, Pacifica youth, parenthood, queering, reader response, refugee experiences, representation, resistance, Samya Kullab, Sardine, second wave feminism, Selina Tusitala Marsh, shame and embarrassment, silence, social commentary, societal rules, song, status and authority, subjugation, Syria, Sıdıka, teenage culture, The Unstoppable Wasp, trauma, Turkey, twentieth century, Valentina Mela Verde, values, vulnerability, women’s magazines, working young women, Zenobia