By Lukas R.A. Wilde

We are back with some more accounts of what was going on in German comic studies recently… After the following update, the ComFor editorial team will take some time off for a short holiday break. The weeks and months since Julia’s last update in May, however, have been nothing short of a rollercoaster. In some of our columns it has been challenging to not just recount the ‘German corner’ of the News Reviews (Martin de la Iglesia deserves all our credit for his excellent coverage of German events); this time, on the contrary, I have to remind myself not to let this get out of hand.

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By Julia Ingold

Just recently, Germany’s Gesellschaft für Comicforschung (Society for Comic Studies, short: ComFor) published the date and a call for papers for its 12th annual conference. Scholars from home and abroad are invited to come together, present, and discuss their latest research under the topic “Comics and their Popularity” from December 1 to 3, 2017. The conference will take place at Bonn University, hosted by Joachim Trinkwitz and his team, who might be well known for their astonishing work on the Bonner Online-Bibliographie zur Comicforschung (Bonn Online Bibliography for Comics Research).

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By Lukas R. A. Wilde

The ComFor editorial team concluded the last year – which already feels like ages ago – with a more detailed self-introduction of our new staff and started off again with the 2016/17 installment of comic book reading recommendations by some of ComFor’s members. Shortly after, an extensive and long-awaited ComFor-publication was released by the Christian A. Bachmann publishing house: Comics an der Grenze. Sub/Versionen von Form und Inhalt [Comics Crossing Borders. Sub/versions of Form and Content], edited by Matthias Harbeck, Marie Schröer and Linda Heyden. This collection of 25 articles (with a sensational cover illustration by Paul Paetzel) collects some of the papers presented at ComFor’s 9^th annual conference held in Berlin in 2014. Scholars from various fields question, on the one hand, the many medial, cultural, national, generic and disciplinary boundaries that are crossed by comics as a form, as well as, on the other hand, the representations of threshold conditions of gender, bodies and borders within individual works. Five of the contributions are in English, including a must-read conversation with Black Kirby (an artist collective comprised of John Jennings and Stacey ‘Blackstar’ Robinson) that created a spectacular exhibition on the intersections of Black history, AfroFuturism and comic book culture.

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