by Laura Oehme

Looking back on 2016, I have to say that it was a great year for comics studies in Germany. The past two months in particular were yet again full of academic events and publications, but also festivals and exhibitions around the comics medium. From a distinct ComFor perspective, the annual ComFor meeting in November was certainly a highlight of the year. As Stephan already mentioned in his last update, this year’s ComFor conference focused on comics’ didactics and brought together academia and teachers in very productive ways.

Speaking from an even more specific perspective of the ComFor online editorial team, the past two months have seen two very particular novelties. For one, we asked all ComFor members to let us know about their lectures and seminars with a comics focus in the winter semester 2016/17 and collected them in an unprecedented overview post on the ComFor website. Secondly, we were lucky enough to gain two new members for our (still rather small) editorial team, but also lost one of our core editors who has been a beloved team member for many years now. Thus, to use a rough translation of a German idiom “with one sad and two cheerful eyes”, we say a heartfelt “goodbye and farewell” to Nina Heindl (Art History, University of Cologne), and welcome Alexandra Hentschel (museum’s director, Erika-Fuchs-Haus) as well as Julia Ingold (German literature, University of Kiel) to the team! We are very grateful for all the hard work that Nina has invested over the years and we are looking forward to the “breath of fresh air” that our newest team members will certainly bring to the ComFor website!

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by Stephan Packard

The new year starts with preparations for 2016’s annual ComFor conference, which will be held at Duisburg-Essen from November 16^th to 19^th. This year, we will focus on didactics, offering workshops and talks about implementing comics and comics studies into school curricula and lessons. Organized by Markus Engelns alongside Ulrike Preußer and Clemens Kammler, the conference will discuss basic concepts of comics analysis with a focus on examples that topicalize school within comics; and then turn that around to focus on comics in schools for the longest part. As usual, the conference will also include an open forum for current plans and intermediate reports from unfinished projects in comics studies that are looking for feedback or simply encouragement – my favorite part of each of our conferences. The call for papers was published recently and the deadline for abstracts is set at April 1^st, 2016.

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by Laura Oehme

Following up on Nina’s update from October, I am providing the sixth and last ComFor update on current developments in German comics studies for 2015. However, before I concentrate on the last two months of 2015 in Germany, I would like to point out that the first academic position for “Graphic Fiction and Comic Art” (connected to a PhD program) at Lancaster University also attracted much interest with the German press. The professorship marks a milestone in comics studies worldwide and, hopefully, the beginning of a trend, as the Scottish University of Dundee also uploaded a job advertisment for a lecturer in comics studies. It is still a long way to an interdisciplinary department solely dedicated to comics studies, but every little step counts. Congratulations to French graphic novelist Benoît Peeters for his appointment are in order!

Conferences, Workshops, Symposiums

Since the fall season for conferences has already passed, the last two months of 2015 brought only a few academic events focusing on comics to light. On November 24, ComFor member Daniel Stein organized a workshop with Björn Hammel titled “Mediamorphose: Die mediale Transformation der Graphic Novel TearTalesTrust” (“Mediamorphosis: The Medial Transformation of the Graphic Novel TearTalesTrust”) at the University of Siegen. A few days later, on November 27–28, an interdisciplinary student conference on “The Rise of Sequential History: Historische Comics in Theorie und Praxis” (Historical Comics in Theory and in the Field) took place at the LMU in Munich. On December 4, the University of Kiel hosted a study day on “Comic & Kunstgeschichte” (Comics & Art History). I would also like to mention the new PhD program “Die Arbeit und ihre Subjekte” (Work and its Subjects) at the University of Duisburg-Essen that explicitly touted for comics projects, for which applicants were able to get funding for three years beginning in 2016.

Publications

In November, the second issue of the very first German-language e-journal for comics studies Closure was released. It focuses on “the dark side” of comics, introduces the new category “ComicKontext,” and includes articles and reviews by numerous ComFor members. Additionally, as every December, two classical yearbooks went into print: Deutsche Comicforschung 2016, edited by Eckart Sackmann, and the Comic-Jahrbuch 2016 of ICOM, edited by Burkhard Ihme. Furthermore, Julia Abel and Christian Klein edited one of the first German-language introductions to comics and graphic novels with J.B. Metzler (Comics und Graphic Novels: Eine Einführung). It covers a wide area of disciplinary perspectives and features contributions by eight ComFor members.

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After Lukas deviated from our usual look back on the last two months of German activities regarding comics and outrageously announced diverse activities in September and October (yes, Lukas, this was cheating!) we would like to recommend the rereading of Lukas’ column and add some updates on events that have not been mentioned yet.

First of all our annual ComFor conference entitled “History in Comics – History of Comics” was held at the University of Frankfurt/M. from September 4 to 6. Although we are excited about each annual meeting, this year’s get-together was a special one: the ComFor celebrated its 10th anniversary. With a record high of 17 panels and roughly 50 talks in three days, the annual meeting in Frankfurt was one of the largest ComFor conferences so far. The four keynotes by Anne Magnussen (University of Southern Denmark, Odense), Stephan Packard (Freiburg), Dietrich Grünewald (Reiskirchen), and Christina Gundermann (Köln) at the beginning set the tone for a conference full of thought-provoking talks, controversial debates, and inspiring conversations among fellow comics scholars.

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