Tag Archives: Germany

Just like my predecessors, Stephan Packard and Lukas Wilde, I will use this fifth column of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) in order to briefly summarize the latest news from the German comics studies scene. While all scholars seem to have been enjoying their summer break in August, September sounded the bell for a highly interesting fall season, full of conferences, festivals, and exhibitions.

Conferences, Workshops, Symposiums

Germany’s capital appears to have become the current hub of comics studies events, starting with the undisputed highlight of this year’s midsummer: the ninth annual conference of the German Society for Comics Studies. For four days (September 25–28), German and international comics scholars from various disciplines gathered at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Under the motto “Drawing Boundaries, Crossing Borders,” they discussed the transgressive potential of comics and their academic study. Whether media or genre conventions, geographical or political borders, the limits of medium or imagination – comics are bound to break them. The ComFor conference featured renowned comic scholars such as Roger Sabin, Neil Cohn or Michael Chaney and numerous established ComFor members, but also young scholars who are only beginning to explore the field of comics studies. Furthermore, participants were able to enjoy an exhibition by the Black Kirby artist group, an open forum that brought academia, publishers and artists together, and they also learned the latest news about Closure, the first German online journal for comics studies. Speaking of Closure, the editorial team announced at the conference that the first issue of the journal will be available on their brand new website by November 5th. Also during the annual conference, the new and improved ComFor website was released. Thanks to the new calender tool and a general bilingualism, it is now easier than ever before to stay informed about the most important events and publications concerning comics studies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

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With most academic conferences in Germany clustered in spring and fall, the summer has been comparatively restful. So this column in our ongoing series on comics studies in Germany and at ComFor, the German Society for Comics Studies, will be comparatively short.

First off, the Roland Faelske Award for Comics and Animation has been announced for the third time in a row. Organised by the ingeniously named ArGL, the “Arbeitsstelle für Graphische Literatur” or “Workplace for Graphical Literature”, at Hamburg University, the prize rewards a best graduate and a best PhD thesis from the previous two years. Winners will be announced in November.

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While April’s column on recent developments in German comic studies was dominated by news about fairs and festivals, the last months saw a bigger emphasis on exhibitions and art galleries. On May 30, Berlin’s Icon Gallery featured an exhibition on German artist Simon Schwartz, whose highly praised graphic novel Drüben is also available in French (translated as De l’autre côté). Munich’s Instituto Cervantes presented an exhibition on Spain’s most famous comic artist Paco Roca throughout May and June, whose book Arrugas (engl.: Wrinkles) and its animated film adaptation received many awards around the world. Until July 27, you may visit an exhibition on “Graphic novel – Bande Dessinée: Gezeichnete Literatur aus Frankreich” (“Graphic Literature in France”) in the municipal library of Osnabrück; until August 3 on the German Democratic Republic-comic magazine Mosaik (and its stars, the Digedags) in the Kulturbrauerei Berlin, as well as on German artist Ralf König in the caricature museum in Frankfurt. And until August 31, the Berlin Literary Colloquium will feature an exhibition on Finnish artist Ville Tietäväinen’s controversial political comic book on EU immigration issues, “Näkymättömät kädet”, which was recently translated into German by the Avant publishing house.

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If the last weeks of winter and the early days of spring were any indication, the coming season should prove highly interesting for Comics Studies. As Stephan Packard did in February’s column for the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor), I will try to give a brief overview on recent developments in the German-speaking fraction of the world. Certain overlaps with Martin de la Iglesia’s News Review column cannot be wholly avoided, but I will try to keep those to a minimum.

While Stephan Packard mentioned the ComFor’s general aim to advance plans for a German Journal for Comic Studies only two months ago, the Institute for Neuere deutsche Literatur und Medien (Current German Literature and Media) at Kiel University pushed forward and announced plans to launch the first issue of CLOSURE – the first German E-Journal for Comic Studies – no later than October 15th. Named after Scott McCloud’s term for the principal cognitive operation bridging sequential ‘gaps and gutters’, CLOSURE is going to combine peer review with open access to provide a platform for a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches. Abstracts for contributions to the journal’s first issue, which will not yet be restricted to a specific topic, are very much welcome up until May 16th (in German, though). In addition to CLOSURE, plans for another independent online-magazine specializing in comic book culture were announced by ComFor’s founding member Martin Frenzel: Comicoskop follows a more journalistic approach, however, intending to engage with a much broader audience on reviews, interviews, and cultural discussions. Plans aim the launch somewhere towards June.

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Today’s short update begins a new column at Comics Forum: Every two months, one of the comics scholars in the German Society for Comics Studies, the Gesellschaft für Comicforschung or “ComFor”, will give a brief overview of recent activities and developments from the German comics studies scene as well as an outlook at upcoming events that might be of interest to an international audience. We’re grateful to Ian Hague for the opportunity and will try not to bore readers too much with local issues. These updates will probably draw mostly from the contents of our website, selected, refocused and translated into English.

2014 is ComFor’s ninth year. The society was founded on February 11th, 2005, in Koblenz; its goals continue to be the coordination and promotion of comics scholarship in German (about comics in any language). Since 2006, ComFor has organized yearly academic conferences at various universities and has published near-yearly volumes of the research presented there. Our popular panel at the Erlangen Comic-Salon, the largest German comics exhibition and convention, has become a recurrent institution as well. ComFor also supports the Bonn Online Bibliography on Comics Studies, and is driving plans towards a German Journal for Comics Studies. The main purpose and function of the society, however, remains the advancement of communication and collaboration among comics scholars, whose field is subject to a high degree of dispersion in German-speaking countries: At its best, it produces encounters between scholars from vastly differing disciplines that are brought together by their common interest in comics and continue to learn from one another. At its worst, it can lead to mutual isolation of parallel lines of research – this is what we’re trying to work against. In the last few years, the field of German-speaking comics studies has grown, and grown more densely connected; a process from which the society profits greatly, and that we hope we have supported in our own way.

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