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
Patrimonialisation as Retcon? – Part 1/3
by Jean-Matthieu Méon
Woodcut novels form a genre of graphic narratives that emerged in Europe at the end of the 1910s with the works of the Belgian Frans Masereel. It was later explored and expanded by several European and Northern American artists, among whom the American Lynd Ward was one of the most influential (Beronä). If the genre waned in the 1950s, its influence has been claimed by diverse artists, especially in the comics field. In recent years, key works of the genre were reprinted in France and they are considered important elements of comics’ heritage.
The three parts of this article analyse this current comics valorisation of decades-old woodcut novels.[1] The theoretical model of patrimonialisation (Davallon) helps to shed light on this process, which relies on a specific relationship with the past, made of both rediscovery and reinvention (part I). The editorial paratext of the current reprints plays here a central role. It’s a means to equate “woodcut novels” and “graphic novels” and to bring together distinct fields of artistic creations (part II). The symbolic stakes of this patrimonialising process are important: for comics and for their publishers, it’s part of a quest for legitimacy and for an artistic autonomy that Masereel and Ward could embody (part III).
Wordless woodcut novels created in the Twenties and the Thirties are enjoying a renewed editorial and critical interest in France. Six “novels in pictures” by Frans Masereel have been reprinted by Martin de Halleux since 2018 and L’Éclaireur, one exhaustive slipcase set of all six of Lynd Ward’s “novels in woodcuts”, was published by Monsieur Toussaint Louverture in 2020 (see list of works cited). But for one exception (in Walker’s anthology), this is the first French edition of Ward’s woodcut novels and only a few of Masereel’s books had been reprinted as individual books in the preceding years by small literary publishers. On the occasion of these reprints, both bodies of works have been praised as forerunners of the modern graphic novels—if not as graphic novels in their own right. Both of them were also selected for the Angoulême festival award dedicated to comics’ heritage: Masereel’s Idée was nominated in 2019 and Ward’s L’Éclaireur won the award in 2021. The place of these works in the history of comics thus seems formally established, as one more milestone in the form’s past. Jean Davallon’s communication approach to heritage (patrimonialisation) offers a heuristic model to describe this process of (re)insertion of woodcut novels in comics history. It also helps to understand its internal logic as well as its specificity: the retrospective look at the past here is as much one of rediscovery as one of reinvention.
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Tags: 25 images, A Contract with God, Angoulême, Art Spiegelman, artistic autonomy, Artists, Éclaireur, Belgium, cinema, comics history, continuity, Davallon, film, fine arts, France, Frans Masereel, Friedenthal, graphic novel, heritage, Idée, illustration, Le Don du patrimoine, legitimacy, Lynd Ward, Martin de Halleux, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, paratext, patrimonialisation, Pouillon, retcon, reverse filiation, Scott McCloud, superheroes, symbolic annexation, USA, Will Eisner, woodcut novel, wordless 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
Attracting Mature Readers[1]
By Peter W. Y. Lee
Among the 1954 Comics Magazine Association of America’s Comic Code’s many regulations was a directive to company admen: “Liquor and tobacco advertising is not acceptable” (Nyberg 168). The ubiquity of alcohol in mainstream media certainly concerned social guardians in post-war America (Rotskoff). However, liquor manufacturers did not solicit to minors in the comics, but another demographic group: their parents.
The first part of my article looked at how Lev Gleason Publications responded to the public alarm over comic books. Gleason and his chief editor, Charles Biro, pushed comics as a progressive medium with educational and artistic merit. This second part explores their second strategy: courting adults. Gleason hoped that an expanded readership would bolster support and offset rising production costs. However, critics rejected comic books’ potential beyond that of disposable children’s entertainment. The Comics Code sanitised comic books and stigmatised readers beyond middle-school age.
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Tags: Abraham Lincoln, adult readership, Alan Valentine, Amazing Adult Fantasy, anticrime comic magazines, Association of Comic Magazine Publishers, Atlas, Boy Comics, Charles Biro, comics code, comics industry, crime comic books, Crime Does Not Pay, Dell Comics, economics, education, educational comics, Frederic Wertham, Fredric Wertham, Great Depression, Henry E. Schultz, History, juvenile delinquency, Lev Gleason, Lev Gleason Publications, mature readers, Mortimer Smith, pre-code, sexual imagery, social progressivism, St. John Publishing, superheroes, USA, violence, WWII
By Vincent Tran
On the 6-8 of December 2018, the Superheroes Beyond Conference took place at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. Organised by the Superheroes and Me research group of Angela Ndalianis, Liam Burke and Ian Gordon, and part of a larger project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the conference was built on the crux of going “beyond out-dated definitions of superheroes”, stemming from the costumed heroes of the 1940s. Running alongside the conference was also the exhibition on Cleverman (2016 -), an Aboriginal superhero television show as well as the Superheroes: Realities Collide virtual reality experience, also organised by Superheroes and Me, allowing participants to explore the streets of Melbourne as a superhero in VR. Across these three days over 50 presenters expanded and enriched the dialogue on superheroes, all in a collaborative effort to hopefully shift the direction of future research to new uncharted ground. Through exploring international examples, historical antecedents, real life super-heroism, on top of a multitude of perspectives, these presentations opened up the discussion beyond the white male caped crusader.
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Tags: Australia, Australian superhero comics, superheroes
Comics Forum 