The most recent issue of Cinema Journal (50:3) features a special section edited by Bart Beaty and devoted to “Comics Studies: Fifty Years after Film Studies.” Therein Beaty notes “the current state of the scholarly study of comics is strikingly akin to that of film in the 1960s” (106). That article punctuated ruminations that the two of us have had since we began collaborating with one another, first in authoring a textbook for the comics studies classroom and now in producing an anthology presenting a host of critical methods utilized in the field.
As the Cinema Journal contributors point out, we in American Comics Studies seem to be making up for lost time. Of course, comics studies have marched on apace elsewhere, particularly in Europe. High profile events like the Angoulême International Comics Festival and a healthy slate of regular publications contribute to a profile of legitimacy that those of us practicing American comics scholarship long for. Meanwhile, our colleagues in Film Studies have enjoyed a largely recombinant international relationship, with American and European scholars regularly and vigorously exchanging ideas with one another, offering a model of dialogue for America’s comics studies to emulate. And yet a major stumbling block to our own development is, alas, a lack of multilingual scholars on this side of the pond, which leaves us largely ignorant of the fields progress abroad and “reinventing” concepts that have already been expressed in French or German. The situation is improving. Recent translations by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen have already enlivened the scholarly dialogue at American comics conferences with the ideas of Thierry Groensteen and Jean-Paul Gabilliet.
Comics Forum 