News

The founding- and managing editors of SANEjournal: sequential art narrative in education seek critical, evaluative, reflective works from those engaged in the making, preserving, teaching, and studying of comics through the creation of comics studies programs, the stewardship of comics libraries and comics collections within libraries, and the establishing of comics studies-associated journals.

We seek pieces that address the history, evolution, and even devolution or dissolvement of such entities.

Essentially, what is the biology, the evolution, the story of your program, collection, or journal? How does your creation or the creation under your current or previous care reflect a situatedness in its field and the ontological, teleological, and epistemologies surrounding it, both in relation to current exigencies but in relation to the past as well?
What has worked to keep your artifact thriving?
What did not work?
What processes, people, and supports were in place – or not in place – to facilitate success or failure?
What happens or happened to you when a program, collection, or journal fail/ed?  
What are the essential qualities needed for such projects to initialize? To grow? To sustain? To come to a close?
Can the process of success and failure within these three domains best be illuminated through a particular – or particular set – of critical lenses?
What truths need to be told? What keeps the truths associated with the types of reflections we seek from being told forthrightly?
What issues, in your estimation, continue to go unresolved regarding the proliferation of existing and future programs of study, collections, and journals within comics studies?

Methodological approaches to addressing these questions are acceptable for consideration, as well as critical and reflective approaches.  

Example essays might have titles such as “The Making and Breaking of a Comics Studies Major: The Story of Comics at Middle-Ground State University, 1999-2010” “Preserving (and Persevering) Against All Odds as the Oddball Special Collection,” “Maintaining an Open-Access Comics Studies Journal that is Actually Open: Resisting the Appeal of Commerce and Profit,” “The History of —-,” or “An Examination of the Life of a Comics Studies Program through the Ecological Lens: 7 Principles

SANE Journal  https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/

Kind regards,
Richard Graham
Associate Professor – Chair, Teaching and Learning PartnershipsCourtesy Professor- Department of English

Malmö University and The Swedish Comics Association invites you to:
The Comics Archive Symposium 2022
Thursday 13th and Friday 14th of October
Malmoe, Sweden.

The field of comics research is expanding, but with that also comes an increasing need for archives that preserve this artform and can offer access not only to printed matter but also behind-the-scenes material – e.g. manuscripts, original artwork, correspondence, advertising and merchandise. These kinds of ancillary materials are essential to deepen our understanding of the art form and for comics research to develop, grow and mature.

There is a movement of comics centered archives being established globally right now, and this symposium will gather people from academia, archivists, collectors and others interested in the work of preserving and making comics-related artefacts accessible to researchers. The purpose of the symposium is to share knowledge of how this work can be developed, to discuss different solutions and to build international networks.

We therefor invite all interested in comics archives (in any sense) to take part of this symposium. If you wish to give a presentation (max 20 minutes) of own experiences of working with comics archives (as an organizer or as a user), please submit an abstract (250 words) no later than September 18th. No fees! Just mail us if you want to participate.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Karen Green, Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University – Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Philippe Capart, manager of the library/publishing house La Crypte Tonique in central Bruxelles and host of Club Bimbo, a platform for material and immaterial exchanges around visual narrative.

The Symposium is organized by Malmö University Comics Hub and the Swedish Comics Association. It will last for two days, from Thursday the 13th to Friday the 14th of October, and will include presentations and panel debates, as well as visits to The Comics Archive, situated in Malmö City Archives.

Venues: Malmö University and Malmö City Archives
To participate: Please mail either Gunnar or Fredrik.

Contact info:
Gunnar Krantz: gunnar.krantz@mau.se
Fredrik Strömberg: sekventiellt@me.com

Framing the Past in Comics June 16-18, 2023

The objective of HistorioGRAPHICS: Framing the Past in Comics is essentially three-fold: First, we seek to review and expand comics studies’ approaches to historiography and representations of the past in comics. Second, we aim to bring together the fields of history and comics studies more closely to deepen our understanding of visual representations not only as primary sources but also as a format of historiography. What does the fragmented mediality of comics offer to the representation of history? How do comics criticize and contextualize historical sources and historiographical practices? What futures do comics have in store for representing the past? Thirdly we emphasize the transnational approach to this topic, in the stories told as well as in the research about them, with a particular emphasis on the transatlantic perspectives.
Contributions may choose to engage with themes that may include but are not limited to:

• Holocaust comics and memory culture
• Indigenous histories and their graphic narrative representations
• The (long) Civil Rights Movement in the United States and graphic narratives of protest
• Histories of the Americas and the Global South in Comics
• Representation of historical crises as well as personal and collective trauma
• Comics in the classroom / the classroom and the public eye: politics and censorship
• Ideologies of historical representation in comics
• Institutions, political education, and (individual) activism
• Comics and/as Public History
• History in autobiographical comics, graphic memoir, and comics journalism
• Theories and methodologies of analyzing historical representations in comics

We are happy to cooperate with the Bavarian American Academy and the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor). Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Dr. Hillary L. Chute (Northeastern University, United States)
As of the current planning stage, the conference will be held in person at the Amerikahaus Munich. The availability of travel reimbursements for active participants remains pending, subject to a grant application for additional funding currently underway.
We invite proposals for individual research papers (20 min.) as well as entire panels (3 papers). Moreover, we also welcome more open and innovative formats of presentation.
Submissions (preferably as one PDF document) should include:

• The title of your paper (and panel, if applicable)
• Your name and affiliation
• Summary of content (max. 300 words, excl. references)
• Short biography (max. 150 words)

Please send your proposal no later than September 30, 2022 to both organizers
Charlotte.Lerg@lmu.de and Johannes.Schmid@uni-flensburg.de
Feel free to contact us with any further questions.

Link: https://www.temporal-communities.de/events/conference-lateral-solidarities.html

Too often, “global literature” has been synonymous with texts that make themselves legible to normative Western reading. Whether texts that originate from the West and circulate globally, those that enter the Western consciousness via translation into European languages, or those that engage with the preoccupations of the West (e.g. the veil and religious extremism in the Middle East; poverty and war in Africa; violence and narcotraffic in Latin America), what has been considered “worldly” in literary studies has not embodied the diversity and multifariousness of literary practices around the world.

For comics, this is true in an even more pivotal way. Even if their ‘value’ as an artistic medium is no longer questioned in both reading and academic communities, they have, in a very similar way to literature, also been largely limited to normative Western reading, and circulated under circumscribed conditions, with the prominent exception of Japanese comic art. As comics’ multimodal language requires acts of showing, seeing, and being seen as well as the setting of lines, frames, and angles, every hegemonic act of reading means a repressing of a medium that is, in fact, predestined to challenge our habits of looking at the world.

By approaching comics via a Global South methodology in our conference, we hope to more fully exemplify the rich world of comics coming from non-Western locales and authors. Generally speaking, we think about the Global South as characterizing work that creates lateral solidarities via culture, economics, art, politics, etc. between peoples marginalized by global capitalism. These solidarities can be explicit via comparison of work from multiple geographies, but we also believe that one can study a single locale or comic via a Global South methodology – that comparison is not the only way to create solidarity. While recognizing that the nation is a powerful unit, we think about Global South work as largely eschewing the nation in favor of smaller and larger units, such as the linguistic, tribal, oceanic, etc. In less academic terms, we are interested in analyzing comics from non-Western locales using approaches that do not rely on Western frameworks to create value and insight. This is not a wholesale rejection of the West, but decentering it as a legitimizing normative part of comic studies seems to us as a prerequisite for valuing Global South comics on their own terms.

Thursday, 2 June 2022, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin

16:00 – 22:00     Artists Soirée

16:00 – 16:15      Introduction

16:15 – 17:00      Nacha Vollenweider: 

Neo/Colonial Relations and Transnational Migration Routes in Notas al pie and Volver

17:00 – 17:45      Deena Mohamed: 

Right to Left: Arabic Comics in Self-Translation

B r e a k

18:00 – 18:45      Lea Hübner: 

Translating South American Comics

18:45 – 19:30      Powerpaola: 

Love, Friendship, Collectives – and Comics 

B r e a k

19:45 – 20:45      Round-Table 

20:45                     Catering

Friday, 3 June 2022, Freie Universität Berlin

10:00 – 22:00     Academic Part

10:00 – 10:15      Introduction 

10:15 – 11:00      Nina Mickwitz (London): 

​​Provocative Alignment: Advocacy and Fantasy in the Ghanaian comic Lake of Tears (Kobe Ofei and Setor Fiadzigbey, 2017)

11:00 – 11:45      Haya Alfarhan (London): 

”He was knowing”: Handala and Implicated Acts of Looking in Naji Al-Ali’s Political Cartoons

B r e a k

12:00 – 12:45      Sandra Federici (Bologna): 

A Sociological Approach to Francophone African Comics (1978–2016)

12:45 – 13:30      Janek Scholz (Köln): 

Nation Building in and through Comics. Examples from Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique

L u n c h

15:00 – 15:45      Lina Ghaibeh (Beirut): 

The New Generation: Arab Comics Today

15:45 – 16:30      Amadeo Gandolfo/Pablo Turnes (Buenos Aires/Berlin): 

With 10 Cartoonists I Can Make a Gnarly Stew: Re-Writing Anthologies in the 21st Century

B r e a k

16:45 – 17:30      Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (Cambridge): 

A Queer Utopia in the Brazilian-Japanese Diaspora: Taís Koshino’s Ainda ontem (2017) 

17:30 – 18:15     Anne Brüske (Regensburg/Heidelberg): ‘Da(ny) Goes Graphic‘: Cultural Positionings beyond the ‘Global South’ in Dany Laferrière’s Graphic Novels [online]

19:00 – 19:30      Final Discussion

————————————————————————————————–

Freie Universität Berlin

EXC 2020 Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective

Research Area 4 ”Literary Currencies”

they are to happen on site / in German but will be available via zoom, too!

die Vortragsreihe ”Comics und Bildung. Herausforderungen und Chancen im 21. Jahrhundert” findet im Sommersemester in Präsenz an vier Terminen an der Universität Hamburg statt. 

Die Comic-Vorstellung am 14.6. findet in Kooperation mit dem Comickolloquium Nord statt und wird auch digital über zoom zugänglich sein: https://www.zfw.uni-hamburg.de/oeffentliche-vortraege/programm-sose/12-comics-und-bildung.html

26.04.2022 
Sachcomics – Vom Nischenprodukt für Comicfans zum anerkannten Sachtext 
Prof. Dr. Heike Elisabeth Jüngst, Fakultät für Angewandte Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften, Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften Würzburg-Schweinfurt

10.05.2022 
‚Man merkt die Absicht und ist verstimmt‘. Comics in der historisch-politischen Bildung
PD Dr. Jeannette van Laak, Institut für Geschichte, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

14.06.2022
Money Matters. Entstehung und Vorstellung eines Comic Essays über Finanzen und Geld
Prof. Dr. Miriam Beblo, Fakultät für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Universität Hamburg / Pauline Cremer, Illustratorin und Grafik Designerin, Berlin / Dr. Julia Schneider, Comic Essayistin, Berlin
-in Kooperation mit dem Comickolloquium Nord –

05.07.2022
Welche Lesekompetenzen schult der Comic eigentlich? Zum Spannungsverhältnis zwischen „comics literacy“ und „visual literacy“
PD Dr. Markus Oppolzer, Fachbereich Anglistik & Amerikanistik, Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg

Zeit und Ort: Dienstags 18-20 Uhr, Fakultät für Erziehungswissenschaft, Von-Melle-Park 8, Raum 207

https://www.zfw.uni-hamburg.de/oeffentliche-vortraege/programm-sose/12-comics-und-bildung.html

There will be an online-conference on ”Adventure Narratives in Popular Images and Texts” from 12.-14. May. It is organised by the DFG Research Unit “Philology of Adventure” (FOR 2568)

Registration: adventure-narratives@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
The zoom-link for the conference will be mailed to all participants shortly before the conference starts : )