CFP: ImageTexT Special Issue: "Comics and Post-Secondary Pedagogy" (July 20, 2013)

ImageTexT Special Issue
"Comics and Post-Secondary Pedagogy"

Guest Editor: James Bucky Carter, Ph.D.
Co-Editor: Najwa Al-tabaa

The "Comics and Post-Secondary Pedagogy" special issue of ImageTexT is accepting paper submissions that address the teaching of comics with adult learners, defined as those in post-secondary settings such as colleges, universities, technical schools, community colleges, professional schools, etc., or in other settings in which adult education, enrichment, or training is a focus (prisons, the military, government, the workplace, extension programs, mutual aid movements, etc.).
Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Teaching comics in university courses
• Teaching the self-contained or special topics comics course
• Comics in the ____________ course (History, Philosophy, Graphic Design, Literature, Media, etc.)
• Introducing students to comics/specific comics in courses that do not feature much comics content otherwise
• Advocating for the incorporation of comics in your discipline/field/class: What works and what hasn't?
• Using comics to inform or educate at the university level in ways beyond the traditional college course (student life, retention, etc.)
• Teaching comics with non-traditional students
• Using comics to educate in the workplace
• Teaching comics in prison settings
• Comics as educational materials in professional development or training programs
• Using comics to assist college student or adult learners in English acquisition
• Adults' concepts and precepts regarding comics and teaching comics
• Using comics in medical, law, and business schools.
• Using comics to teach those who teach others
• Teaching the works of a specific comics artist
• Using/creating comics as a medium of expression/critical thought for students/Integration of comics-creating assignments

Please send completed papers in MLA citation format to James Bucky Carter at jbcarter777@gmail.com by July 20th, 2013. Copy all submissions to Najwa Al-tabaa at naltabaa@ufl.edu.

Articles submitted should usually not exceed 10,000 words including notes and should be presented to generally accepted academic standards. Please submit all articles by sending an email with the submission attached (including images, video etc.). Articles should be submitted preferably in HTML, or as Microsoft Word, StarOffice, or OpenOffice documents. Webbed essays are encouraged.
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See this CFP also at: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/news.shtml?/cfp/comics_and_pedagogy_cfp.shtml 

CFP: A Comic of Her Own: Women Writing, Reading, and Embodying in Comics (UF) (Jan 15; Mar 15-17)

A Comic of Her Own:

Women Writing, Reading, and Embodying in Comics
10^th Annual UF Comics Conference

in association with ImageTexT
March 15-17, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Trina Robbins

Guest Artist: Leela Corman

Guest Artist: Megan Kelso

Trina Robbins’ A Century of Women Cartoonists responds to a comics history which often forgets women.  In the past few years, interest has grown around women working in the comics industry, perhaps best exemplified by Hillary Chute’s 2010 Graphic Women. Similarly, academia has made many inroads into comics and gender through scholarship on superheroines in mainstream comics. Mike Madrid’s 2009 The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines and Jennifer Stuller’s 2010 Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, not to mention works by Trina Robbins and Lillian Robinson, attest to this growing interest in the representation of women in comics. However, these two scholarly fields rarely engage in meaningful dialog, despite their mutual interest: the examination of women in comics, whether behind the scenes or on the page. This conference hopes to facilitate this dialog and foster the scholarly exploration of intersections between women’s writing in comics, women represented in comics, and the women who read them. To accommodate this goal, the conference will feature a mixture of formats: keynote lectures, workshops with guest artists, Q & A sessions, panel discussions, and traditional academic conference presentations.

We encourage scholarly submissions on any one of these topics, as well as proposals for papers that explore the apparent gaps between them. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Superheroines in comics—how super are they, really?
• Good Girls vs. Bad Girls in mainstream comics
• Women’s writing as autobiography
• What women want—explorations of titles that are popular with female readers
• Queer women in comics
• Girly men and manly women in comics—how is gender drawn?
• Feminist readings of mainstream comics—are women still in the refrigerator?
• Monstrous women in comics—sexed/gendered readings of monstrous, radioactive, and generally othered bodies in mainstream comics
• Female sexuality in comics—from mainstream sex goddesses to queer alternatives
• Studies of work by particular women writers and/or artists
• Challenges to the “graphic women” canon
• Girls in children's picture books and children's picture books “for girls”
• Adaptation of comics superheroines to the big screen—representational differences and challenges in media adaptation
• Women in animation—the female form in motion

Please send 250-word abstracts to imagetext@english.ufl.edu by January 15^th, 2013.

CFP: ImageTexT Special Issue Invisible Art: Lettering, Coloring, Publication Design and Other Invisible Elements of Comics (December 15)

Being that I've published an essay on comics lettering myself, I'm particularly interested in this special issue...

ImageTexT Special Issue

Invisible Art:

Lettering, Coloring, Publication Design and Other Invisible Elements of Comics

Guest Editors, Zach Whalen and Aaron Kashtan

The noted comic book letterer Richard Starkings wrote: “It is with good reason that comic book lettering is largely an uncelebrated art. The paradox of good lettering is that the better it is, the less noticeable it becomes to the reader. Often the best lettering job is practically invisible to the reader.” Lettering has historically been invisible to most comics scholars as well, as have many other elements of the comics page and the comics text, including coloring, publication design, paper, and bookbinding. These “invisible” aspects of comics have typically been ignored in favor of more “visible” aspects, such as artwork and narrative. Therefore, this special issue will focus on those parameters of the comics page and text that help to frame comics images and narratives, without themselves drawing the reader's attention. This issue seeks to render visible what is invisible in comics: to inquire how the production of meaning in comics has shaped and been shaped by the invisible properties of the comics page.

Potential topics for essays may include but are not limited to:

• Artistic materials, e.g. pencils, ink, pens, paper, graphics tablets, styluses
• Comics lettering, including conventions thereof (e.g. capitalization, bold lettering)
• Paratextual or nondiegetic imagery in comics, e.g. word balloons, panel borders, emanata
• Comics coloring techniques, e.g. digital coloring
• Publication design
• Comics printing processes
• Comics publishing formats
• Effects of repackaging comics in different formats (e.g. single issues versus trade paperbacks)
• Effects of digital production and distribution on any or all of the above
• Cultural differences in, and effects of translation (including scanlation) on, any or all of the above
• Legal and cultural aspects of comics paratext

Submissions should be critical and/or theoretical in nature, rather than purely historical. As ImageTexT is concerned with the formal study of image/text relations, we are most interested in submissions that give significant attention to how images function in relationship to text. We strongly prefer to receive submissions that make reference to specific images and include high-resolution artwork along with text.

Essay submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, including notes. Contributors should format submissions based on the MLA Style Manual, 3rd edition, and use endnotes. Authors will be responsible for securing copyright permission for all images used.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to the special issue editors at akashtan@ufl.edu and zach.whalen@gmail.com.

The deadline for initial manuscript submission is December 15th, 2010.

CFP - ImageTexT Special Issue: The Hernandez Brothers (11/19)

ImageTexT Special Issue:

The Hernandez Brothers

http://www.derekroyal.com/CFP-Hernandez.pdf

Guest Editors, Christopher Gonzalez and Derek Parker Royal

For nearly thirty years the Hernandez brothers (Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario) have created comics that have expanded beyond superhero and sci-fi, bringing so-called “alternative” comics to the fore. Their fictive worlds are as sprawling and complex as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, and more scholars are beginning to take a closer look at their comics, specifically Love and Rockets. In keeping with this interest, ImageTexT will devote a special issue to the works of the Hernandez Brothers. This volume will seek to explore a multitude of theoretical perspectives that may further illuminate the brothers’ oeuvre. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Their influence on other graphic novelists, alternative comics, or mainstream comics
• Representations of the Latino/a subject
• Depictions of violence and trauma in their work
• Issues of gender, the body, and the sexual subject
• The act of consuming (eating, addiction, pornography, etc.)
• The significance of the telenovela as a metaphor for reading their comics and as a possible stylistic influence
• Any aspect of the non-Love and Rockets stories, e.g., their work with larger publishers such as DC and Dark Horse
• Their uses, or deconstruction, of Magical Realism
• The growth or evolution of prominent characters (Luba, Fritzi, Hopey, Maggie, etc.)
• Their possible influences on text-only authors such as Junot Díaz
• Comics and the political subject
• Narrative theory, narration, and narrative techniques of the Hernandez Brothers
• The Hernandez Brothers’ place and/or legacy (either as individuals or collectively) in the comics medium

All essay submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, including notes. Contributors should format submissions based on the MLA Style Manual, 3rd edition, and use endnotes. Authors will be responsible for securing copyright permission for all images used.

Address all inquiries, and submit all completed manuscripts, to the guest editors at gonzalez.283@osu.edu. Please include the words “Hernandez Special Issue” in the subject heading.

Deadline for final manuscript submission is December 31, 2010.
Abstracts and queries submitted by November 19 are highly recommended.

ImageTexT is a peer-reviewed, open access journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of comics and related media published by the English Department at the University of Florida with support from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more information on ImageTexT, please visit http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/.

ImageText 5.1 Published

The new issue of ImageText, the journal about comics from the University of Florida, was just published. Here's the homepage for this issue. Contents include:

Articles
Graphic Whiteness and the Lessons of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan	Juda Bennett and Cassandra Jackson
Watchmen: The Graphic Novel as Trauma Fiction	Brandy Ball Blake
The Confluence of Heroism, Sissyhood, and Camp in The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather	Frank Bramlett
"To the Stables, Robin": Regenerating the Frontier in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns	Theo Finigan
Breaking the Frame: Political Acts of Body in the Televised Dark Knight	DT Kofoed
"Mosaic Thresholds": Manifesting the Collection and Production of Comics in the works of Chris Ware	Aaron Mauro
The Beautiful Ambiguity of Blankets: Comics Representation and Religious Art	Benjamin Stevens
Reviews
"Now you will pay a dreadful penalty!": A Review of I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! and You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation! by Fletcher Hanks	Terry Harpold
Colophon
Notes on Contributors

CFP: ImageTexT issue on Alan Moore and adaptation (journal issue; April 1, 2010)

So today was the day for Alan Moore scholars, apparently...

CFP:
ImageTexT
Alan Moore and Adaptation

ImageTexT is pleased to announce an upcoming special issue on the work of Alan Moore and adaptation. Throughout his career, Moore has displayed a willingness to adapt and appropriate the plots, characters, settings, and themes from traditional narratives and the works of other authors into his own writing. Additionally, Moore's work itself continues to be the focus of adaptation, typically in the form of big-budget Hollywood films. We are seeking articles that deal with the work of Alan Moore and adaptation in any and every sense, whether that means analyzing the transitions of comics like Watchmen and V for Vendetta into film or analyzing the incorporation of folk tale and literature elements in works like Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

• Problems in adaptation and appropriation of existing characters and elements
• Formal analysis of comics as the medium for adaptation
• Issues concerning film adaptations where the author is not involved (which Moore rarely is)
• Concern with (or disdain for) historical fidelity when dealing with stories from a specific era
• Moore’s collaborations with various artists and their effect on adaptation
• Characters and narratives supposedly reserved for children which are adapted into explicitly adult stories

As ImageTexT is concerned with the formal study of image/text relations, we are most interested in submissions that give significant attention to how images function in relationship to text. We strongly prefer to receive submissions that make reference to specific images and include high-resolution artwork along with text. Throughout his career, Moore’s work has been resolutely bold and we encourage prospective contributors to be similarly daring with their ideas and analysis.

All submissions for this special issue are due April 1st, 2010. Send all submissions to Rex Krueger at rkrueger@ufl.edu and CC them to Katherine Shaeffer at KHShaeffer@gmail.com.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed and returned by June 1, 2010.

This issue is slated for publication in the Spring of 2011.

ImageTexT is a web-based journal published by the University of Florida, committed to advancing the academic study of comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. Under the guidance of an editorial board of scholars from a variety of disciplines, ImageTexT publishes solicited and peer-reviewed papers that investigate the material, historical, theoretical, and cultural implications of visual textuality. ImageTexT welcomes essays emphasizing (but not limited to) the aesthetics, cognition, production, reception, distribution and dissemination of comics and other media as they relate to comics, along with translations of previously existing research on comics as dimensions of visual culture.