CFP: From Brick to Grid: The Comics Grid's Special Collection on 100 Years of Krazy Kat (October 1)

Call for Submissions

From Brick to Grid:

The Comics Grid:

Journal of Comics Scholarship’s

Special Collection on

100 Years of Krazy Kat

This call for submissions will remain open

until 1st October 2013
 

On October 13th 1913, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat – one of the most outstanding comic strips ever created – was first published in The New York Evening Journal. Krazy Kat initiated a whole new way of thinking about comics, and today it continues to amaze and challenge artists, critics and fans. A wide range of scholarship published since the mid-1990s (e.g. Blackmore 1997; Amiran 2000; Baetens 2011; Stein 2012) indicates both ongoing interest and the potential for new interventions.

 

Herriman took a simple premise – the conflict between Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp – and developed it for over 30 years, testing the limitations of the medium and creating a complex universe that few authors or artists have equalled. Herriman’s construction of Krazy Kat’s panels and his manipulation of time and space demanded a way of reading that helped elevate comics to the status of “art” and made Krazy Kat an iconic and inspirational strip.

 

To kickstart its new era as an open access journal published by Ubiquity Press, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship (http://www.comicsgrid.com/) is celebrating the centenary of this iconic strip’s first appearance with a special collection of academic essays dedicated to Krazy Kat.

 

We welcome submissions from graduate students, scholars, artists, teachers, curators, researchers, publishers and librarians from any academic, disciplinary or artistic background interested in the study and/or practice of comics or other related cultural expressions. Submissions can cover any thematic field and approach as long as they fulfill The Comics Grid’s editorial guidelines, available here. (http://www.comicsgrid.com/cfp/).

 

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: Krazy Kat and modernism; the influence of Krazy Kat on later comics and animation; Herriman’s visual and narrative aesthetics; the use of language and slang; politics and Herriman’s work; Krazy Kat, comics, and newspapers; Krazy Kat across the world, etc.

 

This call for submissions will remain open until 1st October 2013.

• The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship is thoroughly peer reviewed in an online, open, collaborative form.
• Accepted contributions will appear on The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship’s new Ubiquity Press (http://www.ubiquitypress.com/) platform, which the journal will be moving to. These will be published online as soon as they pass peer review and will be openly available as HTML and PDF.
• The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship uses the Cross-Check anti-plagiarism service, to ensure that all submitted papers are checked prior to peer review and has a membership to the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org). Our editorial board is listed at http://www.comicsgrid.com/editorial-board/.
• All published contributions wil be marked up into JATS XML (http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov/) and typeset into print quality PDF, this will enhance the quality and functionality for the readers.
• Each article published by The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship will have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI, http://www.doi.org/) which will broaden their ‘findability’. DOIs are essential to enable articles to be cited properly, and those citations can be tracked to assess ‘impact’. This is something that tenure panels and UK REF panels take note of. The Comics Grid is set up to meet the criteria for Impact Factor qualification.
• References will also be linked in the HTML text, linked by DOI, and desposited in CrossRef, enhancing the findability of the article.
• All articles will be sent to appropriate indexers, to help readers find the content.
• All articles will come with full article-level metrics. These will provide standard statistics such as article views, downloads and citations, as well as ‘altmetrics’ that indicate the wider impact of the article, such as tweets, Facebook likes, and Wikipedia references. As with DOIs, these metrics are very important for authors and their assessors.
• The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship will be permanently archived with the CLOCKSS service, which also guarantees their long-term availability as open access (see http://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home for more information).
• The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship uses only Creative Commons-Attribution (CC-By) licenses and all authors retain copyright over their own work. All articles will be completely available for text-mining and can be deposited in any additional repository the author wishes.
• Publishing on the new platform incurs an Article Processing Charge (APC) of £200, charged following publication. Please note however that a no-questions-asked waiver is available for anyone who cannot source the funds. We do not want inability to pay to prevent the publication of good work. The APC covers the costs of production, hosting and access to the services listed above that come with our membership of organisations such as CrossRef, CLOCKSS, COPE, OASPA and ALPSP.

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Ubiquity Press (see http://www.ubiquitypress.com and also http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/ubiquity/43312 for more information) is a researcher-led, fully open access publisher, and as such gives high priority to the interests of researchers and smaller journals, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.

This Call for Submissions is also available online at http://www.comicsgrid.com/cfs-100-years-of-krazy-kat/

CATS IN COMICS #2 Krazy Kat by Gene Kannenberg, Jr.

I have committed bloggery by invitation. Michael Hill (a.k.a. "Doctor Comics") recently began a series on cats in comics at his blog, starting with the great Doraemon. I was honored to be invited to contribute post #2, on George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," which is now live.

I first met Michael in 1999 (can it be that long ago, already?!?) when he came to the US and presented "Outside Influence/Local Colour: the Australian Small Press" at the International Comic Arts Festival, of which I was then the chair. (He still has his 1999 ICAF t-shirt, designed by Max himself!) At the time I was impressed by his scholarship and his conviviality, and we've kept in e-contact over the years. I was pleased to be asked by him to be his first guest-blogger in this series. Thanks, Michael, for the opportunity to wax rhapsodic!

CFP - 2010 Festival of Cartoon Art Pre-Conference (June 15; October 14)

On October 14, 2010 the Billy Ireland Cartoon Research Library & Museum, in collaboration with Project Narrative and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Ohio State University,  will host its second one-day symposium on “Humor, Play and Identity in Comics: Academic Perspectives." The gathering will serve as a prelude to the 2010 Festival of Cartoon Art, which runs from October 15-16. For the second time, the triennial Festival is sponsoring an academic pre-conference in recognition of the exciting developments in academic comics studies in recent years and the growing collaborations between comics creators and scholars. We are soliciting papers for three panels:

1. Humor, Play, and Identity in Comics
2. Perspectives from Narrative Theory
3. Krazy Kat at 100

The afternoon's events will conclude with a keynote address on George Herriman by Herriman biographer Michael Tisserand.  

To be considered for the panels, please send a 250-500 word abstract and a one-page vita to Jared Gardner at gardner.236@osu.edu. The extended deadline for abstracts is June 15, 2010.  Please contact Jared with any questions.

This year's Festival of Cartoon Art speakers and guests will include Matt Groening, Bill Griffith, Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, Gene Luen Yang, James Sturm, Paul Levitz, Patrick McDonnell, Dan Piraro, Brendan Burford, Jan Eliot, Tom Gammill, Jen Sorensen, Dave Kellett, and Steve Breen. For more information about the 2010 Festival of Cartoon Art, see http://cartoons.osu.edu/final_2010/