CFP: SANE Journal (April 27)

Call for Papers

SANE Journal

April 27, 2015

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Researchers, scholars, teachers, administrators, specialists, and advanced graduate students are invited to submit works of research, reviews, and rationales. The mission of SANE Journal is to promote research regarding the integration of comic books, graphic novels, or “other” sequential art narratives in educational settings; including the teaching of comics or the ways in which the comics medium can instruct or cause a change in behavior. Manuscripts should be submitted by April 27 2015, with an anticipated publication date of July 2015.

SANE Journal is a peer-reviewed, open access interdisciplinary journal covering all things comics-and-education-related, from pre-k to doctorate. For more information, email Richard Graham (rgraham7@unl.edu). Articles can be submitted for review and possible inclusion by visiting: http://www.sanejournal.net/.

CFP: Comics and Translation / New Readings journal issue (Nov 10)

Comics and Translation

Call for Contributions

to themed issue of New Readings

Since its rise to popularity in the early 20th century, comic literature has travelled extensively across linguistic and cultural borders. Many comic characters are part of a general cultural heritage that is not confined to any one language. Yet, the role of the translator and translation in facilitating comic literature’s mobility has been relatively little studied. This oversight may well stem from the traditional marginalisation of comics within the literary field, but it can also be linked to the particular circumstances in which many mainstream comics are produced. More often than not, comics are a team effort involving at least one graphic artist and one scriptwriter, or larger creative teams. In such circumstances, the traditional idea of individual authorship and responsibility is untenable from the outset, turning the translator into one of several collaborators in the production process. Lawrence Venuti has studied the translator’s invisibility, which goes hand in hand with a ‘practice of reading and evaluating’ that takes the translation for the original. This invisibility seems to apply even more markedly to the translation of comic literature, where there is a multimodal message. Here the message is only in part encoded linguistically and the visual mode is often taken to predominate over the textual mode, further reducing the translator’s visibility. This themed journal issue aims to expose the importance of translation in the history of comics.

New Readings is inviting articles on any aspect of the translation of comic literature, widely understood here to refer to literature that combines images with words, from single stand-alone panels, to comic strips and graphic novels. We are particularly interested in theoretical contributions and in articles whose scope transcends single texts or individual authors. However, work on practical aspects of comics translation and case studies will also be considered for publication.

 

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• The comics translator’s (in)visibility
• Reading comics in translation
• The limits of translatability
• Translation and comics genre
• Dialect, sociolect and idiolect in comics translation
• Standards and conventions of comics translation
• Translating sound effects
• Translating images
• Software-based comics translation
• Spatial constraints in translating comics
• Translating comics adaptations of literary classics
• Reception of comics in translation
• The market for comics translation
• Case studies of comics translated between any of the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

Contributions to the themed issue should reach New Readings by 10 November 2014. Submission is through the journal’s online system and requires self-registration. Submissions must be prepared in accordance with the conventions of MLA style and be between 6,000 and 8,000 words long (including footnotes and a list of works cited). New Readings welcomes submissions in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Articles in languages other than English are considered for publication if the subject matter justifies the choice of language. If in doubt, and for all other queries, please contact the editors prior to submission: NewReadings@cardiff.ac.uk. For full submission details and a checklist, please see the journal’s webpage: http://ojs.cf.ac.uk/index.php/newreadings/about/submissions

About the journal

New Readings is a peer-reviewed (double-blind), open-access online journal based at Cardiff University. We publish original research in the fields of literature, film and visual culture. Previous themed issues are: ‘Images of Exile’, ‘Figures of the Self’, ‘Identity, Gender, Politics’, ‘Space and Identity’, ‘Travelling the Urban Space’, ‘Writing Difference’, ‘Alternative Voices in European Cinema’, ‘Truth Claims in Fiction Film’ and ‘Hamlet and Poetry’. See the website for all past issues: http://ojs.cf.ac.uk/index.php/newreadings/index/

CFP: Nordic History and Cultural Memory in Comics / SJoCA journal issue (Oct 1)

Call for Papers

From the Land

of the Midnight Sun:

Nordic History and Cultural Memory in Comics

Special Issue of

Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art

The past is all around us, not least in our entertainments. It is also a highly malleable thing that can be moulded and shaped to tell us who we are, who we should be, and where we came from. The myriad ways in which conceptions about the past can be informed by contemporary concerns and the ways the past can be used to legitimize present practices and ideas have been ably charted by scholars in the rapidly growing field of memory studies. Although highly interdisciplinary, comics studies has yet to truly enter this field, despite the fact that its subject matter provides ample opportunity for studies of representations of history and memory.

Nordic comics history and comics that represent the past and present of the Nordic countries provide one of many possible inroads into these fruitful lines of inquiry. For example, Nordic comics, from early comics strips through locally produced contemporary comic books, like the Swedish funny animal series Bamse, Norwegian humor series Nemi, the Finnish Moomin stories, Danish strip Poeten og Lillemor, and many more, all provide a vast and still largely unstudied archive of historical perspectives and attitudes. Similarly, Nordic comics creators, like “Team Fantomen,” who have produced the majority of Phantom stories for regional publication since the 1960s, make frequent use of the Nordic past as a setting or story element. In addition, varying degrees of adulation or criticism inform biographical and historical comics and graphic novels about personages like Swedish writer August Strindberg and Elias Lönnrot, compiler of Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. Finally, it can be noted that the Viking Age and conceptions about its culture and beliefs have been a particularly inspiring topic for comics creators, spawning among others Peter Madsen’s long-running and often ideologically anachronistic Valhalla, several adaptations of Swedish writer Frans G. Bengtsson’s Röde Orm (The Long Ships or Red Orm in English), and, in 2013, the superhero-inspired The Norseman.

Furthermore, comics have helped make Nordic history and memory international imaginative currency. The Viking Age has been a particularly frequent topic, appearing in American mainstream comics like Marvel’s Thor and Vertigo’s Northlanders, Japanese Manga like Viking Saga and King of Viking, and Franco-Belgian album series like Asterix, Thorgal, and Johan and Peewit. In these comics, and in many others like them, the creators use a past not their own to speak to and about their own time and place. But in recent years, Nordic comics have also increasingly appeared in translation, perhaps most notably in such anthologies as Kolor Klimax, From Wonderland with Love, and the United States’ 2010 “Swedish Invasion.” In various ways, these comics contend with preconceived notions about the Nordic countries and Nordicness.

The Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art is planning a special issue on Nordic history and cultural memory in comics, and invites articles about these and related matters.

Welcome topics include, but are not limited to:

• Representation of Nordic historical personages and events
• Nordic comics and the search for a useable past
• Comics and revisionist Nordic historiography
• Comics, the past, and Nordic social criticism
• Nordic stereotypes and stereotyped Nordics
• Vikings and Old Norse religion in comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, and bandes dessinées
• Nordic comics in translation
• The reception of Nordic comics abroad
• What’s so Nordic about Nordic comics?

Please send an abstract of max. 300 words, along with a short bio and contact information, to submissions@sjoca.com. The deadline for abstracts is October 1, 2014. Full articles due by January 1, 2015. We also welcome reviews and forum texts (brief, non-peer reviewed scholarly commentaries, essays, and debate pieces). Interested parties should review our submission guidelines at sjoca.com and contact editor Martin Lund with a pitch or book request at p.martin.lund@gmail.com.

Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (SJoCA) is an online, open-access, peer reviewed academic journal about comics and sequential art. The journal is interdisciplinary, encouraging a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Although the journal is rooted in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), it is global in scope and aims to publish high quality research regardless of national or regional boundaries. The journal publishes articles, book reviews, and forum texts from the field of comics studies. The language of the journal is English.

Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art is an independent journal and is published by the non-profit organisation Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art.

Call for Papers: Transformed by Comics: The Influence of Comics/BD/Graphic Novels on the Novel / Image & Narrative special issue (Sept 30)

Call for Papers

Transformed by Comics:

The Influence of Comics/BD/Graphic Novels

on the Novel

Special Issue of Image & Narrative

While there has been scholarly research on the influence of poetry on cinema, or the influence of paintings on poetry, as well as the relationship between film and fiction, little work has been published on the importance of comics and graphic novels for contemporary writing. Such a space is all the more obvious when one considers new works on the relationship between high and low culture, comics and fine art. What would for example a novelization of a BD, graphic novel or comic mean? What titles exist in today’s ‘comics aware’ culture and is there a forgotten tradition to discover? What codes, practices, themes and narrative techniques are significant for novelizations of text-image source texts?

There is a small but significant discussion on Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay (2001), or Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat (1994) as well as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), but not much on Tom de Have’s Funny Papers (1985), Frederic Teuten’s Tintin in the New World (1993), Rick Moody’s Ice Storm (1994), Austin Grossman’s Soon I will be invincible (2007). More work is clearly needed, including on lost Anglophone texts, as well as sites from other cultural traditions.

We certainly need also to start to evaluate Francophone and other non-Anglophone examples. Do the novelists who also work with BD separate out their two fields of activity or work with more intermedial techniques? For example does Jean Teulé’s Bord Cadrage (2009) work as a complex play between forms? Not to mention work from Harry Morgan (alias Christian Wahl), who is a novelist, BD writer and theorist of comics. And what about the growing importance of Ludovic Debeurme, Benoit Peeters, François Rivière, Willy Mouele, and Joann Sfar? All of whom are working in spaces that sit between traditional fiction and the world of the comics. What about the novels in other languages? In Italian (e.g. Umberto Eco’s La Misteriosa Fiamma de la regina Loanna, 2004)? In Dutch? Spanish? German? Japanese? Also, if the comics world is dominated by male writers and male fans, are there women writers interested in subverting these phallocentric comics in their novels?

We invite papers on any aspect of this research question, including treatments of single authors or comparative works, theoretical engagements with underlying narratological and text-image questions, as well as cross-national expansions of the sense of the field. No special consideration is given for any cultural space, we encourage originality. Similarly papers on the pre-existing tradition of children’s literature and its adaptation strategies are welcome such as Dave Eggers’s novelisation of Where the Wild Things are.

Length & Deadlines:

400-500 word abstracts are invited for 30 September 2014

4000-5000 word essays to be completed after editorial selection for January 30 2015

The text will be published in a special issue of Image & Narrative after the traditional double blind review process.

Language: English or French

Contact editors: Hugo Frey (h.frey@chi.ac.uk) and Chris Reyns-Chikuma (reynschi@ualberta.ca)

CFP: Digital Comics, special issue of Networking Knowledge (July 11)

Call for Papers
Digital Comics
A special-themed issue of
Networking Knowledge,
the journal of the MeCCSA-PGN
Deadline for abstracts 11th July

The medium of comics has always evolved alongside the technology via which it is produced, distributed and consumed. In this age of easily accessible digital technologies, the comic form is undergoing a series of transformative changes. This remediation of the form has seen the medium change to accommodate the wider range of story-telling tropes and functionalities offered by the digital environment. Through portable touchscreen displays we are able to consume comics, film, animation, prose, games and other forms of interactive visual media. The multimodal capacity of these devices allows for the emergence of hybrid forms of comics which incorporate tropes from these other screen-based media.

Against this background, papers focused towards the following areas would sit well within this themed edition of Networking Knowledge:

• New and emergent digital comic forms and technologies.
• Changes to the underlying structures of the form as a result of digital mediation.
• Crossovers, adaptation and hybridisation between comics and other digital media.
• Acts of reading and the impact of digital mediation.
• Aesthetic and literary analysis of digital comic narratives.
• Digital distribution, changes in the industry and the threat of piracy.
• Webcomics, widening readerships, minority voices and fan cultures.
• Multimodality and comics relationship with larger transmedia narratives.

Other areas relevant to the study of digital comics will also be considered.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers of 5,000 to 6,000 words should be submitted via e-mail to Jayms Nichols and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey at netknow@e-merl.com by Friday 11th July 2014.

Abstracts should specify the research question and make a clear connection to one or more aspects of the digital comics theme. Proposed papers must be original and must not have been published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

If you have any questions about the issue, please e-mail the address above. If you have questions about Networking Knowledge in general, please contact the editor, Sam Ward, at aaxsjw@nottingham.ac.uk.

CFP: Comics and the Canon / "Partial Answers" journal issue (June 16)

Call for Papers
Comics and the Canon
a special issue of

Partial Answers:

Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas

Over the last three decades, comics, graphic memoirs, and graphic novels have emerged as literary, artistic, and cultural artifacts of central importance. Comics were once seen as outside what we might broadly call a literary and fine-arts "canon": as objects belonging to low culture rather than high culture, as ephemeral items rather than artworks of lasting and iconic significance, as lesser hybrids of word and image rather than as belonging to a specific demanding medium. And yet the last thirty years have seen the rise and impact of works that are serious, ambitious, and monumental — works in conversation with an established literary and artistic canon, and works which themselves make a claim to cultural centrality and significance. "Comics studies" has developed as an academic discipline; artists and critics have worked to recover the rich and understudied history of the medium, with the result that a "canon" of central figures is emerging.

What is gained and what is lost when we try to establish a Comics canon? How do artists make claims to cultural centrality by putting their work in conversation with more traditional canonical works, and how do they challenge the 'canon' through exploring alternative aesthetic values and subjects? In the canon-building process of winnowing and centralization, which works are elevated and which are excluded? Is there something perverse in canonizing works in a medium that has often characterized itself as marginal? What tensions are thereby exposed, not just in comics but also in the very process of canonization?

This collection invites essays on all aspects of comics and canonization, including

• analyses of comics which rewrite or otherwise engage with canonical works of art, film and literature
• studies that consider comics in relation to other artistic media in which word and image are traditionally combined (illustrated novels, illuminated manuscripts, film scripts and storyboards, etc.)
• defenses and critiques of the artists whose works have become most central to the comics canon (Spiegelman, Satrapi, Bechdel)
• arguments for the inclusion of understudied artists, artworks and movements in the comics canon
• essays on the ways in which comics challenge the premises and processes of literary canonization
• projections on the future of the ‘canon’ in comics classes and scholarship

Submissions (between 5,000 and 10,000 words, the Harvard system of references) are due by June 16, 2014. Authors of the papers that are accepted will be responsible for obtaining permissions to reprint illustrations.

The journal will accept electronic submissions, in Word or RTF, to be sent to partans@mail.huji.ac.il . For inquiries please contact the guest editor, Professor Ariela Freedman (Concordia University, Montreal) at ariela.freedman@concordia.ca

CFP also on-line at the Partial Answers website.

CFP: Comics, Multimodality, and Composition / Special Issue of Composition Studies (Aug 1, 2014)

CFP for Special Issue of Composition Studies
Theme: Comics, Multimodality, and Composition
For 43.1 (Spring 2015)
Guest Editor: Dale Jacobs, University of Windsor

DESCRIPTION
Over the past ten years, composition has increasingly embraced writing and reading in multiple modes (words, but also images, sounds, video, spatial relationships, gestures, and other sign systems). In this movement towards multimodality, comics have been largely ignored. Comics, however, provide rich ground for exploration in relation to multimodality and composition. This special issue begins with the idea that comics are a valuable space of practice for multimodal literacies, both inside and outside the classroom.

Like other multimodal texts, comics form a multifaceted environment in which meaning is negotiated between creators and readers. Comics add another dimension to multimodality, which has often focused on digital texts, and can be used to link traditional alphabetic literacies with newer digital ones. Furthermore, as Michael Bitz argues in When Commas Meet Kryptonite: Classroom Lessons from the Comic Book Project, "In the context of new media and literacies, comics are a rare bridge between the canon of reading skills that children are expected to master in school and the literacies that they embrace on their own and out of school" (11). Not only are comics important multimodal texts in their own right, but they can also function as an important bridge to other literacies.

This special issue of Composition Studies will explore how comics can be productively used in writing theory and practice. Articles, sequential narratives, short reflective essays, and Course Designs are all welcome, as are pieces on comics aimed at the "Composing With" section of the journal. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Comics as a way to connect reading and composing multimodal texts.
• Comics literacies and digital literacies.
• Comics in relation to the NCTE Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies, the WPA Outcomes Statement, and/or the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.
• Comics and/as collaboration.
• Comics, rhetoric, and the teaching of writing.
• Comics theory and the teaching of writing.
• Comics as a way to examine how students conceive and experience literacies outside of school and possible connections to school literacies.
• Specific ways to use comics in the composition classroom.
• Examinations of how Comics Studies can inform Composition Studies and vice versa.

TIMELINE

• Full-length submissions due August 1, 2014
• Submission determinations sent by November 1, 2014
• Revised manuscripts due February 13, 2015

CONTACT
Direct queries about the special issue and full-length manuscripts in .doc or .docx formats to Dale Jacobs at djacobs@uwindsor.ca. Direct general questions about Composition Studies to compstudies@uc.edu. Visit our website for more information: http://www.uc.edu/journals/composition-studies.html.

CFP: Comics and Cultural Work / Comics Forum (Oct. 31)

Comics Forum presents…

Call for Papers:

Comics and Cultural Work

Guest Editor: Casey Brienza

‘All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation,’ wrote sociologist Howard Becker in his seminal monograph on cultural production Art Worlds. Comic art is no exception to Becker’s basic insight. Writers, illustrators, graphic designers, letterers, editors, printers, typesetters, publicists, publishers, distributors, retailers, and countless others are both directly and indirectly involved in the creative production of what is commonly thought of as the comic book.

Yet comics scholars all too often advance a narrow auteurist vision of production in their research. Names such as Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Osamu Tezuka continue to loom large in the intellectual firmament, while, despite recent calls for sociological approaches to comics scholarship, the large numbers of people without whom no comic would exist in the first place are routinely overlooked. A clear focus upon these people and the contributions of their labour is therefore long overdue and absolutely necessary to advance the boundaries of the theoretical and methodological study of comics. After all, how are we to understand any work of comic art if we know nothing about the myriad varieties of cultural work that went into its creation?

Possible topics include (but are not limited to): cultures and/or experiences of work in the comics production, distribution, promotion, and consumption circuit; theorizing the cultural work of comics; precarious and freelance labour in comics; feminization and other employment inequality; professional identities and self-identifications in the comics industry; new workflow/publishing models for comics in the digital age; and analyses of autobiographical comics and/or fictionalized narratives about the life of the comic book artist.

Along these lines, we are seeking short contributions of 1000-1500 words for a series of Comics Forum articles on comics and cultural work to be published throughout December 2013 on the Comics Forum website (http://comicsforum.org). Prospective authors should also include a short biographical sketch of 50-100 words. The deadline for submission is October 31, 2013, and you will receive notification of acceptance or rejection by November 15.

Any inquiries and submissions should be directed to Casey Brienza, City University London (casey.brienza.1@city.ac.uk). Please write ‘Comics and Cultural Work’ in the subject line.

Comics Forum is supported by: Thought Bubble, Dr Mel Gibson, the University of Chichester, Routledge, Arts Council England and Molakoe Graphic Design.

CFP: Italian Science Fiction / journal issue (September 30)

Call for Papers

Italian Science Fiction

Science-Fiction Studies Special Issue

Science-Fiction Studies* is gathering scholarly essays for a special issue on Italian Science Fiction. The projected publication date is 2015.  Articles on this topic that would be of interest include the following themes or approaches:

• analysis and discussion of important works of Italian SF (novels, short stories, film, comics, magazines, t.v. series, on-line journals, in the academy, etc.)
• profiles of important Italian SF writers
• works of SF written by authors who are considered part of the literary mainstream (e.g. Buzzati, Landolfi, Levi, Morselli, etc.)
• the critical debate around SF in Italian culture and the academy
• the socio-cultural impact of science fiction’s visions in Italy

Articles should be written in English, should be between 8,000 and 13,000 words (including endnotes and bibliography), and include a comprehensive bibliography. Authors should follow Science-Fiction Studies’s formatting guidelines (see below **).

Abstracts (max. 500 words) are due on or by September 30, 2013. They should be sent via email as an MS Word attachment, or included within the body of the email to Arielle Saiber (asaiber@bowdoin.edu) and Umberto Rossi (teacher@fastwebnet.it). 

If your proposal is accepted, you will receive a message no later than October 20. We will then need the complete article by May 31, 2014. All submitted articles will be sent for peer-review; final acceptance will be based on reviewer reports and those of the special issue’s editors.

* For information about Science Fiction Studies see http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/sciefictstud/about.html  and http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/

** Guidelines for formatting the article: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/masthead.htm?47,34

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.

—

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/

CFP: The Gothic and Death / Gothic Studies journal (Dec. 1)

Call for Papers

Gothic Studies Special Issue:

The Gothic and Death

Advanced by way of various conventions and symbols, memento mori — “Remember that you will die” — is Gothic literature’s greatest cautionary warning. Although Peter Walmsley has suggested that this reminder to live with death in view is “the peculiar property of the British psyche,” it has required much repeating given what Edward Young identifies in his famous Night Thoughts (1742) as a universal tendency towards death denial: “All men think all men mortal but themselves.” Despite Geoffrey Gorer’s claim that death became the new pornography in the 20^th century, uses of the Gothic mode continue to register an ongoing fascination with the Death Question that often vacillates, in various imaginative ways, between repression and acknowledgement.

Proposals for individual or collaborative papers are invited on the idea of the Gothic anddeath, decay, and the afterlife. The editor is particularly interested in proposals that will theorize the Gothic’s engagement with this fixation trans-historically, trans-nationally, and trans-culturally. Proposals from diverse theoretical perspectives ranging across different genres and mediums (poetry, fiction, film, graphic novels, etc.) are especially welcome. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

• the afterlife and undead afterlives — zombies, angels, vampires, ghosts, etc.
• the corpse — abject, female, anatomized, and otherwise
• danse macabre
• acts/rites of mourning & memorializing — personal and national
• death of the author/reader
• dead women/deadly women
• the sanitization/medicalization of death
• decay and ruin
• live burial; gothic resurrections
• femme fatale/homme fatal
• spiritualism, séances, voodoo, and the Occult
• sex and death
• the aesthetics of death
• death and the visual arts/visual technologies
• Victorian necroculture
• manner of death: suicide (self murder); homicide; the war dead; mass murder; sudden death; capital punishment (torture, executions, serial killings)
• elegies and epitaphs
• symbolic/figurative death
• death and the double
• death and/by technology
• graveyards and graveyard poetry
• the death drive
• ars moriendi — the “Art of dying,” death/consolation manuals
• the Good death/bad death
• dead children
• wills, funerals, wakes

Please send electronic copies of proposals of approximately 500 words and a 100-word bio by 1 December, 2013, to Dr. Carol Margaret Davison, Professor and Head, Department of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing, University of Windsor (cdavison@uwindsor.ca). Notices of acceptance will follow shortly thereafter with completed essays of approximately 6000 words (including endnotes) due by March 31, 2014.

 

The official journal of the International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.

 

For more information on Gothic Studies, including submission guidelines and subscription recommendations, please see the journal's website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/journals/gs

 

To view Gothic Studies online, see here: http://manchester.metapress.com/content/1362-7937 

 

To sign up to alerts for Gothic Studies, see here: https://manchester.metapress.com/content/122707/toc-alert

CFP: Writing Visual Culture: Digital Comics / journal issue (August 19)

Call for Papers
Writing Visual Culture:

Digital Comics

Writing Visual Culture is the open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal of the University of Hertfordshire's TVAD Research Group. The journal's focus is the relationship between text, narrative and image. We are currently seeking submissions for a new themed edition examining the world of digital comics.

The medium of comics is undergoing a period of transition as the popular mode of creation, distribution and consumption shifts from print to digital display. This is a transition that has been underway since before the general adoption of the World Wide Web and recent advances in portable digital display has only served to accelerate the pace of this change.

Digital comic pioneers have pushed at the boundaries of the medium and explored the possibilities offered by the inherent interactivity of the medium and the multimodality of computing devices. Today, smart phones and tablet computers provide a single platform of consumption on which comics, film, animation, games and other interactive visual media are equally at home. Now as comics gradually leave behind the tropes and trappings of print and embrace those of the screen, we also see the emergence of new hybrid forms that appropriate tropes from other screen-based media.

Against this background, papers focused towards the following areas would sit well within our themed edition of Writing Visual Culture:

• New and emergent digital comic forms and technologies.
• Changes to the underlying structures of the form as a result of digital mediation.
• Crossovers, adaptation and hybridisation between comics and videogames.
• Motion comics and animated adaptations of the form.
• Acts of reading and the impact of digital mediation.
• Aesthetic and Literary analysis of digital comic narratives.
• Digital distribution, changes in the industry and the threat of piracy.
• Webcomics, widening readerships, minority voices and fan cultures.
• Multimodality and comics relationship with larger transmedia narratives.

Although other areas relevant to the study of digital comics will also be considered.

Abstracts of 200 words for papers of 3000 to 6000 words should be submitted via e-mail to Daniel Merlin Goodbrey at wvc@e-merl.com by Monday 19th August. Abstracts should specify the research question or issue that you are addressing and make clear the connection between your paper and the Digital Comics theme. Proposed papers must be original and not have been published already or accepted for publication elsewhere.

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: Australasian Journal of Popular Culture "All-Pulp" Issue (Feb. 1)

Call for Papers:

Australasian Journal of Popular Culture

"All-Pulp" Issue

 

The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture is seeking submissions of articles for an "all-pulp" issue.  This issue will be co-edited by the journal's editor, Toni-Johnson Woods, and Justin Everett, area chair for Pulp Studies for the Popular Culture Association. 

Our aim is to produce a truly international publication, and so we encourage articles that explore pulp in every nation!  We are not limiting "pulp" to the American magazine tradition, but wish to include the pulp traditions of countries outside the U.S. which may include paperbacks, comics, and other forms as appropriate to that country's tradition.  Please include as many images as is appropriate to your article.

The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture is a double-blind refereed journal and is the official publication of Popcaanz (Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand).

We are embracing all meanings of “pulp” and are particularly interested in innovative approaches to scholarship—practitioners, artists, and fans are welcome to submit material.  We are also interested in material that comes from the broadest possible spectrum and can include:

•    Print – digests and cheap fiction
•    Pulp “industry”
•    Merchandise
•    Film
•    Music
•    Websites
•    Comics
•    Radio
•    Book Reviews – please submit your pulp book for review
•    Exhibition Reviews
•    Photographic essay

Submission Deadline:  Feb. 1, 2013 for full papers.

All papers must conform to the journal’s style guide (British English):
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/page/index,name=journalstyleguide/

Please submit articles of between 4,000 and 6,000 words to the editors:
Toni Johnson-Woods, t.johnsonwoods@uq.edu.au

CFP: Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books

FYI.

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) will publish a special issue devoted to comics and comic fandom in 2013. TWC seeks theoretically informed essays that explore how dedicated fans as well as the broader public have appropriated, interpreted, re-invented and transformed comic books and comic book characters to define visions of themselves, their groups, and their relation to broader society, both national and global. The deadline for submission is 1 April 2012.

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works that publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. TWC's aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

For the full CFP, visit the website at
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/announcement/view/20

SANE Journal 1.1 On-Line

SANE (Sequential Art Narrative in Education) Journal vol. 1 issue 1 is now available on-line. Titled "Comics in the Contact Zone," it includes articles and features on X-Men, Thor, Citizen 13660, Pride of Baghdad, Magneto: Testament, Teaching Graphic Novels, and more. Congrats to all involved!

Announcement: Membership of the International Bande Dessinée Society and European Comic Art

From Liverpool University Press.

Membership of the

International Bande Dessinée Society

and European Comic Art

The IBDS (International Bande Dessinée Society) is a forum for scholarly exchange on all aspects of the bande dessinée, or French-language comic strip.  It welcomes all critical approaches, be they historical, sociological, political, literary, linguistic or other.

The Society largely, but not exclusively, draws its membership from English-speaking countries, thereby offering an alternative viewpoint to that of the thriving French-language BD community. The Society was officially founded in 2001, again following a conference in Glasgow, and its work has continued at further conferences in Leicester, Manchester and London.

In 2011, members of the IBDS can again receive the journal European Comic Art as part of a special membership package.

Published by Liverpool University Press twice a year, European Comic Art was the first English-language scholarly publication devoted to the study of European-language graphic novels, comic strips, comic books and caricature.

The journal is hosted online by Metapress: http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/121625/

Membership fees for 2011 are £25, please contact Clare Hooper at the below address to update your membership.

CLARE HOOPER

JOURNALS PUBLISHING MANAGER, LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

4 Cambridge Street, Liverpool, L69 7ZU, UK Tel. +44-[0]151-794-3135, Fax +44-[0]151-794-2235

E: clare.hooper@liverpool.ac.uk   W: www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk

Follow Liverpool University Press on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivUniPress

Download LUP’s new Spring 2011 catalogue from our website:

http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/documents/LUPSPRING2011.pdf

CFP: Gender and Superheroes (Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics; January 1)

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

Special Issue: Gender and Superheroes

Editors: David Huxley and Joan Ormrod

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Consulting Editor: Roger Sabin

The superhero genre dominates the comics industry with representations of hypermuscular action men or sexy women wearing costumes that show off their near naked bodies. There are examples of more diverse approaches to both creating and analysing these figures but they remain, as yet, in the minority. Much of this work is produced by mainly male creators for similarly constructed audiences. Whilst that does not limit the possibilities of the superhero, to date there has been little substantial work in superheroes and gender beyond Trina Robbins work on women superheroes and Ndalianis’s edited collection of essays on heroism in which a few essays touch upon superheroes. This area, however, is of great interest to academia as evidenced by a significant proportion of papers submitted to the journal in recent months. We are, therefore, proposing a special issue in which this topic can be examined in a more sustained manner. Submissions are invited of papers 5000-7000 words by January 1, 2011 relating but not limited to the following topics:

Representation

• Representing gender: masculinity, femininity, gay, transvestite superheroes – transgression or queer readings
• The superhero/ine body
• Superheroes in other nations – eg: British, Indian or Latin American superheroes and how they hail transnational and national identities
• Representing superheroes in comics – eg: Love and Rockets, Kim Dietch’s The Cat
• Revisioning of the character – for instance, the reworking of Catwoman

Theoretical Issues

• Feminist theory and gendered identities – Judith Butler
• Gaze and psychoanalytic
• Class and the superhero

Audiences

• Manga superheroes and their audiences
• Girls reading superheroes
• Fanboys and specific heroes
• Fan production – slash fiction, changing gendered identities

History and Industry

• Online comics – fan production or industrial production
• Tracing specific characters within an industrial context
• Creators’ representations of gender – eg: Alan Moore, Promethea, Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

SUBMISSION DETAILS
We’ll be happy to address any queries about the issue if you email either Dave Huxley d.huxley@mmu.ac.uk or Joan Ormrod j.ormrod@mmu.ac.uk.

If you are submitting an article please remember to check our format guidelines and obtain agreement from copyright holders for any images you plan to use. If you have queries about this then visit the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics website for clarification. We can publish black and white or colour images.

www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rcom

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.

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics - First Issue Now Available Free Online

The first issue of Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics is now available online, including free online access to the following articles throughout 2010.

Editorial

David Huxley and Joan Ormrod                                                                              

Articles
                                                                                                                          

From Iky Mo to Lord Horror: representations of Jews in British comics

Paul Gravett                                                                                                         

From fan appropriation to industry re-appropriation: the sexual identity of comic superheroes

Gareth Schott                                                                                                       

'A fistful of dead roses…'. Comics as cultural resistance: Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta

Maggie Gray                                                                                                         

The absence of black supervillains in mainstream comics

Phillip Lamarr Cunningham                                                                                     

Redrawing nationalism: Chester Brown's Louis Riel: a comic-strip biography

Andrew Lesk                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                          

Book Reviews
                                                                                                                         

Che: a graphic biography, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón

James Scorer                                                                                                         

Of comics and men: a cultural history of American comic books, by Jean-Paul Gabilliet

Tony Venezia                                                                                                        

Art Spiegelman: conversations, edited by Joseph Witek

Ranen Omer-Sherman                                                                                            

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Find out more at www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rcom

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