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.