Comics Forum announces 'Death and the Superhero' event

Comics Forum has announced the second event in its ‘Comics Forum presents…’ series. José Alaniz, author of Komiks: Comic Art in Russia, guest author for the Comics Forum website and the current chair of the executive committee of the International Comic Art Forum, will appear at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (UK) on the 25th March.

Proceeding in part from the writings of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, Death and the Superhero: ‘Strikeforce: Morituri’ examines the late 1980s Marvel Comics series Strikeforce: Morituri (originally written by Peter Gillis with art by Brent Anderson), which took as its premise the inescapable mortality of its superteam’s members, for a consideration of the ways “real” death warps and complicates the routinely death-denying superhero genre.

José Alaniz, is currently the Chair of the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum, the leading comics studies conference in the US. (He edited a symposium on Czech comics for the Forum in 2009).

His research interests include Death and Dying, Disability Studies, Film Studies, Eco-criticism and Comics Studies and his current projects include Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond and a history of Czech comics.

He's the associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington – Seattle, published his first book, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi) in 2010. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art, the Comics Journal, Ulbandus, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and Kinokultura, as well as the anthologies The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times, The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov and Russian Children’s Literature and Culture

• Entry to this event is free, but places are limited so registration is required. Places will be given on a first come first served basis, and early booking is strongly recommended. To register, send your name and the number of tickets you would like to comicsforum@hotmail.co.uk

Rummaging Around in Alan Moore’s Shorts!

The Comics Forum has published the first in a series of articles about the short works of Alan Moore over on its blog. This series, cheekily entitled ‘Rummaging Around in Alan Moore’s Shorts’ has been guest edited by Maggie Gray, and comprises a wonderful selection of pieces on a wide variety of subjects.

The full list is:

• ‘Rummaging Around in Alan Moore’s Shorts’ (Introduction) – Maggie Gray
• ‘Doctor Who and the Genesis of Alan Moore’ – Lance Parkin
• “Will You Listen to That!”: (Dis)Ability in Moore/Willingham’s ‘In Blackest Night’ – José Alaniz
• ‘Alan Moore’s Lost Treasures: ‘The Bowing Machine’ & ‘The Hasty Smear of My Smile’’ – Marc Sobel
• ‘The shadow over Northampton: the transmogrification of the Lovecraft mythos by Alan Moore’ – Daniel Leal Werneck
• ‘Moore vs. Albarn: Between the Angels and the Apes’ – K. A. Laity

The series will be presented on the blog over the month of September; you can make sure you don’t miss any of the articles by checking http://comicsforum.org regularly, or by subscribing to their RSS feed or email subscription service.

As always, any comments are welcome.

Comics Forum was established in 2009 as part of Leeds’ annual sequential art festival Thought Bubble, which takes place at various venues across the city every November. Taking the festival’s emphasis upon the educational value of comics as its starting point, Comics Forum aims to increase the visibility and accessibility of comics scholarship through an academic conference that brings together scholars, artists and fans in a spirit of mutual cooperation and development.

Leeds to host Comics and Philosophy Talk

Later this month Comics Forum and the organisers of the Thought Bubble convention will be running an evening event in Leeds to discuss the philosophical questions posed by comics.

The speakers at ‘Comics and Philosophy: From Maus to She-Hulk’ wil be Aaron Meskin and Roy Cook, editors of The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach and the event will take place from 5-6.00pm on the 29th March at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

Entry is free but registration is required.

Aaron Meskin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds and the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aesthetics and other philosophical subjects. He was the first aesthetics editor for the online journal Philosophy Compass, and he co-edited Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, published in 2007. He's a former Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and Treasurer of the British Society of Aesthetics.

Roy T Cook is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, a Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and an Associate Fellow of the Northern Institute of Philosophy (Aberdeen). He works in the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the aesthetics of popular art. He blogs about comics at: www.pencilpanelpage.wordpress.com.

• To register for ‘Comics and Philosophy: From Maus to She-Hulk’ send your name and the number of seats you would like to comicsforumAThotmail.co.uk.

• More info: http://comicsforum.org

Comics Forum launches "scholar directory"

Today sees the launch of a new resource on the Comics Forum website. The scholar directory provides information on the biographies, research interests, conference papers and publications of scholars researching comics from around the world.

The site runners tells us the hope is this will be useful in helping scholars to make connections, see where people are studying and what they’re interested in, and increase the accessibility of comics scholarship for everyone.

Until today, the directory has been running in a limited pilot phase, with invited parties submitting their data for inclusion so Comic Forum could work out how to build the pages and structure the system. Many thanks to all those who agreed to take part in this trial run.

Now, all comics scholars are being invited to fill in our data form and submit it to comicsforumAThotmail.co.uk for inclusion in the listings.

"It would be great to build a better picture of who is where," says Ian Hague, director of the Comics Forum. "Any queries about getting listed can also be directed to the above email address."

Any comments on the directory are very welcome. If you know of anyone who would be interested in being listed in the directory, please pass on this news story to them.

• To be taken to the directory and download the data form, go to: http://comicsforum.org/scholarly-resources/scholar-directory/.

Comics Forum for comic studies gets overhaul, adds digital texts

(with thanks to Norman Boyd): The Comics Forum website (http://comicsforum.org) has recently had something of a makeover and now includes the addition of a new 'Scholarly Resources' section for anyone interested in the study of comics (accessible from the top of all pages on the website).

This section also includes a newly launched Digital Texts archive, which offers freely downloadable texts of relevance to comics scholars - including a digital copy of the controversial UK Children and Young Person’s (Harmful Publications) Act, 1955, the genesis of which was discussed at length in Martin Barker’s A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (and is still in force).

The digital text archive is currently in its launch phase and as such contains a small number of texts, but the creators hope to be able to expand this collection as time goes on in order to provide a useful centralised hub for freely available, open access comics scholarship.

"We are particularly keen to feature previously unpublished material," says Forum manager Ian Hague, "or texts that have gone out of print, in order to help develop the breadth, longevity and sustainability of comics scholarship, and contribute to overcoming the sense of ‘reinventing the wheel’ that was alluded to in a post on the Comics Forum site by Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith in July of this year, and by Charles Hatfield in a post on the Thought Balloonists blog in September 2009.

"We are also interested in publishing new material where it is available, with the hope that featuring such material on this website can help it to find a wider audience."

If you are an author and you would be interesting in making your articles, books, dissertations, essays, fanzines, theses etc. available via this archive please contact me at this address or I.Hague@chi.ac.uk.

Already available in the Digital Texts archive are Ian Gordon’s book Comic Strips and Consumer Culture 1890-1945 and Dan Raeburn’s series of critical essays published as The Imp (four issues).

Ian is also planning to launch additional resources to complement the existing materials and would welcome some assistance in doing so. "Up to this point I have largely been running the website by myself, he says. "At present the situation is fairly manageable, but I would like to expand the site and the remit of Comics Forum as a whole if possible, in order to increase its usefulness to scholars individually and to scholarship as a whole.

"At the moment I am looking to get together a larger team of people to help with the 'behind the scenes' aspects of the website and possibly the 2012 conference (depending on what format that takes next year)."

• If you would be interested in getting involved with Comics Forum please get in touch with Ian via the email address above for more info. Experience working with the WordPress online service would be helpful but is not essential.

• You can access the scholarly resources section directly here: http://comicsforum.org/scholarly-resources/

Sculpture and Comic Art feature for Comics Forum

The second edition of Sculpture and Comic Art by Kirstie Gregory is now available on the Comics Forum blog. Entitled ‘Chris Ware: Cabinets, Cardboard and Joseph Cornell’, the piece will be of interest to anyone who’s thinking about submitting a paper for this year’s Comics Forum, along with those  who have broader research interests around Chris Ware, and the intersections between comics and sculptural art forms.

If you have any comments or feedback on the piece or the website in general, the site’s comments sections are available.

The deadline for abstracts for Comics Forum 2011, scheduled for the 16th - 18th of November 2011 in Leeds as part of Thought Bubble, is the 18th July.  It will comprise three events:

16/11/2011 – Sculpture and Comic Art

17/11/2011 – Graphic Medicine: Visualizing the Stigma of Illness

18/11/2011 – Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics

The call for papers is available here. Registration will open once speakers have been confirmed in early August 2011.

Tickets will be priced as follows:

1 day ticket: £10

3 day ticket: £30

5 day ticket: £40 (includes two-day pass to Thought Bubble convention)

Comics Forum 2011 is supported by Thought Bubble, the University of Chichester, the Henry Moore Institute, Dr Mel Gibson and Molakoe Graphic Design.

Academic Comics Forum registration opens

Registration for Comics Forum, a two-day academic event taking place as part of this year’s Thought Bubble Sequential Art Festival in Leeds, is now open.

The Forum includes the Women in Comics II conference on 18th November and Theory and Practice: A Conference on Comics on the 19th.

Taking place at Leeds Art Gallery, Women in Comics II celebrates the contributions of women in comics, noting the increasing number of female artists, writers, scholars and publishers of comics, with guests that include Suzy Varty, who published the very first all-woman comic book in 1977 in the UK, Heroine in the UK, Maureen Burdock and Karen Hansen.

Theory and Practice - A Conference on Comics will investigate the strong ties between production and scholarship of comics, discussing why, for example, creators still work on comics even when they are unprofitable and the work of Grant Morrison.

• For more details see visit: www.thoughtbubblefestival.com/ACADEMIC.asp. To register, please email Ian Hague at: I.HagueATchi.ac.uk and let him know how many tickets you would like. 

• Tickets cost £15; this covers entry on both days and includes lunch. Payment will be taken in cash on the day. You are advised to register as seating in the venue is limited and the organisers cannot guarantee entry to unregistered attendees.