Category: Publications

New publications about the COMICS project activites

We are incredibly happy to report two short publications about our project!

First, Sylvain Lesage devotes a nice, insightful article (in French) to From Private to Public, Philippe Capart’s volume dedicated to exploring and contextualizing the Van Passen collection (link to the first episodes here).

Second, Eva Van de Wiele (with contributions from Maaheen Ahmed and Lou Braibant) writes an in-depth review (in Dutch) of the exhibition ISSUE ZERO – Reading the Van Passen Collection, which takes place (and renews it material every two weeks) from September 16 to December 22 this year at KIOSK, Pasteurlaan 2 in Ghent (clicking on this link one may download the biweekly ‘issues’ that accompany the exhibition).

The Cambridge Companion to Comics

The Cambridge Companion to Comics is out!

 

With original and insightful chapters by Simon Grennan, Paul Williams, Matthieu Letourneux, Jaqueline Berndt, Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Blair Davis, Jan Baetens, Daniel Stein, Nicolas Labarre, Shiamin Kwa, Erwin Dejasse, Benoît Crucifix, Kim Munson, Mel Gibson, Susan Kirtley and Joe Sutliff Sanders.

 

To find out more, read the blogpost on Fifteen Eighty-Four:

https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/06/so-you-think-you-knew-comics/

 

Or listen to the History of Literature podcast:

 

Or listen to the New Books in Literary Studies episode for the New Books Network:

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-cambridge-companion-to-comics

 

 

Text in Comics — New Special Issue

Benoît Glaude has co-edited, alongside Blanche Delaborde and Pierre-Olivier Douphies, a special issue of the online journal Revue Textimage, a landmark title in the field of word-and-image studies. Titled “Espaces et formes du texte dans la bande dessinée”, the issue focuses on the spatial and visual display of text within comics productions. It brings together an array of scholars from different horizons, and joins research articles with interviews, reviews, and an artist’s contribution from Gabri Molist. Eva Van de Wiele contributes a piece on versified captions in Spanish comics and Benoît Crucifix on the uses and functions of a Futura typeface in Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby.

 

 

Playing with Formats

Two new articles by Dona Pursall and Eva Van de Wiele have been published in the special issue “Jeux de Formats” of the online journal Interfaces:

Domesticating and Glocalising the Dreamy: McCay’s Little Nemo and Its Sequels in Early Italian Corriere dei Piccoli (1909-1914)

The editors of Corriere dei Piccoli (CdP), an Italian comics magazine for children launched in December 1908, followed the New York Herald’s every step. In envisioning the creation of a children’s supplement, Italy’s biggest newspaper understood the enthralment and economic potential of the Sunday pages and introduced its Italian readers to various American serial figures. One of those recurring characters, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, was the most heavily reformatted on CdP’s centre pages in 1913. The drastic flattening of McCay’s vertical appeal to a double page put the graphic designer to the limits of his possibilities. This domestication of the American format is a consequence of the pedagogical ideas and moralistic intentions behind the bourgeois magazine, and Italian style and reading preferences related to readership. Still, Little Nemo inspired the autochthonous authors to create their own versions of McCay’s serial narrative. I uncover the actualizations of the serial figure by three Italian comic artists, unveiling the many moralistic and propagandistic incarnations of Little Nemo. Although heavily reformatted, Little Nemo’s legacy in CdP went further than any other Sunday page.

“Tin-Can Tommy The Clockwork Boy”: A case study in incompleteness for humorous effect in British children’s comics of the 1930s

This article explores the format and construct of longer humorous comics strips through the close analysis of “Tin-Can Tommy The Clockwork Boy” from D C Thomson’s The Beano Comic, a publication aimed at children and launched in 1938. This study of one specific strip argues that the use a seriality somewhere between open-ended and discontinuous, continual fluctuations between flat and round characterisation and a style wavering between completeness and expressivity constructs an aesthetic of incompleteness which is essentiel in the creation of humour. Following investigation of the ways in which this particular format constructs funniness as a process of continual negotiation, specifically through the use of exaggeration, asymmetry, dissatisfaction and imbalance, the article concludes that a quality of unfinished-ness is integral to the relationship these comics create with their readers, and therefore fundamental to laughter.

The Jaume Rumeu Collection

Dona Pursall has contributed an essay to this recent collection of Jaume Rumeu’s work in Misty.

A brand new showcase from the Treasury of British Comics brings the stunning work of a Spanish master artist back into print after more than forty years! The Jaume Rumeu Collection includes four terrifying tales from the pages of the legendary Misty, the late ’70s supernatural horror comic book marketed for girls. Also known as Homero, Jaume Rumeu Perera brought his flare for the intoxicatingly to British comics, with macabre stories full of black widows, femme fatales, mad scientists and giant spiders. One of the unsung masters of British horror comics, this collection celebrates his timeless talent and is a must have for fans of great comic book art. To further celebrate, this collection contains five short essays by celebrated academics Julia Round, Ian Horton, Geraint D’Arcy, John Miers and Dona Pursall. The short essays are an accessible introduction to Misty, Jaume Rumeu’s technique, and the wider field of Comics Studies, and are an excellent starting point for those wanting to know more about British girls’ comics, as well as starting to think critically about the comics medium.

Call for Papers — Children’s Drawings in Comics

We are launching a call for papers for a special issue of Comicalités, edited by Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix, on children’s drawings in comics. This special issue examines different ways of looking at and thinking about children’s drawings in the history of comics. The diversity and multiplicity of interactions between comics (as a cultural object produced for children) and children’s drawings (both as objects of adult discourses and as children’s productions) offer a vast field of inquiry. This thematic issue invites contributions along three interlocking angles.

 

« Le nin et le jéant » (sic.), bande dessinée de Colette Boermans à l’âge de 7 ans, Bruxelles, c. 1936.

 

Abstracts in English or French should be submitted before December 15, 2012 to maaheen.ahmed@ugent.be and benoit.crucifix@ugent.be

 

Full call for papers > https://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/6730

Appel à contributions en français > https://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/6729

Dibujando historias

Dona Pursall and Eva Van de Wiele have each contributed a chapter to the collective volume Dibujando historias. El cómic más allá de la imagen, recently published by the University Press of Zaragoza. Eva writes on metamorphosis in the Spanish children’s magazine TBO (“El motivo de la metamorfosis en TBO (1921-1932)”), while Dona consigned a paper on wartime solidarity and child characters as role models (“Wartime role models of solidarity and empowerment: child characters in The magic comic“).

Time in children’s comics magazines

Dona Pursall, Maaheen Ahmed and Eva Van de Wiele join brains and pens in an article for 9de kunst that cuts across British, Italian, French and Belgian comics to inquire into the intertwined notions of childhood and time: about what children make of their time and how their time is organized, as imagined by these periodical magazines and their own times!

 

Children scribbling comics

New article by Benoît Crucifix in the latest issue of Studies in Comics, about two Jojo & Jimmy albums scribbled over by children readers. The article considers material uses and reading practices in Belgian comics culture. As doodles and marks left on battered copies, scribbles foreground complex questions for the comics historian, offering clues that otherwise remain elusive to understand childhood reading practices.

Loving Comics in Neil the Horse

New article by Maaheen Ahmed, in the Comicalités issue “Histoire et influence des pratiques bédéphiliques” edited by Jean-Paul Gabilliet and Nicolas Labarre, about Neil the Horse.

Abstract: This article examines the love of comics or bedephilia discernible in Katherine Collins’s Neil the Horse Comics and Stories, a short-lived comic from the 1980s. It interrogates and contextualizes the “childish” elements of the comic, its bridging of children’s culture and adult culture through focusing girls’ comics and funny animal comics. It also discusses the comic’s interactions with musicals. Situating the comic in the “maturing” scene of 1980s North America, this article shows how Neil the Horse expresses a love for comics that were often left out of the mainstream and its alternatives; it reached out to a relatively mixed audience and an all but forgotten group of comics readers that often steered clear of the abundance of superhero comics.