Category: Publications

New publication on Popular Press in Fascist Italy by dr. Manuela Di Franco

Our colleague dr. Manuela Di Franco has an Open Acces volume out with imlr books: Going to the People – University of London Press

In the interwar years, Italy underwent profound social and cultural transformations which shaped the emergence of a modern mass-consumer society. Amidst the Fascist regime’s centralised control over cultural production, new forms of popular print culture flourished, most notably the rotocalco, the illustrated magazine aimed at a broad readership. This book explores the development and popularity of these magazines in the 1930s and early 1940s, focusing on how they navigated the tensions between authoritarian cultural policies and the powerful appeal of foreign models, especially from the USA. Di Franco analyses three representative magazines, investigating the complex dynamics of cultural exchange defining Italian print culture under Fascism, a field caught between commercial imperatives and ideological pressures; and examines how these magazines served as sites of transnational cultural negotiation, blending entertainment, Fascist influence and the demands of an increasingly modern readership. The rotocalco emerges as both a product and a driver of Italy’s evolving mass-media landscape, in which nationalist rhetoric co-existed with international influences and the popular press mirrored society’s contradictions and transformations.

New publication on Comics and Children’s Magazines

New publication, edited by Prof. Maaheen Ahmed and dr. Giorgio Busi Rizzi

Comics and Children’s Magazines | Maaheen Ahmed, Giorgio Busi Rizzi | (scroll down to download 2 chapters)

Comics and serial print have a long, closely intertwined history, with the earliest comics proliferating in newspapers before gradually migrating to children’s magazines. In positioning itself between the booming  research on comics and periodicals and comics and children’s culture, this book offers a transnational perspective on the diverse connections between the ninth art and magazines.

Beginning with the heyday of children’s periodicals and their incorporation of comics since the late nineteenth century in the UK, the book ends with a survey of paratextual reader engagement in Topolino issues until the 2010s. Its eight chapters showcase different possibilities for analysing vast, serial corpora, ranging from thematic and formal approaches to more distant readings mapping evolutions across magazine issues. It covers the impact of American comics on the Corriere dei Piccoli magazines from the 1920s and 1930s, forms of editorial communication in French and Belgian magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, the interplay of artistic pursuit, commercial needs, and national identity in the American Camera Comics from the mid-1940s, the comics scare in Italy read through the Italian Western comic Pecos Bill, the changing editorial policies of French magazine Lisette, and the construction of post-war national identity in Greek comics.

This book will be of great interest to comic and children’s literature enthusiasts along with researchers of comic studies, cultural studies, literature and art. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

 

Table of contents

Introduction: Comics and Children’s Magazines
Maaheen Ahmed and Giorgio Busi Rizzi

Stories and Pictures for Boys and Girls: Identifying the Child Reader in British Comics 1890-1920
Michael Connerty

Domesticating American Serial Characters in European Children’s Comics Magazines: The Case of Corriere dei Piccoli in the 1910s
Eva Van de Wiele

Editorial Communication: Letter Columns in the French-language (Comics) Magazines (1934-1949)
Maaheen Ahmed

Cameras and young people belong together: Camera Comics (1944-46) as an imaginative, ideological and commercial space for addressing and depicting American child photographers
Annebella Pollen

Pecos Bill and the Campaign against Children’s Comics in Postwar Italy
Paola Bonifazio

Lisette and the disappearance of illustrés for girls
Nicolas Labarre

1953-1970. Stories of Young Orphans in the Service of National Reconciliation
Effie Amilitou and Mikros Iros

“Topolino” beyond comics: fostering readership engagement and parasocial relationship through the paratextual apparatus (1960–2010)
Benedetta D’Incau

 

New publications about the COMICS project activities

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!