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Dossier thématique (Comicalités) : Dessins d’enfance dans la bande dessinée (2023)

Edited by Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix

This special issue considers the various ways that children’s drawings have been imagined, solicited and organized in comics history. 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, from conceptions of graphic style in comics to children’s recycling of comics in their own drawings.

This special issue is an outcome of the COMICS project, funded by the European Research Council’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

More on this link.

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PhD position: Illustrated Periodicals for Children in Belgium, 1919-1949

In the context of the FWO research project “Pictures for the Kids: Visual Seriality in Illustrated Periodicals for Children in Belgium, 1919-1949”, we are looking for a PhD researcher candidate to work on the intermedial transformation of Belgian children’s periodicals in the early twentieth-century.

Project

The period stretching from the end of the Great War to the immediate postwar era witnessed a proliferation of mass-market illustrated periodicals and a diversification of its audiences. This project considers the mutations of the children’s magazine in Belgium before the postwar boom of the comics magazine and seeks to highlight the intermedial diversity of these periodicals. Those titles typically included editorial sections, comics, games, puzzles, serial fiction, illustrations, cut-outs, readers’ letters, photographs, advertising and covered a wide range of text-and-image combinations. Continue la lecture

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ACME/COMICS LECTURE – IVAN LIMA GOMES

Politics and criticism in the Latin American comics world during the 1960s and 1970s

4 January 2024, 2:00-3:30 PM, Camelot Room, Third Floor, Blandijn, UGent

Abstract
Within Latin America, the 1960s and the 1970s constitute a pivotal period for the comics art world. It was a moment when comics artists and intellectuals sought to assert what meant to produce comics in the region, establishing a clear contrast between the Latin American historietas/quadrinhos and the American comics. Echoing critiques against the “dependency” condition and the U.S. “cultural imperialism”, several Latin American editorial projects aimed at introducing new characters and themes to the comics scene. Continue la lecture

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PARUTION – LA MUSIQUE SILENCIEUSE DE MUÑOZ ET SAMPAYO

Erwin Dejasse, La Musique silencieuse de José Muñoz et Carlos Sampayo, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, collection « Iconotextes », 2023, 252 p., 29€

Tous deux Argentins exilés en Europe dans les années 1970, José Muñoz et Carlos Sampayo ont construit ensemble au fil des années une œuvre dont la singularité narrative et graphique marque la bande dessinée de la fin du XXe siècle et du début du XXIe. Souvent décrit comme une rupture radicale avec les usages habituels, leur travail s’enracine pourtant dans une tradition ressentie comme définitivement classique, une bande dessinée fondée sur l’illusion de la réalité qui décline les différents genres de la fiction d’aventure.

Ce livre entreprend d’étudier ce paradoxe, en replaçant l’œuvre des deux auteurs dans la tradition qui lui donne naissance, des adventures strips étasuniens à leur réappropriation dans l’industrie de la bande dessinée argentine d’après-guerre. Quels mécanismes de déconstruction des normes esthétiques, narratives et thématiques utilisent le dessinateur et le scénariste ? Comment leurs bandes dessinées entrent en résonance avec le contexte historique ? Comment d’autres formes d’expression – musique, littérature, cinéma, poésie – ont influencé ces deux auteurs et leurs créations ?

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ACME SPEAKER SERIES – ANTONIO MIRIZZI

How specific is the cognitive experience of the comics reader? Formulating hypothesis through empirical experiments

6 December 2023 - 10am-12pm | ULB, Brussels, Solbosch Campus, Room P4.1.17.

Illustration © Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, 1986, DC Comics.

Abstract
The complex morphology of the comics medium calls for peculiar reading strategies aimed at bridging the gaps between its components, both structural and material. Although we speak broadly of visual literacy, in the case of comics it is necessary to consider specific skills of information synthesis and translinear reading. My research focuses on the distance between the implied reader and the actual reader, that is, it aims to understand how the latter behaves with respect to the cognitive effort virtually solicited by the comics form.

Continue la lecture

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ACME SPEAKER SERIES – ILAN MANOUACH

Comics as Computation

15 November 2023 — 10:45   |   ULiège, Faculté de philosophie, arts & lettres (Quai Roosevelt 1B – access from Place du XX août), building A4 (histoire), Room A4/R30 (ground floor).

A talk by Ilan Manouach, who will be presenting his postdoctoral research project (ULiège).

Abstract

Nowadays, anyone can generate stunning algorithmic illustrations with a few inspired keywords. In the fast-evolving world of computational creativity, the potential impact of AI technologies on comics, a medium that has historically served as a laboratory for today’s global entertainment industries, is a case in point. With the term « synthetic comics, » I propose to describe comics content that was generated, modified or manipulated in a highly automated manner by way of machine learning. Continue la lecture

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Reading session – Barbara Postema

A COMICS reading session open to all ACME members.

7 November 2023 – 1:30-3:45 pm
Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent – Room Camelot (3rd floor)

Dr. Barbara Postema, lecturer in English for Academic Purposes at Groningen University, will lead a group discussion on the following texts:

Shiamin Kwa, Perfect Copies: Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic (Chapter 1), Rutgers UP, 2023.
Barbara Postema, « Establishing Relations: Photography In Wordless Comic », Image & Narrative, vol. 16, no. 2, 2015, p. 84-95.

Contact: comics@ugent.be

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ISSUE ZERO – Reading the Van Passen Collection

Exposition, 16.09  –  22.12, KASK, Gand

Illustration © photographie d’Isabelle Arthuis.

 

En 2018, la bibliothèque de l’Université de Gand a acquis une vaste collection de périodiques illustrés auprès du collectionneur belge de bandes dessinées Alain Van Passen.

En ce moment, KIOSK offre un aperçu de cette vaste collection à travers une exposition, réalisée par Felipe Muhr en collaboration avec le groupe de recherche COMICS de l’Université de Gand, qui se tient à la KASK de Gand (Louis Pasteurlaan 2, entrée gratuite).

L’exposition s’étend sur trois mois, du 16 septembre au 22 décembre 2023, et se déroule en sept chapitres de deux semaines. Chacun d’entre eux est dirigé par un.e membre du groupe de recherche COMICS ou par un.e spécialiste de l’histoire de la bande dessinée. Il est accompagné d’une publication et d’une affiche conçues par d’ancien.ne.s étudiant.e.s en master du département de design graphique de la KASK.

Après un Prologue: What’s an Issue Zero?, le premier chapitre, dirigé par Maaheen Ahmed et exposé jusqu’au 15 octobre, s’intitule Beyond the Comics: Letters, Contests and Other Forms of Editorial Communication.

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Comics, the Children and Childishness conference

International conference – Ghent University, 18-19 September 2023

 

Comics have often been dismissed as child’s fare. While comics scholars have long struggled with such dismissals, today they are more likely to run up against the stereotype that ‘comics are not just for children’ (Pizzino). The ‘for children’ snub has encouraged scholarship to focus on comics and graphic novels for adults. Although we have seen several exciting studies on the children in comics (Abate; Apostolidès, Chaney; Gordon; Saguisag) and comics for children (Abate and Tarbox, Heimermann and Tullis), most of which have appeared over the past decade, the many complex interactions between comics and children remain understudied.

Building on the research of the COMICS team based at Ghent University since 2018, Comics, the Children and Childishness seeks to disentangle these connections by focusing on two key strands: comics and children’s culture (especially print culture), and childishness and comics. This follows the objectives of the COMICS project at Ghent University which focuses on children’s comics magazines, child characters in comics and graphic novels, young readers’ interactions (both programmed and unexpected) with their comics and children’s drawings.

The conference aims to open a crucial forum of dialogue between European and international researchers, by focusing on a resolutely international corpus, covering comics from not only the dominant areas of Western Europe and North America, but also Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America, hoping to inspire further research in this overlooked but crucial aspect of comic studies. The program page is here, and here you can find some practical information you may need.

The conference will also be accompanied by an exhibition in KASK of the Alain Van Passen comics collection, a rare and extremely well-preserved archive of French and Belgian comics magazines from 1930s through the 1990s.

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PARUTION – DRAWING FROM THE ARCHIVES

Drawing from the Archives. Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel?

Benoît Crucifix

Following Art Spiegelman’s declaration that « the future of comics is in the past, » this book considers comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. Cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Seth, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others have not only produced some of the most important graphic novels, they have also turned to the history of comics as a common visual heritage to pass on to new readers. This book is a full-length study of contemporary cartoonists when they are at work as historians: it offers a detailed description of how they draw from the archives of comics history, examining the different gestures of collecting, curating, reprinting, forging, swiping, and undrawing that give shape to their engagement with the past. In recognizing these different acts of transmission, this book argues for a material and vernacular history of how comics are remembered, shared, and recirculated over time.

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, coll. « Cambridge Studies in Graphic Narratives« , 2023
EAN : 9781009250931
280 pages
Prix : 85 £