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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 £
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PARUTION – COMICS & NOVELIZATION

Benoît Glaude, Comics and Novelization A Literary History of Bandes Dessinées, Routledge, coll. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature”, 2023, 214 p., 9781032436647

Qu’ont en commun les romans Les Aventures de Superman de George Lowther, La Bataille de Pharsale de Claude Simon, Tintin au Nouveau Monde de Frederic Tuten, L’Année où le lion s’est échappé de Carlos Sampayo, les séries de romans pour la jeunesse Titeuf, de Shirley Anguerrand, et Petit Vampire, de Joann Sfar, de même que plusieurs nouvelles des recueils Le Petit Nicolas de René Goscinny et Des Choses fragiles de Neil Gaiman, ou encore l’autobiographie J’avais six ans à Hiroshima du mangaka japonais Keiji Nakazawa? Ces textes qui relèvent de genres littéraires variés sont liés à des bandes dessinées qui leur ont préexisté. Si à première vue, ces exemples semblent exceptionnels, ils font en réalité partie d’un corpus qui n’a jamais été ni inventorié ni étudié spécifiquement.

En s’y attelant, Comics & Novelization : a Literary History of Bandes Dessinées ouvre une nouvelle perspective sur les interactions entre la bande dessinée et la littérature. Ce livre postule que les deux médias artistiques ont entretenu une émulation mutuelle, depuis qu’ils coexistent dans la culture médiatique. Pour le montrer, cette recherche ne se concentre pas sur les adaptations littéraires en bande dessinée, mais plutôt sur un corpus littéraire qui reste pratiquement inexploré : les romans liés à la bande dessinée. Rédigé en anglais, mais focalisé sur la création francophone, ce livre reconstitue une histoire littéraire de la bande dessinée à travers ses romans, du XIXe au XXIe siècle. Alors que la bande dessinée – y compris le « roman graphique » – a parfois été regardée comme la disciple d’un modèle littéraire indépassable, ces adaptations romanesques peu étudiées ne témoignent-elles pas plutôt d’une relation mutuelle, voire d’une émulation, entre les deux médias ?

© Dupuis 2023 Goscinny/Morris

ACME SPEAKER SERIES – AUDREY GARCIA & RODOLFO DAL CANTO

Two lectures by two visiting PhD students at the UGent.

Tuesday 13 June 2023, 10h00-12h00 am | ULB, Brussels, campus Solbosch, room AY2.107

Illustration © Dupuis 2023 Goscinny/Morris

 

The Imaginary Wild West: Transnational Tropes and the Franco-Belgian Cowboys as a Tool of Self-Reflection (a lecture by Audrey Garcia, University of California, Irvine)

Narrating Uncertainty through Comics: Precarious Times and Ghostly Worlds in Citéville and Citéruin by Jérôme Dubois (a lecture by Rodolfo Dal Canto, University of L’Aquila)

 

Abstracts

 The Imaginary Wild West: Transnational Tropes and the Franco-Belgian Cowboys as a Tool of Self-Reflection (a lecture by Audrey Garcia, University of California, Irvine)

This project focuses on the trope of the Western and the Western cowboy firstly as a tool for transnational exchange and also for exploring national imaginaries, specifically, projections of Franco-Belgian identity. In this study, the prominence of the American cowboy rises to the forefront as I present the cowboy and the mythological West to be a “safe space” for Belgian comics to explore their relation to power and its identity through a third party. Because the mythologized West is an adaptable stage found within the adventure genre, it has potential to convey localized ideologies. Cowboys’ unique openness results from the fact that the “American” cowboy is truly not American at all; cowboys popularized by cinema are based on Italian Spaghetti Westerns or are inspired by tales of Mexican ‘vaqueros’. Therefore, the cowboy is a figment of imagination rooted in idealism and a mythologized version of the American West. The inherent transnationality of cowboys creates a figure capable of becoming adapted by any specific culture. The transnationalism of cowboys and geographic distance of its setting allows the genre to be used as a tool of fantasy that removes itself directly while maintaining its Franco-Belgian characteristics. Furthermore, the ability for these figures to travel internationally allows it to open pathways for various social commentary and expansion into new iterations of the trope.

 

Narrating Uncertainty through Comics: Precarious Times and Ghostly Worlds in Citéville and Citéruin by Jérôme Dubois (a lecture by Rodolfo Dal Canto, PhD student at the University of L’Aquila)

In 2020, French cartoonist Jérôme Dubois simultaneously published a couple of comics for two different publishing houses: Citéville, brought out by Cornélius, and Citéruin, released by Éditions Matière. The former features nine short chapters set in a major urban center, Citéville: here the characters are victims of various forms of systemic violence, within dynamics that border on dystopia. Citéruin looks like the same comic, with the division into short stories with the same title, identical layout and framing, with one fundamental change: the streets of Citéville are deserted, completely devoid of human presence, and the buildings seem to have been abandoned long ago or struck by a sudden catastrophe. Jérôme Dubois’ double work shows different levels of precariousness, which turn out to coexist in a layered dialogue. On the one hand, Citéville shows through a grotesque style some characteristics peculiar to our contemporary times, such as job precariousness or the difficulty of building a future within dynamics that are as rigid as they are absurd; on the other hand, Citéruin stages, through a story told by subtraction, the existential uncertainty of humanity as a whole. Through an original use of tools proper to the comic medium, the author makes human presence coexist with his own absence, inviting reflection on the time and space we inhabit, and the ruin inscribed in them. The presentation will navigate through these intersections, analyzing the two texts using an approach that links the themes related to ecocriticism, posthumanism, and precarity with the formal strategies through which they are told, using a medium-specific approach.