Category: Activities

Comics, the Children and Childishness

Ghent, Belgium, 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 connections between comics and children remain understudied. These include but are not limited to:

• child characters and comics childhoods

• caricature and its closeness to, and inspiration from, childlike drawing styles

• the historically unstable status of comics as the medium transitioned into the realm of children’s culture and then out of it; contents, publication contexts and sociocultural factors contributing to changes in intended readerships

• the presumed childishness of the medium and the ways comics authors, readers and critics engage with it

Comics, the Children and Childishness seeks to disentangle these and other forms of interactions between comics and children. 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 elaborates on two key strands: comics and children’s culture, especially print culture, and childishness and comics.

1. Children’s (Print) Culture

 The conference is keen on exploring the vast range of comics in children’s magazines, especially, but not only, from the early decades of the twentieth century, to map out the different roles accorded to comics, the kinds of comics associated with children’s culture and how conceptualizations of comics have varied in children’s print cultures. It hopes to interweave insights from comics studies, periodical studies and the broader field of childhood studies.

Possible questions to be broached include, without being limited to, the following:

What kinds of spaces were accorded to comics in children’s magazines?

What kinds of paratexts accompanied these comics?

How did comics sections change over time and across contexts?

How did comics interact with changing media landscapes?

What kinds of pedagogical and editorial influences molded (or ignored, or criticized) children’s comics and the publications in which they appeared?

This strand is also interested in transmedia interactions with children’s and youth cultures and the ways in which children interact with comics as readers and critics (Tilley) and as comics makers. Contributions on memories of childhood comics readings are also welcome. Further topics to explore therefore include:

Expansion of comics characters and storyworlds beyond printed pages;

Changes in reader segments (young, gendered, mixed, teen);

Interactive segments in magazines and other activities promoted by them, including children’s letter columns, competitions, games and clubs;

The retelling and revisiting of childhood memories of comics readings in comics and other media (novels, films etc.).

2. Childishness

The second strand of the conference explores how notions of childishness affect critical and popular discourses around and within comics. Seeking reflections on a diverse range of comics, including self-published and unpublished works, such as children’s drawings incorporating comics, this strand also encourages contributions on the manifestations of childishness in comics for children. We hope to combine insights into comics forms and styles with new methodologies for better understanding unpublished, scattered and marginal materials. Once again transdisciplinary insights from comics studies, children’s literature and childhood studies are especially welcome.

Possible questions and topics include:

How does the labeling of comics as childish impact reading practices?

How has childishness impacted the reception of comics and how have artists and authors responded to it?

How can conceptions of childishness have an impact on comics styles, ranging from the imitation of childish styles to artists incorporating or taking inspiration from children’s drawings?

What are the possibilities for reading and interpreting childishness in comics stories and styles?

How do connotations of, and interactions with, childishness compare across comics for children, crossover comics and comics for adults?

What kinds of impact can different publication contexts and formats have on notions of childishness?

How can such reflections on childishness in comics benefit from insights on comictuous (see Beineke) corpora including children’s drawings, outsider art, doodles, and the more institutionalized visual and popular arts?

For the purposes of this conference, children include all non-adults. Comics is likewise understood to encompass a broad range of publications, from comic strips and zines to magazines with comics, comics albums and graphic novels. We welcome papers on comics cultures from all over the world, ranging from the earliest printed comics to contemporary publications.

The conference will be held in Ghent, Belgium, from 18 to 19 September 2023.

Please send abstracts of about 500 words and a brief bio note by 15 January 2023 to comics@ugent.be and to maaheen.ahmed@ugent.be.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 30 January 2023.

^{Image from Noël Bayon’s photo essay, La Bourse aux Illustrés, 1953}

This conference is a COMICS activity, which has received generous funding from the European Research Council under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 758502).

Selected Bibliography

Michelle Ann Abate, Funny Girls: Guffaws, Guts and Gender in Classic American Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.

Michelle Ann Abate and Joe Sutliff Sanders, eds. Good Grief! Children and Comics. A Collection of Companion Essays. Ohio State University Libraries, 2016.

Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox, eds. Graphic Novels for Children and Adults: A Selection of Critical Essays. University Press of Mississippi, 2017.

Jean Marie Apostolidès, “Hergé and the Myth of the Super Child,” Yale French Studies no. 111 (2007), 45-57.

Bart Beaty, The Twelve-Cent Archie. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Michael Chaney, “The Child in and as Comics,” Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel, 57-94. University Press of Mississippi, 2016.

Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon, eds. The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life. University Press of Mississippi, 2017.

Mel Gibson, Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British Girlhood. Leuven University Press,

Ian Gordon, Kids Comics: A Genre Across Four Countries, Palgrave, 2016.

Charles Hatfield, “Comic Art, Children’s Literature and the New Comics Studies,” The Lion and the Unicorn vol. 30, no. 3 (2006), 360-382.

Mark Heimermann and Britanny Tullis, eds., Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. University of Texas Press, 2017.

Christopher Pizzino, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. University of Texas Press, 2016.

Julia Round, Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2019.

Lara Saguisag, Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. Rutgers University Press, 2018.

Gwen Athene Tarbox, Children’s and Young Adult Comics. Bloomsbury, 2020.

Carol L. Tilley, “Children and the Comics: Young People Take on the Critics,” Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent Since 1865, edited by James L. Baughman et al., 161-182. University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.

Come on Thursday 29 to Het Pand and get in the crowd to witness Eva Van de Wiele defend her thesis, Building a Glocalised Serial for Children: Corriere dei Piccoli (1908-1923) and TBO (1917-1932), and take part in the ensuing joyful celebrations.

Thesis abstract

Practical info

On 30 September we are organizing at Het Pand a study day on transnational circulations and influences in comics. Through six case studies, we will look at particular ways of adaptation, domestication, repurposing, and other types of transnational circulation in comics, both in Europe and the Americas. Each lecture will be followed by a short reaction from a respondent, and a Q&A with the audience.

Download the program.

Program

9:30 Welcome & Coffee

Practical info

Convention Center Het Pand,

Onderbergen 1, 9000 Ghent

room Oude Infirmerie

Register using this link before Monday 26 September.

“Redrawing photos: comics as a medium to read the family album”, presentation by María José Suárez

Tuesday 5 July at 11 AM — Room 1.12 (Blandijnberg)

On Tuesday morning, María José Suárez, who has been an intern with the comics team for the past two months, will present the research for her MA thesis at EESI (Angoulême):

“As photography has been used as a reference for comic book authors almost from the beginning, this project aims to understand what happens when they use pictures from the family album. For this, I put myself in the experiment of drawing from this type of photos to make a dialogue with different authors that have done the same.”

“The Comics Reader and the Neoliberal Novel: Contemporary Debates on Cultural Value”, talk by Christopher Pizzino

Tuesday 5 July at 2 PM — Library Lab Magnel (Faculteitsbibliotheek Letteren en Wijsbegeerte)

Many different constituents seem unhappy with comics in the United States, from literary critics who dismiss them as neoliberal to fans who attack them as too “woke.” But where are these discontented readers located, where are comics in relation to literature, and can we find better ways to read comics–as fans and as critics–in the neoliberal era?

Christopher Pizzino is Associate Professor of Contemporary US Literature at the University of Georgia, and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of English at George Mason University. He teaches literary and genre theory, image theory, comics studies, and various genres of contemporary fiction, film, comics, and television.

Talk open to everyone — to request reading materials, please write to benoit.crucifix@ugent.be

Commonly drawn for children, comics have a particular link to lines drawn by children. Since at least Rodolphe Töpffer, who in 1848 praised the “liveliness of movement” of the little men doodled in the margins, children’s drawings have been regularly admired by cartoonists. And as comics and graphic culture started to proliferate in the pages of mass-printed magazines, so did children’s drawing grow into an object of new attention and discourses, caught between pedagogues, psychologists, painters and writers. This research workshop gather various international researchers and practicioners around the intersections and interactions between comics and children’s drawings, opening a vast field of inquiry. These two days will take us from school boards to juvenile delinquency institutions, from adult cartoonists drawing ‘as’ children to children cartoonists drawing ‘as’ adults, from twentieth-century pedagogy to contemporary practice-based research, from cartooning contests to contemporary kids’ fanzines, from personal archives to found treasures. Full program is available here.

Souvent dessinée pour les enfants, la bande dessinée entretient un lien particulier au dessin d’enfant. Depuis au moins Rodolphe Töpffer, qui déjà en 1848 louait la « vivacité du mouvement » des petits bonshommes griffonnés dans les marges, le dessin d’enfant a souvent été une source d’admiration pour les dessinateurs et dessinatrices. Et tandis que la bande dessinée et la culture graphique s’installait dans les pages des nouveaux imprimés produits en masse, le dessin d’enfant lui devenait un objet de nouvelles attentions et de nouveaux discours, cerné entre pédagogues, psychologues, peintres et écrivains. Cet atelier de recherche rassemble des chercheuses et chercheurs de différents pays autour des nombreuses intersections et interactions entre bande dessinée et dessins d’enfants, ouvrant un vaste chantier de recherche. Ces deux journées nous amèneront des pupitres scolaires aux institutions de surveillance de la jeunesse, d’adultes dessinant comme des enfants à des enfants dessinant comme des adultes, de la psychopédagogie vingtième-siècle à la recherche-action contemporaine, des concours de dessin d’hier aux fanzines pour enfants d’aujourd’hui, d’archivelles personnelles à des trésors retrouvés. Le programme complet est disponible ici.

 

Workshop organized by Benoît Crucifix and Maaheen Ahmed, and featuring Yassine de Vos, Mathias Gardet, Xavier Girard, Breixo Harguindey, Dragana Radanović, Johanna Schipper, Daniel Silvestre, Carol Tilley, Nancy Vansieleghem, Aleksandar Zograf — and, online, Shiamin Kwa, Emma Hunsinger and Tillie Walden.

 

 

If you want to attend this workshop, please register before May 20 by noon, through this online form. Pour vous souhaitez participer à l’atelier, veuillez compléter ce formulaire avant le 20 mai, heure de midi.

13 May 2022, Faculteitsbibliotheek Letteren en Wijsgebeerte, Library Lab Magnel

10:30-12:00 Popular Serial Narratives: Genre Politics and Periodical Histories

Workshop with Prof. Daniel Stein (Siegen)

12:00-13:30 Lunch break

13:30-14:30 Alain Van Passen collection visit

14:45-16:15 Sérialités médiatiques et iconotextuelles, le périodique de bande dessinée

Talk by Prof. Matthieu Letourneux (Paris Nanterre)

No registration required!

To obtain the reading materials required for Prof. Stein’s workshop, please e-mail Maaheen Ahmed (maaheen.ahmed@ugent.be)

31 March 2021, 08:30-9:45 — Blandijn, 2nd floor, room 2.25

Talk by Lorenzo Di Paola, University of Messina/University of Salerno

The Corriere dei Piccoli was born at a particular moment in Italian history, between old systems of literary communication and the blossoming of new factors that were transforming the national cultural scene thanks to the advent of new industrial technologies and new cultural logics. This paper aims to investigate the communication format of this famous periodical in which national cultural models and international leisure models began to coexist and circulate, capable of breaking down the rigid boundaries of Italian literary culture and habitual pedagogical and monumental figures of the late nineteenth century. A new family scene of entertainment was thus created in a formula in which (the great names of the first Italian comics, Antonio Rubino, Attilio Mussino, Sergio Tofano, and others) an evident co-participation in their own historical time – thanks to the connections with Art Nouveau, Futurism, cinema – and the remediation of a long cultural tradition – the illustration of the figurine makers, satire, the spectacle of the storytellers – were intertwined. The proposed analysis therefore includes

– a focus on the social and perceptive revolution that accompanied the Corriere dei Piccoli;

– an investigation into the imagery and media narratives that nourished the magazine;

– an overview of the major authors of the Corriere dei Piccoli‘s auroral phase;

– readings and the critical fortunes of the periodical.

Bio

Lorenzo Di Paola is research fellow at the Department of Ancient and Modern Civilisations, University of Messina. He is adjunct professor of “Teorie e sociologie del fumetto dalla stampa al digitale ” at the University of Salerno. He cooperates with the chairs of Sociology of Cinema and Audiovisuals, Digital Media and Sociology of the Imaginary at the University of Salerno. He works on the mediology of comics and literature and the sociology of digital cultures. He has written numerous articles for scientific journals and collective volumes, and has participated in numerous national and international conferences. He is part of the international research group on Italian comics SNIF – Studying ‘n’ Investigating Fumetti, and is a member of the “Centro Studi Media Culture Società” at the University of Salerno. He also co-edits the scientific series “L’Eternauta, Collana di studi su fumetti e media”, together with Luigi Frezza and Mario Tirino. He has edited with Mario Tirino the volume Poi piovve dentro a l’alta fantasia. Dante e i fumetti (Polidoro Editore 2022). His most recent publications include: From Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality: Devices, Bodies, Places and Relationships (Ismar-adjunct 2021); L’immaginazione al potere (Oedipus 2020); Alla ricerca di una nuova identità disciplinare. Il fumetto e la transdisciplinarità (Mediascapes Journal, 2019). He is the author of the book L’inafferrabile medium. Una cartografia delle teorie del fumetto dagli anni venti a oggi (Polidoro editore, 2019).

3 March 2021, 11:30-12:30 — Blandijn, first floor, Faculteitszaal

Talk by Lorenzo Di Paola, University of Messina/University of Salerno

Comics are a very particular medium capable of living between the fragile boundaries that separate the various media narratives. A sort of media nomadism is what feeds and best describes the vital processes of this medium, which has always remediated previous and contemporary media (remediation that has had and still has very strong influences on formal and narrative aspects, on ‘contact’ with the public and on reading protocols). The web and digital technologies have not only somehow reconfigured forms of work, modes of production and consumption, but have also impacted the semiotic and spatial structures of comics and their reading modes. In this lecture, we will try to investigate these factors through the analysis of the Italian webcomic To be Continued by Lorenzo Ghetti and the web experience of Zerocalcare. Moreover, comics remain a fertile ground for investigating the dynamics that contribute to creating that ‘conception of the world’ capable of orienting the experiences and the emotional experience of entire generations. Through these two authors, therefore, we will try to understand how and with what contribution shared places and memory repertories, symbolic contents and narratives contribute to creating that common sense, that value system that allows mutual recognition among the members of the same generation.

Bio

Lorenzo Di Paola is research fellow at the Department of Ancient and Modern Civilisations, University of Messina. He is adjunct professor of “Teorie e sociologie del fumetto dalla stampa al digitale ” at the University of Salerno. He cooperates with the chairs of Sociology of Cinema and Audiovisuals, Digital Media and Sociology of the Imaginary at the University of Salerno. He works on the mediology of comics and literature and the sociology of digital cultures. He has written numerous articles for scientific journals and collective volumes, and has participated in numerous national and international conferences. He is part of the international research group on Italian comics SNIF – Studying ‘n’ Investigating Fumetti, and is a member of the “Centro Studi Media Culture Società” at the University of Salerno. He also co-edits the scientific series “L’Eternauta, Collana di studi su fumetti e media”, together with Luigi Frezza and Mario Tirino. He has edited with Mario Tirino the volume Poi piovve dentro a l’alta fantasia. Dante e i fumetti (Polidoro Editore 2022). His most recent publications include: From Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality: Devices, Bodies, Places and Relationships (Ismar-adjunct 2021); L’immaginazione al potere (Oedipus 2020); Alla ricerca di una nuova identità disciplinare. Il fumetto e la transdisciplinarità (Mediascapes Journal, 2019). He is the author of the book L’inafferrabile medium. Una cartografia delle teorie del fumetto dagli anni venti a oggi (Polidoro editore, 2019).

Nicolas Verstappen, lecturer at the Faculty of Communication Arts, Chulalongkorn University, will come on Wednesday 5th January to give a talk on children characters in Thai comics. He is the author of a recent first English-language historical overview of comics in Thailand, The Art of Thai Comics. The talk will take place at Blandijnberg 2, room 1.11.