Digital comics: media and generational transformations

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).

Children Characters in Thai Comics

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.

Comics Strike Back — Call for Papers

Our colleague Giorgio Busi Rizzi organizes a conference on digital comics which will take place in Ghent next summer, 11 to 13 July 2022: Comics Strike Back: Digital Comics, Digital Audiences, Digital Practices:

Digital comics encompass a variety of works, ranging from print comics that are then digitised or pre-published online to e-comics that resist print publication and have stronger affinities with videogames, animations, and other digital products. Online or offline, static or animated, reproducing the page format or expanding beyond the borders of a screen, digital comics always imply some degree of adjustment of processes and habits, because comics are also cultural objects, creative practices as well as models of production and consumption.

Read the full call for papers and visit the conference website here: https://www.digitalcomics.ugent.be/

Drawing Back, Revealing and Subverting Belgian Colonial Legacy in Comics

30 Nov. 2021, 9:30-11:00 — Blandijn, first floor, Faculteitszaal

Talk by Alicia Lambert, Université catholique de Louvain

 

The last two decades have been marked by a revival of (de)colonial issues in Belgian public, political, and artistic debates, including in the comics field. Based on recent research on the potentialities of comics – or art, in general – to destabilize colonial ideologies and stereotypes (Gardner, McKinney, Wanzo, Macé, Rosello), this PhD project examines comics and graphic novels, published during this period (2000-2021), that generate a critical and reflexive distance towards the Belgian colonial imaginary.
This presentation focuses on Barly Baruti and Christophe Cassiau-Haurie’s Le Singe Jaune (2018) and Jean-Philippe Stassen’s graphic documentary “I Comb Jesus” (2009-2010). It explores the artistic and narrative techniques (pastiche, parody, generic hybridization, temporal superpositions, tabular composition, text-image tensions…) that allow the artists to draw back, to reveal, and to subvert various images inherited from Belgium’s colonial past (monuments, archives), including Franco-Belgian comics associated with Belgium’s ex-colonies (Tintin in the Congo) as well as their generic paradigms and traditional tropes (exoticism, adventure, ligne claire…). The analysis will demonstrate how artworks, plots, characters, and styles that have traditionally spread colonial ideologies are here subverted from their initial functions (colonial propaganda, entertainment) to be given new ones (attraction/identification tools, reflexive anti-stereotypes), thereby challenging readers’ expectations and allowing them to discover other perspectives on Belgium’s colonial past, or to unveil the mechanisms under its propaganda as well as their legacies in postcolonial times.

 

Bio

Alicia Lambert is a PhD student at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). She holds a BA degree (UNamur) and an MA degree (UCLouvain) in Modern Languages and Literatures (English-Dutch). Her PhD project examines the ways in which Belgian colonial imagery is redrawn, unveiled and subverted in the works of artists such as Barly Baruti, Asimba Bathy, Serge Diantantu, Anton Kannemeyer, Nicolas Pitz, Olivier Schrauwen, Jean-Philippe Stassen and Thibau Vande Voorde.

How to Frame World War II in Comics: Issues of Representation and Formats

17 Nov. 2021, 9:00-12:00 — Blandijn, third floor, Camelot meeting room

Talk and discussion by Prof Kees Ribbens (NIOD/Erasmus University Rotterdam)

 

Bio

Kees Ribbens is a senior researcher at NIOD, where he has worked since 2006. He is also an endowed professor of ‘Popular historical culture of Global Conflicts and Mass Violence’ at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His interest is in how memories of war, genocide and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are represented in words and images. More generally, he looks at how individuals, groups and societies relate to these histories. He is fascinated by the ways in which the Second World War is given meaning, represented and appropriated, each time anew, across various communities.

Unpacking Norbert Moutier’s Juvenilia

19 Nov. 2021, 15:00 — Faculteitsbibliotheek Letteren en Wijsgebeerte, Library Lab Magnel

Déballage des bandes dessinées d’enfance de Norbert Moutier

Xavier Girard, coordinateur pédagogique à l’ESAD Orléans, a réuni un impressionnant corpus d’archives des bandes dessinées d’enfance de Norbert Moutier. Cette collection réunit environ un millier de fascicules dessinés, colorés, reliés main. Xavier Girard procédera à un déballage de certains de ces recueils, reviendra sur le processus de découverte et d’organisation de ces archives, et sur les possibilités d’arpentage de ce large corpus. Ces recueils dessinés seront présentés à côté de sélections d’illustrés pour enfants contemporains, tirés de la collection Van Passen.

Un deuxième déballage sera organisé par Philippe Capart à Bruxelles à la Galerie Bortier, le 20 novembre 2021 à 10h.

Pour participer à l’atelier, écrire à benoit.crucifix@ugent.be

Bio

Xavier Girard vit et travaille à Orléans. Au sein de l’ESAD Orléans, il coordonne la classe préparatoire aux métiers de la création et les ateliers de pratiques amateurs. Parallèlement, il porte divers projets artistiques centrés sur le jeune public, la culture participative et la médiation des supports numériques dans le monde physique : l’exposition OUJEVIPO autour du jeu vidéo indépendant, l’atelier-spectacle Hypothèses graphiques mêlant dessin et numérique, notamment. Il participe à de nombreux festivals et programmes pédagogiques en France et dans le réseau des Instituts français à l’étranger : à Londres, Tanger et Rabat, Séoul ou Tokyo.

Summer school workshop for children

For the ZomerWijs in de Wijk intiative of the Onderwijscentrum Gent we organized a small workshop comics reading and making for children between 8 and 12.
After a short reading of Matthew Forsythe’s Pokko heeft een trommel adapted for Kamishibai-format storytelling, we talked with them about comics and visual storytelling and invited them to make their own little fanzines, using the format templates from L’Articho, cutting-and-pasting comics, rewriting texts, drawing their own stories.

 

Workshops on Italian fumetti at Sint-Lievenscollege Ghent

October 2020

PhD student Eva Van de Wiele introduced fifteen-year-old pupils of Sint-Lievenscollege to the wonders of (Italian) comics.

Watch this video for a brief recap of the three workshops.

This folder gives an overview of the three workshops, the primary bibliographical sources used and the reponsible persons.

Picture of the overview of the three workshops

 

“Multi is more. Towards Multiliteracy and media awareness in the Flemish Classroom Through Comics” (Eva Van de Wiele, Michel De Dobbeleer, Mara Santi)

Data-set of our chapter:

  • The glossary (Dutch) we handed out to the pupils after workshop 1 drew laregly from Jan Baetens, Pascal Lefèvre’s, Strips anders lezen, Amsterdam, Sherpa, 1993.
  • The reading list

  • To evaluate the workshops:
    • we ended the third workshop with a Kahoot;
    • we presented the teachers with the following questionnaire. Their answers can be found here.

We would like to thank the Embassy of Italy in Belgium, Società Dante Alighieri Gent, Cecilia Valagussa, the SInt-Lievenscollege and its teachers Laurent Florizoone and Lieven Van den Weghe for the fruitful collaboration.

Picturing Girlhood · Keynote by Mel Gibson

Our digital symposium Sugar and Spice, and the Not So Nice: Comics Picturing Girlhood  was launched on 22 April 2021 with a profound and personal keynote by Mel Gibson. Using herself as a case study she reflected on being a reader, a librarian, a scholar and an individual who, in a variety of fields, has represented non-standard notions of ‘girl’. In workshops for librarians, teachers and scholars, Gibson uses comics for object elicitation, allowing her to encourage others to reconsider themselves as child comics readers and the complex ideologies knotted up in this experience. Gibson’s work provokes the notion of the individual as a role model, a unique and precise representation with particular qualities, interests and passions. Using restorative nostalgia entails not just reflecting back on, but also resisting, shame and embarrassment, forgiving and accepting ourselves as the child readers we were. Gibson shows a respect for the powerful and evocative materiality of comics and offers a compassionate model for identity. Whilst speaking personally about comics reading, Gibson engaged with discourses of hierarchy, child development and affect, interrogating the simple truth that what we read is part of making us who we are.

 

Image courtesy by Dragana Radanović.

 

 

Comics on the Outside

Hetamoé, « Violent Delights » (KUŠ!, 2020). Image courtesy of Ana Matilde Sousa. www.heta.moe

Bandes dessinées hors-champs / Comics on the Outside

Université libre de Bruxelles | 2-4 June 2021

 

This international conference aims at seizing this complex and hard-to-translate notion of the corpus hors-champ (Menu 2011), locating an ‘outside’ of comics. This notion can facilitate the convergence of various research interests to bring forward objects for scrutiny that were previously held at the margins of comics studies. The ‘outside’ invites us to expand our usual corpora to a wider range of objects, works, and practices positioned at the limits and margins of what has been established as ‘field.’ Rather than trying in vain to redefine the parameters of the field, this symposium invites a broad and changing understanding of the ‘field’, where its ‘inside’ (champ) and ‘outside’ (hors-champ) are caught in a dynamic tension. For all its spatial connotations, the ‘field’ appears as a moving target: a work, a practice, an object can slide from center to periphery and vice versa. The chosen focus and approach, together with the methods applied for analysis, fully participate in the construction of this corpus hors-champ.

Attending the conference

This symposium can be attended online via the Zoom platform. The online conference is free and open to everyone. To register and receive the link, please write to the following e-mail address: acme.bdresearch@gmail.com

Some conferences will also take place in situ on the ULB campus, in compliance with the measures against the spread of covid-19.

Download the full program