Blog – Comics

New publications about the COMICS project activites

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

A new article on the Van Passen collection!

Prof. Hugo Frey, affiliated member of the COMICS team, has recently discussed the Van Passen collection in a new entry of Paper Trails, the BOOC (living online book) edited by University College London Press and dedicated to “The Social Life of Archives and Collections”.

Prof. Frey detailed the acquisition and curation of Alain Van Passen’s “enormous personal collection of predominantly, but not exclusively, Francophone comics” by Prof. Ahmed, and explore its holdings, now “preserved in over 700 box files” and comprising “comics from much of the twentieth century, with some core emphasis on the long period of 1940–80”, making it, in Prof Frey’s words, “one of the key sites of comics research for twenty-first-century scholarship”.

You can read the whole article here: https://ucldigitalpress.co.uk/BOOC/Article/3/125/ .