Category: Interview

Conferences are fertile ground for networking. The European Research Council supports COST actions to promote fruitful, professional bonds and networking.

iCOn-MICS is one such action (CA19119). It aims at bringing together all who are involved in comics and graphic novels from the Iberian cultural area, led by Prof. Viviane Alary of the University of Clermont-Auvergne. You can contact her (viviane.alary@uca.fr) or the Science Communication Manager of the action Antonio Lázaro-Reboll (a.lazaro-reboll@kent.ac.uk) via mail. Eva had a talk about the network and the upcoming activities with Dr. Jesús Jiménez Varea (jjvarea@us.es), Vice Chair of the action and professor at the University of Sevilla, in Spain. More info on the website.

Here is the link for one of the CfPs Dr. Jiménez Varea mentions, i.e. a special issue of the Spanish magazine Neuróptica on the relation(s) between Iberian comics and franco-belge bande dessinée.

 

Be sure to stay tuned until the end, when Dr. Jiménez Varea discusses a bunch of interesting girls in comics:

Mafalda (Quino – Argentina), Esther (Purita Campos – Spain), Little Orphan Annie (Harold Gray – USA), Palomar (Gilbert ‘Beto’ Hernández – USA), Locas (Jaime Hernández – USA), The Ballad of Halo Jones (Alan Moore & Ian Gibson – USA), Monica’s Gang – Turma da Mônica (Mauricio de Sousa – Brazil)

 

 

 

 

As part of the Comics Picturing Gilrhood international symposium, Eva Van de Wiele and Benoît Crucifix interviewed two cartoonists trained in Ghent and based in Belgium, Mathilde Van Gheluwe and Valentine Gallardo (who drew the poster for the conference) about their book Pendant que le loup n’y est pas, originally published through Atrabile in 2016. Their graphic novel recounts the experience of growing up in the 1990s amidst horrific cases of child abuse, creating a media frenzy and a range of adult concerns. The book intersperses viewpoints form two pre-teen girls in Brussels, over a couple of years, creating snapshots of this period through different stories seen and drawn from a child’s perspective.

 

If you are interested in buying the comic we discussed, this is where you can order it

Mathilde Van Gheluwe’s blog can be found here. Follow her on Instagram. Mathilde has published another comic on coming-of-age girlhood, discover it here.

Find Valentine Gallardo’s website or Instagram for more posters, zines, festival news, etc.