Category: Open Access

Text in Comics — New Special Issue

Benoît Glaude has co-edited, alongside Blanche Delaborde and Pierre-Olivier Douphies, a special issue of the online journal Revue Textimage, a landmark title in the field of word-and-image studies. Titled “Espaces et formes du texte dans la bande dessinée”, the issue focuses on the spatial and visual display of text within comics productions. It brings together an array of scholars from different horizons, and joins research articles with interviews, reviews, and an artist’s contribution from Gabri Molist. Eva Van de Wiele contributes a piece on versified captions in Spanish comics and Benoît Crucifix on the uses and functions of a Futura typeface in Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby.

 

 

Playing with Formats

Two new articles by Dona Pursall and Eva Van de Wiele have been published in the special issue “Jeux de Formats” of the online journal Interfaces:

Domesticating and Glocalising the Dreamy: McCay’s Little Nemo and Its Sequels in Early Italian Corriere dei Piccoli (1909-1914)

The editors of Corriere dei Piccoli (CdP), an Italian comics magazine for children launched in December 1908, followed the New York Herald’s every step. In envisioning the creation of a children’s supplement, Italy’s biggest newspaper understood the enthralment and economic potential of the Sunday pages and introduced its Italian readers to various American serial figures. One of those recurring characters, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, was the most heavily reformatted on CdP’s centre pages in 1913. The drastic flattening of McCay’s vertical appeal to a double page put the graphic designer to the limits of his possibilities. This domestication of the American format is a consequence of the pedagogical ideas and moralistic intentions behind the bourgeois magazine, and Italian style and reading preferences related to readership. Still, Little Nemo inspired the autochthonous authors to create their own versions of McCay’s serial narrative. I uncover the actualizations of the serial figure by three Italian comic artists, unveiling the many moralistic and propagandistic incarnations of Little Nemo. Although heavily reformatted, Little Nemo’s legacy in CdP went further than any other Sunday page.

“Tin-Can Tommy The Clockwork Boy”: A case study in incompleteness for humorous effect in British children’s comics of the 1930s

This article explores the format and construct of longer humorous comics strips through the close analysis of “Tin-Can Tommy The Clockwork Boy” from D C Thomson’s The Beano Comic, a publication aimed at children and launched in 1938. This study of one specific strip argues that the use a seriality somewhere between open-ended and discontinuous, continual fluctuations between flat and round characterisation and a style wavering between completeness and expressivity constructs an aesthetic of incompleteness which is essentiel in the creation of humour. Following investigation of the ways in which this particular format constructs funniness as a process of continual negotiation, specifically through the use of exaggeration, asymmetry, dissatisfaction and imbalance, the article concludes that a quality of unfinished-ness is integral to the relationship these comics create with their readers, and therefore fundamental to laughter.

Children scribbling comics

New article by Benoît Crucifix in the latest issue of Studies in Comics, about two Jojo & Jimmy albums scribbled over by children readers. The article considers material uses and reading practices in Belgian comics culture. As doodles and marks left on battered copies, scribbles foreground complex questions for the comics historian, offering clues that otherwise remain elusive to understand childhood reading practices.

Loving Comics in Neil the Horse

New article by Maaheen Ahmed, in the Comicalités issue “Histoire et influence des pratiques bédéphiliques” edited by Jean-Paul Gabilliet and Nicolas Labarre, about Neil the Horse.

Abstract: This article examines the love of comics or bedephilia discernible in Katherine Collins’s Neil the Horse Comics and Stories, a short-lived comic from the 1980s. It interrogates and contextualizes the “childish” elements of the comic, its bridging of children’s culture and adult culture through focusing girls’ comics and funny animal comics. It also discusses the comic’s interactions with musicals. Situating the comic in the “maturing” scene of 1980s North America, this article shows how Neil the Horse expresses a love for comics that were often left out of the mainstream and its alternatives; it reached out to a relatively mixed audience and an all but forgotten group of comics readers that often steered clear of the abundance of superhero comics.

 

Advertising and Children’s Comics

The latest issue of H-ermes features an article in Italian by Eva Van de Wiele, “Sedurre a tavola: confini mutati tra pubblicità e fumetti per bambini,” about the long history of comics and advertising relationships, as a brief archeology of the cartoonist-marketeer from the newspaper to the digital arenas of social media
“This article aims to investigate how advertising in Italy and in children’s comics has evolved. In postmodern times when goods have become messages (Klein, 2001), comics’ characters are progressively morphing into products. The intensification of the relationship between cultural and economic production (Jameson, 1998) led to different outcomes. On the part of the industry, similar appropriations – although they may seem either innovative or antiquated operations – testify to the persistent idea of a deep-rooted link between childhood and the medium itself (one of the childhood geographies studied by Ahmed 2020). These appropriations also show a relationship that has been established in comics since its origins: the bond between children and consumption in the comics published in Corriere dei Piccoli. This paper discusses the survival of paper comics for educational purposes as well as its strategies to retain the reader (International Kids). These are contrasted with pure entertainment comics which present various hybrid forms on social media such as Instagram and TikTok. Finally, the boundaries between the cartoonist- marketeer and international companies that create or deny the use of testimonials in advertising are also changing. The hybrid forms of comics activate the multimedia skills of the child consumer.”
Also of UGent note, Giorgio Busi Rizzi’s article, “Il fumetto digitale tra sperimentazione e partecipazione: il caso Homestuck,” about the tension between two inclinations (experimental and participated) of digital comics:
“Digital comics that try to maximize the affordances of their medium seem to be condemned to in-betweenness: their strength (leveraging on unusual narrative potentials) often becomes their limit, and authors are hardly able to free themselves from the role of niche experimenters and open up to audience participation. A significant exception, however, is Homestuck, a gigantic webcomic by Andrew Hussie. Strongly connected to videogame culture and the very nature of the internet, Homestuck features animations, sounds, embedded flash games, and so on. The webcomic resulted in various transmedial branches (a videogame spin-off and several friendsims, a multi-volume soundtrack, a book epilogue) and an ongoing intermedial adaptation in book format. It has equally managed, over the years, to consolidate an extremely lively community active both in its interactions with the author (with a constant exchange of ideas and an endless readiness to subsidize his projects), in its interpretation of the canon production, and in providing an amazing extent of fan production.
This contribution aims to analyze Homestuck as a possible mediation between the two inclinations (experimental and participated) of digital comics.”

Graphic Attractions in TBO

The Spanish comics studies magazine Cuadernos de Comics has published Eva van de Wiele’s detailed study “Las atracciones gráficas de Méndez Álvarez en la phase foraine de TBO (1917-1928)” (English title “Méndez Álvarez’ graphic attractions during TBO’s phase foraine“), which considers the cartooning career of Méndez Álvarez, who has moved between different magazines, juggling adult and child audiences, and often times revisiting already-used gags in fresh ways. Eva van de Wiele considers the gag economy of his work together with the grotesque humor and lively drawing style, which she described in terms of the carnivalesque.

Children in Graphic Novels

Maaheen Ahmed’s article “Children in Graphic Novels: Intermedial Encounters and Mnemonic Layers” has been published in the latest issue of the open-access journal Etudes francophones. The article fleshes out the notion of media memory (building on previous work) in connection to pseudo-autobiographical graphic novels in Europe and North-America published between the 1990s and 2010s that turn to children and childhood.

“They are imbued with the specific childhood geographies of children’s image-making practices and children reading comics (the latter with a focus on the North American context). These geographies, which are intermedial in their essence, are fleshed and activated by media memories.”

In tracing these geographies, the article extends the concerns and issues at the heart of the COMICS project to a contemporary corpus of adult comics where the figure of the child gathers various tangents and concerns.

“Childish presences capture the struggle of canonical hierarchy, but also of expression, and hence of establishing emotional, affective and consequently powerful connections.”