Random records through the 2017 ComFor conference
Regular readers with this blog might have wondered why, after 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, there clearly was no blogpost regarding the 2016 ComFor (German Society for Comics Studies) seminar. There was a straightforward reason behind that: I experiencedn’t attended last year’s seminar. Fourteen days ago, nevertheless, the trip was taken by me to Bonn where this year’s meeting (subject: “Comics and their Popularity”) happened. Please be aware that listed here records aren’t designed to acceptably summarise the particular meeting paper; alternatively they’re rather subjective and random – thus the name with this blogpost.
The meeting began on Friday, December 1 because of the Workshops” that is“Open.e. Documents not in the meeting theme of “Comics and their Popularity”.
- The presentation that is first by Zita Husing (Bonn) on “Being and Nature: the value for the Southern Space associated with Swamp in Alan Moore’s The Saga associated with Swamp Thing” in which she submit connections between tropes regarding the United states South and Swamp Thing, e.g. That both are difficult to kill – no matter exactly how defectively these are typically maimed or burned down, they constantly return through the dead. Like was remarked into the conversation a while later, nevertheless, it’s interesting how article writers after Moore, such as for instance Jeff Lemire, have actually expanded Swamp Thing’s backstory into a cosmology that shifts the main focus through the regional into the worldwide.
- Within the 2nd paper, “Batwing, Batflugel oder Flugel-Bat. Die onimischen Einheiten im Comic” (“onimic devices in comics” – all translations mine), Rafal Jakiel (Wroclaw) viewed the names (poetonyms) of figures in superhero comics and identified traits such as for instance their simple iconicity: by way of example, Killer Croc is actually a murderous man whom seems like a crocodile.
- Daniela Kaufmann (Graz) then offered “A Study in monochrome. Zur Signifikanz der Farben Schwarz und Wei? im Comic” (“on the importance of this tints white and black in comics”). Beginning Kazimir Malevich’s Ebony Square – showcased e.g. In Nicolas Mahler’s comic Lulu und das Schwarze Quadrat – she proceeded to Krazy Kat together with ambiguity that is racial of its creator George Herriman and its particular eponymous protagonist.
- This is accompanied by Elisabeth Krieber‘s (Salzburg) paper on “Subversive feminine shows in artistic Media – Phoebe Gloeckner’s and Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Narratives” which additionally considered the musical adaptation of Fun Residence plus the film adaptation of Diary of the Teenage woman.
Unfortuitously we missed the following two speaks by Karoline M. Pohl and Sakshi Wason, correspondingly, who shut the “Open Workshops” section after which it the documents regarding the “Popularity” theme began.
- The presentation that is next attended had been by Veronique Sina (Cologne / Tubingen) on “Comickeit is Judischkeit. Uber das diskursive Zusammenspiel von Comic, Popularkultur und judischer Identitat” (“on the discursive interplay of comics, popular tradition, and Jewish identity”). Her examples that are main the comics of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Harvey Pekar, and she additionally talked about Jonas Engelmann’s theory of popular tradition because the dissolution of identification.
- Pnina Rosenberg (Haifa) mentioned “Mickey au camp de Gurs: Political critique and car censorship in comics done through the Holocaust”, by which she offered three image publications created by Hans Rosenthal during their internment at a concentration camp in 1942.
- The keynote that is first of meeting was presented with by Julia Round (Bournemouth), en en en titled “Canon or popular? Sandman, Aesthetics, Intertextuality and Literariness”. She talked about the ongoing fight about the status of comics generally speaking and Sandman in specific as literary works (also: high vs. Low art, “graphic novels” vs. Comic publications), just exactly exactly exactly how this can be afflicted with the intimate writer idea around Neil Gaiman (“Mr Gaiman could be the Sandman” – Clive Barker), and exactly how this discourse comes to your fore in fan talks at neilgaimanboard.com.
Saturday, December 2:
- inside the talk on “Batmans queere Popularitat. Ein comicwissenschaftlicher und kulturhistorischer Annaherungsversuch” (“Batman’s queer popularity. A strategy through the viewpoint of comics studies and history” that is cultural, Daniel Stein (Siegen) talked about how Batman is appropriated as homosexual by some visitors, while some are gripped by ‘queer anxiety’, i.e. The fear that their beloved character might formally be homosexual.
- Laura Antola‘s (Turku) paper “Marvel’s Comics in Finland: Translation, ‘Mail-Man’ plus the interest in superheroes” portrayed the eccentric figure of ‘Mail-Man’, a real-life translator and editor whom additionally replied fan mail within the page pages of Finnish Marvel comics from 1980 forward.
- “Das Popula(e)re und das Signifikante. Der Comic als Antwort auf die Krise liberaler Erzahlungen? ” (“The popular in addition to significant. Comics as a remedy towards the crisis of liberal ” that is narratives by Mario Zehe (Leipzig) talked about Economix by Goodwin/Burr, Le Singe de Hartlepool by Lupano/Moreau, and fortunate Luke: Los Angeles Terre vow by Jul/Achde as types of comics that demonstrate the limitations of cosmopolitanism.
- Stephan Packard (Cologne) mentioned “President Lex Luthor, Wakanda und der osteuropaische Schwarzwald. Zur popularen Ideologie der Fiktionalitat in Comics” (“President Lex Luthor, Wakanda together with Eastern European Black Forest. In the popular ideology of fictionality in comics”) additionally the often problematic connection between fictional things and their real-world counterparts. A striking instance is the current “Alien Nation” tale from Captain Marvel vol. 1 (2017) that will be partly set within the “Black Forest”, albeit A black colored woodland that does not look any such thing just like the real one out of Southern Western Germany and it is found, in accordance with a caption, in “Eastern Europe”. Packard unfolded a tight theoretical framework which included the kinds of fiction concept talked about by Marie-Laure Ryan like the ‘principle of minimal departure’, but also Theodor Adorno’s ‘categorical imperative regarding the tradition industry’, amongst others.
Lecture hallway IX at Bonn University during David Turgay’s talk. Photograph by Ronny Bittner
The next paper had been David Turgay‘s (Landau) very interesting “Das alternate im Popularen: Eine korpusgestutzte Analyse von Mainstream-Comics” (“the alternative into the popular: a corpus-based analysis of mainstream comics”) in which he examined the panels of 150 US comic publications from 1996 and from 2016 pertaining to six requirements: politics / social critique, narrative peculiarities, creative peculiarities, metafictional elements, absence of fighting www.camsloveaholics.com/male/gay-guys, and lack of text. The outcome for the analysis revealed a significant enhance of those requirements with time, but general these faculties (which David Turgay interpreted because the impact of separate comics) nevertheless took place less frequently in 2016 than anticipated.
Sunday, December 3:
- Michael Wetzel‘s (Bonn) paper ended up being en titled “‘Graphic Auteurism‘: Von Kreativitat und Copyright im Comic” (“On imagination and copyright in comics”). An appealing theory ended up being that the most popular notion of a ‘Romanticist idea of authorship’ is flawed because Romanticist writers such as for instance E. T. A. Hoffmann actually deconstructed authorship.