Call for Papers
The Comics Work of Neil Gaiman
A special issue of ImageTexT

ImageTexT is pleased to announce an upcoming special issue on the
work of Neil Gaiman. ImageTexT is a web-based journal published by
the University of Florida, committed to advancing the academic
study of comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. Under
the guidance of an editorial board of scholars from a variety of
disciplines, ImageTexT publishes solicited and peer-reviewed
papers that investigate the material, historical, theoretical, and
cultural implications of visual textuality. ImageTexT welcomes
essays emphasizing (but not limited to) the aesthetics, cognition,
production, reception, distribution and dissemination of comics
and other media as they relate to comics, along with translations
of previously existing research on comics as dimensions of visual
culture.

From Websnark, I found this forum thread about how to make Garfield a better strip – aside from the obvious solutions like “don’t” or “cancel it.” The poster’s claim is that if you remove all of Garfield’s dialogue and thought, the strip becomes funny. And looking at the examples in the thread, he’s dead right – some of these strips are genuinely funny in a way Garfield never has been.

This interests me for a couple of reasons – first, I’m a sucker for fan community stuff, and I think there’s something cutely ironic about the idea of a Garfield fan community. Second, I’m slightly astonished that Garfield has even the remotest chance of being good. Third, I’m interested in repurposing comic art. I’ve long thought it would be neat to take an unsubtitled anime or an untranslated manga and translate it with no knowledge of Japanese, but without devolving into parody – make a genuine attempt to find a story within the text. This seems to me in a similar spirit- on the one hand, it totally changes Garfield. On the other hand, it changes it into something that, on some level, it always was.

I’ve been thinking about Scott McCloud, in all his problematic glory. Certainly, in my experience, there are some major problems in trying to use Understanding Comics as a theoretical text for, well, understanding comics. On the other hand, I think the book has tremendous pedagogical use – I can’t think of a book that’s better suited for undergrads making their first steps into comic studies. But what, if anything, is McCloud useful for in more advanced study of comics? Are there areas where he’s particularly useful to comics research? In particular, is there something academically useful to be done with Reinventing Comics?

I’d post some sort of screed on the subject, but I find myself wholly ambivalent – I like McCloud’s explanations of how we read comics, for the most part… but I also tend to suspect that we, in the end, don’t need a detailed semiotics written out, and, in fact, that such a thing would be unhelpful in the long term – much like a firm definition of what comics are isn’t the most useful thing in the world.

Then again, I’m aggressively pan-media, and don’t really feel like anything in my world is lost if I stop being able to distinguish comics from something else. So I may be the wrong person to ask. Not that anyone did ask me.

Given the success of game studies blogs in terms of popularizing game studies and connecting to a large game studies audience, hopefully this blog will be yet one additional method used in promoting comics studies.

In addition to this blog, we’ll hopefully soon have a handy resource list of comics sites like Teaching-comics.org, so that we can further promote existing sources for comics scholarship.

This is that obligatory test post that goes at the beginning of blogs.

So. Um. This is the Comic Studies blog, which is a place for comics scholars to point out interesting things in the field, have discussions, work out ideas, and generally provide a/another hub on the Web for the growing field of comics studies.