– A research seminar focusing on comic-art and graphic noveling.
The starting point for the Everyday Comic-Art Network and a release for the presentation of the comic-art based project: Det är i vardagen det händer – Tecknade serier för att skapa tryggare grannskap (It happens in the everyday – Comic-art to create safer neighborhoods).
9 Dec 2025. 09:00 – 16:00 Location: Glashuset, HDK-Valand. Entrence Storgatan 43 or Vasagatan 50, Göteborg Additional info. Zoom link is provided.
Organizers: Mathieu Li-Goyette, Erin La Cour, Toni Pape, Rik Spanjers
At the turn of the 20th century, techniques of observation and of visual representation were achieving an exponentially fast industrial revolution of production, distribution, and reception. Presses and cameras were faster, more precise, and as their influence on society rapidly broadened, a whole new set of visual practices became available to artists. Since then, vision has become fully fragmented or accelerated, with the collapse of “classical models of vision and their stable space of representations. Instead, observation [became] increasingly a question of equivalent sensations and stimuli that have no reference to a spatial location” (Crary 1990). These advancements encouraged a perpetual deconstruction of vision prompting new techniques of representation, which are still ongoing in our technological age.
During this period, print and visual media developed new modes of combining words and images that both dynamize vision and normalize it in new directions. This results in media forms that playfully engage the eye in nonlinear visual explorations, forms that are implicitly forces of deinstitutionalization of subjects, framing, and usages. Examples can be found in comic strips and magazines, but also advertisements, games, miniatures, puzzles, rebus, travelogues and visual bibles.
This conference invites an intermedial reflection on the development of modes of reading and seeing in relation to constraints of production and distribution. We welcome contributions on subjects ranging from a medium’s early stages of development up to the present digital world, while addressing issues of readability, narrativity, interactivity, and/or materiality. How did new ludic modes of seeing develop from scientific observation to artistic production? What techniques did artists develop to increase the readability of their medium? How did they negotiate the tensions between originality and standardization? What new visual norms were established along the way?
Bringing together scholars and practitioners, the conference aims to understand how popular media art contributed to the ludification of vision, training our eyes to see in playful, nonlinear and equivocal ways.
We welcome submissions on any aspect of ludification in the visual arts and its adjacent practices. Please send an abstract (300 words maximum) with a title, bio, and a brief bibliography related to the paper (maximum of 5 titles) through this submission formby October 31st. We plan to announce decisions by November 21.
Bibliography
Beringer, Alex. 2024. Lost Literacies. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.
De Koven, Bernard. 2025. The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ensslin, Astrid and Alice Bell. 2021. Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gaudreault, André. 2009. From Plato to Lumière. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gidding, Seth. 2024. Toy Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Horstkotte, Silke and Nancy Pedri. 2022. Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Kashtan, Aaron. 2019. Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
LaMarre, Thomas. 2009. The Anime Machine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2007. Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth- Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, David. 1999. Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saguisag, Lara. 2019. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press.
The Comics Archive in Malmö has expanded significantly in recent years through large donations. To provide a better overview and inspire scholars to initiate new projects, Malmö University Comics Hub/much and The Comics Archive invites you to a full-day symposium where we will present some of the most important additions. During this full-day symposium, comic scholars will also provide different perspectives on comics research and parts of the collections will be presented thematically. The goal is to inspire you to initiate new research with the starting point in the archive’s unique and largely unresearched collections.
The Symposium will be in the form of presentations and workshop, so there will be no call for papers.
Target group: Comics-scholars and PhD-students.
Cost: Free.
Date: November 14, 2025.
Place: Malmö university, K3-Studio, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1 and The Comics Archive, Friisgaan 19b, Malmö.
Filmvisning på Panora om serierevolutionen på 80-talet.
Onsdag 7/5 kl 18.30
”Jag har ju egentligen inte växt upp med serier.” Så inleds filmen om och med Horst Schröder – serietidningsförläggaren som förändrade Seriesverige för alltid. Välkommen på visning av Samtal med Horst följt av ett samtal mellan Fredrik Strömberg och Gunnar Krantz.
I Samtal med Horst möter vi Horst Schröder, förlagschef på Epix Förlag, i en nära och personlig berättelse om hans liv. Från en tuff uppväxt i efterkrigstidens Tyskland till ett akademiskt liv – och kärleken som förde honom till Sverige. Nästan av en slump kom han sedan att skapa ett av de mest tongivande och kontroversiella förlagen i svensk seriehistoria.
Efter visningen samtalar journalisten, författaren och forskaren Fredrik Strömberg med Gunnar Krantz, serieskapare och konstnärliga professor på Malmö universitet och tillika medarbetare till Horst Schröder på förlaget Epix under 1980-talet. Samtalet kommer att fokusera på Krantz tid på förlaget, alla de kontroverser som uppstod och skälen till varför han till slut lämnade Epix.
Doctoral student in Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Culture and Society, the School of Arts and Communication, focusing on storytelling.
Work duties
Those appointed to doctoral studentships shall primarily devote themselves to their studies. Those appointed to doctoral studentships may work to a limited extent with educational tasks, research, artistic research, and administration. However, duties of this kind may not comprise more than 20 per cent of a full-time post (Higher Education Ordinance (HEO) Chapter 5, section 2).
The doctoral education concludes with a doctoral degree and comprises 240 credits, which corresponds to four years of full-time study. The programme consists of courses and an independent research project that is presented in a doctoral thesis. As a doctoral student, you will be expected to play an active part in the research and educational environment and, when applicable, in the research programmes of the Department/School.
The doctoral education is carried out within the academic environment storytelling at the School of Arts and Communication (K3). This environment explores narratives in various forms, with a special focus on what is traditionally described as aesthetic forms of expression and on journalistic/documentary storytelling. The media and art forms that are mainly in focus are literature, film, art, graphic novels and comics, photography, and journalism. Ongoing research projects deal with, among other things, literary representations of class, work, and the relationship between the urban and the rural, creative writing, comics, literary material in the trade-union press and documentary storytelling in various media. The doctoral student’s dissertation project shall contribute to the development of the research environment of storytelling.
The Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures hereby invites for the 4th symposium at Malmö University on the theme of storytelling and collaborative future making. The actual symposium will take place 13-14 May 2025. The 15th of May, we combine with the rest of the centre for a seminar on better stories with Professor Andrea Pető, Central European University and guest professor at Malmö University. We plan to construct a varied program with paper presentations, workshops and spaces for dialogue. For the symposium, we invite a varied group of scholars from disciplines like design studies, leadership and organization studies, communication, comics research, art, architecture, education and urban planning. The theme Storytelling and Collaborative Future Making addresses collaborative responses to making a sustainable and common future within diverse areas mentioned above. A common thread in the symposium is to explore the role that storytelling can have in crafting ethical foundations for work, organization, design, architecture, education and urban development. Storytelling and collaboration for earthly survival mix with questions concerning how to collaborate and organize for human rights.
While the 17 SDGs have been successful in mobilizing attention to questions concerning sustainability and inclusion, the embedded idea of balancing profit, people, and planet in actual strategies and practices seem to be off-track in practicing sustainable and inclusive development. Sustainability and inclusion are more and more at risk of becoming empty signifiers. Therefore, this symposium presents new ideas, concepts and approaches that allows for new understanding of how to work with all aspects of sustainability. The symposium explores new ideas and approaches that mix storytelling and collaboration with questions concerning human rights and our relations to nature. These approaches might range from new embodied, relational, and material understandings of storytelling, the problematic and complex relations between small stories and grand narratives, visual narratives/comics, the relations between places, spaces, and stories, post-human, transhuman and storytelling for Gaia, feminist, transgender, or queer storytelling.
We also invite contributions of how to research and write differently in ways in which we take upon us our earthly responsibility. Such contributions may be inspired by engaged scholarship, reflexive inquiry, post-qualitative inquiry, or speculative fabulation. Finally, we also invite new approaches to understand the details how we work and collaborate and how they mix with issues concerning human rights and nature. These might comprise ideas from performative approaches to accounting, logistics, learning, collaboration, and planning. If you want to join us, please submit an abstract of app. 500 words by 16th April 2025 to one of the organizers, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Gunnar Krantz or Per-Anders Hillgren. The event is free of charge. We don’t offer any accommodation, lunch, or dinner. We will make space for social arrangements in Malmö and organize a joint meeting place for dinner for those who are interested. Please send any queries to Kenneth, Gunnar, or Per-Anders using the following emails. The venue for the symposium will be announced later.
Location: Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée and Hoek 38, Brussels, Belgium
Tuesday 24 June – Wednesday 25 June 2025 (online)
Monday 30 June – Friday 4 July 2025 (in-person)ers
The Taste of Comics
Taste is constructed through culture, aesthetics and the senses. What is good taste and bad taste? In the past comics were aligned with trash culture evoking notions of good literature and bad literature, good art and bad art. How and why were these hierarchies constructed? Are they still relevant? Changing tastes can make a topic more appealing or less appealing and inform how we view a place, text, theme, author, or artist. Aesthetic tastes have informed the reception of styles such as the école de Marcinelle or Hergé’s clear line. There are issues of good taste and restraint, bad taste and excess in art movements from the Classical to the Gothic or the architectural taste of the Cités obscures. There are also issues of taste in the consumption of art or fashion as in, for instance, paper cut out dolls and makeover stories.
Speaking more literally, graphic gastronomy is filled with stories about taste and food in in autobiographies like Lucy Knisley’s Relish: My Life in the Kitchen. Food features prominently in manga of cookery and romance are found in manga such as Kitchen Princess by Natsumi Ando and Miyuki Kobayashi and LGBTQA+ manga such as Fumi Yoshinaga’s What Did You Eat Yesterday, or Jarrett Melendez’s Chef’s Kiss. Food features in instruction books like Robin Ha’s Cook Korean!: A Comic Book with Recipes and adventure stories skilfully whisked together with instruction as in Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki’s Oishinbo a la carte #1: Japanese Cuisine. Bakhtinian excess is evoked in characters such as Capitaine Haddock’s drinking, Garfield’s love of Lasagne, and Scooby Doo and Shaggy who will eat anything. Matter-Eater Lad, from the Legion of Superheroes, of course, can eat anything. Eating can also be dis-tasteful in stories such as Chew, a detective who gets psychic impressions from whatever food he eats. And at the opposite end of excess is the tragedy of famine in graphic novels like Red Harvest: A Graphic Novel of the Terror Famine in Soviet Ukraine (Michael Cherkas) or starvation as in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.As always, papers outside of this theme are also welcomed.
We are looking for papers based on, but not limited to, any aspects of taste such as:
· changing tastes in comics and graphic novels – e.g. a franchise or character
· artistic styles such as art nouveau, art deco, ligne clair
· kitsch, punk, anti-taste
· cultural tastes and traditions
· synesthesia – tasting words, colours
· graphic gastronomy, depicting food, recipes
· horror and dis-taste – ghouls, vampires, werewolves, cannibalism
· food and romance
· greed and excess
· feasting, fasting, famine
· appetite and the body
· changing appreciations of art and fashion, makeovers
· places and their gastronomic reputations: Belgium and beyond!
As always, papers outside of this theme are also welcomed.
We invite proposals for single 20-minute papers, 60- or 90-minute participatory workshops or roundtables, or three-paper panels. Please complete the online form at https://forms.office.com/e/cwa9dxQeYW, which includes details such as proposal title, your desired format (paper, workshop, panel, roundtable), co-presenter details, in-person or online, abstract (200 words) and biography (100 words). The online form will close at midnight UK time on 31 January 2025, and we will confirm acceptance by 1 March 2025.
We hope this whets your appetite. Please email TheIGNCC@gmail.com with any queries, and keep an eye on our website www.IGNCC.com for more updates and the latest news.
Malmö University Comics Hub (MUCH) and K3 Monster Lab In collaboration with activist art group Party of the Dead Invite to K3 Halloween 2024 Exhibition:
The Voices of the Dead
October 29 to November 16 in K3 Open Space, Niagara building Art activism, satire, comics, workshops and calaveras.
Thursday October 31, 14-16
Grand opening with activities in and around K3 Open Space:
Draw your inner critics
Listen to the sound of the monstruous
Make contact with the Dead
Take part of comics and satirical drawings
Join the movement of Late Bloomers
Early November: Monster writing workshops, presentations and standup comedy. Dates not decided (but will be within opening hours of Niagara building)
Malmö University Comics Hub (MUCH) is a platform för research, artistic development and cooperation within the field of comics, hosted by the School of Arts and Communication (K3) at Malmö University. K3 Monster Lab is a research group looking into monsters and the monstruous, hauntology and creative practices, from a feminist and posthuman perspective. Contact: Åsa Harvard Maare asa.harvard@mau.se
The Party of the Dead is an art activist group located in Tbilisi and Cologne, using actions and installations to critique how the dead are used rhetorically in political pro-war discourse in today’s Russia. @partyofthedead @партия мёртвых
much contributed to Ystad Comics Festival with an academic Friday, focusing on fanzines.
For the 4th time much presented an academic day in collaboration with Ystad (formerly Skillinge) Comics Festival. This time the research presented focused on fanzines. Among the presenters were Ýrr Jónasdóttir, head of Ystads Art Museum, who presented the museums huge collection of artist books. Anna Nordenstam, Professor of Literature at the University of Gothenburg, who presented her ongoing research on fanzines, and senior lecturer Anders Høg Hansen, Malmö University, who discussed his recently published book Mix Tape Memories: Movement and Difference in Life Writing in relation to the praxis of fanzine-making. See the full program below:
Dr. Harriet EH Earle. Photo: Sheffield Hallam University
We are happy to announce that Dr Harriet EH Earle FHEA, Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Sheffield Hallam University, will present a keynote.
Harriet Earle (Hattie) is a lecturer and researcher in comics and popular culture. Her current research brings fibre arts and needlework into conversation with comics. What connections can we make between these two artistic forms and to what end? If we broaden our working definitions of comics to include narrative needlework, how does our understanding of both fields change – who is included and what is gained? Hattie considers the politics and poetics of the needle as a tool for creating narratives that give voice and power to [previously] silen[ced/t] communities.
