CFP: Reading Between the Panels (Scan Journal; due Mar. 31, 2008)

Scan is a project of the Media Department @ Macquarie University, Sydney. This CFP is also available at Scan Journal's website.

Call for Papers:
Reading between the panels

Edited by:
Can Yalcinkaya – canyalcinkaya@yahoo.com
Dr Steve Collins – scollins@scmp.mq.edu.au

Comic books have been often treated deridingly as a hybrid of art and literature, but ultimately a product of low culture. Works by artists, writers and scholars including Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Scott McCloud, Will Brooker and Danny Fingeroth have forced a reappraisal of the space occupied by comic books. Over the last two decades comic book stories have diverged from hero-centric mythologies to more broadly explore areas such as the full gamut of the human psyche, sexuality, and politics. Beyond the stories themselves, the comic industry and economy has expanded to encompass underground, adult and alternative productions as well lucrative movie adaptations. This issue of Scan Journal invites submission on areas dealing with comic books and graphic novels that include, but are not restricted to:

• Studies of narrative
• Visual aesthetic
• Analysis of specific titles or characters
• Comics and adaptations/derivatives
• Fan fiction
• Comic book histories
• Economics of the comic book industry
• Comics and new media, Web comics, micropayment systems such as Bitpass, digital comics on DVD
• Comic books and intellectual property, for example copyright assignments, the pirate trade in scanned comics

Abstracts should be emailed to the editors by no later than 31st March 2008.

Full articles will adhere to the submission guidelines for Scan Journal and be emailed as a Word document attachment to the editors by Friday, 16th May 2008.

Submission guidelines can be found here.

CFP: Mechademia 4: War/Time (Deadline:January 7, 2008 )

This is a wonderful journal. Be sure to have your library order it!

MECHADEMIA 4: War/Time
Editor: Frenchy Lunning Associate Editors: Thomas LaMarre, Christopher Bolton, Michelle Ollie

Call for Papers

Mechademia is an annual forum published by the University of Minnesota Press, for critical work on anime, manga, and fan arts. We are seeking submissions on topics linked to Japanese and international manga or anime, as well as related material from fields like fashion, film studies, fine art, game design, and global fan culture, among others. We encourage contributions in a variety of formats, by authors from a wide range of backgrounds and fields. Contributors should endeavor to write across disciplinary boundaries, presenting their unique knowledge in all its sophistication, but with a broad audience in mind.

We are currently accepting submissions for Mechademia #4, the theme of which is "War/Time." Possible topics include:

• past and future conflicts
• war and memory
• animated violence and cinematic duration
• millennialism and apocalypse
• manga histories
• heroic archetypes versus real histories
• avatar wars
• etc.

This list is only a beginning: contributors are encouraged to interpret the topic broadly and contribute their own original perspectives. Superior submissions that fall outside the theme may also be considered if space permits.

The submission deadline for volume #4 is January 7, 2008.

Submissions should be approximately 5000 words or less, plus notes. Mechademia uses Chicago style documentation. Files may be sent as attachments to submissions@mechademia.org.

Detailed submission guidelines and further information are available on our web site at http://mechademia.org.

CFP: "Autographics" (8/15/2007)

[Thanks to new ComicsResearch & Such friend Chandra Wells, via the inestimable K.A. Laity.]

CALL FOR ARTICLES.
"Autographics": A Biography Special Issue.

The Winter 2008 Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly will be devoted to Autographics. Guest editors Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti seek to explore the diverse forms of visuality and conjunctions of image, text, and materiality in contemporary life narrative. Graphic forms include visual elements such as drawings, images, and pictures, as well as elements of design and physical features of the text--for instance, the diverse use of materials in such DIY autobiographical forms as personal zines, installations, and websites. Other examples of autographics include autobiographical comix and sequential art, graphic memoir, writing on the body and body maps, self portraiture, auto/biographical uses of found objects in collage, assemblage and installation, and contemporary uses of craft.

TO SUBMIT: Manuscripts should be double spaced and ideally between 3,000 and 10,000 words. A double-blind submission policy will be followed; the author's name should not appear anywhere on the manuscript, but an accompanying cover letter should contain the author's name and address. Consultation on manuscript ideas is welcomed.

Inquiries and submissions may be sent by email to biograph@hawaii.edu, or to:

Center for Biographical Research
University of Hawai'i at Mänoa
1800 East-West Road #325
Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822 USA
(Tel./Fax 808 956-3774)

DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF SUBMISSIONS: 15 Aug. 2007.

Ditko = Ditko

I first discovered cartoonist Steve Ditko's work in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man - or, more accurately, in Pocket Books' three-volume Spider-Man Classics series, published in the late 1970s. Technically, the first Ditko art I saw must have been in Origins of Marvel Comics- but the Pocket Spider-Mans gave me hundreds of pages of Ditko artwork, and I devoured them all, over and over again. Ross Andru was the current Spider-Man artist at the time, and I liked that work a lot; but the old books drawn (and often plotted) by Ditko were quirky, instantly recognizable, intensely felt: They were magic, and I couldn't get enough of them (or reprints of his early work on Doctor Strange). Fans of Ditko's Marvel-era work will be interested in the recent Marvel Visionaries: Steve Ditko volume, at right.

It wasn't until years later that I discovered Ditko's own, more personal work, on characters like Static, The Mocker, and - of course - Mr. A (you might still find copies of The Ditko Collection, with lots of Mr A., if you're lucky.) Ditko had become a student of Ayn Rand, and Mr. A. was the living embodiment of Rand's philosophy of "Objectivism": A is A. In Mr. A's world (and in Ditko's) there can be no moral grey areas; there is good, and there is evil, and there is nothing else. I think the icongraphy in the following image (from the Heritage Comics website) makes the stark argument quite clearly, itself:


While I find Ditko's personal work fascinating, I can't say that I could ever agree with it philosophically; I guess I'm too much of a grey-area kind of person. But that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy Mr. A; it's clearly passionate, heart-felt work. How many commercial artists of any stripe are that willing to put their innermost beliefs down on the page, this starkly, with no apologies or hedging?

Thanks to a post by Dr. Chris R. Tame on the Ditko-Kirby email list, I was happy to learn about the following article:

"The Illustrated Rand", by Chris Matthew Sciabarra. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6.1 (2004): 1-20. (Download a PDF version of the entire article here.)

The article, part one of two, catalogues Rand's cultural influence by listing some of the scores of academic journals, magazines, televsion shows, and more media which have quoted or mentioned Rand's work. Unfortunately, the bulk of the article is little more than a list. There's precious litle analysis here, although there may be more extended discussions in part two, which I haven't yet read. We don't even learn if most of these mentions are positive or negative, informed or throw-away.

The largest section of the article by far, however, is devoted to Steve Ditko and Frank (Sin City) Miller (pages 8-12). While the section includes several meaty Mr. A quotes, we still don't find much in the way of analysis. I'd love to learn more about how Objectivism plays out in Ditko's work: How accurately does his work embody the philosophy? Does Ditko's thought expand on, embellish, or even contradict Rand's? Again, perhaps I'm asking too much of an admitted "overview" article; but if anyone out there knows of more critical looks at Ditko's pesonal work, I'd love to hear about them.

And since I haven't mentioned it yet, the premiere website for Ditko is Blake Bell's Ditko Looked Up. Watch for Blake's Steve Ditko: Mysterious Traveller, a biography forthcoming from Fantagraphics. I'm sure that Blake's book will get into the questions I've asked above - and more - with relish.