Regular readers of the blog might have wondered why, after 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, there is no blogpost in the 2016 ComFor (German Society for Comics Studies) meeting. There is certainly a easy reason behind that: I experiencedn’t attended year’s conference that is last. Fourteen days ago, nevertheless, we took the journey to Bonn where this year’s meeting (subject: “Comics and their Popularity”) happened. Take note that the next records aren’t designed to acceptably summarise the particular seminar paper; alternatively they’re rather subjective and random – thus the name of the blogpost.

The seminar began on Friday, December 1 aided by the “Open Workshops”, i.e. Papers outside the meeting theme of “Comics and their Popularity”.

• The presentation that is first by Zita Husing (Bonn) on “Being and Nature: the value associated with the Southern Space of this Swamp in Alan Moore’s The Saga regarding the Swamp Thing” for which she submit connections between tropes for the United states South and Swamp Thing, e.g. That both are difficult to kill – no matter what defectively these are typically maimed or burned down, they constantly keep coming back through the dead. Like was remarked within the conversation a while later, nevertheless, it is interesting how authors 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 international.
• Into 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: for example, Killer Croc is actually a murderous guy whom appears like a crocodile.
• Daniela Kaufmann (Graz) then delivered “A Study in monochrome. Zur Signifikanz der Farben Schwarz und Wei? im Comic” (“on the value for the tints white and black in comics”). Beginning with Kazimir Malevich’s Ebony Square – featured e.g. bisexual men In Nicolas Mahler’s comic Lulu und das Schwarze Quadrat – she proceeded to Krazy Kat therefore the racial ambiguity of both its creator George Herriman as well as its eponymous protagonist.
• It was accompanied by Elisabeth Krieber‘s (Salzburg) paper on “Subversive Female shows in artistic Media – Phoebe Gloeckner’s and Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Narratives” which additionally considered the musical adaptation of Fun Residence in addition to movie adaptation of Diary of a Teenage woman.

Regrettably we missed the following two speaks by Karoline M. Pohl and Sakshi Wason, correspondingly, whom shut the “Open Workshops” section and after that the documents in 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 culture, and Jewish identity”). Her primary examples had been the comics of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Harvey Pekar, and she additionally discussed Jonas Engelmann’s theory of popular tradition while the dissolution of identity.
• Pnina Rosenberg (Haifa) mentioned “Mickey au camp de Gurs: governmental critique and automobile censorship in comics done throughout 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 handed by Julia Round (Bournemouth), en en en titled “Canon or typical? Sandman, Aesthetics, Intertextuality and Literariness”. She talked about the struggle that is ongoing the status of comics as a whole and Sandman in specific as literary works (also: high vs. Low art, “graphic novels” vs. Comic publications), just just how that is afflicted with the intimate writer idea around Neil Gaiman (“Mr Gaiman could be the Sandman” – Clive Barker), and just how this discourse comes towards the fore in fan conversations at neilgaimanboard.com.

Saturday, December 2:

• inside the talk on “Batmans queere Popularitat. Ein comicwissenschaftlicher und kulturhistorischer Annaherungsversuch” (“Batman’s queer popularity. A method through the viewpoint of comics studies and social history”), Daniel Stein (Siegen) talked about how Batman is appropriated as homosexual by some readers, although 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 appeal of superheroes” portrayed the eccentric figure of ‘Mail-Man’, a real-life translator and editor whom additionally replied fan mail when you look at 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 and also the significant. Comics as a solution towards the crisis of liberal 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 samples of comics that reveal the restrictions 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 in addition to 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. An example that is striking the current “Alien Nation” tale from Captain Marvel vol. 1 (2017) which can be partly set when you look at the “Black Forest”, albeit A ebony woodland that does not look such a thing just like the genuine one out of Southern Western Germany and it is positioned, 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 for instance the ‘principle of minimal departure’, but also Theodor Adorno’s ‘categorical imperative regarding the tradition industry’, and others.

Lecture hallway IX at Bonn University during David Turgay’s talk. Photograph by Ronny Bittner

The paper that is next David Turgay‘s (Landau) highly interesting “Das alternate im Popularen: Eine korpusgestutzte Analyse von Mainstream-Comics” (“the alternative when you look at the popular: a corpus-based analysis of mainstream comics”) for 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, and lack of text. The outcomes regarding the analysis showed a significant increase of those requirements as time passes, but general these traits (which David Turgay interpreted once the impact of separate comics) nevertheless took place less frequently in 2016 than anticipated.

Sunday, December 3:

• Michael Wetzel‘s (Bonn) paper had been en en titled Auteurism‘ that is“‘Graphic Kreativitat und Copyright im Comic” (“On imagination and copyright in comics”). An appealing theory ended up being that the favorite notion of a ‘Romanticist idea of authorship’ is flawed because Romanticist writers such as for instance E. T. A. Hoffmann actually deconstructed authorship.