Incredibly talented Paco Roca has won a bunch of national prizes, is published in Spain, France and Italy and is the author of critically-acclaimed Arrugas (Wrinkles), which we expect to have soon translated into English and distributed in the USA.

J Salvadore’s Super Emo friends (below). Better yet, you should pop over to his site, where, among other treasures you can get peeks into his sketchbook to see how one of his pieces moves from concept to product.

* Seminar Organizer: Giuseppe Gazzola, SUNY Stony Brook; David M. Ball, Dickinson College

Comics are heralded as a putatively “universal” language, one that can be intuitively seen and read across cultural boundaries. They have nonetheless been shaped by specific social and national locations, and as such, are particularly illustrative of the promises and limitations of intellectual cosmopolitanism. The popularity and production of comics around the world have generated a keen heterogeneity of forms, idioms, and graphic geographies, a heterogeneity that remains largely unaccounted for in contemporary comics criticism and theory.

The recent critical interest in graphic narratives in the past few years has motivated renewed attention to long-held and long-unanswered questions about the medium. Most centrally, foundational questions about comics continue to frame as well as generate conversations among critics: What are comics? Do they represent a hybrid medium or a unique field of study? How do they define generic expectations, or rather are they confined by those expectations?

The goal of this seminar is to reframe these longstanding debates through a cosmopolitan lens; we believe that such critical impasses can be productively addressed through a multinational and multicultural approach to graphic narratives. Achieving a cosmopolitan turn in comics criticism allows for new approaches to many of these topics, including:

* How is cosmopolitanism represented in comics, and is this cosmopolitanism the main current or an undertow in the production of graphic narratives?
* Do national identities shape genre expectations and formal innovations, or are such boundaries being transgressed by contemporary graphic authors?
* How are visual grammars and compositional languages formed in different cultural locations? Are universal vocabularies or comics creoles establishing themselves?

Proposals are due November 13

We’ll be hearing a version of Kate Tanski’s paper that deals with Understanding Comics and Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics. We’ll be then be discussing Kate’s paper and The System of Comics itself.

This 2009 translation of Groensteen’s 199 French work on bande dessinée the world over provides a new voice (in English) in the field of comics study.

For more, see Neil Cohn’s excellent and critical review, at his fantastic blog, The Visual Linguist.

Bring your list of books that you’d like to read and discuss this semester.

N.B. If you can’t make it to this meeting, do not despair! Email in what you’d like to read, and we’ll add it to the potential list.

We’ll also work on scheduling meeting times that work for each book.

Panel for the 2009 Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association Conference in Detroit, MI, October 30-November 1

Panel Title: Frank Miller—Comic Books and Graphic Novels

Deadline for submissions: May 10, 2009