Getting Graphical

The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS) in Campo Grande will host the 1st International Meeting of the Association of Researchers in Sequential Art (I EIASPAS) which will be held along with the VII National Research Forum on Sequential Art (FNPAS) between November 5th and 8th, 2024. The event will be attended by foreign and national researchers and with the participation of people linked to the Brazilian publishing market, as well as comic book artists.

This edition aims to promote discussions and reflections on research with comics, both in terms of artistic creation and art in education and/or scientific research.. The proposal is to discuss issues linked to the ninth art that involve the interrelations between languages in terms of artistic practices, research on comics and teaching through sequential art, always keeping in mind the idea of “why study comics at the university?” in the contemporary scenario in which art has suffered retaliation from different social propositions.

Submissions for the event for short courses propositions and workshops, as well as communications or just listeners can now be made using this formand the complete program will be available on September 5, 2024 on the website www.eiaspas.com.br.

At the same time, ASPAS invites the community of comics and fanzine producers to participate as exhibitors at Feira Suplemento, the association's sequential art fair, which will take place on Thursday and Friday, November 7th and 8th, 2024. Selected participants will not need to pay for the space to sell their work. The Suplemento: Comics Fair aims to combine research and comics practices, bringing academics closer to people who make comics in Brazil. Thus, a more direct dialogue is created, in which researchers can learn about new developments in comics production and comic creators can get in touch with the proposals and results of research on comics carried out in Brazil and internationally. Registration for the Suplemento: Comics Fair will be available between August 12th and September 13th, 2024 on this form.

ASPAS (Association of Researchers in Sequential Art) is a congregation of academics based in the city of Leopoldina/MG and founded in 2012, aiming to popularize and highlight researches carried out in Brazil and around the world on comic books. Another of ASPAS' efforts is to decentralize academic production on comics in Brazil, with members from all federative units in the country. From the beginning, the combination of these efforts has produced at least one event and one academic book per year related to comics research.

Captain America made his debut in 1940, just two years behind the first comic book superheroes and five years before the United States’ emergence as the world’s primary superpower at the end of World War II. His journey has been intertwined with America’s progress throughout the decades. Known as the “Sentinel of Liberty,” he has frequently provided socio-political commentary on current events as well as inspiration and warnings concerning the future.

BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence

In 1954, the culture, distribution, and content of comics forever changed. Long a mainstay of America’s reading diet, comic books began to fall under the scrutiny of parent groups, church leaders, and politicians. The bright colors and cheaply printed pulp pages of comic books that had once provided an escape were suddenly presumed to house something lascivious, insidious, and morally corrosive. While anxieties about representations of violence in comics have largely fallen to the wayside since the moral panic of the 1950s, thematic and symbolic visual depictions of violence remain central to the comics form. BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence examines violence in every iteration—physical violence enacted between people and their environments, formal and structural violence embedded in the comics language itself, representations of historical violence, and ways of reading and seeing violence.

BOOM! SPLAT! is composed of fifteen essays from renowned comics scholars and is organized thematically into four sections, including an examination of histories of violence, forms of violence, modes and systems of violence, and political and social violence. Chapters focus on well-known comics and comics creators, such as Steve Ditko, Hulk, X-Men, and the Marvel universe, to newspaper cartoon strips, postwar graphic novels, revolution, civil rights, trauma, #blacklivesmatter, and more. BOOM! SPLAT! serves as a resource to scholars and comics enthusiasts who wish to contemplate and confront the permutations, forms, structures, and discourses of violence that have always animated cartoons.

FROM THE EDITED VOLUME

Comics and Graphic Novels - International Perspectives, Education, and Culture [Working Title]

Dr. Adam I. Attwood

The purpose of this chapter is to identify the impact of the transnational consumption of Japanese manga on today’s international society. Advances in information technology and the popularization of online platforms lead to economic and market growth for the content industry and transnational conflicts between global fans from different cultural backgrounds. By analyzing the typical cases, these conflicts could be categorized into three types of background: the different perspective of history, the old feud with the other country, and the image of the war memories. On the one hand, these cases reveal the different ways of reading that are rooted in different cultural backgrounds and sometimes reinforce stereotypical images of other countries. On the other hand, this situation also provides an opportunity to create dialogs that lead to mutual understanding among global manga fans.

Keywords

Japanese manga

transnational consumption

conflict

dialog

This article examines a series of Captain America stories by Black creators and locates these works in the tradition of "shadow books," as defined by Kevin Young in his study of Black culture and artistic expression, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Truth: Red, White, and Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker; The Crew, written by Christopher Priest and drawn by Joe Bennett; and Morales' truncated 2004 run on Marvel's flagship Captain America title are all examples of what Young calls "shadow books," works by Black creators that subvert conventional meanings and are in turn "disallowed, vanished": out of print for years, sometimes with plots that were cut short and never completed, their events only glancingly recognized (or retroactively altered) in Marvel's continuity. This article focuses, in particular, on the retroactive revision of a key plot point from Truth: Red, White, and Black, and the way in which this editorial revision functions as an act of erasure in a broader struggle over the representation of American history.

KEYWORDS

In the past few decades, Japanese comics, commonly referred to as Manga, have transcended both cultural and linguistic boundaries to become a true worldwide sensation. Yet, the inherent reliance on visual cues and illustration within manga renders it largely inaccessible to individuals with visual impairments. In this work, we seek to address this substantial barrier, with the aim of ensuring that manga can be appreciated and actively engaged by everyone. Specifically, we tackle the problem of diarisation i.e. generating a transcription of who said what and when, in a fully automatic way.

This chapter applies ideas from comic book studies and folklore to the young adult speculative fiction novels The Amazing Absorbing Boy, written by Trinidadian Rabindranath Maharaj, and Children of the Spider, written by Guyanese Imam Baksh. Each novel attends to experiences of migration, identity formation, and personal growth through narratives focalized on children. Whether it is Samuel of The Amazing Absorbing Boy migrating from Trinidad to Canada, or Mayali of Children of the Spider moving through the fictional portal of Zolpash to Georgetown, Guyana, readers are invited to consider the ways in which Caribbean children negotiate their belonging in unfamiliar worlds. The use of speculative fiction tropes such as shape-shifting and superhero personas allow the child protagonists of each novel to overturn power dynamics involving adults and children. Thus, the author considers the Caribbean speculative fiction genre to constitute a power that represents the world anew, empowering readers to appreciate the perspectives of Caribbean children in literature.

While most US-based comics studies anthologies tend to neglect race, Beyond the Icon brings it to the foreground through an analysis of the vibrant and growing body of graphic narratives by Asian North American creators in the twenty-first century. By demonstrating how the forms and styles of the comics genre help depict Asian Americans as nuanced individuals in ways that words alone may not, Beyond the Icon makes the case for comics as a crucial artistic form in Asian American cultural production—one used to counter misrepresentations and myths, rewrite official history, and de-exoticize the Asian American experience.

An interdisciplinary team of contributors offers exciting new readings of key texts, including Ms. Marvel, George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s The Shadow Hero, works by Adrian Tomine and Jillian Tamaki, and more, to uncover the ways in which Asian American comics authors employ graphic narratives to provide full and complex depictions of Asian diasporic subjects and intervene in the wider North American consciousness. Beyond the Icon initiates vital conversations between Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and comics.