International Comic Book Research Conference

The International Comic Book Research Conference: Perspectives from Visual Culture, organized by Instituto Franklin de la Universidad de Alcalá and Cátedra ECC-UAH de Investigación y Cultura del Cómic, aims to propose a space for research, dissemination and debate around studies on comics, from the methodological framework of visual culture.

The theme of the conference is the relationship between the various lines of research on comics and visual culture studies, which, in recent decades, have been developed by authors such as W. J. T. Mitchell, Keith Moxey or James Elkins, and which suggests a set of analysis tools that are specific to the image, compared to other linguistic paradigms. We propose an approach to the comic that does not treat it as an exception or isolated language, but that inserts it in the set of image media typical of contemporary society, on the one hand, and that mainly attends to its visual nature, on the other. Thus, the following lines of research are established, covering those studies on comics carried out within the framework of various disciplines and methodological approaches:   

• Draw words, write drawings. Comic, multimodality and visual literacy.
• Visual Culture or Visual Cultures?
• Similarities and differences between the languages of the comic strip, comic book, bande dessinée, manga and other manifestations of the medium.
• Vignettes and Graphic Heritage: Confluences between the Comic Book and the Dialectic of Maps, Diagrams, and Infographics.
• From typography to layout: Comic and graphic design.
• The Analysis of Images from the Past: Visual Culture(s) of the Lost and Recovered Comic Book.
• History of image reproduction technology and its connection to comic reception.
• Highbrow/Lowbrow: Comics as Visual Art and Mass Media.
• Comic and cultural canon.
• Comic and visual theory: Relations between the theories of Comic Studies and those of other disciplines (Cinema, Painting, Television, etc.).
• Interactivity and Audiovisual Mixing: The Comic at the Crossroads of Transmedia Storytelling.
• Other related arguments related to visual culture.

Within these lines, communication proposals are accepted with a maximum of 500 words. The proposal should describe, briefly, the objectives of the research, the theoretical framework, including some bibliographic reference, and the methodology used. The proposals will be written in Spanish and English, will not contain any data related to the authorship. Proposal must be complete in the website of the conference with data full authorship, institutional affiliation, email, and contact telephone, together with a short CV of 150 words.

We also accept complete panels that will be composed of 3 or 4 communications. In that case, the coordinator must send the abstract of all the communications of the panel and the data and CV of the authors. Each individual communication shall follow the rules set out in the preceding paragraph.

The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2023. Acceptance of the communication shall be notified by September 15, 2023. A selection of communications will subsequently be published in the journals CuCo, Cuadernos de Comic, Neuroptica and Tebeosfera, as well as in a monographic volume.