As a Robin fan (Tim Drake is the best Robin I will not be taking questions at this time), I was very excited to hear about Robin and the Making of American Adolescence, a new book that will be released August 13, 2021 as part of the Comics Culture series being published at Rutgers University…
Comic-Con@Home Day One Roundup: Graphic Novels and Lovecraft Country in the Classroom
As always, the first big day of Comic-Con is dedicated to all things educational. I checked out two panels on July 22: LitX’s Graphic Novels are the New Textbooks and GeekED Rewind 20-21: The True American Horror of Lovecraft Country.
Rereading Bitch Planet in 2021: Basic Bitches & Blackface
I write this on what is the traditional land of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nations. In the first part of this series, I examined the main narrative of Bitch Planet through a critical race theory framework. Critical race theory is a theoretical framework developed by mostly Black American legal scholars and is used…
REVIEW: Women in Marvel Films: They Don’t Know Their Value Yet
Women in Marvel Films answers the question “why aren’t there more superheroines on our screens?” Especially when a comics giant like Marvel has successfully churned out so many films featuring male heroes. And when we do get women characters, what kind of role do they play? What agency do they have? Readers aren’t going to…
Teaching Comics with Comics: On Meghan Parker’s Teaching Artfully
I first heard of Teaching Artfully in the second year of my doctoral program. I was just starting to grapple with the idea of drawing my dissertation as a comic and had reached out to Nick Sousanis, the author of Unflattening and the only person who I knew had drawn their dissertation. Nick led…
Rereading Bitch Planet in 2021: Back Off, Karens
I write this on what is the traditional land of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nations. I was introduced to comic books by my father and brother. Comic books are a traditionally male-dominated sphere and women trying to enter into this sphere experience misogyny, gate-keeping, bias and gendered microaggressions; I know this because I…
Comics Academe: 7th Anniversary Retrospective
The first Comics Academe was published 7 years ago yesterday, on January 28th, 2014. Francesca Lyn was at the time a second-year doctoral student in the Media, Art, and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University, and has since then graduated and become a well-known figure in comics studies and a mentor to other graduate students…
Comics Academe: 2020 in Review
To close out 2020, Comics Academe asked contributors to write about the conferences, articles, and books that had the biggest impact on them. They attended virtual conferences and comic cons and read, wrote, and were recognized for groundbreaking work in and around comics studies.
REVIEW: Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel: Militarism and Feminism in Comics and Film
Higher. Faster. Further. More. Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are icons in comics. Advertised as inspiration for girls and women. Except, sometimes, for me, but I could never articulate why. They both protected people who couldn’t protect themselves. Each is confident and fully realized. They are adult women. It was something… else. And Carloyn Cocca…
I Draw (A Graphic Dissertation), Comics as Method and Holding Environment
Last week, in “I Draw (A Graphic Dissertation), Therefore I Am,” I wrote about how I got to drawing my dissertation, drawing comics as scholarship, and about comics as a way to think. Building on that, this week I want to start with the concept of “holding environments” (term originally coined by Donald Woods Winnicott…
I Draw (A Graphic Dissertation), Therefore I Am
[Editors’ note: In part one of a two-part essay, Ph.D. candidate Kay Sohini writes about drawing a graphic dissertation, comics as scholarship, and comics as thinking. In part two, coming next week, Sohini builds on what she’s written here as she writes about comics as literary affordances and holding environments, key ideas in her graphic…
Reimagining the Personification of Death in Popular Culture
When people learn that I am studying death and comics they will invariably ask if I mean the grim reaper. Usually I say no, because that’s not at all what I’m doing, but sometimes I say yes, just to see where the conversation will go, to find out what they know about the thing that…
