Wrapping up the 10th Volume of The Comics Grid! Our Pandemic Year: On the Comics Scholarship to Come

Our editorial to wrap-up the tenth volume of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship was published yesterday. With this article we close the editorial year at the journal. We’ll restart publications from January 2021.

Dunley, K., Priego, E. and Wilkins, P., 2020. Our Pandemic Year: On the Comics Scholarship to Come. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 10(1), p.15. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.227

Abstract
This editorial article reflects on the past, present and future of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. It discusses the challenges overcome so far, and discusses the tenth volume of the journal, corresponding to 2020, ‘our pandemic year’. The article presents the authors’ vision for the type of comics scholarship they would like to see in future volumes of the journal, calling for greater diversity and inclusion and for work which is ‘media-specific’ in at least three ways: firstly because the field’s focus is comics, in all their multifaceted diversity, complexity and vibrancy; secondly because the study of comics, like many of the studied comics themselves, mostly exist and take place today somewhere in the spectrum of digital environments, and thirdly because comics studies as a field operates within academic institutions and cultures, and therefore plays a role within established hierarchies of knowledge production.

Because lots of copies keep stuff safe (and easier to find), the article is also now available from City Research Online: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/25378

As we noted in the article itself, the editorial “was drafted collectively in a shared online environment across time zones.” Not only does a “combination of American and British spellings may have remained”- as editorial luck has it some minor stubborn typos may have remained- if you happen to spot them, thank you for ingoring them ;-).

It was a pleasure to collaborate with Peter and Kathleen in this article and I am immensely grateful to everyone who works in and around the journal- everything we achieve is the result of collegial, collective effort. Thank you all.