I am looking forward to returning, many years later, to my beloved UEA Norwich (where I did my master’s more than two decades ago) to attend this year’s International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference, with the theme of ‘Comics & Technologies’.
The schedule (on-line and in-person) and the book of abstracts are now available at the conference website.
Our abstract:
Resisting logocentrism: exploring the technologies of comics beyond reading
Ernesto Priego, Hailey Austin, Peter Wilkins
In “The Question Concerning Comics as Technology: Gestell and Grid”, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins (2018) asserted that the comics grid is a technology of revealing: a system of gathering and showing images in a framework. At the time, we saw this argument as something of an antidote to treating comics as their narrative content, as literature by another means, and a critique of an overly logocentric discourse on comics. Resisting concepts like “the language of comics” (Gubern 1972; Saraceni 2003) or “the visual language of comics” (Cohn 2013) is important: by posing that drawings and images in sequence follow the same structure as (verbal) language, comics are conceptualized logocentrically. This structural approach privileges a kind of linguistic sense-making because they seem to recover comics for the world of language and “reading”. In discussing comics as technology, our premise was that the readable dimension of comics is only part of the story or picture and that there is something other in comics worthy of our attention, a medium-specificity that defies or resists the paragraph, the sentence, the word. For 2024’s IGNCC we propose a round-table featuring Hailey Austin (Abertay University, Dundee), Ernesto Priego (City, University of London), and Peter Wilkins (Douglas College) to reflect on and revise these ideas, while adding other, critical, voices to the mix. Each participant will make a brief presentation on the issue of comics as technology and/or language as they see it, followed by a round-table discussion of the issues with audience participation.
References:
Priego, E. & Wilkins, P., (2018) “The Question Concerning Comics as Technology: Gestell and Grid”, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 8, 16. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.133
Gubern, R. (1972) El lenguaje de los cómics. Barcelona: Ediciones Península.
Saraceni, M. (2003). The Language of Comics. London and New York: Routldege.
Cohn, N. (2013). The Visual Language of Comics. Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Biographies:
Dr Ernesto Priego is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, City, University of London, and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. https://ernestopriego.com/
Dr Hailey Austin is a Lecturer in Visual Media and Culture at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. She teaches and researches global creative industries, specifically comics, zines, video games and board games in the UK, Sweden and China.
Peter Wilkins is a Training Group Programmer at Douglas College in Vancouver, where he creates programs for newcomers and youth at risk. He is an editor at The Comics Grid. He has worked on the Parables of Care dementia project as editor and artist and is currently working on a comics project about people recovering from stroke.
I am also proud to share that Linda Berube, whose PhD I co-supervise, will also be presenting:
The Future Is Post Digital? UK Digital Comics Creators, Publishers, and Readers Creating the Comics Ecosystem(s)
Linda Berube
Abstract: Some scholars claim we are in a post digital future (Cramer and Jandric, 2021) when not quite 25 years ago the future was set to be all digital (McCloud, 2000; Poe, 2001; Gomez, 2008; Price, 2012). The current reality for the creation, production, and consumption of digital comics is more complex. The creation and production processes, “the nexus of practice” (Bramlett, 2015) in the digital comics publishing ecosystem, so to speak, combine in diverse ways to create a comic first, “a formation of discrete interactions” (Antonini et al., 2020) even, then to be manifested in print or digital form depending upon where the readers are, the intentions of the creator, and what the publishers’ business model is.
According to this comic first-format second perspective, it is not useful to consider “‘analog’ and digital algorithmic magic to be two different things. Instead, you would analyse them as one comprehensive phenomenon…In such an analysis, one may end up finding that the criterion of ‘analog’ versus ‘digital’ is not the most important (Cramer and Jandric, 2021, p. 968). In this sense, the “one comprehensive phenomenon” is the comic, the digital and print manifestations only important within the particular ecosystem within which the comic is read. Indeed, the more casual, incidental readers of digital comics, often encountering them in a non-comic setting (social media and messaging apps, for instance), are not so much focused on the material aspects of comics but on what meaning the comic has for them, how it demonstrates and strengthens their views and experiences. These can also be reinforced through haptics, the physical encounter with the containers of devices and platforms.
The findings from my doctoral digital comics research, based on such Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methods as interviews and iterative talk aloud (ITA) reading sessions with UK creators, publishers, and readers of digital comics, while revealing that all comics are essentially “born digital”, suggest a mixed economy, a mash-up, between print and digital practices creating a comics ecosystem (or multiple ecosystems) informed by comic and non-comic communities. In this presentation, I will review these findings and discuss the ecosystems in which comics are found, including the many types of interactions between the digital environment and those who experience it.
Biography: Linda Berube is an AHRC Collaborative Partnership doctoral researcher investigating digital comics creation, production, and consumption processes, supported by the British Library and City, University of London. She has published on reader interaction with web archives and is the author of Do You Web 2.0? Public Libraries and Social Networking (Elsevier, 2011).
I will also be chairing another panel and participating in the publishing panel chaired by Julia Round.
I can’t wait!
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