Comic Scholarship

The most recent post in the current Monday series on chess comics was Comics Scholarship, Not Necessarily Chess (March 2024). At the end of the post I wrote,

In the same Google search, the top result was The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship (comicsgrid.com). [...] I look forward to discovering the journal.

That was then, but this is now. The first article in the journal is currently Labra | Caught Between Manga and the Graphic Novel: Two Cartoonists' Trajectories in Contemporary Argentinian "National Comics" (comicsgrid.com). The abstract started,

What do Ignacio Minaverry and Ciro Berliac's trajectories say about comics in contemporary Argentina?

Without reading any further, I decided to look for something more at my level -- absolute beginner in comics scholarship. I searched the catalog of articles on keyword 'comic' (clever, wasn't I), received a long list of titles covering subjects that were all over the map, and decided to read Berube | Context is Everything: A Review of Comics Studies: A Guidebook (ditto; mentions 'Doonsbury' [sic]). The abstract started,

This article is a review of Comics Studies: A Guidebook, edited by Charles Hatfield and Bart Beaty (Rutgers University Press, 2020). This volume, ranging over the broad themes of Histories, Cultures, Forms, and Genres, provides an introduction to some of the major debates in comics studies.

Although this was more accessible than the first article, I still didn't advance very far on the learning curve. I decided that for my last attempt, I would look for something close to home, meaning Belgium, my adopted country. This time I chose Seago | The Ninth Art: A Review of Comics in French. The European Bande Dessinée in Context (ditto). The abstract started,

This article reviews Laurence Grove's Comics in French. The European Bande Dessinée in Context (2010; 2013). The review argues that this book can be seen as a handbook, or almost as an encyclopaedic introduction to be consulted in small parts as and when needed.

Example sentence:-

There is much interesting material in this section: for example, the detailed discussion of the innovative role of the Journal de Mickey (1934) in redefining the BD and making it a commercial success allowing for artistic growth and innovation; a nuanced consideration of the ideological slant in collaborative journals such as Le Téméraire (1943–1944) while acknowledging their artistic verve, or the impact of censorship laws in 1949 preventing imported texts for children and creating a space which allowed for the creation of BD as a distinctive French art form.

This convinced me that I was fighting against the tide and wasn't going to get very far. What to do for this post? I went back to creating illustrations that involve chess.

'Tintin plays chess.'
AI Comic Factory

Maybe I'll come back later to the 'Journal of Comics Scholarship'. History says that I probably won't.