Date:         Thu, 28 Apr 1994 00:21:48 CDT
Sender: COMICS Discussion List <[COMICS L] at [UNLVM.UNL.EDU]>
From: Bill Hayes <[IANR 012] at [UNLVM.UNL.EDU]>
Subject:      Volume 4 Issue 15 Part 3

April 27, 1994          The Comics List Weekly       Vol. 4 No. 15 Pt. 3
Scholarship   : US- 3rd Annual Comics Arts Conference (part 1 of 2)
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Date: Sun, 17 Apr 1994 23:53:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: Peter M Coogan <[c--ga--e] at [student.msu.edu]>
Subject: CAC 3 Abstracts/Pro Invitation

Please feel free to distribute this to other professionals.

Dear Comics Professional:

The Third Annual Comic Arts Conference will be held in conjunction with the
Chicago Comicon on July 2, 1994 at the Radisson Suites O'Hare, directly across
the street from the Convention Center.  The Comic Arts Conference seeks to
build bridges between academia and the comics industry by bringing together
scholars and professionals for serious, vigorous, and friendly investigations
of topics ranging over the world of comics.   Founded in 1992 by Communications
professor Randy Duncan and American Studies graduate student Peter M. Coogan
the CAC has been attached to the San Diego Comicon for its first two years, and
will be in Chicago for the next two.

Currently the Conference organizers are seeking professionals willing to serve
as respondents to papers.  Respondents will receive their paper(s) three weeks
in advance of the Conference in order to provide adequate time to prepare
remarks on the scholars' work.  Past respondents have included Scott McCloud,
Will Eisner, Donna Barr, Steve Bissette, R.C. Harvey, and Clayt Moore.  Mike
Friedrich took part in a panel discussion, which Dave McKean attended as an
audience member.  Carl Potts, Scott McCloud, and Steve Bissette also presented
slide shows.  While specific professionals are being approached to respond to
specific papers, the organizers want to involve a broad range of professionals,
from both within and outside the mainstream.

If you would like to participate in the Conference, please look at the
abstracts below.  Indicate which papers you would like to respond to, and your
order of preference.  We recognize that many professionals, artists especially,
cannot be absent from the Comicon proper for extended periods; each panel lasts
an hour and a half, and we expect that many respondents will come and go
throughout the day.  Besides paper preference, please also indicate time
preference as the schedule and panel composition are not finalized.  We will be
scheduling the panels partially according to the needs of professionals'
Comicon commitments.  The tentative schedule for the Conference is as follows:
8:30-9:00 Registration; 9:00-10:30 Panels A and B; 10:30-12:00 Panel C ("Comics
Are Not Books"); 12:00-1:30 Lunch (during which the discussion usually
continues); 1:30-3:00 Panels D and E; 3:00-4:30 Panel F ("Comics Scholarship:
Views From The Academy And The Industry").  There is a registration fee of
$20.00 ($10.00 for students).

Please return the Respondent form to: Peter M. Coogan, Comic Art Studies, MSU
Libraries, East Lansing, MI 48824-1048;  or by email: [C--ga--e] at [student.msu.edu.]
 For more information, please write or call: (517) 485-8039.

____________________________________________________________


PANEL A: Mirror or Lamp?: How Comics Shape and Reflect Their Readers and
Creators.

1. "The Inner-Directed Batman: Comics and The Lonely Crowd "
    Mark T. Best, Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington,
Indiana.

In The Lonely Crowd (1950) sociologist David Riesman used the comics, among
other mass media, to demonstrate his paradigm of "other-directedness" and
"inner-directedness," images of social character which attempted respectively
to summarize the social ills of post-war America and to hearken to a superior
individualism of the past. This paper examines Riesman's use of the comics by
contrasting his argument (based on the seminal study of comic book readership,
especially of the superhero genre, by Wolf and Fisk in 1949) that the comics
promoted "other-directedness," with the centrality of Riesman's notion of
"inner-directedness" to the superhero genre itself.

2."Canadian Comics Fans Fifty Years Later: Finding Canada Jack Club Members and
Finding Out What They Remember."
    Vicki A. Green, Educational Program, Okanagan University College, Kelowna,
British Columbia, Canada.

This presentation looks at the role comics have in nested narratives of
reminiscences, based upon individual interviews with former members the Canada
Jack Club.

3. "Drawn Together II: Ritualistic Behavior and Practices of the Gay and
Lesbian Community, as Portrayed in Homosexual Relationstrips."
    Solomon Davidoff, Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, Bowling
Green, Ohio.

As rituals are formal and elaborately repeated sets of actions that can be
specific within communities, it can be useful to examine representative
examples of popular/mass culture artifacts in order to learn more about a
community; to learn how they represent themselves to themselves and to others.
Utilizing examples of comics produced by the gay and lesbian community, I will
explore common rites of passage, unity, seasons, reversal, displacement, and
spectacle and how these rituals can guide us to understanding and acceptance of
all groups.  Examples will come from the work of Allison Bechdel, Jane Caminos,
Andrea Natalie, Nancy Dunlap, among others.
____________________________________________________________


PANEL B: Constructing Legitimacy: Caught Between Expectations.

1. "Adapting the Canon: Reader's Digest, Classic Comics Illustrated and the
Problem of Mass Literacy."
    Bart Beaty, Communications, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

When, in 1955, Leslie Fiedler wrote that "the fear of the vulgar is the obverse
of the fear of excellence" he proposed a model for understanding comic books
which is fundamentally untenable. Fiedler suggests that critical attacks on
comic books stem primarily from middlebrow critics whose objections are more
strongly related to the content of comic books than they are to form. Indeed,
in Fiedler's understanding of the matter the question of form is of so little
weight that, according to a middlebrow aesthetic, comics which are adaptations
of 'literary classics' should be as well received in American culture as are
Life Magazine  and Reader's Digest.

Yet this argument suffers from an obvious and fatal flaw: namely that, outside
of a specialized collector market, comic book literary adaptations have never
been seen to have literary or social
merit. The problem arises because by limiting his analysis of comic books to
the level of content Fiedler is only able to define the middlebrow as an
extension on the genteel tradition which characterized American notions of
literature in the nineteenth century. Yet, as Gayle Rubin has pointed out, the
middlebrow sensibility is characterized not simply as a continuation of
gentility into an era of increasing industrialization, but also as a specific
negotiation of the idea of 'high art' and the commodity form.  Although
anti-comic book rhetoric is ostensibly concerned with issues of content (or
more precisely sex and violence), the opposition to the medium can be better
understood, I would argue, more generally as a problem surrounding the
commodity status of comic books.

In this paper I will attempt to demonstrate the connections between opposition
to comic books and to other forms of commodified (or 'disposable') literature.
Specifically, by examining the similarities between critical attacks upon both
Classic Comics Illustrated  and Reader's Digest Condensed Books (both of which
seek to present 'literary classics' in an accessible fashion) I hope to
illustrate that the ongoing marginalization of comic books in American culture
is simply the continuation of a larger reaction against the extension of
literacy beyond the boundaries of the privileged classes.

2. "Up from the Swamp:  The Rise of the 'Mature' Comic Book."
    Greg M. Smith, Department of Communication Arts, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin.

When a devalued artform begins to gain cultural status, this rise is often tied
to certain high profile artworks which obviously demonstrate what the medium is
capable of.  This paper traces the strategies that DC Comics' Swamp Thing  used
in the 1980's to gain the kind of cultural cachet rarely given to a comic book.

I delineate the textual strategies used to differentiate Swamp Thing  as a
comic for "mature" readers, and I examine how effective these strategies were
in the comic's reception.  Based on reception data from more than fifty fan
interviews, I discuss how readers perceived the comic and its bid for new
cultural status.  By focusing on both text and reception, this paper hopes to
shed light on how the devalued medium of comics has gained some small measure
of cultural standing.

3. "Nina Paley: Funny Girl or Twisted Sister?"
    Justin Estes, Louisville, Kentucky.

Nina Paley is a self-syndicator of her strip.  She frequently deals with issues
of acceptance by both the "mass culture" as represented by the syndicates and
the underground comix community.  Her cartooning style is "too nice" and "too
cute" for readers of more "traditional" female underground cartoonists while at
the same time, her subject matter does not fit with traditional concepts of the
newspaper "funnies" page.  This paper examines Paley as a cartoonist caught
between the expectations of established perceptions of what a female cartoonist
is or does.
____________________________________________________________

PANEL C: Comics Are Not Books: Issues of Reading and Writing.

1. "How Not to Read Comics like a Book."
    R.C. Harvey, Champaign, Illinois.

This slide presentation might be termed a primer on how comics work.  Because
it stresses the blending of words and pictures, it serves as somewhat of a
counterpoint to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which concerns itself
almost entirely with the visual element.

2. "Approaching Milligan's Meta-Comic Through Post-Structuralism and
'Literature'."
    Christopher Busiel, English, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud compares the effects of pictorial and
non-pictorial icons, making the following comment: because the non-pictorial
icons represent invisible ideas, appearance doesn't affect their meaning.
"Words," he says, "are totally abstract icons" (28).  This is a notion
particularly prevalent in post-structuralist theory, and McCloud's further
reference to that touchstone of post-structuralism, Magritte's "The Treachery
of Images," suggests the connections possible between his theoretical approach
to the medium of comics, and extant strategies within the literary academy for
approaching non-pictorial texts.
>From this nexus I will begin an investigation of Peter Milligan's recent work,
with particular focus upon his meta "literary" discussion of the act of
writing.  In his thematic application of Finnegan's Wake in Skreemer, his
tribute to the Burroughs cut-up in his brief run with Animal Man  and the
appearance of James Joyce in Shade, Milligan demonstrates the attraction of the
literary figure in the process of writing comics which seek to question the
creation of comics.  What post-structuralism and the fiction of both Joyce and
Burroughs all share is a problematizing of the role of author in the production
of text.

Another fundamental principle of McCloud's book, of course, is that we should
not conflate writing comics with other kinds of writing--they are distinct acts
with their own characteristics and strategies.  With that in mind, the latter
part of this paper will be concerned with comparing Milligan's essentially
post-structuralist view towards literature with his meta-treatment of writing
specifically for comics, in Shade, and more extensively in Enigma .
____________________________________________________________


PANEL D: Cartoons and Cartoonists: World War II and Cold War America.

1. "The Atomic Bomb, the Hydrogen Bomb, and Their Portrayal in Political
Cartoons."
    Todd Allen, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

This paper examines political cartoons related to nuclear weapons from two
critical periods:  1945, when people formed their first impressions of atomic
energy and weapons, and from 1954, when America made public its successful
testing of the hydrogen bomb.

The cartoons' methods of humor are classified and contrasted.  Portrayals of
nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nationalities, and Earth; personification; and
tone are major themes.  The subject of representational change through public
perception  of nuclear weapons is addressed.

2. "Nibbled to Death by Ducks: An Introductory Study of Walt Kelly's Editorial
Cartoons."
    Steve Thompson, Richfield, Minnesota.

Known for political commentary within his Pogo  comic strip, Walt Kelly served
as editorial cartoonist three times between 1948 and 1964.  Each period shows
different elements of Kelly's artistic style and opinions on politics and
society, some of which could not be presented in Pogo.  His newspaper cartoons
appeared only in New York papers, yet garnered recognition in the national
press.

Primarily known as a strip cartoonist, Kelly's editorial work is generally
unknown, having never been collected.  Selections from all three time periods
show Kelly's approach to events such as the 1948 and 1953 presidential
elections and social changes beginning in the 1960s.

3. "The Comic Artists Who Won the War."
    Hal Higdon, Hal Higdon Communications Inc., Michigan City,  Indiana.

This presentation will discuss cartoonists from the 1940s, whose heroes fought
World War II.  Included will be: Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Roy
Crane (Buz Sawyer ), Leslie Turner (Captain Easy ), Frank Robbins (Johnny
Hazard ), and Zack Mosely (Smitlin' Jack ).  Other cartoonists who served in
the war included: Jack Kirby, Dan Barry, and Will Eisner.  The presentation
will be an expansion of Mr. Higdon's article "Combat Comics" that appeared in
the December/January Air and Space Smithsonian.  Mr. Higdon will illustrate the
lecture with art from his collection.
____________________________________________________________


PANEL E: Presenting Characters: Writers and Editors.

1. "The Heroic Image:  A Content Analysis of Comic Book Covers."
    Randy Duncan, Henderson State University, Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

This study seeks to determine if there has been a significant change in the
image of comic book super-heroes.  More specifically, it is a study of the
super-hero image as "marketed" on comic book covers.  A content analysis
methodology is used to examine the situations, actions, and presentation on
selected Timely/Marvel Comics covers from the 1940's to the 1990's.

2. "Chris Claremont and Narrative Exposition in the X-Men ."
    Mark McClusky, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota.

The serial form of comic narrative creates unusual demands on the writer.  One
of the greatest challenges is to establish the cast of characters of a book
quickly, so prospective readers feel attached to them, compelling them to read
the series.  Chris Claremont, at the start of his run as the writer of Marvel's
X-Men , provides one model of how a creator can introduce a cast of characters
for future adventures.  An analysis of the first ten to twenty issues of
Claremont's tenure will show how he established character traits he used over
the next 150 issues.

3. "The Comics Code and The Punisher  : A Case Study of the Editorial Process."
    Amy Nyberg, Communications, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New
Jersey.

The comic book industry adopted a self-regulatory code in 1954.  That code,
although revised in 1971 and in 1989, is still in effect today.  Many have
argued that such a regulatory code is no longer necessary and hinders the
creative development of the medium, but recent comments by fans and retailers
in the Comic Buyers' Guide  suggest that adherence to the code is necessary to
protect the industry from the new wave of public concern over violence in the
media.

This paper will explore how the comics code affects the content of those comics
which still adhere to its standards.  The author has selected one of Marvel
Comics' most popular titles, The Punisher, as a case study to examine how the
comics code affects editorial decisions, utilizing interviews with the writer,
artists, and editor and investigating past disputes with the code office.

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End part 3, more to follow...