Comics Forum 2025: Call for Contributions

By John Freeman on July 20, 2025

The Call For Contributors to this year’s Comics Forum 2025, taking place at Leeds Art Gallery and Central Library over Saturday 13th – Sunday 14th November, closes at the end of next month.

Here’s the full “Call For Contributors” from the Comics Forum web site…

When David Kunzle, who died last year, asserted in his 1973 magnum opus The Early Comic Strip, that it was by definition “a mass medium”, he pointed to comics’ industrial and mechanical foundations, arguing that: “The comic strip is, and can only be, the product of the printing press”. Although experimental comics challenge the idea that mechanical reproduction is a defining characteristic of comics, and the notion of the comic book industry as a coherent entity has been questioned, it is undeniable that comics have been greatly influenced by the industrial contexts in which they are created and circulate. These contexts include the companies that are well known for creating comics, such as publishers and retailers, but also less publicly visible but vitally important industries: printers, distributers, marketers, translators and more. Technology platforms and other media industries that connect to comics through branding, cross-promotion and trans- or multimedia forms also play important roles.

Comics Forum 2025 will explore the theme of industry, broadly conceived, in relation to any form of comics (i.e. including bande dessinée, manga etc.). Proposals are welcome from academics, and from industry participants (in any role). Topics may include:

Historical and/or geographical comics industries
The economics of comics and related industries
Models for studying comics as industrial forms
Anti- or non-industrial comics production
Digitisation as an industrial shift
Representations of industries in comics narratives
Agency, authorship and alienation within industrial contexts
Industrial relations, labour movements, precarity, collectivisation
Disruption in comics’ industrial contexts
The ethics of comics’ industrial practices
Comics as part of a broader media ecosystem
Future(s) for comics as industrially produced mass media
Challenges facing comics industries in the 2020s and 30s

We recognise that artificial intelligence (AI) is a key point of concern across a range of fields, and proposals on this topic are welcome, but we encourage applicants to think broadly about technology and manufacturing.

Submissions will be considered in any of the following three formats:

Paper: 20-minute paper on a focused topic
Panel: 1-hour structured discussion between three or more participants
Workshop: 1-hour interactive, collaborative session

Proposals of up to 250 words in length are now being accepted at this link: SUBMIT NOW. The deadline for submissions is the 31st of August and you will be notified of acceptance by or before the 12th September 2025. Please include a short (100 word) biography of your speaker(s) with your proposal. We look forward to welcoming you to Leeds!

• Comics Forum is online at comicsforum.org

• Comics Forum 2025 Thursday 13th – Friday 14th November 2025, Leeds Art Gallery and Central Library

Remembering David Kunzle

*David Kunzle, a UCLA professor emeritus. Photo: Ellen Lutwak*

David Kunzle, a British-born UCLA professor emeritus who was widely recognised as one of the founders of contemporary comics scholarship, died 1st January 2024 at the age of 87. The cause was amyloidosis.

Kunzle’s scholarship was unusually wide-ranging, but perhaps his signature work was the multivolume The History of the Comic Strip, which first appeared in 1973 as The Early Comic Strip, published by the University of California Press. A second volume, focusing on the 19th century, was published in 1990.

He was celebrated in particular for his study of 1800s European cartoonists, according to an obituary published by the Comics Journal. “Kunzle’s reputation among comics scholars will forever be defined by his scholarship and celebration of the European masters of the 19th century … whose works might otherwise have faded into obscurity,” the article read.

But far beyond the world of comics, Kunzle explored an expansive range of subjects, including political and public art, fashion history, Che Guevara and the revolutionary art of Latin America.

Beth Rosenblum, a UCLA art history lecturer who earned a doctorate at UCLA with Kunzle as her advisor, said Kunzle was chiefly responsible for preserving Nicaraguan political murals of the late 20th century for future study. His 288-page book, The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979–1992, was published in 1995.

“Many of the murals were whitewashed, and very few of them still exist,” Rosenblum said. “They survive through his scholarship. It was a passion project of his that turned into a book, and now I can teach that material because we have the history he wrote.”

Charlene Villaseñor Black, a UCLA art history professor and longtime colleague, said fellow scholars were moved by Kunzle’s merging of his ideological and scholarly interests. “For me, his most important work was his publications on revolutionary Nicaragua and his work as a scholar–activist — how he documented Nicaraguan murals through a Marxist art history framework and married that with his own political commitment.”

Villaseñor Black, who also is chair of UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, said Kunzle was one of the art history department’s most politically active faculty members. “He was the model for being a scholar and an activist, and I think that inspired students and, certainly, the younger faculty.”

Kunzle was a prodigious collector of political posters. According to a remembrance published by the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Kunzle began his collection in 1965, inspired by the Vietnam War, and he became one of the first scholars to recognise the medium’s artistic and historical importance. In 1995, he began donating works from his collection to the center; the organization said he eventually donated about 20,000 posters.

Kunzle was born 17th April 1936, in Birmingham, England. After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge in 1957, he took courses in art history and folklore at the University of Zurich from 1957 to 1958 and received his doctorate in art history from the University of London in 1964.

He began his career as a lecturer in 1962 at the National Gallery in London and then moved to the University of Toronto, where he taught courses on Renaissance and Baroque art. He joined UC Santa Barbara as an associate professor of art history in 1965 and expanded his teaching to include 20th-century Mexican art and the history of pictorial satire and caricature. Kunzle taught at Santa Barbara until 1973, when he was dismissed for issues related to his protests of the war in Vietnam. He later won a wrongful termination suit against the university.

After lecturing at the California Institute of the Arts and Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles in 1975, he joined the UCLA art history department in 1976 as a lecturer and was appointed professor the following year.

“What was so amazing was that he came to UCLA as an early modernism specialist, but he had all of these other interests, and he pursued them and actually published in those areas,” Rosenblum said. “He was truly a Renaissance man, and it was inspiring to see someone who just studied everything he felt passionate about and interested in.”

Among his other interests was performing. From 1969 through the mid-1980s he was part of a gymnastics and tumbling act that performed regularly at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, then held in Agoura, California. He also was an actor who, in the decade of the 2000s, appeared in Shakespearean and other plays in Los Angeles. Villaseñor Black said she and her son once participated in a production that Kunzle staged.

Kunzle retired from UCLA in 2009 after 33 years on the faculty, but he taught a few courses after that and continued to publish. “Even after he retired, he was never hard to track down,” Rosenblum said. “If he wasn’t in his office, he had a carrel at Young Research Library where he often wrote. He was still on campus, thinking and writing.”

Kunzle is survived by his wife of 37 years, Marjoyrie, and Marjoyrie’s daughter, Amy Bailie, son, Daniel Bailie, and sister, Jennifer Kunzle-Fernyhough.

This tribute was published by UCL last year as a news release

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.