Writing Visual Culture: Digital Comics – Call for papers

By John Freeman on June 28, 2013

ROK Comics digital audio comic title “Houdini Adventures”

Writing Visual Culture is the open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal of the University of Hertfordshire’s TVAD Research Group. The journal’s focus is the relationship between text, narrative and image. We are currently seeking submissions for a new themed edition examining the world of digital comics.

The medium of comics is undergoing a period of transition as the popular mode of creation, distribution and consumption shifts from print to digital display. This is a transition that has been underway since before the general adoption of the World Wide Web and recent advances in portable digital display has only served to accelerate the pace of this change.

Digital comic pioneers have pushed at the boundaries of the medium and explored the possibilities offered by the inherent interactivity of the medium and the multimodality of computing devices. Today, smart phones and tablet computers provide a single platform of consumption on which comics, film, animation, games and other interactive visual media are equally at home. Now as comics gradually leave behind the tropes and trappings of print and embrace those of the screen, we also see the emergence of new hybrid forms that appropriate tropes from other screen-based media.

Against this background, papers focused towards the following areas would sit well within a themed edition of Writing Visual Culture:

•   New and emergent digital comic forms and technologies.
•   Changes to the underlying structures of the form as a result of digital mediation.
•   Crossovers, adaptation and hybridisation between comics and videogames.
•   Motion comics and animated adaptations of the form.
•   Acts of reading and the impact of digital mediation.
•   Aesthetic and Literary analysis of digital comic narratives.
•   Digital distribution, changes in the industry and the threat of piracy.
•   Webcomics, widening readerships, minority voices and fan cultures.
•   Multimodality and comics relationship with larger transmedia narratives.

Although other areas relevant to the study of digital comics will also be considered.

• Abstracts of 200 words for papers of 3000 to 6000 words should be submitted via e-mail to Daniel Merlin Goodbrey at wvcATe-merl.com by Monday 19th August. Abstracts should specify the research question or issue that you are addressing and make clear the connection between your paper and the Digital Comics theme. Proposed papers must be original and not have been published already or accepted for publication elsewhere.

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.