Graphic Possibilities is a research workshop in the Department of English at Michigan State University. This research workshop engages with comics through two interrelated branches, critical inquiry and engaged pedagogy, as a means of bringing together faculty and graduate students with current and burgeoning interests in comic studies. Critical inquiry manifests in any number of ways through comics, including treating comics as data, comics as scholarship, and comics as critical-making, what Stacey Robinson and John Jennings term to be a methodological approach that insists scholars engage with broader critical and cultural conversations through the act of making comics. Alongside of this, we explore how scholar-practitioners can make pedagogical interventions about/through the comics medium in an effort to develop new strategies for teaching and working with comics pedagogically.

Faculty coordinator: Julian Chambliss

Graduate Coordinators: Nicole Huff and Sinclair Portis

UPCOMING EVENTS:

An Afrofuturist Conversation with Rodney Barnes

In this virtual interview-style webinar, we will be talking with Rodney Barnes about his work in comics. Specifically, we will discuss representation in horror comics and Afrofuturism in comics.

Rodney Barnes is an award winning writer and producer and is known for his Killadelphia comics series as well as his work on hit television shows like The Boondocks and the new HBO Series Winning Time.

This event will take place via Zoom on January 9th, 2023 at 7pm ET/4pm PT.

The webinar registration link can be found here.

FEATURED PUBLICATIONS:

Chambliss, Julian Carlos, Nicole Huff, Kate Topham, and Justin Wigard. 2022. “Days of Future Past: Why Race Matters in Metadata” Genealogy 6, no. 2: 47. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6020047

Topham, Kate, Julian Chambliss, Justin Wigard, and Nicole Huff. 2022. “The Marmaduke Problem: A Case Study of Comics As Linked Open (Meta)data”. KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 6 (3):1-8. https://doi.org/10.18357/kula.225

FEATURED PODCAST EPISODE:

Episode 1 5 : “Rachel Marie-Crane Williams” (Summer, 2022)

Tune in for a special episode of the Graphic Possibilities Podcast with special guest Dr. Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, the newly-minted Dean of the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). She is the author of Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (2021) and Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (2021).

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams with her two new graphic narratives, *Run Home* (2021) and *Elegy for Mary Turner* (2021).

What has she learned about telling the story of race in the United States through comics? What lessons can we take from her experience in the classroom? In this conversation, we ask Professor Williams to reflect on using comics to tell stories about race and social justice.

You can find more about Dr. Williams’ work here: http://rachelwilliams.squarespace.com/