The 2024 MSU Comics Forum occurred on February 2nd and 3rd at the MSU Library. The keynote artist was Keith Knight, and the keynote scholar was Dr. Rebecca Wanzo. The academic program was organized under the auspices of the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop. Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of Comics (2023) inspired the academic presentations.
“How Else Could I Have Created a Black Boy in That Era: Racial Caricature and Will Eisner”
“African American Comic Art and the Museum”
Session II: 1:30 – 2:30 PM: Race, Comics and Villainy
Julian Chambliss, Department of English, Michigan State University and Philip L. Cunningham, Department of Communication, Wake Forest University
A discussion of the intersection between race and villainy and what tells about the agency afforded to characters of color in comics.
Session III: 2:45: 3:45 PM
Carol Tilley, Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois
“Never Any Dirty Ones: Comic Readership Among African American Youth in the Mid Twentieth Century”
Session IV: 4:00- 4:45 PM — Comics, Archives, and Teaching
Julian Chambliss, Department of English, Michigan State University
Gary Hoppenstand, Department of English, Michigan State University
Qiana Whitted, Department of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina
Christopher Frilingos, Department of Religious Studies, Michigan State University
Valentina Denzel, Department of Romance and Classical Studies, Michigan State University
Lynn Wolff, Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, Michigan State University
Graphic Possibilities is a research workshop in the Department of English at Michigan State University. GP 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.Read More →
The 2024 MSU Comics Forum occurred on February 2nd and 3rd at the Michigan State University Library. The recent publication of Desegrating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, edited by Dr. Qiana Whitted. You can find the presentation recordings on the MSU Comics Forum YouTube channel.Read More →
In this special episode, we debut a new ongoing project to bring the voices of comic scholars to the public, sharing their insights about their literature shaping the field. In this episode, Dr. Anna Peppard gives a nice overview of sexuality in American comics.Read More →
Curt Pires talked with Professor Julian Chambliss about his new Comixology Original comic New America. Pires is a writer, producer, and creative that splits his time between Calgary, Canada, and Hollywood. He is the creator of YOUTH and WYRD, both of which are in development as television series (at Amazon and FX, respectively). As the founder of TECC CONTENT, Pires has championed a vertically integrated publishing and production model. In this conversation, he talks about some of the inspiration for New America and reflects on his comic storytelling goals.Read More →
Rethinking Comics & Digital Humanities: A Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop with Dr. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley The keynote scholar at the 2021 MSU Comics Forum, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, and writer. She is a Professor of American and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her acclaimed book Black Women in Sequences: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime explores African, American American, and multiethnic women in the context of graphic novel production and comic book fandom. For this workshop, Professor Whaley discussed research methods at the intersection of comics studies and digital humanities. Read More →
“The Storyworlds of Tim Fielder” On October 15th, 2020, the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop welcomed Tim Fielder for a virtual conversation with Professor Kinitra Brooks. We spoke with Tim about his upcoming book, Infinitum (out January 19, 2021), which is an Afrofuturist tale epic in scope and steeped in Afrodiasporic experience that embraces the potentialities of the comic page. Tim talked to us about the influences of Buck Rogers & heavy metal; the critical importance of teaching and working with students; visualizing the Black experience through Afrofuturistic illustration; and, of course, comics. Check it out below, and you can find more of Tim’s work on hisRead More →
In the summer of 2020, the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop led by Julian Chambliss, Faculty Director, Zack Kruse, Graduate Co-leader, and Justin Wigard, Graduate Co-leader, in the Department of English at Michigan State University assembled a small group of future educators to engage in a professional development opportunity with outcomes in the form of lesson plans that addressed critical issues in humanities education at the secondary and collegiate levels. This series of workshops was supported by a fellowship awarded to Graphic Possibilities by The HistoryMakers, and the workshops and lesson plans included substantive engagement with The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. As such, one of the primary goals of theRead More →
Several graduate students met up with Dr. Chambliss to workshop a roundtable proposal for submission to the MSU Comics Forum in Spring 2020. Out of these conversations, two central themes emerged: We each had a experience working with and a vested research interest in the archive, broadly conceived We were each working to incorporate archival practices into the comics classroom in different ways. Led by Graphic Possibilities graduate coordinator Zack Kruse, participants in this workshop collaborated on a roundtable proposal devoted to comics and the archive with a pedagogical focus.Read More →
On October 29th, 2019, Professor Qiana Whitted spoke with graduate students about developing a space that embraces exploratory narrative around questions of race and identity within comics. We were joined by English graduate students Kiana Gonzalez and Liz Deegan, as well as Daniel Fandino, graduate student in the Department of History. We were so pleased to have the 2019 MSU Comics Forum Keynote Scholar join us for a wonderful conversation about how to teach comics, particularly those that center or tackle questions of race. Professor Whitted shared insight into her comics pedagogy, discussed her recently published (EDIT: and, as of July 2020, EISNER-WINNING) bookRead More →
Graphic Possibilities engaged 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. During the fall semester, the workshop focused on how scholar-practitioners engage with comics. In September 2019, we welcomed John Jennings (UC Riverside) and Stacey Robinson (the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign), two artist-scholars that work together under the moniker Black Kirby. An Afrofuturist inspired remixing of comic book visual culture; Black Kirby explores the intersection of black culture and history to forge an aesthetic language that investigates the historical trauma and liberationRead More →