McSweeney's and the challenges of the marketplace for independent publishing

In their article "McSweeney's and the Challenges of the Marketplace for Independent Publishing" Katrien Bollen, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen argue that the artistic projects of the US-American author, activist, and editor Dave Eggers are marked by a tension between the desire for independence and the demands of brand-building. The article offers a close analysis of the materiality and paratexts of one particular issue of McSweeney's, the literary magazine of which Eggers is the founding editor. Both the content and the apologetically aggressive tone of Eggers's editorial statements betray a deep unease with the inability to inhabit a cultural and economic position that is untainted by the compromises that publishing requires. Still, this disavowed complicity with the market in fact sustains Eggers's editorial practice in McSweeney's, which, in marked contrast to his explicit statements, thrives on a dynamic of commodification

Sounding the Occupation: Joe Sacco's Palestine and the Uses of Graphic Narrative for (Post) Colonial Critique.

Working at the intersection of postcolonial literary studies and comics narratology, this paper argues that Joe Sacco’s graphic narrative Palestine contributes a spatial and sonic record of territorial occupation to the Palestinian national narrative. Sacco utilizes the comics form to represent the complex of physical borders and spatial narratives he encounters in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Further, he renders graphically the epiphenomenal sonic regime resulting from spatial management.  Rather than an absence or gap in the Palestinian narrative, Sacco understands spatialized sound as a presence, a marker of materiality. Ultimately, Palestine suggests the rich potential of the comics form for postcolonial literary studies. Sacco’s graphic narrative reinvigorates the field’s engagement with literary representations of Israel-Palestine by demonstrating the continued utility of the (post)colonial paradigm and by challenging the fields’ scholars to forge new interdisciplinary linkages to comics studies

Comics and authorship : an introduction

If media authorship can be understood "as a site of cultural tension" (Johnson and Gray 2013, 10), then a deeper understanding of comics authorship will also provide clues regarding the sustaining—and constraining— of creative practices in other media ecologies and intermedial interactions (such as, for instance, adaptations). For comics, this implies combining insights from comics scholars, practitioners as well as agents involved in the publication and dissemination of comics. This issue, building on the findings of extant scholarship on authorship in comics and other media, hopes to provide incentive for further adventures into the (almost) unknown of comics authorship

On Cultural Materialism, Comics and Digital Media

In 1936, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) accounted for the paradigm shift that mechanical reproduction meant for art and politics. For Benjamin, technological change was not merely a sign of uncomplicated, forward-thinking progress; it meant a profound transformation of the realm of human experience. In this account of the era Benjamin witnessed, the German philosopher and collector was also unknowingly predicting a time he personally would not experience: four decades later, these descriptions of his time are illuminating the reality of the present. Benjamin wrote that ‘the cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room’, but he was not describing digital 3D imaging, Wikipedia, YouTube or Google; he was writing about film photography and the phonograph, forms of technology many now consider ‘obsolete’. The fact we can identify that sense of wonder at technology’s ability to make the absent present and vice versa proves Benjamin’s point: that there is a ‘logic of form’ in art and technology, or, in other words, that the future and the present are also contained in the past, as new technologies and art forms do not simply supersede present and anterior ones, but depend on them. Benjamin's work has proven so influential because, unlike the digital media ‘pundits’ of today, he did not predict the future, but analysed the present

Physicality and Cooperative Design

CSCW researchers have increasingly come to realize that material work setting and its population of artefacts play a crucial part in coordination of distributed or co-located work. This paper uses the notion of physicality as a basis to understand cooperative work. Using examples from an ongoing fieldwork on cooperative design practices, it provides a conceptual understanding of physicality and shows that material settings and co-worker’s working practices play an important role in understanding physicality of cooperative design

The rise of the comics künstlerroman, or, the limits of comics acceptance: the depiction of comics creators in the work of Michael Chabon and Emily St. John Mandel

The künstlerroman is a genre with a long and celebrated past. From Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park (2005) to John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) and Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), the genre has occupied a prominent place in bestseller lists and awards shortlists. The enduring popularity and continued critical celebration of the künstlerroman makes it all the more striking that, since the turn of the millennium a new kind of author-protagonist has emerged — the graphic-novelist-protagonist. This move not only inducts graphic novelists into this existing — and prestigious — literary genre, it also draws them into the same struggle for recognition in which other novelist-protagonists have long been involved. Drawing on the recent examples of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), in this article I argue that there is a clear move toward the serious discussion of comics and comics creators in contemporary literature, an increasing willingness to talk about comics and their makers that is marked by a surprising faith in the fitness of comics as a mode of self-expression and a recognition of the clear kinship between prose authors and graphic novelists.N/

When Inexpressible Becomes Expressible: The Duality Of Narrative In Graphic Memoirs Of Growing Up And Trauma

This thesis examines two graphic memoirs: Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (2002), and David Small’s Stitches (2009) to elucidate the connections between the duality of narrative in graphic memoirs and the subject of childhood trauma. I begin by observing how the inexpressible memories of childhood trauma become expressible through the platform of graphic narrative that allows the authors to illustrate rather than verbalize the memories. Following this analysis, I examine the aspects of embodiment and materiality in the two memoirs demonstrating how the form of graphic narrative enables the authors to effectively bring back their memories and become the witnesses of their own traumas. Finally, I explore the conventions of sequential art explaining how the traumatic memories of the past get fragmented and fictionalized and connecting it to the ethics of life narrative