Ally Sloper: The First Comics Superstar?

This book is the result of the conference ‘Comics Scenarios: Cultural Analyses of a Picto-Graphical Medium’, organised by the Universities of Berlin and Viadrina, and held in Berlin in 2003. My chapter involves the early British comics character ‘Ally Sloper’, a Victorian anti-hero, and his crossover with other mediums, such as music hall. Specifically, it is an investigation of the various texts which have borne the signifier ‘Ally Sloper’ in the years between 1867 and 1916, in an attempt to reconstruct their context and hence recover the meanings carried by this cultural icon at key moments in his history. It also asks how Sloper’s cross-fertilisation with other mediums constituted the forerunner for modern multinational capitalism in the entertainment business. The approaches taken include a combination of political economy and Cultural Studies methodologies

Who Loves Ya, David Simon? Notes towards placing The Wire’s depiction of African-Americans in the context of American TV crime drama

This essay surveyed a number of key shows from the past that purported to convey a liberal viewpoint, and which made race a focus. This was in order to suggest ways in which 'The Wire' might be part of a genre tradition – and equally how it might be seen as expanding the parameters of that tradition

Being at home abroad: Londoners ‘ong continong’ (on the continent) in the 19th-century comics of Marie Duval.

Marie Duval is one of the great unsung cartoonists of the 19th century. Her work for the journal Judy between 1869-1885 took comic strips into new and unexpected areas. One of her interests was travel, and in particular the way in which working class and lower middle class people were starting to go on holiday abroad. This phenomenon was a continuation of the notion of the ‘tour’, an upper class pursuit aimed at improving one’s cultural capital though seeing the (usually classical) sights. However, the new cheap package tours of the late 19th century allowed a ‘lower sort’ to participate – with obvious comedic possibilities for the cartoonist. This paper will explore Duval’s take on the clash of manners when ordinary British people came into contact with ‘funny foreigners’ (in particular the French, the Swiss, and the Germans), while at the same time indicating her very knowing references to cartooning traditions (Busch, Rowlandson, etc.) and her ‘other’ career as a popular actress. The paper is part of a bigger project about Duval, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and will be presented jointly by the project’s three leads

Depiction as comedy and truth: women’s dress in Marie Duval’s drawings for ‘Judy’ 1869 – 1885.

This paper will present and theorise aspects of the facture and iconography of the work of pioneering female cartoonist Marie Duval, in relation to conceptions and representations of women’s dress in London in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Duval’s work appeared in a variety of the cheap British penny papers and comics of the 1860s-1880s. An actress as well as a cartoonist, she lived and worked in an environment of music halls and unlicensed theatres, sensational plays, serials, novels and comic journals. Her drawing style was theatrical, untutored and introduced many techniques that only became common in much later cartooning. She drew hundreds of comic strip pages for the magazine Judy and spin-off compilations, focusing on the humour, attitudes, urbanity and poverty of the types of people she knew. Her characters’ appearance, the ways in which they shape and move themselves in her visual world, and the technically maverick style in which they were drawn, provide a range of subtle and forthright commentaries on the historic dress and behaviour of her working-class London contemporaries, in particularly women of a range of ages, occupations and financial and social situations within this immediate milieu. First, the paper will consider the extent to which the facture of Duval’s drawings articulates relationships between constraint and liberation, in the ways in which she depicts women’s dress, utilising tracing techniques and briccolage, combined with a technically untutored style of drawing. She both cues readers to comedy (emerging as dissonance in her cutting and re-inscribing of contemporaneous fashion illustrations), and depicts embodied social discourse in the form of practices (as contemporaneous truths, in her deft manipulation of misrecognition), themselves generating a system of ideas, and creating a cognitive consensus connecting particular ideas with the behaviour of specific social groups. Second, the paper will consider Duval’s use of body distortion, accumulation, diminution and exaggeration, in which her depictive techniques present women’s dress not as a produced subject but as praxis. It will examine the complex parodic relationships that she creates between readers’ cultural knowledge of action on the contemporaneous theatre stage, in the practices of stage melodrama, and her depictions of women moving through her drawn plots in ‘old fashioned’ bonnets; of their noses; of the significant, ever-changing silhouettes of the carapaces of their chin-to-ankle dresses and of their feet, for example. Parallels will be identified between these Victorian ‘innovations’ and their continued use in twenty-first century ‘current’ and neo-Victorian’visual comedy. Finally, the paper will focus on the plots of Duval’s cartoons, identifying the general anonymity of Duval’s women characters relative to the developing visual identity of a single woman character who appears throughout: Judy herself, the muse and mistress of the magazine. It will present a close reading of a single frontispiece drawing of Judy from 1884, in which Judy rides an ostrich, in order to extrapolate a description of Duval’s cartoons of contemporaneous women that brings together facture, iconography and social milieu in order to understand both the unique processes of her comedy and her ability to depict the truth

Framing pre-1914 British Comics

The chapter presents three frames through which we can start to interrogate early British comics: namely, their relationship with the entertainment environment, with promotional culture, and with intended audiences. It is offered as an introductory method since this era of comics production remains under-researched (in particular, its historicisation has barely begun), and because theorising the idea of ‘frames’ can sometimes assume separations which may not exist. These caveats aside, by relating comics to their wider socio-cultural environment, it should be possible to draw out which themes were era-specific, and which endured. In so doing, the hope is to shed light upon how the very definition of ‘a comic’ was being constructed, and to sketch a pattern of development over time

Comics in the Academy: Three Questions

Comics – comic books, newspaper strips, graphic novels, manga, bandes dessinées, digital comics and more – are now the focus for an established field of research and teaching in the universities. There are comics studies book lists, journals, and degree courses; and an international network of research organisations, including UAL’s own ‘Comics Research Hub’ (founded 2019). The transition from ‘field’ to ‘discipline’ seems inevitable. But what questions does this raise? Does legitimization mean entropy? What kinds of comics should be emphasised, what kinds of research, and what manner of relationship with higher education institutions? Professor Sabin’s talk is aimed at a general audience, and is designed to provoke discussion. Please join him! (Cosplay discretionary.

The “Ets” Factor: Vessel Formation in Zebrafish—The Missing Link?

The zebrafish offers a powerful model for studying the development of new blood vessels

HIV-1 drug resistance in people on dolutegravir-based antiretroviral therapy:a collaborative cohort analysis

BACKGROUND The widespread use of the integrase strand transfer inhibitor (INSTI) dolutegravir in first-line and second-line antiretroviral therapy (ART) might facilitate emerging resistance. The DTG RESIST study combined data from HIV cohorts to examine patterns of drug resistance mutations (DRMs) and identify risk factors for dolutegravir resistance. METHODS We included cohorts with INSTI resistance data from two collaborations (ART Cohort Collaboration, International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS in Southern Africa), and the UK Collaborative HIV Cohort. Eight cohorts from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, and the UK contributed data on individuals who were viraemic on dolutegravir-based ART and underwent genotypic resistance testing. Individuals with unknown dolutegravir initiation date were excluded. Resistance levels were categorised using the Stanford algorithm. We identified risk factors for resistance using mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression models. FINDINGS We included 599 people with genotypic resistance testing on dolutegravir-based ART between May 22, 2013, and Dec 20, 2021. Most had HIV-1 subtype B (n=351, 59%), a third had been exposed to first-generation INSTIs (n=193, 32%), 70 (12%) were on dolutegravir dual therapy, and 18 (3%) were on dolutegravir monotherapy. INSTI DRMs were detected in 86 (14%) individuals; 20 (3%) had more than one mutation. Most (n=563, 94%) were susceptible to dolutegravir, seven (1%) had potential low, six (1%) low, 17 (3%) intermediate, and six (1%) high-level dolutegravir resistance. The risk of dolutegravir resistance was higher on dolutegravir monotherapy (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 34·1, 95% CI 9·93-117) and dolutegravir plus lamivudine dual therapy (aOR 9·21, 2·20-38·6) compared with combination ART, and in the presence of potential low or low (aOR 5·23, 1·32-20·7) or intermediate or high-level (aOR 13·4, 4·55-39·7) nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI) resistance. INTERPRETATION Among people with viraemia on dolutegravir-based ART, INSTI DRMs and dolutegravir resistance were rare. NRTI resistance substantially increased the risk of dolutegravir resistance, which is of concern, notably in resource-limited settings. Monitoring is important to prevent resistance at the individual and population level and ensure the long-term sustainability of ART. FUNDING US National Institutes of Health, Swiss National Science Foundation

Antiretroviral penetration into the CNS and incidence of AIDS-defining neurologic conditions

Objective: The link between CNS penetration of antiretrovirals and AIDS-defining neurologic disorders remains largely unknown. Methods: HIV-infected, antiretroviral therapy-naive individuals in the HIV-CAUSAL Collaboration who started an antiretroviral regimen were classified according to the CNS Penetration Effectiveness (CPE) score of their initial regimen into low (,8), medium (8-9), or high (.9) CPE score. We estimated "intention-to-treat" hazard ratios of 4 neuroAIDS conditions for baseline regimens with high and medium CPE scores compared with regimens with a low score. We used inverse probability weighting to adjust for potential bias due to infrequent follow-up. Results: A total of 61,938 individuals were followed for a median (interquartile range) of 37 (18, 70) months. During follow-up, there were 235 cases of HIV dementia, 169 cases of toxoplasmosis, 128 cases of cryptococcal meningitis, and 141 cases of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. The hazard ratio (95% confidence interval) for initiating a combined antiretroviral therapy regimen with a high vs low CPE score was 1.74 (1.15, 2.65) for HIV dementia, 0.90 (0.50, 1.62) for toxoplasmosis, 1.13 (0.61, 2.11) for cryptococcal meningitis, and 1.32 (0.71, 2.47) for progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. The respective hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) for a medium vs low CPE score were 1.01 (0.73, 1.39), 0.80 (0.56, 1.15), 1.08 (0.73, 1.62), and 1.08 (0.73, 1.58). Conclusions: We estimated that initiation of a combined antiretroviral therapy regimen with a high CPE score increases the risk of HIV dementia, but not of other neuroAIDS conditions