Journal of Comics & Culture

H-Announce Call for Submissions - Journal of Comics & Culture - Pace University Press / June 15

Announcement published by Pace University Press on Monday, June 8, 2020 Type: Call for Papers Date: June 1, 2020 to June 15, 2020 Location: New York, United States Subject Fields: Cultural History / Studies, Fine Arts, French History / Studies

The Journal of Comics & Culture

« US Comics in France / Bande Dessinée in America »

Guest editor: Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) [email protected].

2020 has been officially labeled « Year of Comic Art » by France’s Ministry of Culture. The time is ripe for the Journal of Comics & Culture to devote an issue to « US Comics in France / Bande Dessinée in America » by means of a dual agenda:

- expand knowledge and scholarship about the almost two-century history of transatlantic circulations of comics and bande dessinée between France and the USA - document the present state of comics publishing in the two countries, the various relations between French and US publishers, and envisage future developments.

A wide range of actors make comics a lively cultural sector: readers, creators, publishers, distributors but also translators, literary agents, and agencies of cultural promotion.

We will welcome submissions about the following topics:

• Historical essays • Reception of BD in America and reception of comics in France • Business stakes and perspectives on comics publishing today • Economic models in France and the US • Fandom: Comparing national readerships and comic cons and festivals in France and the US • Impact of new formats and readers - digital hosting included • Licensing/transmedia issues in France and the US • Translators and translations

250-word abstract by June 15 and replies by June 22.

First drafts to be submitted by August 14th; review by August 28th. Final manuscripts due by October 1 with all illustrative material.

Guidelines for Authors We are interested in publishing lively and provocative scholarly essays situated in both established and emerging areas of comics studies. Comics scholars are the Journal’s primary audience, but we encourage you to write in a manner that is equally accessible to lay readers and comics fans. Although the Journal’s focus is on North America, we will consider thoughtful essays that extend beyond those borders. The Journal of Comics & Culture will not consider manuscripts that are under review elsewhere or that have been previously published. The Journal does not accept unsolicited book reviews. All scholarly essays published in the Journal are peer reviewed; other contents are editorially reviewed. Authors whose submissions are accepted for publication will be required to secure permissions for any images that are reproduced.

Manuscript Preparation • Articles should not exceed 10,000 words, including references and footnotes. • Articles in comics form are welcomed (feel free to query the editor if you are considering this as an option). • A separate title page should include the article title, the author’s name, institutional affiliation (if available), mailing address, telephone number, e-mail address, word count, and a brief (250 word) abstract. • Do not include the author’s name on subsequent pages. • Submissions should follow the author-date system of documentation, with limited footnotes, as outlined in The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.). A brief guide is available here: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle. org/tools_citationguide.html • Submissions should be made to editor Jean-Paul GabillietJean-Paul.Gabilliet@u-bordeaux- ( montaigne.fr) in Microsoft Word (.doc / .docx) or PDF format. Black and white or grayscale images may be attached separately as TIFF or JPG formats. • Please use - Journal of Comics & Culture - in the subject line.

Some background :

In the rich history of Franco-American cultural flows, the circulation of comic art has proved quite asymmetrical on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Relatively few US-made comics were imported to France during the first third of the 20th century. This situation changed radically in 1934 with the launch of the Journal de Mickey weekly, whose immediate success initiated a long-lasting taste for American comic strips. For over eighty years, US-made comics have been read in France almost permanently, regardless of periods when they were banned (under the Nazi occupation) or targetted

In the United States, on the contrary, French and European francophone comics suffered from chronic invisibility for a long time. Whereas the medium arguably reached the USA in the 1840s via bootleg translations of the “picture novels” authored by Rodolphe Töpffer, the Swiss “father of the comic strip,” the cartoons that started spreading in a number of US magazines and Sunday newspapers by the last two decades of the 19th century were all produced domestically. Newspaper funnies, a progeny of the US turn-of-the-20th-century cultural industry, and the comic books that appeared on newsstands as of the mid-1930s exemplified the creative insularity that typified both the production of comics and reading habits of comics readers in the United States until the 1970s—as confirmed, for instance, by the failed attempt to publish Belgium’s bestselling Tintin graphic novel series in the US in the late 1950s (Gabilliet 2013). Only in the last quarter of the 20th century did bandes dessinées (most of which initially came from France’s new breed of mainstream adult comic magazines) become very gradually visible in the then emerging US alternative comics scene (Scott 2002, McKinney 2008, Gabilliet 2016, Labarre 2017).

Simultaneously, the dominant economic model of comics publishing entered a long-term evolution with the slow rise of the “graphic novel” format, the US avatar of the Franco-Belgian/European “album de bande dessinée.” Whereas US-made comics had been singled out consistently as relentless agents in the cultural Americanization of Europe at least since World War II (Ory 1984), their turn-of- the-century mutation into graphic novel-worthy material testified to what amounted, possibly, to an unexpected Europeanization of the medium (Gabilliet 2005).

Until the late 20th century, the asymmetric circulation of comics between the two sides of the Atlantic resulted in a paradox. While the majority of the American public had always simply ignored the existence of French bandes dessinées (Beaty 2006, Mills 1986), the newspaper strips and comic- books coming from the US since the mid-1930s had fascinated generations of young and not-so-young French readers—even during the post-World War II decades, when Franco-Belgian BD enjoyed most public visibility and consistently increasing cultural prestige (Ferragatti 2016, Gabilliet 2016, Gabilliet 2017). The paradox reached the point that the activism of French bédéphiles was actually instrumental in accelerating the cultural acceptance of comics in the USA (Munson 2016). A turning point occurred with the “First American International Congress of Comics” (1er Congrès international américain de la bande dessinée)—when 200 cartoonists, publishers, and key figures of the European comics scenes, most of whom were French or francophone, flocked to New York City on April 23-30, 1972¬¬ for a week-long event co-organized by the National Cartoonists’ Society and SOCERLID, France’s leading comic art appreciation society (Pascal 1972). Although this exceptional transatlantic gathering had hardly any immediate outcomes, it gave a number of American comic creators the opportunity to discover French and European comics and initiate or consolidate contacts that would mutually impact the parallel evolutions of their respective creative and publishing scenes in the ensuing decades.

In the present-day book market, comics have increasing appeal for both publishers and readers. On

Citation: Pace University Press. Call for Submissions - Journal of Comics & Culture - Pace University Press / June 15. H-Announce. 06-08-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/6183002/call-submissions-journal-comics-culture-pace-university-press Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Announce both sides of the Atlantic the longtime demonization of the medium started falling apart in the 1960s. Since the 1980s the emergence of the “graphic novel” label, an effective marketing ploy that has spawned a new aesthetic category, has significantly reconfigured the status of comic art in contemporary cultural hierarchies by enabling it to catch up with Europe, where the legitimization of bande dessinée had started off earlier (Beaty & Woo 2016). While American observers still view France as an ideal laboratory where comic art has achieved cultural and commercial recognition (Emina 2019, Seneca 2019), comics now circulate between the two countries with ever more intensity¬. In France, a century-old importer of US comics, the share of US material published in translation in the national bande dessinée market has rocketed from 12% to 45% between 2007 and 2017 (SNE 2017). But the US is experiencing a more novel, although very promising phenomenon when it comes to importing bande dessinée into the land of superheroes (MacDonald 2015, Salkowitz 2019).

Bibliographic references

Beaty, Bart. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. —— & Woo, Benjamin. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016. Emina, Seb. “In France, Comic Books Are Serious Business.” The New York Times 29 January 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/books/france-comic-books-angouleme.html. Ferragatti, Jean-Michel. L'Histoire des Super-Héros - L'âge d'or (1939 - 1961). Marseille : Neofelis, 2016. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. “Freedom of Speech and Un-Consecrated Mass Media: A Franco-American Comparison on Comic-Books.” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 24.1 (2003): 77-88. ——. “Du comic-book au graphic novel : l’européanisation de la bande dessinée américaine.” Image [&] Narrative : Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative 12 (août 2005) : http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/tulseluper/gabilliet.htm. ——. “A Disappointing Crossing: the North American Reception of Asterix and Tintin.” Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, eds. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, Daniel Stein. London & New York : Continuum, 2013. 257-270. ——. “Actuel, 1970-1975 : passeur transatlantique de l’underground américain et de la bande dessinée pour adultes.” Marc Atallah et Alain Boillat (dir.), BD-US : Les comics vus par l'Europe (Lausanne : Infolio, 2016). 79-98. ——. “« Âge d’or de la bd » et « Golden Age of Comics » : comparaison des notions fondatrices de la bédéphilie dans l’aire franco-belge et aux États-Unis (1961-2015)”. Le Temps des médias. Revue d’histoire 27 (Automne-Hiver 2016/2017) « L’Âge d’or ». 139-152. Labarre, Nicolas. Heavy Metal, l'autre Métal Hurlant. Pessac : PU de Bordeaux, 2017. MacDonald, Heidi. “U.S. Market Ripe for French Graphic Novels.” Publishers Weekly May 26, 2015. URL: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/66808-u-s-market-ripe-fo r-french-graphic-novels.html. McKinney, Mark, ed. History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels. Jackson,

MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008. Mills, T. F. “Franco-Belgian Comics: A Success Story.” The Comics Journal #105 (February 1986): 75-85. Munson, Kim. “How the French Kickstarted the Acceptance of Comics as an Art Form in the US: The Books and Exhibitions of Maurice Horn.” International Journal of Comic Art 18.2 (Fall/Winter 2016): 111-155. Norot, Anne Claire (éd.). La BD d'auteur américaine en 80 albums. Hors série Les Inrockuptibles 2 n° 79 (2018). Ory, Pascal. “Mickey go home ! La désaméricanisation de la bande dessinée (1945-1950).” Vingtième Siècle, revue d'histoire 4 (octobre 1984) : 77-88. Pascal, David. “The First American International Congress of Comics.” Phénix revue internationale de la bande dessinée 20 (1972) : 35-41. Salkowitz, Rob. “U.S. Comics Publishers Tap a Rich Vein of Eurocomics.” Publishers Weekly Oct. 4, 2019. URL: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/81390-u-s-comics-publis hers-tap-a-rich-vein-of-eurocomics.html. Scott, Randall W. European Comics in English Translation: A Descriptive Sourcebook. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Seneca, Matt. “An American in a French Comics Shop.” Europe Comics website. March 21, 2019. URL : http://www.europecomics.com/american-french-comics-shop/. SNE [Syndicat National de l’Edition] – GFK. La Bande dessinée, une pratique culturelle de premier plan : qui en lit, qui en achète ? Rapport publié en octobre 2017. URL: https://www.sne.fr/app/uploads/2017/10/GfK-SNE_SYNTHESE-BD_OCT2017-1.pdf.

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