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[email protected] #IGNCC18 @TheIGNCC RETRO! TIME, MEMORY, NOSTALGIA THE NINTH INTERNATIONAL GRAPHIC NOVEL AND COMICS CONFERENCE WEDNESDAY 27TH – FRIDAY 29TH JUNE 2018 BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY, UK Retro – a looking to the past – is everywhere in contemporary culture. Cultural critics like Jameson argue that retro and nostalgia are symptoms of postmodernism – that we can pick and choose various items and cultural phenomena from different eras and place them together in a pastiche that means little and decontextualizes their historicity. However, as Bergson argues in Memory and Matter, the senses evoke memories, and popular culture artefacts like comics can bring the past to life in many ways. The smell and feel of old paper can trigger memories just as easily as revisiting an old haunt or hearing a piece of music from one’s youth. As fans and academics we often look to the past to tell us about the present. We may argue about the supposed ‘golden age’ of comics. Our collecting habits may even define our lifestyles and who we are. But nostalgia has its dark side and some regard this continuous looking to the past as a negative emotion in which we aim to restore a lost adolescence. In Mediated Nostalgia, Ryan Lizardi argues that the contemporary media fosters narcissistic nostalgia ‘to develop individualized pasts that are defined by idealized versions of beloved lost media texts’ (2). This argument suggests that fans are media dupes lost in a reverie of nostalgic melancholia; but is belied by the diverse responses of fandom to media texts. Moreover, ‘retro’ can be taken to imply an ironic appropriation.