Spotlight: Comics Academe

Comics Academe is an ongoing monthly series published on Women Write About Comics (WWAC) since the site’s inception in 2015. Since 2017, Comics Academe has been curated by Katherine Tanski, a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University. Tanski is a former Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow (like comics studies scholars Leah Misemer and Aaron Kashtan), who began incorporating comics into her composition courses at Purdue University in 2005. She was a founding member of the Comics Graduate Reading Group at Purdue University and the Purdue Sequential Arts and Narrative organization (PSAN). Under her editorial vision, Comics Academe has garnered international attention from scholars in comics studies, including the Comics Studies Society and MLA Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives as one of the few curated spaces for public-facing scholarship available for women and non-binary individuals who have a scholarly interest in comics studies.

Tanski’s goal as editor of Comics Academe has been to create an interdisciplinary space for women and nonbinary individuals to publish short-form articles on comics, comic studies scholarship as well as the field of comics studies itself and related events, such as conferences, archives, libraries, and museum exhibits. This includes essays, roundtables, conference reviews, and interviews. Many of the contributors are graduate students working in disciplines unrelated to comics studies who nonetheless work with comics. Past contributors to Comics Academe include Rachelle Cruz, author of Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing, and Creating Comics, and Elizabeth Coody, co-editor of the forthcoming edited collection Monstrous Women in Comics. 

Several essays published in 2019 have been included on syllabi, including, “Monstress and the Problem of Women in Pain,” by Brandi Estey-Burtt, which interrogates the depiction of women in pain in Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Eisner Award-winning comic Monstress as it relates to mental health, trauma, and the documented prejudice in medicine that dismisses women’s pain. 

Another often-cited article,  4 Colorism, or, the Ashiness of it All by Zoe D. Smith, looks at how printing technology contributed to inconsistencies in the way brown-skinned people were depicted in comics—an issue that is still ongoing, even with the advent of digital art software. 

One of the other main types of articles published is book reviews of comics studies publications by academics. Morgan Podraza’s review of Kate Polak’s Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics, “Looking at Suffering: A Review of Ethics in the Gutter,” engaged with both the content and structure, as well as its contribution to comics studies. Comics Academe also publishes reviews on comics from a disciplinary perspective, in addition to reviews of books published in comics studies. In her review of the recently-published comic Lost City Explorers, “The Harmful Pseudoarchaeology of Mythological Atlantis,” Stephanie Halmhofer, a graduate student in archaeology, debunks the “myth” of Atlantis and highlights the racism pseudoarchaeology perpetuates. 

Interviews published on Comics Academe are often on projects focused on historically marginalized communities. A former student of noted Comics Librarian Carol Tilley, Alenka Figa interviewed the curators of the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP), “Our Queer Older Siblings Will Guide Us: An Interview with the Queer Zine Archive Project.” 

Comics Academe also publishes first-hand accounts of comics studies conferences, such as Adrienne Resha’s recounting of the 2019 Comic Studies Society (CSS) conference at Toronto’s Ryerson University, “Con(ference) Diary: CSS19 Comics/Politics,” wherein she examined the ways in which the theme of the conference was echoed in her experience of the conference as a graduate student.  

The landscape of comics studies is changing, and it must continue to recognize non-traditional spaces as integral and vital to comics studies scholarship. In her TECHstyle article, “Taking Twitter Higher, Further, Faster: Leading the #WomenOnPanels Event,” Leah Misemer writes about how the hashtag event surprised her with the diversity of academic disciplines represented, as well as participants who “occupy liminal spaces between the academy and the public,” such as Comics Academe. She further asserted that:

“This example connects scholars across international borders, across disciplinary boundaries, and demonstrates the permeable boundaries between scholarship and activism, between creation and scholarship, and between research and teaching. It uses the connectivity of public digital writing to capture the transdisciplinary potential of comics and harnesses that potential for feminist goals.”

The mission of Comics Academe has always been to further these feminist goals. In addition to its history of public-facing scholarship by writers in marginalized academic communities, Comics Academe itself functions as a challenge to the traditional academic spaces, disrupting the binary between mainstream comics criticism and academic writing through its publication on WWAC. In contrast to a blog, newsletter, or other publication, Comics Academe and WWAC demonstrate how academic work on comics can have mainstream appeal, that those in comic studies can and do write for audiences outside of disciplinary silos, and that this binary must be challenged if comics studies as a discipline will be able to survive.