Periodic Reporting for period 3 - COMICS (Children in Comics: An Intercultural History from 1865 to Today)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-10-01 do 2023-03-31
How many of us know Quadratino? The boy whose scrapes often involve being de-shaped and re-shaped, from a hexagon, for instance, back to a square. Beautifully drawn by Antonio Rubino and published in the long-running Italian children’s magazine, Corriere dei Piccoli in 1910, Quadratino exemplifies the rich variety of children in comics. These productions for children, part of an emerging and rapidly changing modern consumer culture, are a key source for reflections on notions of childhood and the young, constantly muting medium of comics.
COMICS (Children in Comics: An Intercultural History from 1865 to Today) pieces together an intercultural history of comics from 1865, the year Wilhelm Busch published his famous illustrated poem about two naughty boys, Max und Moritz, to contemporary graphic novels. While focusing on key European centers of comics production - Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy - it also covers transnational interactions, especially the influence of North American comics.
The rise of the graphic novel in the 1990s was accompanied by the rise of comics studies. Keen to counter the assumption that comics are for kids, this field tends to focus on comics for adults and to overlook the many connections between children and comics. Recently, the interest in comics for children (including young adults) has increased, in proportion to the success of such comics. However, this research has essentially focused on comics in English and remains quite limited. Further, the full scope of connections between children and comics still needs to be carefully mapped out and understood. These include:
child characters in comics;
comics for children;
childishness of comics styles (visual and narrative);
re-constructions of childhood in comics and graphic novels.
Examining all four of these aspects, COMICS establishes a new, exciting field of research at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies. The project also closely interacts with periodical studies: 3 of the 5 researchers involved in the project work actively on children’s magazines. These include a doctoral project on the first decades (1910s through 1920s) of the long-running Spanish magazine TBO and the equally successful (but completely different) Italian magazine, Corriere dei Piccoli; another doctoral project on the British children’s magazine The Beano in the 1930s and 1940s; and diverse presentations and publication projects by the PI on French children’s comics magazines during the First World War and the interwar period.
COMICS mines the vast potential of examining children in comics, across formats, cultures and over more than a century of comics production. It sheds light on a dynamically changing medium, its interactions with other media, such as cinema, and print culture, and on the rapidly transforming children’s culture. It also valorizes a corpus of forgotten material, including the rich variety of European children’s comics magazines from the first half of the twentieth century.
Through COMICS, the Faculty Library of Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University succeeded in acquiring a unique and substantial collection of French-language comics magazines and fanzines covering a vast period from the 1930s through the 1980s. The Alain Van Passen Collection will facilitate further research on comics magazines and will provide material for public exhibitions to share an all but forgotten history of comics.
COMICS (Children in Comics: An Intercultural History from 1865 to Today) pieces together an intercultural history of comics from 1865, the year Wilhelm Busch published his famous illustrated poem about two naughty boys, Max und Moritz, to contemporary graphic novels. While focusing on key European centers of comics production - Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy - it also covers transnational interactions, especially the influence of North American comics.
The rise of the graphic novel in the 1990s was accompanied by the rise of comics studies. Keen to counter the assumption that comics are for kids, this field tends to focus on comics for adults and to overlook the many connections between children and comics. Recently, the interest in comics for children (including young adults) has increased, in proportion to the success of such comics. However, this research has essentially focused on comics in English and remains quite limited. Further, the full scope of connections between children and comics still needs to be carefully mapped out and understood. These include:
child characters in comics;
comics for children;
childishness of comics styles (visual and narrative);
re-constructions of childhood in comics and graphic novels.
Examining all four of these aspects, COMICS establishes a new, exciting field of research at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies. The project also closely interacts with periodical studies: 3 of the 5 researchers involved in the project work actively on children’s magazines. These include a doctoral project on the first decades (1910s through 1920s) of the long-running Spanish magazine TBO and the equally successful (but completely different) Italian magazine, Corriere dei Piccoli; another doctoral project on the British children’s magazine The Beano in the 1930s and 1940s; and diverse presentations and publication projects by the PI on French children’s comics magazines during the First World War and the interwar period.
COMICS mines the vast potential of examining children in comics, across formats, cultures and over more than a century of comics production. It sheds light on a dynamically changing medium, its interactions with other media, such as cinema, and print culture, and on the rapidly transforming children’s culture. It also valorizes a corpus of forgotten material, including the rich variety of European children’s comics magazines from the first half of the twentieth century.
Through COMICS, the Faculty Library of Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University succeeded in acquiring a unique and substantial collection of French-language comics magazines and fanzines covering a vast period from the 1930s through the 1980s. The Alain Van Passen Collection will facilitate further research on comics magazines and will provide material for public exhibitions to share an all but forgotten history of comics.
The project began with a consolidation of an accessible and feasible corpus for each team member and the development of specific research trajectories and methodologies. Since comics were deemed as expendable and not always archived, certain magazines are difficult to find especially in times of paper shortages (such as the Second World War).
COMICS team members have published and are preparing articles and book chapters on children in comics (newspaper strips, magazines, graphic novels) and comics for children from diverse perspectives that are situated at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies in a first step, and more recently, with periodical studies. Notable publications include the edited volume Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics, which takes a first, unique step in exploring interactions between children and animals in a diverse range of comics. Team members have presented their research at international academic conferences and at local educational initiatives.
In addition, several popularizing initiatives were taken, including:
A dossier devoted to COMICS on 9de kunst, a Dutch website devoted to comics, with four popularizing articles a year on the connections between children in comics
https://9ekunst.nl/2020/04/12/comics-project-ugent-kinderen-en-strips-cultuur-historisch-in-kaart-gebracht/
Eva Van de Wiele’s article on the Spanish magazine TBO and its interactions with the burgeoning American cinema industry in Tebeosfera, an online magazine on graphic cultures
https://www.tebeosfera.com/documentos/lo_que_no_une_a_opisso_y_keaton_en_el_primer_tbo.html
Dona Pursall’s three-part post on The Beano exploring the theme of naughtiness and the creation of national icons on renowned media scholar, Henry Jenkins’ website
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2019/11/17/on-the-beano-naughty-national-icons-and-a-history-of-misbehavior-part-1-of-3-by-dona-pursall
Michel De Dobbeleer's blogposts on the popular Flemish comics strip Jommeke from January 2021 to August 2021 beginning with:
https://balkanknipsels.wordpress.com/2021/01/31/jommeke-en-houdini-in-roemenie/
COMICS team members have published and are preparing articles and book chapters on children in comics (newspaper strips, magazines, graphic novels) and comics for children from diverse perspectives that are situated at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies in a first step, and more recently, with periodical studies. Notable publications include the edited volume Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics, which takes a first, unique step in exploring interactions between children and animals in a diverse range of comics. Team members have presented their research at international academic conferences and at local educational initiatives.
In addition, several popularizing initiatives were taken, including:
A dossier devoted to COMICS on 9de kunst, a Dutch website devoted to comics, with four popularizing articles a year on the connections between children in comics
https://9ekunst.nl/2020/04/12/comics-project-ugent-kinderen-en-strips-cultuur-historisch-in-kaart-gebracht/
Eva Van de Wiele’s article on the Spanish magazine TBO and its interactions with the burgeoning American cinema industry in Tebeosfera, an online magazine on graphic cultures
https://www.tebeosfera.com/documentos/lo_que_no_une_a_opisso_y_keaton_en_el_primer_tbo.html
Dona Pursall’s three-part post on The Beano exploring the theme of naughtiness and the creation of national icons on renowned media scholar, Henry Jenkins’ website
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2019/11/17/on-the-beano-naughty-national-icons-and-a-history-of-misbehavior-part-1-of-3-by-dona-pursall
Michel De Dobbeleer's blogposts on the popular Flemish comics strip Jommeke from January 2021 to August 2021 beginning with:
https://balkanknipsels.wordpress.com/2021/01/31/jommeke-en-houdini-in-roemenie/
Even though comics studies in Europe is a growing field (just like the slightly older fields of childhood studies, children’s literature and periodical studies), European children’s magazines remain by and large overlooked by research. Even the most popular of magazines, TBO, Beano, Lisette, have attracted only limited interest so far. COMICS therefore contributes to the cultural historical knowledge of these publications while exemplifying methodologies for studying such works. Comics magazines played a central role in the development of a popular children’s culture during the first half of the twentieth century. They also played an equally important role in the development of comics (comic strips, albums, graphic novels) as we know them today. COMICS productively maps, problematizes and operationalizes the connections between children and comics, covering the magazine form and comics styles and the establishment and transformations of a burgeoning children’s culture.
The COMICS team is in the process of developing a handbook, Reading Children in Comics Magazines which will introduce new, interdisciplinary methodologies for studying children’s magazines, combining insights from comics studies, childhood studies and periodical studies. The handbook will also provide the basis for a short MOOC of two hours that will be freely available. It will offer an accessible introduction to children in European comics, focusing on historical children’s magazines and famous comics children. A first exhibition based on the Alain Van Passen collection in Ghent is in the pipeline for 2022. Showcasing fascinating children’s magazines that were immensely successful in their time but are generally unknown today, the exhibition will broach themes of formats, visual storytelling and children’s culture.
The COMICS team is in the process of developing a handbook, Reading Children in Comics Magazines which will introduce new, interdisciplinary methodologies for studying children’s magazines, combining insights from comics studies, childhood studies and periodical studies. The handbook will also provide the basis for a short MOOC of two hours that will be freely available. It will offer an accessible introduction to children in European comics, focusing on historical children’s magazines and famous comics children. A first exhibition based on the Alain Van Passen collection in Ghent is in the pipeline for 2022. Showcasing fascinating children’s magazines that were immensely successful in their time but are generally unknown today, the exhibition will broach themes of formats, visual storytelling and children’s culture.