Comics & Cartoon History: New Archives, Methods, and Discoveries
Thursday, September 26 & Friday, September 27

FREE and open to the public. A two-day academic comics symposium.
Sullivant Hall Collaboratory (room 141)

10:00–11:45 AM

• Alexander Ponomareff (University of South Florida): “Simple, Legible, and Clear: Comics Lettering and the Demand for Clarity”
• Mark Minett (University of South Carolina): “Quantifying the Poetics of the Page: Formal Design in Early 1940s American Adventure Comic Books”
• Adrienne Resha (University of Virginia): “Coloring, Color Printing, and Critical Color Theory”
• Michelle Ann Abate (Ohio State University): “All By Myself: Single-Panel Comics and the Question of Genre”

1:00–2:45 PM

• Jared Gardner (Ohio State University): “Towards a Deep History of Cartooning”
• Shawn Gilmore (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign): “The Panoramic Impulse in Comics and the Limits of the Page”
• Guy Lawley (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts): “Mr. Töpffer Goes to America: A Highly Fortuitous Historical Contingency” [via Zoom]
• Alex Beringer (University of Montevallo): “The ‘Smoking Gun’ of 1901: Speech Balloons, Editorial Power, and the Emergence of the 20th Century Comic Strip”

3:00 PM – Keynote

• Caitlin McGurk (Ohio State University): “Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund”

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Friday, September 27

9:00–10:30 AM

• Susan Kirtley (Portland State University): “Working Nine to Five: Employing Fluffy Ruffles”
• Daniel Worden (Rochester Institute of Technology): “Working Cartoons: Ted Key’s Hazel and Domestic Labor Across Media”
• Jennie Law (Georgia State University): “HIV + Me: Comics from the Front Lines”

10:45 AM–12:15 PM

• Chair: Margaret Flinn (Ohio State University)
• Mark McKinney (Miami University): “Comics and Other Arts in 19th-Century France”
• Hugo Frey (University of Chichester): “Finding ‘Liliane the Air Hostess’: Archives, Gender, and the History of French Indochina War Comics”
• Aubrey Gabel (Columbia University): “BD Reportage in France”

1:00–2:30 PM

• Felipe Muhr (KU Leuven and UGent): “Scavenging the Picture Morgue: Raúl Roux”
• Morgan Podraza (Ohio State University): “How We Play with Comics”
• Kate Kelp-Stebbins (University of Oregon): “Unsettling the Material Relations of Comics”

2:30 PM

• Chair: Sidney Heifler (Ohio State University)
• Matthew J. Smith (Ohio State University, Newark): “Rewriting the Textbook Comics History: A Critical Case Study on Authoring Historical Narratives”
• Kim Munson (Independent Scholar, San Francisco): “The Comics Legacy of Trina Robbins”