Join us for the 2nd annual Will Eisner Week Comics Studies Forum at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum! Come hear from comics scholars on their most recent work in the field.

Our feature presentation will be from Kate Polak, entitled “Displacing the Memorial: Holocaust Comics in Conversation with Memory.” Kate Polak is Assistant Professor of English at Wittenberg University, where she teaches literature and writing. Her book, Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics, was nominated for an Eisner Award. Her current projects include a book on Holocaust memorialization in the digital age, essays on the #metoo movement, and a graphic memoir.

-There is no single image or iconic aspect of the shôjo…but you know it when you see it.
FUJIMOTO Yukari

It is impossible not to notice the perplexing multitude of contradictions to be found in the materiality of the highly patriarchal culture of contemporary Japan. It is paradoxically encrusted — overpoweringly — with the consuming evidence of the feminine; and not just any feminine, but specifically the young, cute, endearing femininity of the shôjo. Her trace is everywhere, and yet, who or what is she? Travelling through the postwar emergence and consequent proliferation, transformations, and translations of shôjo manga first in Japan, but ultimately globally; this discussion will investigate its various representations, as well as the many scholarly explanations, definitions, and descriptions of the shôjo in order to arrive at a notion of what is, at this moment, the tentative center of what might be understood as a rhizomic ecology of desire. Although various origins, endings, and subterranean mysteries can be plotted deep in its short (perhaps) history, nevertheless, this discussion will grab at the objects entangled in our present that are redolent with shôjo history, texts, images, meanings, and inferences, as they bob up into our view. Inevitably, of course, we will end with more questions than when we began, as she, by nature of her changing temporality and multiplicity, will always evade a definitive profile; yet it is worth the journey.

This event is FREE and open to the public. Let us know you’re coming on Facebook

Leila Abdelrazaq is a Palestinian author and artist born in Chicago and currently living in Detroit. Her debut graphic novel, Baddawi (Just World Books 2015) was shortlisted for the 2015 Palestine Book Awards and has been translated into three languages. She is also the author and Illustrator of The Opening (Tosh Fesh, 2017) as well as a number of zines and short comics. Her creative work primarily explores issues related to diaspora, refugees, history, memory, and borders. She is co-founder of Maamoul Press, a multi-disciplinary collective for the creation, curation, and dissemination of art by marginalized creators whose work lies at intersections of comics, print making, and book arts.

In this artist talk which forms part of the Borders in Motion Symposium, Leila will share images from her career as an artist and writer and talk about how her thinking about borders, nationalism, and national identity have shifted over time. She will share how this shift is reflected in how she approaches her work and tells stories.

FREE and open to the public.

A book signing will follow the presentation. Leila Abdelrazaq’s work will be available for purchase.

This event is cosponsored by Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and made possible by funding from a Migration, Mobility, and Immobility grant.

Because our first workshop was so successful in 2018, we’re doing it again!  This 2-day workshop will introduce teachers to the history of French-language comics and vocabulary needed for textual analysis, as well as address how to create language learning activities based in this kind of authentic text content so as to respect the artistic medium and the goals of the language classroom. Activities are designed to enrich language teaching from the beginning through advanced levels, including attention to AP and IB themes. The workshop will take place in the reading room and classrooms of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and all materials (books) and lunches will be provided. Each day will begin at 9:30 AM and end at 5:00 PM.  The majority of sessions will be conducted in French. The workshop will be facilitated by Ohio State University faculty and staff.

Repeat participants are very welcome. There will be some repetition in curriculum in that we will again have general bande dessinée vocabulary and history sessions, but activities will be updated and the specific books that we will read and discuss in their entirety will be different.

This program is co-sponsored by the Ohio State University Department of French and Italian and is made possible by a generous gift from Engie-Axium.

Registration is now closed