Call to Action! Expanding Dragon*Con Academics

[firmament]

Dragon*Con Academics was GREAT this year. We did 8 panels with high attendance, great presentations, and rousing discussions. Now's the time to push for an expansion of academic programming at Dragon*Con! The way to do this is to let the Dragon*Con office know how much support there is for academic programming and an academic conference at the

Comments

[rosindust]

Where are people getting their sources for these kind of papers? Are Yale professors publishing deconstructionist analyses of The Incredible Hulk? Or are they mostly working with primary sources, ex. "Interpretive readings of the Hulk's dialogue during combat sequences point to gyno-centric tendencies, as we see here in issues 34,35, and 39."

[firmament]

At least if we limit ourselves to Comics Studies, its complicated because the field is both nascent and interdisciplinary. Most academics doing this stuff are taking ideas out of there area (literature, history, rhetoric, communication, religious studies, philosophy, etc.) and applying it to Comics texts. There are some central texts by non-academics (McCloud's Understanding Comics, some work by Eisner and Spiegelman), but little canonical work by academics. This is starting to change, though; there are several new journals and a growing dialogue between comics scholars. But largely, references are to source material and theoretical material from various disciplines not originally developed for looking at comics.