Editorial issues 10:5&6

The Comics Studies field of research, as we continuously stress in these editorials, is a thriving discipline. There is a healthy crop of enthusiastic and rigorous scholarship emerging in areas like comics form, methodologies, education, national comics traditions like manga, autobiography, gender, history, and medicine (there are a few forthcoming special issues devoted to graphic medicine, watch this space). Alongside the journals, monographs, edited collections and Comics Studies series by respected academic publishers, conferences and comics courses and programmes in academia show great promise for the future of the field.

To develop the field we need more scholarship in other areas that focus on diversity and inclusion. Yes, we still have to construct the histories and cultures that inform our research. And yes, superheroes are a rich subject area that opens up some diverse issues like gender, national identities, race and sexuality (amongst others). But we can do more. One area that most scholars in our discipline would agree needs more work is in research in sequential art outside of the usual studies of American and European comics. There have been books on African, Asian and Latin American by scholars such as John A. Lent (2004, 2005; 2009a); Lent (2009b) and Karline McLain (2009). Most of the work done in this area tend to be dispersed and sporadic. There is, for instance, the project Comics and the Latin American City at the University of Manchester. It was also encouraging to see some really good papers on Indonesian and Indian comics presented in recent conferences, including the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference along with several fine papers published in this journal.

We want to help scholars to develop these areas of research and have several forthcoming special issues concentrating on specific national and transnational comics including Australian and Indian comics (there is a call for papers on Indian comics on the Taylor and Francis website: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/journal-of-graphic-novels-and-comics-indian-narratives/). We would also like to see special issues proposed on any of these areas so we can show how national and international discourses illustrate the richness, range and creativity of the medium.

In this issue of The Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels, the articles cover a range of philosophical musings and research methodological practices which, as we suggested above, illustrate the diversity and potential of comics as an area of research. Several of the articles included in this issue come from those healthy and emerging fields of study, autobiography, research methodology and graphic medicine, within comics research. Most of the articles deal with national identity whether through reading and readership, the exclusion of the other, negotiating national and ethnic identities or the experience of childhood within culture.

In '“A Gorgeous waste“: solitude in Calvin and Hobbes' Michelle Ann Abate shows how Calvin’s imagination and creativity are triggered when experiencing solitude. She analyses this within the historical context of American culture at the end of the 20^th century, concluding that Calvin and Hobbes offers commentary on the ‘benefits, joys, and importance of solitude.’

Lydia Wysocki’s ‘Linking research and practice: qualitative social science data collection at a UK comics convention’ examines her novel approach to research into readers and readership designed around her engagement with the comics convention, Thought Bubble, held in Leeds, UK. Her research is both practice and qualitative based and she frequently presents her creative work at the convention. Her work is based on sociocultural theories of language which, she argues, informs us on readers notions of national identity.

Matt Reingold examines the complexity of national identity and Jewishness in, ‘American Jews explore Israel: Jewish and Israel identity exploration with Harvey Pekar and Sarah Glidden.’ In this article, Sarah Glidden’s (2010) How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less and Harvey Pekar’s (Pekar and Waldman 2012) Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me are examined as autobiographic texts to show how the writers negotiate their identities as Americans, Jews and Zionists. Reingold argues that ‘for American Jews, forming a relationship with Israel is a complex process that requires navigation and sacrifice and might even entail alienation and loss.’

Notions of disease and contagion aligned with otherness, are analysed in Tim Gauthier’s ‘Negotiating community in the interregnum: zombies and others in Robert Kirkman’s the walking dead.’ Gauthier explores how exclusion between us and them is constructed in a post 9/11 world. The politics of exclusion that constructs us and them is founded on the artificial construction of boundaries (even a wall) which, Gauthier argues, is based on artificial distinctions. As all people carry the zombie virus within their bodies, we are all potentially, the same.

In ‘Comics and medical narrative: a visual semiotic dissection of graphic medicine’, John Rosswell Cummings III manages to combine graphic medicine and education in a study of how four graphic narratives produced by medical students at Penn State College of Medicine reveals the empathy so necessary to the doctor/patient relationship and Cummings calls for more use of graphic narratives in medical education. The notion of empathy is picked up in the book review by Dorian Lucus Alexander at the end of the issue on Ethics in the gutter: empathy and historical fiction in comics by Kate Polak.

In the final article, ‘Finding Beatrix Potter: Bryan Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat’ Donna R. White argues that in addition to the story being about child abuse, we cannot ignore the importance of the narrative as an examination of Beatrix Potter’s life.

We hope you enjoy the issue. And keep up the good work of research in our field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.