Call for Papers. Folio: Stories of Australian Comics
FOLIO: STORIES OF AUSTRALIAN COMICS
How are Australian comics made, read, contested, thought about, produced – what do Australian comics mean to you? We are a research team called Folio; we are academics from three universities working with a broader group of practitioners on an Australian Research Council project to tell stories of contemporary Australian comics 1980-now. The project entails putting together an interactive history and archive of the last 40 years of comics in Australia.
We are putting together a proposed book that will grow out of the project in response to an invitation from an international publisher. We are interested in hearing from scholars of all kinds, Australian and international, such as comics-makers, creative practice researchers and artist-critics, scholars from other disciplines including but not limited to medical humanities, literary and cultural studies/ histories/ geographies, creative writing, visual arts and graphic design, print and digital publishing studies, media and film, on Australian comics topics of interest.
One of our guiding ideas is that Australian comics represents a complex intersecting ‘ecology’ of many different genres, networks and formats. We want our project to highlight the many nodes of this ecology, mapping and traversing the ways in which they interconnect.
As such, essays can be in a mix of forms, prose, comics or both, and can incorporate personal experience.
Essays might ask: What is 'Australia' in Australian comics? How does it look? How does it sound? What is the Australian comics ‘scene’? What places, people and atmospheres make this scene what it is? What are the limiting or excluding aspects of the Australian comics world? How has Australian comics tracked or offered counterpoint to social shifts as they relate to decolonisation and Indigenous sovereignty, gender and sexuality, understandings of environmental crisis, understandings of capital? What about changes in production and distribution format, including the digital? How is the Australian comics world situated within comics globally? How have key artists advanced the form? Which quality artists remain underread and under-described? How have you made comics? How has comics made you?
We are seeking abstracts of 200 words by 30 April 2022; abstracts should come accompanied with a short bio and an outline of how the work will be presented.
Timeline:
30 April 2022 – 200-word abstracts due
June 2022 – Editors respond to abstracts
December 20 2022 – Full essays between 3000 and 5000 words, or 10 and 20 comics pages, due (Instructions on format will be sent on acceptance of abstract)
Early 2023 – Essays and comics sent for peer review
2024 – Projected publication
Please send abstracts and queries to australiancomicsfolio@gmail.com.
About Folio and the research team: https://www.foliocomics.com/about