Call for Papers

Making Queer Comics: Foundations and Touchstones

Making Queer Comics: Foundations and Touchstones is a proposed volume in the Critical Approaches to Comics Artists Series at the University Press of Mississippi (soon to be under advance contract).  This volume will survey the work of foundational figures in LGBTQ+ comics art and storytelling from the 1960s to the 1990s.

This volume proposes to delve into LGBTQ+ comics artists, their networks and publishers, zines and anthologies, activism and communities—all to make visible the history of making queer comics.  It aspires to engage this history by intervening in the LGBTQ+ archive, laying bare the intersections among race, gender, and sexuality, and tracing the development of forms and media.  In doing so, Making Queer Comics will deepen our knowledge and engagement with LGBTQ+ comics art, spotlighting essential figures, networks, spaces, and movements in ways that have yet to be done and conceptualizing the role of comics in making queer community and unfolding queer histories.

Making Queer Comics will be structured around these broad themes: framing the making of queer comics by way not only of singular artists but by their networks of mentors, editors, readers, and fellow artists; the emergence of key themes, genres, and forms of visual storytelling and serial visual narrative; queer comics art and activism; and comics in the making of queer history. These themes, and the intersections among them, will foster further thinking about comics and queerness, and comics studies more broadly as it takes greater account of its queer foundations and touchstones.

Abstracts that propose essays that make the following interventions and cover the following ground would be especially welcome:

• Queer comics pre-Stonewall and in the age of the Code
• Essential creators, artists, and editors
• Networks, galleries, collectives, anthologies, zines
• Black queer comics artists and artists of color
• Gender, genderqueering, and LGBTQ+ comics
• Transnational approaches and connections
• Making the invisible visible: missing figures in queer comics history
• The making of LGBTQ+ comics genres, forms, and media
• Comics artists’ responses to AIDS
• Early queer comics art and/as activism
• Making space: the significance of early queer comics in queer community-building
• Queer comics making queer history

Please send abstracts of at least 500 and no more than 1000 words, along with CV and contact information, to Janine Utell by July 1, 2021.