Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2025

“We are in a new age of superhero comic books: the Blue Age” (Resha 2020: 67). The Blue Age, taking its color from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, began in the 2010s and continues into the present. Although shaped by superheroes, the Blue Age is distinctive for a number of reasons, including the onset of digital readers, guided reading, and social media. It signals a convergence of legacy and new media in the twenty-first century, evidenced in part by social media platforms’ surge in popularity and comics publishing’s shifts within traditional, independent, self, print, and digital markets. Moreover, it is about where and how we read comics – in their different forms and genres – and how technology has changed their consumption and creation. 

Today’s creators use traditional and virtual tools in the production, publication, and promotion of their digital comics. In the twenty-first century, many comics are “scripted, penciled, lined, colored, lettered, formatted, edited, and/or otherwise mediated through a computer” (71). They are simultaneously distributed across physical shelves and digital platforms by mainstream and independent publishers, with published formats ranging from single issues, weekly installments, and mini comics to limited editions, collected anthologies, and graphic novels. Furthermore, comics are announced, read, and talked about online. Comics creators, publishers, and readers optimize the participatory affordances of social media sites like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube for the purposes of marketing and/or analyzing comics. Some creators use image posting tools and video editor studios to engage audiences with their work, while readers use comment sections and post sharing features to produce critical-creative commentary in response.

The Blue Age of Comics Book recognizes the contemporary period (2010s-present) to be when comics and social media make significant contact, both as sequential forms of cultural production and as emergent fields of academic inquiry. As such, this collection surveys industry shifts and formal conventions that shaped the creation, distribution, and reception of comics in the last decade, and brings them into conversation with social media’s concurrent expansion. It also considers how themes of identity and representation emerge across comics narrative and critical discourse, and how these depictions compare to that of legacy media forms like film and television. In this regard, The Blue Age of Comics Book contributes to conversations happening across comics studies and social media studies about topics related to narrative media, digital self-mediation, transmedia storytelling, and contemporary fan practices, among others. From comics studies, this includes texts like Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s Black Women in Sequence (U of Washington P, 2015), Ramzi Fawaz’s The New Mutants (NYUP, 2016), Sean Kleefeld’s Webcomics (Bloomsbury, 2020), Margaret Galvan’s In Visible Archives (U of Minnesota P, 2023), and Sam Langsdale’s Searching for Feminist Superheroes (U of Texas P, 2024). From social media studies, this includes texts like Stuart Cunningham and David Craig’s Social Media Entertainment (NYUP, 2019), Jillian Hernandez’s Aesthetics of Excess (Duke, 2020), Jennifer O’Meara’s Women’s Voices in Digital Media (U of Texas P, 2022), and Nicole Erin Morse’s Selfie Aesthetics (Duke, 2022). In sum, this collection surveys the state of comics’ materiality, creation, and circulation in the twenty-first century, with attention to how social media and digital tools aid in their development and distribution. 

We invite contributors to apply the framework of “The Blue Age of Comic Books” to the study of digital comics and virtual comics culture. We are particularly interested in work by and about people of marginalized identities, as well as work at the intersection of comics studies and social media studies.

Visit: https://adrienneresha.com/the-blue-age-of-comics-book/

Proposals submission by February 10th, 2025

Since the turn of the century, comics have considered the contested nature of American identity. Comic strips, comic books, and editorial cartoons featured stereotypes and caricatures that contributed to non-white people’s marginalization in the United States and advanced narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. The weight of this visual history often obscures the moments when artists, writers, and publishers fought against the regressive imaginary and offered something new. From the dynamic imagination of African American cartoonists such as Jay Jackson’s Bungleton Green in the 1940s to contemporary comic innovators such as C. Spike Trotman’s Iron Circus Comics, the urge to create diverse comics has a long legacy.

Given this history, we celebrate the resistance, resilience, and resolution demonstrated in the comic medium. As we approach the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, it’s a time to reflect on the progress made and the work that still lies ahead. We recognize that the revolution will be drawn and celebrate the artists, scholars, and communities that embrace the comic medium to do so. We celebrate an expanding literature in comic studies that highlights how those groups, often framed at the margin, have moved to the center of the cultural conversation. This is achieved not only through the celebration of characters that reflect them but also by seizing the imagined affordance of the comic form to elevate, transform, and inspire new conversation. Building on the dynamic comic scholarship that recognizes how readers leveraged the imagined affordance of the comic page to create new worlds and challenge old paradigms. 

We invite comics scholars from around the world to submit proposals for the 8th annual Comics Studies Society that engage in topics pertaining to the transformative potential of comics.

Visit: https://comicsstudies.org/css-2025-call-for-papers/