This Special Collection of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship will focus on the global circulation of comics in digital forms,
from webcomics to subscription services from traditional comics publishers. The
Collection’s emphasis will be on the international, multi-lingual,
multi-format, diverse nature of “comics”. Comics have circulated in their original language and in translation
since the inception of print: as a physical object, comics (including strips in
newspapers) can travel across international borders with their readers, or they
can be translated for publication in new locales. Recent technologies have made
digital distribution possible, theoretically allowing for global access to
comics published online anywhere in the world as well as the possibility of
distributing translated versions within a proprietary system.
Translation is central to the global circulation of comics and comics as
an art form are often experienced in translation (Evans 2017). While there is a growing body of work on the
translation and circulation of comics (Zanettin 2008, Altenberg and Owen 2015,
Mälzer 2015, Reyns-Chikuma and Tarif 2016; see overview in Zanettin 2020),
little has yet addressed the new world of digital distribution and how this is
affecting translation practices. Work on the digital distribution of comics
(e.g. Priego 2010, Steirer 2014, Crucifix et al. 2017-19, Augureau et al. 2018)
has tended not to address this at a global scale or to investigate how comics
are distributed across languages.
Translation can be both official and unofficial: scanlation -- the fan
translation (Evans 2020) of comics -- is a vibrant practice that has found a home
online, but it is unclear how the shift towards digital publishing by legacy
publishers such as Marvel and DC has changed the environment for the practice.
Nor is it clear how extensively platforms such as Comixology have embraced
translation and international distribution, as the French language site
includes large quantities of untranslated, English language materials. Web
comics as born digital objects may easily be distributed online, but there is
less understanding of how they cross linguistic and cultural borders.
For this Special Collection, we are open for submissions that explore
the intersections between the translation and distribution of comics, the
latter understood in its most diverse, international sense, with a particular
focus that goes beyond dominant themes that are over-represented in current
scholarship. The Special Collection seeks original research articles that
investigate the ways in which digital distribution has opened up, or closed
down, access to comics produced globally. Are the old centres of the USA,
France and Japan still central to comics production? Or has comics production
been democratised and decentralised? How have different comics cultures adapted
to and capitalised on digital distribution, and how are they reaching readers
in other cultures (through translation)?
We are especially interested in the reception and translation of comics
outside of the Anglosphere, which are typically overlooked, but also welcome
work on American comics. We encourage research on the underrepresented areas of
non-English language comics, LGBT+ comics, women’s comics and comics by people
of colour. Contributions may use any relevant methodology to address the topic,
but should follow the journal’s guidelines for submissions.
We call for submissions that are professionally written and presented,
incorporating high-quality images that authors discuss directly and in detail.
We will consider submissions from affiliated senior or early career scholars,
practitioners and independent researchers, as long as they fit the journal’s
call for papers, scope and editorial guidelines.
We invite energetic writing that is theoretically and interpretively
bold. While academic rigour, the inclusion and close discussion of images and
citational correctness are important to us as a precondition, a key feature our
editors and reviewers will consider is the argument, the discovery, the
evidence-based eureka moments conveyed in economical, precise, and, ideally,
subtle prose. We believe academic writing about comics should be as striking
and immediate as the medium itself.
Authorship
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously (except
as unreviewed pre-prints in open access repositories) nor be under
consideration for publication elsewhere.
All contributors should be listed, whether from those listed as authors
or individuals named in acknowledgements; corresponding authors should ensure
listed co-authors have provided their consent prior to submission.
We recommend using CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) to describe each
contributor’s specific contribution to the submission. Please refer to our journal Authorship
Guidelines at Comics Grid.
Submissions Information
Submissions to this Special Collection must engage with and directly
cite, and if appropriate, link to relevant scholarship, and follow our
submission guidelines for the Research section (3000-7000 words).
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship seeks to encourage robust
open science methods and advocates the value of reproducibility. Authors
submitting research articles presenting conclusions from quantitative and/or
qualitative analysis, and/or presenting, discussing or referring to datasets or
code in their submissions are strongly encouraged to cite and share such code
or data in their submissions using appropriate open-access repositories such as
CORE, figshare or Zenodo. Where data from human participants is presented and
discussed, evidence of Ethics Review approval should be provided, and research
ethics guidelines followed and discussed. Where the nature of the data impedes
its open dissemination in spite of anonymisation, this should be clearly
discussed in the submission. Submissions whose methods rely on datasets or
present results from data analysis without citing the datasets used are likely
to be declined unless a reasonable justification is discussed in the submission
itself.
For full submissions information, please go to Comics Grid. Please note we do not consider submissions on
the basis of abstracts only; we only receive and consider full versions of
submissions via our journal management system . If you have any queries
relating to the Special Collection, please contact jonathan.evans@port.ac.uk
for more information.
Timeline
- Deadline for first drafts: 30 June 2021
- Initial editorial desk review: 30 August 2021
- Peer Reviews due: 16 January 2022
- Revised papers due: 30 June 2022
- Estimated Publication of articles as they become ready: August 2022
Licensing and Archiving
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship provides immediate open
access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to
the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
Authors of articles published in The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to
use, reproduce, and share the original contents of the article according to the
Creative Commons-Attribution license agreement.
The Comics Grid is published by the Open Library of Humanities. Unlike
many open-access publishers, the Open Library of Humanities does not charge any
author fees. This does not mean that we do not have costs. Instead, our costs
are paid by an international library consortium.
The journal is indexed by the following services: SCOPUS, Nordic list,
Web of Science, Google Scholar, Chronos, ExLibris, EBSCO Knowledge Base, CNKI,
CrossRef, JISC KB+, SHERPA RoMEO, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ),
EBSCOHost, OpenAire, ScienceOpen, and Academia. In addition, all journals are
available for harvesting via OAI-PMH. To ensure permanency of all publications,
The Comics Grid also utilises CLOCKSS, and LOCKSS archiving systems to create
permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.
For full submissions information, please go to Comics Grid.
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