The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship seeks scholarly submissions on the technical, theoretical, cultural, and historical aspects of comics studies that gives vitality to the form and challenges readers’ assumptions about it.
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship seeks scholarly submissions on the technical, theoretical, cultural, and historical aspects of comics studies that gives vitality to the form and challenges readers’ assumptions about it.
Deadlines for submissions: 31st March 2020 and 31st October 2020.
Despite the healthy amount of comics scholarship over the past ten years, the discipline remains theoretically open and ontologically incomplete. There is much work to be done, with many methodologies, objects of study and interpretive voices still absent or under-represented. We want quality and diversity to appear in The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship.
What do we mean by “quality and diversity”? We seek to contribute to constructing a critical discipline that is creative, innovative, experimental and risk-taking. Our ambition is to provide a platform for work that avoids traditionally over-researched topics and perspectives and that instead focuses on those which have been overlooked, that shares new critical and insightful perspectives. We are motivated by the need to encourage a diversity of critical reflections and free comics scholarship from the competitive, publish-or-perish, paywalled, publication-for-publication’s sake aspects that often constrain scholarly research.
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 do not consider submissions on the basis of abstracts only; we only receive and consider full versions of submissions via our journal management system and cannot provide informal pre-submission advice.
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.
The Comics Grid encourages open science methods and advocates the value of reproducibility. Authors using datasets or code in their submissions are encouraged to cite and share them in their submissions using appropriate open-access repositories such as CORE, figshare or Zenodo.
For full submissions information, please go to https://www.comicsgrid.com/about/submissions/ or download our CFP.
Posted on 30 Oct 2019