Welcome to the first edition of what we hope will be a weekly feature here at the michigan comix collective. In the wake of the San Diego Comic Con, as if a listless fever had suddenly left us, we of the collective are beginning to blog in earnest. Here’s to a long, leisurely convalescence. Here’s to you. Gentle readers, behold: a bang-up round-up of the latest news.

A list of Eisner award winners.

Katharine Farmar on the politics of the Eisner awards.

Gary Panter on the Great Beyond via the Comics Reporter.

The International Comics Festival at Angouleme reveals some of its 2009 program.

Who watches the watchmen? No matter how you feel about the adaptation of Alan Moore’s magnum opus into filmic form, you have to admire the exuberance of the metafictions going into its making. Fan-created advertisements for key character Adrian Veidt’s company will run in the background of the movie. Watch them here. Link via io9.

Stay tuned for another update on Friday, citizens. Over and out.

Our own Josh Lambert reviews some didactic comics about Orthodox Judaism here. Mister Lambert’s talents are manifold–for more, click here.

The excellent Grace Tran (though curiously misspelled) gets a shout-out from The Comics Reporter. Her new project, Graphoscope, a journal for comix criticism, is now accepting submissions, maybe even yours!

The excellent Kaila Hale-Stern blogs the New York Comic-Con at io9.

The excellent Steve Burt mentions us in a thought-provoking post over at the Columbia University Press blog.

Until,

the michigan comix collective

Dear you,

If you’re in Ann Arbor, please join us at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 2nd in Angell Hall, Room 3154, for the michigan comix collective’s inaugural event (!) Robert Bell, a graduate student in American Cultures, and Josh Lambert, a graduate student in English Language and Literature, will be sharing some work in progress:

“New Dawn Fades”: Detroit, Disaster, and the Emerging  Global Consciousness 1967-1992

Robert Bell

A phantasmogoric setting of Detroit provided a fundament to several stories of ruin and redemption in the decades after the 12th Street Riots of 1967. Looking closely at James O’Barr’s comic ‘The Crow’ and at the stories within the Robocop universe, this talk will cover my in-progress exploration of the meaning and form of the fictional, post-millennial Detroit. The motif of the burning  future city, rather than a sufficient comment on the coming future,  was an urgent reaction to the spatio-temporal and political concerns  of the present. What, then, is the form of urban disaster today?

“Dirty Pictures, Graphic Novels: Obscene
Images and the Genesis of a Genre.”

Josh Lambert

How do you convince people that comics are for serious adult readers? This talk explores the surprising answer to this question presented in pioneering works by Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Briefly glossing a history of anti-comics activism, the talk argues that Eisner and Feiffer used explicit images of sexual failure
and disappointment to distinguish their work from traditional comic strips and comic books on the one hand, and from Tijuana Bibles and underground comix on the other, thus opening a space for mature literary narratives in the medium. (Fair warning: If the images shown during this talk appeared in a movie, it would almost certainly be rated NC-17.)

We hope you find the above both informational and enticing (!)

Until Wednesday–

the michigan comix collective

Dear you,

Welcome to the online chapter of the michigan comix collective–an interdisciplinary group of University of Michigan graduate students with academic interests in comix (comics/sequential art/the graphic novel/bandes dessinees). You have deduced it all, of course (!), but here we state for the record our intent to provide you with incisive, intellectually stimulating comix related commentary, links, recommendations and other sequential art related errata. We mean to contribute our energies to shaping a body of scholarly criticism that does more than justify the right of creators to work in the comix medium and the right of readers to value that medium–mature academic work that assumes the value of the primary material. Thanks to the industrious efforts of Scott McCloud, Douglas Wolk and others, comix readers in our current moment have the luxury of building on the critical foundations these theorizers of the Ninth Art have laid out. We hope–cordially, with generosity and intelligence–to add our bricks to the wall. See you soon.

yrs.,

the michigan comix collective