Tag: comics
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2021 – A Busy Year
When I was looking back on 2020 in my January 2021 post, I wrote that the best decision I made was quitting my job at a multinational company in the summer of 2020 (in spite of the pandemic, etc). I was grateful for that decision each and every day of 2021. Though freelancing is hard, it is getting easier and easier to find work. I still could not support myself financially if I lived alone, but I do not live alone, and I can rely on a partner who supports my freelancing projects. All year round, I could work on projects that make sense, which is a wonderful feeling.
TEACHING
I got some teaching gigs in the spring term, and got even more in the autumn. This is fantastic, I love teaching. I have taught a history of comics class at METU, academic writing at AMFI, “Good and Evil,” a critical thinking course at Milestone, a comics making workshop at MOME, and two practical comics making and comics as thinking classes at MOME and METU. I have put some of my syllabi online, just follow the links. I will be teaching full time (though with 4 different contracts) in 2022.
INTERNATIONAL DISCUSSIONS OF COMICS
During the summer, I was asked to join the editors of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics as the new book reviews editor. I really enjoy this work, which has allowed me to get to know some fantastic academics from all over the world.
In the summer, I was invited to take part in Lyon BD and attend the professional workshops for organizers of comics festivals. This was AMAZING! I have never been to a French comics festival before, and even with the restrictions due to COVID, I felt the love and culture of comics.
In October, I was invited to Lebanon, to speak at the American University of Beirut and to attend the Beirut Comics Art Festival. I learnt so much in Beirut and I met brilliant comics artists and students – I have posted about it on this site, too. In preparation for my trip, I interviewed Lina Ghaibeh, organizer of the festival and chair of the Arab Comics Initiative about Arab comics and about life in conflict-ridden Lebanon – link to the article on The Comics Journal. I have also written a report on the festival, here it is.
At the end of the year, I was invited to join the History in Comics Erasmus BIP project. We will organize a conference in September, 2022, so stay tuned! This is our website: historyincomics.org.
JOURNALISM IN HUNGARIAN
I continued writing to various cultural magazines and portals. This is a cause for continuous conflict in me, because these magazines and portals pay so little that if you write a good, long, well thought-out article, your wage is something like 1-2 dollars/hour. My journalistic work is collected here, and here is a list of the long and interesting things I could write about: on Alois Nebel, a cool Czech comic, report on horror in Hungary, report on conserving old paper documents, interview with writer Anita Moskát, interview with Anna Gács on memoirs.
POPULAR SCIENCE IN HUNGARIAN
I started writing about current academic topics in the field of comics studies in essays. I would like comics to be more accepted here and I would like to contribute to the canonization of comics studies as a valid academic discipline. I have written three essays: on Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay and its translation; on graphic medicine; on Paul Williams’s book on the origins of the graphic novel.
PUBLICATIONS
This year I haven’t written or published any articles in English -and that is okay. I feel I need more time to find a topic after my book – and I am still grateful every day that I could write a book and publish it with the Ohio State University Press. I published two book reviews, though.
IN 2022
I already have a number of teaching contracts and promises that I am very excited about. I am also looking forward to our meetings with the History in Comics research group, and I hope I’ll find a research topic and I start writing articles again.
I wish you the very best, creative energies, piece, long walks, friends for 2022!
- Keynote at IGNCCOne of the greatest honors of my life has been to keynote at the joint conference of IGNCC and IBDS (International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference, International Bande Dessinée Society) in Brussels on 4 July 2025.
- COMPLEX is published
THE choose your own adventure comic from the Balkans that you would not want to miss – brought to you by the Random Factor Comics Collective! - Versions of Me – Comics Anthology
Last autumn I had the pleasure to co-teach a one-week practical workshop on making comics and feminism. We exhibited and printed our comics!
- Keynote at IGNCC
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Guest Lecturing at the American University of Beirut, Reporting on Arab Comics for TCJ
In October 2021 I was invited by Lina Ghaibeh to hold a lecture to graphic design students about drawing and comics. I was and am still honored by this opportunity.
I met Lina in Lyon as we both were invited to Lyon BD, and it was really easy to talk with her about the difficulties of organizing comics festivals and events in countries that do not really have an appreciation of comics as an artform, and also about teaching comics. We both love teaching. 🙂 Before my visit, we talked a lot about the situation in Beirut, which is extra difficult: Covid came upon a grief financial and political crisis, and the illegally stored ammonium nitrate exploded in the port of Beirut on 4 Aug 2020. It killed many people and destroyed culturally important parts of the city. I interviewed Lina for The Comics Journal, and she speaks about how they decided to eventually organize a festival in this situation, the role of art in hardship, the history and present of Arab comics, and the work and goals of the Arab Comics Initiative at the American University of Beirut. I learned a lot from this discussion, which was recorded in three sittings. Here is a link.
When I arrived at Beirut, I was really excited about being there and being present at the opening of the comprehensive, extensive, and beautiful exhibition of contemporary Arab comics – with works exhibitied from ten countries. The exhibition was curated by Lina Ghaibeh and George Khoury JAD. At the same time, I was humbled by knowing that the fact that my hotel has electricity is a privilege, as that the government provides only around 3 hours of electricity a day, and people have to use generators or candles. I walked a lot around the city and I saw the scars left by the Civil War (1975-1990) and the Revolution in 2019 and the Explosion, I saw street art everywhere, and I saw and talked to really kind people. This has been an experience of a lifetime.
If you are interested, here is my report on the events and exhibitions of the Beirut Comics Art Festival, published on The Comics Journal. I really enjoyed the drawn concerts, the programs at various locations in the city, and the exhibitions that showed political engagement, concern, and power. In the report, I made mini interviews with organizers and artists.
And of course I also talked at the American University of Beirut. It went okay. I took many pictures by phone and by my beloved analog camera (those in the beginning of this post were taken by my Minolta x700). If you want to see more, visit my blog, please.
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Book Reviews Editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
I am happy to share that I am the new book reviews editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. I am really excited about this job and cannot wait to read and publish tons (!) of interesting reviews of books on comics.
I have been a secret book reviews enthusiast in the past 10 years or so, and I think many of you agree with me that there is a lot going on in comics research now. The field is becoming more international and more global, newer and newer chapters are explored in the history of the medium, and there is a great number of monographs and collections that offer syntheses of and guides to this expanding field.
If you are interested in reviewing books for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, please contact me (eszterszep AT gmail DOT com).- Doctoral students, postdocs, independent scholars, as well as tenured and non-tenured faculty are all welcome!
- Please write a few lines about yourself, as well as about your areas of expertise and interest. If you already have a title in mind, do not hesitate to share it!
Finally, here is a comic I made about our book review philosophy. The strip was deeply influenced by Hungarian critic József Lapis’s several funny essays and self-reflections on reviews and the roles of reviewers.
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The Marie Duval Patreon Project
In 2018 Roger Sabin gave me a Marie Duval T-shirt. Now THIS is the way to put ideas into someone’s head: you give them a T-shirt with a cool pattern related to a little known aspect to their research, and they are doomed… Yes, my new #patreon project is on Duval.
Marie Duval was drwaing to the British humorous-satyrical weekly Judy from 1869, and she started drawing the adventures of the first comics superstar, Ally Sloper. After her death, there were conscious attempts to misattribute her work and to erase her from the history of cartooning and visual journalism.
My project is based on the fantastic book Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite (2020). In the four parts of the project, I explore some of my favourite topics in the book: #1 Duval’s career, #2 women and work in Victorian Britain, #3 the influence of theatre on Duval’s cartooning, and #4 the politics of her drawing style and why it was considered vulgar. Link.
I think Marie Duval was a creative woman employee who provoked the norms of her age in many ways, including her employment, her lack of formal training, her style, her topics, her sense of humour, her acting career, and even her family. I simply adore her achievement. Check out the details of the project on Patreon!
Here are some images that I love. They come from the Marie Duval archive.
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History of Comics Course
I was asked to lecture on the history of comics in the spring term. There are a few things you should know:
#1 I don’t believe in lecturing and any forms of frontal teaching.
#2 I don’t think that students of photography, design theory, or visual communication should sit an exam in the history of comics (in Hungary each lecture must be finished by a written or spoken exam.) They would benefit more about making comics or understanding how they work or getting inspired by them.
I am terrible, I know.
However, this lecture series turned out to be the greatest joy of my spring ’21 quarantine season.
I could transform the course to be less formal, more interactive, more practice-oriented, and a bit more interactive. Here is the syllabus, some creative assignments, and some of the amazing work done by the students.
And some student work to tease you. The first two images are stylistic practice, the third one is an adaptation of a poem, the last one is a page analysis – the exercise comes from Nick Sousanis.
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Drawing and Transforming the Body in Ken Dahl’s Monsters: Video and Sketchnotes
You can watch the 20-minute presentation on Monsters, a very creative and playful comic on STDs by Ken Dahl (penname for Gabby Schulz) on YouTube. This video was made for the Transitions 9: New Directions in Comics Studies conference in 2021.
Before the actual video, I also would like to share sketchnotes made by fantastic artist-researchers during the talk – thank you Muna, John, and Paul!
This sketchnote is by Dr Muna Al-Jawad, aka The Old Person Whisperer, who was the official sketchnoter of our panel:
Dr John Miers also made sketchnotes:
And Dr Paul Fisher Davies mentions this talk in his sketchnote on our panel:
And now the video:
PS: This talk is based on Chapter 2 of my book, Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability. -
Drawing and Transforming the Body in Ken Dahl’s Monsters – Abstract for Transitions 9
This is my abstract for Transitions 9: New Directions in Comics Studies 2021 (Transitions was canceled in 2020 but will take place online this year – 2021. There will be live sketchnoting during the panels! I’ll speak on 8 April about a chapter of my book that I’ve not talked about at any conferences before. – Check out the full program here.)
Ken Dahl, in his graphic narrative on living with the sexually transmitted disease of herpes, represents his avatar and personifies the illness of the avatar with cunning visual inventiveness. Dahl’s dynamic visualizations freely transform the bodies of the characters, which, I argue, emphasize drawing as a performance and as a way to think about the many controversial topics of this comic (eg. relationships, responsibility, sex, guilt, prejudice). Bodies are constantly created and recreated in acts of drawing, which offer creative ways for Dahl (pen name for Gabby Schulz) not only to find visual expressions of complex feelings and experiences regarding illness but also to testify to the endlessness of pictorial embodiment (El Refaie) itself.
The metamorphoses keep the avatar in what Margrit Shildrick called the “condition of constant becoming” (1): in a particularly vulnerable state where the repeated acts of transforming the avatar’s body are used to ask visual questions about the body. Shildrick does not talk about comics, her book, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self, studies monstrosity and vulnerability in various cultural products: my paper applies Shildrick’s questions to Dahl’s take on normative and the monstrous bodies. I show with examples and by close reading that the morphing of the avatar’s body is expressive of vulnerability on two levels: on the level of the narrative where the illness is transforming the body, and on the level of representation, where it is the lines that govern the transformations of the body.
Content warning: Dahl uses a cartoony style to show a sexually transmitted disease, but occasionally he switches to a very realistic, photoreferential way of drawing, which can be disturbing. Actually these changes are extremely interesting.
Some personal notes:
– this conference presentation is based on chapter 2 of my book, Comics and the Body, which has, I am so happy to say, entered production phase!
– I cannot wait to meet the fantastic members of the comics community in the UK and to talk to keynote speaker Nick Sousanis again! I am 100% sure this will be a most inspiring conference!
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Comics and the Body is now released
The day has come when I can proudly share with you that my book has been released! I really enjoyed writing it and discussing my ideas at conferences. I just love this topic. I am really happy now!
I am so grateful for the support of my husband and friends and for EAAS for their postgrad research grant to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. Without them and it I really could not have written this book.
In this book I examine the role of the body in drawing and reading comics within a single framework. In each chapter I approach a different aspect of embodied interaction with comics (drawing lines; drawing bodies; drawing style; reading bodies and abstract lines; interacting with a book object). This is an interdisciplinary book that is equally inspired by art practice, feminist ethics, and materiality studies.
If you are interested, I’d like to recommend two videos for further info: In this video I discuss my research with Frederick Louis Aldama.
And I made this short video to introduce the basic ideas of my book:
Amazing cover art by Amanda Weiss.
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Where Do Graphic Novels Come From?
Contrary to the myths inherited from the 80s and later, the graphic novel was not invented or made popular exclusively by Will Eisner or his manager. In my latest Patreon project I dig into the origins of the graphic novel format and I also explore the origins of the term. A teaser of the project is now available for anyone on my website.
The project itself is longer than this teaser and is more argumentative. It is based on Dreaming the Graphic Novel by Paul Williams (Rutgers UP, 2020). I absolutely recommend this book. And my Patreon! Have I mentioned my Patreon in this paragraph yet?
The project on Patreon (ha!) shows that in the 60s and 70s many people had many ideas about how comics should be rethought. Yes, creators, publishers, editors, retailers thought that comics was in need of some change.
I do not dwell on this moral and financial crisis for long in my Patreon project (check!) , instead, I show the diversity of things people were doing and thinking AT THE SAME TIME. This is a dynamic and exciting age: noone knew that the graphic novel will turn out to be successful. They did not know it would be called graphic novel!
Why Patreon? I am experimenting with new formats to keep on doing research, thinking, and discussing ideas. As some of you know, I am outside Academia, which gives me a hard time, but I have watched dozens of Neil Gaiman motivational speeches and I am actively looking for alternative ways to share what I know and to learn from you all.
Distinguished guests, behold the project teaser:
The argumentation and further details of how people were experimenting with long format comics is available on Patreon, where my previous project is also available: You can also listen to an audio/podcast/thing on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle. Here is the link: patreon.com/eszterszep
Eszter Szép 