January | 2018 | Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Blog

SAVE THE DATES!
We have an exciting spring ahead, with a full schedule of exhibits and events to look forward to. All of the following programs are FREE and open to the public. Stay tuned for more information on each event as they approach, and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for regular updates. We hope to see you soon!

Cartoon Couture: Reception and Costume Party!

Friday, February 9
5 – 7pm
Will Eisner Seminar Room & Museum Galleries

You’re invited to a fashion-forward celebration and reception for our current exhibit, Cartoon Couture! This exhibit features original cartoon art as well as costumes from the OSU Historic Costume and Textiles Collection, and traces the history of fashion in cartoons and comics dating back through the 1700s.

We’ll be celebrating in style, and the costume theme is DECADES! Break out your bell-bottoms, fedoras, letter jackets, flapper dresses and more, and join us for:

Light refreshments and a cash bar
A paper doll-making activity
Curators’ tour at 6 pm

Lynne Miyake, “Gender Flipped, ‘Cutie,’ (Non)Eroticized Subject/Objects of Consumption and Production: The Manga Comics Tales of Genji”

Tale of Genji Manga

Wednesday, February 21
4 – 5:30 pm
Will Eisner Seminar Room

Written a millennium ago by Murasaki Shikibu, lady-in-waiting to Emperor Ichijō, The Tale of Genji is a story that has told many times over the centuries, in woodblock prints, novels, films, a symphony, and even an opera in English. It has appeared over 30 times in one of its newest iterations—Japanese comics—since the 1970s.

LYNNE K. MIYAKE, Professor of Japanese and Asian Studies at Pomona College and Core Faculty of the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at the Claremont Colleges, presents ways in which these comics, or manga, remediate male and female gazes, gently add humor, eroticize, gender flip, queer, and simultaneously re-inscribe and challenge heteronormative gender norms. “Pretty boy” heroes, dazzling, luminous (fe)male objects of desire, young men targeted “eye candy,” and more abound!

Presented by The Institute for Japanese Studies. Cosponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.

Will Eisner Week: Ramzi Fawaz, “Legions of Superheroes: Multiplicity, Diversity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book”

Thursday, March 1
4 – 5:30 pm
Will Eisner Seminar Room

This talk explores how the speculative worlds of contemporary US superhero comics have addressed the problem of difference and human diversity through stories about the catastrophic threat of genocide. I focus on a classic storylines–The Legion of Superheroes’ Legion Lost from 1999–that depicts a diverse teams of teenage superheroes collectively struggling against the genocidal actions of a former ally and colleague. I show superhero comics in the late twentieth century visually presented multiplicity and heterogeneity–in the figure of the superhero team as a kaleidoscopic gathering of ethically motivated but widely divergent actors–not only as a quality of human difference but a set of values that actively work against forms of genocidal violence. In Legion Lost, the desire to obliterate or extinguish life that is different than oneself is linked to the experience of social isolation from friendship, camaraderie, and collectivity–it is loneliness, the narrative argues, that facilitates xenophobia and fear of difference, and friendship and trust that dispels them. Ultimately, I unpack how the visual and narrative conventions of American superhero comics offer fantasies of collective solidarity that exceed the demand for representational diversity that has so strongly shaped recent comics production, and have incredible utility in our political present.

Ramzi Fawaz is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016). The New Mutants won the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship Award for best first book manuscript in LGBT Studies and the 2017 ASAP Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. His work has been published in numerous journals including American Literature, GLQ, Feminist Studies, Callaloo, and Feminist Review. He is currently co-editing a special issue of American Literature with Darieck Scott titled “Queer About Comics,” and co-editing Keywords in Comics Studies with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby for NYU Press. His new book Queer Forms, explores the relationship between feminist and queer politics and formal innovation in the art and culture of movements for women’s and gay liberation. Queer Forms will be published by NYU Press.

Sponsored by Project Narrative

Will Eisner Week Research Forum

Thursday, March 8
4 – 7pm
Will Eisner Seminar Room

In honor of Will Eisner Week, visiting scholars Roy T. Cook and Mark Fertig will be joined by local presenters in a symposium devoted to recent comics scholarship.

Roy T Cook (University of Minnesota), “Multimodal metafiction in comics”
Mark Fertig (Susquehanna University), “Take that Adolf!: Comic Books During the Second World War”
Margaret Flinn (Ohio State University), “Popular Terroir: French Comics as Pastoral Ecocriticism?”
Rachel Miller (Ohio State University), “Plugs Pages: Women’s Mini Comics Networks of the 1990s”

Popular Culture Studies Program & the Department of English

Cartoon Couture: Paper doll workshop for kids!

Saturday, March 17
2 – 3:30 pm
Will Eisner Seminar Room

Paper dolls are a popular pastime in cartoon strips and comic books, giving young readers a chance to play “dress-up” and bring their favorite characters to life. In conjunction with our current exhibit, Cartoon Couture, kids aged 7-12 will have a chance to make their own paper dolls and clothing to take home.

This is a FREE workshop, but space is limited and registration is required. Email cartoonevents@osu.edu to register your child.

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Contemporary Comics and Immigration

Tuesday, March 27
5:30 – 7 pm
Jean & Charles Schulz Auditorium

Cartoonists Khalil Bendib, Eric Garcia, Alberto Ledesma will discuss their work surrounding the topic of immigration, in conjunction with our current exhibit, Looking Backward, Looking Forward: U.S. Immigration in Cartoons and Comics. Book signing to follow.

Co-sponsored by Latinx Space for Enrichment and Research (LASER).

IJS Lecture: Mark MacWilliams, “Rethinking What’s Sacred about ‘Ano Hana’ Anime Pilgrimage”

Anime Fans on Pilgrimage

Wednesday, April 4
4:30 – 6pm
Will Eisner Seminar Room

“Anime Pilgrimage” is a startling new spiritual phenomenon that is taking place throughout Japan. Visiting anime or a comic book (manga) related places is called “pilgrimage to the holy land” (seichi junrei) among contemporary anime fans. For my talk, I am looking at how this new form of pilgrimage is developing in a traditional sacred area, Chichibu in Saitama prefecture. Chichibu, located northwest of Tokyo, has for centuries been the destination of pilgrims traveling on the thirty-four temple pilgrimage route dedicated to the bodhisattva Kannon. In recent years, however, Chichibu has attracted a new type of pilgrim due to the popularity of the hit 2011 TV anime, Ano hi mita hana no namae o bokutachi wa mada shiranai (literally, “We Still Don’t Know the Name of the Flower We Saw That Day”), the story of which takes place in Chichibu. What is anime pilgrimage? What makes it sacred? Why would fans travel to a place that forms the backdrop of a cartoon fantasy? What’s the anime about anyway? Pondering these questions about Ano hana as part of the broader phenomenon of anime pilgrimage leads to the important question of whether the “sacred” is alive and well in contemporary Japan.

Mark MacWilliams is currently a professor of East Asian Religions at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. His interests and publications are focused primarily on contemporary Japanese spirituality—particularly, pilgrimage in all its forms, the Internet and spiritual life, and Japanese manga (and anime). His work most recently has gone into a whole new fields—how Shinto has been defined in the modern period and anime pilgrimage in Japan. He also serves as Executive Editor for the journal, Religious Studies Review.

Cosponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.

Brazilian Comics with Luli Penna

Thursday, April 19
4 – 6pm
Will Eisner Seminar Room

Luli Penna is a Brazilian illustrator and cartoonist. She has contributed to a number of magazines, newspapers, and books, and is the author of the graphic novel Sem Dó (No Pity), a beautiful and tragic love story set in São Paulo in the 1920s. Following the time period of the story, Penna abandons speech balloons as an homage to silent films.

Sponsored by the The Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Portuguese Graduate Student Organization at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Ian Gordon is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. He has written dozens of articles and books about comics history, and his most recent book is Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017). Dr. Gordon recently spent a week in our Reading Room conducting research, and we asked him a few questions about his time here.

Can you tell us about the research project that brought you to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum?

In Italy, Norway, and Brazil weekly comic supplements or children’s magazines published versions of [R.F. Outcault’s influential comic strip] Buster Brown as early as 1905. I am working on a project comparing these different versions of the strip to the American original. So far, I have visited both Italy and Brazil to acquire materials and hire translators. For this project then I needed reference copies of the American comic strips.

In the early 1990s, I read a lot of Buster Brown strips but I did this using microfilm of newspapers at the Library of Congress. I visited [San Francisco Academy of Comic Art founder] Bill Blackbeard in San Francisco in 1992, and he generously gave me free range in his collection, but it would have taken weeks and probably months to sort through his storage facility and locate all the Buster Brown strips. As a graduate student, I couldn’t afford to spend that amount of time on the process or indeed the cost of staying. So for me it was a real delight to visit the Library and get that material.

Richard F. Outcault, Buster Brown. Published in Los Angeles Herald, February 14, 1904. From the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection.

Did you make any unexpected finds in the collection?

Well, not so much in the Buster Brown material I was looking at, but there were many potential distractions in the other strips in the boxes. I did find a satire by Frederick Opper of Henry James’ work. Or at least an account by Henry James entitled “What Henry James Saw and Heard in New York,” with illustrations by Opper. The illustration undercut the text and so the piece and the satire appeared side-by-side in Hearst papers on January 21, 1906. An early example of repurposing material perhaps.

Frederick Opper, “What Henry James Saw and Heard in New York,” 1906. From the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection.

What were some of the most interesting items you found?

Well I got over 800 images, so trying to single out the most interesting is hard. Probably what’s most interesting is the change in Outcault’s style over time, with some of the strips from the mid-1910s being much more colourful and dynamic than the earlier strips.

What was it like to conduct research at the Billy Ireland?

I did a day’s research at the Billy Ireland in 2013 around the time the new building opened when I was here for a conference. I walked in and was greeted by Eddie Campbell, who heard an Australian accent and introduced himself. Later my friend Christina Meyer arrived for her research on the Yellow Kid. In the afternoon that day, Eddie introduced me to Audrey Niffenegger. At one stage, Eddie, Christina and I were all calling each other over to look at our finds. It is hard to top that day, but let me say–this time I had a wonderful research trip.

Left to right: Scholars Eddie Campbell, Ian Gordon and Christina Meyer happened to be visiting the Lucy Shelton Caswell Reading Room from Australia, Singapore, and Germany on the same day in 2013.

Can you tell us a bit about your process, and how you found these resources?

My early research on comic strips in the 1990s was mostly conducted at the Library of Congress using microfilm. I spent months in the semi-dark scrolling through film getting motion sickness. As I mentioned I visited Bill Blackbeard in San Francisco and he gave me access to his collection, and very generously copies of reprint editions he had done and even a Buster Brown strip. But the collection was not organized in a way that made it usable for a researcher with a week or so to find a lot of material. To walk into the Billy Ireland, where the relevant boxes were organized and pulled from the stacks for me was great. Everything is so well organized, the experience was as painless as possible. I photographed all the strips with my phone. I will then compare these strips with strips from other countries and try to match up various translations to see what they tell us. I got through the equivalent amount of material in days that would have taken me months and months in the 1990s. And everyone was so friendly.

Any highlights from visiting the city of Columbus (food, stores, bars, museums, etc)?

I stayed downtown and walked in through the Short North each day. In the evening, I went through the day’s haul and dated the material so I didn’t lose track. So I didn’t venture out much. But when I was here in 2016 for CXC I went to a tiki bar with comic scholars Brannon Costello, Craig Fischer, Andrew Kunka and Ben Woo. It was wonderfully tacky. The cartoonist Dustin Harbin was so entertaining in my hotel bar that I was up much later on my first night than I intended. I wish I could remember the two restaurants I ate at that trip because they were both good but their names escape me. This time I had dinner at Martini, which was a decent Italian place. So yes, I have been to Columbus three times and I hope to be back a fourth time in 2018 for CXC.

To see more of Ian Gordon’s research and work, visit his website.

Ohio State nav bar

Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Blog

Month: January 2018 (page 1 of 2)

Upcoming events at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Researcher Spotlight: Historian Ian Gordon

Search This Site

Post Topics

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Tags

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Meta