Articles from and news about the premier and longest-running academic journal devoted to all aspects of cartooning and comics -- the International Journal of Comic Art (ISSN 1531-6793) published and edited by John Lent.

Thursday, November 7, 2024

Research Prompts from IJOCA 26:1 - #1 What comics never leave home?

 Some Ideas for Articles, written by Mike Rhode, and excerpted from the print edition.

What comics never leave home?

How many comics in a mass medium, such as comic books, comic strips, editorial cartoons, animation, or webcomics, only appear in their native language and never in any other language? Or in their native country and never anywhere else? Or are not held by any libraries beyond their native country? Or aren’t even held in their native libraries?

As Gene Kannenberg noted in an interview earlier this year, speaking about the content in newspapers held by the Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University, “...[There is] indigenous stuff that’s never been collected. If I could, I could spend all my time just putting together collections. We had one editorial cartoonist... who came to our library just to get photos of all his cartoons. Because he had no way to get photos of his published cartoons in his country.”(1) This would be a multidisciplinary, multinational, multiyear project to figure out, but it would be pretty darn interesting.


(1) Geoff Grogan. 2024. “Gene Kannenberg Jr. & comics at Northwestern University.” Blockhead: Cartoonists talk Comics (March 25). <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gene-kannenberg-jr-comics-at-northwesternuniversity/id1440223132?i=1000650431997 -- around minute 25:00>.

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