Memories of Tom Inge, part 1

When I began as the new editor at University Press of Mississippi, I did not really know a lot about comics. Fortunately for me, I could confer with Tom Inge. What a pioneer in the field of comics studies! 

Consulting with Tom, sometimes I felt like I was at the moment of creation. 

In working on so many books together, Tom graciously made me feel like I was benefiting him. When of course, it was actually the other way around. 

This gift was one of his several qualities.

Vijay Shah

editor at University Press of Mississippi.  

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I met Tom when I was in my first job out of graduate school, serving as a visiting assistant professor in a one-year capacity with no accomplishments to my name and no future secured beyond the end of the academic term. He was a guest of honor at an academic conference, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and I was part of a group of new scholars following Tom around with puppy-dog eyes. He treated us with patience and kindness, not a surprise to anyone who knew him, and asked us about our research. He helped us understand how the work we dreamed of doing might fit into the critical conversation as well as the economy of academic publishers. He never once urged us to read his own work to try to build our arguments: he was delighted to see the new directions of the field, even when they were not the directions he himself wanted to take. I stayed in touch with him over the years, and his demeanor was always the same. He treated me with kindness, a genuine curiosity, and a pragmatic mentorship that helped me understand the realities of being a professional academic. To me, he was a model mentor and set a standard I will always be pursuing.

Joe Sutliff Sanders

University Lecturer

University of Cambridge

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Word is moving through the comics academic community that M. Thomas 'Tom' Inge passed away last week. I didn't know Tom deeply, but for a long time I sent him comics ephemera for his collection at VCU, and articles about Edgar Allen Poe in comics. He was a big fan of my friend, Richard Thompson too.

Tom and I probably met at an ICAF meeting, but we became better acquainted when I was called up from the minors to fill in for two Harvey Pekar interviews at SPX. I did them, and then transcribed them for John Lent's International Journal of Comic Art. Not wanting to miss a wider audience, I offered them to Tom for whomever might do a book in Tom's Conversations with Comics Artists intervew series at the University Press of Mississippi.

Tom instead wrote back, changing one direction of my life - "How about your doing the Pekar volume in the Conversations series?  I don't have anyone signed up for him, strange to say, and you already have two interviews I assume.  Have you resources to locate the previously published ones? " ( Jul 19, 2006)

Never having edited or compiled a book before, I wrote back that I'd think about it, and then a day later, "Tom,  I'm still mulling it over although I'm leaning towards doing it." (Jul 20, 2006)

So I did it, and Harvey Pekar: Conversations came out in 2008. Not learning from experience, I wrote to Tom about doing a collection of Herblock interviews. He responded favorably to me and the Press' editor -

"[Mike] raises the question of doing another volume for the series on the political cartoonist Herblock. I think that is an excellent idea.  It is a shame that we have had not titles yet on political cartoonists, and Herblock is a very good place to begin (we need them on Bill Mauldin, Jeff MacNelly, Pat Oliphant, and Doug Marlette, among lots of others as well)." (May 1, 2008)

Unfortunately the Herblock Foundation never really got behind the idea, and they controlled his rights, so the idea faded away. Tom didn't though and he continued to be a major force in comics studies. I saw him for the last time at the PCA meeting in DC in 2019, I think? I snuck into the meeting and just said hello in passing after watching his panel. One always assumes there's more time...

Tom was one of the best and most productive members of the first group of academics to study comics. He was an immense help to my second career, and to many others, and the field is much richer for his time spent cultivating it. He'll be missed by many.

Mike Rhode

IJOCA editor

Harvey Pekar: Conversations editor