CARTOONISTS RIGHTS PLEDGE DRIVE, DECEMBER 2025

CARTOONISTS RIGHTS PLEDGE DRIVE, DECEMBER 2025

Every holiday season CARTOONISTS RIGHTS asks for your direct support in aid of our mission to defend cartoonists whose freedom of expression is threatened simply because of what they draw, leading to their criminalization, displacement, judicial harassment, physical or verbal abuse, or worse.

Coming to the end of a very hard year in our sector and looking ahead to the next, we face two challenges common to all American non-profits with an international remit:

HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT

The USA's withdrawal from humanitarian efforts abroad, DOGE-led cuts to funding, the issuing of total travel bans on multiple nationalities, the near total abeyance of accommodation for refugees and asylum-seekers, disruption to visa applications and the threat posed to legitimately admitted foreign nationals posed by ICE, the knock-on effects of the recent government shut-down, and the mischaracterization of those working in our sector voiced by key figures in government have all led to worsening operating conditions. Independent foundations and alternative sources of grant funding cannot compensate for the absence of the government.

SUPPLY & DEMAND

Inevitably, as alternative providers have experienced a spike in applications their processes have slowed down, at the same time as attempting to restructure what they are able to disburse to maximize its effect. The net result is that many non-profits have in the past year received less than they budgeted for, and took longer to get it, while the numbers in turn asking them for assistance only increased across the board. Victims who might once have been fast-tracked must now be told to stay put and wait for things to improve. Mechanisms intended for emergency intervention have been used to sustain life for months on end, draining their efficacy. And there is a third, more insidious problem specific to our constituency:

SATIRE & FREE SPEECH IN CRISIS
We live under an administration that is unapologetic in its targeting of satirists. Certainly, our day-to-day remains largely focused on cartoonists threatened by authoritarians and extremists in familiar hot spots (Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Türkiye) but in recent months we've had cause to examine cases in Belgium, Croatia, South Africa, the UK and USA as well. The front lines are being redrawn. It's not incredible to imagine

an American cartoonist soon threatened enough to merit our Courage in Cartooning Award.

We know times are hard and everyone faces high living costs. So, only if you can, please consider donating. Remember, setting up a little each month helps us over the whole year of activity more than one larger payment – although all contributions are very welcome!

And help spread the word by forwarding our social media posts in the coming weeks, and especially on GIVING TUESDAY, 12/02.

Thank you for your support!
Link – https://cartoonistsrights.org/donate

Further information
Cartoonists Rights Network International – CARTOONISTS RIGHTS for short – is a human rights non-profit focused on defense of threatened cartoonists' freedom of expression and founded by Dr. Robert Russell in 1999. An award in Dr. Russell's name is given to cartoonists who exhibit exemplary bravery under duress. Past recipients of the Robert Russell Courage in Cartooning Award include Zehra Ömeroğlu (Türkiye) , Abecor (Bolivia), Badiucao (China), Pedro X. Molina (Nicaragua), and Atena Farghadani (Iran). The prize alternates biannually with the Kofi Annan Courage in Cartooning Award presented by the Freedom Cartoonists Foundation, Geneva. Giving Tuesday i.e. the Tuesday following Thanksgiving in the USA, is a "global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world". In recent years it has been observed as an opportunity for non-profits to benefit at the end of what is generally considered to be the busiest shopping period of the year. 

CARTOONISTS RIGHTS is not associated with the registered charity that uses the name Giving Tuesday.

We are 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Donations are tax deductible to the full extent allowable under law in the USA. Those wishing to make a deduction for the 2025 tax year should donate before 00:00 01/01/26. A financial statement is available upon written request from the Office of Charitable and Regulatory Programs, Virginia Dept. of Agriculture and Consumer Services. 

Further inquiries should be sent to: director@cartoonistsrights.org

CFP: Comics and Machines 2026 in Sweden

***Call for Papers and Conference Talks***

"Comics and Machines"

April 22-23, 2026

Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm & Uppsala University, Sweden

Steering committee: Jan Baetens, Jaqueline Berndt, Jan von Bonsdorff, Gareth Brookes, Benoît Crucifix, Björn-Olav Dozo, Anna Foka, Isabelle Gribomont, Andre Holzapfel, Per Israelson, Gaëtan Le Coarer, Ilan Manouach, Pedro Moura, Everardo Reyes, Keith Tillford, Ray Whitcher

with the production support of Src Material (Seattle) and Echo Chamber (Brussels)

Read more: 

https://www.echochamber.be/en/opencalls/comics_and_machines/

Contact:

conference@echochamber.be

Deadline for abstracts: 1st December 2025

Notifications of acceptance: 30th December 2025

Today, the field of comics is undergoing a profound transformation marked by a growing heterogeneity of forms, formats, and production processes. From synthetic comics, operational images, data-driven visualization to embodied, non-visual comics, comics are expanding beyond the conceptual and historical frameworks that have traditionally defined it. Existing models in research— grounded in the artisanal craft traditions, narratology, text-image correlation, and human-centered authorship— are struggling to account for this rapidly diversifying landscape. Craft-based approaches might appear resistant or inadequate in the face of new technological practices that recombine production, circulation, and reception through computational logics.The current moment compels a broader redefinition of comics as fundamentally technical objects. The boundaries that once separated comics from technical and operational systems are dissolving. To grasp the full scope of these developments, we must account for comics as sites where technological processes are not external influences but internal engines — where creation is entangled with computation, standardization, and new modes of mediation. As computational processes— from machine learning to synthetic image generation and communication systems powered by computer vision— increasingly shape the creation, distribution, and experience of comics, it is no longer sufficient to understand the medium solely through the lenses of narrative, visual storytelling, or artisanal craft. Recognizing comics as engineered configurations of information, relational diagrams, and experimental knowledge structures is not a speculative gesture; it is a necessary step for understanding the profound transformation underway in the medium's ontology, practice, and future potential.

Within this expanded computational landscape, comics increasingly function as sites of artistic research— experimental configurations that generate knowledge through making rather than merely representing it. As comics engage with computational systems, they become laboratories for investigating the material conditions of contemporary media production. These research-oriented practices extend beyond traditional academic boundaries. Rather than simply illustrating research findings, comics-as-research deploys their unique capacity for relational thinking— the medium's inherent ability to orchestrate temporal, spatial, and conceptual relationships — to investigate how technical systems reshape creative labor, audience relations, and the very possibility of narrative meaning. This artistic research dimension positions comics not as objects of study but as active investigative tools, capable of generating insights about computational culture that emerge specifically through the medium's hybrid technical-aesthetic operations.

We are pleased to announce a two-day international conference on April 22-23, 2026 at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and at Uppsala University dedicated to examining the rapidly evolving landscape of comics. Rather than framing this transformation solely as a rupture, the conference seeks to situate it within a longer history of computational rationality— a lineage in which the medium has continuously negotiated the demands of efficiency, scalability, and technical constraint. Our aim is to critically rethink comics not as passive recipients of technological change, but as active computational configurations: media fundamentally entangled with systems of automation, standardization, and information processing.

We welcome submissions addressing the following areas (among others):

* Histories of automation and engineering in comics production and distribution

* Transformations in formats and workflows driven by technological change

* Comics as data: informatization, discretization, and database design

* Human-machine collaborations in past, present, and speculative comics practice

* Audience and user labor in automated platforms and circulation systems

* Data-mining and recirculation techniques in digital comics ecologies

* Machine subjectivities: authorship, intention, and expression in machinic agents

* Computational archiving practices: scraping, clustering, and vectorization

* Speculative and critical practices addressing automation and machinic mediation

* Industrial logics in comics: international and comparative perspectives

* Resistance to automation: sabotage, slow media, and disobedient design

* Operational aesthetics: the visual and affective languages of automation

* Speculative histories and alternative futures of comics as technical media

* Comics as simulations: diagrams, blueprints, and procedural environments

* Comics as artistic research methodologies: practice-based inquiry and knowledge production where comics are used to interrogate emerging technologies and social systems

We invite submissions for the following presentation formats:

 

* Research Papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion): Traditional academic presentations suitable for theoretical, historical, or analytical work 

* Practice-Based Presentations (15 minutes + 15 minutes discussion): Presentations by creators, artists, and practitioners demonstrating work and reflecting on process 

* Interactive Demonstrations (30 minutes): Hands-on sessions showcasing new tools, platforms, or methodologies 

* Panel Discussions (90 minutes): Collaborative sessions bringing together multiple perspectives on specific themes 

* Lightning Talks (5 minutes): Brief presentations ideal for work-in-progress, provocations, or preliminary findings 

* Workshop Sessions (3 hours): Extended collaborative sessions for skill-sharing and collective exploration of tools and methods

–

Submission instructions:

Abstract length : 250 words

Short bio: 150 words

Deadline for abstracts: 1st December 2025

Notifications of acceptance: 30th December 2025

Send to conference@echochamber.be

More info:

https://www.uu.se/en/centre/digital-humanities-and-social-sciences/events/archive/2026-04-22-comics-and-machines-conference

–

With production support by Src Material, a non-profit organization supporting artists and researchers at the vanguard of new media.

Exhibition review: Stefano Ricci's "Je les ai vus" at Martel BXL

by Nick Nguyen

Je les ai vus. Stefano Ricci. Martel BXL, Brussels, Belgium. October 4 - November 22, 2025. 

Photos taken by Nick Nguyen except for the exhibition poster (below) from the Martel BXL website. 

 https://www.galeriemartel.com/2025/stefano-ricci-2025/

The 2025 Fall programming at Martel BXL opened with a monograph exhibition devoted to the recent projects of Stefano Ricci, the Italian visual artist whose distinct sensual graphic style resonates across his work in animation, illustration, painting and comics. This show marked the third time that Rina Zavagli's gallery shone its spotlight on Ricci, and Je les ai vus represented his first solo exhibition in Belgium. The English translation of this title is I Saw Them, an assertive nod to the act of seeing that offers several entry points for visitors to engage with the exhibition.

Firstly, it is a reference to the production context of the first grouping of fifteen original pieces displayed in the front section of the gallery. The 2023 reopening of the Cinema Modernissimo in Bologna, Italy after an overlong restoration project was cause for great celebration by cinephiles like Stefano Ricci, inspiring him to offer his artistic support to the Cineteca di Bologna for a poster project that would be known as Li Ho Visti (also translated as I Saw Them). For the complete inaugural season of programming at the Mondernissimo, Ricci proposed to create a personal poster for one of the four-to-seven films that screened everyday, from its start on 21 November 2023 to the end of the season on 7 June 2024. Within that time frame, Ricci met his commitment by watching a programmed film each morning and then creating its poster over the course of the day. This process led to Ricci eventually producing 189 posters of films from a wide spectrum of cinema that spanned national, cultural, generic and temporal categories. 

Front left wall display 

Front right wall display

The arrangement of these fifteen pieces, all of equal size, followed an attractive color rhythm that contributed to their immediately striking visual impact upon entering the gallery. The featured pieces were devoid of the layer of text and dates that accompanied their movie poster incarnation so visitors had the privilege of seeing the art as it was originally conceived on its velvet paper support. Wall labels featuring the associated movie title information accompanied each piece, offering the opportunity to situate the film and engage with Ricci's personal visual and material interpretation of it.

The title Je les ai vus also literally frames the second grouping of pieces that occupied the middle section of the gallery, which were modest in scale and color palette in relation to the movie posters. Arranged in a symmetrical alignment based on their size and format was a selection of twenty images from Ricci's recent Avvistamenti project, a collection of his drawings of everyday observations, of the people, places, animals and things that he sees. 

Fifteen pieces taken from AVVISTAMENTI arranged on the left wall of the central area of the gallery

Four pieces taken from AVVISTAMENTI arranged on the right wall of the central area of the gallery

Portrait of Italian intellectual Goffredo Fofi taken from AVVISTAMENTI, installed on the column in the central area of the gallery

While the title Je les ai vus frames the displayed images through the lens of Ricci's vision, it can also extend to include the spectator's experience of seeing them. "I Saw Them" also suggests an act of bearing witness, of taking the time to pause, reflect and connect with what one perceives. Seeing Ricci's original art offers a unique opportunity to contemplate his creative process, which is more akin to sculpting than drawing. The layers of ink, acrylic, chalk and pigments that he leaves on his canvasses provide an added textural dimension to his images that eludes accurate capture by print reproduction. His rich deployment of color as vibrant expressions of visual and physical affect are amplified by the lighting of a gallery context, whether it be direct or indirect, artificial or natural. The experience of seeing both of these material aspects of Ricci's artwork in a presential setting not only draws attention to the creative labor behind their realization, it also opens contemplative possibilities of personal and emotional connection with the art and the artist. 

  

The relationship between connection and creative labor was fully present at the vernissage of the exhibition, with Stefano Ricci availing himself for an afternoon signing session at the gallery. Seeing Ricci work at the drawing table is a performative spectacle in and of itself. His body tenses into a shamanic trance of focus and concentration while his hands are in perpetual motion as he scratches, wipes, smudges, brushes, spits and erases to create images that slowly take shape on the nothingness of a blank page. Ricci recounted that his image creation begins with a chaotic amount of ideas in his head that he feels he must visualize through his hands in a non-linear fashion. The amount of physical labour that he puts into each piece often stresses the fibres of his paper support due to the intensity of his tactile manipulation and the sometimes excessive amount of brute material he uses. This can sometimes lead to artwork that exhibit areas of strain, wear-and-tear, and liquid saturation, but Ricci incorporates these "imperfections" to be part of the image that he has created. Visitors who received the unexpected privilege to witness the creative process of such a unique graphic artist in front of their naked eyes all walked away knowing that they had seen something special.   

The central table showcasing the books that feature the exhibited works: 
Edition Sigaretten's "Avvistamenti-Apparitions" (top) and the Cineteca di Bologna's "Li Ho Visti"(right).

Je les ai vus also served as the occasion to debut the two Italian-produced books that featured the entire collections from which the exhibited works were drawn from. Li Ho Visti from Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna, which lists its publication date as October 3, 2025 (a mere day before the exhibition opening) is a beautiful oversize hardcover collection of full color reproductions of all 189 movie posters that Ricci created for the Cinema Modernissimo, accompanied by a handful of introductory texts, including one from Ricci himself.  Avvistamenti from Sigaretten in their Edizione Grafiche series is a smaller softcover collection of his everyday observations (or apparitions as its English title suggests). It is an equally beautifully produced book, with full color reproductions of all the pieces comprising that project, including fold-out pages to respect the "widescreen" ratio of some of the images. 

All told, Je les ai vus successfully mobilized all of these elements to serve as an enticing primer to the vision of Stefano Ricci for those uninitiated to his work. It was also a wonderful reminder for those familiar with his work that his creative efforts and energy remain undiminished over time, just as much as his curiosity continually leads him to explore and experiment with different forms of visual narrative. 

A fuller look at the pieces on display for this exhibition is available at this Flickr photo album. 

Oct 16: Online Book Launch – Italian Comics in the New Millennium

Online Book Launch – Italian Comics in the New Millennium

Dear Colleagues, following my announcemente from a couple of years ago (and with apologies for bothering you again!), I am glad to invite you to a webinar presentation of my two-volume edited collection, Italian Comics in the New Millennium, organized by the research group SnIF (Studying 'n' Investigating Fumetti). I will be in conversation with members of the SnIF group about the contributions of these volumes to contemporary Italian comics studies and the Italian comics scene over this last quarter of a century. Please find the details below.

I hope you can join us for this discussion and celebration of Italian comics scholarship.

All the best,

Alessio Aletta

Date: Thursday, 16 October 2025

Time: 17:00 – 18:30 CET

Link : https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/388603568855?p=PO6loi9KtjDgOc7E1p (no registration required)

Info: grupposnif@gmail.com ; https://grupposnif.it

Books presented:

• Italian Comics in the New Millennium. Volume 1. Continuity and Innovation, ed. by Alessio Aletta (Vernon Press, 2025) https://vernonpress.com/book/2376
• Italian Comics in the New Millennium. Volume 2. New Scenarios, New Forms, New Themes, ed. by Alessio Aletta (Vernon Press, 2025) https://vernonpress.com/book/2377

Sept 30 - Stop Drawing or Else: A Cartoonist’s View on Democracy’s Perilous Moment

I wanted to share the webinar registration link for an upcoming live event at the University of Minnesota. Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who won her second Pulitzer Prize in 2025, will deliver the 40th Annual Silha Lecture on Tuesday, September 30 at 7:00 pm CDT, 8:00 pm EDT. Following her lecture, Ann and I will have a conversation about our free expression journey in the United States. We also will entertain questions from the audience.

Our host is Jane Kirtley, the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. We hope you will join us.

2025flier07082025.pdf

If you cannot make it, the event video will be posted on UMN's YouTube Channel in early October.

Kind regards,

Roslyn A Mazer

LinkedIn

Book Review: Horror and Comics

reviewed by Elizabeth Brown, Assistant Teaching Professor, and Cody Parish, Program Director, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Barbara Chamberlin, Kom Kunyosying, and Julia Round, eds. 2025. Horror and Comics. Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 2025. 296 pp. US $75.00 (Hardcover). ISBN:  978-1-8377-2255-6. https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/horror-and-comics-round-et-al/

         Far more complex than its title suggests, Horror and Comics delivers an array of original essays on the global genre of horror comics. This collection, as the editors make clear in their introduction, seeks to move existing scholarly conversations beyond specific comic publishers, individual creators, finite historical periods, and bias toward popular Western comics. Instead, it includes essays organized into three parts, each composed of four chapters, that carve out space to introduce new questions around the themes and rhetoric of the medium, yet refrain from creating an exhaustive anthology of all global horror comics.

Part one presents essays that examine the fluidity of horror comics and the ways in which they both draw from, and influence comics of other genres. Distinguished by its visual essay format, Elizabeth Allyn Woock’s opening chapter analyzes the thematic evolutions found in comic adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Woock’s essay privileges readers’ multimodal knowledge of comic convention to depict its argument in an exciting example of form following function--a scholarly comic about comics! It is worth noting, however, that the use of Chiller font for the lettering makes the text inaccessible. The second section of the collection consists of essays that examine representations of Othered identities in horror comics--including women, queer folks, and black, Latinx, and rural communities--for the ways in which they are rendered monstrous and for how these marginalized characters, at times, regain agency through their monstrosity. Of note is Keiko Miyajima’s chapter on Ito Junji’s Tomie. Miyajima interrogates the ways in which Ito utilizes “aspect-to-aspect” visual presentation to position the female gaze as a disruptive force to the male gaze and reframe the abject monstrous-feminine of the Japanese bishōjo as desirable. The final part of Horror and Comics features cultural-historical readings of horror texts depicting national anxieties, with Christy Tidwell’s chapter providing a rich, nuanced critique of Slow Death Funnies, that, at once, praises the comic as a subversive example of 1970s’ American ecohorror, while simultaneously critiquing it for its “sexism, ableism and ecofascism” (p. 297).

Horror and Comics boasts rich analyses brimming with historical depth on comics from Italy, Brazil, Germany, Japan, and the United States, including comics published between the 1600s and 2021. Beyond traditional horror comics and graphic novels, the contributors consider Italian fumetti neri, or black comics; Japanese manga; documentary/nonfiction comics; and underground comix. However, the texts examined only partially meet the editors’ goal of expanding existing discussions of horror comics to a global stage:  just five of the twelve chapters focus on non-English language comics, whereas analyses of more comics from the global south would enhance the volume. Materially, the use of visuals is inconsistent throughout the volume, with some chapters featuring copious reproductions and others none at all--possibly pointing to the complexities of licensing rights in a project with as ambitious a scope as this one. Moreover, the comics reproductions themselves appear inconsistent, as pages of Tomie in the original Japanese used in Miyajima’s chapter, for example, show up in poor resolution should the reader magnify the screen to try to read them. Triebel and Vanderbeke reference and reproduce 16^th-Century German woodcuts, but their horizontal orientation clashes with the page format of the volume. There is also inconsistency in the editing and individual organization of the essays. The texts lack abstracts and writers’ theses occasionally lacked development or were buried within their writing, making this text less accessible to new scholars. With its varied themes and approaches to scholarship, Horror and Comics is, first and foremost, for rhetorical scholars of horror as a genre, with secondary overlap into the study of comics as a medium.

  Table of Contents

Introduction – Barbara Chamberlin, Kom Kunyosying, and Julia Round

PART ONE: Crossing Genres, Blurring Boundaries
Multimodal Mirroring in ‘The Black Cat’ – Elizabeth Allyn Woock
Satanic Feminism and Decadent Aesthetics in Guido Crepax’s ‘Valentina’ Comics – Miranda Corcoran
The Living, the Dead and the Living Dead: Brazilian Horror Imagery and Genre Hybridisation in Shiko‘s Três Buracos – Tiago José Lemos I Monteiro and Heitor Da Luz Silva
Befriending the Past: The Genre-Bending Vanessa Comics Series (1982–1990) and its Historical Context – Barbara M. Eggert

PART TWO: Identity, Agency, Humanity
‘I’m not who he thinks I am’: Identity and Victimhood in Country Horror Comics – Matthew Costello
‘What’s one more monster?’: Articulations of Latinx Monstrosity and Whiteness in Border Town – Anna Marta Marini
‘Still pretty, ain’t she?’: The Female Gaze and the Queer Monstrous Feminine in Itō Junji’s Tomie – Keiko Miyajima
Sinister Houses and Forbidden Loves: Queer Identity in DC’s Gothic Romances – Lillian Hochwender

PART THREE: Society, Anxiety, Politics
Abjection, Ambivalence and the Abyss in EC’s New Trend Line – Alex Link
The Power of a Demon and the Heart of a Human: The Darkness of Humanity in Devilman – Meriel Dhanowa
Comics and the Horrors of Reality – Dirk Vanderbeke and Doreen Triebel
‘REALITY scarier than any boogeyman’: Shock, Exploitation, and Environmentalism in Slow Death Funnies – Christy Tidwell
Afterwords – Barbara Chamberlin, Kom Kunyosying, and Julia Round