Memories of Tom Inge, part 5 - A note about Tom Inge by Charles Hatfield

 

A note about Tom Inge

Charles Hatfield

 

My initial thoughts on hearing about Tom's passing....

On Saturday, December 30, 1978, at the New York Hilton, M. Thomas (Tom) Inge presided over the first-ever Modern Language Association panel about comics, featuring cartoonists Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman. It was sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association.

In 2000, Gene Kannenberg, Scott Stoddart, and I presented in the first-ever MLA panel about Charles Schulz's Peanuts, organized and chaired by Tom. It too was sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association. It was at that MLA that I interviewed for the job I have now.

Of course, I met Tom in between those two events—specifically, at the Popular Culture Association conference in Philadelphia in April 1995. That was the conference that ushered me into the PCA comics studies community, I mean the Comic Art and Comics Area, within which Tom was understandably and rightly revered. That was the conference that propelled me into my dissertation and changed my life.

In fact, Tom Inge not only opened the doorway to my career as a research writer but changed the lives of many, many other scholars. My first two books are due to him. I cannot imagine what my last twenty-five years would have been like without him. He quite literally made the field of comics studies, as I understand it, possible.

Tom Inge: a tireless scholar, a happy, productive, infinitely generous man, a true gentleman. Where would I, we, have been without him? There are debts we can never repay.

My deepest condolences to Tom's loved ones, colleagues, students, and mentees, everywhere. My further thoughts about Tom’s career can be found at http://www.tcj.com/tom-inge-and-what-he-did/

Memories of Tom Inge, part 4 by Marc Singer

 

Marc Singer

Howard University

It’s rare that a single scholar can be said to shape an entire field, but I can think of no other way to describe the profound impact that Tom Inge had on comics studies. Indeed, “impact” seems grossly inadequate to describe the scope of his contributions, in that it implies there was a field to be impacted before he came along.

More than just a writer or researcher, Tom was an institution builder, to the extent that it’s impossible to imagine the discipline or my own career without him. I presented my first paper on comics at the Popular Culture Association conference, which he helped found, and my first book was published as part of a series he edited for the University Press of Mississippi, which he made into a home for comics studies.

But he was so much more than the list of his accomplishments, impressive as they are. Tom was incredibly generous with his time and patient with younger scholars. Even his moments of reproach—there were a few—were delivered with a gentle encouragement that motivated you to do better. He was a model scholar and his influence will be felt in ways great and small for decades to come.

I last saw Tom at the first Comics Studies Society conference in 2018. That meeting felt like a singular moment in the history of comics studies, an inflection point in the development of the field, and it was entirely appropriate that Tom was there to usher it in. I’m glad I got to see him there. I wish I’d seen him since. Rest in peace, Tom.

 

Memories of Tom Inge, part 3 - A Tribute by José Alaniz

 A Tribute

José Alaniz

University of Washington, Seattle

 

Though I would describe our relationship as mostly collegial, Tom Inge never failed to greet me with a warm smile and handshake at the various conferences where we crossed paths. Everything people are saying about him in their various tributes – his tireless devotion to the fields he helped inaugurate, his unflagging support of younger scholars – holds 100% true for my own interactions with him.

We first met, I want to say, at one of the late 1990s or early 2000s ICAFs. I recall more than once seeing him and John Lent sitting together at the back of the room, like Odin and Zeus, looking on as we grad student whippersnappers presented at the podium, drawing – whether we knew it or not – on their generation’s insights and breakthroughs. Tom had done so much to prepare and enrich the soil we later worked.

Of the various objects in my shambles of a campus office, the one I’m most proud of is a plaque that says I won the 2005 Inge Award for Comics Scholarship, given annually to a paper presented in the Comic Art and Comics Area of the Popular Culture Association, for material which would eventually make it into my second book, Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. Running into Tom at the PCA conferences over the years became just a given, like the sun in the sky. To his credit, he never made you feel cowed in his presence; he always had an encouraging word and good suggestions. That also proved the case in Tom’s reader report for my first book, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia. He played an important role in shaping that work.

In recent years I mostly corresponded with Tom for work reasons. But even these short e-mails always bore his congenial stamp. For example, knowing that I write on Eastern European comics, he took the time in one missive from 2012 to tell me about how much he liked going to Palacký University in Olomouc as a visiting professor and his delight at finding a two-volume anthology of Czech comics in Prague. “You probably have them already,” he wrote.

Indeed I did, but in a very real sense I wouldn’t have my professional interests, my career or even the field of Comics Studies to play around in if not for Tom. I am eternally grateful.

 Requiescat in pace.