Comics: From the Middle Ages to the 21st Century

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The 8^th Russian Comics Conference ‘The World of Comics’, organised by the HSE Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, took place online in March 2023. Over the two days of the conference, 44 comics researchers from Russia, France, China, and Malaysia presented their papers on comics history, narratives, visuals, and animation.

The 2023 conference opened with the presentation ‘Rodolphe Töpffer: Founder of the Comic Book?’ by Daria Martynova from St Petersburg University. The first section was dedicated to ‘protocomics’ such as medieval Russian parables about animals and 18^th-century splint pictures, illustrated magazines and magic lantern slides of the 1880s, Soviet-era ROSTA Windows and contemporary memes.

For the first time, this year’s conference included a section on female comics. It started with a paper by Saqifah Azlan from Ryukoku University, who talked about the “boys’ love” (BL) comics genre, and continued with papers on comics by female artists from Japan, Korea, and Latin America.

Saqifah Azlan, PhD student from Malaysia under the Japanese Government's MEXT scholarship at the Graduate School of International Studies, Ryukoku University

I participated in the conference with the paper ‘Character Distinction and Situated Affect on BL Manga Covers’. My research is dedicated to exploring the commercial aspect of manga from how producers strategically ‘sell’ a genre to readers within a single page, ie the covers. My presentation shared how titles that use character monologues have a communicative function that aligns with the visual strategies on the covers. I also showed that the two character roles specific to the genre afford different kinds of affect, which allow you to distinguish them from how they express themselves. This not only makes the title representational, but also carries interactional meanings that resonate with readers.

I’m currently focused on completing the pilot study for my PhD project that explores the role of titles and character visuals on BL manga covers with the aim of publishing my first research article. Once that is completed, I will explore the research questions for each aspect in more detail to understand their relationship and connect it to the commercial context. At the moment, I am in the process of preparing to conduct interviews with manga editors to validate my findings. 

At the conference, it was interesting to see presentations on different types of comics and the different lenses through which they can be explored. As someone who is researching women's comics, the questions I received from other participants who are familiar with the topic were very helpful for me to improve to better present my ideas.  

The first day of the conference also featured the sections ‘Comics of China and Vietnam’ and ‘Japanese Pop Culture’ that analysed comics and animation cultures in Asia. The second day of the conference began with the section on Russian comics and continued with such topics as narrative in comics, Japanese animation, the superhero genre, and Indian comics.

A collection of papers will be published as a result of the 8^th Russian Comics Conference ‘The World of Comics’. Previous conferences proceedings are available here.