Notice of Comics Get Medieval at Kalamazoo 2019

Here are the details of a set of sessions we are proposing for the 2019 International Congress on Medieval Studies. Wish us luck.

The Comics Get Medieval at Kalamazoo I: Medieval-themed Comics and Medieval Studies (Roundtable)

The Comics Get Medieval at Kalamazoo II: Accessing Medieval-themed Comics in the Twentieth-First Century (Workshop)

Most medievalists have come to accept popular manifestations of the Middle Ages and are willing to talk about fiction, film, and television programs in their classrooms, and some are even writing about these items in their scholarship; however, few have as readily embraced the material produced in the comics medium. This fault is not due to a lack of interest. As our sessions over the past two decades attest, many medievalists are curious about how the comics have adapted medieval figures, events, and stories, but a much smaller group knows how to access this corpus and use it profitably for research and teaching. Thus, the goal of these sessions, sponsored by The Medieval Comics Project, is twofold. First, we intend, through a roundtable, to present some overviews, by an assortment of medieval-comics scholars, of how the comics have appropriated some of the most well-known material from the Middle Ages (such as Beowulf, the Crusades, Dante’s Commedia, the Matter of Britain, Norse mythology, and the Robin Hood legend) to provide insight into what has been done so far in terms of comics and comics scholarship with regards to these topics and what kind of work might be done in the future. Equally importantly, we also seek, through a workshop session, to instruct participants in how to use various online tools (such as comics companies’ websites, comics sellers’ store sites, databases of comics, fan wikias, and repositories) to successfully find and access comics of use to them. This last objective is especially vital, as resources like the Grand Comics Database and its various search options, can be invaluable when looking for resources (especially when paired with repositories of comics, like Comic Book + and comiXology). Furthermore, instruction on the various forms of the comiXology platform (both website and app) is of great importance as it stands to revolutionize access to and distribution of comics in the twenty-first century by providing affordable digital editions of books from all eras of the medium’s history. Finally, fans of the comics have produced important resources essential in any quest to track and understand the larger contexts involved in how comics have used medieval motifs; these include various wikis devoted to specific publishers (like the DC Database and the Marvel Database) and sites like The Appendix to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Unfortunately, all of these new resources appear foreign to most medieval. We hope that this session will change that.