On Feb 27, 2006, at 11:17 AM, David Gerard wrote:
I meant the implication that there was not and could not be an actual
academic peer-reviewed journal of webcomics, which has come up a bit
in this thread - that's definitely arguing from personal ignorance.
To be fair, ImageTexT not a journal of webcomics - it's a journal of
comics and animation in general, broadly construed, that has
published what is, to my knowledge, the only peer-reviewed piece on
webcomics.
The journal on webcomics is the Webcomics Examiner, which is not peer
reviewed, though it is run by Joe Zabel, an artist who has worked
with Harvey Pekar on American Splendor,
I've worked on both, as it happens.
Another note is that I just got done with the 4th annual comics
conference here at UF, and though no papers were presented on
webcomics (Which is in part, I suspect, because the topic - Comics
and Childhood - didn't really lend itself to those papers), I can
tell you that webcomics and digital distribution were on a LOT of
people's minds in Q&A, and there's a strong push for the 2008
conference to be on digital comics.
What it comes down to is this:
Is there a systematic peer-reviewed academic study and classification
of webcomics at present? No.
Is there a systematic popular academic study and classification of
webcomics at present? Yes.
Is it any good? Yes.
Are webcomics something of concern to comics scholarship? Yes, though
few people in the (fairly small) field of comic studies have them as
a primary focus. That said, few people have post-war newspaper strips
as a primary focus. So we should get right on deleting [[Calvin and
Hobbes]].
None of which is the real question. The real question is:
Has the webcomics community developed a sufficient non-promotional
body of thought to be taken seriously in its self-assessment of what
its important parts are?
Between the Examiner, the academic attention, the division of the
community into profitable syndicates, and people like Eric Burns, the
answer is, frankly, an unequivocal yes.
-Phil