Comics Forum - The Plan

Established in 2009, Comics Forum began life as a one-day conference on academic approaches to comics linked to the Thought Bubble comics convention in Leeds. By 2010 the event had expanded to two days, and brought together two conferences: ‘Women in Comics II’ and ‘Theory and Practice: A Conference on Comics’. 2011 saw a further expansion to three days (‘Sculpture and Comic Art’, ‘Graphic Medicine: Visualizing the Stigma of Illness’, and ‘Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics’), and the launch of the Comics Forum website at http://comicsforum.org. In addition to providing information about the annual conference series, the website is intended to serve as a hub for comics scholarship and includes numerous resources including digital texts for download, guest articles by established and up-and-coming scholars, content hosting for other conferences and more. Over the course of this presentation I will outline where Comics Forum came from, where it sits in the context of comics scholarship and what its purposes are, and present the road-map for future developments. I will ask for audience input on what they would like to see us develop in order that we might be more useful for the scholarly community, and perhaps even look to recruit a few audience members to assist in our on-going development!