2018: A Very Good Year for The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship

~ Ernesto Priego

This year we broke our own record and published a total of 18 articles during 2018. I cannot say it enough: the Journal is only possible because of the work volunteered by our editors, reviewers and authors: thank you all!

I would also like to thank the Open Library of Humanities (https://www.openlibhums.org/) for their ongoing support: without their funding we wouldn’t be able to do what we do.

Here’s a listing of the articles we published during 2018, our 8th volume, by section:

Research

Rageul, A., 2018. On the Pleasure of Coding Interface Narratives. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.107

Dell’Angelo, T. and DeGenova, M., 2018. “I am a Teacher”: Early Career Teachers in High Needs Schools. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.5. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.115

Baudry, J., 2018. Paradoxes of Innovation in French Digital Comics. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.4. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.108

Wysocki, L., 2018. Farting Jellyfish and Synergistic Opportunities: The Story and Evaluation of Newcastle Science Comic. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.6. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.119

Gavaler, C., 2018. Undemocratic Layout: Eight Methods of Accenting Images. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.8. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.102

Verstappen, N., 2018. Prayoon Chanyawongse’s Cartoon Likay: Amalgamating Likay Theatrical Form and Comics into a Unique Thai Genre. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.9. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.121

Kowalewski, H., 2018. Heart is for Love: Cognitive Salience and Visual Metonymies in Comics. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.10. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.117

Zhu, A., Phuong, M. and Giacobbe, P., 2018. The Story of ECT: Behind the Scenes of a Controversial yet Effective Treatment. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.13. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.129

Rifkind, C., 2018. Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.14. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.128

Priego, E. and Wilkins, P., 2018. The Question Concerning Comics as Technology: Gestell and Grid. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.16. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.133

Farinella, M., 2018. Of Microscopes and Metaphors: Visual Analogy as a Scientific Tool. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.18. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.130

Review

Gröppel-Wegener, A., 2018. Raiding the Superhero Wardrobe: A Review of The Superhero Costume – Identity and Disguise in Fact and Fiction. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.1. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.122

Bessette, L.S., 2018. We’re All YA Now: A Review of Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.2. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.124

Davies, P.F., 2018. Enacting Graphic Mark-Making: A Review of A Theory of Narrative Drawing. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.7. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.127

Priego, E., 2018. The Comics Page: Scholarly Books Briefly Noted (2017–2018). The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.136

Murel, J., 2018. On the Significance of the Graphic Novel to Contemporary Literary Studies: A Review of The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.15. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.138

Simmons, T.E., 2018. Unmasked Lex Text: A Review of On Comics and Legal Aesthetics – Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.17. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.134

Interview

Giddens, T., 2018. “I’m Aware that a Lot of these People that I’m Feeling Sorry for are Wankers”: A Conversation with Hannah Berry. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.12. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.132

Other Grid-related News

Honourable Mention

This year fellow co-conspirator Dr Peter Wilkins and I received an Open Scholarship Award 2018 Honorable Mention for their Comics Grid editorial work. The Open Scholarship Awards are sponsored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute and its partners. The announcement was published on 13 April 2018 by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (University of Victoria, Canada). We were literally honoured.

Featured in Open Insights

I’d also like to hank you to Martin Eve and James Smith from the Open Library of Humanities for interviewing me for their Open Insights series, part of their EmpowOA programme. The URL for the interview is: https://www.openlibhums.org/news/275/. Make sure to follow the #EmpowOA hashtag for the whole series. Find out more about the Open Library of Humanities’ EmpowOA programme here.

Editorial Work Experience

This year we also started collaborating with the Creative Writing and Publishing MA Programme at City, University of London by offering our first editorial work experience placement for a postgraduate student. Angelica Curzi started her placement in December 2018. Welcome to the team, Angelica!

Articles received by or after our second yearly editorial deadline (October 2018) have been under review and editorial processes will restart from January 2019.

We completely appreciate scholarly publishing can be a frustrating affair- if you submitted work during 2018 and your submission is still under review (or was accepted but due to be published in 2019) please accept our gratitude for your patience and understanding.

After 8 years we remain a relatively small, volunteer-led scholarly publishing operation, and the volume of submissions this year increased significantly, with 2018 being our busiest year so far, which has meant longer waiting times for authors. This is far from ideal, but we keep working hard to find ways to continue engaging in faster and more efficient and rigorous editorial processes. Thank you once again for bearing with us.

If you are interested in submitting work for review or you just want to find out more about the journal, or catch up with all our previous volumes, please do click on https://www.comicsgrid.com/!

We are also in constant need for academic reviewers. If you would like to become a peer reviewer, please register, including your areas of expertise, at https://www.comicsgrid.com/author/register/reviewer/.

Here’s looking forward to a 2019 full of open access comics scholarship!

To be continued…

[This post was adapted from an email campaign I sent to the Comics Grid newsletter list yesterday. You can subscribe to the Comics Grid Newsletter at http://eepurl.com/iOYAj].

 

Published by Ernesto Priego

My passion is creating opportunities for discovery, creativity and innovation. I am an advocate for enhanced access to information as a public good. I enjoy fostering engagement and openness, facilitating collaboration and mentoring. My main focus is multi-disciplinary and involves practically and theoretically connecting the dots between varied, closely-related fields and topics: comics studies; human-computer interaction design, library and information science, digital humanities, scholarly communications, publishing studies, digital innovation and material culture, intellectual rights and open science, access, data and educational resources. I love writing and spreading the word about the things I believe in. I love higher education and the Internet and I define myself as a digital scholarship advocate. I love working collaboratively and on my own. You can still follow me and/or contact me via Twitter @ernestopriego.