This fall has been a whirlwind of academic and social activities! It’s been nice to get back into the swing of things after recovering from surgery and travelling all over the place this summer, during which I helped organize a continuing education event for high school teachers who want to use comics in their classrooms (under the direction of the amazing Maggie Flinn), helped organize this year’s Comics Studies Society conference (where I also helped organize and presented on a roundtable on digital humanities and comics studies with Justin Wigard), and participated in three panels at San Diego Comic-Con (two of which I organized).
The surgery recovery, in particular, made it hard to get as much research and writing done over the summer as I wanted to, but, now, I am doing pretty well. I’ve completed a substantial second draft of my first chapter of my dissertation and less-substantial draft of my third chapter. I am currently writing my second chapter. Tomorrow, I participate in the Graduate Student Colloquium, where I will be getting feedback from fellow graduate students and professors in my department on the latest draft of my first chapter, “So, this is Love: The Rise of Romance Comic Books After the War.” Below, is a particularly fun comic I discuss in my chapter. You can read the comic here.
Aside from dissertation work, I started off the semester peer reviewing an article, applying for a pretty intense fellowship, and also submitting to some conferences. I’ve been working on an article for the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center’s upcoming anthology of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s teenage and funny animal comics, Funny Animals and Teen-Age Hi-Jinks. I also got invited to submit an article on romance comics to a feminist publication, which I am pretty excited about (but I will be working on that next summer!). And I’ve been editing my comic, “The Anatomy of My Spine,” for the upcoming Palgrave Handbook of Disability in Comics and Graphic Narratives. I’ve also been working on another graphic medicine project with my friend Mark Badger. I also got to meet my academic idol and romance scholar queen, Janice Radway. She is so nice and so smart!!
Community-wise, I have been working on the Cartoon Crossroads Columbus programming committee to help plan next year’s festival. This includes helping plan the annual graduate student round table, in which OSU graduate students who research comics or cartooning in some capacity get to present their research to the broader comics audience. It’s always a packed room! And I sent out over 100 romance comic Halloween cards and stickers to friends and people in the comics community.
I also made sure to have some fun. It is important to hang out with friends. And I’m trying do fun things that bring my life some balance and meaning beyond academia and comics. I saw many, many movies this past month, notably a lot of Hitchcock movies as my local cinema shows them every weekend in October. I also saw the Off Broadway showing of Death Becomes Her with my friend James, the Rocky Horror Picture Show (in theater!) (for the first time!), Halloween (in theater!) (for the first time!), and I went to my first haunted house! It has been nice to get into film without any expectations to write anything academic about it. I also had two costumes and I decorated the apartment very thoroughly for the spooky season.
My goal for the rest of the semester is to produce a good draft of my second chapter, which is one of the harder chapters to write. Until next time!