Welcome back, everyone, to the Fall 2024 semester and a new year of school, work, and Comics Studies at UNT! We’ve got lots of updates on our Comics Studies initiative and other comics-related events and activities happening at UNT.

Over the last two years, our Comics Studies community has grown and developed, both here in the Libraries and across the university, as well as in the broader UNT community.  We continue to support and promote comics, graphic novels, and other sequential art and narrative, along with the teaching, scholarship, and creative work being done here at UNT and in the broader comics studies world.

Among our recent events and activities was helping to host the 2023 Comics Studies Society Annual Conference, “Comics in the Margins” here at UNT. That event brought comics scholars, students, creators, and publishers from all over the world to our campus to share their scholarly and pedagogical work, engage in lively discussions, enjoy some trivia and cosplay together, and explore some of the sights and sounds of Denton. Even in the heat of a Texas summer, I think we made a pretty good impression.

This summer, we also participated in the 2024 Comics Studies Society Virtual Conference, “Glitching Comics” as sponsors and presenters, featuring several UNT faculty, students, and librarians who are actively engaged in comics scholarship, teaching, collecting, and outreach. 

 

 

 

 

In May of this year, we also participated in the “Into the Archieverse” Virtual Conference, hosted by the Digital Cultural Studies Cooperative. That event featured a talk with Mike Pellerito, President/Editor in Chief of Archie Comics Publications, Inc. and a keynote address by Archie comics scholar and librarian, Kay Clopton, as well as panels and presentations by other comics scholars, including some current and former UNT faculty.

In the lead-up to that event, UNT Libraries hosted an Archie Comics Research Day, featuring our recently acquired research database, The World of Archie Comics Archive. It’s just one of several electronic research databases that offers a vast array of comics and comics-related materials for study or teaching.

In November of 2023, UNT Libraries hosted an artist’s talk with Christopher Sperandio, director of the Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop at Rice University, who shared the history of the workshop and his own work in comics with an audience of UNT faculty, students, and librarians. He also visited the UNT Art Department’s Printmaking students and talked with them about their work. 

Professor Sperandio returned the favor by inviting Dr. John Edward Martin (me) from the UNT Libraries to give a talk at Rice University’s Woodson Research Center, “Perception & Pursuit: Comics Studies in the Research Library” in January of 2024.  This was an opportunity to not only return to my alma mater, but also to the library where I had my very first library job as a work-study student many years ago! I was able to do some research in their own recently-acquired collection of EC horror comics and talk to some of their students and faculty about how we’ve made use of comics in our own library and curriculum.

 

Finally, this summer, we completed a year-long collection enhancement project that added over 150 new Comics Studies scholarly titles to our collection. Many of these titles were recommended by our own faculty and students, as well as by colleagues from the Comics Studies Society and other organizations devoted to the study of comics and sequential art. In November, we’ll feature some of those titles in a book display on the first floor of Willis Library. Stay tuned for another posting about that display and a list of all the new titles in the near future.

Among our other milestones since creating the Comics Studies at UNT community are the following.

The UNT Libraries has added: