[Comicsstudiessociety] Introduction [Jared Gardner] and a seminar invitation

[Gardner, Jared]

Hi, all,

I teach at Ohio State University and work closely with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library here on campus. I have edited a few collections of historical newspaper comics—including Skippy and the Gumps—and a couple of edited volumes about comics. My 2012 book Projections spun out of a meditation on the twinned birth of film and modern sequential comics in the late 19th century. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the history of cartooning going back a lot earlier. As a result I’ve drifted away from contemporary comics in my research lately, spending much of my time in the 17th-19th centuries thinking about the long history of the popular printed images we used to call caricature and the artistic practice we only started calling cartooning in the 1840s.

Which brings me to an invitation:

I am organizing a small seminar/working group to coincide with my spring semester at OSU. Since we are all locked down, I thought I would open it up to anyone who has interest in comics history/research before 1920. The seminar is titled Caricature, Cartooning, and Comics, 1620-1920. We will be starting with discussion of the rise of etching and early modern techniques for printing images, along with the rise of caricature (what would be later called cartooning) in the early 17th century. We will follow the travels of early caricature from northern Italy across Europe, and especially to England, where in the 18th century it would flourish both as a popular art form and a print marketplace. In the early decades of the 19th century we will look at the changes brought about by the rise of wood engraving, followed by a series of rapid advancements in industrial print technologies that would give rise to a new popular visual culture—including periodicals entirely devoted to comics and cartooning beginning in the 1830s. We will conclude by looking at the first generation of newspaper comics from the 1890s-1920s.

The working group seminar will run from the week of January 11th through the last week in April. We will meet synchronously online 1 day a week for 2-3 hours communicate/collaborate via a LMS to be determined shortly. If you are interested in the materials but unable to participate synchronously let me know that on the form below. I am still in the process of figuring out details on platform and schedule, but my hopes is that it would be a collective exploration of stuff that remains woefully underexplored in comics history, especially in recent decades when research into pre-20th-century cartooning (and even early newspaper comics) has fallen away dramatically.

If you are interested in participating, please let me know by filling out this form: https://airtable.com/shrlmt6waTmqYi89r

Best,

Jared




_________________________________
Jared Gardner  Professor of English | The Ohio State University
Director, Popular Culture Studies
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum | Project Narrative
546 Denney Hall, 164 Annie & John Glenn Ave, Columbus, OH 43214
614-323-6267 (m) | english.osu.edu/people/gardner.236<https://english.osu.edu/people/gardner.236> | jaredgardner.org<http://jaredgardner.org/>
schedule office hours<https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/OhioStateUniversity6@buckeyemail.osu.edu/bookings/>


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