The Journal of Comics and Culture, a new, peer-reviewed, annual academic journal to be published by Pace University Press, announces its first call for papers.

In the past 40 years comics have moved from occupying a decidedly lowbrow niche at the margins of pop culture to the center of the popular and critical imagination. Comics—a catch-all term that encompasses monthly comic books, graphic novels and web comics—are embedded in, relate to and comment upon other forms of media like film, painting and the novel. In addition to these formal connections, comics operate uniquely as political expression. So, in the 1970s, one might connect mainstream comics and underground comix to graffiti through their form (each are a kind of visual writing primarily disseminated and consumed throughout cities), but each of these also addressed the rising conservatism that changed understandings of and formations of urban space in that period. By scrutinizing not just the materiality of comics but also its often overlapping genres—superhero, crime, war, fantasy, memoir and biography, reportage—and its contexts—economic, cultural, and political—we begin to produce a more comprehensive understanding of comics' logics, about why the medium unfolds as it does.

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following:
Comics and cultural theory
Comics and the post-WWII period
Comics and the post-Vietnam period
Comics and McCarthyism
Comics and the city
Comics and feminism
Comics and cinema
Comics and digital cultures Comics and gender
Comics and American exceptionalism
Comics and science
Comics and pornography
Comics and race
Coimcs and sexuality
Comics and Hip-Hop
Comics and television

The JC&C is looking for both original scholarly articles and reviews of recent scholarly monographs about comics and graphic novels. Please submit 500 word abstracts and a brief bio by 15 Feb 2015 to journalcomicsculture@icloud.com Full articles, if accepted, will be due for peer review by 15 May 2015.