The Blue Age of Comics Book
The Blue Age of Comics Book
Call for Proposals
Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2025
Edited by Adrienne Resha and Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero
“We are in a new age of superhero comic books: the Blue Age” (Resha 2020: 67). The Blue Age, taking its color from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, began in the 2010s and continues into the present. Although shaped by superheroes, the Blue Age is distinctive for a number of reasons, including the onset of digital readers, guided reading, and social media. It signals a convergence of legacy and new media in the twenty-first century, evidenced in part by social media platforms’ surge in popularity and comics publishing’s shifts within traditional, independent, self, print, and digital markets. Moreover, it is about where and how we read comics – in their different forms and genres – and how technology has changed their consumption and creation.
Today’s creators use traditional and virtual tools in the production, publication, and promotion of their digital comics. In the twenty-first century, many comics are “scripted, penciled, lined, colored, lettered, formatted, edited, and/or otherwise mediated through a computer” (71). They are simultaneously distributed across physical shelves and digital platforms by mainstream and independent publishers, with published formats ranging from single issues, weekly installments, and mini comics to limited editions, collected anthologies, and graphic novels. Furthermore, comics are announced, read, and talked about online. Comics creators, publishers, and readers optimize the participatory affordances of social media sites like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube for the purposes of marketing and/or analyzing comics. Some creators use image posting tools and video editor studios to engage audiences with their work, while readers use comment sections and post sharing features to produce critical-creative commentary in response.
The Blue Age of Comics Book recognizes the contemporary period (2010s-present) to be when comics and social media make significant contact, both as sequential forms of cultural production and as emergent fields of academic inquiry. As such, this collection surveys industry shifts and formal conventions that shaped the creation, distribution, and reception of comics in the last decade, and brings them into conversation with social media’s concurrent expansion. It also considers how themes of identity and representation emerge across comics narrative and critical discourse, and how these depictions compare to that of legacy media forms like film and television. In this regard, The Blue Age of Comics Book contributes to conversations happening across comics studies and social media studies about topics related to narrative media, digital self-mediation, transmedia storytelling, and contemporary fan practices, among others. From comics studies, this includes texts like Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s Black Women in Sequence (U of Washington P, 2015), Ramzi Fawaz’s The New Mutants (NYUP, 2016), Sean Kleefeld’s Webcomics (Bloomsbury, 2020), Margaret Galvan’s In Visible Archives (U of Minnesota P, 2023), and Sam Langsdale’s Searching for Feminist Superheroes (U of Texas P, 2024). From social media studies, this includes texts like Stuart Cunningham and David Craig’s Social Media Entertainment (NYUP, 2019), Jillian Hernandez’s Aesthetics of Excess (Duke, 2020), Jennifer O’Meara’s Women’s Voices in Digital Media (U of Texas P, 2022), and Nicole Erin Morse’s Selfie Aesthetics (Duke, 2022). In sum, this collection surveys the state of comics’ materiality, creation, and circulation in the twenty-first century, with attention to how social media and digital tools aid in their development and distribution.
We invite contributors to apply the framework of “The Blue Age of Comic Books” to the study of digital comics and virtual comics culture. We are particularly interested in work by and about people of marginalized identities, as well as work at the intersection of comics studies and social media studies.
Potential topics may be inclusive of, but not limited to:
- Webcomics, webtoons, and social media comics (e.g., Facebook, Twitter/X, Tumblr)
- Platform affordances for publishing and distribution, such as creators’ formal strategies on Tapas or Webtoon compared to that of Instagram, Twitter/X, and/or Bluesky
- Creator trends in digital publishing, such as online subscriptions and digital exclusives on sites like Patreon, Ko-fi, and Etsy
- Traditionally and independently published comics (comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, graphic memoirs, graphic histories, and so on)
- Evolving practices of reading, collecting, and/or storing digital, hybrid, or print comics
- Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on comics creation, distribution, marketing, and publication
- Genre comics (superhero, romance, scifi, horror, teen, etc.)
- Transmedia adaptation (animated and live action television and film, literature, children’s lit, podcasts)
- Fandom and fandom platforms (like Archive of Our Own)
- Comics journalism (The Nib) and comics criticism (WWAC, Shelfdust)
- Creator interviews
Submission Guidelines
Proposals of 300-500 words with tentative titles, brief bios of 150-250 words, and 2-page CVs due to amr9hk@virginia.edu and kmsweeney@ucdavis.edu by January 15.
Timeline
Abstracts due by January 15, 2025
Decisions returned by February 15, 2025*
First full chapter draft due by August 15, 2025**
Final chapters due January 2026
*Following the abstract review period, we will seek out a contract with a university press.
**Essays will undergo review prior to publication, and contributors should expect at least one round of revisions based on editorial and peer feedback.
Keywords: comics studies, digital comics, media studies, social media studies
Resha, Adrienne, “The Blue Age of Comic Books,” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 4 no. 1, 2020, p. 66-81.
Downloadable CFP