Comics Memory: Archives and Styles

Despite the boom in scholarship in both Comics Studies and Memory Studies, the two fields rarely interact―especially with issues beyond the representation of traumatic and autobiographical memories in comics. With a focus on the roles played by styles and archives―in their physical and metaphorical manifestations―this edited volume offers an original intervention, highlighting several novel ways of thinking about comics and memory as comics memory. Bringing together scholars as well as cultural actors, the contributions combine studies on European and North American comics and offer a representative overview of the main comics genres and forms, including superheroes, Westerns, newspaper comics, diary comics, comics reportage and alternative comics. In considering the many manifestations of memory in comics as well as the functioning and influence of institutions, public and private practices, the book exemplifies new possibilities for understanding the complex entanglements of memory and comics.

Maaheen Ahmed is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University, Belgium. She is currently working on possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between comics and different kinds of memories, ranging from personal memories to collective and medium-based ones. Her books include Openness of Comics (2016) and Le Statut culturel de la bande dessinée/The Cultural Standing of Comics (2017), co-edited with Stéphanie Delneste and Jean-Louis Tilleuil. She recently received an ERC Starting Grant for her project on children in European comics.

Benoît Crucifix is a FRS-FNRS doctoral fellow at the University of Liège and UCLouvain, Belgium. His thesis focuses on the cultural memory of comics in the contemporary graphic novel. His research on comics memory has been published in European Comic Art, The Comics Grid, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and Inks. He isa member of the ACME Comics Research Group and of the editorial board of Comicalités.