Tzvetan Todorov, speaking of the "whodunit" in his 1966 essay The Typology of Detective Fiction, famously noted that the detective novel "contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation." This dual structure—one narrative hidden, one revealed—has shaped the development of mystery and crime across modern storytelling. It also helps explain why investigative modes travel so easily: wherever narrative worlds can conceal, distort, or withhold information, mystery and crime can take root. From classic detective fiction to noir cinema, from serialized radio dramas to contemporary streaming series, the investigative imagination has shown a remarkable ability to adapt, transform, and migrate. Comics, graphic novels, video games, and other visual narrative media have become crucial sites where questions of evidence, secrecy, revelation, and moral ambiguity take shape.

 Mystery and crime, then, operate less as a set of crystallized genres than as a discourse cutting across genres, infiltrating science fiction and fantasy, adventure tales, romantic narratives, historical fiction, and other traditions alike. This fluidity is precisely what allows mystery and crime to function as narrative engines capable of reshaping any fictional world they enter.

 Comics have long embraced this versatility: the stylized grit of noir traditions, the procedural rhythms of investigative reportage, supernatural detective stories and hybrid Sci-Fi/crime sagas are only a few examples. The medium has produced works that merit sustained scholarly attention, read against the broader history of crime fiction and its long fascination with the unknown. In comics, this genre started to become popular in the 1930s, often capitalizing on the success of the hardboiled genre (Dick Tracy is a clear example of this phenomenon). Simultaneously, some tropes of the genre would soon be adopted by the superhero genre (see for instance Batman, and in more recent years series like Jessica Jones, and Spider-Man Noir, among others). Nonetheless, it was only after WWII that mystery and crime comics reached their peak (see Crime Does Not Pay and Murder Incorporated) as the popularity of the superhero genre started to decline. Yet, in the 1950s the genre would soon become subjected to censorship due to comics crusaders campaigning against the depiction of violence in a medium perceived as “targeting kids”, and notably one of the most famous victims of this hysteria was Crime SuspenStories. In the US, the genre got a new impulse in the 1980s, that is when the CCA lost its power and the rise of graphic novels, with its mature contents, imposed new discourses. It is in this new scenario that important graphic novels like Sin City, El Borbah and Hellboy have emerged. As these examples testify, through time, crime comics have incorporated elements originated in other genres to renew themselves. 

 It is thus high time to devote a large-scale event to the discussion of SF/F in comics; therefore, the ICLA Research Committee on Comics Studies and Graphic narrative has decided to celebrate its 20th anniversary by organizing a conference to be held at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. We look forward to receiving panel and presentation proposals along, but not limited to, these lines of research:

• Critical/theoretical approaches. How should SF/F comics be analyzed? What “traditional” critical methodologies focusing on purely verbal literature could be applied to comics? Do we need specific instruments or literary analytical tools? How might conversations like Afrofuturism and Techno-Orientalism play out in such discourses?

• Transmediality and comics: adaptations, remediations, rewritings, and other intertextual retellings.

• Feminist, Gender, Ethnic, and Environmental Studies in science fiction and their impact on comics. How do we address the questions of race, class, gender, and the environment? Is this an opportunity to disentangle critical strains in science fiction and fantasy studies?

• Unearthing the future and the past: the history of SF/F comics, methodological questions of historiography, comics archaeology, literary and historical traces.

• Video games and SF/F: new horizons of SF/F imagination.

• Canonical issues: locating the key figures of SF/F comics (panels on authors / series / characters / places).

• Hybridization and slipstream: superheroes, supernatural detectives in SFnal contexts, Lovecraftiana, postmodernist comics, analyses of the works of Moore, Morrison, Gaiman, and similar creators.

• SF/F politics: does the unreal have a political agenda? What current issues does it draw our attention to or alert us to in the real?

• Graphic migrations: SF/F comics translations, transnational diffusion, adaptation to different national contexts, Afro-futurism, and similar issues.

• Serial issues: collective vs. individual authorship, publishing policies, continuity / discontinuity, reboots and retcons, or related topics.

 The event will be held in dual mode in presence / online.

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SUBMISSIONS

 Proposals (in English, Spanish, or Italian) should be submitted (preferably in a .doc, .docx, or .rtf file) including email addresses and 200-word bios for all presenters.

• For panels (by April 15, 2024) include a general introduction (200 words) and a 300-word abstract for each presentation.

• For standalone presentations (by May 31, 2024) include a 400-word abstract.

 Send your proposals to framingtheunreal@comics-studies.com copying the conference organizers in: Angelo Piepoli, Umberto Rossi, Davide Carnevale, and Alessandro Scarsella [angelo.piepoli@gmail.com, umbertorossi_000@fastwebnet.it, davide.carnevale@uniroma1.it, alescarsella@unive.it].