EVENTS > CONFERENCES > 2027 > UNFRAMING THE UNKNOWN
Mystery, Crime,
and the Visual Enigma
University of Pisa, Italy - 13-17 September 2027
An international conference presented by
EARLY CAREER SCHOLARS AWARDS 2024
We are pleased to announce the winners of the first Early Career Scholars Awards of the ICLA Research Committee on Comics Studies and Graphic Narrative.
In the SF (Science Fiction) category:
Honourable Mentions:
Genesis Hepburn: Entering the Whirlpool: Modernist Precursors of Contemporary Artificial-Intelligence Narratives
Valentina Romanzi: Animals and care in post-apocalyptic video games
Winner:
James Macaronas: “I feel! I anger! I fight!”: Exclaiming the human in Jack Kirby’s The New Gods.
The awarded paper stands out as a remarkable contribution to the field of science fiction studies, particularly for its innovative focus on the lesser-known works of the renowned comics artist, Jack Kirby. By shedding light on these often-overlooked aspects of Kirby's oeuvre, the author not only expands the understanding of his creative legacy but also provides a compelling foundation for an overarching interpretation of his artistic journey.
This paper is distinguished by its engaging writing and structure, seamlessly guiding the reader through a nuanced exploration of Kirby's works. The author demonstrates a remarkable command of secondary literature, skillfully situating their argument within the broader scholarly conversation while maintaining originality and depth.
The meticulous balance between textual analysis and visual examination is another key strength of this work. By giving equal and thoughtful attention to Kirby's imagery and narrative elements, the author underscores the interconnectedness of text and image in his artistic output. Furthermore, their careful selection of visual materials not only enriches the analysis but also enhances the audience's engagement.
Finally, the paper’s effective presentation at the conference reflects the author’s dedication and talent. Delivered with clarity, insight, and enthusiasm, the presentation brought the research to life for the audience, leaving a lasting impression. The choice of accompanying images further amplified the impact of the talk, demonstrating a keen understanding of how to communicate complex ideas in an accessible and compelling manner.
For these reasons, the paper is deserving of recognition at the Early Career Scholars Award for its originality, scholarly rigor, and exemplary communication of research.
In the F (Fantasy and the Fantastic) category:
Honourable Mentions:
Simona Bartolotta: Who Fears the Sematic Void? Junji Itō and the Horror of Hollow Human Shapes
Elisha Schuett: Decolonizing The Sandman: House of Whispers, Nalo Hopkinson, and the Remediation of Colonial Perspectives in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman
Winner:
Jindřich Pastorek: In Folklore We Flourish: Supernatural Experience as a Preservative Strategy in the Graphic Novel Adaptation (2021) of Ramsey Campbell’s “The Inhabitant of the Lake”
This essay stands out for its originality and academic rigor, making it a deserving candidate for the Early Career Scholars Award. It begins with solid theoretical foundations, skillfully applying them to the analysis of a non-US comic that is neither universally known nor widely read. This choice not only expands the scope of scholarship but also demonstrates the author's dedication to shedding light on overlooked yet significant works in the genre.
The essay is enriched by a robust secondary bibliography, which situates the comic within a nuanced cultural and scholarly context, while the well-structured narrative leads the reader seamlessly through the theoretical discussion, interpretation, and thoughtfully drawn conclusions. The author's clear prose ensures accessibility, guiding readers to grasp the intricacies of the analysis without losing sight of its depth.
Moreover, the insights presented are remarkably compelling, offering a fresh perspective on the comic while laying the groundwork for potential application to other works within the genre. This transferability underscores the broader relevance of the findings, enhancing the essay's scholarly value.
By bringing attention to a less familiar comic, the essay highlights the importance of diversifying academic inquiry and offers an enriching addition to the field of Comic Studies. Its originality, intellectual curiosity, and scholarly impact make it a strong contender for recognition at the contest.
The Conference Organizing Committee, 7 April 2025
CONFERENCE STARTS IN
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.
---
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].
