#julia round

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Cambridge University hosts major academic Comic Conference, "Better Living Through Comics", next month

A major academic conference poses the question "Do comics have a role to play in wellbeing?" at the University of Cambridge next month

The 2023 Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novel & Comics and the International Bande Dessinée Society opens on 3rd July at the University of Cambridge, offering an interesting programme of talks aimed, largely, at academics and comic archivists. Entitled “Better Living Through Comics” the organisers pose the question, “Do comics have a role to play in wellbeing?“ “We find ourselves…

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Coming Soon: 1900, a Victoriana-inspired picture anthology

A new independent anthology, 1900, inspired by Victorian story papers is edging closer to launch, with some excellent creators on board for the ride

Coming soon from the people behind the 2000AD-inspired comic zine Sector 13 is 1900, a project described as “the picture-story paper of scientific romances” founded, 1877. The 1900 “threatens to corrupt our youth with tales of fantasy, crime and votes for woman. The very thought!” Art by David Hitchcock First announced earlier this year, full details are still a closely guarded secret, but…

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In Review: Gothic for Girls by Julia Round

In Review: Gothic for Girls by Julia Round

Review by Peter Duncan

What we read as kids can have huge effect on the rest of our lives.  Books and comics can set our prejudices and interests and political views, sometimes, if we are lucky, they can even start us down the road of a career.  Julia Round is one of the lucky ones. Her book, Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics, exists because of a chance purchase at a jumble sale and one…

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In Memoriam: Jack Cunningham, Art Editor of Misty

In Memoriam: Jack Cunningham, Art Editor of Misty

Peter Downer, Jack Cunningham, Steve Holland. Photo taken at Fleetway reunion, 2007. Photo provided by Wilf Prigmore and used with kind permission.

The recent death of artist Jack Cunningham ended a long life that contributed to many British girls’ comics. Jack was one of IPC’s unsung heroes, and worked on a number of their women’s magazines and girls’ comics, including Mirabelle (1956-77), Valen…

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Call for Papers: Creating Comics, Creative Comics

Call for Papers: Creating Comics, Creative Comics

A panel from the Misty strip “The Cats of Carey Street”. Art by Mario Capaldi The first University of South Wales Cardiff: Comics Symposium whose Key Note will be from Dr Julia Round, author of an upcoming book on girls comic Misty, has re-issued a Call for Papers on the theme of “Creating Comics, Creative Comics”. The Symposium will take place Friday 1st June 2018 in partnership with the Cardiff…

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[myvampirebodyoftext]

If vampires are all about surface (hardened marble skins, beauty, glitter) then zombies are all about innards (wounds, torn flesh, emerging organs). The contemporary cultural embrace of the zombie and displacement of the sexualized and sanitized vampire may therefore be due to our increasing fascination with our own identity as this becomes ever-more problematized by technology.

Julia Round, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels, 199

[myvampirebodyoftext]

One clear argument for the current zombie appeal is in socio-economic terms--what better symbol for a global recession than the zombie: hopeless, downtrodden, and unaware? Zombie films and literature contain a healthy suspicion of governments, who generally either deny the zombie threat or have their own agenda, often not in the people's interests.

Julia Round, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels, 206

[myvampirebodyoftext]

The reader brings into being the comics creator, who is not dead (as Barthes would have us believe), but undead. Theirs is a spectral authorship, relying upon a revenant reader to create (decompose) the narrative from the page's spatial layout. This reader's activity takes place in the gutter, here redefined as the crypt, for although the reader creates and realizes the bridging events of the story these will never be viewed: their existence is know, but unseen, locked away in the gap between the explicit elements of the story. The boundaries between self and Other are blurred here, and this final tenet also informs the two previously discussed: for haunting also structures the reader's gutter activities (as the reader must have viewed the next panel in order to fill the gap), and an excess of seeing blurs the boundaries between self and Other (for example when we are given the perceptual point of view of intradiagetic characters).

Julia Round, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels, 58