Presentations - Talks - Workshops

Third International Symposium on Comics Studies - University of Alcalá de Henares

On 15 May I will be discussing slapstick in children's comics periodicals from the 1910s to the 1950s. My corpus contains early twentieth-century Spanish magazines such as Dominguín and TBO as well as 1930s to 1950s French-language periodicals for children from the Alain Van Passen collection at Ghent University. There will be a lot of slaps, unfortunate falls, acrobatic accidents and famous actors and actresses!

Stripgidssalon

February 22 2025, I had the pleasure of being on the panel of "Stripgidssalon" with three incredibly interesting guests, from left to right, journalist Patrick Van Gompel, graphic novelist and art teacher Bart Proost, me, Marissa Delbressine (manga artist of The Shadow Prophet who will draw the manga version of Suske & Wiske, and Mike Beyers, the new scriptwriter of De Kiekeboes.

COMICSNeT - Climate, Outreach, Migration, Intersectionality, New Technologies in/through Comics Studies

On 9 & 10 September 2024 I will be at COMICSnet, an iCOnMICs Training School, at the University do Minho (Braga-Portugal), presenting my research on girlhood in comics together with dr. Nicoletta Mandolini.

Playing (with) Magic

I was part of the Playthings & Playtimes symposium organised by Prof. Ben Highmore and Prof. Hannah Field at the University of Sussex.

My online paper discussed magic tricks in the movable sections of children's periodicals from different European countries between 1850 and 1950 (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain). Who is asked to perform which tricks, what does this tell us about the remediation of nineteenth-century parlour magic books, how these tricks are gendered scripts, and how contemporary magic toy sets continue or contradict these ideas. The below example is from German interbellum periodical Dideldum, from January 1938.

Seen and Heard: Voices of Transnational Girlhood(s) on Identity, Gender, and Culture Conference (University of Warwick, Simona di Martino and Anna Gasparini)

My talk focused on the three volumes published since 2017 of the German comics series on three girls: Nika, Lotte, Mangold! by Thomas Wellmann.

Instead of reviewing the series myself, I brought together reader responses through a survey I did with German child readers (thanks to the lovely Miriam at Kuckuck Buchhandlung in Munich) and reviews found on online blog posts by children, adolescents and adults.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/researchandnetworks/calendar/upcomingevents/girlhood/

Thanks to Adrienne Resha and the Comics Studies Society for allowing me to discuss my PhD with Adrienne Resha, Eleanor Ty, Brannon Costello, and Jonathan Gayles.

Workshops on Comics

Op 19 januari introduceerde ik drie klassen uit het vijfde middelbaar aan het SJO in Oostende tot de Vlaamse strips. We bespraken hoe strips werken, wat een beeldroman is en welke termen je kan gebruiken om ze te bespreken. Leerlingen kozen een strip om thuis te lezen. Hopelijk een begin van een hele ontdekkingstocht.

Workshops on Italian comics for high school pupils

In autumn 2021, I introduced fifth-year pupils of the Sint Lievenscollege in Ghent to Italian comics. Download this folder for an overview of the three workshops, the primary bibliographical sources used and the reponsible persons.

Summer Zine Workshop

Maaheen Ahmed and I offered an interactive workshop based on comics and children’s books at the summer academy in Freinetschool Het Tandwiel in Ghent.

The workshop started with a Kamishibai story, for which we selected Matthew Forsythe’s Pokko’s Drum.
Afterwards, we discussed the differences between picture books and comics, between solitary reading and chaperoned storytelling.
Then, with a lot of unbridled imagination, cut out material, markers, colours, scissors and glue, the children started to make their own stories in hybrid forms and formats.

Many thanks to Sofie Beunen (Diversity and Learning) for the materials and the workshops preparing us for this task. Happy to contribute again next year!

Round Table on Comics and Society
With generous funding of the International Ilaria Alpi Library in Parma and thanks to the organisational skills of the director of Boston College, Caterina Dacci, 5 October offered students and pupils insights into "i mestieri del fumetti". Which jobs can one take up in comics? In the round table "Fumetti e società", I discussed my research on girlhood with two comics artists: Cristina Portolano and Pat Carra. Important keywords in that conversation were: art as a means to make the unbearable, bearable; the importance of community, authenticity, and diverse points of view. I warmly thank Pat and Cristina for this lovely talk and hope the students enjoyed it.

left to right: Eva Van de Wiele, Pat Carra, Alessia Mangiavillano, Cristina Portolano.

background: cartoons by Pat Carra.

Thank you for the lovely image, copyright: Marco Turambar.

Round Table on Comics & Child(ish)ness with dr. Frauke Pauwels

As part of the Comics, the Children and Childishness conference,

Dragana Radanovic (KULeuven & LUCA) chaired our round table "Manifestations of Child(ish)Ness" in which Frauke Pauwels (Universiteit Antwerpen) and I talked about definitions of child(ish)ness in different corpora: Frauke discussed Peter Hollindale's childness and applied it to Dutch books by van de Vendel and Van Leeuwen; I discussed contemporary children's comics magazines from Germany (Polle), France (Biscoto), and Belgium (Cuistax) and how they "script" child readers' behaviour.

Study Day "Transnational Insights into Comics"

On 30 September 2022, I organised this study day with talks by:

Ian Gordon (respondent Hugo Frey) "Chiquinho: Brazilian Buster Brown or Bricolage"

Joe Sutliff Sanders (respondent María Porras Sánchez) "A Duck, a Possum, and Shakespeare Walk into a Bar: How MidCentury Comics Courted the Literary World"

Ivan Pintor Iranzo and Eva Van de Wiele (respondent Rhiannon McGlade) "The Katzenjammer Kids’ transcultural mutations in Spanish and Italian children’s comics magazine"

Giorgio Busi Rizzi (respondent Inge Lanslots) "Comics from the Blocks: Distant Reading Comics from Eastern and Western Europe, 1945-1989"

Hugo Frey (respondent Ian Gordon) "Indochina war comics: a forgotten history from the Van Passen Collection"

Benoît Glaude (respondent Ivan Pintor) "Captions and bubbles rewritten as a bridge over redrawn illustrations: Mickey Mouse and Secret Agent X-9 repurposed by Hachette in the early 1930s"

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