Building and Unbuilding a Comics Canon

Abstract

The inaugural conference of the comics studies society, held in August 2018 at the University of Illinois, Urbana, was the most professionally diverse conference I've ever attended. There were presentations by tenure-track faculty members, non-tenuretrack faculty members, graduate students, and independent scholars; by people from four-year institutions, community colleges, and high schools; by literary critics, art historians, media scholars, research librarians, and working artists. Everywhere one felt the energy of a new field of study coming together, of institutionalization in a good sense: the gathering of past work to create a critical canon, the debate over methodology, the effort to establish priorities for moving forward as a discipline. he emotional palette that this event produced, at least for me, was an odd combination of excitement and melancholy—melancholy because, at a moment when traditional humanistic disciplines are having their support cut, it's hard to imagine a new ield getting anything like the resources or hires it needs to survive, let alone thrive.