I’m really honoured to be the keynote speaker at the first TCAF Academic Symposium on June 17, 2022 (i.e., the day before the Toronto Comic Arts Festival). Anna Peppard has done a knock-out job organizing this event program, and the theme—Histories & Futures of Comics Communities—is right up my alley, so I’m really humbled by the invitation to share some of my work.

Title slide. The background is a detail from the cover of Superman Annual #1 with art by Ron Frenz. Superman grimaces as he strains under the weight of a massive foot belonging to Titano, a gigantic chimp.

My talk is entitled Looking for Community in Comic Book Memories:

We all have our own paths into (and sometimes out of) the comics world, but sometimes those paths run in parallel. This talk will share some early findings from the Comic Book Memories project, a series of interviews with regular, occasional, and former comic book and graphic novel readers of different ages about how their relationship with comics has changed over time. In these interviews, it is clear that, for many, comic book reading opens onto friendship, community, and fandom. At the same time, however, interviewees value comic book reading as an intensely personal, perhaps even inherently solitary practice. How can we account for the tension between these two different understandings of the role comics play in our lives?

If you’re reading this after the talk, here’s my full bibliography:

Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics versus Art: Comics in the Art World. University of Toronto Press.
Burke, Liam. 2012. “‘Superman in Green’: An Audience Study of Comic Book Film Adaptations Thor and Green Lantern.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 9 (2): 97–119.
Cedeira Serantes, Lucia. 2019. Young People, Comics and Reading: Exploring a Complex Reading Experience. Cambridge Elements in Publishing and Book Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1982) 1997. “Technologies of the Self.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 223–51. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1984) 1997. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 281–301. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. New York: The New Press.
Gibson, Mel. 2015. Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constructions of British GIrlhood. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Gibson, Mel. 2019. “Memories of a Medium: Comics, Materiality, Object Elicitation and Reading Autobiographies.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 16 (1): 605–21.
Harrington, C. Lee, and Denise D. Bielby. 2010. “A Life Course Perspective on Fandom.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 13 (5): 429–50.
Johnson, Derek. 2019. Transgenerational Media Industries: Adults, Children, and the Reproduction of Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Woo, Benjamin. 2013. “How to Think About Comics as Social Objects: The 2013 John A. Lent Scholarship Lecture.” International Journal of Comic Art 15 (2): 361–72.
Woo, Benjamin. 2018. Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Woo, Benjamin, and Jeremy Stoll, eds. 2021. The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.