Summer 2022 Conference Presentations

2022 Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novel & Comics Conference
and the International Bande Dessinée Society

June 21 – July 1, 2022
Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Ireland

Madeline will present her paper, “Marvel Comics and the Ethics of Responding to 9/11,” at the 2022 Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novel & Comics Conference and the International Bande Dessinée Society, which will be held at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin, Ireland. Through an examination of Marvel Comics’ multifaceted diegetic and extra-diegetic responses to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, this paper argues that while on the surface, post-9/11 Marvel comics like The Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #36 may read as oversentimental and aggressively patriotic, they also present a clear moral and ethical stance on the tragedy.


2022 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference

UNABLE TO ATTEND DUE TO ILLNESS

July 13-15, 2022
Loughborough University, England

Madeline will had planned to present her paper, “The Diseased Victorian Masculine Adventure Narrative in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as Illustrated by Matt Kish,” at the 2022 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference, which will be held at Loughborough University in England. This paper reads Heart of Darkness as descended from, and indebted to, the kind of masculine adventure fiction and imperial romance seen in the Victorian popular press. It argues that Matt Kish’s 2013 illustrated edition of the novella presents the masculine adventure as self-consuming, and highlights the sickness of late-Victorian empire and its potential to infect its perpetrators across the ocean.

Drawn to Reconcile

Drawn to Reconcile: The Queer Reparative Journey of ElfQuest” appears in the Summer 2020 issue of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. In this article. Madeline and her co-author propose that the independent comics series ElfQuest can be read as an attempt to make sense of the seeming contradictions between theories of queerness and between the identities claimed by individuals.