Do Comics Have Electric Dreams? Open Call for Papers IJFMA Vol. 11 No. 1 (2026)

The editorial board of the International Journal of Film and Media Arts is pleased to announce an open call for submissions for Vol. 11 No. 1 (2026) Do Comics Have Electric Dreams? Comics and Technology, in collaboration with the two guest editors Marco Fraga da Silva and Pedro Moura.  

Considering media as “socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning” (Lisa Giltman), their relationship with technologies has always been one of co-evolution. Their interconnectedness is so profound and varied that it has led to a plethora of theoretical approaches with multiple specific, differentiated notions, such as multimedia, intermedia, transmedia, cross-media, each with their own valence and focus.

Stemming from multiple strands such as narrative drawing, caricature, press and satirical literature, comics (considered as a whole, and not as specific textual formats such as strips, wordless novels, comic books, graphic novels, tankonbon, etc.) have emerged as a medium of and on its own. From its early 19^th century stages up to today, and within multiple national and global traditions, comics have been considered under many guises, such as a form of art, an IP factory, or a technology onto itself, able to be employed for multiple discourse purposes or having some of its elements appropriated by both art and commerce to convey specific meaning-making dimensions, e.g., “crass popular culture” in Roy Lichtenstein appropriative art, or the use of the split screen in Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk to represent parallel narration and traumatic dissociation.

Historically speaking, print media comics have established immediate mutual relationships with several other media in their earliest appearances, either through adaptation (e.g., L'arroseur arrosé, Ally Sloper, radio serials), early transmediation (e.g., L. Frank Baum's World of Oz), or remediating them into its' own formal specificities (page composition, narrative voices, technology representation and social-cultural negotiation, and so on). Today there are multiple challenges, thanks to the increasing use of comics as parts of transmedia projects, the usage of multiple digital devices, the emergence of AI platforms (such as Neural Canvas and ComicsMaker.ai, among others), the good fortune of webtoons as smartphone-friendly texts, and so on. As new or adapted technologies and media enter the fray, so do themes and topicalities, reading protocols, changes in styles and engagement, etc. One fundamental question could arise: are comics simply yet another curtailment by the “demands of capitalism” or can they contribute to a “radical attention” (Julia Bell) in our lives?

The International Journal of Film and Media Arts is an open access, promoted by the FilmEU - European University and Film and Media Arts Department - Lusófona University, Lisboa, Portugal. IJFMA is a semiannual publication focusing on all areas of film and media arts research. Since June 2020, IJFMA was accepted for indexation in Scopus from Elsevier, reaching the Q2 level in Visual Arts.

While chapters on the intermedial relationships between comics and traditional and historical media (press, poster art, theatre, animation, cinema, radio, television) are most welcome, or even a broader sense of “media archeology” (Jussi Parikka), we are looking forward for contributions that address late 20^th and 21^st century “new” media. From video games, internet-native media, interactive streaming, geolocation storytelling, pod/videocasting, or others, while considering issues of digitisation, the use of digital tools, Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) assisted production, etc., that negotiate with the medium of comics. The facets of creation, promotion, distribution and reception are equally important, but so are those of digital fandom and participatory culture, web-based archives, and conservation, file-sharing, piracy, and other critical practices.

 

We wish to understand the place of comics within a broad material, cultural and political context of the contemporary digital and social-media-suffused world we live in. How do comics inform, interact, or mirror such a world? What is their role in communicative approaches or the entertainment industries? What is their weight within transmedia franchises? What is their impact on the economic field? How have new or newly integrated technologies changed them and the way we consume them?

Here are some possible topics of discussion:

• New digital production and distribution options for comics;
• Affordances and hindrances of digital tools for comics-creation, including web-based, transmedia worldbuilding tools;
• Ethical, political, and creative impacts on the use of ML and AI in creation and reception, and changes in the scalability of comics styles and production;
• Repurposing of (traditional) comics in digital platforms and new ways of fashioning spectatorship via new digital-native or influenced texts, technologies and institutional reading contexts;
• Changes in storytelling, materiality and the readerly experience brought forth by digital means (motion, animation, interactivity, sound, colouring, lighting, augmented reality);
• Comics in transmedia and in convergence culture;
• The media/tech, economic, or narratological dimensions of digital comics, webcomics, webtoons, etc.;
• The renegotiation of comics' identity as “print media” with the emergence of digital-native comics forms;
• Comics as Big Data: computational analysis of large corpora;

We are looking forward to collecting several chapters (minimum: 7 500, maximum: 40 000 characters)

Abstracts to be submitted by 2025 February 21^st.

Please provide two Word documents (.doc) with:

1. ABSTRACT, no longer than 500 words with 5 keywords.

The abstract should not have any reference to the authors or the institution they belong to. The authors must ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in such a way that they do not reveal their identities to reviewers, either directly or indirectly.

1. BIO, no longer than 50/70 words. Name, Email address and institutional affiliation.

Please submit your abstract, here: https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/ijfma/about/submissions
When submitting, include the Open Call for which your paper should be reviewed.
Submissions will be reviewed by at least 2 peer reviewers. Accepted abstracts will be given guidelines for the preparation and submission of the final text for the 2^nd round of double-blind peer reviews.

No fees are requested for submission or processing.