Call for Papers 2025!

Censorship, Book Burning, and the Separation of Artist from their Art!

The ninth volume of the Pace University Journal of Comics and Culture is inviting authors, scholars, cartoonists, and comics creators to submit essays on banning and censorship of comics, contemporary or otherwise. Be it due to artist, content, religion, region, not aging well, or being offensive in the contemporary world.

Potential topics for proposals include, but are not limited to:

• Separation of Artist from Art: Scandals surrounding the personal lives/views/actions of authors/artists of comics and the affect they hold over public attitude towards their work
• Frederick Wertham and the Seduction of the Innocent: The aftereffect on the comic book industry
• The role of critics on pop culture – Clement Greenberg’s “The Avant Garde and Kitsch” and the decades that followed: the loss of credibility (and subsequent rise to prominence), of popular media
• Comics and Politics: the “validity” of certain political agendas over others and the preference for narrative content associated with/in support of said agendas
• Comics and Religion: censorship and book banning brought on by religious affiliations
• School – censorship of specific content and the role of parental views of what should or should not be available in school libraries
• The Academic World – The push from academia of political correctness in works produced today: Sensitivity readers and the rewriting of old tales
• Digital book burning
• Censorship, book banning, and digital book burning in the U.S.A. vs other parts of the world (Europe, Africa etc.)
• Fandom and comics – the opinion/strength of the fan base and its influence on book banning and digital book burning     
• Comics in the midst of WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam, 9/11, etc. Lack of sensitivity and negative stereotyping in politically charged cartoons from the time and their lack of place in the current environment: the, “It has not aged well!” problem.  
• Religious, nationalistic, and political censorship in Indian, Korean, Chinese, and other Comics
• Censorship in Eastern European Comics

Please submit a short bio and your abstract of 250-300 words to Ioana Atanassova at iatanassova@pace.edu and Matthew Brake at popandtheology@gmail.com by March 20^th, 2025. We are interested in a broad range of voices and are happy to hear from both academic and independent scholars. All scholarly essays published in the Journal are peer reviewed; other contents are editorially reviewed. Authors whose submissions are accepted for publication will be required to secure permissions for any images that are reproduced.