April 6-7, 2024: Emily Lauer on Comics Analysis & Editing as Public-Facing Scholarship

[This is EmilyLauer’s fourthGuest Post,making her the current leader in sharing her great ideas and writing here.Everybody else, time to step up your Guest Posting game!]

It’s always lovely to guest post for Ben’s AmericanStudies community, and this time around, instead of reviewing some interesting American Culture Thing, I’m writing about one of my own activities in public-facing scholarship. 

 

I’ve been involved with the website WWAC for almost eight years now, and I currently hold the position of Comics Academe Editor - that is, I edit the posts that go up in the section of the site dedicated to academic writing about comics. This includes scholarly reviews of comics, reviews of comics scholarship, and academic analysis of comics for a general audience. All the editors are volunteers; this role is a labor of love, not a paying gig. 

 

The website WomenWriteAboutComics.com was started by Megan Purdy in 2012 in response to a specific claim by some ill-informed pundit who said, when asked why his site didn’t publish criticism written by women, that, “women don’t write about comics.” In the many years since then, the site has grown to encompass coverage of television and film and non-comics books in our Bookmarked section as well.

 

We won the Eisner Award for Best Comics Journalism three times in a row, in 2020, 2021, and 2022. 

 

We are archived by the US Library of Congress, wherewe are featured as an online source for research about women and comic books. 

 

After Megan stepped back from her roles as Editor-in-Chiefand Publisher, those roles have been filled by a number of dedicated people,currently Nola Pfau as Editor-in-Chief and Kate Tanski as Publisher. Under their leadership WWAC has “become an educational partner of the Oregon State University Creative Writing Internship program,” and they are pursuing “potential future partnerships with comics-related non-profit organizations” according to Kate. I am especially looking forward to their plan to change the site name to WeWriteAboutComics.com, to better reflect the range of marginalized genders among our varied contributors. In the meantime, we are going by our initials, WWAC, as much as possible. 

 

Personally, I got involved with WWAC in the summer of2016 when I saw a call for people to join their copyediting team. I had asabbatical coming up with a project writing about comics adaptations, and someexperience in journalism and proofreading. It seemed like a good fit. After atime as a copyeditor, I also became a contributor; after a time as acontributor I was asked to take on editing duties for a section of the sitecalled Pubwatches which offers roundups of comics publishers’ new releases and news on a monthly basis. 

 

After years as the Pubwatches Editor, we startedwinning Eisners. Was it largely due to my own personal efforts that the sitebecame so celebrated? Reader, it was not. But it was definitely an excitingtime to be involved. Due to some personal stuff with the pandemic and movinginto a new apartment, I took a break from editing, but I missed it, and startedmy current role in the Comics Academe section of the site about a year ago. 

 

The Comics Academe section is a venue for scholarlywriting with journalistic publishing practices. If you are a scholar who hassomething to say about a comic (or about Comics) but you don’t feel it needs tobe in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, it is probably right for Comics Academe. Kate Tanski points out that, “essays published in Comics Academe are frequently used on syllabi, and have won the Gilbert Seldes Prize from the Comics Studies Society’s annual awards in 2021 and 2023 . Several current or past members of the Comics Studies Society have also served on the CSS board.” 

 

In my short time working on this section of the site,we’ve published a three-part series about archeology in comics, written byacademic archeologists who happen to be interested in comics; we’ve publishedreviews of comics that take a scholarly approach to their analysis, and we’vepublished a pedagogical discussion of using comics in the classroom—among otherthings. In the queue now we have a review of a scholarly collection of essaysabout comics, and a biographical look at an influential comics creator inIndia. 

 

It’s a vibrant and varied section, is what I’m saying.And we welcome pitches!

 

It’s really fun for me to receive these pitches andthen get to read all these cool things scholars are doing with comics, often ina more casual tone than would be required for a scholarly journal, and a morecasual timeline than would be required for most journalism. The best of both. 

 

Being a part of an organization like WWAC is rewardingfor other reasons, too. Not only because the submissions are so interesting,but also partly because my involvement with WWAC is so different from myday-to-day experience of being a college professor. WWAC includes people allover the world, not all academics, with different career goals and strengths inwriting. It enriches my scholarly practice, as all public-facing scholarshipdoes, by broadening my perspective on what scholarship can be, and where it cango. 

[Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Ideasfor Guest Posts of your own? Share‘em, please!]