The visual language of comics offers unique possibilities for representing gender and sexuality visually. Colors, shapes, and styles can be employed to depict genderfluid or non-binary characters and their experiences. Medium-specific gaps resist fixed and normative determination. At the formal level alone, comics artists can experimentally rearrange the sequencing of panels, signs, and storylines to create non-linear narrative structures that reflect diverse identities in queer narratives. While we close the gaps between panels as we read comics, these gaps remain decisively visible and present—a refusal of continuity that queer comics have taken up in order to suggest »queer temporalities« (Halberstam) outside normative conceptions of time. Continue reading.

 

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Call for Papers: Tropes of Comics and Manga — 2nd International CLOSURE-Conference 2026

Kiel, 19.–21. November 2026

The concept of the trope occupies a peculiar space between fan culture and academic discourse — systematized on platforms like TVtropes.org, yet theoretically underdeveloped in comics and manga studies. This conference sets out to address exactly that gap, asking how tropes function across scales from rhetorical figure to macro-plot, what makes them medium-specific in comics and manga, and how they intersect with questions of seriality, transmediality, and ideology.

The 2nd International CLOSURE Conference invites contributions that engage with these questions theoretically, analytically, historically, or through ideological critique. Abstracts of approx. 300 words and a short bio-bibliographical note should be submitted by 1 May 2026 to closure@email.uni-kiel.de. Conference languages are German and English. Further information in our Call for Paper.