Papers by Leah Misemer
With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy
Leah Misemer interviews influential comic book creator and professor, Lynda Barry, discussing the... more Leah Misemer interviews influential comic book creator and professor, Lynda Barry, discussing the role of pedagogy within Barry’s classroom practices. Barry’s words here complement the varied nature across the chapters in this section and her diverse array of publications.
Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 2019
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 2019
The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS schola... more The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service.
Composition Studies, 2015
Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 2019
ABSTRACT:Despite the prevalence of the serial anthology format in underground comics, current sch... more ABSTRACT:Despite the prevalence of the serial anthology format in underground comics, current scholarly approaches tend to focus on single authors or individual comics. In the case of Wimmen's Comix, a series written by and for women, the serial anthology format provided important opportunities for dialogue through and across difference. This article presents an analysis of these dialogic possibilities through the lens of what I call the "correspondence zone," which refers to the public dialogic spaces enabled by serial publication where readers build solidarity. My analysis of the correspondence zone in Wimmen's Comix demonstrates two seemingly paradoxical aspects of seriality: while the unification of stories within the same series suggests solidarity, the diversity of multiple stories published across multiple issues encourages discussion of difference. Though the broader feminist movement has been critiqued for its homogeneity, the case study of Roberta Gregory creating a comic that responds to a published comic by Trina Robbins demonstrates how the serial anthology provided a space for lesbian critique of feminism without undermining solidarity. By providing a framework for discussing the multiple types of public dialogue presented throughout comics, the correspondence zone methodology enhances our understanding of how readers, particularly marginalized readers, have deployed the cultural, political, and ethical potential of comics to form publics and counterpublics.
This peer-reviewed comic deploys the combination of sequentiality and simultaneity in the comics ... more This peer-reviewed comic deploys the combination of sequentiality and simultaneity in the comics form to call attention to how the serial publication of single issues in a series can help marginalized readers build solidarity. By paying attention to the paratexts, Misemer's comic reveals the conversations about LGBTQ identity, printed in the letter columns of the Sandman series during the launch of the Vertigo imprint, that ushered the idea of commercial comics as art.
Full article can be found at on the Sequentials open access website: https://www.sequentialsjournal.net/issues/issue2/misemer.html
Course Description This section of English 177: Literature and Popular Culture, The Graphic Novel... more Course Description This section of English 177: Literature and Popular Culture, The Graphic Novel was designed to teach students to " make compelling arguments about and in various media " and to produce a " professional-like final product that represents their work to the world at large. " While twice weekly lectures by Professor Robin Valenza explored the development of the graphic novel as a genre, my section meetings focused on multimodal composition, helping students hone analytical skills and guiding them to create multimodal texts. After analyzing comics as multimodal texts, students worked in teams to interview members of the comics community—cartoonists, librarians, comics store owners, researchers, etc.—and craft documentary videos. The course mobilized the analytic potential of the comics form and its multimodal nature to encourage production of authentic texts that students viewed as having value beyond the classroom.
Published in Composition Studies, Special Issue on Comics and Multimodal Composition 43.1 (2015)
Because the field of comics studies is still relatively new, critique of the rhetoric used by lum... more Because the field of comics studies is still relatively new, critique of the rhetoric used by luminaries such as Scott McCloud and Paul Gravett pushes the study of comics closer to legitimation. Taking as my premise the assumption that criticism affects the development of its object of critique, I argue that Orientalism in the discourse of comics studies has been detrimental to the evolution of comics in the US. Orientalist rhetoric inscribes and partitions the East from the West, foreclosing the possibility of using Eastern subjects or styles in Western comics, and also presenting comics in both the US and Japan as monolithic and homogenous. If those who study US comics want to encourage further growth in their medium of study, then rather than perpetuating Orientalism, they need to recover cultural flow and the diversity of both manga and comics in the US. As critics open the door to cultural flow in their rhetoric, comics artists will be able to do the same for their techniques and subjects, learning from each other and growing the medium to reach its full potential.
Published in Forum for World Literature Studies 3.1 (2011)
I argue that studying authors and readers in webcomics helps us redefine relationships between in... more I argue that studying authors and readers in webcomics helps us redefine relationships between individuals in a capitalist economy supported by the attention economy of the Internet. Analysis of the public readerly authorship on display in reciprocal guest comics in webcomics illuminates how relationships in the attention economy of the early Internet are characterized by what I call "cooperative competition." I use this term to explicate how the attention economy, along with the early Google search algorithm, encourages individuals to band together in order to gain attention in a crowded Internet marketplace. I examine how reciprocal guest comics from Jeph Jacques of <i>Questionable Content</i> and Sam Logan of <i>Sam and Fuzzy</i> demonstrate this economic phenomenon.
Sample Syllabi by Leah Misemer
Syllabus for a first year writing course at Georgia Tech where students analyzed print and digita... more Syllabus for a first year writing course at Georgia Tech where students analyzed print and digital comics about mental illness in preparation for creating their own digital research-based comics designed to raise awareness about mental health issues and resources for the Georgia Tech Counseling Center. Taught in Fall 2018.
Syllabus for a first year writing course at Georgia Tech where students analyzed comics about the... more Syllabus for a first year writing course at Georgia Tech where students analyzed comics about the city in preparation for creating their own research-based comics about issues related to urban development. Taught in Spring 2018.
A syllabus for a first year writing course I taught at UW-Madison in Spring 2017 and as a Brittai... more A syllabus for a first year writing course I taught at UW-Madison in Spring 2017 and as a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech in Fall 2017.
A course I taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison in Fall 2012 and Spring 2013. Students perf... more A course I taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison in Fall 2012 and Spring 2013. Students performed case studies of public memorials in Madison, debated about how memorials should address their publics, and wrote grant proposals accompanied by imovie videos for their own memorial designs.
A course I taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison in Fall of 2010 where students practiced tra... more A course I taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison in Fall of 2010 where students practiced transmedia storytelling. The Course description and rationale is also published in <i>Composition Studies</i> 43.1.
Conference Presentations by Leah Misemer
A Prezi presentation for the Digital Humanities and Art Conference held at UW-Madison in Spring 2... more A Prezi presentation for the Digital Humanities and Art Conference held at UW-Madison in Spring 2015. The presentation provides a tour of the Africa Cartoons website I've been working on for Teju Olaniyan and also explores some of the challenges of preserving ephemera from marginalized countries.
When do reading practices, such as note taking, commenting, responding,writing fan fiction, etc.,... more When do reading practices, such as note taking, commenting, responding,writing fan fiction, etc., become acts of authorship, particularly on the Internet? As media studies scholars such as Henry Jenkins and George Landow have noted, reading on the Internet is participatory, with readers writing comments on websites or posting fan fiction on the media they consume. This collapse between producer and consumer is possible because of what Richard Lanham refers to as the “economy of attention,” where authors compete for corporate sponsorship based on number of views, rather than for direct monetary contributions from consumers.
Webcomics emerge as interesting spaces to observe changing notions of authorship on the web. Responding to an often problematic disconnect between authorship and labor in commercial comics, webcomics authors promote one another through guest comics, as well as through linking and comment mentions, fostering communities of authors visible in the web space. The practice of posting guest comics, strips drawn by other webcomics artists, in the same space as the main webcomic highlights reading as an act of authorship, because guest comics present parodic readings of the main comic. Examining the practice of guest comics on the website for the long-running webcomic Questionable Content will allow me to explore how authorship can work when influenced by the economic structures of the web space. Because authorship is destabilized in the space of the web and in the space of a comic, this examination allows us to see how readers and authors are not as distant as we usually assume.
(Includes both link to download PPT and link to its posting on Charles University page for HERMES seminar 2015)
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Papers by Leah Misemer
Full article can be found at on the Sequentials open access website: https://www.sequentialsjournal.net/issues/issue2/misemer.html
Published in Composition Studies, Special Issue on Comics and Multimodal Composition 43.1 (2015)
Published in Forum for World Literature Studies 3.1 (2011)
Sample Syllabi by Leah Misemer
Conference Presentations by Leah Misemer
Webcomics emerge as interesting spaces to observe changing notions of authorship on the web. Responding to an often problematic disconnect between authorship and labor in commercial comics, webcomics authors promote one another through guest comics, as well as through linking and comment mentions, fostering communities of authors visible in the web space. The practice of posting guest comics, strips drawn by other webcomics artists, in the same space as the main webcomic highlights reading as an act of authorship, because guest comics present parodic readings of the main comic. Examining the practice of guest comics on the website for the long-running webcomic Questionable Content will allow me to explore how authorship can work when influenced by the economic structures of the web space. Because authorship is destabilized in the space of the web and in the space of a comic, this examination allows us to see how readers and authors are not as distant as we usually assume.
(Includes both link to download PPT and link to its posting on Charles University page for HERMES seminar 2015)
Full article can be found at on the Sequentials open access website: https://www.sequentialsjournal.net/issues/issue2/misemer.html
Published in Composition Studies, Special Issue on Comics and Multimodal Composition 43.1 (2015)
Published in Forum for World Literature Studies 3.1 (2011)
Webcomics emerge as interesting spaces to observe changing notions of authorship on the web. Responding to an often problematic disconnect between authorship and labor in commercial comics, webcomics authors promote one another through guest comics, as well as through linking and comment mentions, fostering communities of authors visible in the web space. The practice of posting guest comics, strips drawn by other webcomics artists, in the same space as the main webcomic highlights reading as an act of authorship, because guest comics present parodic readings of the main comic. Examining the practice of guest comics on the website for the long-running webcomic Questionable Content will allow me to explore how authorship can work when influenced by the economic structures of the web space. Because authorship is destabilized in the space of the web and in the space of a comic, this examination allows us to see how readers and authors are not as distant as we usually assume.
(Includes both link to download PPT and link to its posting on Charles University page for HERMES seminar 2015)