Here We Go Again (Round Two)
We’ve been quiet on the blog during this pandemic year, foregoing reporting on our work in favour of simply churning out more and more data. As we head into April 2021 we find ourselves fact-checking our completed Book and Story level data while research assistants finalize the collection of data at the Page level. Paratext data (ads, letter columns, and so on) still needs some additional cleaning to deal with content, but was mostly finished a few years ago. We had originally proposed to index comic book elements on five planes (Book, Story, Page, Panel, Paratext) and four of those are all but finished now, six years into our original five-year project.
“So,” asked one of our research assistants, “What are you going to do now?”
Well, the answer is “Why stop there?”
When we began this journey in April 2015, we wrote:
Our project is the foundational step in a larger program of work that seeks to reorient the study of comics (comic books, comic strips, graphic novels) through the use of large-scale, quantitative research methods. We will create the most comprehensive and accessible research tool for the study of the American comic book, and we will use the data produced by this tool to write a data-driven history of the American comic book as the development of a set of styles and techniques that existed across the industry as a whole. We believe this will enable new approaches to periodization and force us to re-evaluate many taken-for-granted truths that have long circulated among fans and scholars alike.
That foundation is fairly firmly in place. True, we still have all of our Panel level data to collect, but we have been intentionally pushing that off because we imagined that we might combine that effort with an expansion of our work that would allow us to do two things at once. For that to happen, however, we would need additional funding.
Today we are thrilled to announce that we are, in fact, moving on to What Were Comics? Phase Two
Last week, we were informed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that our application for a second round of funding for this project was successful. This means that we will be continuing our work through 2026 (at least).
Given that I just reported that we are almost finished, what does this mean going forward?
Well, we are expanding our work in two distinct directions
First, inspired by Rebecca Wanzo’s observation that comics are an art of exaggeration that “reduc[es] people to real and imagined excesses in order to represent something understood as essential about their character” we want to examine the checkered history of the comic book industry in the United States when it come to representing women, people of colour, 2LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities. To that end, we will be producing a systematic picture of textual representation in each of the 17,202 stories included in the What Were Comics? corpus. This analysis will proceed at the Panel level (i.e. What is depicted in every single panel of our corpus?, which is why it made sense for us to defer that effort).
Second, we are also keenly interested in the composition of the pool of professional comic book creators over time. The comic book industry in the United States finds its roots in Depression-era work-for-hire systems that afforded no ownership rights and little creative autonomy. Over the course of decades, it has emerged as a site of creator-ownership where cultural entrepreneurialism is a hallmark. Each of these eras has attracted different types of creative personnel to comic book publishing, and this project will correlate shifting representational strategies on the page to the changing face of creative labour within the industry. Our project, therefore, is the first full-scale longitudinal analysis of the dominant English-language comic book tradition that tracks the two major factors of representational diversity analysis: labour and textual representation.
Big tasks, both of these, and we are incredibly grateful to SSHRC for continuing to underwrite our efforts in this regard.
And, because the task is so large, we have grown our team. For this round of funding we are incredibly proud to have added Dr. Rebecca Sullivan as a co-investigator. Rebecca is a feminist media studies scholar with award-winning publications, substantial leadership experience, and a deep understanding of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. We are fortunate to be able to draw on her extensive expertise.
Oh, and one final thing: While we were all in various states of lockdown, we decided to expand the corpus to bring it closer to the present day. We added just over four hundred additional comic books to the corpus, representing two per cent of the published work from 2015 to 2019. A few thoughts on that process next time.