CONGRESS CANCELED Saving the Day for Medievalists: Accessing Medieval-Themed Comics in the Twenty-First Century I: Comics and the Classroom (A Roundtable)

Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University

Description

Most medievalists have come to accept popular manifestations of the Middle Ages and are willing to talk about fiction, film, and television programs in their classrooms, and some are even writing about these items in their scholarship; however, few have as readily embraced the material produced in the comics medium. This fault is not due to a lack of interest. As our sessions over the past two decades attest, many medievalists are curious about how the comics have adapted medieval figures, events, and stories, but a much smaller group knows how to access this corpus and use it profitably for research and teaching.

Thus, the goal of this session, sponsored by The Medieval Comics Project, is to attempt to rectify this neglect by to presenting some overviews, by an assortment of medieval-comics scholars, of how the comics have appropriated some of the most well-known material from the Middle Ages (such as Beowulf, the Crusades, Dante’s Commedia, the Matter of Britain, Norse mythology, and the Robin Hood legend) to provide insight into what has been done so far in terms of comics and comics scholarship with regards to these topics and what kind of work might be done in the future.

Suggestions for topics and resources can be accessed at both The Medieval Comics Project site (https://medieval-comics-project.blogspot.com/) and its sibling The Arthur of the Comics Project site (https://arthur-of-the-comics-project.blogspot.com/). Additional material on the comics medium appears at our Saving the Day: Accessing Comics in the Twentieth-first Century site (https://accessing-comics-in-the-21st-century.blogspot.com/).

Michael A. Torregrossa

 
May 8th, 10:00 AM

CONGRESS CANCELED Saving the Day for Medievalists: Accessing Medieval-Themed Comics in the Twenty-First Century I: Comics and the Classroom (A Roundtable)

Sangren 1740

Most medievalists have come to accept popular manifestations of the Middle Ages and are willing to talk about fiction, film, and television programs in their classrooms, and some are even writing about these items in their scholarship; however, few have as readily embraced the material produced in the comics medium. This fault is not due to a lack of interest. As our sessions over the past two decades attest, many medievalists are curious about how the comics have adapted medieval figures, events, and stories, but a much smaller group knows how to access this corpus and use it profitably for research and teaching.

Thus, the goal of this session, sponsored by The Medieval Comics Project, is to attempt to rectify this neglect by to presenting some overviews, by an assortment of medieval-comics scholars, of how the comics have appropriated some of the most well-known material from the Middle Ages (such as Beowulf, the Crusades, Dante’s Commedia, the Matter of Britain, Norse mythology, and the Robin Hood legend) to provide insight into what has been done so far in terms of comics and comics scholarship with regards to these topics and what kind of work might be done in the future.

Suggestions for topics and resources can be accessed at both The Medieval Comics Project site (https://medieval-comics-project.blogspot.com/) and its sibling The Arthur of the Comics Project site (https://arthur-of-the-comics-project.blogspot.com/). Additional material on the comics medium appears at our Saving the Day: Accessing Comics in the Twentieth-first Century site (https://accessing-comics-in-the-21st-century.blogspot.com/).

Michael A. Torregrossa