THE INTERNATIONAL COMIC ARTS FORUM
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“Look Out World – We’re Comin’!”: Queer Utopia in Mildred Louis’ Agents of the Realm

10/29/2020

 

Ayanni C. H. Cooper

English PhD Candidate at the University of Florida

The webcomic Agents of the Realm (AotR) by Mildred Louis is a “college years coming of age story that takes influence from a number of timeless Magical Girl classics,” like Sailor Moon (“About”). The narrative follows Norah, Adele, Kendall, Paige, and Jordan—five young women at the imaginary Silvermount University who, after the discovery of magical amulets, transform into “fetching super-warrior[s] … [who] courageously fight the forces of evil” (Sugawa). Louis relies on some of the greatest, tried-and-true magical girl tropes in her story: the team of five become “a specialised task force” of “chosen” ones who must “protect our world,” plus they “are endowed with heightened strength, stamina, [and] magical powers” (Liu 5). That said, Louis also adds her own spin to the genre by making the main cast college freshman and by having “the majority of the cast [identify] within the LGBTQ community” (“About”). Louis uses the university environment in AotR to create a utopic space for her queer magical girls. While this is a story-wide project that unfolds over the course of many chapter, I’ll examine a brief sequence towards the end of volume one that demonstrates how this utopic space explores queer identities.1

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Re-Worlding Comics: A Call for Reflexive Scholars

10/22/2020

 

Jeremy Stoll

Assistant Professor of Science & Social Science at Columbus College of Art & Design


As a comics creator, researcher, and teacher, I think of my work less as providing answers and more as honing questions. In this essay, I follow a trail of them, namely: Who are we to study comics and make claims to the ways that people inhabit this social world?

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    About

    Due to the ongoing pandemic crisis, ICAF was forced to cancel its events at the 2020 Small Press Expo. Over the next 16 weeks (give or take), we will be publishing
    a series of short posts  submitted by some of the scholars whose original papers were meant to be presented at ICAF@SPX 2020 as a lead up and supplement to our ongoing virtual panels.

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  • Home
  • About ICAF
    • Cecile Danehy in Memoriam
    • Executive Committee
    • New ExCom Members
  • Conference
    • ICAF 2020 Virtual Conference >
      • ICAF 2020 Virtual Conference Program
      • ICAF 2020 Virtual Conference Blog Posts
      • Roundtables >
        • Publishing Roundtable
        • From Gender and Violence to Cyborgs and Selfhood
        • Representation, Repatriation, and Renovation
        • New Perspectives on Reading Comics
        • Comics Trauma: Representing Violence and Genocide
        • Graphic Activism: The Extraordinary, the Ordinary, and the Precarious
        • Critical Interventions in Comics Studies
    • ICAF 2019 in Review
    • Past ICAF Programs
  • Lent Scholarship
    • 2019 Lent Award
  • Comics Studies Bibliography
    • Comics Studies Bibliography 2021
  • Donate
  • Contact