Our Pandemic Year: On the Comics Scholarship to Come

This editorial article reflects on the past, present and future of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. It discusses the challenges overcome so far, and discusses the tenth volume of the journal, corresponding to 2020, “our pandemic year”. The article presents the authors’ vision for the type of comics scholarship they would like to see in future volumes of the journal, calling for greater diversity and inclusion and for work which is ‘media-specific’ in at least three ways: firstly because the field’s focus is comics, in all their multifaceted diversity, complexity and vibrancy; secondly because the study of comics, like many of the studied comics themselves, mostly exist and take place today somewhere in the spectrum of digital environments, and thirdly because comics studies as a field operates within academic institutions and cultures, and therefore plays a role within established hierarchies of knowledge production.


The Past; The Present
This has been an exceptionally challenging year for everyone. It is likely to be remembered by most around the world as what we could call (with apologies to Pekar, Brabner and Stack 1994) "our pandemic year". As we close what is the tenth volume of this journal, we would like to take stock and look back, in order to set the gaze towards the future.
Once upon a time, in what now seems a galaxy far, far away, the very first article on the Wordpress incarnation of The Comics Grid was first published on 31 January 2011 (Figure 1). This means that in January 2021 we will be celebrating a decade of having appeared as a publication in the comics scholarship landscape. By our third year we had launched as a full-fledged open access journal thanks to Ubiquity Press.
We had by then, as noted in the journal's inaugural editorial, "published 92 peer- Year One shows we were willing to do the walk and not just the talk by demonstrating 'publishing' is something academics could do ourselves without the mediation of for-profit third parties. This spirit of independent experimentation still defines what we do today, and remains our ethos. We are proud The Comics Grid continues true to its first reason for existence, which is providing immediate open access to comics studies outputs on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
We acknowledge we still need to find a way (i.e., secure funding) to retrospectively re-publish and safely archive the work published on our Wordpress blog during  and Academia. The Comics Grid is also available for remote metadata harvesting via OAIPMH, a mechanism and set of standards that allow the sharing and collection of bibliographic information across databases and repositories, facilitating the wider dissemination of our content.
To ensure permanency of its articles, The Comics Grid also uses CLOCKSS and LOCKSS archiving systems to create permanent archives for preservation and restoration. We may be wrong but we suspect that some of these services and acronyms are likely to sound intriguing to many an arts and humanities scholar. If we are to "retake responsibility for the way we communicate", as James Baker argued in the fifth volume of this journal, it is essential that as a field we all start learning more about how it is that scholarly publishing infrastructures operate (Baker 2015). We are proud to have embraced a strong tradition in comics publishing, and increasingly in academia too, which is the struggle of authors to retain the copyright of their own work. Since day one, authors of articles published in this journal have remained the copyright holders of their original work, granting third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the original contents of the article according to the Creative Commons-Attribution license agreement. In parallel, we have also actively promoted a more sensible and less conservative approach to the essential inclusion of third-party material for the purpose of academic citation in scholarly study, commentary and review (Deazley 2014).
We think it is fair to say that, at least in terms of publishing infrastructure, The Comics Grid has come a long way. We still have a lot to get right, though. We see ourselves as part of a larger, ongoing process, and we hope to continue learning and playing a part in the ongoing transformation of scholarly cultures.

Our Pandemic Year
The COVID-19 pandemic this year has been, indeed, "inescapable [...] a shared experience that emphasises, through the pandemic's pervasive disruption, the social interactions and behaviours that define our shared world" (Callender et al 2020).
However, not everyone has been affected in the same way (Khunti et al 2020; Dyer 2020). In academic publishing specifically, the pandemic has worsened inequalities (Peterson Gabster et al 2020). By changing the conditions of production of many of us, the pandemic has in many ways evidenced systemic issues. In this respect, after a decade of leading a researcher-led peer-reviewed journal, we note that the pandemic has made even more visible the structural challenges academic publishing and peer review systems currently pose for colleagues, working as a gatekeeping mechanisms that are personally taxing and institutionally expensive.
The journal's editorial team and pool of reviewers are composed by academics who work in the journal as one more component of their academic workloads, which means we are not paid by the publisher or the journal to work on it. Though historically the journal has aimed for rapid (or at least efficient) review and publication timeframes, editors and reviewers have a limited capacity and, importantly, the journal has a limited budget to consider and publish a certain number of articles per year, which also allows us to focus more strictly on quality rather than quantity.
However, we suggest that scholarly publishing should not have to rely on the good will and volunteer labour of colleagues. This way of doing things is not inclusive as it assumes the privilege not just of expertise and esteem but of time and appropriate conditions, both at a premium in today's academia. We are concerned it is not and has never been a sustainable way of doing things, and as most of us have juggled many more responsibilities during the pandemic, this concern has been intensified. On the one hand higher education depends on the quantity and quality of peer-reviewed publications (so much depends on it: employment and professional development opportunities, career progression, funding, rankings, student fees), but expects the labour required to make research publishing and assessment possible to be performed by academics mostly voluntarily and without sufficient recognition and reward. This is incongruent and continues to be the source of much toxicity and exclusion.
Production timings remain one of the key challenges for everyone. As a journal we have taken steps to be context-sensitive and hopefully contribute to small We suggest that academic Workload Allocation Models, where they exist, should consider at the very least the time required for peer review and editorial work.
Moreover, the time and labour invested in editing a journal volume does not differ too much from that required to edit a collected edition in traditional book form, and yet the arts and humanities appear to continue to hold the latter in higher esteem.
There is no objective basis for this disparity, except the reputational economy of tradition (on reputation in scholarly publishing, see Eve 2014). Therefore sometimes engaging in researcher-led journal publishing (editorial work; peer review) may seem like a thankless effort, done against the grain and without the required resources. For us, however, editing the journal is not a hobby nor a luxury, but a central component of our professional practice.
It is therefore no surprise that this year in particular would pose unique challenges in producing the journal. However, though this year we struggled editorially to get peer review requests accepted, and when accepted, completed, we are pleased we were able to consider the highest number of submissions we had ever received. In this challenging context, however, this tenth volume of the journal includes a major- Evans' Threads: From the Refugee Crisis" (Earle 2020) represent that effort. Each of these submissions is medium-specific, and focuses on formal features of their respective comics. Although we are not wed to a formalist approach, we want to focus on writing that pays attention to form's relation to content rather than simply content without reference to form.
One of the fascinating things about editing a journal is that it provides you with unique insights into scholarly trends and dominant discourses and narratives. In the last three years we have received plenty of submissions on superhero comics that fall into the category of disembodied content. Often, these submissions discuss the representation of a social issue in certain superhero comics without considering medium specificity. We receive many articles about subjects that comics cover but that say little to nothing about why it matters that these subjects be presented in comics form. This is not the case of an article like Christian Mehrstam's "Silver Lining: The Emblematic Exemplum of Silver Surfer #40-43" (Mehrstam 2020), that presents unexpected thematic and formal qualities of the comic. Mehrstam's argument that the medieval exemplum structures the issues he discusses is detailed and precise as well as challenging and even controversial.  Dr. Jeanette D'Arcy and Dr. Miranda Corcoran, which was video-recorded for those who could not attend 4 . We are currently organising the next seminars in the series, which will take place over 2021.
With this tenth volume of the journal we believe that we are well on our way to achieving what we want The Comics Grid to represent: lively articles that are academic but attentive to the needs of a 21st Century online audience; a journal friendly and encouraging to marginalized voices; and comics scholarship whose primary subject is comics as a medium. We hope to get even better with the 11th volume.

The Future We'd Like to See
Despite the healthy amount of comics scholarship over the past ten years, the discipline remains theoretically open and ontologically and epistemologically limited.
There is much work to be done, with many methodologies, objects of study and interpretive voices still absent or underrepresented. Our editorial team and pool of reviewers will be looking for submissions resulting from a motivation to share professional expertise in an engaging manner and that, as research outputs, aim to work-in-progress, collective editorial 'manifesto' of sorts.
We seek to help construct a critical discipline that is creative, innovative, experimental and risk-taking. Our ambition is to provide a platform for work that avoids traditionally over-researched topics and perspectives and that instead focuses on those which have been overlooked, that shares new critical and insightful perspectives, in a variety of forms that go beyond the traditional research article (for example, Degand 2020; Letizia 2020). We are motivated by the need to encourage a diversity of critical reflections and free comics scholarship from the competitive, publish-or-perish, paywalled, publication-for-publication's sake aspects that often constrain scholarly research.
The majority of the submissions that we receive focus on American superhero comics, often by male authors, with particular emphasis on textual analysis and a preoccupation with plot. We feel that the international, multi-genre complexity and diversity of world comics remains largely unexplored. A common revision query has been asking authors to clarify what research question(s) their articles seek to address, and to detail what specific methods were followed in order to study/analyse/critically-describe their objects of study.
We have witnessed a dominance of analyses that could be adjectivized with thematic, textual, and historical, including references to close reading. Often this methodological scope is present but in practice it is not mentioned, as if it were the standard and only method to engage in the study of comics. Based on many submissions we have considered, we have found that comics scholarship often appears to see itself as a method in itself, because, unlike other disciplines, its outputs tend to either not include a 'methods' or 'methodology' section, or be implicit and multidisciplinary. We have received a good number of content and thematic analyses that identify tropes and techniques, often establishing isomorphic relationships with external concepts, and in so doing, seem to displace the focus from comics to those external concepts-as an apologetic exercise in which the 'value' of comics were to be demonstrated by signaling their similarities or relationship to concepts or phenomena thought to be more widely 'valued.' We recognise this as a dominant trend in the history of comics scholarship, but consider that it is important to declare our methodological lens more clearly and transparently, so that any bias and limitations may also be assessed.
We would like to see submissions where the methods employed are clear and to the point, so another scholar could learn how to apply them to read the same or a different comic. Questions we would like to see addressed, to give some examples, are how generalisable are the methods and the conclusions presented? What is the evidence the specific contribution the article is making has not been made before in the same way? We believe research articles on comics should be more than expert, extended book reviews that include scholarly references, and therefore there should be an element of systematic, reproducible methodology, while respecting at the same time the accepted scholarly practices of different disciplines.

Dunley et al: Our Pandemic Year
Art. 15, page 15 of 21 Our interest in research articles that are structured as such is balanced by our ongoing invitation to receive submissions where the writing is energetic and theoretically and interpretively bold. While academic rigour, the inclusion and close discussion of images and citational correctness are important to us as a precondition, a key feature we ask our editorial team and pool of peer reviewers to consider is the clarity and originality of the argument, the discovery, the evidence-based eureka moments conveyed in economical, precise, and, ideally, subtle prose. Over the years we have seen submissions become longer and longer. We know well it is hard (take this long Editorial as an example!) but we do believe academic writing about comics should aim to be as striking and immediate as the medium itself, particularly when it is a fact most of us are now reading and doing research online and via screens. and epistemological biases that must continue to be interrogated. However, it must be said that "while recognizing these biases at a personal level is important, creating new structural and institutional conditions to reduce bias can be even more valuable" (Hatch and Schmidt 2020).
Scholarly journals play an important structural role in this sense, and we would like The Comics Grid to be a platform where this can happen. For too long the contributions of non-Western, non-male, non-white authors have been largely overlooked in past and current scholarship, and this can be argued to be both the result of and the cause of a common structural bias: "resources often flow to those who already have them [...] highly cited references may be more cited in part because researchers see that they're highly cited" (Hatch and Schmidt 2020).
Indeed, as Brenna Clarke Gray stated it clearly in the 6th volume of this journal, "comics scholarship has a problem with representation that could be addressed if it paid greater attention to whose voices are amplified and when" (Gray 2016). We take this seriously. There is much to be done in comics scholarship to "correct the gaze" and widen the view beyond a few ubiquitously-cited (and studied) sources (Priego and Berube 2020). In this sense, we predict it will not be long before we start seeing in comics studies more critical awareness of the politics of citation practices (Ahmed 2013) inspired by more "conscientious engagements" to counter-balance "unethical hierarchies of knowledge production" (Mott and Cockayne 2017). We are acutely aware that, in our citation (and self-citation) practices in this article for example, we may still be contributing (or not) to the very issues we are aware need tackling more critically.
We therefore have a vision for comics studies which is 'media-specific' in at least three ways: firstly because the field's focus remains comics, in all their multi-faceted diversity, complexity and vibrancy; secondly because the study of comics, like a many of the studied comics themselves, can be said to mostly exist and take place today somewhere in the spectrum of multimodal, interactive, user-centred digital environments, and thirdly because comics studies as a field operates within academic in stitutions and scholarly and scientific cultures, and therefore plays a varied role within established hierarchies of knowledge production. What role exactly comics studies will continue to play beyond our most immediate contexts -in which direction we will take what we do-is up to all of us, auto-critically, collectively, cooperatively, openly, and collegially.

Authors Note
This article was drafted collectively in a shared online environment across time zones.
A combination of American and British spellings may have remained.