Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering and Michigan State University are collaborating on a project that will create digital scholarly editions for early American comic books.
It’s a two-year project funded through a $65,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. IU Luddy professor and the project’s lead researcher John Walsh said this project is for creating prototype editions. This will allow them to document the process, have a manual and have a prototype web system for the next phase.
When this project is completed, they will apply for a full implementation grant to start building and publishing five to six scholarly editions of early American comic books. This project and the following one will take five years. Walsh said if all goes well they could continue their work, which will be available to the public.
“We'd have all the systems and guidelines and that in place, and we could recruit other scholars to collaborate with, and just keep going from that beginning,” he said. “So it could go on, as many of these digital projects do, indefinitely, and that's common with scholarly editions, whether print or digital.”
Similar to scholarly editions of literary and historical works, a scholarly edition of a comic book can include an introduction and footnotes that explain the historical context, contain biographies on the creators, and have notes on the writers’ and artists’ editorial decisions, Walsh said.
Focusing on early American comic books is because many of them will be entering the public domain with their copyright expiring in the next five to 10 years. The motivation is also the cultural history and significance early comics have.
“You can encounter issues about war and military and the Cold War and issues of race and gender and human relations and civil rights, different scientific development,” Walsh said. “So we see all this reflected in comics, like we do in television shows and film. So it's another perspective.”
There are several genres of comics: children comics, romance comics, science fiction comics, war comics, superhero comics and more.
For example, many war comics were created by writers and artists who served in the military in World War II, or other wars, so understanding that aspect can help readers understand the significance of the content in the comics, Walsh said.
Other comics such as Marvel include superheroes like the Hulk and Spiderman who got their powers being exposed to high gamma radiation or bitten by a radioactive spider, respectively. How they got their powers can be related to what was going on during the time those comics came out, Walsh said.
“The science context of what's going on in the early '60s is important: the Cold War and fear of nuclear war,” he said.
There is also consumer culture to examine with early
American comics. They have advertisements for toys and other publications as well as fan mail pages.
With the two-year project, Walsh and the project’s team will be choosing one comic from IU’s Lilly Library and another comic from Michigan State University’s library that are already in the public domain to create prototype editions. They’re hoping to have comics chosen by early November, Walsh said.
In their search so far, they have found the comic Treasure Chest, a Catholic themed comic book distributed in the 1940s through the 1970s in Catholic grade schools and high schools. They are also looking at works by Steve Ditko, who was the co-creator with Stan Lee of Spider-Man.
There are different comic formats, including floppies, collected editions and graphic novels. For this project, Walsh said they will be working with floppies because of the era they are focused on.
Walsh said comics have been digitized by fans and enthusiasts, and there is scholarly work that has been done. The Journal of the Comics Studies Society is devoted to the study of comics, but there are few digital scholarly editions of comic books.
Walsh said he hopes having scholarly editions of comics will demonstrate that comics are an important artifact like academic journals. He said he hopes it will be useful in classrooms and for researchers.
