Chris Ware, The Smartest Kid on Earth

Call for submissions for The Cult of Difficulty: Critical Approaches to the Comics of Chris Ware, edited by Dave Ball, Dickinson College, and Martha Kuhlman, Bryant University.

The Cult of Difficulty is a proposed collection of essays on the work of Chicago-based contemporary graphic novelist/comic book artist/ cartoonist Chris Ware. Author of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000, winner of the 2001 Guardian First Book Award), Quimby the Mouse(2003), and The Acme Novelty Library (2005), Ware has quickly emerged as one of the central figures in the recent ferment of graphic narratives and comics criticism. We are currently seeking abstracts for 20- to 25-page articles that analyze Ware's work, with particular interest in multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to his oeuvre. Essays that address the following questions are especially encouraged, but other topics are also welcome:

--How is Ware's work engage with the history of Chicago, and with the Columbian Exposition of 1893?
-- How do Ware's texts raise questions about representations of race, gender, class, and disability? In particular we are eager to receive analyses of Jimmy Corrigan and Acme Novelty Library that engage with these topics.
-- How has Ware's work as an editor, anthologist, and collector shaped the landscape of contemporary comics and informed his own corpus?
-- What is Ware's relationship to the literary canon (both in terms of graphic and conventional literature) and how does he re-imagine our relationship to the idea of literariness?

Please send 500-1000 word abstracts (or completed articles), c.v., and contact information in Word format to warecollection@gmail.com by March 10th. Papers from a diversity of disciplinary orientations and methodological approaches are especially encouraged.