This run of INKS is preceded by a version of the journal that ran from 1994-97. Editor Jared Gardner and his team have presented a satisfying and accessible mix of rigorous peer-refereed articles, reviews, and interviews that should prove indispensable for scholars and general audience readers looking to understand what the brightest thinkers in comics scholarship are working on. Dedicated solely to comics and published by the Ohio State University Press, INKS has the look and feel of an academic journal that can act as a standard bearer for the field. The newly revived INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society seems poised to change all of this. Even worse, the most influential articles in comics studies often end up appearing in traditional literary, art history, or cultural studies journals where authors must cater to the interests of other fields. On one hand, anyone wanting to understand trends in comics studies has had to comb through a thicket of grassroots publications and blog-like online journals with widely variable quality. These tendencies aside, the lack of a forum has also been a real problem. Comics studies people are typically renegade non-conformists who recoil “authoritative” word on much of anything. The scholarly study of comics and graphic novels in the US has long been without a journal of record.
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