Held every year on the beautiful campus of Michigan State University, home of the largest public collection of comic books, The Michigan State University Comics Forum is a 2 day event that brings together scholars, creators, and fans in order to explore celebrate the medium of comics, graphic storytelling, and sequential art.

Sponsors

The Michigan State University Comics Forum is genereously supported by The American Studies Program, The College of Arts & Letters, 21st Century Comics & Games, and MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online.

Organizers

Ryan Claytor

Ryan Claytor is a comics artist and professor living in Lansing, Michigan. In 2007, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from San Diego State University with an emphasis in multimedia, researching autobiography in comics. Claytor’s achievements have included a Cartoonist in Residence position at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, California, visiting lecturerships at the Dallas Museum of Art and Michigan State University, an internship with Marvel Comics in New York City, and judging the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailing Award in 2007.  In early 2009 the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco featured an exhibition of his work and Claytor began teaching the first “Comics and Visual Narrative” class in Michigan State University’s history.  As a creator, Claytor is most widely known for his self-published, autobiographical, comic book series And Then One Day. Although the series has undergone several format changes and incarnations since its inception in 2004, And Then One Day readers are consistently treated with Claytor’s thoughtful and entertaining personal anecdotes immaculately packaged with a designer’s eye for production detail. Most recently, in the summer of 2008, he released a republication of his Master’s Thesis on autobiography in comics entitled Concatenations. For more information about Ryan Claytor or any of his work, visit his website www.ElephantEater.com

Joseph Darowski

Joseph Darowski is a PhD student in American Studies. He completed his Bachelors and Masters degrees in English from Brigham Young University. His primary research area is comic books, and he makes frequent use of Michigan State’s excellent resource, the National Comic Arts Collection.

Jay Jacot

James “Jay” Jaycot is an amalgamation of Graphic Designer, all around Artist, and Entrepreneur working to create and provide a good story thrugh sequential art and visual imagery. Long hours and late nights have been his copilots on this journey. He looks forward to many more creations & endeavors in the future including a continued run of COMICS OBSCURA (http://www.comicsobscura.com/) & many more projects to come.

Ann Larabee

Larabee earned her PhD in English at Binghamton University. Her teaching and research interests include disaster studies, cultural impacts of technology, cultural theory, feminism and technology, and history of terrorism. She has taught Tier 1 courses–Writing: Science and Technology and Writing: American Radical Thought–as well as upper level and graduate courses in American and Women’s Studies, including Body and Technology; Impacts of New Technologies on Women; Introduction to Women’s Studies; and American Studies Methodologies. She is a member of the core faculty of the American Studies Program at Michigan State University

Ethan Watrall

Ethan is currently Assistant Professor at MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online; an Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media; and a Principal Investigator in the Games for Entertainment & Learning (GEL) Lab at Michigan State University. Watrall is a co-founder of the undergraduate Game Design and Development Specialization and co-founder of the Serious Games MA program in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at MSU.  Watrall is currently co-chair of the Meaningful Play Conference (http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu).  In addition, Watrall is a member of the National Academies Committee on Modeling, Simulation, and Game.  Watrall specializes in cultural heritage informatics, with a particular focus on serious games for cultural heritage learning, outreach, and engagement. Among his many and (varried) classes, Ethan teaches HST110h - Panels & Pages: The History of the Modern Comic Book. Ethan’s website is located at www.captainpirmate.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at www.twitter.com/captain_primate