Everything I Know, I Learned From Comics

June 11-13, 2026, The Ohio State University

In her talk at 2023’s Cartoon Crossroads Columbus festival, Susan Kirtley breaks comics studies pedagogy into three interrelated practices: teaching about comics, teaching with comics, and teaching through comics. In partnership with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, the 2026 Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society will focus on pedagogical practices and related topics that broadly explore comics, teaching, and learning. In recent years educators have begun developing more robust comics pedagogies that expand beyond content–teaching about comics–or teaching complex ideas with comics, to consider what it means to engage with the forms and processes of comics and comics composition (teaching through comics).  For instance, in interdisciplinary fields like Disability Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies (among others), comics are tied to transmission, preservation, and revival of central ideas and histories both in and beyond the classroom. From practitioners to scholars, researchers to students, archivists to editors, many in the field have made concerted efforts to consider how and why we engage with comics in the classroom. From special issues of journals focused on comics pedagogy to a growing number of books and collections, the scholarly interest in comics and classroom practices continues to grow.

Central to CSS 2026 are the ideas that comics are for everyone, anyone can make comics, and comics can help anyone engage with the world and education through unique pedagogical interventions. Comics Studies stands in a particular place within scholarship largely because of its uneasy situation in the history of the academy and its inherent interdisciplinarity (or “Indiscipline” in the words of Charles Hatfield). This conference seeks to center that liminal space of comics as it relates to questions about pedagogy–bringing together educators, scholars, librarians, and practitioners from various fields of study, levels of education, languages and locations of study, and other educational contexts. 

The partnership between CSS and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum for CSS 2026 offers a unique opportunity for exploring comics through pedagogy. Alongside the important role the BICLM plays in the connection between education and archives, they also provide an important public museum space which will feature an exhibit on the work of Chris Ware titled “Life is Complicated.”  Following this exhibit, the archives, and the importance of institutions like the BICLM, we welcome papers specifically on these ideas and pedagogies. Institutions like the BICLM and practitioner-educators like Ware have been invaluable in considering how we think about and engage with comics, both in and beyond the classroom setting. We look forward to submissions and programming about practitioners as teachers (like Ware himself), the larger comics community in and around Columbus, representations of education and school, and the use of archival materials in teaching. 

The Comics Studies Society invites proposals for 15-minute individual papers, pre-formed panels, roundtables, and pedagogy or other workshops that engage with how we learn and teach about, with, and through comics. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Comics Content in Various Classrooms
• Field-Specific Content in Comics Form
• Pedagogical Approaches to Comics Genres (Biography, Memoir, Superhero, etc.)
• Transmedia Possibilities in Learning
• Fandoms and Student Identity
• Curation as Teaching
• Comics as Resistant Pedagogy
• Representations of Teachers and Teaching
• Teaching the Making of Comics
• Comics and Digital Humanities
• Documentary/Non-Fiction Comics as/in Teaching
• Language Study and Comics
• Comics and Pedagogical Inclusion (BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Disability)
• Comics, Children’s Literature, and Education
• Comics-Focused Activities for the Classroom
• Chris Ware’s Comics and Education
• Industry Case Studies (e.g. Scholastic Press)
• Comics Pedagogy and Other Pedagogical Approaches (Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Project-Based Learning (PBL), Sheltered-Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP), etc.)
• Teaching with comics archives and special collections

We are accepting submissions for:

1. Individual papers (15 min.)
2. Panels of 3-4 papers
3. Roundtables of short (5 min.) presentations by 4-5 presenters followed by discussion
4. Pedagogy or other workshops attendant to the conference theme

Proposals should be submitted using the google forms linked above. Please make sure to submit to the correct form.

A presenter’s name may appear twice in the program. 

The deadline for all submissions is January 15th, 2026.