Conceptual and post-digital comics insist upon the medium’s affordances within localized nodes of articulation, and upon the performative dimension of comics’ materiality, highlighting “that what something is, has to be understood in terms of what it does, how it works within machinic, systemic, and cultural domains”. What can comics do? Futures of Comics highlights the comics medium as a storehouse of inventions by emphasizing the directness of a subversive, marginal art form whose democratic potential depends on its ability to be criticized within itself.
Future of Comics establishes a springboard for contemporary comics artists who use their work as tools of production of knowledge, by exploring the very substrate of their medium not as a transparent signifier or a culturally neutral site, but as an object in their own right, replete with its own material properties, histories and signifying potential. Through talks and conferences from various actors in the field, we travel along a signifying chain of productive contexts, entanglements of relationships between authors, readers, publishers, production routines, and the book economy.
