WonderCon 2025

Ishita Sehgal (Indiana University, Bloomington) explores the construction and reproduction of memory through the graphic medium while focusing on female authorial agency in Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream, Mira Jacobs’s Good Talk, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Audrey Garcia (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) uses Maaheen Ahmed’s theory of openness in comics in a case study of 1940s Franco-Belgian cowboys to examine social values in children’s comics magazines. Callum McNutt (Cape Breton University) argues for the integrity of the Batman Noir series, notwithstanding its having appeared originally as individual comics written and drawn by different artists. Michael Mazzacane (University of California, Los Angeles) reads Spy x Family through the lens of asexuality in order to deconstruct compulsory sexuality and gender through the manga's reflexive construction of the “normal” heterosexual family.