Editorial

As I embarked upon writing this editorial, I had the whole thing mapped out in my head. I wanted to acknowledge the ongoing pandemic, and the harmful and widespread impact it has had on all our lives, both personally and professionally. I wanted to reflect upon how the shift to online conferences has added to the insular experience many have felt, given the lack of a certain social element that makes academic conferences so special. As a counter, I also wanted to point out how they have provided a brilliant mode of access for emerging scholars (I myself will have presented at conferences that were meant to have been held in the U.S., Germany, and Italy all from the comfort of my living room in rainy Manchester, UK). And then I read the editorial from the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 12.2, and seen how David Huxley had put all my sentiments into a much more eloquent and nuanced way. Nevertheless, I feel those sentiments he expressed are worth echoing again here. The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics may ‘not replace the wider contacts and exchanges that would have been possible at this year’s International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference, and other similar events. But hopefully its appearance is reassuring, in that it shows that, despite all the current restrictions, that comics research continues unabated. ’ Hear, hear! The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics publishes research on all aspects of Comics Studies, and this issue is no exception. The examination of newspaper comics strips and cartoons still remains underdeveloped within the wider corpus of Comics Studies (notwithstanding some brilliant exceptions! ). Therefore, it was with great delight to see that this area of study has been well represented in some recent submissions we have received for the journal. This is reflected in a few articles in this issue too. In ‘Autotransmogrification in Asaf Hanuka’s “The Realist” as critique on Israeli society’, Matt Reingold explores the autobiographical comic strips of artist Asaf Hanuka. In particular, the article focuses upon the artist’s distortion of his own face in the comics, which Reingold argues provides a critique of Israeli society and the ways that ethnic and religious identities are constructed in the country. This is followed by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem’s article, ‘The multimodal recycling machine: toward a cognitivepragmatic theory of the text/image production’, which investigates the common approach taken by cartoonists to frequently recycle pictorial and compositional ideas they have developed earlier. The article argues that these recycled ideas serve as templates which guides the formation of wider patterns of novel cartoons. Finally, in ‘“Getting Arno”: the New Yorker cartoon caption competition’, Philip Smith examines the New Yorker caption contest cartoons in their sociological context. Smith pays particular attention to fan interactivity with the cartoons, and argues that they belong to the imagined community of New Yorker readers. Paired with this series of articles is Christopher Smith’s ‘Becoming illegible: the repatriation of Japanese fan culture in Genshiken’, which looks at underlying anxieties JOURNAL OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS 2021, VOL. 12, NO. 3, 173–175 https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2021. 1932165