Rice University’s international, interdisciplinary and cross-campus dialogue focuses on a form whose relevance to 21st-century communication and literacy is constantly growing. From panels and gutters to speech balloons and narrative boxes, comics are famously marked by graphic borders. Yet, with their inherent mixing of words and images, they are equally about the defiance of borders, offering a literary stage for artists and narratives that challenges graphic, national, and cultural frontiers. Echoing a similar act of academic border defiance, the conference gathers esteemed artists and scholars from around the globe who produce and study such texts.

The keynote event will feature Pulitzer Prize–winning comic artist Art Spiegelman, author of the groundbreaking graphic memoirs Maus (1980–1991) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). This opening event will be followed by three days of presentations, exhibitions, and comics-making workshops in locations across the Rice campus. A volume of papers and art will be collected in the graphic anthology š! from Riga-based comics publisher kuš!, available at the conference.