Return to Comic Arts Conference at SDCC

Dr. Hammonds is scheduled to speak this coming July (2023) at the annual Comic Arts Conference - a scholarly event held concurrently with San Diego Comic-Con. This will be his second talk at the conference, following a presentation on Strange Planet comics in 2021. The presentation for this year is titled "Reading Comics with Ricoeur: Hermeneutic Mediations in George Takei's They Called Us Enemy." Dr. Hammonds' academic talk will examine Takei, Eisinger, Scott, & Becker’s graphic rendering of Takei’s childhood memories, especially growing up in Japanese-American concentration camps, as a case demonstrating that selection, arrangement, and portrayal of history might influence how readers refigure (Paul Ricoeur's term for making meaning in retrospect) their understanding of the past in light of new perspective. Importantly, Takei and team do not merely imagine the past but also draw both narrative and semiotic parallels to present day atrocities against marginalized peoples. These parallels utilize concepts from graphic art and psychology, such as closure and implicature, to prefigure (frame understanding of new phenomena) ways that awful history may repeat itself unless readers act against it in new political configurations.