#ISA2014 Mixer and Launch of Journal for Narrative Politics |

For the second time in a week, Ad Astra Comix was out and about meeting and discussing the power of political comics.

Here in Toronto the International Studies Association is wrapping up there annual convention, with hundreds of academics visiting internationally to deliver talks and share ideas on everything from global economic migration to the homogenization of Indigenous cultures and practices worldwide. And we’re here to hell you… #TheresAComic4That .

Tonight’s event was a social mixer for the convention, and an official launch to a new project called the Journal of Narrative Politics, encouraging untold and unheard voices within the historical academic record.

A portion of our Ad Astra Comix table offered a sneak preview of our project with the Graphic History Collective (a comic I’m personally involved in, on the Corbin Miners’ Strike of 1935), plus a varied selection of some of the comics available on history, activism, culture and policy.

Opening page of Coal Mountain. Here we meet Gracie, a young girl who lived through the Corbin Miners’ Strike of 1935. Gracie is inspired by an interview I conducted with a woman, now in her 90s, who was a child at the time.

Here we get some context for the story. Corbin is and always has been an extremely isolated region of the Canadian Rockies, just along the Alberta border. It officially falls into the collection of towns along a road known as the Crowsnest Pass. Many were hotbeds of labour radicalism in the first half of the 20th Century.

A collection of photos combined for the purposes of this teaser.

The last scene before the showdown with police, scabs, and company-men on that fateful day in April, 1935. What happens? You’ll have to wait and see!

We met academics from Canada, United States, Britain, Japan, New Zealand, … and Texas. Conversations varied, but typically boiled down to the same key points: comics are an under-used medium in education, and as they evolve to take on more sophisticated subject matter, the delay in using them only grows more perplexing.

Many thanks to the organizers, and all who attended. And to any reading this who were there, my invitation stands: contact us whenever you’re looking for a comic about a subject for your class–and we will find you something, …or make our own*!

Enjoy the rest of your week.

Nicole Marie Guiniling
March 27, 2014

* – Editor’s note: Offer subject to Nicole’s overzealous commitment to projects. AAC-produced comics on your PhD thesis or post-grad class on feminist interpretations of Viking poetry may be subject to long processing times.