Too Many Abs: Narrative Inquiry of Critical Noticings Across Comic and Anime Conventions

• In Event: Margins, Gutters, and Futures: Comics as Sites of Critical Literacy and Speculative Cultural Resistance

Abstract

In the field of education, comic and manga are often studied for their potential for foregrounding the marginalized and encouraging conversations that bend worldmaking toward justice (Low & Torres, 2022; Dando, 2023; Krone et al., 2025), but scholars are just beginning to consider the many ways that fans can take up critical literacies at in-person fan gatherings (McDermott, 2018; Author et al., 2025). Comic conventions are complex spaces with different ways to engage in sequential graphic art, e.g. panel discussions or interviews with professionals; opportunities for purchasing merchandise and franchise-related art; or cosplays, which are fan embodiments of characters of interest through costumes and props. This is all to say, there are many pathways to meaning-making in these spaces, and it can be difficult to capture how people navigate and make sense of these many activities.
Methodologically, I (first author) have worked with youth, adults, and teachers via digital and video microblogging of such spaces, often paired with participatory analysis (Hennessy Elliott et al., 2023; Author et al., under review). In this project, instead of analyzing such data through multimodal coding or interaction analysis labs, I share analysis of such data using methods that resonate better with these arts-based spaces – autoethnographic narrative inquiry through storytelling (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004; Toliver, 2021). In this project, participants were guided to make sense of their microblogging experiences through storytelling, intended to help them recognize critical noticing trajectories. In this presentation, we will share several of these narratives and offer conclusions about critical or speculative ways to navigate conventions drawn from across the different cases.
To give an example, I participated in this practice by liveblogging my experiences at a local anime convention which featured graphic narrative texts such as manga, anime, comics, cartoons, and webseries. I started with a question drawn from my own experiences about ways convention participants engaged with anime’s tendency toward stereotypical portrayals of gendered bodies. I noticed many examples of sexualized male and female anime characters, including women with unrealistically large breasts and men with more muscles than a human can physically have (for example, one character had 10 abs!). As I traversed the con and its different spaces, I was struck by how cosplayers and fan artists had the most potential to be removed from the original media designs. Cosplay has to be somewhat realistic because actual people wear them, while artistic fan works allow artists to redesign characters, giving them opportunities to critique and restory through different cultural filters (or alternatively, make characters even more sexualized). On the other hand, the show floor and official merch, including manga/figurines, by legal necessity must be in alignment with the original media and thus have strong potential to reproduce critical issues that dominate the media (traditional gender roles, sexism, male gaze, etc). This has implications for classroom spaces, as teachers can consider how to take up fan works like cosplay and fan art to critique issues across sequential art reproducing various cultural standards of beauty through character designs.

Author

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University