View the full post on the Canadian Literature website here

Deadline: January 31, 2027 (Pacific Time)

Submission Length: Articles (6,000–8,000 words), interviews (7,000–9,000 words), and graphic essays

Guest Editor: Melissa Jacques (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)

In 2022, Canadian Literature published a special issue on Canadian comics based on “80 Years and Beyond,” a two-day virtual symposium hosted by Western University. Both the conference and the special issue showcased the rich history of comics in Canada, from the Golden Age of Canadian comics (1940–1946) through to the explosion in independent comics in the late twentieth century and beyond. In their introduction, guest editors Candida Rifkind and Zachary J. A. Rondinelli acknowledged the practical limitations of representing Canadian comics in a single issue and called on others to continue working toward a “reorientation of the Canadian comics conversation, which has long languished in the rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism” (9).

This special issue on comics aims to answer their call while, at the same time, focusing on comics that fall under the rubric of life writing, broadly conceived. Tentatively titled “Truth or Dare,” after a game that pushes at the limits of truth and invites risk, the issue hopes to capture the incredible risk-taking of contemporary Canadian nonfictional graphic narratives. Consider politically informed biographies like Guy Delisle’s Hostage (2017) and Sarah Leavitt’s Agnes, Murderess (2019); graphic memoirs like Geneviève Castrée’s Susceptible (2013) and Kate Beaton’s Ducks (2023); and speculative memoirs like Arizona O’Neill’s Opioids and Organs (2026); to texts that address history and experience through a method akin to Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” (11), like the four volumes of katherena vermette’s A Girl Called Echo, Lee Lai’s Cannon (2025), and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ The Lost Haida Manga (2026).

One guiding premise of this special issue is that comics are intrinsically suited to telling stories about lived experience that challenge narrative conventions governing time and space. This expansiveness—achieved through tensions between text and image, between panel and gutter, between the diegetic and the extradiegetic, and even between fact and fiction—makes possible complex forms of representation and engagement. As comics scholar Juliet J. Fall has argued, “reading comics is an embodied, codified, learnt and culturally-situated activity. Viewer involvement takes place through the distinctive devices, vocabulary and grammar of comics: parts are observed while the whole is sensed and constructed” (17).

Canada is a real international comics powerhouse, even beyond what “Canadians” produce. To read comics as a culturally situated activity within Canada, then, means engaging with work that both recognizes and extends beyond our borders. To that end, we invite contributions on contemporary Canadian writers and illustrators who are producing graphic auto/biography, memoir, and cultural history. In addition to essays on specific creators and texts, we welcome contributions including, but not limited to:

• essays on Canadian publishers like Drawn & Quarterly, whose roster includes award-winning work by Canadian as well as international writers and illustrators; 
• essays that explore the relationship between comics and pedagogy, such as the inclusion of graphic nonfiction in elementary-, middle-, and high-school curricula;
• essays that explore the unique contribution of comics within post-secondary programs like narrative medicine or health humanities; 
• autobiographical contributions about the teaching of graphic nonfiction in programs like creative writing and visual art; and
• essays on recent film adaptations of Canadian graphic memoirs, like Chester Brown’s Paying for It (dir. Sook-Yin Lee, 2024) or Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (dir. Leah Nelson, 2026), which premiered this year at Cannes.

In addition to traditional essays, we invite interviews and graphic essays on any aspect of Canadian comics relevant to our contemporary experience.

Works Cited

Fall, Juliet J. “Worlds of Vision: Thinking Geographically through Comics.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2021, pp. 17–33, https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v20i1.2037.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.

Rifkind, Candida, and Rondinelli, Zachary J. A. Introduction. Past, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics, special issue of Canadian Literature, no. 249, 2022, pp. 5–10, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.vi249.197406.

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Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be sent online through our Open Journal Systems (OJS) portal.

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).

Please limit images accompanying submissions to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Contributors will be required to obtain permission to reproduce images in their article and pay for any permission costs. The journal will provide a template for permission requests; such requests must be completed before publication. Please send high-quality images as separate attachments along with your article file.

Please review our full submission guidelines prior to submitting.

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Contact Us

Feel free to contact the guest editor (melissa.jacques@ubc.ca) or Canadian Literature (can.lit@ubc.ca) with any questions.