ComFor’s 15th annual conference aims to intensify a dialogue between the various disciplinary approaches to the medium of comics and related popular narrative images (including manga, graphic novels or cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. Building on perspectives from actor-network theory and subsequent approaches to a possible actor-media theory, the conference aims to reconstruct the complexities of distributed agency within historical and contemporary cultures of comics. An “actor” is here understood as any entity that becomes recognizable as the catalyst or cause of interrelated, complex chains of action, transformation, or reconfiguration. According to “new materialist” approaches, agency can not only be attributed to “natural” persons, but also to “things” as heterogeneous as materialities, devices, inscriptions, or programs within complex configurations or assemblages. The ComFor conference is going to focus primarily on the interrelations between (groups of) individual, collective, and institutional or corporate actors. From this [...]