Welcome to the tenth installment of The (re)Collection Agency, a post series where we bring you informal talks with comics scholars about their comics reading and collecting practices and how that intersects with their work. The idea is to open up the discourse a bit to integrate the personal experience of comics reading and material culture with the scholarly side of comics, through historicizing, interpreting, and archiving. I explained in the introduction of the first installment the origins of the term “(re)collection,” as I coined and theorized it in my dissertation project. While the installments of The (re)Collection Agency do not specifically focus on (re)collection the idea behind it energizes my inquiries, and seeks to narratively suture the idiosyncratic experience of reading and collecting with a scholarly context that asks that reading and organizing serve a further critical purpose.

While the first time I got to talk to and get to know Margaret Galvan was at ICAF 2017, she was a figure whose work preceded her. Our mutual friend and colleague, Dr. Jonathan Gray, would often talk to me about her when I would run into him, and her name commonly came up when folks were discussing recent conference presentations or articles on comics worth checking out. Hearing her work for the first time at that conference I was impressed and eager to learn more and to consider the implications of her archival work and exploration of grassroots periodicals for a genealogy of comics (particularly queer comics) that remains largely invisible to comics fans and scholars alike, but that also pervades American culture if we know how to look for it.

Dr. Margaret Galvan is Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She received her PhD in English  at The Graduate Center, City University of New York where her completed dissertation was awarded the Monette Prize for the Best Dissertation in Lesbian/Gay Studies. Her research spans over a dozen archives where she analyzes comics, captioned photographs, drawings, transparencies, advertisements, and other image-text media produced by women. She has received numerous grants to fund this work, including grants from Duke University and Smith College. She is now building a personal collection of comics in social movements for teaching and research. Her published work analyzes visual media culture through intersectional approaches She is currently at work on In Visible Archives of the 1980s: Feminist Politics & Queer Platforms, a book and digital project under contract with the University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold Scholarship Series. Her published work, which analyzes comics through intersectional approaches, can be found in journals like Australian Feminist Studies, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Archive Journal, American Literature, and Journal of Lesbian Studies. Margaret serves on the MLA Forum Executive Committee for Comics & Graphic Narratives. You can read more about her and her work at her website.

We sat down to talk over Google Chat on Friday, October 19.

Osvaldo Oyola (OO): Hello!

Margaret Galvan (MG): Hey!

OO: Thanks so much for agreeing to do this!

MG: Thank you so much for asking!!

OO: So, I have a bunch of stuff I want to talk about, but let’s start with something you sent me in preparing for this talk that I am really excited about and that I think will organically lead to other interesting subjects to discuss: your comic collection spreadsheet. Yes, I am such a nerd that I get excited over spreadsheets and databases.

MG: Spreadsheets are a big thing for me. I have one for about everything I study.

OO: So, what inspired this particular project of making a record of your collection of comics?

MG: Two things stand out distinctly. Over the past several years, Karen Green at Columbia University has been shaping the circulating comics collection there and at one point she shared a spreadsheet of the collection with me.

OO: Oh man, that must be massive!

MG: I peek at it every so often and see what new texts have been added! It’s a treat! A more direct inspiration, however, is that in the spring I taught a graduate seminar on archives. One of my students, Ayanni C. H. Cooper, became really interested in the comics collections of two of the spaces that we visited—the Sequential Artists Workshop and the University of Florida special collections—and how they organized them. In talking with her as she started to develop this idea, I encouraged her to read the (re)Collection Agency posts on The Middle Spaces and posts where you discuss your thoughts on collecting.

OO: I really appreciate that!

MG: Ultimately, she created her own spreadsheet for her single-issue collection alongside a paper thinking about collecting, comics, and archives. So, then, I thought, I gotta spreadsheet this, too! Especially since recently I’ve been collecting a lot more comics that I originally saw in archives. Though I extensively photograph the materials I’ve researched at dozens of archives across the nation, it has become important to me to acquire them when I can. I’m collecting mainly women’s and LGBTQ comics from the 1970s-1990s that appeared in comic books, grassroots newspapers and publications, zines, etc. Since I now own them, I can show these rare items in classrooms and talks. It has become important to record these in a spreadsheet to track the titles as I grow the collection but also to make content notes and track networks of creators across series.

OO: How we organize, research, and make meaning are all connected.

MG: Yes. When you’re researching comics in archives, you start thinking about how people collect and what they don’t collect and in what collections certain titles appear.

OO: I found my own relationship to collecting changed a lot when I started keeping a record.

MG: How so?

OO: Gaps became more evident. The nature of what became noteworthy about the comics changed as I got into the habit of making notes on each one when possible.

MG: Ah, so your record contains content notations?

OO: Sometimes. A variant cover by a notable artist, a cameo by some character, some other cultural note like if the comics code seal didn’t appear on it, etc… Also, my shortboxes are now organized based on the individual sheets in the spreadsheet, so I have a digital way to manipulate the boxes with less heavy lifting. I can rearrange and rethink and then do the physical labor.

MG: That’s smart. I am still working on the physical part of things. Also, considering what to do with different sizes of things like minicomix, zines, newspapers, etc.

OO: Looking at your spreadsheet I was immediately jealous of some of your categories! Like, “I should have been keeping track of that!”

MG: In what way?

OO: Like where you got stuff and when…

MG: I benefited from talking with Ayanni about her spreadsheet categories. But I still wish that I started this spreadsheet much sooner!!!

OO: That is a problem with keeping the record: the idea of going back and adding a category seems like a huge undertaking. My collection has more than doubled since I started the spreadsheet. So, keeping it up to date is important so I am not overwhelmed, but sometimes I want to go back and—for example—be more specific about the full creative team (currently I only mark down writer and penciller). There are always new categories of knowledge to discover, even about what you already have.

MG: Yeah, record keeping is important, yet not foolproof. I’ve encountered a lot of archives’ finding guides that only include titles of comics.

OO: Very minimal information!

MG: How long have you had the record? When did you realize you needed a record?

OO: I think I started it in 2013. It was important as my research on comics became more central to my work, but it was mainly a key source of dissertation procrastination.

MG: Productive procrastination–my favorite kind!

OO: The only kind you can feel good about 😉.

MG: Alas!

OO: I loved that on your spreadsheet some of your notable entries were just stuff like “acquired in Maine.” I am not sure why I thought it was funny…like so specific and vague at the same time.

MG: I was just too lazy to look up the name of the comics shop. It was a great comics shop in Portland, Maine. I got all of Kitty Pryde and Wolverine as one very affordable set!

OO: So many of the comics I still have from when I was a kid would be labeled “acquired in Brooklyn.”

MG: Haha. You know, that’s a big part that’s missing from the current spreadsheet: my childhood comics that are at home in Los Angeles. Mostly X-Men!

OO: Oh weird. you are the second person to tell me something like this during one of these talks—that some or all of their childhood collection of comics reside in storage with their parents. Why are they not with you?

MG: I’m planning for them to be with me soon! Didn’t have the space in New York City.

OO: Ah yeah, I feel that.

MG: I looked this up: my first comic was X-Men #24 (1993). That one would read: “acquired in grocery store” and/or “Because of the cartoon.”

OO: Ha! Now that is the kind of acquisition I am most interested in! Was it your first comic period or your first X-Men/Superhero comic? How do you know it was your first?

MG: Oh, I remember acquiring it clearly. It was my first comic period. I loved the hell out of that issue. The spine is now re-stapled by me. My first few issues of X-Men that I bought are VERY worn. It was not the first comic in my house. There were always my dad’s Superboy comics from his childhood, sitting around, moldering and fragile. But I love this history of discovering X-Men because I feel connected to a lot of people in this way. At the back of one of Trina Robbins’s The Great Women Super Heroes (1996) she writes about girls getting into comics through the X-Men cartoon and reprints a 1994 letter to the Los Angeles Times from a young girl who was writing at the same age and time as I was when I got into comics and complaining about equitable representation of women in the X-Men cartoon.

OO: Oh, that sounds awesome! I always had and read comics, but I didn’t get “serious” (at least in my own mind) until I started getting superhero comics at age 9 or 10, but I have no real memory of a first, just a bunch of overlapping and confabulated memories. Looking back at my own writing, I have found contradicting accounts about my early days, which I am sure I believed at the time.

MG: It’s okay to have origin stories, plural! X-Men were so big in my childhood. Not sure I want to admit this… but my friends and I would draw our own characters and write our own stories: “X-Women: The Next Generation.”

OO: HAHA! That is awesome! Not only should you admit that, you should make it into a zine!

MG: Yes, maybe I should scan those items and make a zine!  Also, connecting back to our discussion about archives and collections, I have ALWAYS been the archivist of my social groups. So, I have all of the X-Women drawings and stories saved in a notebook and a 101 Dalmatians folder.

OO: That is so great.

MG: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how these early habits are why and how I think the way I do now about collections. Because I was creating these things to make space for myself and my representations and collecting them to preserve that space. Of course, these childhood practices parallel the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s and its zine explosion.

OO: When did you know that you were going to be putting this predilection to use in an academic setting?

MG: The middle of grad school. Originally, I thought I would study feminist science fiction, but I ended up finding more a vibrant community around comics. My advisor, Nancy K. Miller, teaches and writes about comics, so studying them in seminar with her was transformative. Also, Jonathan W. Gray, as you know, is a huge influence. Working with both of them made me feel that I could focus on comics. And I started to learn about these women cartoonists in the 1970s and 80s who I didn’t know existed.

OO: Jonathan is a great guy.

MG: I cannot say enough good things about Jonathan and Nancy both. They have always been extremely generous and supportive of my work. They never said, “don’t study comics.” This was about the time that Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women (2010) came out and that led me to the archives and down the proverbial rabbit hole.

OO: So, going back to your spreadsheet, do you have a similar method for keeping a record for what you are looking for?

MG: The spreadsheet lives on my phone since it’s a google sheet. So, I use it when I’m in a shop. I also have a very formal method that sits on my desk as we speak: a post-it note.

OO: Ha! I love it and the doodles. I have a little blue pocket notebook I carry around

MG: You can see from the scribble in the image that I’ve just completed Action Girl!!! Thanks to the AMAZING comics shop in Athens, GA: Bizarro Wuxtry.

OO: OK. . . that’s quite a name…

MG: I call it amazing because I found so many things there and at amazingly affordable prices.

OO: (note to readers: Bizarro Wuxtry has in no way paid for this endorsement)

MG: Haha! Gay Comix #9 was perhaps my favorite find on that list. And for $5! I haven’t seen it anywhere else for anything less than $50 since it’s an issue focused exclusively on the work of Jerry Mills.

OO: I love the hunt and the satisfaction of finding something you’ve been looking for for a lot less than you imagined it’d cost. But the serendipitous find of something you didn’t even know you wanted/needed is good too.

MG: Oh yeah, definitely. In comics shops, I always tell the folks the kind of things I’m looking for because sometimes they locate other titles for me that I wasn’t thinking of.

OO: Right, and depending on the shop, stuff may not be organized as you would expect. So, I imagine they can also tell you where to look

MG: Yeah, Bizarro Wuxtry organizes a lot by size of the comic. So, things are all over.

OO: So as mentioned before and evident in this conversation about comic shops, where and when you find things is important to you. Why is that kind of info significant?

MG: Good question. Various reasons. Especially with more ephemeral objects, the location where you found it can be part of the meaning of it. I haven’t fully cataloged them yet, but a number of the grassroots periodicals I’ve gotten are from the Lesbian Herstory Archives when they’re getting rid of duplicates. So, there’s a history of connection and community that’s part of that. Also, a friend of mine, Maggie Rehm, sent me a HUGE collection of issues of Lesbian Connection from the 1990s-2000s that she and her partner owned. As I’ve been flipping through those, I’ve noticed some places where they made notes or circled items.

OO: Nice! I love that. I love finding artifacts of a text being read.

MG: The objects I’m collecting aren’t exactly new. They have history. So, how they came into my hands is part of that history. At a research visit at QZAP in Milwaukee, I learned of Rob Kirby’s early 90s comics zine, Strange Looking Exile, and I LOVED it. I figured I’d never find it on eBay or anything like that, so I reached out to him directly to see if he had any remaining copies and he was kind enough to sell them to me along with some other zines and such he had done.

OO: QZAP?

MG: QZAP = Queer Zine Archive Project. They invited me for a summer fellowship. Chris ([Wilde]) and Milo ([Miller]), the stewards of the space, are amazing. I got to spend a week living IN an archive.

OO: That’s a great story (about Rob Kirby).

MG: Yeah, it’s important to me that I got those copies from him. I hope to write about them sometime. That connection point between zines and comics, especially in queer communities needs to be further talked about!

OO: I am so impressed by your archival work. It is so important, as this talk has already suggested, it provides ways to think about another degree of texture in comics history and comics culture.

MG: Thanks! The archival work has led me to this collecting work.

OO: Those words— archive vs. collection—get used interchangeably a lot – what do you see as the distinction, if there is one?

MG: Well, I am definitely not an archivist or one who’s very specific about parsing out those terms. The way I see it: collections live in archives. Part of my hesitation here is that “archive” becomes this term that moves in a lot of directions and takes on new meanings especially in community spaces. I’m thinking Lesbian Herstory Archives or QZAP. Not everything they collect is necessarily archival in the way we often think. Like, not manuscripts.

For instance, libraries can be an important part of these community spaces. Not all archives are trying to preserve unique texts. Some are collecting things from small presses, collecting parts of a conversation about marginalized folks that aren’t always super well-collected in more mainstream libraries.

OO: So, there is different inflection of the aura of these objects vis-à-vis preservation and uniqueness.

MG: Exactly–especially with grassroots archives. But these grassroots spaces have been so important to my work because they’re collecting comics differently than university archives who get their collections from different kinds of  people. They help answer questions like: How were comics important to queer folks? Or, how do comics appear in materials in these communities that people outside of the communities don’t know about?

OO: There seems to be a thread in your work in thinking about how / where things are archived (or collected) limits or open ups how we think about those texts.

MG: Justin Hall talks about this in his introduction to the No Straight Lines anthology. He writes about how lots of queer comics were produced outside of the comics industry and thus not recognized as part of comics history. Think: Alison Bechdel.

OO: I am thinking of your article on Wimmen’s Comix. . . and the network of contributors you conceptualized.

MG: Where and how comics exist and in what collections are so key. What does it mean for issues of Wimmen’s Comix to appear alongside the mostly-male underground versus appearing alongside only comics by other women? Of course, it’s a more nuanced distinction than that. There’s a sense of a community in comics collections that too often make certain creators and folks still seem marginal.

OO: And how that door opens between those realms and discourses is kind of capricious and quick—like Bechdel gets a lot of attention in the mainstream now, but it is like she is the only queer cartoonist, or the only one that matters to those with the penchant to canonize texts.

MG: YES! For a while I resisted doing work on her for that very reason. But she is really important to understand as part of a network of queer cartoonists, and they all did a lot of work supporting each other’s careers.

OO: It is hard to articulate, but it is also not fair to Bechdel in a way, despite her success. Maybe it the issue of being taken for token.

MG: To be fair, though, also, Bechdel is huge! Dykes to Watch Out For was EVERYWHERE.

OO: Oh yeah. I just meant in relation to the mainstream. When someone is taken as “the” representative of an identity it can severely limit both how their work is read and the acceptable range of ways to represent a swath of experiences and stories that queer (or whatever marginal identity) cartoonists can tell.

MG: I am still trying to figure out how to map her publication history of Dykes to Watch Out For over two decades in a way that can be animated.

OO: I remember you presenting a bit on that at ICAF last year. That was the first time I was exposed to your work. I was blown away.

MG: Yeah, there I was talking about her little-known Servants to the Cause strip which ran for about a year and a half in The Advocate at the end of the 1980s. I’ll have a piece on that in a forthcoming anthology on Bechdel edited by Janine Utel, The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In (with Mississippi University Press). That work and all my other work on her is indebted to the fact that she’s a big enough name that she already has a bunch of her stuff archived in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. And I love that her papers are there because it’s a women’s history collection, so it places her in a different genealogy.

OO: This notion of genealogies also comes up a bunch in your work.

MG: I’m REALLY into genealogies. The notion that archives and the ways how we archive are political really influences how we evaluate those genealogical lines.  I often meditate on a line from Nancy K. Miller’s “Parables and Politics” (1986) essay: “Legacies have everything to do with the future of feminism.” I would add, “And how we write our histories…” I love Kate Eichhorn’s work on this topic in The Archival Turn in Feminism (2013).

OO: Going back to your Wimmen’s Comix network I loved how you explained that the creators on the edge of the network were connecting to other “comics times, spaces and politics”

MG: The center of the network tells us about that series in particular, but the edges, they tell us about the larger community or the connections between one series and another—Who’s in? Who’s out? Who might bring in another set of readers?—which to me is a conversation about how we identify or evaluate these lineages.

We often only evaluate by the names at the center. And we know that comics isn’t an economically profitable medium, so there are a lot of folks at the edges, always. Folks who are at the edges of a lot of different communities. I mean, part of this is how more grassroots comics publishing works. It’s not always the same community that produces one issue that produces the next issue in a series.

OO: Right, especially with how much time can pass between issues sometimes.

MG: Definitely.

OO: It is too easy to think about history as something done and past, rather than something being shaped in the present. When I was skimming some of your work this morning, your reference to the 2016 Angouleme International Comics festival debacle—reminded me that had happened.

MG: Such a facepalm of a moment. But it works well to illustrate the point of women STILL not being taken seriously as important to comics history.

OO: The internet is always on to the next thing, which makes our memories of these things vulnerable…But I was struck by the festival’s response that “We cannot remake the history of comics,” when that is EXACTLY what they were doing by excluding women!

MG: YES! I’m like, can I ship Franck Bondoux [the festival’s executive officer at the time] all of Trina Robbins’ oeuvre of comics herstories? When things like that happen, it’s like they’re not aware that they’re operating from one very specific notion of and value set of comics. We are always going to draw our own boundaries and make our own definitions, but we have to be aware of the implications of them. Who do they welcome in and who/what/etc. do they exclude?

OO: So, moving from history to the present, are there any current books you are reading now—following on the regular?

MG: There’s nothing I’m reading currently as it comes out. Almost currently would be Paper Girls.

OO: I love it.

MG: But also: zines that I get at zine fests. We have one here in Gainesville tomorrow at the Civic Media Center (another grassroots archives) that I’m super excited about. I love watching how mini comix become books, like Georgia Webber’s Dumb and L. Nichols’ Flocks.

OO: I am not familiar with them.

MG: They’re amazing. My students ADORED Dumb. So much to say. It’s about a woman who loses her voice and what it means to be a woman without a voice. So much more than that, too. There’s a great essay on it in that volume on disability studies and comics.

OO: Had you taught it before?

MG: No! It just came out in a collected edition Also, I’ve been teaching a lot of things for the first time since I’ve been developing a lot of new classes.

OO: That sounds both exciting and a little nerve-wracking

MG: Oh, never a dull moment.

OO: Do you have favorite things to teach? Anything you’re tired of teaching? Something you’re looking forward to teaching for the first time?

MG: Hmmm… It’s hard to choose. I will say that I’ve come to a new appreciation for why certain comics get over-taught. It’s frustrating how many things go out of print so quickly in comics, so I’ve had to be savvy about how to make materials available for students. Also, for a while I resisted, because it is over-taught, but I just taught Maus for the first time.

OO: So, you mean availability leads to over-teaching of certain texts?

MG: I don’t think it leads to, but I think it contributes to it. What stays in print and stays available is definitely part of it. Teaching in an ephemeral form like comics requires fancy footwork. And even with the boom of academic and popular mainstream interest in comics, things are still ephemeral.

OO: Yeah, teaching comics runs into that a lot. I haven’t even taught comics that much and I have run into it with Love and Rockets.

MG: I was recently talking with Nick Miller and Jeremy Carnes about how that’s even true of online subscriptions with Marvel changing what’s available online.

OO: Right it is like when you wait too long to watch something on Netflix and then it’s gone.

MG: I think also of the fact that so many comics are being produced through Kickstarter in necessarily time-bound runs. Like this trans anthology, We’re Still Here, which is so important.

OO: Right. And none of this even touches on the subject of also having to be cognizant of what you might be asking your students to pay for assigned texts.

MG: Yeah, I haven’t solved that one quite yet.

OO: Has anyone?

MG: I used to teach my classes in general with very minimal book costs… but it’s a real problem in comics. And you WANT students to support the artists of course!

OO: Of course.

MG: I do make sure to put all my books on reserve so that the library will acquire a copy if they don’t have one already. In the future, I might also put in requests for my local library to acquire the comics.

OO: I am all for comics being everywhere! That is one of the things I like about when comics are more ephemeral, rather than collectible, you are more likely to find them any old place.

MG: My favorite thing to do with students—especially those who don’t identify as comics readers—is to have them think about where and how they do encounter comics. Where and how comics circulate and appear in unexpected locations helps to highlight how comics are already everywhere, but our histories (right now) don’t yet see that. That’s especially true on the web today. But it’s also important—to bring things full circle—when conceiving of comics histories. It can explain why I’m finding comics in grassroots newspapers from cartoonists I’ve never even heard of before.

OO: Yeah. that sounds right. A kind of comics invisibility.

MG: In terms of the web comics and the need to archive, Leah Misemer’s forthcoming scholarship is one to watch.

OO: We are all Leah Misemer stans here.

MG: Leah and I are working on a special issue of Inks that thinks about how to rework our understanding/history of underground comix. Leah is a lovely person to collaborate with and so much of my work is indebted to being able to think alongside her.

OO: Sounds great. A very necessary project. Any sense when that will be out?

MG: I think sometime next year. We’re in edits right now. It’s going to be quite the line-up, I promise! Misemer! Galvan! Kashtan! Kopin! Saguisag!

OO: Well, my subscription is up to date, so I’ll be getting that. And speaking of Leah, I hope to have a roundtable in the future on The Middle Spaces about letters pages. I should talk to her about that.

MG: Ooooh! I’ve been meaning to do something with the letters in the Hothead Paisan mini comix. They’re amazing!

OO: Then I will make sure to get you on the elite invite list 😉. So, we are nearly out of time, but I want to talk more about X-Men because you said you got into them through the 90s cartoon (which I have never watched, btw).

MG: Yes! That cartoon still holds up! I re-watched it a few years ago with friends!

OO: Does it? I am skeptical.

MG: Well… #nostalgia. And it helps if you’re watching with friends and homemade cookies.

OO: Right. So, does the 90s cartoon being your entry into the X-Men mean you like Jubilee better than Kitty Pryde?

MG: No! When I started getting into the show I learned that they had tried to do an earlier cartoon of which only one pilot episode existed, featuring Kitty Pryde.

OO: Yes, Pryde of the X-Men. I think it was a spin-off of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.

MG: I acquired the episode on VHS and watched it like NONE other. My first academic essay, which was on Kitty Pryde, secretly pays allegiance to that.

OO: That pilot is on YouTube now.

MG: Yet, I was such a Rogue/Gambit shipper with the original cartoon.

OO: Ew.

MG: Haha, I know. I was a preteen.

OO: They are married in the current comics.

MG: Haha, for now…

OO: Everything in X-Men is “for now.” Anyway, now I am interested in the cross-influence of comics and the cartoon versions. Are you Cyclops yea or nay?

MG: 🙄

OO: Hahaha!

MG: To say it in a way other than through emoji: nay. It may be an unpopular opinion but I don’t think there’s ever been a version of Cyclops that I could stand.

OO: That is not an uncommon opinion. I like Cyclops as mutant terrorist who has rejected Professor X’s vision (since I think Prof X is a secret bad guy anyway). The favorite/least favorite superhero question is one I have found harder and harder to answer as the years have gone on. A few years back I saw a “Genius Talk” at the Public Theatre between Jonathan Lethem and Alison Bechdel—people who won MacArthur “Genius” grants. Someone in the audience asked them about their favorite superhero and Bechdel refused to answer. She was like, “None. I hate them all.”

MG: Haha. You know what I love about Bechdel? She’s really into Sex and the City.

OO: Ha! Yeah, I think I read that about her somewhere.

MG: Now, I know that they’re not superheroes per se, but Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha are definitely iconic.

OO: Well, YOU are an icon in the making and I hope that TMS readers will soon know it too after reading this.

MG: Awww, thanks! A pleasure to chat!

OO: Thanks so much for taking the time. I look forward to all the great work you have coming down the pike.

I want to thank Dr. Margaret Galvan one last time for sitting down with me and for her great work. She is a stand-out among the crowd of fantastic comics scholars I have gotten to know and become friends with over the last few years. I am not exaggerating when I say her work is a crucial contribution to thinking about the collecting and archiving of comics that should be influencing all of us in the field (and related fields).

Stay tuned for more installments of the (re)Collection Agency featuring more conversations with comics scholars. The next one should appear some time in February 2019. Until then!

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity)