Call for Papers – 2nd International CLOSURE Conference
Tropes of Comics and Manga
Kiel, November 19–21, 2026

Comics and manga work intensively with recurring, conventionalized situations: the superhero's backstory wound, the laconic animal reflection in the four-panel strip, the alliance of hero and antagonist against a greater threat. Such standard situations are increasingly referred to as tropes in both popular and academic discourse, and the term carries a peculiar tension between fan cultures and scholarly inquiry. Platforms like TVtropes.org have been systematizing an extensive body of classificatory knowledge for over twenty years, currently comprising more than 30,000 entries across more than 80,000 media texts, while continuously negotiating the rules of correct classification. The ethos of these descriptions—“contrast this to,” “downplayed here,” “subverted as”—deserves to be taken seriously. Yet against the studied, if often ironically inflected, precision of individual articles, the overarching question of what distinguishes a trope in the first place, at which levels we locate it, and how it changes historically, remains productively open.

In the rhetorical tradition, “trope” designates a figure of figurative language: analogy, metonymy, oxymoron. In popular usage, trope tends to describe the scale of a conventionalized scene and its constellation of characters. Bakhtin’s (1981 [1975]) chronotope, for instance, prefigures actions and encounters in characteristic spacetimes, just as the dark alleyway implies the mugging and the crossroads the encounter between strangers. At the broader macro-level of plot structure, Campbell’s (2008 [1949]) hero’s journey has also been understood as an identifiable trope. What lies between rhetorical figure, scene type, and macro-plot, however, remains theoretically underdeveloped, and this conference aims to address that gap more precisely. The goal is to move beyond implicitly assumed concepts such as “cliché,” “stereotype,” or “motif,” as well as beyond unreflective adoption of the TVtropes framework, which has so far served primarily as a starting point for ideological critique of gender categories and representation. The precise scaling of the trope, its structural, semantic, and iconographic determinacy, remains an unresolved problem (Kunz and Wilde 2023, 51–70).

Comics and manga raise particularly pressing medium-specific questions in this regard. Manga in particular has repeatedly been characterized as “database consumption,” in which the anticipation of categories and narrative structures constitutes a significant part of the reading experience (Kacsuk 2016). But do the recurring, often schematically simplified figures of hand-drawn comics also encourage a particularly “tropistic” mode of storytelling? Does the seriality of the medium play with recognizability and variation in ways that are distinct from other media? If comics are to be understood as an inherently parodic medium (Frahm 2010), this might be expected to work against the affirmative, quasi-naive use of tropes—yet such use is undeniably widespread. Where does this contradiction come from, and what does it say about the relationship between formal reflexivity and generic convention in comics?

These questions have a pronounced transmedia dimension as well. Many tropes appear to be so shaped by their medium that their translation into live-action formats long proved unsuccessful, or became possible only through modern CGI technology. In his new Superman (2025), James Gunn cites interdimensional invasions in the background of the image, as tropes that require no further plausibilization. A plot that would first need to establish and naturalize them would be a non-starter. Similar dynamics can be observed in live-action adaptations of anime, which enjoyed little critical success before the Netflix One Piece adaptation (2023), perhaps precisely in their handling of tropistic characters, scenes, and character designs. Transmediality becomes a test case here for what in a trope is medium-specific and what is structurally anchored in narrative.
Tropes are also politically far from neutral. The sexist “Women in Refrigerator” trope is only the most familiar example of how hegemony, othering, and intersectional categories such as gender, race, class, and dis/ability are reproduced or subverted at the level of the scene (Sina 2021). Whether comics and manga structurally prefigure tropes toward subversive or affirmative uses, or whether this can only be determined case by case, is one of the most open and productive questions in the field. It also touches on the ideological weight of trope literacy in fan hierarchies and fan practices, where recognizing, naming, and varying tropes constitutes a distinct form of cultural knowledge.

The 2nd International CLOSURE Conference invites contributions that engage with these questions theoretically, analytically, historically, or through ideological critique.

Keynote Speakers: Stephan Packard (Cologne) and Jaqueline Berndt (Stockholm)

Possible areas of focus include:

– Theoretical definition and scaling of tropes (rhetorical tradition, narratology, genre theory)
– Medium-specificity of comics and manga tropes: seriality, drawing style, character design
– Parody, reflexivity, and affirmative trope use in comics
– Transmedial and media-comparative perspectives on the translatability of tropes
– Historical development and transformation of conventions
– Ideological critique: hegemony, othering, and subversive use
– Intersectional perspectives: gender, race, class, dis/ability in trope structures
– Media aesthetics: immersion, rupture, and ambivalence
– Fan discourses: trope literacy, TVtropes, databases, and the hierarchization of knowledge
– Fan fiction, dōjinshi, and other fan practices of exaggeration or dissolution of tropes

Abstracts of approximately 300 words (in German or English) and a short bio-bibliographical note should be submitted by 1 May 2026 to closure@email.uni-kiel.de. Conference languages are German and English. Further information about CLOSURE is available at www.closure.uni-kiel.de.


Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail: Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, transl. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. In The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981 [1975], pp. 84–258.
Campbell, Joseph: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato: New World Library, 2008 [1949].
Frahm, Ole: Die Sprache des Comics. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2010.
Kacsuk, Zoltan: “From ‘Game-Like Realism’ to the ‘Imagination-Oriented Aesthetic’: Reconsidering Bourdieu’s Contribution to Fan Studies in the Light of Japanese Manga and Otaku Theory.” In: Kritika Kultura, 26 (2016), pp. 274–292.
Kunz, Tobias, and Lukas R.A. Wilde: Transmedia Character Studies. New York: Routledge, 2023.
Sina, Véronique: “Comic, Körper und die Kategorie Gender: Geschlechtlich kodierte Visualisierungsmechanismen im Superheld_innen-Genre.” In: Closure. Kieler e-Journal für Comicforschung, 7.5 (2021), pp. 31–53.