Arctic Winter Games Artist Spotlight: Cole Pauls
The UBC Pop Culture Cluster, Critical Play Lab, and the Indigenous Comics Initiative will set out for Whitehorse, Yukon, on March 8, 2026 with a dozen Indigenous artists and a support team for the Arctic Winter Games. Here’s a spotlight on artist Cole Pauls.
Meet the Indigenous Comics Artists & Game Designers Headed to the Arctic Winter Games with the Pop Culture Cluster
The Pop Culture Cluster, with its partner project Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North, are traveling to the Yukon with six Indigenous comics artists and three Indigenous game designers to the 2026 Arctic Winter Games (AWG) to document and create AWG-inspired artworks.
‘Understanding Through Comics’ End-of-Term Workshop with Cartoonist Jeff Ellis
On 24 November 2025, the Understanding Through Comics: A Comics and Comics Studies Journal Club held an end-of-term comic making workshop in the IKBLC Peña Room with Cloudscape Comics president and local cartoonist Jeffrey Ellis. Jeff tells us that when Comics Studies members and UBC students completed the workshop with comics of their own, they too earned the title of cartoonist. Today we will be highlighting both the past workshop and the work produced therein, the art of a new generation of […]
Xwémalhkwu Hero Stories: Translation, Digitization, and New Teaching Resources Underway
Work is well underway on the next phase of Xwémalhkwu Hero Stories: A Graphic Novel (2024), with a focus on translation, digitization, and the creation of flexible educational materials for classroom use. This new initiative, which is led by ongoing Project Lead Tchadas Leo in collaboration with Drs. Bonny Norton and Liam Doherty in UBC’s Department […]
Field Trip Recap: Critical Play Lab Takes on asses.masses
On Sunday, November 16th, Critical Play Lab Director Biz Nijdam and two Critical Play Fellows set out on an epic, joy-filled adventure to Vancouver Island for Impulse Theatre’s production of asses.masses by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim. After the panicked search of multiple inboxes for the e-tickets and a little too much caffeine, the team […]
The Pop Culture Cluster & UBC Film Society Go Global with International Horror Festival
It’s our second collab with the UBC Film Society on the Annual Horror Film Festival for Arts Multilingual Week! The Global Horror Film Festival ran from Oct. 27-30 and was free to attend at The Normand Bouchard Memorial Theatre.
Icelandic Scholar Visit and The Day Iceland Stood Still
From October 22-25, 2025 we hosted three scholars from the University of Iceland at UBC for a range of activities including a guest lecture in a Nordic literature class, a public talk on Romani comics, relationship-building activities with faculty from Nordic Studies, and a public panel discussion following a screening of the 2024 documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still on the 50th anniversary of the Icelandic Women’s Strike on October 24, 1975. Panelists reflected on their own personal experiences related to the strike, its legacy, and the necessary work that carries forward in the strike’s wake.
Video Games and the Pornography of Death (Nov. 26 @ 12 PM + Lunch)
The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Noted Scholars Series and Critical Play Lab present: Video Games and the Pornography of Death with Dr. Amanda Phillips WHEN & WHERE Wednesday, November 26th, 12-1pm Buchanan Tower, Room 323 Please RSVP below in advance A light lunch will be served at 1:00 PM Amanda […]
Comics Talk: Romani Literary History & the Role of Comics and Graphic Narratives
Thursday, October 23 12:30 – 2 PM BuTo 997, CENES Seminar Room & Online The talk will discuss graphic narrative production in the context of the historical developments of Romani literature, with examples from Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe. As with other forms of Romani literary production, various factors intersect in the creation of graphic […]
Comics Talks events with Dr. José Alaniz
José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published the monographs Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (OSU Press, 2022); and Comics […]