Conference Team

Geraint D’Arcy

Geraint D’Arcy is a practising scenographer, and the author of Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design (2019). A Lecturer in Media practice at the UEA, Norwich, he previously worked at USW, Cardiff, where he helped establish the bi-annual Creative Comics, Creating Comics symposium.

Ian Horton 

Ian Horton is Reader in Graphic Communication at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He has published work on: oral history and text-based public art; colonialist stereotypes in European and British comic books; the relationship between art history and comics studies; and public relations and comic books. He is co-editor of two forthcoming books Contexts of Violence in Comics (Routledge 2019) and Representing Acts of Violence in Comics (Routledge 2019), and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

Dave Huxley

David is an Independent Researcher, previously a Senior Lecturer on the MMU BA (Hons) Film and Media Studies course. His subject specialisms are the Graphic Novel and the Comic Strip, Censorship, Hollywood Film and Animation. He is the author of Nasty Tales: Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll in the Underground (1990) and Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books, 1945-1962 (2018) and has written widely on American and British generic comics, and has written and illustrated a range of adult and children’s comics. He has supervised a wide range of PhDs in the fields of the graphic novel and the comic strip, horror, genre and national film and examined a wide range of Phds in film and media studies. He is the editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge, 2010-).


Chris Murray

Professor Murray’s research interests are in comics, film and popular culture, specifically the theorisation of how popular visual culture relates to other discourses (literature, art, and politics).

Chris has published on various aspects of comics, including:

        • the relationship between American superhero comics, popular culture and propaganda during World War Two;
        • the comics of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison;
        • Independent/small press comics (mini-comics);
        • British comics, specifically DC Thomson.

Chris is editor (along with Dr Julia Round and Dr Madeline B. Gangnes) of the peer-reviewed comics journal, Studies in Comics (Intellect Books). He is Secretary of the Scottish Word and Image Group, which researches aspects of the relationship between verbal and visual representation. Click here for contact details/profile


Julia Round

Julia is an award-winning writer and scholar whose work explores the intersections of Gothic, comics, and children’s literature. Her most recent books include Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (McFarland, 2014), Gothic for Girls (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), the co-authored Comics and Graphic Novels (Bloomsbury, 2022), and the co-edited Companion to Literary Media (Routledge, 2023) and Multimodal Comics (Intellect, 2024). She has also published over fifty peer reiviewed articles and book chapters on various aspects of comics as well as press articles and writing her own comics. She is an Associate Professor of English and Comics Studies at Bournemouth University, UK, and a founding editor of Studies in Comics journal (Intellect Books) and the Encapsulations book series (University of Nebraska Press). She shares her work at www.juliaround.com.


Joan Ormrod

Joan’s research explores gender and representations in comics.  Her books include Wonder Woman, the Female Body and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic 2020), co-edited collections Superheroes and Identities (with Mel Gibson and David Huxley, Routledge, 2015), Time Travel in Popular Media (with Matt Jones, McFarland and Co. 2015).  She is currently researching UK romance comics and girlhood and published preliminary research ‘Reading production and culture UK teen Girl comics from 1955 to 1960,’ in Girlhood Studies, (2018) 11 (3). pp. 8-33. She is an Independent Researcher, having previously taught as a senior lecturer on units at Manchester Metropolitan University in Film and Media BA Hons in The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. She edits Routledge’s Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcom20/current) and is one of the organising team for the annual International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference (IGNCC). Click here for her contact details/full profile.​


Roger Sabin

Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London. He has written several histories of comics, and was part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He is series editor for the booklist Palgrave Studies in Comics, and consults on curating (Tate Gallery, British Museum, British Library). The ‘Sabin Award’ is given yearly at the IGNCC.


Adam Twycross

Adam has taught on undergraduate and postgraduate course in animation, VFX and games. Previously the programme leader for the NCCA’s MA in 3D Computer Animation and the Course Leader of Arts University Bournemouth’s BA in VFX, Adam joined ARU in January 2022 as a Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Art. He has worked as an environment artist for Cambridge-based games studio Frontier Developments, and for the Neil Roberts studio on Macragge’s Honour, a graphic novel set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, as well as for a broad range of clients including the BBC and the Metropolitan Police Service. His research centres around comics, periodicals and the emergence and development of newspaper strips, and he is currently under contract to Palgrave Macmillan for a book on this topic for release in 2024.