Author Guidelines

General Guidelines

Only submissions in English are accepted.

Articles, forum texts and reviews should be sent to submissions@sjoca.com.

Please follow these simple guidelines for preparing your electronic manuscript:

1. Be consistent. The same elements should be keyed in exactly the same way throughout the manuscript.

2. Do not break words at the end of lines. Use a hyphen only to hyphenate compound words.

3. When emphasizing words please use the italic feature of your word processor software.

4. Do not justify your text; use a ragged right-hand margin.

5. Use a double hyphen (–) to indicate a dash in text.

6. Do not use the lower-case l for 1 (one) or the upper case O for 0 (zero).

7. The space bar should only be used as a word separator.

Files from any word processing system are accepted; however, styled Microsoft Word files are preferred. Keep electronic illustrations as separate files, preferably as TIF or PDF.

Article Specific Guidelines

Articles should be 5 000-8 000 words.

Manuscripts offered for publication as articles must be attached with an abstract of 150–200 words. The abstract is not to be included in the article document, but submitted separately.

To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this journal, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

1. The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with “Author” and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors’ name, article title, etc.

2. With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application: File > Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.

3. With PDFs, the authors’ names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat’s main menu.

Book review specific guidelines

Book reviews should be prepared and submitted in the same way as other contributions. Also provide a descriptive heading for the review. Each book review should begin with the author name(s), title of the work, publisher, and place of publication, year, ISBN number and number of pages. As a minimum a Book Review should contain a description of the book’s content and an evaluation of its merits. Book Reviews should be between 1 300 and 1 500 words. References to specific pages in the book reviewed are made in the main body of the text e.g. “(p. 23)” and “(pp. 23–27).

Forum text specific guidelines

Forum texts are NOT peer reviewed. They provide the option for authors to present comics scholarship that has the character of a lengthy personal comment, an essay or a point of departure for debate. Forum texts are not necessarily thesis driven and can provide an overview of a field, a presentation of scholarship or point towards areas worthy of the attention of the comics scholar community. Forum texts have a maximum length of 4000 words.

Style Guide

Manuscript Layout

Organise the paper in the following order: text pages, acknowledgements, endnotes, list of figures.

In the text (and endnotes): mark titles of works of art and books, poems, periodical publications, technical terms, phrases in foreign languages in italics.
Mark quotations of more than three sentences by indenting 1,5 cm from the left-hand margin.

The Journal uses the Chicago Manual of Style’s (16th ed.) author-date system. Please see www.chicagomanualofstyle.org for a more complete list of examples of references.

References:

1. Reference for the works cited list.

2. In text citation.

Article in print journal:

1. Lent, John A. 2010. “The winding, pot-holed road of comic art scholarship.” Studies in Comics: 1 (1): 7–33.

2. (Lent 2010, 30)

Article in online journal:

1. Howes, Franny. 2010. “Imagining a multiplicity of visual rhetorical traditions: Comics lessons from rhetoric histories.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 5 (3): 1-48. Accessed September 29, 2011. http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_3/howes/.

2. (Howes 2010, 5)

Article in book:

1. Kunzle, David. 1998. “Precursors in American Weeklies to the American Newspaper Comic Strip: A Long Gestation and a Transoceanic Cross-breeding.” In Forging a New Medium. The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Pascal Lefèvre and Charles Dierick, 157–185. Brussels: VUB University Press.

2. (Kunzle 1998)

Book with one author:

1. Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga. Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

2. (Kinsella 2000, 41)

Book with multiple authors:

1. James, Allison, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout. 1998. Theorizing Childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press.

2. (James, Jenks and Prout 1998).

In-text citations of texts with four or more authors: ([first author’s surname] et al. [year])

Illustrations

• Illustrations of the highest quality must be provided. An article cannot be scheduled for publication until illustrations have been submitted.

• Illustrations can be either in black ink on white, scanned in 100% and 1200dpi or in colour or greyscale scanned in 100% and 400dpi, and then saved as separate files, preferably as TIF. Illustrations fall under fair use according to Swedish law.

• Illustrations should be numbered according to the place they will have in the manuscript, and named according to the following system:.

Figure [#] – Author’s last name

• All illustrations should be accompanied with a caption, written according to the following system:

Figure [#]. [Comments to the image, if necessary.] [artist last name, artist first name (if two artists “and” between them, if more than two first comma and then “and”)], [Name of the comic, book etc.], [publisher], [year], p. [page number, if applicable]. (c) [copyright holder].

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission’s compliance with all of the following items. Submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor). The only exception to this rule is if the article has been published in one of the Nordic languages and not previously been published in English. If the text in case is a translation of an already published article, this must be clearly indicated in the comments to the editors

2. The submission file is in a word processing file format.

3. Illustrations are kept as separate files, e.g. high resolution TIF or PDF files. These files have been defined as: Figure [#] – Author’s last name.”

4. Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.

5. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in how to ensure a blind peer review have been followed.

6. The text is spaced with 1.5 in a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.

7. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements mentioned above..

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

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