All throughout June, I'll spotlight a different web site about comic books.. Like with the month of independent comics, the month of LGBT comics and last month's month of webcomics, I figure I will let you comic book site/blog owners out there suggest your comic book web site (or blog) for spotlight during this month. So if you want me to spotlight your comic book site, drop me a line at bcronin@comicbookresources.com!

Today we look at the comics scholarship website, Comics Forum!

At its simplest form, Comics Forum is designed to be the home page for the Comics Forum conference, which has been part of the Leeds Thought Bubble comic book festival since 2009. Comics Forum is designed as a place where people can deliver scholarly papers dealing with comic books.

However, Ian Hague, the director of Comics Forum, also wants the website to be MORE than just that. Here's Ian describing how he sees the newly launched site:

[W]e're trying to expand on the aims of the event by providing an "always on" platform for scholarship, and a way into the field for those who may be less familiar with it. In addition to releasing information about the annual conference, the site hosts an archive of material relating to previous years' events and presents articles from a wide range of guest writers. So far we've had articles from a number of great writers, including Sarah Lightman (director of Women in Comics), Ernesto Priego and Esther Claudio Moreno (http://thecomicsgrid.com). Coming up we have pieces by Mark McKinney (editor of History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels), and Randy Duncan & Matthew Smith (The Power of Comics). We also host ongoing columns by Kirstie Gregory (Sculpture and Comic Art), and Ian Williams, Columba Quigley and M K Czerviec (Graphic Medicine). We try to update the site most Fridays and some Mondays if we can.

The two most recent articles were The Reinterpretation of the superhero in Seagle and Kristiansen’s ‘It’s a bird’ by Esther Claudio Moreno and http://comicsforum.org/2011/06/28/sculpture-and-comic-art-2-chris-ware-cabinets-cardboard-and-joseph-cornell-by-kirstie-gregory/

Sounds pretty neat, huh?

If you're interested (in either the site or perhaps submitting your own scholarly paper), check the site out here or go to: http://comicsforum.org/