Can Yalçınkaya’s Comic Scholarship against the Zombification of Academia

“[A]n experiment in making scholarly comics”: this is how Can Yalçınkaya defines his publication titled Homoti: The Turkish Gay E.T. Remake, a first-person essay conveyed through comics about “the weird and wonderful story of the Turkish gay E.T. movie”. Yalçınkaya is a Turkish-born, Sydney-based scholar, but also multidisciplinary artist, musician, translator, editor and curator. As a comic artist, he has authored and edited several comic projects, while - less predictably - resorting to comics also for academic purposes. In this sense, he is part of an expanding community of scholars who experiment with the comic medium to deliver their research. This rising trend is testified, for instance, by the launch in 2017 of Sequentials, an online, peer reviewed, open-access academic journal for scholarly work conveyed in the comic form. This is precisely where the comic essay about Homoti was published, in 2018 (vol. 1, n° 2). Yet, there is more about this publication: in the same year Yalçınkaya self-published a limited number of copies for Other Worlds, a zine fair held in Sydney. This version is enriched with a cover and extra pages - from which the quotes at the beginning of this abstract are taken. This comic essay is just an example of Yalçınkaya’s contribution to scientific research through artistic imagination, and of his ability to push the boundaries of academic knowledge both in terms of content and dissemination. Another example, quite different in nature, is Resist Comics, a do-it-yourself comic anthology about, and in support of, Turkey’s mass protests of summer 2013. In addition to contributing to some comic stories, as editor Yalçınkaya penned the written parts of this collective work, including an introduction, a timeline, and a glossary. In a previous contribution for roots§routes titled Ostinata e contraria: la nona arte in Turchia (year XII, n° 40, September-December 2022) I address Resist Comics as an emblematic example (among others) of comics becoming relevant in Turkey as sites for critical thinking, contestation, and resistance. In the present article, I abandon geographical and genre boundaries to discuss Yalçınkaya’s academic and creative work more broadly, to reflect on his endeavor to re-signify research and knowledge through a wide range of artistic practices and codes.