David Bowie died on 10 January 2016. On 14 March 2016, inspired by the need to respond to Bowie’s death from a comics studies perspective, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship invited authors and artists to submit contributions for a special collection of papers offering alternative scholarly approaches to Bowie and comics. The editorial team, led for the purpose of this collection by Dr Brenna Clarke Grey, did not wish to establish thematic or methodological boundaries, and invited colleagues to submit research work inspired by its title.

Our intention was to encourage more diverse, open access scholarly responses to the influence of Bowie on comics, and to start developing a collection of peer-reviewed research outputs that would build upon and complicate our notion of Bowie scholarship by directly engaging with the comic and the graphic in Bowie’s work, and with Bowie's diverse and complex presence and influence in comics worldwide.

Though the original call for papers closed on 1 September 2016, we will continue to consider appropriate submissions to be published within this collection. We continue to explicitly invite submissions from early-career, marginalised, or underrepresented scholars, including those who are people of colour, queer, or woman-identifying. More information on how to submit can be found at http://www.comicsgrid.com/about/submissions