The dissertation deals with comics that combine a cinephile interest in film with methods typically associated with fan culture. These draw on film history in different ways, tracing, reusing and recombining cinematic images. Professional comic authors such as SeSar, Blutch or Charles Berberian, deal for example with their own cinematic memories or those of their protagonists, and combine seemingly disparate elements from different films in a form reminiscent of fanfictions. The project is located at the intersection of film studies, comics studies, fan studies and cultural memory studies. The aim behind this is to question the differences between cinephiles and fans that have dominated scholarly perceptions so far and to understand these cinephilic fan comics as an archive of (re)drawn cinematic images resulting from the close interplay between memory and imagination of their comic creators. Located at the centre of this ‘fan cinephilia’ is, thus, a transformative memory work that in addition to more traditional concerns for the ephemeral nature of film images focuses on their personal processing and creative appropriation.

Christian Alexius is a researcher in film and media culture studies. In 2025, he earned his Ph.D. from Philipps-Universität Marburg. The resulting book, Cinephile Fancomics: Filmgeschichten im Spannungsfeld von Archiv, Erinnerung und Imagination [Cinephilic Fan Comics] (Marburg), will be published at the end of 2026. He is an alumnus of the “Configurations of Film” research collective at Goethe University in Frankfurt and holds an M.A. in film studies from the University of Mainz. Alexius previously worked as a research assistant in the Department of Media Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg and as organisation leader of the Marburg Camera Award. His research focuses on film and media history, media and cultural memory, post-cinema and film culture.

christian.alexius[at]googlemail.com

https://independent.academia.edu/ChristianAlexius1.