Shenandoah: Comics

Overview
Shenandoah, the literary magazine of Washington and Lee University, maintains a distinct portal for comics—a genre it treats with the same editorial seriousness as its prose and poetry. The submission window is rolling, and there is no fee to submit. Chris Gavaler, the editor responsible for comics, reviews work in black and white or color, provided it arrives as a PDF. The magazine's broader reading periods for other genres do not apply here; this portal is exclusively for comics, and work sent through it in any other genre will be declined without being read. The guidelines are unusually explicit about submission hygiene. Only one submission per author may be active at any time, across all genres. Multiple submissions are deleted without reading. Work must be previously unpublished in English, though simultaneous submissions are permitted—on the condition that the author withdraws the work immediately upon acceptance elsewhere. The magazine also states plainly that it does not accept AI-generated or AI-assisted text or images. These constraints are not incidental; they reflect a curatorial preference for deliberate, singular attention from both contributor and editor. What the magazine offers is consideration by a dedicated comics editor within a established literary quarterly, with no fee and no intermediary. There is no prize or payment listed in the provided facts, and no fixed deadline. The terms are straightforward: submit one comic, wait for a response, and only then submit again. For cartoonists and graphic narrators, this is a chance to place work in a venue that reads comics as literature—without the noise of multiple simultaneous submissions or the ambiguity of AI-assisted material.