Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s
Abstract
In the last fifteen years or so, a wide community of artists working in a variety of western European nations have overturned the dominant traditions of comic book publishing as it has existed since the end of the Second World War. These artists reject both the traditional form and content of comic books (hardcover, full-colour 'albums' of humour or adventure stories, generally geared towards children), seeking instead to instil the medium with experimental and avant-garde tendencies commonly associated with the visual arts. Unpopular Culture addresses the transformation of the status of the comic book in Europe since 1990. Increasingly, comic book artists seek to render a traditionally degraded aspect of popular culture un-popular, transforming it through the adoption of values borrowed from the field of 'high art.' The first English-language book to explore these issues, Unpopular Culture represents a challenge to received histories of art and popular culture that downplay significant historical anomalies in favour of more conventional narratives. In tracing the efforts of a large number of artists to disrupt the hegemony of high culture, Bart Beaty raises important questions about cultural value and its place as an important structuring element in contemporary social processes.
... Indie games inherit the rhetoric and aesthetics of other fields, especially indie comics, indie music, and indie film, but repurpose and revise the concept of independence in particular ways. Indie game studies can draw upon and engage with a growing range of scholarship from other fields -to -7 -name a few, Newman (2011) in American independent film, Beaty (2007; on European and American indie and alternative comics, and Hesmondhalgh (1999) and Hibbett (2005) on indie music. These conceptual links become especially important as direct alliances and convergences are established between indie comics, visual art, music, and games at events like New York's Babycastles and San Fransisco's ArtXGame. ...
As independent or “indie” games become more visible and prominent in the digital game industry and in gaming culture, the idea of independence becomes increasingly difficult to pin down. This short paper provides a starting point for scholars interested in studying indie games. Beginning with a mission statement that addresses some of the challenges and opportunities of indie game studies, the paper surveys eleven years of research on the history, theory, political economy, and socio-cultural aspects of indie games and highlights tensions or gaps. The paper concludes by identifying productive avenues for future inquiry, arguing that indie games should be more fully integrated into game studies as a field.
... Closely related to the transformation of European graphic literature in the 1990s (Beaty 2008), graphic subgenres like reportage, inaugurated in the 1990s by Joe Sacco, and travel writing with visual narratives have flourished. Widely distributed newspapers (like Courrier International), specialized journals (like the Beaux Arts Magazine), and hybrid-format magazines (like La revue dessinée or XXI) have published various issues on political graphic narratives and migration. ...
Following its substantial diversification over the past two decades, graphic literature now occupies numerous symbolic locations within both the artistic field and other areas of representation and social discourse. While notably (auto)biographical, testimonial, and non-fictional graphic storytelling has contributed to the medium’s increased legitimization and visibility, it has also become fertile in addressing complex political issues such as war, displacement, and migration. Yet these newly “engaged” productions of a polysemic medium touch on several complex, partly interrelated questions. On the one hand lingers the reduction to the solely illustrative, on the other the suspicion of simplification and superficiality – all of which cannot be easily dismissed when graphic texts become simple pre-texts for other presumably extra-textual matter: identity, politics, society, and so on. However, like in the case of literature, certain forms of fictionalization and aesthetic play may meet with (ethical) reservations for topical issues which seem to rather call for “serious” and “factual” attention. And, of course, discursive and visual expression entertains a multiple relationship, where one may compensate for, double, or strategically contrast the other. Informed by such interrogations about the specificity of the medium and the intricacy of its new “engaged” formats, this essay focuses on the graphic work on migration and displacement of selected contemporary Francophone authors (Edmond Baudoin and Troubs, Yvan Alagbé, Jean-Philippe Stassen) and discusses several ways of representing and reflecting on death of migrants and refugees in these narratives. It will demonstrate that writing about such sensitive problems does not have the same scenographical implications, nor does it trigger the same (empathetic and critical) response as drawing them. This ultimately reveals that the aesthetic and political relevance of these graphic works lies in the medium’s characteristic interplay between text and image.
... Perspectivas críticas más recientes, como las de David Herman (2002), Lisa El Refaie (2012), Hillary Chute (2010), Michael Chaney (2011) y Andrew Kunka (2017) consideran la autobiografía gráfica como un novedoso artefacto artístico-literario, que a partir de la discursividad cruzada entre imagen y palabra, construye una genuina idiosincrasia híbrida tanto desde la arena literaria como desde las artes visuales. La autobiografía gráfica, también llamada memoir gráfico (Herman, 2011), autográfico (Whitlock, 2006) o cómic autobiográfico (Beaty, 2007), imbrica modos textuales visuales y verbales que construyen una narrativa del yo. A diferencia de las más extensas novelas gráficas, los Atenea 526 II Sem. ...
En el devenir de la pandemia por covid-19, la literatura constituye una de las tantas formas de agencia para resignificar una emergente cosmovisión gestada a raíz de la megacrisis. Esta dejó al descubierto cambios profundos en las interacciones humanas y sociales, entre ellos, se acentuaron los procesos de otrorización y segregación hacia los inmigrantes y ciudadanos de minorías étnicas. A partir de la relación otredad/pan-demia, este trabajo propone el análisis de dos textos: “You Clap for Me Now”, poema de Darren Smith, y “The Wuhan I know”, autobiografía gráfica de Laura Gao. Partimos de la hipótesis de que en ambos textos, la condición de ser otro emerge como parte del complejo entramado de la crisis pandémica, revelando la tensión entre la perdurable dicotomía de la modernidad “mismidad y otredad”. Concluimos que “The Wuhan I know” humaniza y construye una dimensión identitaria de Wuhan, contraponiéndose a la retórica racista de los regímenes dominantes de representación que surgieron du-rante la pandemia. En tanto, “You Clap for Me Now” edifica un marco social en el que la figura del extranjero se deconstruye a partir de una plataforma metafórica compartida con el virus pandémico.
... As for graphic autobiography, in particular, more recent critical perspectives, such as those of El Refaie (2012) and Herman (2002) consider it as a genuine artistic product, whose porosity builds a hybrid idiosyncrasy both from the literary arena and from the visual arts. Graphic autobiography, also called graphic memoir, autographic (Whitlock 2006), or autobiographical comic (Beaty, 2007) imbricate visual and verbal textual modes that construct a narrative of the self. Unlike the more extensive graphic novels, graphic memoirs stick their narrative to a particularly significant moment or episode in the life of a subject (Herman, 2011). ...
This paper aims to analyze the graphic memoir "The Wuhan I know" (Gao, 2020) published on the WWW and social networks during the first stage of the Covid-19 pandemic. The comic narrates the discrimination towards Asians and, particularly, towards Wuhanese in the United States during the pandemic. The comic is approached from a postcolonial perspective and nodal conceptual concepts such as ideology, identity, and Otherness. Umberto Eco's theory (2008) has been followed to study the structure of the comic as an ideological statement. The analytical reading concludes that in the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, “The Wuhan I Know” acquires epistemic salience in a continuum of discriminatory discourses that it attempts to deconstruct.
... But after issue 14 (2000), Allen, also a monograph by artist Isabel Carvalho, all of their production would be printed professionally in offset. However, as it was happening elsewhere in the European independent comics scene, singular format solutions were chosen according to the particular project (see Baetens, 1998 andBeaty, 2007). Lemos-Grosz' issues was entirely silkscreened. ...
... But after issue 14 (2000), Allen, also a monograph by artist Isabel Carvalho, all of their production would be printed professionally in offset. However, as it was happening elsewhere in the European independent comics scene, singular format solutions were chosen according to the particular project (see Baetens, 1998 andBeaty, 2007). Lemos-Grosz' issues was entirely silkscreened. ...
... In his manifest, Menu was attempting to insulate the Association's book catalog from the sensibilities of the Franco-Belgian mainstream comics industry. While words such as "avant-garde" rely on sets of cultural appreciation criteria that assume distinctions between high and low form of artistic engagement (Beaty, 2007), and might seem dated to the contemporary reader, Menu's claim to belong in a counter-institutional movance with a certain modernist ethos, thematizes the conflicting relations of the comics industry with contemporary art. His infectious negativity has been rarely expressed in the comics world, or in the counter-cultural comics scene of the french speaking underground. ...
En este artículo examino el proceso de composición de mi libro Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge, publicado en 2018 y bajo el catálogo de libros de ocho editoriales de cómics. Abrégé fue producido siguiendo los preceptos de la ontografía, un modelo de representación conceptual de objetos teorizado por el diseñador de videojuegos y filósofo de la Ontología Orientada a Objetos Ian Bogost. Abrégé presenta una tipología visual y personal de grafemas extraídos de un reservorio compartido de la tradición de la historieta franco-belga, donde se pueden encontrar una variedad de proto-memes de cómics, dispositivos metanarrativos, elementos paratextuales y bloques de construcción de la historieta europea.
... In his manifest, Menu was attempting to insulate the Association's book catalog from the sensibilities of the Franco-Belgian mainstream comics industry. While words such as "avant-garde" rely on sets of cultural appreciation criteria that assume distinctions between high and low form of artistic engagement (Beaty, 2007), and might seem dated to the contemporary reader, Menu's claim to belong in a counter-institutional movance with a certain modernist ethos, thematizes the conflicting relations of the comics industry with contemporary art. His infectious negativity has been rarely expressed in the comics world, or in the counter-cultural comics scene of the french speaking underground. ...
El propósito de este artículo es describir las estrategias narrativas que se emplean en “Sátira Latina” de Mariana Paraizo (2015) como un ejemplo de una narración que desorganiza el tiempo histórico teleológico. A partir del análisis del uso de las viñetas y las conexiones intertextuales con los géneros noticiosos y satíricos, se justifica que el cómic presenta una narración experimental con un estilo que más que emplear secuencias problematiza la idea misma de secuencialidad visual al momento de accionar actos de memoria subjetivos que tensionan hechos oficiales.
... In this sense, Ristorcelli's graphic novel must be read alongside recent developments in the comics world. Since the 1990s, European comics have increasingly incorporated techniques from the fine arts, reemphasizing the visual and pictorial aspects of the medium (Beaty 2007). There has been an influx of intermedial exchanges, of other techniques and concepts into the work of cartoonists, which is not limited to the book trade but also moves into the white cube of museums and galleries. ...
Cultural memory in comics studies mostly seems to revolve around nonfictional graphic novels tackling major historical events. Drawing on recent trends in cultural memory studies, this paper focuses on Jacques Ristorcelli‘s Les Écrans (2014) as an experimental counterpoint where memory is animated by the author’s use of collage. Delving into an ‘archive’ of heterogeneous elements, Les Écrans borrows from old war comics in a way that reflexively constructs a discourse on the past of the medium and its memory. Through the analysis of Ristorcelli’s book, this paper highlights how collage can function in comics as a work of memory that reaches back to appropriative practices common to both readers and fine artists.
... This same technique has been adopted by the antholôgy Laiþþu. (Beaty 2007,1"31)2 ...
Montenegro examines the graphic novel Poncho fue (2017) by Argentine female comics artist Sole Otero. This fictionalised autobiographical graphic narrative allows Montenegro to explore the implications of self-referentiality in narrating and illustrating personal experiences of domestic abuse. This chapter considers female subjectivity through the enunciative graphic voice and the portrayal of the autobiographical self. Remembering, recounting and drawing personal experiences serve to examine themes of memory, trauma and self-depiction, termed ‘self-drawgraphies’. Poncho fue is a personal story and yet Montenegro argues that it holds universal value in writing and speaking out on abuse and in graphically portraying psychological violence against women. By analysing Otero's graphic novel, this chapter aims to contribute to the broader discourse on female subjectivity and abuse in graphic narratives by women.
Mon but, dans cet article, est de présenter et analyser la revue PLANCHES , créée par Sandra Vilder et Émilie Dagenais en 2014. Dans la première partie, je donnerai quelques repères chronologiques qui ont jalonné l’histoire de cette revue, tout en situant son projet à la fois dans l’histoire de la bande dessinée québécoise (BDQ) et dans le marché francophone mondialisé des revues de bandes dessinées (dominé par celui de l’Europe francophone). Dans la deuxième partie, je ferai une étude systématique des dix-huit numéros de manière quantitative et qualitative pour révéler à la fois les structures, les idées et les tendances esthétiques de la revue, à l’aide de quelques tableaux sur la représentation des genres ( gender ) et des groupes culturels, linguistiques et ethniques et d’une analyse des catégories de BD (BD de reportage, BD humoristique, etc.). Je pourrai alors conclure mon texte en abordant la ligne éditoriale de PLANCHES et les raisons possibles de son succès et de sa précarité.
Justice Framed is born of the passionate and rich – though not always peaceful or courteous – nexus between two long-time companions: comics and law. Comics are utterly gripped by issues of legality, order and justice, but their theoretical and ideological partnership has been conspicuously neglected in legal scholarship. Even in the emerging field of law and the visual, or in the firmly established disciplines of criminal justice studies or law and popular culture, jurisprudential and sociopolitical texts addressing law’s manifestations in, around, and through the comic frame are still an odd rarity – with a few remarkable exceptions. While law’s fascination with control and order is reflected in the existing literature dealing with the governance of comics by legal rules – the law of art – the ways in which comics imagine and depict law – the art of law – are still academically underestimated and underexamined. Fortunately, the situation seems to be rapidly ameliorating. This special issue of Law Text Culture reflects a growing interest among scholars in the insight and opportunity comics provide for illuminating, developing and critiquing law.
Cet article entend examiner l’importance de la traduction pour l’édition de bande dessinée. Plus précisément il s’agit de montrer comment une partie des acteurs de cet espace – les éditeurs regroupés dans le récent Syndicat des éditeurs alternatifs (SEA) – se positionnent par rapport à cette question, dans un secteur où la traduction d’oeuvres étrangères représente plus de la moitié des nouveautés éditées dans l’année. Pour rendre compte de ces éléments, on s’appuiera sur l’analyse des catalogues du SEA afin de rendre compte des modes d’action de ces structures éditoriales. Dans un second temps, nous porterons notre attention sur les langues traduites par ces éditeurs, afin de définir la potentielle spécificité de ces derniers au regard du reste du secteur, où deux langues, l’anglais et le japonais, dominent.
This open access book offers a systematic overview of the relations between comics and religion from the perspective of cultural sociology. How do comics function in religions? How does religion appear in comics? How does the reading of comics relate to rituals, ethics, and worldviews? And how do graphic narratives inform us about contemporary society and the changing role of religion?
Contributing authors, use examples from across the globe to explore a diversity of religions, spirituality and dispersed notions of the sacred – including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Indian and Japanese religions, Anthroposophy, Hinduism and Norse religion – but also the rituals, ethics, and worldviews that pop up in the comics milieu itself.
In the burgeoning field of comics studies, research on the religious aspects from a sociological point of view is missing, a gap filled by the current contributors, making this volume as relevant to students of religion in popular culture, cultural sociologists and students of comics.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Faculty for Humanities and Education and the University Library at the University of Agder, Norway.
Bringing digital humanities methods to the study of comics, this monograph traces the emergence of the graphic novel at the intersection of popular and literary culture. Based on a representative corpus of over 250 graphic novels from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, it shows how the genre has built on the visual style of comics while adopting selected features of the contemporary novel. This argument positions the graphic novel as a crucial case study for our understanding of twenty-first-century culture. More than simply a niche format, graphic novels demonstrate how contemporary literature reworks elements of genre narrative, reconfiguring rather than abolishing distinctions between high and low. The book also puts forward a new historical periodization for the graphic novel, centered on integration into the literary marketplace and leading to an explosive growth in page length and a diversification of aesthetic styles.
Following Art Spiegelman's declaration that 'the future of comics is in the past,' this book considers comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. Cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Seth, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others have not only produced some of the most important graphic novels, they have also turned to the history of comics as a common visual heritage to pass on to new readers. This book is a full-length study of contemporary cartoonists when they are at work as historians: it offers a detailed description of how they draw from the archives of comics history, examining the different gestures of collecting, curating, reprinting, forging, swiping, and undrawing that give shape to their engagement with the past. In recognizing these different acts of transmission, this book argues for a material and vernacular history of how comics are remembered, shared, and recirculated over time.
In the 1980s, Farid Boudjellal, José Jover and Larbi Mechkour published “Aziz Bricolo,” a humor-based comics series, in Pif, a children’s periodical associated with the French Communist party. The series marked a postcolonial turn in French comics featuring multicultural groups of children as protagonists, a genre with a history reaching far back into the colonial period. “Aziz Bricolo” broke with the previous dominant paradigm, in which white middle-class characters were the main protagonists, while the history and cultural heritage of their sidekicks of color were often erased through assimilation. The technological wizardry, humanism, and good humor of Aziz Bricolo, the series’ primary character, constitute him as a young superhero and empower him to defend the disadvantaged, and to foster harmonious relations between different sociocultural or ethnic groups in postcolonial France, in clever and amusing ways.
In the history of French comics, Barbarella is usually perceived as a turning point towards the “adult” bande dessinée. Released as an album by avant-garde publisher Eric Losfeld in 1964, Barbarella is key to the Bildungsroman narrative structuring the history of the ninth art. Whereas Astérix plays on the ambiguities and multi-layered readings of both children and their parents, Barbarella—a sexualized space opera created by veteran comics artist Jean-Claude Forest—unquestionably targets a male adult audience. A closer reading of Barbarella allows us to nuance this simplistic interpretation of French comics history. The 1964 album was a reprint of a story previously released in serial instalments in the pornographic V magazine. When published as a book, Barbarella was thoroughly transformed by the materiality of the format, allowing for a new narrative rhythm, structured in chapters. The monumentality of the book engendered an auteur-driven approach to comics. Barbarella, then, represents a key moment in comics publishing, and a crucial model for the literary turn in comics. Its reception, both by the then-emerging fan culture and by the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle in charge of comics censorship, throws light on the difficulties facing the emerging “adult” comics scene. Roger Vadim’s problematic adaptation (and the new version of the book released alongside the movie) played a major role in the canonisation of Barbarella as a pop icon.
The transformation of comics into art was far from complete in 1975. Yet while many facets were still to come, the foundations had been laid. The critical gaze had changed, as had that of the public authorities, who had until then confined comics to the status of a cultural product for children, and in need of monitoring. Comics were no longer assigned to the sphere of childhood and had acquired respectability. During the 1960s, a new consensus emerged in France: comics were of cultural, intellectual, and artistic value for an educated adult readership—on top of the more traditional child readership. The 1980s saw the emergence of a real cultural policy to support comics, both their history and their creation. With the disappearance of nearly all the last comics periodicals, the 1990s were a time of great creative and editorial dynamism in the alternative comic strip sector. But the transformation of comics into art has a bitter counterpart today for creators: assigning comics to the world of art has made it harder to properly address the socio-economic conditions and precarity which undermine the sector, threatening the dynamism of a type of production unique to France.
This chapter looks at three books published simultaneously by the Futuropolis bookstore in 1974: Calvo, Gir, and Tardi. The store, which had recently opened, had become one of the key forums for the heritage of the ninth art. It had been bought by a couple of young designers, Étienne Robial and Florence Cestac, who moved into publishing. From this point of view, 1974 marked a watershed in the history of fandom: the market was maturing enough for expensive arty books to go on sale in generalist bookstores, as opposed to reprints circulating among crusading enthusiasts as had previously been the case. The first three titles clearly signalled Futuropolis’ cultural ambitions: first the republication of a “forgotten” master, Calvo, followed by the publication of works by two young authors: Tardi and Gir who were mutating from his identity as Jean Giraud to that of Moebius, his alter ego. The outsize formats reveal the publishing house’s singular vision of the future of comics: Futuropolis’ books were radically different from the forms inherited from children’s albums, seeking both to promote the authorial identity of the artists and to impose a unique visual identity.
En este trabajo se pretende analizar las diferentes formas que tiene el autor de cómic de representarse a sí mismo. Para ello se centra la atención en el estudio de la obra de Art Spiegelman titulada Retrato del artista como un joven %@&*! Sobre una estructura narrativa fragmentada se construye un inventario de posibilidades de autorretratarse que inserta dentro del discurso autobiográfico una gran novedad expresiva que proviene del medio utilizado: el cómic. Con ello se ofrece no sólo una poética narrativa sino una profunda reflexión sobre el autorretrato y la representación gráfica del “yo”. El Retrato de Spiegelman es un acto de memoria y, además, un ejercicio intertextual con su propia obra.
This chapter “Iconography and Cultural History in Comics Studies” returns to Ernst Gombrich’s conception of Cultural History which was indebted to Aby Warburg’s ideas concerning the scope of Art History as a discipline and some of its primary modes of operating, all issues closely related to the iconological methodology developed by Panofsky examined in previous chapters. Cultural History as a project has remained much contested and this chapter considers some of these debates in detail. Cultural History is then contrasted with the distinct but related field of Cultural Studies which emerged in the UK from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and had a significant impact on Comics Studies and the work of Martin Barker, James Chapman, Mel Gibson and Roger Sabin. These competing approaches to contextualising comics will be considered by examining the emergence of the British comic the Eagle in the 1950s and the lead character Dan Dare who appeared on its cover pages for many years. It will situate the Eagle in relation to the broader field of British magazine culture from the 1930s to the 1960s.KeywordsCultural HistoryCultural StudiesDan Dare
Eagle
Magazines
In 1986 Tiziano Sclavi published Dylan Dog. This commercial series rapidly attracted a massive audience of young readers by engaging with key issues within the transnational sub-cultures of their generation: animal rights, antiracism, the inclusion of marginalised communities. These themes underline the first series of Dylan Dog (n. 1–100, 1986–1995) reflecting the wider production and the political engagement of its author. By incorporating literary, musical and cinematic references, Sclavi empowered a generation of Italians readers who would identify in the transnational aesthetic canon of Dylan Dog. The identification between text and readers couldn’t be replicated in the subsequent two series (n. 101–324, 1995–2013; 2013-now) despite the continuing attempt to engage with cultural issues and to develop the visual style of the comic series by drawing from TV series. By examining the creative and commercial strategies developed by the authors of Dylan Dog over three decades, the article analyse how elements of the cultural memory of different generations may be represented in a comics series and which factors facilitated or impeded the identification between the different Dylan Dog series and its readers.
Although the chapter, “Variations of Formalism, Modernism, Abstraction”, noted connections made in Comics Studies between comics and early twentieth-century modernist art movements, as well as the implicit application of models of the avant-garde in formalist analyses of the medium, the subtleties of debates about this historical and conceptual category have not been accounted for in any detail. This chapter examines how the relationship between practices designated “mainstream” and “alternative” has been constructed in comics scholarship and explores the insights contrasting art-historical definitions of the avant-garde by figures like Clement Greenberg, Peter Bürger, Benjamin Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss could offer. Different framings of what is meant by avant-garde practice are applied to the case study of Escape Publishing in the context of the British small press comics scene of the 1980s.KeywordsAvant-gardeAlternative comicsEscapeSmall pressBritish comics
The chapter “Variations of Formalism, Modernism, Abstraction” examined a shift in comics scholarship which has turned to modernist art criticism in developing formalist methodologies. Often scholarship on the relationship between comics and modernism does not fully consider the heterogeneity of modernism in both theory and practice. This chapter examines the different uses of the term modernism in Art History and traces the development of modernist formalist art theory from the work of Roger Fry and Clive Bell in the early twentieth century to Michael Fried’s defence of high modernist approaches to art in the 1960s in the face of the neo-avant-garde. It notes some of the criticisms of high modernism, particularly from the 1960s onwards, and how they map onto formalist approaches in Comics Studies, before applying different understandings of modernism in an analysis of Alan Moore’s 1988 “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” strip from music-themed UK comics magazine Heartbreak Hotel.KeywordsModernismModernist criticismModernityFormalismAlan Moore
Heartbreak Hotel
This chapter introduces Art History’s distance from the development of comics scholarship as an interdisciplinary field and the impact this has had for Comics Studies, particularly in terms of the respective dominance of methods drawn from Literary Studies, Linguistics, narratology and semiology. It notes the ‘hidden history’ of art historians’ contributions to the foundations of comics scholarship, and what the range of art-historical methodologies offers Comics Studies in terms of addressing overlooked aspects of visual style and form, aesthetics, perception, materiality, visuality and the image. In addition to considering what Art History offers Comics Studies, including the questioning of some of its deep-rooted categories, concepts and procedures, it also appraises what comics and Comics Studies affords and asks of Art History. It outlines the structure and contents of the edited collection, and its focus, limitations and purpose.KeywordsArt-historical methodologiesComics Studies and Art HistoryHistory of Comics StudiesInterdisciplinarityPractice as research
The article provides to the problem of identity in autobiographical comics. In the recent years authors of comics have been increasingly addressing the topic of identity search, putting autobiography in the foreground. This study attempts to identify the most distinctive narrative strategies in autobiographical comics and to contextualise them within a new research field, one in which the authors' “experiments” in personal narrative are realised. The focus is on the two main methods of autobiographical storytelling employed in the work of comics. One is structured narrative and the other has more literary references and is similar to literary prose. The comparison of these methods has led to the question of the true identity of the author in the works he creates.
This chapter examines Allison Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, Fun Home (2006), with additional material from its follow-up, Are You My Mother? (2012), and the prologue from The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008), arguing that through the use of a queered mode of representation, Bechdel’s autobiographical narratives create queer “houses of memory,” (Jean-Pierre Wallot), as the vantage point from which to reconsider the childhood “fun home.” Her autobiographical narratives queer graphic memoirs specifically, through their visual/verbal hybridity, their non-linear approaches to temporality, and alternative constructions of the narrative around the self. They open a space where the vast archive of one’s life can be explored on the author’s own terms, apart from normative frameworks. The graphic memoir thus materializes a queer/ed home, rooted and mobile, a refuge against the processes of othering, objectification, marginalization, and exclusion endured by the author, a lab where the self is ceaselessly disassembled and recomposed, an archive that articulates the personal and collective aspects of queer and lesbian identities.
Building on growing interest in the development of the ninth art in Spain, this article returns to a foundational work by creator Pere Joan that encapsulates Barcelona’s role in forging the post-dictatorial Iberian comic. Beyond carrying out a close reading of the eponymous comic contained in Passatger en trànsit, it is important also to elucidate the cultural forces shaping post-dictatorial comics in Spain: from the languages of publication, to the legacies of visual style, the relationship between comics and prose literature, and the reemergence of Barcelona as a putative center of the comics industry. Published by Norma Editorial in 1984, the hardback volume arguably reflected the growing expansion of the Catalan-language cultural market specifically and the progressive linguistic diversification of the Iberian comics market in general. The theme, story and comics form of the visual tale – “Passatger en trànsit”, which was adapted from English science fiction writer Barrington J. Bayley’s earlier short story “Man in Transit” – establish a number of the hallmark traits of Pere Joan’s subsequent work: such as contemplative mood; themes of isolation, alienation, interiority and travel; and his characteristic use of landscape panels in page design. The comic’s spatial aesthetics also connects with notions of space, place and nonplace that were receiving renewed attention in 1980s Barcelona.
Relacionado con la tendencia contemporánea de la novela gráfica autobiográfica, cierto tipo de cómics puede ser incluido en la categoría de “autoficción”. Sin embargo, la forma en la que el creador manipula su “self” gráfico y la distancia irónica que se introduce lleva a pensar que nos enfrentamos no sólo con una “autoficción” sino con una “autoficción cómica” en la que le humor constituye un mecanismo narrativo muy importante. Los textos fragmentados que se estructuran de acuerdo con la poética del “gag” pueden considerarse en cierto modo un punto de fuga al modelo traumático canonizado por Art Spiegelman y su Maus. Paco Roca, Lewis Trondheim, Manu Larcenet son espléndidos ejemplo de esta práctica que se nutre de múltiples formatos como son las páginas de la prensa o los diarios.
Framing Lewis Trondheim’s Formidables aventures de Lapinot as a critical take on Franco-Belgian serial bandes dessinées, this article examines how Trondheim explores and exhausts the constraints associated with the medium, and particularly the notions of forms, characters, and roles. Changing, unstable, and reimagined character-spaces and character-systems suggest the metamorphosis of the eponymous character from a function into a sign. The character not only operates within the formal and narrative systems of classic bandes dessinées but also acts, through a series of transformations, as a sign of these systems.
Coleman’s analysis of Hernán Migoya and Joan Marín’s Olimpita tackles two issues that have dominated Spanish news media since the 1990s: African immigration and gender violence. Coleman explains how the use of binary black and white drawings and various stereotypes takes readers on an emotional roller coaster with a crash ending. This polemic collision not only facilitates a better understanding of how race and gender are constructed and hierarchized, but also recognizes the importance of graphic novels within Spanish cultural production. Despite a fatalistic view in which the exploitation of immigrants and the abuse of women are ingrained into Spanish society, Coleman suggests that the novel leaves readers better equipped to spot the red flags that surround them in their daily lives.
Industri komik daring di Indonesia sudah berkembang pesat. Perkembangan komik dalam platform web ini pun setara dengan perkembangan teknologi. Jika sekarang komik digital berbasis web menjadi medium utama pembaca untuk menikmati karya komik, di masa depan akan lebih banyak lagi inovasi dan teknologi yang memungkinkan komik menjadi sesuatu yang baru dan unik. Namun perkembangan teknologi tersebut juga berisiko untuk menghilangkan identitas komik maupun si komikus tersebut. Perkembangan komik hakikatnya tidak menghilangkan inti dan tuiuan narasi bergambar tersebut sampai kepada pembaca. Aspek pendukung lainnya adalah internet. Karena pengaruh internet, maka hasilnya hampir seluruh aspek produksi komik berubah menjadi lebih efisien. Dan ini merupakan sebuah fenomena yang menarik atas dampak positif kemajuan teknologi yang memungkinkan pola kerja industri komik dapat berubah, khususnya di Indonesia. Karenanya kajian ini adalah untuk memperlihatkan berbagai hal dimana yang terkait dengan industri komik daring. Dimana pemilihan Komik Tahilalats sebagai studi kasus popularitas dan perkembangannya di dalam industri komik, respon yang besar dari pembaca serta keunggulan lain IP Tahilalats dalam segi bisnis. Sehingga melalui Tahilalats dapat diperlihatkan pemetaan komik daring Indonesia.
This study investigates the rise of South Korea’s webtoon industry and the fan–translators who are contributing to the transformation of this entrepreneurial digital comics format. By analyzing the creator-owned thriller series Bastard (2014 –) and its various foreign-language versions, the authors demonstrate how cultural intermediaries are localizing content and cultivating new audiences through a process of 'collective innovation'. The characteristics of this crowd-sourced activity offer new understanding of the dynamics and potential impacts of this digital comics industry, which is rapidly transforming with only limited policy intervention. The study illustrates how the French digital comics platform Delitoon is attempting to compete in this Korean-dominated domain, raising questions for enterprises seeking to join this popular wave of digital media. In doing so, this study fosters debate for business managers, policymakers, and practitioners in Europe’s creative industries who are developing and promoting creator-owned content while challenging protectionist boundaries.
Julia Round’s essay discusses the relationship between the novel network and the comic book or graphic novel, using the example of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series (DC Vertigo, 1989–). Round argues that reading Gaiman—and graphic novels in general—invites one to complicate Michel Foucault’s concept of the author function. On the one hand, Gaiman features prominently as the comic’s writer, to the apparent exclusion of the various people involved in its production, especially those who create the various graphic elements of the series. Yet conversely, the importance of stylistic variation and innovation in the art complicates any simple reading of Sandman as Gaiman’s. The author function thus serves as a point of departure for the discussion of the comics medium’s fundamental differences from the novel and its associated connotations. Round argues that Sandman enacts the status struggle of the collaborative comics medium against the “graphic novel” brand and reflects on what this means for definitions of cultural worth, conceptions of the novel, and our understanding of artistic creation and ownership.
[fr] Dans leurs discours consacrés à la bande dessinée alternative, les « instances de légitimation
» — presse écrite et audiovisuelle, festivals, chercheurs universitaires ou non… —
privilégient souvent une poignée de créateurs (Sfar, Trondheim, Ware, Satrapi,…), un petit
nombre d’éditeurs (singulièrement L’Association), des formats particuliers (le « roman
graphique »), des genres emblématiques (l’autobiographie en particulier), ou encore certains
territoires comme la France ou les États-Unis. Or, elle relève d’une culture résolument
internationale. Multiple dans ses expressions, elle est pourtant porteuse d’enjeux communs
à l’ensemble de la production. Émergeant dans les territoires les plus divers, l’édition
alternative échappe largement à deux écueils souvent associés à la bande dessinée : son
ethnocentrisme et son amnésie. Loin de faire table rase de l’histoire du mode d’expression,
elle cherche, bien au contraire, à valoriser ce passé dans lequel elle plonge ses racines les
plus profondes.
Positioned at the intersection of disability studies and urban comics studies, this article explores the artistic form, content and social engagement of the tactile comic ‘A Boat Tour’. Though the comic’s credited author is Max (a.k.a. Francesc Capdevila Gisbert; Barcelona, 1956-), it was nonetheless developed through a collaborative process as part of the Catalan contribution to La Biennale di Venezia. Using both braille and a form of haut-relief braille-like texture, the comics sensory representation of a boat tour experience is significant on two levels: first for its contributions to a transnational disability culture and its general avoidance of the problems common in disability representation; and second for its innovations within the tactile comics form. These innovations are explored in the context of scholarship on the Iberian comic, the wordless and tactile comic, and accounts of visual impairment understood as a social construction. In particular, the work of Georgina Kleege, including her recent book More than Meets the Eye, demonstrates that the distance routinely established between visual art and the experience of visual impairment is itself an ableist construction.
Dans le contexte de la mondialisation culturelle des années 2000, les bandes dessinées circulent de façon croissante d’un pays à l’autre. Pour autant, ce passage des frontières ne s’accompagne pas nécessairement d’une ouverture des frontières du champ lui-même, dont certains acteurs demeurent aux marges. En 2008, c’est en réaction à la position périphérique occupée par les femmes en bande dessinée que le collectif Chicks en Comics voit le jour. Les dessinatrices qui le composent se proposent de rompre l’isolement en s’appropriant et en subvertissant les outils de la mondialisation pour mener une discussion transnationale autour des questions de genre sur un blog commun. Mené en bande dessinée à travers le principe du cadavre exquis, cet échange a favorisé le développement d’une véritable poétique des flux.
Depuis les années 1960, la bande dessinée a connu de nombreuses transformations de ses logiques de création comme des formes de sa consommation. Sa production s’est ainsi diversifiée en intégrant des recherches artistiques aux côtés des succès commerciaux plus classiques et sa lecture s’est diffusée au sein de la population française, notamment auprès des catégories les plus diplômées. Cependant, la bande dessinée conserve un statut culturel ambivalent, entre divertissement, art populaire et forme artistique à part entière. Sa légitimation reste en effet marquée par des handicaps symboliques, liés à sa forme et à son histoire, et conditionnée par une soumission aux formes les plus légitimes que le fonctionnement même du champ de la bande dessinée tend paradoxalement à entretenir.
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