{"title":"Spirou’s Origin Myth and Family Romances","authors":"","doi":"10.3167/eca.2021.140203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2021.140203","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the narratives of Spirou’s origins and backstory from Rob-Vel to Feroumont and Bravo, examining his progressive departure from the Tintinesque adventure paradigm. The Freudian notion of family romance, developed by Marthe Robert into the figures of the foundling and the bastard, is key, as it thematises the hero’s origins and early life in a domestic sphere. This motif, absent in Tintin, occurs in Spirou as Rob-Vel’s artistic creation becomes origin myth, and post-Franquin ‘naturalised’ conceptions give the character a family, a childhood, and related memories. The article examines how Spirou’s family romances, however small and allusive, create a connection between adventure and the domestic sphere and how this contributes to reinventing the Tintinesque model of adventure in contemporary bande dessinée.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79090406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reframing the Western Genre in Bande dessinée, from Hollywood to Ledger Art","authors":"","doi":"10.3167/eca.2021.140205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2021.140205","url":null,"abstract":"In European Francophone Western comics, intermediality goes beyond the widely acknowledged visual influences from Western films. The different sections of this article outline in several case studies how Western bande dessinée often translates an intermedial web of pictorial and photographic hypotexts that have been researched to different extents. Finally, this paper explores a neglected perspective on the visual representations of the American frontier in comics: the artistic production of Native Americans, which is very much present in Western bande dessinée. Building on this analysis and following the lead of researchers that have surveyed some of the main historical developments of graphic narratives, this article posits that the critical and historical study of marginalised visual narratives such as Native American ledger art could feature more prominently in comics scholarship.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"134 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77804426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Outlining Conceptual Practices in Comics","authors":"","doi":"10.3167/eca.2021.140206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2021.140206","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how the shortcomings of institutional representation in comics, and the shifting role of existing institutions in the industry, can engender a new comics practice. ‘Conceptual Comics’ mobilise the historical legacy of conceptual art in its capacity for institutional critique, self-reflexivity, alternative forms of skilling, and the prioritisation of context over content, to renew comics making and reading. My case study, Noirs [Blacks] (2015), a facsimile détournement of Les Schtroumpfs noirs [The Black Smurfs], closely approximates the original, with the same cover, number of pages, and format, but replaces four different composite colour plates by four uniform plates of cyan, resulting in a monochromatic deviation. Noirs demonstrates how a form, when no longer conventionally operational, can foreground industrial fabrication normally intuited as a transparent and mechanic process.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79973002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Cerisy to Oubapo","authors":"Thierry Groensteen","doi":"10.3167/ECA.2020.140103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/ECA.2020.140103","url":null,"abstract":"Thierry Groensteen’s memoir recalls the intellectual ferment of colloquia held at Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, subsequently the venue for two conferences organised by Groensteen himself. The first, the ground-breaking Bande dessinée, récit et modernité [Comics, Narrative and Modernity] in 1987, was a key moment in the history of the theorisation of comics as art form. Groensteen’s own presentation explored the threshold of narrativity in comics, and other noteworthy contributions included those of the philosopher Henri Van Lier and Marc Avelot, whose reading of Martin Vaughn-James’s La Cage rescued this masterpiece from obscurity. This conference also laid the foundations for the Oubapo movement, the production of comics under constraint, whose later development Groensteen chronicles. The second, ‘La Transécriture’, in 1993, was an early exploration of comics as part of a cross-media environment.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82668632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interview with Hannah Berry","authors":"Ann Miller","doi":"10.3167/ECA.2020.140105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/ECA.2020.140105","url":null,"abstract":"In this interview, the Brighton-based comics artist Hannah Berry discuses her current role as Comics Laureate, which has included the commissioning of a survey into the conditions of work of comics artists in the United Kingdom and has demonstrated the financial hardship that most of them endure. She also talks about the importance of mentoring, organising work around childcare, and how she came to produce a weekly strip for the New Statesman. The interview then focuses on Berry’s three published graphic novels, touching on the influence of films, the tension between storytelling and play with the codes of the medium, the use of gutters and text as elements in a horror story, comics as a corrective to fake news, and the political research that underlies satire.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80033698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Autobiography: An Autopsy","authors":"Jean-Christophe Menu, Fabrice Neaud","doi":"10.3167/ECA.2021.140104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/ECA.2021.140104","url":null,"abstract":"In this email exchange, Jean-Christophe Menu inveighs against the deterioration of comics autobiography into a formulaic ‘genre’. Fabrice Neaud maintains that the autobiographical enterprise is necessarily a dangerous undertaking in which a precarious subject comes into being, unlike the ‘proximate’ autobiography featuring a ready-made persona in search of peer approval. He employs a Darwinist evolutionary metaphor to demonstrate the colonisation of the ecological niche that houses comics autobiography by an ‘autobiography-lite’ better adapted to the market. He details the criticisms that have been made of his work (‘egotistical’, or formally over-conservative) and laments the tendency to equate artless scribbles with ‘sincerity’. Menu regrets that a distanced and selective portrayal of family life can be read as invasive of privacy, with devastating legal consequences.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"35 1","pages":"41-68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90223630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tintin ‘In Black and White’","authors":"P. Delisle","doi":"10.3167/ECA.2020.140102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/ECA.2020.140102","url":null,"abstract":"The Tintin albums that were first printed in black and white offer a revealing picture of the conservative, Catholic, nationalist climate in which the young Hergé was immersed in the 1920s and 1930s. Taken together, they offer a coherent vision of the world. Tintin sometimes takes on the role of a pious young hero, and a character such as Rastapopoulos may seem like a perfect illustration of the enemy as defined by a writer like Charles Maurras. But Belgian conservative Catholics also had a powerful social mission. From the Congolese escapade up to L’Oreille cassée [ Tintin and the Broken Ear ], Tintin is combating the same proponents of Anglo-American cosmopolitan capitalism. Conversely, he comes to the help of the poor and needy, reactivating a whole Christian iconography of charity, as, for example, when he rescues Tchang from drowning in Le Lotus bleu [ The Blue Lotus ].","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87227993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Bunker and the Desert","authors":"R. Chavanne","doi":"10.3167/eca.2020.130202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2020.130202","url":null,"abstract":"Dispensing with semiological terms inappropriately applied to comics, this article uses the concept of the ‘cube-panel’ to show that the comics panel is indissociable from drawing itself. There is no ‘code’, only drawing. The cube-panel is exemplified in Inside Moebius. Rather than sampling from a wider, out-of-frame space, it represents a retreat from that space, a prison or refuge, both suggestive of an inner life. The title promises just such a revelation, but it is in the nature of a Moebius strip, and of a graphic representation of the author’s self, for that inside to be inseparable from an outside. Two examples of the inside–outside pairing recur throughout: the desert, representing a creative void, and the bunker, in which the artist externalises himself.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"32 1","pages":"6-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89851070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Five Years of Editing Les Cahiers de la Bande Dessinée","authors":"Thierry Groensteen","doi":"10.3167/eca.2020.130203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2020.130203","url":null,"abstract":"Thierry Groensteen looks back over the years during which he edited Les Cahiers de la Bande Dessinée, transformed from the earlier Schtroumpf into a publication that promoted analysis and brought challenging and ambitious comics to the attention of readers, in a context where an earlier generation of comics studies pioneers had deserted the medium, and the experimentation of 1970s comics had given way to the dominance of more commercially viable series. Groensteen details the complex labour of putting a journal together, the recruiting of contributors, the coexistence of disparate theoretical approaches, and the hostility from certain quarters of the comics milieu that considered the journal pretentiously intellectual. The legacy of Les Cahiers endures in the form of major works for which it laid the foundations.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"8 1","pages":"37-63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74921294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Schemata in the Graphic Novel Persepolis","authors":"Fredrik Strömberg","doi":"10.3167/eca.2020.130205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2020.130205","url":null,"abstract":"It has repeatedly been suggested that the art in the graphic novel Persepolis by Iranian French artist Marjane Satrapi contains numerous connections to ancient Persian art forms, to the point of this becoming a ‘truism’, although the claim has not been subjected to in-depth analysis. The present formal analysis employs Gombrichian schema theory to identify visual elements in the graphic novel potentially connected to Persian visual cultures to discern if and how they might relate to their proposed influences and how they integrate with styles and visual conventions in comics. The results indicate that there are indeed connections, although integrated into the art form of comics through combination and accommodation, and that this reinforced the Persian theme of the graphic novel and potentially enriched the art form of comics.","PeriodicalId":40846,"journal":{"name":"European Comic Art","volume":"80 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80953833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}