Book Review: Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature

 
reviewed by John A. Lent

James Hodapp, ed. Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature. New York:  Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 285 pp. US $130.00. ISBN:  978-1-5013-7341-1. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/graphic-novels-and-comics-as-world-literature-9781501373428/

James Hodapp’s introduction, “Global South on Their Own Terms,” plays on needs this reviewer has called for in writings and teachings in the U.S. and abroad since the 1960s--that South mass communications (and, in this case, comics art) should be looked at from their own cultures, not those of the West; that Western-oriented theories, notions, and research methodologies are not appropriate in the South with these countries’ wide-ranging linguistic forms, reading patterns, and visual literacy levels.

Hodapp gets at these points, stating, that comics studies have “lagged considerably in coming to terms with its Eurocentrism and in offering alternative and better paradigms that place non-Western comics on equal footing with their Western peers.” Much of what he finds lacking harkens to the 1960s-1970s’ debates concerning a need for a new world information order, consisting of a free and two-way flow of information, the ending of cultural imperialism, and media that are accessible and affordable to the masses. Hodapp provides as main tasks of his book, to “conceptualize non-reductive ways of reading and understanding Global South comics in and of themselves without prioritizing Western legibility” and to avoid a “Global South one-size-fits-all singularity of theory and method.” These are worthy goals, but, as mass communications studies have shown, they may be a long time in coming.

Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature itself, an excellent compendium of comics research dealing with 13 countries and the Francophone Africa region, nearly all in the South, makes a start in satisfying what Hodapp seeks, putting comics in frameworks of “south to south exchange, transculturalism, and translocality.” For example, Jasmin Wrobel, while highlighting women as important to South American comics, focuses on the work of Colombian-Ecuadorian Powerpaola (Paola Gaviria), showing how her comics coincide with some Western successes, at the same time, how they differ; Dima Nasser, describing Egypt’s The Apartment in Bab El-Louk as a series of “visual poems,” points out how the book rebukes the graphic novel form, and Jana Fedke analyzes the Western comic Black Panther and its pretensions to represent African cultures.

Other chapters deal with the acceptance of Japanese “boys love manga” in Chile; the statelessness of Palestinian comics; an overview of the comics scene of Francophone Africa; a rundown of the contained-in-Malaysia Reach for the Stars comic; an allegorical study of the South Korean graphic novel, Grass (dealing with comfort women of World War II) and grass vegetation; graphic reportage overwhelmingly about refugee camps, including in Mexico; Indian graphic novels; the Ramayana epic and its comics adaptation, Sita’s Ramayana; an argument for using the storytelling traditions of Yawuru people of Australia to give an indigenous Global South perspective, and a split narration in a graphic memoir about a perplexed Korean-born boy existing in a Belgian adoption setting.

Though a noble effort to look at the non-Western comics through Global South perspectives, Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature and its contributors cannot resist depending on Eurocentric comics theories (actually, notions that have not even made it to the hypotheses stage) and research techniques, and mostly taking the word of Western writers (e.g., Hillary Chute is cited on at least 17 occasions).

However, delineating the challenges awaiting Global South comics researchers, which this book does, is the first step towards action. For that, and providing fascinating case studies of comics in every region of the world, James Hodapp must be commended as a pioneering voice.

Book Review: A History of Women Cartoonists by Mira Falardeau

 A History of Women Cartoonists. Mira Falardeau. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2020. 298 pp. ISBN 9781771613514. $24.99. http://www.mosaic-press.com/product/history-women-cartoonists/

 reviewed by Jean Sébastien, Professeur, Collège de Maisonneuve

Working in comics, cartooning, or animation was for a long time perceived as man’s work and this is slow in changing. In A History of Women Cartoonists, Mira Falardeau envisions how we can turn the tide. The title of the book shows that one of the ways in which change can be brought is by including more works by women in the canon and to do this by valuing work published by women from the early 20^th century up to the most current day. Even if the book is largely a history of women artists, the last chapters have a different tone.; they act as a call to action in order to get things to change!

In this book, Falardeau gives an overview of the work of creators from the United States, from English Canada and Quebec, from France, Belgium and Switzerland and from the Middle East and the Maghreb. The main portion of her book is structured according to these four regional cut-outs. In her general introduction, she acknowledges that her book, thus, limits itself to only a part of the world’s production by women artists. Such a project, by its very nature, can be celebratory, but deciding who should be included can always become an issue. Falardeau has chosen to reference a larger number of artists in the introductions she writes for each of the four sections that constitute the main content of the book. For example, in her section on the United States she refers briefly to some 60 authors; out of this number, Falardeau selected 15 for whom she has written a more detailed biography, while describing that author’s most important works.

Falardeau’s book is designed to bring forth the similarities in the obstacles that women are faced with, whether in cartooning, comics or animation. In her introduction, she makes a point of noting that these three mediums share elements of a common language. In animation as in comics, women have been less recognized than men and Falardeau’s book works to tilt the balance. This is especially important, for instance, if one is to have a proper historical view of the animation that came out in 1930-1960 period: among the women animators portrayed are two pioneers: American Mary Ellen Bute and Canadian Evelyn Lambart.

A most interesting aspect of the book is its comparative nature. If the section about the United States will not bring any new names to the attention of those who have read Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode’s Women and the Comics, or Trina Robbins’ follow-up works, including her more recent Pretty in Ink. Falardeau does a great job in comparing the general economic context and the prevalence of misogyny at different times in the four contexts that she has chosen to look at. For instance, Falardeau links the relative openness to women in newspaper illustration in the United States to the fact that America developed early on a very dynamic illustrated press and that the sheer number of positions opened some of them up to women. She notes that this was not the case in Canada, either English or French, where she finds that women only began to have a presence as major newspapers added women’s pages and children’s pages to their pages from the 1940’s on. In France, there were numerous girls’ magazines in the early 20^th century. However, very few illustrations in such publications were attributed, and even if it is likely that there were women illustrators, most worked in anonymity. Falardeau’s section on the Middle East and the Maghreb is the shortest of the four and she touches very lightly on the political situations in different countries only to point out that, if some women have found it easier to create as expatriates, others became professional illustrators  to work in their home country. Through this comparison of the history of the press, Falardeau compares feminisms within different national contexts finding more advances for women in the United States.

“Should we link this abundant production to freedom of expression generated, on the one side, by a fundamental tradition and on the other, by successive waves of immigration providing the most innovative ideas of feminist thought? Ultimately, the United States were at the forefront of comic’s innovations while the other countries remained a little more conservative.” (p. 154)

Falardeau also points to the differences as to how second-wave feminism entered comics. Whereas in the U. S., this was mostly in comic book form through counterculture publishers, in France, it was the publishers of the science-fiction magazine Métal hurlant who thought that there was a market for a feminist publication in the world of bande dessinée and developed Ah! Nana a quarterly that came out from 1976 to 1978. The title roughly translates to Hey! Gal, but is homonymous with the French word for “pineapple.” In the section about Quebec, Falardeau briefly situates herself in this. As women’s magazines were taking on feminism, one of them asked her to create a strip which she did for from 1976 to 1978. A few years later (1981-1987), Falardeau joined a specifically feminist monthly, La Vie en rose, covered political and social issues; it gave humor and cartooning an important place.

The small press movement of the early nineties embraced autobiography as an important genre in which quite a few women creators of the period found their niche. Falardeau points to the fact that there already was an important autobiographical strand in the work of many women artists before that and refers to Mary Fleener’s comics in the underground movement, Lynda Barry’s early work in alternative weeklies and Lynn Johnston’s syndicated strip For Better or Worse. Even if there have been some opportunities for women in the past decades, feminist criticism has highlighted the slowness in openings within the mainstream. For those who remember Robbins’ criticism of the closed doors for women at Marvel and DC in her 2001 book The Great Women Cartoonists (to which Falardeau refers), there is a sad resonance to be found in more recent criticisms in France against the Angouleme International Festival which has granted its Grand Prize to only three women since it was founded in 1974. One of the festival’s attempt to correct the situation was miserably sexist; in 2007, the festival had come under heavy fire for having named an event “the brothel”, “La maison close.” In 2016, a collective of women authors called for a boycott because that year there were no women at all in the list of thirty author candidates for the Grand Prize.

In accounting for current production by women, Falardeau takes into account the rise of webcomics. She duly notes issues that come with self-publication on the web, especially that of needing to monetize one’s work, and the fact that, especially for younger artists, webcomics have served as a springboard to get attention from traditional publishers. Here she brings to attention a few artists in each of the four geographical groupings she highlighted. Her book is a who’s who in this new medium, from Meredith Gran and her comedic Octopus Pie to the tidal wave of blogs in France (many of them by women in the early years of this century), to the more recent political use of Facebook posts by Nadia Khiari in which she drew, Willis from Tunis, a cat who commented about the Arab Spring.

Even if Falardeau’s book is mainly designed as a canon-making work, she has found it important to show how empowerment of women cartoonists has been possible over time. In a chapter titled “Three Examples of Positive Action,” she opens with a short history of the New Yorker magazine. Its liberal founders, Harold Ross and Jane Grant published a great number of women illustrators. Her brief overview of the less-than-great record of the magazine in the ‘50s and ‘60s in its openness to women is meant to show that there needs to be an awareness about patriarchy’s hold on the workplace, and on certain types of work at the decision-making level, if change is to be attained. She makes this even more clear with her next example. The National Film Board of Canada developed structures in the early 1980s that encouraged the development of a women’s cinema. However, it was only in 2016 that the organization gave itself the goal of getting to 50% of its productions directed by women. Political cartooning still is, by and large, a line of work in which the number of men is disproportionate.  The organization Cartooning for Peace, founded in 2006, has chosen to value the membership of women cartoonists in many of its activities.

A History of Women Cartoonists translates and updates Falardeau’s 2014 Femmes et humour published by the Presses de l’université Laval. In each of the contextual pieces that precede the portrayals, Falardeau added a new paragraph or two. Among the additions in the section discussing the United States are Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis. In the section about Canada, she features Emily Carroll’s innovative work with webcomics. The call to boycott the Angouleme festival in 2016 is one of the new additions in the contextual text about France. In the case of artists from the Arab world, she added references to a few political cartoonists, among them Samira Saeed and Menekse Cam. However, the editorial work on the book by Mosaic Press is subpar. There are words in which a letter is missing. Some names have not been checked. For instance, when referring to French academic Judith Stora-Sandor, her name is properly spelled on page 22, but misspelled twice on page 246 as Stora-Standor and Stora-Stantor.

Falardeau concludes her book by taking on a certain number of issues. For instance, in cartooning, how can a character be designed to represent humans in general? She notes that the use of characters identifiable as women will lead to an interpretation of the drawing as referring to women specifically. Can the universality of a situation only be represented by the inclusion of male characters? Then there is the issue of caricature --in exaggerating characteristics, one runs the risk of encouraging stereotypes. The situation is not much better in the work of academics who analyze the work of women, where the cliché is noting the ‘sensitivity’ of the work of a woman author. Falardeau closes this short chapter by noting “the obvious link […] between humor and power, and consequently, the difficulty for women […] to achieve recognition for themselves in the world of humour” (p. 247). Destroying stereotypes takes time. “This is the task that feminist women cartoonists have given to themselves. But which stereotypes? Those held by men? The way that they see women? Or the opposite? The way women see themselves?” (p. 258) The last words in her conclusion come as an answer: “Women cartoonists need to create their own mythology.” (p. 269)

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.

When Le Chat Was Put Among the Pigeons

 Musings by Wim Lockefeer

In a time of pandemic, it was no more than a fait divers on the global news cycle, but it was a fait nevertheless: the plan of the Brussels regional government to invest 9 million euros in a museum for Belgian cartoonist Philippe Geluck and his character Le Chat met with less than favorable, or at least mixed, reactions. Protest predominantly focused on the perceived lack of artistic merit in Geluck’s work and on whether the government should spend that amount on a new museum in times of Covid (while the Museum of Modern Art has been closed for more than a decade).

What is Le Chat? Why would the Brussels government want a museum for a cartoon cat? And why is everybody in the art world seemingly so set against it? Here are some thoughts from a local part-time comics journalist.

For the casual observer, Belgium’s government structure may seem like an impossible Gordian knot. We have three communities, each with their own language (Dutch, German, French) and their own governmental functions. In addition, there are two state-like regions that don’t really cover the same grounds, but also have their own governments. Then there’s the region of the capital or Brussels (with its own government) and there’s the federal government. Even I had to look it up, and I’ve lived here for more than fifty years.

Belgium likes to present itself as the cradle of European comics. Almost every sizable town has its speciality store, and comics fairs and festivals are all over. In Brussels especially you’ll bump into comics around every corner, be it in one of its several museums (including the comprehensive Comic Art Museum and the specialized Marc Sleen Museum), along the comics mural route, in galleries and art houses and in quite a lot of comics shops, both in French and Dutch (and a little English).

Even though Philippe Geluck is a cartoonist, his most important work, Le Chat, largely is not a comic strip. During its run in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir (from 1983 until 2013) his daily offering was quite often a single panel gag cartoon, with a penchant for bon mots, absurdism and self-referential jokes. Le Soir is one of the oldest newspapers in the country, and its readership is a perfect fit for Geluck’s kind of humor: respectable, highly educated, with a well-paying office job and quite progressive values, but not so much so as to ever be calling for a revolution.

Belgium may well be the birthplace of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, but for the longest time comics were considered to be low-grade children’s fodder, whereas the single-panel cartoon was a quality cultural product for the discerning connoisseur, with international festivals in places like Knokke-Heist since the early 1960s. Think of the status of the New Yorker cartoon in the USA.

Single-panel jokes have the additional benefit that they can be easily reproduced on all kinds of merchandising products. Over the years Le chat has graced numerous post cards, napkins, badges, magnets, posters, and lately, of course, face masks. Le Chat chocolates (Les Langues du Chat) in their collectable tins are a favourite to take along when visiting friends. Les Chat and its licensing is omnipresent.

Or rather, that’s what you’d think if you visit Belgium and land in Brussels National Airport (or, conversely, if you leave the country and want a final farewell to all the riches it has to offer). If you don’t consider the ever-present Tintin for a moment (or at least try not to), you’d think that Belgium is basically Chat country.

Which it isn’t. I’d wager that if you ask any one hundred Dutch-speaking Belgians, roughly 80% would not know about Le Chat or Geluck (although they would now, after all the hullaballoo in the papers). In Brussels, the urban centers in the south of the country, and in France, they are a bona fide hit though, with more than 14 million books sold.

Because, indeed, Geluck also managed to get his cartoons collected in a long-running series of albums, published by Casterman (historically, the publisher of the more respectable clear line of bandes dessinėes, such as Tintin or Alix). From 1985 onwards, Le Chat was a recurring feature in color in the avant-garde comics monthly A Suivre (also published by Casterman) and, as with most of the more popular titles in that periodical, later collected in up-market hard cover books.

All in all, Philippe Geluck is without a doubt a very successful creator, with numerous books in various languages, radio shows and television series, awards and honorifics a-plenty, and even an asteroid named after him. He could be considered, for better or for worse, one of the most recognized Belgian authors of the past few decades.

But even while he kept quite busy with his cartoon series, stand-alone books, spin-off books and animation series, Geluck also started try his hand at a different, even more profitable business - that of fine art. Helped by specialized galleries such as Huberty-Breyne, he started doing large scale paintings with the same zany, absurdist humor and, indeed, with Le Chat.

At high-profile art events like the Brafa art fair, Geluck is present with his paintings, offered at quite hefty prices, and limited-run multiples. And he is selling – this is the kind of art that fits the office wall of an accountant who wants to be more than just a dreary functionary. It’s funny (it has an actual joke that may break the ice), it’s easy (Geluck’s art style has been called a lot of things, but never sketchy or chaotic) and it’s largely innocuous.

Halfway through the 2000s, Geluck started mentioning how Paris and other French cities had approached him with proposals for a museum of some kind for him and his creation, and culturos in the Brussels government got a tad anxious. After all, haven’t they just lost Tintin and the Hergé Museum, to Louvain-La-Neuve-Ottignies, a provincial town in French-speaking Walloon Brabant (one that, admittedly, also had a university)? Could they afford to lose Geluck as well, and to France at that?

            And so, a plan was made, a site was chosen (a building that for the longest time had been empty, but that is situated on the Rue Royale, in the middle of the cultural heart of the city) and initial designs were presented to the assembled press.

After which a (small) wave of protests washed in, especially from the Brussels art world, with a petition asking why a museum dedicated to one man, a cartoonist with a simplistic style at that, was in the works, while the whole collection of the National Museum of Modern Art had been in storage for more than a decade, and while other (more serious, I gather) art was being neglected.

While all this was covered in the press and on TV, the Brussels, and Belgian, comics scene, kept strangely quiet, even though the Belgian Comics Museum had announced only two weeks earlier that it was forced to let go a third of its employees because it had attracted 70% fewer visitors due to the COVID crisis. In addition to the rent from the book store and coffee shop, tickets are the only source of income of this unique Museum.

            Philippe Geluck seemed quite shocked by all the hubbub the plans for his museum had caused. During a television debate on commercial station RTL he announced that, if a better goal for the building could be found, he’d gladly step aside.

            So, what to do? Perhaps turn the Rue Royal building into a modern art museum and support the already existing Comics Museum? Give Le Chat its own wing there? For the government bodies involved in the affair, nothing seems to have changed in spite of any controversy. Maybe we should simply wait a couple more years. After all, Geluck is still alive and very much kicking, while other bigwigs of the Belgian art world only got their museums long after their demises. 

 A version of this will be published in print in IJOCA 23-1.

About four comic art exhibits in France in the summer of 2019

About four comic art exhibits in France in the summer of 2019

Jean-Paul Gabilliet

Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Sempé en liberté, itinéraire d’un dessinateur d’humour (Sempé at large: a humor cartoonist’s itinerary). Bordeaux: Musée Mer Marine. May 29-October 6, 2019.

Jack Kirby : la galaxie des super-héros (Jack Kirby: the galaxy of superheroes). Louise Hallet and Bernard Mahé. Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, Normandy: Musée Thomas Henry. May 25-September 1, 2019.

Scientifiction - Blake et Mortimer au musée des arts et métiers. Thierry Bellefroid and Eric Dubois. Paris: Musée des Arts et Métiers. June 26, 2019-January 20, 2020.

Histoire de l’art cherche personnages… (Art history looking for characters…). Bordeaux: CAPC. June 20, 2019 thru February 2, 2020.

Holidaymakers (or wandering scholars) engaging in comic art tourism will possibly remember France as their destination of choice in the summer of 2019. Even for a country where museums of all sizes nationwide seem to have developed a particular liking for funny books since the early 21st century, this estival surge of exhibitions giving pride of place to comic art appears as an unusually happy coincidence, especially given the geographical diversity of the locations featuring some of the medium’s luminaries. Another worthwhile point is that each of those events highlights a distinct approach to comic art exhibiting. Although comics have been displayed in museums and galleries increasingly routinely all over the world in the last five decades, the challenge that curators have to meet is to constantly reinvent the museographic approaches to the medium to avoid rehashing the “the artist and his/her work” pattern which, however appealing to mainstream media, way too often frames the public perception of the medium as a middlebrow, petit-bourgeois ersatz of creator-based fine-arts history. Career retrospectives of cartoonists are not intrinsically flawed (two will be reviewed below), but they should not be the only format brought to bear to develop the museography of comic art.

Poster of the Sempé show.

            Sempé en liberté, itinéraire d’un dessinateur d’humour (Sempé at large: a humor cartoonist’s itinerary) exemplifies the most classical form of monographic comic art museography. It’s apparently odd location­—a museum dedicated to oceanography and the history of sea navigation—has nothing to do with any particular connection of the artist with seafaring, but a lot with his personal history as a Bordeaux native. The exhibit displays close to 350 pieces created by Jean-Jacques Sempé, a now-elderly cartoonist whose fame rests on very different pillars in France and the USA. Born into a working-class family outside Bordeaux in 1932, Sempé never received any formal art training and started working in the fifties as a freelance cartoonist for newspapers and magazines. He has actually produced a very limited amount of sequential comics, a format with which he has always felt uncomfortable. Still “Le Petit Nicolas” (Little Nicolas), the comic he contributed to the Belgian magazine Le Moustique from 1956 to 1958 was the origin of his future long-term fame in France. Scripted by René Goscinny (who was to co-create Asterix the Gaul with Albert Uderzo in 1959),  this series of one-page gags loosely based on the two creators’ childhood memories was subsequently reborn as of 1959 in the form of illustrated short stories in Bordeaux’s daily newspaper Sud-Ouest and in Goscinny’s new weekly magazine Pilote. 

Goscinny (left) and Sempé (right) autographing "Les récrés du Petit Nicolas" (c. 1963).

The “Petit Nicolas” collections published by Denoël and constantly reprinted since the sixties have become classics of children’s literature in France. They are Sempé’s main claim to fame with the country’s general public. His illustrated stories and collections of press cartoons are very much respected too, although they have never met with the same long-term popularity as Nicolas. In the United States, Sempé has never become a household name to the same extent as in France. However, he has contributed over a hundred covers for The New Yorker since 1978, which has made him there a middlebrow–to-highbrow cartoonist—a status quite distinct from his widespread perception as a beloved children’s book illustrator in his birth country.

            Sempé en liberté exemplifies traditional gallery-like exhibiting, with a great deal of white wall space and comments in French and (sometimes shoddy) English underneath the displayed pieces. It is easy to tell that the exhibit has been put together under the supervision of Martine Gossieaux, the owner of the Parisian cartoon art gallery that has been Sempé’s agent for years. The show is basically a chronological overview of the artist’s career illustrated by a wide choice of original art pieces and, unfortunately, very few printed documents. The eponymous 300-page catalog released in connection with the show (Sempé : Itinéraire d'un dessinateur d'humour, Martine Gossieaux, 2019, €39.00) regrettably misses some of the pieces on display, but otherwise aptly recreates and sometimes provides further insight into the breadth of Sempé’s creativity, that of an instantly recognizable draftsman who has always cultivated minimalist composition and low-key humor and based most of his illustration work on small (or sometimes tiny) characters featured within or against expansive backgrounds.[1]

Poster of the Kirby show.

            The second show will be much more familiar to the US and international public. “Jack Kirby : la galaxie des super-héros” (Jack Kirby: the galaxy of superheroes) is located in Normandy. The Musée Thomas Henry is the fine arts museum of Cherbourg, the small Normandy port made famous by Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical romantic drama and box-office hit The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. In 2002, following a successful exhibit on Enki Bilal organized two years earlier, the museum became a key partner in the Biennale du 9e art, a local biennial comics-related cultural event whose highlight is a big exhibition about a major creator, either French (Moebius, Tardi) or international (Hugo Pratt, Winsor McCay). The choice of Kirby for 2019 is justified both by the 25th anniversary of Kirby’s death and the 75th anniversary of D-Day, around which many celebrations have been held in Normandy. Another, smaller Kirby-related exhibit titled La Guerre de Kirby, l’inventeur des super-héros modernes (The War of Kirby, the Creator of Modern Superheroes) is in Bayeux, 60 miles south-east of Cherbourg, from June 4 through August 24. This show (co-curated by the French Kirby scholar Jean Depelley), staged in a cultural center with an admittedly didactic focus, features no original artwork, but consists of several large posters including numerous reproductions of photographs and comic art illustrating Kirby’s biography with an emphasis on his participation in ground combat on the French front in 1944.[2]

Darkseid room. ©JMEnault_Ville de Cherbourg-en-Cotentin

By contrast, the Cherbourg show, largely based on original art, has trumpeted its museum-worthy specificity, even though, as usual, the eye candy of connoisseurs may taste a bit dull to lay visitors, particularly children. Such is the insurmountable dilemma of exhibits of original comic art—too much black and white, not enough color! Co-created by Musée Thomas Henry curator Louise Hallet and the well-known Paris comic art dealer/expert/collector Bernard Mahé, the exposition presents 217 original pieces (and twenty actual vintage comic books), many of which have never been shown in public events before. Not every single piece of artwork has been drawn by the King though. Unlike the Sempé exposition, this one has steered clear of a fully monographic approach and instead contextualized Kirby’s work within the continuum of 20th-century US comics history. While most of the itinerary concentrates on Kirby’s artwork, the curators have chosen to emphasize the importance of both the artist’s precursors and followers, who account for about a quarter of the original art displayed throughout the exhibit. The first room, titled ”Jack Kirby’s imaginary museum” presents to visitors a sample of the big names and works that influenced the artist—Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, Will Eisner’s The Spirit, among others. The next rooms follow Kirby’s career from his early collaboration with Joe Simon to the turn-of-the-1950s romance period to the Atlas (soon-to-become Marvel) years with Stan Lee and all the way to the end of his life. The pièce de résistance is the big circular room at the center of which stands a presumably life-size 9-foot-tall statue of Darkseid. On the wall are displayed forty pages of original art from the “Fourth World” titles that Kirby created for DC in the seventies, including the complete New Gods #6 drawn in 1971. 

The other theme of the show is to have included the creators that were influenced more or less closely by Kirby, from James Steranko to John Buscema to Mike Mignola and others. The casual visitor who is not particularly knowledgeable about US comic history will probably be surprised by the inclusion of twenty original pages of “Duel in the Depths,” a story published in 1968 in Silver Surfer #3 and drawn by… John Buscema. It is a treat for the eyes for sure­—but also a reason to wonder: how off-topic can museographic choices go? In this case the curators’ historiographic concerns may have overshot the mark. So much wall space devoted to another artist in a Jack Kirby exposition is perhaps a tad too much (says this writer who is otherwise a huge fan of J. Buscema’s late sixties’ artistry…). The exhibit is a pure delight for any original comic art connoisseur, who will welcome the opportunity to behold such a spectacular array of John Buscema art from the artist’s best period. Only a curmudgeon would deny themselves such pleasure. 

The actual final regret about this show, however, cannot be blamed on its curators. The planned catalog had to be dropped because of the demands of the Marvel material’s copyright owner regarding reproduction fees and editorial control—the Walt Disney Company.[3]

Scientifiction EP Jacobs poster.

Let us now move down to the French capital with Scientifiction - Blake et Mortimer au musée des arts et métiers. This exhibit has had more media coverage than the previous two because, France being France, an art show located in Paris is automatically more high-profile than any comparable event taking place in the provinces. The other asset of this exposition, from a French and Belgian perspective, is that it is centered on Edgar P. Jacobs and his series “Blake and Mortimer.” These names that do not necessarily mean much to Americans, but have been familiar to many French people since the fifties. The Belgian cartoonist Edgar P. Jacobs (1904-1987) used to be the second pillar of the “clear line” school of comic art pioneered by Tintin creator Hergé. “Blake and Mortimer” was the series to which he devoted his whole career, exclusive of any other recurring characters. Jacobs was Hergé’s first assistant from 1943 to 1947 and a mainstay of the weekly Journal de Tintin as of its debut issue in 1946. The British adventurers’ duo formed by scientist Philip Mortimer and MI5 Captain Francis Blake appeared in ten albums during Jacobs’ lifetime and have been revived in twelve volumes since 1990. Although Blake and Mortimer, as much as or even more than Tintin, originated the stylistic traits and characterization clichés of Belgium’s postwar clear-line comics, the series’ original run and post-1990 sequels have remained favorites for a large middle-aged-to-elderly readership enjoying narratives that come across as undeniably dated nowadays, yet retain the nostalgic aura that can be found for instance in Hollywood film noir and its “post-modern” rewritings. Every new Blake & Mortimer album is a surefire best-seller in Belgium and France with initial print runs hovering around a half million copies.
 

Jacobs show. © J.-P. Gabilliet

Scientifiction is at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, the industrial design museum located in Paris’ 3rd arrondissement and made famous worldwide by Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel as the repository of the original Foucault’s Pendulum. Walking through this exhibit is an engrossing multi-media experience: visitors find themselves surrounded by often hard-to-identify scientific objects, huge canvases featuring color enlargements of comic panels, showcases displaying rarely more than three pieces of original comic art, and background music by Bruno Letort that changes when one moves from one spot to the other. Unlike the Sempé and Kirby exhibits, this is no standard retrospective of the artist’s career. It is more of a staged dialogue between art and science, between the visionary scientific imagination that Jacobs brought to bear in his graphic novels and the technological objects and innovations of his time, i. e. the 1940s through the 1970s.  This is a case where comic art meets cultural history for the mutual enrichment of both.

Those visitors that have little or no familiarity with Blake and Mortimer will quickly lose track of what elements belong to which album, but it does not really matter. The show’s curators Thierry Bellefroid, a Belgian writer and TV journalist, and Eric Dubois, a French professor of applied arts, have done away with the traditional museographic criteria of chronology and linearity. They have instead structured the exposition around the four elements: air, earth, wind, fire. After entering a lobby where they are treated to some background information about Jacobs’ career, visitors pass into a dark corridor only lit by loop footage from Fritz Lang’s M (1931) featuring Peter Lorre on the left wall, and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) on the right wall; these two early expressionist influences permeated Jacobs’ imagery and visuals well into the 1950s and are particularly perceptible in the 1956 album La Marque Jaune (The Yellow “M”),  regarded by many as the original run’s masterpiece. In the large central room plunged in a penumbra, visitors can circulate freely from one showcase to another. Each showcase, related to a theme and a color, displays (sometimes outlandish) technological objects and original pieces of Jacobs artwork that resonate with one another. The room at the far end, in normal lighting, is a laboratory of sorts in which visitors can view more state-of-the-art scientific objects of yesteryear and a number of artifacts coming from Jacobs’ personal studio, such as models characters’ heads but also of l’Espadon (the Swordfish, the ultra-advanced aircraft, thanks to which the European forces defeated their Asian aggressors in the imaginary Third World War depicted in the series’ first album).

Although the agenda of the curators is less to show pretty pictures than to bring visitors to immerse themselves in the scientific imagination and imagery of the mid-20th century, hardcore comic art amateurs and/or Jacobs fans will not be disappointed with the show. The selection of artwork on display, on loan from Fondation Roi Baudoin (Belgium’s royal philanthropic foundation founded under King Baudoin I’s auspices in 1976), is simply spectacular. It includes a number of pieces rarely or never shown to the public before, including several detailed preliminary sketches of full pages that highlight the rigorous craftsmanship that Jacobs used to put in his drawing. As a final bonus the show is accompanied by a gorgeous hardbound 100-page catalog with a faux cloth spine that mimics the format of 1950s Blake and Mortimer albums.[4]
 

Poster of the CAPC show

            We return back to Bordeaux, finally, for Histoire de l’art cherche personnages… (Art history looking for characters…) on display at the CAPC, the local museum of contemporary art, from June 20, 2019 thru February 2, 2020. This exhibit, co-organized with Angoulême’s Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image and Geneva’s Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, gathers over a hundred works by 60-odd comic art and contemporary art creators.[5] According to page one of the free booklet authored by cartoonist Philippe Dupuy and available with the admission ticket, it addresses “what may define the human being, from their representation to their condition, as an individual forced to deal with their surroundings, their history, and the other.” 

The visitor is invited to explore two perpendicular “galleries” divided into a series of adjacent rooms. Galerie Ferrère has seven rooms titled Intrigue, Silhouettes, Animaux philosophes (Philosophizing Animals), Attente (Expectation), La Cage (The Cage), Démultiplication (Multiplication), and Dans le noir (In the dark). It overarching topic is the quest for the human figure based on the questioning of modes of existence and representation. 

Galerie Foy comprises thirteen rooms divided into nine sections: the first four have English titles—Privacy, Home, Trauma, Blue Spill—and the last five French titles—Les démons (The Demons), Le musée (The Museum), Tabloïds (Tabloids), Cabinet de lecture (Reading Room), and Cinéma (Cinema). Its subject-matter is the human creature’s quest for meaning, with a focus on narration rather than representation per se as in the Galerie Ferrère displays. The most amazing piece, in the Cabinet de Lecture section, is a 14.5-meter-long steel chassis holding a mobile conveyor belt to which are attached the pages of Une histoire de l’art, Philippe Dupuy’s own take on art history which was originally created as a webcomic before being published as a 23-meter-long leporello in 2016.[6] Viewers will find it impossible to read each page, which is in constant motion, but cannot help witnessing the endless succession that replicates the temporal flow of pages in a webcomic.

Detail from Philippe Dupuy’s installation.
© J.-P. Gabilliet

In each room, pieces of comic art (original art, enlarged panels, floppy comic books, albums, TPBs, or graphic novels) are displayed next to pieces of figurative contemporary art (paintings, sculptures, installations) around a unifying, if often loose, theme. In this context, comic art appears strongly de-commodified. The juxtaposition with contemporary art works by contrast emphasizes the expressiveness of isolated pages, a dimension often overshadowed and literally “lost from sight” in the narrative flow of linear reading. Unlike the three shows previously reviewed, this one gives no specific added value to original comic artwork over books or printed art; Art Spiegelman, for instance, is featured only through issues of RAW and underground comix. What is at stake here is the consideration of the expressiveness and meaningfulness made possible by the medium rather than the celebration of any individual artist(s). Obviously whoever is familiar with Martin Vaughn-James’ The Cage, besides being delighted with the displaying of several original pages from this famous experimental comic in the eponymous room of Galerie Ferrère, will quickly become alive to the analogy between Vaughn-James’ work and the show’s “formal vocabulary” (as defined by Dupuy). The booklet’s central section is itself a 22-page comic in which Dupuy “narrates” his personal experience of “Histoire de l’art cherche personnages…”.

The exhibit’s underlying agenda questions the major changes and achievements of figurative art since the late 1960s and the heyday of “figuration narrative,” a current identified by art critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot  around those French contemporary artists that simultaneously rejected full-fledged abstraction and “the static derisiveness of US pop art” (Gassiot-Talabot). It is important to remember that this pictorial movement (exemplified in the Bordeaux show by some of its big names: Adami, Arroyo, Erró, Klasen, Monory, Rancillac, etc.) was the gateway of comic art into museums through Bande dessinée et figuration narrative, the high-profile exposition held at the Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs in spring 1967.[7] In many respects Histoire de l’art cherche personnages… comes across as a follow-up to the trailblazing show of 1967. It provides insight into the huge strides achieved over the last half-century by comic art in terms of cultural legitimization and by figurativeness as artistic ethos in the early 21st century contemporary art scene.[8]

            The four exhibits I have briefly reviewed here testify to the diversity of possible museographic uses of comic art nowadays. From standard monography (Sempé) to historiographic monography (Kirby) to cultural history (Jacobs) to dialoguing across art forms (Histoire de l’art…) comic art exhibiting seems increasingly open to a plurality of conceptual and aesthetic possibilities that by far transcend the arguably increasingly humdrum pattern of “career retrospectives,” notwithstanding the genuine satisfaction one is perfectly free to experience while beholding wall-to-wall displays of original comic art drawn by a given creator. While many museums and galleries still regard comic art as “easily accessible” art that will likely attract paying visitors—a legitimate expectation by all means, unfortunately—the full museographic potential of comic art is yet to be tapped. The more imaginative curators will prove, the more alive we will all become to the versatility of our favorite art form.

(A version of this review will appear in an upcoming issue of IJOCA, but we wished to make it available while the exhibits included are still available to visit)

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[1] TV clip in French on the exhibit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMaSA3KlafQ.

[2] http://bdzoom.com/143355/actualites/jack-kirby-revient-en-normandie-75-ans-apres-son-debarquement/.

[3] Photographs of the exhibit can be seen at the following URLs : https://www.actuabd.com/Jack-Kirby-roi-de-Cherbourg; http://bdzoom.com/142972/patrimoine/incroyable-exposition-jack-kirby-une-galaxie-de-planches-originales-du-createur-de-captain-america-envahit-cherbourg/.

[4] Thierry Bellefroid (dir.), Scientifiction. Blake et Mortimer au musée des arts et métiers (Editions BLAKE & MORTIMER, 2019), €30.00. Photographs of the show:https://www.actuabd.com/Scientifiction-Blake-Mortimer-dans-le-temple-de-la-science.

[5] The roster of comic artists includes David B., Blanquet & Olive, Charles Burns, Cham, Julie Doucet, Philippe Dupuy, André Franquin, Jochen Gerner, Marcel Gotlib, Emmanuel Guibert, Patrice Killoffer, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Chantal Montellier, Pierre La Police, Ruppert & Mulot, Joe Sacco, Johanna Schipper, Joann Sfar, Art Spiegelman, Lewis Trondheim, Martin Vaughn-James, Fabio Viscogliosi, Chris Ware, Willem, and Winshluss.

 [6] Dupuy’s own detailed description of this installation: https://www.du9.org/chronique/une-histoire-de-lart/.

[7] The book published in connection with that show was translated in English: Pierre Couperie & Maurice Horn (ed.), A History of the Comic Strip (New York: Crown, 1968).

 [8] The booklet can be downloaded from https://fr.calameo.com/read/0014801212ede7ed7a1c2. A press kit in French including several reproductions can be downloaded from http://www.capc-bordeaux.fr/sites/capc-bordeaux.fr/files/capc_dp__histartcherchepersonnages_fr.pdf. A well-illustrated English-language web presentation of the show is at https://www.fg-art.org/en/exhibition-exhibitions/histoire-de-lart-cherche-personnages.