The Huge Comics Exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris - A View from Finland

by  Harri Römpötti, a journalist and critic of comics based in Finland, who has been a freelancer for 35 years writing reviews, articles and books about comics among other subjects

Bande dessinée, 1964-2024,  https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/9htHbj4  

Corto Maltese: Une vie romanesqu, https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/h0PE028

La BD à tous les étages,
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/zozduYP

Paris: The Centre Pompidou. May 29 - November 4,  2024. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/la-bd-a-tous-les-etages

Comics have taken over the Pompidou Center in Paris. The facility advertises that there are comics on all floors. The entirety of the exhibition is exceptionally extensive, even by the Pompidou’s scale.

   It is also exceptional in the history of comics. The world’s most famous and prestigious museums of modern and contemporary art are probably Pompidou and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Neither has had anything similar before.

   “There have been big comics exhibitions in France, but nothing like this. In the early 1990’s, MoMA had an exhibition called ‘High and Low:  Modern Art and Popular Culture,’ which included comics. But cartoonists led by Art Spiegelman criticized it for its condescending attitude,” says comics scholar Thierry Groensteen.

   Groensteen (born 1957) is known for, among other things, his book Systéme de la bande dessinée (1999, System of Comics in English 2007). He has also managed the comics museum in Angoulême and founded the publishing house Éditions de L’An 2. Groensteen has curated some of France’s previous major exhibitions and is one of the four curators of the Pompidou exhibition.

   Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the comic Maus, is not only an artist, but also one of the most authoritative comics experts in the United States. At the exhibit opening in the end of May, Spiegelman applauded the Pompidou exhibition. “Beforehand, I was afraid of the worst, but this advances the status of the comics by years,” Spiegelman stated.

   The defining of the time period covered by the main exhibition, “Comics 1964-2024” (or “Bande dessinée, 1964-2024”), is interesting. The 60-year period covers the development arc of contemporary comics. Comic books have long been considered children’s culture. In the U.S., newspaper comics were aimed at adults or the whole family. Comic books that only appeared in the 1930’s were mostly made for children. In Europe, the early Tintin and a large part of the rest of the comics were aimed at children. Similarly, manga production in Japan swelled after World War II. The heyday of children’s comics lasted mostly from the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

   After that, artists in many different parts of the world, who grew up with comics for children and young people, started making comics for adults. That’s where Pompidou’s main exhibition begins. “The counterculture highlighted arts that were previously neglected. The boundaries between high culture and pop started to break down,” Groensteen says.

   In France, one of the milestones was Jean-Claude Forest’s erotic science fiction comic Barbarella. In the U.S., Robert Crumb and others broke taboos in underground comics, and in Japan, Yoshihiro Tatsumi and others developed manga into gekiga, dramatic pictures, in Garo magazine. Garo artists didn’t see themselves as part of the manga industry.

   “It was my idea to start from the 60’s and not from the beginning of the history of comics. At first, I thought we’d stop at 2000, because it’s hard to choose the most relevant ones from the latest developments. Then we would have gone from Barbarella to Persepolis, but very few women would have been included. Most of the female artists have established themselves only in the 21^st Century.” Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical success, Persepolis, would indeed have been a rarity in an exhibition limited to the 20^th Century.

   Although the exhibition is breathtakingly extensive, it only scratches the surface. The three main regions of the comics--U.S., Europe, and Japan--appear side by side for the first time on such a large scale. But the Nordic countries are represented only by Sweden’s Joanna Hellgren. Groensteen explains, “I’m the only one of us curators who knows Nordic comics at all. To be honest, we didn’t even consider the others. We had a list of over 200 must-have artists, but we had to cut it down to about 130. The artists’ home country was never a selection criterion. I would have liked to include Africa as well, but we ran out of space.”

   For Groensteen, it was important that next to well-known artists, others were exhibited for the general public. He brought along, among others, the German Anke Feuchtenberger and the Austrian Ulli Lust.

   Groensteen came up with the idea that “Comics 1964-2024” be divided into themes. Chronological order would have brought out the historical development, which now remains obscure. However, the division into themes also creates other small problems. For example, Crumb and Satrapi are not to be found in the room of autobiographical comics--or personal stories, as they are called at the Pompidou. Crumb is in the room of underground and other taboo-breakers, and Satrapi is in comics about history. Of course, they also belong to those rooms, but, many themes are strangely lacking expected cartoonists, when the artists belonging to several sections are in some other one.

   If you’re familiar with comics at all, you’ll miss some of your favorites at Pompidou, even though you’ll find many others. Groensteen says that he has a meter-long list of those left out. The omissions emphasize one of the key messages of the exhibition: that comics art is so vast that even a giant exhibition does not cover nearly everything. “Comics 1964-2024” is a slightly chaotic kaleidoscope that doesn’t even stay within its own limits. The all-time favorites, Asterix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke, are included. “Admittedly, they are rather from a different generation than the core of the exhibition, but, in France, we would never have been forgiven if they were missing,” Groensteen explains.

   One of the achievements of the exhibition is the large number of Japanese originals. Traditionally, it is very difficult to get them for exhibitions. There are also funny details. Maybe only the French could think of putting Guido Crepax’s erotic comics in the section of geometry, even though they fit there based on the exceptional compositions of the pages. Erotica doesn’t have its own section.

    Below the main exhibition, on the fifth floor, there is the museum’s traditional main collection exhibition. Comics have been placed there in dialogue with visual art in the “La bande dessinée au Musée” exhibition. Groensteen participated in its preparation only in discussions, not as an actual curator. The temporal limitation has been waived there. Among others, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, and George McManus have their own small but impressive showcases in the corridors between main spaces.

   The works of 15 contemporary comics artists are hung side by side with the big names in art. For example, David B., the creator of the Epileptic, is placed next to the surrealist André Breton, and Joann Sfar, the creator of The Rabbi’s Cat, hangs side by side with Jules Pascin. “However, the purpose is not to justify the position of comics in the museum, because it is no longer necessary,” Groensteen points out.

   Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese has been given its own exhibition in the museum’s library. Marion Fayolle, the author of surrealistic studies on human relationships, has set up a village for the whole family on the terrace of the main lobby.

   The share of actual experimental comics remains somewhat small, although for example Yuichi Yokoyama is prominently presented. The experimental magazine, Lagon, whose authors include Joe Kessler and Olivier Schrauwen, has its own extensive exhibition in the basement.

   The exhibitions were created relatively quickly, in 16 months. Groensteen says the biggest credit goes to Laurent Le Bon, who became director of the Pompidou Center in 2021. “Le Bon is a big fan of comics. For years, he and collector Édouard Leclerc dreamed of a big comics exhibition. Previously, they hoped to get it in the Louvre or d’Orsay. Leclerc has a huge collection, from which about a third of the originals in the exhibitions come from.” Of course, there have been cartoon exhibitions at the Pompidou before, but the giant entity became possible when Le Bon was chosen as the director of the museum.

   The Pompidou Center has also started acquiring its own collection of original comic art. The works of ten artists have been acquired first, featuring David B, Edmond Baudoin, Blutch, Nicolas de Crécy, Emmanuel Guibert, Benoit Jacques, Éric Lambé, Lorenzo Mattotti, Catherine Meurisse, and Fanny Michaëlis. Most of the exhibitions are on display until November 4^th. After that the entire Pompidou will be closed for extensive and long-lasting renovations.

[Versions of this article have previously appeared in Finnish newsmagazine Suomen Kuvalehti and will be published in the Swedish Comics Society’s newsmagazine Bild & Bubbla. This article was translated using Google, edited by John A. Lent, and then reworked by the author, and re-edited by Rhode and re-posted on Aug. 26, 2024.]

Book Review: Final Cut by Charles Burns

reviewed by Luke C. Jackson

 Charles Burns. Final Cut. Pantheon Books, 2024. 224 pp. US $34.00 (Hardcover). ISBN:  978-0-593-70170-6. https://penguinrandomhouselibrary.com/book/?isbn=9780593701706

I first read Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole in my early twenties. Since then, I – like many people – have considered it to be required reading for those who seek to understand the storytelling potential of the comics medium. First published as a series of twelve comics, Black Hole was collected and published in hardback by Pantheon Books in 2005.

Set in Seattle in the 1970s, Black Hole tells the story of a group of teenagers who contract a sexually transmitted disease, referred to as “the bug” and often read as a metaphor for AIDS. This disease causes sufferers to see hallucinatory, psychedelic visions, before transforming them into nightmarish versions of themselves. As a result, sufferers are ostracised and forced to live in the hills outside town. The haunting images of these grotesque doppelgängers are captured in the book’s end papers, which act as a dark mirror to those in the front papers. In stark black and white, both depict yearbook-style images, their subjects staring at the camera – and the reader – their pre-evolutionary smiles replaced by tumor-like growths and gaping wounds. And yet, the book asks, is it these funhouse mirror-like images that are the true horror, or the plastic smiles of the teenagers within whom these monsters had once lain dormant?

Burns is an eclectic creator. Before the creative and commercial success of Black Hole, he came come to the attention of the comics community as an artist for Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s RAW Magazine. His cover for Raw #4 is dystopian, disquieting and yet strangely beautiful, the perfect visual encapsulation of that issue’s promise to be ‘The graphix magazine for your bomb shelter’s coffee table.’ Since finding mainstream success with Black Hole, Burns has created covers for Time, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New Yorker, while he is both co-founder and cover designer for Believer Magazine. He has also continued to explore the narrative potential of comics through his work on X’ed Out (2010), The Hive (2012), and Sugar Skull (2014), a trilogy of short books that use a disarmingly Tintin-like visual style to convey a characteristically disturbing worldview.  

Like Black Hole, Burns’s latest graphic novel, Final Cut, is a teen drama in which supernatural occurrences are an allegory for social and psychological torment. With their parents either absent or neglectful, budding filmmakers Brian and Jimmy have recruited some of their classmates, including the beautiful and alluring Laurie, to help bring their latest cinematic vision to life. Inspired by the 1960s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, the boys' film – which is never titled – tells the story of a group of campers who stumble across an alien invasion and are subsequently replaced with simulacra. In this way, the central conceit is reminiscent, also, of Burns’ previous graphic novel. However, unlike Black Hole, the focus here is on the construction of narrative itself, through the medium of film, and on how creative choices necessarily reflect the desires, biases and limitations of their creators.

While shooting the film, for Brian at least, reality gives way to fantasy, the natural gives way to the supernatural, the terrestrial to the alien. Burns utilizes the medium of comics to reflect this fluidity, switching between different page constructions, artistic styles and colors without warning. A single page begins in a traditional ‘waffle iron’-style, with panels separated by thick black frames and characters presented in muted colors with little shading. Only moments later, this construction breaks down, as a panel – depicting a greyscale still from the 1960s classic film The Last Picture Show - stretches the width of the page. The still itself depicts an almost barren landscape, devoid of people, capturing Brian’s sense of isolation, as well as his spatial and temporal dislocation.

The more attuned we become to Brian’s perspective, the more the book comes to mimic the frames of a movie, which, unlike the panels of a comic, are uniform in size, shape and rhythm. This allows Brian to construct a world that is more predictable, one in which his wishes can be fulfilled. However, the events of the graphic novel are not told exclusively from Brian’s perspective. The reader is also invited, at crucial moments, to see things from Lauren’s point of view. Whereas, for Brian, the events depicted in Final Cut function as an elegy for lost innocence, for Lauren they represent a time of self-discovery – a new beginning. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide which of these perspectives they accept as true. In this way, Burns suggests, the ‘final cut’ is not Brian’s, or Lauren’s, but ours.

 

Author Bio:

Dr. Luke C. Jackson is an author, teacher and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He has written novels, films, games, and graphic novels, including Two-Week Wait: An IVF Story (Scribe, 2021). His current research focuses on the spatialities of texts, including comics.