Demystifying The U Ray, the better to rewrite the origin myth of Blake and Mortimer

 Éric Dubois

 ODDYSEY to the origins of Blake and Mortimer, Eric Dubois (curator), Brussels: Belgian Comic Strip Center / Comics Art Museum, April 7 – October 1, 2023. https://www.comicscenter.net/en/exhibitions/gallery/oddysey-to-the-origins-of-blake-and-mortimer

What does the ODYSSEY exhibition explain about the origins of Blake and Mortimer?

It shows that The U Ray (Le Rayon U) album is a missing link between comics in the English-language tradition and the Franco-Belgian one. Edgar P. Jacobs was inspired by Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, which he had started by plagiarizing in Bravo! magazine before going on to create his own story. The way in which the artist freed himself in a few pages from an American comic strip narrative and graphic codes such as text boxes and no speech balloons, to forge his own cartooning grammar is fascinating to observe, with period tracings and original pages on display as evidence. For his first attempt at a comic story, it's a stroke of genius. At the Comics Museum in Brussels, Jacob’s talent is displayed before our eyes.

More importantly, the exhibition changes the way we look at this album. U is more than the matrix of the characters and themes of the work to come when Jacobs creates Blake and Mortimer. In 1973, for the first collected album edition, Jacobs was not content to reassemble the original 1943 story from by just rearranging the original two panels per tier to three. He “Blake-and-Mortimerized” his U Ray. The album published by the Éditions du Lombard was no longer just the matrix of the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer, but became an extension of that aesthetic. The direct comparison of pages from The U Ray album version and earlier plates from The Secret of the Swordfish, Atlantis Mystery and The Time Trap shows us the mythical character of this two-version album.

What are the most emblematic pieces of the exhibition?

The exhibition presents only original material and a majority are unpublished ones. Among the top pieces, the visitor can discover four panels sketched on tracing paper which are as sumptuous as they are extremely rare; two color-enhanced sketches of Flash Gordon, of which Jacobs only drew five pages in 1942; and two others of the two-panel version of The U Ray from 1943. These are the oldest documents from the story, as well as in the career of Jacobs as a cartoonist. Precious handwritten notes from this first story bear witness to the genesis of the names of places and characters. "Rayon V," "Rayon Vert," but also "Olrik," "Flying shark," and further on "Swordfish." We are struck by the premonitory character of such notes. They prove that from the start that Jacobs did not think in terms of comics, but in rather in terms of the novel, indicating "Roman d’aventure genre Gordon" at the top of his page. The exhibition also displays a small paper model of the album, bound by hand, on which Jacobs sketched all the boxes, the page connections, the strips to be redrawn, the new boxes, and so on, a further testimony to the needs of the draftsman to work out the story.

The visitor can view a selection of original pages from The U Ray. When observed carefully, it is possible to understand the full process of the reassembling of the story in an album and its second inception. Collages and overlays in white gouache and Indian ink abound, to house the speech bubbles as well as format the boxes. But above all, for six of the pages printed in sepia in the Journal Bravo! we have the complete redrawing. This is the exhibition’s key treasure.

Next to this black and white original art that has remained in the shadows for so long, the visitor has the chance to lift the veil on a series of sublime polychrome tracings. Abundantly commented on by Jacobs, a meticulous artist, these fragile sheets also testify to the care taken to document his work and constitute his archives. This is a process that will lead, in 1984, to the creation of the E.P. Jacobs Foundation, today in charge of preserving and promoting the heritage of the Belgian cartoonist.[1]

From what angle does the ODYSSEY exhibition approach the album The U Ray?

Six themes make up the exhibit: Under the Auspices of the Gods, A Modern Homer, Theater of the World, The Death Ray, Unknown Earth and The Eternal Return.

The ODYSSEY exhibition considers The U Ray’s comic strip origin, as well as its genesis from the angle of the myth and the great stories of antiquity, especially Homer's Odyssey. The exhibition explores the affiliations between the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer and American comics, in particular Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond, while going beyond the model/copy pattern in order further to suggest relationships between the two stories, whose authors, Jacobs and Raymond, drank from the same literary and cinematographic sources. Jacobs' first story as an author appears as the missing link in a history of Franco-Belgian comics under American influence, of which the superhero became the titular figure, but was not when Jacobs began working.

The mythological angle therefore invites us to see Jacobs as a storyteller. It is a bridge between two generations and two cultural shores. There is a genius for storytelling in him, which cannot be reduced to the sum of the references or the tropes used. This means that despite all the analyses, even the most scholarly, there will always be something more to say about his work. Where Jacobs is at his strongest is in his ability to appropriate the narrative codes of the great tradition of storytelling and mythical narrative. We forget their influence - conscious or not - when one reads a Blake and Mortimer comic book. Jacobs is a true storyteller and that's why his stories are timeless.

I think of Jules Verne and his Voyage to the Moon, but also in particular Arthur Conan Doyle with his novel The Lost World. Behind this fantasy story, that has the trappings of a pseudo-scientific novel, hides a sociological study on the brutality of human relations in a civilized environment. I perceive in Jacobs this same universalism in the narratives with a reflexive background. In his stories, Jacobs reconnects with the primary vocation of storytelling, which was to give food for thought by striking the imagination with edifying tales, thereby creating images capable of inspiring or transmitting a certain morality.

The exhibit layout plays a major role. How did you envision it?

My creative process played on radical changes: scale, light, and color, and is inspired by the spectacle side of amusement parks. The exhibition is initially fully lit before darkening and then returning to light, following a ritual symbolism of the return to the starting point. The design is based on large sets playing the role of thresholds. It was a question of giving the space an aura of grandeur, but also of punctuating the visit with twists -- such as acts in the theater. Right from the entrance with its giant octopus, the tone is set. These decorations evoke the fairground attractions of Coney Island in New York, the model of all modern magic and source of inspiration for Winsor McCay, the creator of Little Nemo.

Under the Auspices of the Gods is dedicated to Flash Gordon and the Journal Bravo!. It presents the tracings of the 2^nd and 4^th panels of Flash by Jacobs. Modern Homer concentrates on the characters. Attention is drawn to the "small note papers of Edgar P. Jacobs", which show to the method of reassembly for the album. The Theater of the World emphasizes spatio-temporal exoticism and the art of staging. Color is also evoked as an agent of the wonders of Jacobs’s world. The Death Ray is dedicated to the ultimate weapon which is the McGuffin of The U Ray. The Unknown Land is the famous Terra Incognita of old maps and terrestrial globes. In this part, it is about the ape-men and the perils that threaten the troop led by the Lord Calder character.

The final theme, The Eternal Return, is dedicated to the sequel to U and presents a series of original pages from The Fiery Arrow. This theme closes the time loop by highlighting the return to certain visual archetypes in this sequel, and the way in which, again in mythology, ritual (codified repetition) is the means for humanity to access the divine, and therefore immortality. From The U Ray onwards, Edgar P. Jacobs maintained a delightfully paradoxical relationship with time that was tempting to explore here, not to resolve or reduce it, but to settle in it and savor it.

How did you take into account the interior space of the building of the Comics museum, which is extremely bright?

To ensure the preservation of the works, it was essential to control the luminosity of the interior of the building, first designed by the Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta as an opulent and bourgeois fabrics store, which serves now as a showcase for the Museum. A paper ceiling was created to break the sunlight coming from the iconic glass roof. It also plays the role of the chromatic palette of the exhibition, directly inspired by that of the album. This design device is very significant visually, both for visitors who are below and for those seeing it from the mezzanine of the upper floor. As such, an exhibition addresses the mind as much as the body and create the conditions for an encounter with the work in its very essence, and not only in the materiality of the pages that made it possible.

We must not forget that the original work in comics is the printed and published story in an album. That is what is on display. So this exhibition puts itself forward even more as a true setting in this sense, because with Edgar P. Jacobs, the setting is as important as the action and the characters. I was careful to maintain a kind of sensory and chromatic unity throughout the visit, without forgetting the key contribution of sound to give the exhibition its inhabited character. Once again, my accomplice the composer Bruno Letort, knew how to create an atmosphere that gives soul to the exhibition. Letort is a fan of Jacobs who listens to Blake and Mortimer albums as much as he reads them. For the visitors we hope to have created an exhibition in which all the senses are awakened.

Éric Dubois is a design professor in Paris and has been participating with comic strip exhibitions since François Schuiten and Benoit Peeters set him on the path with their Drawing Machines in 2016 at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. After that, he worked with Blake and Mortimer, for which he created several exhibitions with journalists and comics experts Thierry Bellefroid and Daniel Couvreur: Scientifiction (2018), The Secret of the Swordfish (2021), MachinaXion (2022). Dubois is the sole curator of ODYSSEY exhibition on the origins of Blake and Mortimer. This is an exhibition dedicated to The “U” Ray, the first comic book by Edgar P. Jacobs.

 The Belgian Comic Strip Center

The Belgian Comic Strip Center opened its doors to the public on October 6th 1989. In no time this impressive museum became one of the main attractions of Brussels. Every year more than 250.000 visitors come here to explore 4,200 m² of permanent and temporary exhibitions, not to mention its comprehensive documentation center and rich collections. The BCSC collects anything that deals with European comics, from its prestigious beginnings to its latest developments.

Temporary and permanent exhibitions have transformed this Art Nouveau gem into a living and attractive temple. It is a dynamic and exciting place where everything is done to promote the Ninth Art (associated with the creation of the Brussels Comic Strip Route, the issue of Comic Strip stamps, etc...). The Belgian Comic Strip Center also produces, for many partners, conferences, books, creative workshops and counseling.

With more than 700 comic strip authors, Belgium has more comic strip artists per square kilometer than any other country in the world! It is here that the comic strip has grown from a popular medium into an art in its own right. Nowhere else comics are so strongly rooted in reality and in people's imagination.

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[1] Since 2018, first under the aegis of the King Baudouin Foundation which hosted the Jacobs Fund for four years, then under the impetus of a renewed E. P. Jacobs Foundation, several exhibitions and publications have been able to highlight the unique qualities of the work of Edgar P. Jacobs. The work of preserving the archives left by the creator of Blake and Mortimer continues. The E.P. Jacobs Foundation is actively involved in this, in collaboration with the King Baudouin Foundation, which now assists it in this task. Created by Edgar P. Jacobs to guarantee the heritage of his work, it is possible today to look into its archives of unsuspected richness and to discover there the stages of an extraordinary creation. 

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.