“David Kunzle Page” on Töpfferiana Website for Early Comics

 Michel Kempeneers 

Fig. 1. Screenshot of the “David Kunzle Page” on the Töpfferiana website. 

 

Introduction 

In order to pay tribute to comics history pioneer, David Kunzle (1936-2024), the “Töpfferiana” website takes a unique initiative and shares most of Kunzle’s writings on early comics on a dedicated “Kunzle Page,” thus making them available to scholars and researchers.

Though, in 2025, comics are widely spread and the subject of significant academic interest, “early comics” remain a field apart, and a highly specialized one.

Since Kunzle started his academic career in the 1960s, he has always remained an important voice in this field, maybe even the only one reaching a broader, not necessarily, academic audience. More importantly, Kunzle probably was the only high-profile author trying to get books on the subject published.

This has never been easy, though, not even for a researcher of Kunzle’s reputation. In his early years, because Kunzle demanded his “Early Comics” volumes be published in a huge format, (to do justice to the reproductions of broadsides), even though most of them still required a reduced format to fit them on the “early comics” pages. But even in the new millennium, Kunzle complained, among insiders, of a lack of interest by his publisher, who kept postponing the publication of, for example:  his Cham book, without ever providing a satisfactory explanation for yet another delay. Surprisingly, Kunzle was always worried that his publisher would no longer be interested in his next book, which also shows how keen he was on sharing his findings with an interested audience, even long after he had officially retired as an academic.  

David Kunzle (Tribute) Page 

The organizers of the yearly, “Platinum Meeting,” which is organized in the margin of the Angoulême “Festival de la BD,” end of January, found it appropriate to start their gathering of Platinum Age[i] scholars with a tribute to Kunzle. Participants shared testimonies and anecdotes, and one researcher wondered if anyone in the audience was aware of the status of Kunzle’s two landmark books on early comics. “Kunzle 1” (1973) and “Kunzle 2” (1990), as these are commonly tagged, had been out-of-print for ages, and nothing seemed to indicate that the University of California Press was ever going to reprint them. The answer was negative, and the meeting’s organizers promised to reach out to Mrs. Marjorie Kunzle and inquire.

They quickly found out that Mrs. Kunzle holds the rights to all of David’s articles, and, it later turned out, that the same goes for both “early comics” volumes. Mrs. Kunzle was completely in agreement with the suggestion that both volumes be spread as pdf files among the early comics community, though she would not actively participate in any concrete project to make that happen.

During these exchanges, the idea grew to grab the occasion and to really pay tribute to Kunzle’s legacy of half a century of research on early comics. And, why limit the effort to Kunzle’s first two major works, when it seemed possible to stretch it to all of Kunzle’s writings on the subject and share these on one platform? This way, scholars would have a single point of access, and, thus, be able to more easily advance with their own research projects.

As we were convinced that Kunzle himself would have loved that idea, and with Mrs. Kunzle backing it, the “David Kunzle(tribute) Page” (DKP) was born. “Töpfferiana.fr” seemed the logical place to host it, for the site shares a focus on early comics, and since, for a couple of years, it also organizes the Angoulême “Platinum Meeting.”

So, we set out to compile Kunzle’s comics bibliography. It seemed easiest to kick off with articles and book chapters, as we were already sure that there would not be any rights issues with these. Moreover, we discovered that, in February 2024, independent scholar, Hillel Schwartz, published a draft of Kunzle’s complete bibliography, all subjects included,[ii] i.e., not only comics, but also posters, arts, and even corsets(!). Schwartz imposed only one important limitation on this cv; it would not include the many reviews written by Kunzle.[iii]

From Schwartz’s overview, we retrieved all comics-related articles and book chapters, and ordered chronologically in an Excel table. Such an underlying table will allow researchers to also easily search the set for specific data, or extend their own copy with extras for personal use. That may sound trivial for a corpus consisting solely of early comics articles, as it will probably consist of little more than some 40 entries. But, if ever the list is extended to other areas in which Kunzle’s expertise led to publications, that may quickly change, so it seemed better to foresee such potential extensions in the specifics of the current table. Besides, it is not impossible that, at some point in the future, the current project scope is extended to include reviews, both by and of Kunzle.

All in all, it took less than a week to gather about 15 articles, which presumably already contained most of the essential ones. At the DKP Go Live on March 2, the counter stood at 26 articles/chapters out of 38 pieces identified, and early June (deadline for this article), these figures are 37 out of 45, i.e., almost 82 percent, with a couple more files to come. But, the real gems are the pdf versions of “Kunzle 1” and “Kunzle 2,”[iv] which were added on April 6 and, as such, can be regarded as a first highlight of the DKP.  

Structure 

All shared articles are in pdf format. We harmonized their presentation, as well as the way the corresponding files are named. Moreover, we made it a point to only share searchable files, for this characteristic is one of the prime reasons for researchers to be keen on e-versions of reference materials. We also made sure to document all such specifics in the detailed Excel table. That file is only aimed at visitors needing more details; the overview on the DKP of all articles and book chapters identified (and their download links) will be more than sufficient for most people.

On top of that, we explicitly marked every article which we have not been able to locate; this way, scholars and researchers who consult the DKP, or its Excel table, and discover that they have a pdf copy available of one of the Kunzle writings still missing in our offer, can reach out and share, so that we can add it to the DKP at the next update. In fact, this already happened almost immediately after we publicized the initiative on the Platinum discussion list. 

Fig. 2. Excerpt of the article bibliography on Töpfferiana’s “David Kunzle Page.” 

It is also worth pointing out that the overview makes no distinction between languages (English, French, Spanish, ...), and does not try either to establish a logic between articles with the same subject. Indeed, as is the case for most academics, no subjects were ever really “completed” for Kunzle. He kept reworking them, leaving out parts, updating others, and adding new finds and insights, possibly reacting to fellow researchers. Kunzle made no distinction between languages while doing so:  any journal wanting to publish his--then current--insights, was entitled to a state-of-the-art article, regardless of language. (Kunzle was fluent in four or five languages.) 

Future

 An inherent danger of any tribute initiative is that it outgrows its purpose; tribute has been paid, check. People have no obvious reason to return; they have visited the site, secured all the extras they wanted, or found the information they were looking for. Full stop.

Töpfferiana is very much aware of this pitfall and wants to avoid it by approaching the DKP as work-in-progress. In practice, the DKP team will try to add novelties on a regular basis, and will notify its core community of any such updates. In a sense, this boils down to giving the DKP some of the characteristics of a periodical. The aim is to share something bound to interest the early comics community every three months or so.

So far, the DKP has not only shared Kunzle articles; it celebrated its first update by also adding some Kunzle tributes spontaneously offered to the DKP by researchers who had known Kunzle for a long time. More tributes will be added in due time.

Furthermore, Philippe Kaenel of Lausanne University (Switzerland), a long-time friend and colleague of Kunzle, recently suggested to Töpfferiana to open up the DKP to other historic research on Töpffer, other reference articles on Töpffer which have become very difficult to find unless one has easy access to a good research library.

Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) was already on the radar of Kunzle’s mentor, Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001), the influential art and culture historian, and he is probably the artist whom Kunzle studied for the longest time. And, logically, Töpfferiana itself would find it difficult to hide or deny its sympathy for this Swiss comics pioneer. Kaenel shared several of his own articles on Töpffer with the DKP team, who probably have added them already. On the other hand, chances are that the DKP will be able to share the articles of the Töpffer coffee table book, published in 1996 by (then) Swiss publisher, Skira. That book accompanied the celebrations for the 150^th anniversary of Töpffer’s death, and has been out-of-print for decades.[v]

Obviously, it would be beneficial if the missing Kunzle articles were to be added. As they are not readily available on the academic e-platforms, that may turn out to be complicated, but we are confident that researchers will contribute, because Kunzle has left a strong impression with generations of them, especially the ones who were lucky to meet him. We also hope that we will be able to add Kunzle publications in less obvious languages, e.g., German, as we have also identified some of these. That would be helpful, especially because Kunzle always had a keen interest in seeing his writings spread as widely as possible. For him, that wasn’t a matter of ego, but he was very much aware how little has been written about early comics, and how important it is to make Töpffer & Co. available to audiences who don’t know French.

The DKP team decided to also add an atypical, unusual contribution of the “early” Kunzle, which we believe tells a lot about his drive then, and, which is definitely worth pointing out.

In 1972, before “Kunzle 1,” Kunzle translated an article by the French author, Francis Lacassin (1931-2008), for the Fall issue of Film Quarterly.[vi] In this article, Lacassin argued that the “language” of the comic strip shows many similarities, and even some historical priorities, over the language of film. Curiously, it turns out that there is no genuine source article by Lacassin:  in fact, Kunzle combined a recent article and a huge chapter from a new book, both by Lacassin, directly into an English summary. In the process,  he added a couple of small footnotes, and, more importantly, extended his Lacassin summary with four more pages of comments, even adding illustrations, as he wanted to update some of Lacassin’s findings by his own, not yet published, ones. Obviously, he did so with the consent of the journal, which even publicized this unusual translation in the article’s introduction.

If similar unexpected finds pop up, we will make sure to add them to the DKP, as they definitely have historical importance. 

Opportunity 

It may not be obvious at first, but the DKP also offers a test case for “collaborative improvement” or “enrichment” of these source materials. Indeed, it seems that this specific format for a tribute page, with shared materials, has never been deployed before. The DKP offers opportunities to probe how such a project might evolve, when it appeals to its reader community, not only for them to fill holes in the current offer, but also to investigate which added value a community can offer to factually improve key works, such as “Kunzle 1” or “Kunzle 2,” and how their findings can best be shared with the early comics community. A first attempt to do so is on the DKP already, for interested researchers to discover.[vii] Similarly, it can help to offer added value to users by providing bookmarks, e.g., of the publication’s structure, or to add pagination when missing, so that these users do not have to re-invent the wheel. The point here is to see if the community feels like participating to the effort, and if it does so spontaneously, or, on the contrary, it must be stimulated and encouraged to do so.

 The DKP can be consulted here:

http://www.topfferiana.fr/2025/03/david-kunzles-bibliography.

The “Platinum Age Comics” discussion group is hosted by Google Groups:

https://groups.google.com/g/platinum-age-comics.

---

[i] Roughly anything pre-World War II, but, especially, because European comics focus is mostly on 19^th Century production.

[ii] See, https://www.academia.edu/114691723/David_Kunzle_A_Bibliography (accessed Jan. 15, 2025).

[iii] One notable exception is Kunzle’s review of Thierry Groensteen’s “M. Töpffer invente la bande dessinée” (Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2014) for European Comic Art, 7-2 (Autumn 2014). This review also contains a personal biographical account of the origins of his own interest in Töpffer. Hence, it seemed worth adding to the list.

Similarly, Kunzle’s “Review Essays” for the International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) have been withheld. For, indeed, as the name indicates, this particular IJOCA format is more than merely a review, and is like a lengthy article triggered by a new publication, as reviews get considerably less space in the IJOCA.

[iv] Contrary to popular belief, Kunzle’s final book, Rebirth of the English Comic Strip:  A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870 (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), is not the last volume of his History of the Comic Strip series, which had been announced as a trilogy. Rebirth... does not contain any such reference, and the description of the would-be content of this volume in Ian Gordon’s Kunzle tribute on the IJOCA blog makes clear that this third volume, unfortunately, never materialized (see, https://ijoca.blogspot.com/2024/01/ian-gordon-remembers-david-kunzle.html, accessed on March 16, 2025).

[v] Even though, in 1996, Kunzle had already been an established international Töpffer authority for several years, he did not contribute to the Skira book. For administrative reasons, it was not possible to include an article by him.

[vi] “The Comic Strip and Film Language,” Film Quarterly. 26 (1, Fall 1972): 11-23. As hinted by Michael Connerty on the Platinum discussion list March 5, 2025.

[vii] For example, in his “Kunzle 2” (Note 19, p.109), Kunzle (notoriously) states that he did not find a copy of Gustave Doré’s Holy Russia at the French National Library (BnF), which, he found surprising. In the Internet era, it is easy to establish that Kunzle was wrong, but not really so, as it turns out that the BnF does have a copy, be it not in book format, but as loose sheets (prints). Hence, the BnF’s Holy Russia set is kept in the Prints Department.

 ________________________

Michel Kempeneers is an independent Belgian comics scholar. After several decades of comics journalism in the national press, he has turned his focus to proto-comics and 19^th-Century illustrated press, the latter especially through e-versions shared online by major reference libraries. A version of this article will appear in IJOCA 27-1.

The Ninth Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou: A Review of Comics 1964-2024

  

The Ninth Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou:

A Review of Comics 1964-2024

 Mark David Nevins

  

Fig. 1

 

One could say that comics and art museums have had an uneasy relationship--but the reality is, they’ve mostly had no relationship at all.

One of the first large-scale attempts to bring comic art into museums in a serious way was MoMA’s 1990 show “High/Low:  Modern Art and Popular Culture.” This ballyhooed exhibition aimed to show how pop culture shapes “high” art, juxtaposing fine artists, such as Picasso, Warhol, and Lichtenstein, with comic strips and newspaper ads--some of which had served as sources or “swipes” for those artists’ work. From scholars to fans, reception was scathing. Roberta Smith famously sneered in The New York Times that it was “at best, the wrong exhibition in the wrong place at the wrong time.”¹

Me? I didn’t really care. I was 25, completely unconcerned about esoteric intellectual debates, and awestruck to be able to spend hours looking at “Krazy Kat” original pages.

A less intellectually encumbered celebration of comic art came 15 years later with “Masters of American Comics,” which was shown across two venues in Los Angeles:  the Hammer Museum and MOCA. This 2005 show highlighted 15 comics “masters”--from Winsor McCay and George Herriman to Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware--with each essentially given his own mini-retrospective. A sprawling “greatest hits” of American comic art, the show was praised for its attempt to legitimize comic art as museum-worthy while faulted for presenting a canon that was, without exception, white and male. (Even early in the 21^st Century, Herriman was still “passing,” posthumously.)

Unlike “High/Low,” the “Masters” show presented some problems for me--40 years old and in possession of a Ph.D. in Literature--due to its lack of any curatorial framework or “idea” behind the exhibit:  no examination of commercial or cultural contexts; no argument for the development of an art form; no attention to the various marginalizations that had shaped the medium of comics. That said, I left my pretensions at the door to bask in the glow of hundreds of pages of original art--and left with some insights that still inform my passions and opinions to this day:  Frank King and Milton Caniff are absolute geniuses; Lyonel Feininger is criminally underrated, while Will Eisner is a bit overrated (sorry); and Winsor McCay’s work really must be seen in color to be fully appreciated--the black-and-white original art mostly sits on the wall and disappears.

This past year, nearly two decades later, France raised the stakes with a compendious and ambitious exhibition at the Centre Pompidou titled “Comics 1964-2024,” curated by Anne Lemonnier, Emmanuèle Payen, Thierry Groensteen, and Lucas Hureau.² Billed as a celebration of 60 years of le neuvième art (“the ninth art,” a term adopted in the 1960s by Francophone critics seeking to legitimize comics), the show gathered hundreds of works from around the globe and across a remarkable range of styles, formats, and movements. This was not the Pompidou’s first foray into comics:  previous exhibitions included shows in the 1970s and 1980s on comics and everyday life and comics from the 1950s, as well as a blockbuster Hergé show in 2006. But “Comics 1964-2024” has been by far the most ambitious European effort to present comics holistically as a mature art form.

Thanks to some serendipitous business travel, I was lucky enough to have a free day in Paris on literally the last day of the Pompidou show, thus giving me a trifecta of the most important museum shows about comics in my lifetime … so far.³ I stayed inside the museum for the entirety of its opening hours on Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024, exhausting the friends who had joined me--and I could easily have spent three or four more days at the show without getting bored. Indeed, surrounded by more than 1,000 comic pages, covers, illustrations, sketchbooks, printed books, and other ephemera, I’d have happily been locked into the museum for a week!

After passing through a “portal”--an homage to the 20^th-Century master Jean-Claude Forest by beloved and prolific 21^st-Century cartoonist Blutch--the visitor entered an initial room that presented a powerful argument:  the global upheavals of the 1960s--cultural, social, political, and artistic--had catalyzed a new kind of comic art.

 

Fig. 2

 

Or, perhaps put more daringly:  catalyzed by those events, comics as a form had become something completely different from its historical roles as children’s entertainment or an occasional diversion for adults in daily newspapers.

As linguists and anthropologists talk about polygenesis, there was something going on in the zeitgeist or collective unconscious during this decade that sprouted distinct but essentially related sequential narrative traditions. In France, a touchstone was the rise of Hara-Kiri, a self-proclaimed “stupid and nasty” magazine featuring bandes dessinées mocking bourgeois politics and aesthetics. In Japan, Garo magazine presented a showcase for introspective, radical manga for adult readers. And in the United States, the Underground Comix movement exploded with Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Trina Robbins, and other over-the-counter pioneers who irreverently satirized mainstream American culture and mores.

That opening salvo for “Comics 1964-2024” was strong:  the claim that these simultaneous cultural eruptions laid the foundation for what was to come in sequential art over the next half-century. Just a few decades later, the world would witness the almost unimaginable flowering and maturation of the graphic novel, the literary comic, and the hybrid artistic experiments that represent comics as a medium and an art form in the 21^st Century. From origins at the margins of proper society--countercultural ’zines, head shops, underground presses--comics have evolved into a medium now worthy of being presented in one of the most admired museums in the world.

For better or worse, that opening argument dissipated as one got deeper into the show. As the exhibit unfolded, the programming shifted to a loosely structured sequence of theme-based rooms, seemingly committed to displaying a “greatest hits” of stunning comic art rather than exploring any cohesive story about the medium’s development. For visitors newer to comics, the sheer variety must have been thrilling--if perhaps overwhelming--but for those with more knowledge of comics’ history, its major works and key creators, the lack of historical or conceptual throughline was frustrating. Or that was certainly my own feeling, as well as the report I heard from more than a few knowledgeable friends lucky enough to see the show.

With “Contre-culture” (Counterculture) as the first room, the themes of the following rooms ranged from “Fiction du future” (Future Fiction or science fiction) and “Rêve” (Dreams) to “Villes” (Cities) and “Géométrie” (Geometry). This selection of themes felt arbitrary--if not uninteresting. While the whole exhibition gave the attentive viewer both visual delight and historical range, it came at the expense of clear intentionality and without much curatorial apparatus.

The early countercultural material was rich with context and layered juxtaposition. Seeing French underground comics alongside American and Japanese works from the same era revealed not just parallel energies but fundamentally different--and even orthogonal--artistic responses to the global cultural moment. Where American underground comix leaned into psychedelia, drugs, and sexual liberation, French artists channeled their energy into political dissent and aesthetic innovation, as in the case of Forest’s Barbarella or Peellaert’s Jodelle. Japan’s Garo offered yet another track:  class struggle, existential introspection, and artistic minimalism, perhaps taking cues from contemporary national writers and filmmakers, such as Kenzaburō Ōe and Nagisa Oshima. This juxtaposition was brilliantly instructive--as the wall text explained:

 

The 1960s saw the development of forms of free expression and protest all over the world, going against the values and hierarchies of establishment culture. This counterculture was the identity marker of a generation and especially permeated the field of comics, which until then were considered as being for children by their very nature.

 

Fig. 3

 

In France, Japan, and then the United States, new forms of comics appeared on the fringes of mainstream production. They expanded comic readership and sowed the seeds for themes that would take on considerable significance around the turn of the century, defining the contours of modern comics:  graphic journalism, confessional style, addressing major societal issues, and mixing comics with other forms of art. The 1960s also marked the start of the process of cultural legitimisation that would lead to the recognition of “the ninth art.”

 

But, as the exhibition unfolded, its themes became more diffuse. “Rire,” the room dedicated to humor, gathered pages by Claire Bretécher, André Franquin, Bill Watterson, and Albert Uderzo, among others--but presented them with no logic or framing. Which caused the viewer (or me, at least) to start a little mental game:  “Which creators should or could have been included in this room, and why were they omitted?” As I proceeded through the rest of the exhibition, that game took up more and more of my mental attention. In the section on “black and white,” for example, to illustrate how comics intersect with film and roman noir, I’d have preferred less Frank Miller (who has always struck me as overly derivative of his forebears) and more Jose Muñoz (Fig. 4), Baru, Didier Comes, Alex Toth, or even Darwyn Cooke’s masterful interpretations of Richard Stark’s brilliant series of hardboiled novels about a thief named Parker.

 

Fig. 4

 

To continue, while hopefully not complaining overmuch, the 1980s “realistic” branch of Franco-Belgian comics, not so fashionable these days, was completely overlooked (no Jean Giraud, no François Boucq, no Hermann), as was much of the kids’ section (no Peyo, no Quino). While that first room had implicitly set the show’s parameters as Western Europe, Japan, and North America, the utter omission of comics from Africa (with strong traditions in South Africa, West Africa, Nigeria, and Algeria); China, Korea, or the rest of Asia outside Japan; or South America (aside from the few creators published in Europe like Muñoz and Alberto Breccia) was puzzling. The United Kingdom also got short shrift. The omission of inarguable giants and massive influencers like Jaime and Beto Hernandez (USA), Max (Spain), Joost Swarte (Netherlands), and Dylan Horrocks (New Zealand) was mystifying. And there not even a glimpse of the Italian Milo Manara, one of the biggest names in latter-day European comics--though perhaps for an all-ages show a 13^th room on Erotica was understandably vetoed.⁴

While the European curators made efforts to include plenty of North American cartoonists, their perception of 21^st-Century work from the new world felt dated. Creators, such as Eleanor Davis, Sammy Harkham, Dash Shaw, or Jillian Tamaki, could have settled nicely into more than one of the thematic rooms and offered a more contemporary look at how comics creators across the Atlantic are engaging with the form. What’s been happening in English-language comics in the latest generation is as exciting as anything coming from the continent, but you wouldn’t know it from this show.

One side note on the exhibition’s physical space:  clearly the desire to show as much original comic art as possible was paramount. But each room--even the makeshift ones set off by curtains--felt cramped and claustrophobic, especially with the masses of enthusiastic crowds. Artwork was hung tightly arranged, with little breathing room for the material or the viewers. The original works were mostly presented simply--often without frames at all--but the density, along with the lack of commentary, again made it difficult to discern patterns or threads, never mind arguments. One could happily lose hours in any room, nose inches from stunning originals--seeing the actual ink on paper in the hand of the artist is transporting--but the exercise felt more like rummaging through some lucky collector’s trove than engaging in a museum show.

A section on horror or fear, “Effroi,” followed suit. With work from the EC Comics of the 1950s (which, it should be noted fall well outside of the show’s stated timeframe!), Japanese masters Junji Ito and Hideshi Hino (Fig. 5), and Charles Burns, it was packed with macabre brilliance but, again, no curatorial logic. Horror is not a monolithic genre--it spans the grotesque, the psychological, the physiological, the absurd, and more--and without guidance, the viewer was left to make sense of jumps from, say, Swamp Thing to Daniel Clowes without much sense of relation. That said, highlights abounded, including 110 pages from Hino’s Hell Baby, which held my attention for a good half hour. Oddly, the curators offered a full wall of the spellbinding work of the German master, Anke Feuchtenberger, in this section, where it felt out of place. Perhaps “Dreams” would have been more suitable.

 

Fig. 5

 

To be fair, every section of the exhibit pleased, once the viewer gave up looking for a curatorial argument and simply enjoyed the work. “Rêve,” the room on dreams, included some of the most imaginative work on display--from Fred’s surreal Philémon strips to Julie Doucet’s dream diaries to David B.’s Les Incidents de la nuit (Nocturnal Conspiracies).

In this area, an oneiric anthology, comics’ unique power to blur inner and outer worlds was on full display. A towering installation, perhaps ten feet tall, of the first 32 pages of “Les Cauchemars de l’amateur” (Fig. 6), a never-published nightmare comics story by Killoffer, was one the highlights of this section, and indeed the entire show. (How is it possible that this work has never been collected into a book?!)

 

Fig. 6

Another triumph was the room dedicated to “Couleur,” which traced how artists from Moebius to Brecht Evens use color not just decoratively but narratively and emotionally. Seeing original pages from the illustrator/cartoonist Lorenzo Mattotti (Fig. 7), Nicole Claveloux’s The Green Hand, and Moebius’s ground-breaking Arzach (Fig. 8) in their unmediated, physical form offered a rare treat: mechanical printing simply cannot capture the nuance of these richly painted colors.

 

   

     Fig. 7                                                             Fig. 8

 

Autobiography (Récits personnels) was a particularly strong section. Works by David B., Alison Bechdel, Fabrice Neaud, and Dominique Goblet, illustrated how comics can be a powerful medium for emotional intimacy, psychological inquiry, and self-reinvention. The juxtaposition of Bechdel’s Fun Home and Neaud’s diary comics underscored how different cultural contexts may shape confessional storytelling--even in what some viewers might (falsely) assume would be a leveling category such as queer comics. But again, the lack of a curatorial thesis led to puzzling omissions and lost teaching moments. It’s no surprise, of course, that this section was so strong, since autobiography has in many ways been the foundational mode for comics’ self-reinvention since the 1990s. As such, autobiography isn’t just a one category among others--it is, arguably, one of the central evolutions of comics in the last 30 years, and that argument could and should have been made.

The section, “Histoire et mémoire,” powerfully elucidated comics’ relationship with history and memory. Pages from Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), Emmanuel Guibert’s La guerre d’Alain (Alan’s War, Fig. 9) and Jacques Tardi’s World War I narratives (Fig. 10) traced how cartoonists have tackled historical trauma with depth, immediacy, and moral urgency. These works stand not only as documentation, but as emotional interpretation--and they remind us how comics, through juxtaposition and layering, are uniquely suited to convey the fragmented nature of recollection. However, since war comics have been such a dominant genre over the last half-century, including in the mainstream, a savvy viewer was likely awkwardly reminded of how much was left out.

 

        

                                    Fig. 9                                                                Fig. 10

 

To my dismay as an English Ph.D., the “Littérature” room felt the least essential. It presented capable adaptations of works by Poe, de Maupassant, Flaubert, and Steinbeck--alongside satirical appropriations, such as Winshluss’s Pinocchio and Posy Simmonds’s Gemma Bovery--but didn’t offer much insight or commentary into anything novel such adaptations might produce. Hunt Emerson’s sly and sometimes scandalous retellings of classics, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, would have been much more illuminating, not to mention David Hughes’s magnificent Othello. (Both artists are British.) While there’s nothing wrong with showing comics’ engagement with literature, the underlying message here seemed to be one of validation:  “Look, comics can do literature too!” Yet the deeper truth--that comics can do many things that traditional words-only prose cannot--was left unexplored. The section missed an opportunity to explain the medium’s distinctive capabilities:  its ability to collapse time, blend narration and image, and structure perception spatially as well as temporally.

By the final few rooms--which focused on geometry, cities, and formal experimentation--the show began to feel more like a sprawling cabinet of magnificent curiosities than a presentation of ideas organizing the displays. I suspect most viewers, whether comics experts or casual visitors, were running out of gas by this point--yet perhaps they might not have been, had there been a clearer explanatory thread or conceptual map running through the exhibit. Indeed, the back end of the show featured some of the most visually inventive objects on display--including pages by Chris Ware, Jochen Gerner, Yuichi Yokoyama, and Marc-Antoine Mathieu--which dazzle in their conceptual complexity. Seth’s surprisingly large and meticulous model of his imagined city of Dominion (Fig. 11) was stunning, but must have been lost on some visitors who had by now reached complete cognitive saturation.

 

Fig. 11

For all its bounteous riches, I admit that “Comics 1964-2024” nevertheless left me with the feeling of a missed opportunity. The show began with a sharp idea: that comics around the world had collectively responded in a unique and unexpected way to the shocks and possibilities of the 1960s and have since matured into a complex, global, and increasingly popular set of languages and media--no longer an overlooked little sibling to more serious modes of high art. That idea could have carried through the exhibition, but, instead, the show followed a more traditional retrospective model:  gather as much great work as possible and organize it loosely by theme. The result was often stunning--but rarely instructive.

However, being more generous, perhaps the exhibition’s biggest flaw--its lack of sustained argument--was also, for some viewers, its strength. Over glasses of wine after the show, one of my companions said to me, “I don’t know a lot about comics, but moving from room to room what was most amazing to me was how very different all of the work of the different creators is and what a vast universe of ideas and styles and subject comics can embrace.” No, the show did not lay out a coherent history or thesis, but it certainly conveyed comics’ astounding depth and breadth. And it did so with affection, admiration, and an earnest desire to elevate the medium.

So, a positive and optimistic conclusion. It was absolutely thrilling to see almost the entirety of a major art museum, like the Pompidou, turned over to comic art for the better part of a year, and “Comics 1964-2024” is truly unprecedented in its scope, depth, and sheer celebration. As comics continue to gain cultural legitimacy, we can hope that exhibitions like “Comics 1964-2024” may become more common. The Pompidou show may not have achieved the full integration of narrative and form, of ideas and images, that the best comics themselves offer--but it did bring graphic narrative into the halls of one of the world’s great museums, with no need of a Trojan Horse like “High/Low,” and put its diversity on display for a wide public. That alone is an achievement. The Ninth Art, like the curators who care for it, is still evolving. May the next major comics exhibition be even more beautiful--and a bit braver in its storytelling.

 

 

Endnotes

 

¹ “High and Low Culture Meet on a One-Way Street.” The New York Times. Oct. 5, 1990.

² It should be noted that “Comics 1964-2024” was just one part of a broader program at the Pompidou, “La BD à tous les étages” (Comics on Every Floor), which ran from May 29 to Nov. 4 of 2024. In addition to a series of lectures and performances, ancillary exhibitions included Corto Maltese:  Une vie romanesque, focused on Hugo Pratt’s iconic sailor; “Tenir tête,” an immersive installation for children designed by the remarkable Marion Fayolle; a showcase of the avant-garde comics from the magazine Lagon; and “La bande dessinée au Musée” or “Comics at the Museum.” I was able to spend some time at this last show as well, which paired contemporary comics artwork with masterpieces of modern art. While I liked the concept, the promised “dialogues” didn’t really impress.

³ For those less lucky, a sumptuous catalogue was produced for “Comics 1964-2024.” Like the catalogues for the two earlier American shows, it deserves to be in the library of any committed comics aficionado.

⁴ On the other hand, another great Italian comics artist known for his erotica, Guido Crepax, was included. And rightfully so:  once you get past the kink, Crepax is one of the most innovative and influential masters of page composition in all of comics history.

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Mark David Nevins is a professor at Holy Cross College and heads a consulting group.

Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two exhibition review

reviewed by Laurie Anne Agnese 

Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. Paris: Galerie Martel, November 7, 2024 - January 11, 2025. https://www.galeriemartel.com/emil-ferris-2024/

Like the werewolf stories that she treasures, Emil Ferris’s evolution as an artist started with a bite. “But it wasn’t the bite I thought it would be,” she explains in the Meet Emil Ferris documentary short that was playing at Galerie Martel’s show for My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. “But it did make me a monster and it made me understand being a monster.”

In 2002, Ferris was celebrating her fortieth birthday when she was bit by a mosquito and contracted West Nile Virus. Ferris woke up from a coma three weeks later to discover her transformation: she was paralyzed from the waist down and unable to use her drawing hand. It closed the chapter of her life as a single mom working to support her six-year-old daughter on various commercial art freelance jobs in Chicago.

“The bite saved my life,” Ferris says. “Because if you lose something that you take for granted, all of a sudden it becomes extremely valuable to you.” She fought back paralysis so she could raise her daughter. She committed to drawing again, this time for her own art and enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. To create the two books that comprise My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Ferris spent 14 years drawing at night, while working odd jobs and struggling with various health and financial issues.

 

Video credit: Meet Emil Ferris, 2019, director Mathieu Gervaise for Monsieur Toussaint Louverture (Ferris’ French publisher)

Ferris’ voice was heard throughout Galerie Martel whose curators placed this looped chapter of the documentary to preface their exhibit of original artworks from the second volume of My Favorite Thing is Monsters. At more than 800 pages, the two books represent a remarkable and wholly unique work that was praised by Art Speigelman for advancing the language of comics. But viewing the work through the additional lens of Ferris’ struggle also contextualizes the tremendous effort that informs the hard-earned message of the book: art has the power to heal.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2, continues the story as told through the personal notebook of Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old living in Chicago during the tumultuous year of 1968. This gothic romantic tale of Karen’s coming of age is layered with her understanding of herself as an artist, as a “good monster,” as a trangendered person. These transformations are uncovered through a generic detective story that drives the narrative: Karen is also on a dangerous quest to solve the murder of her neighbor, Anka, a holocaust survivor, while also discovering that her life in her uptown Chicago neighborhood is built on lies and violence.

Photo credit: Vadim Rubenstein, courtesy of Galerie Martel

The arrangement of the artworks in the gallery was notably symmetric. To the left, drawings of equal height showed the variety of visual techniques and forms borrowed from comic books and artist sketchbooks.  The selection on the right side of the gallery were portraits of the gothic characters who inhabit Karen’s imaginary and actual world. The focal point of the arrangement was Book Two’s enlarged cover placed in the center of the gallery:  a self-portrait of Karen as she sees herself as a monster. 

Emil Ferris’s original drawings of covers from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two.

Being a monster in Ferris’s world is identified with physical differences, in particular the visually grotesque. In the book, Karen’s copies of covers of monster magazines are dark and ghastly, though she takes enormous pleasure in reading, collecting and sharing them.  The cover images hover between imaginary and real-life horror as they often foreshadow scenes in the story. The covers also provide the only structure to the books which otherwise contain no chapters or page numbers. They appear as monthly installments, so the passage of time is suggested through the device of the occasional cover issue date.

But being a monster is not always observable from the exterior, but rather through actions and motivations. The original pieces offer a closer appreciation of the variety of styles employed by Ferris, such as the fluid comic panels and word balloons that are reformatted to make a page spread, to drive the action of the story and demonstrate how the characters live. 

An original artwork (left) and the published version (right), from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. The monster on display is a supposedly religious man preaching the bible, while also abusing his followers, and keeping his secrets in his own notated version of the bible, which Karen reads.

 

Original artwork which appears as a double page spread in the published book.

Karen’s copies of fine art that she finds in books or during her cherished visits to the Art Institute of Chicago with her brother recall a form borrowed from the artist sketchbook.  Karen’s interpretations of works of art are the book’s most exquisite and surprising, and they demonstrate Ferris’ demanding and labor-intensive style. Working with basic materials, ball point pens and cheap spiral bound notebooks, Ferris uses the materials that Karen could afford, building rich textures and shadows from the smallest of cross hatches.

Original artwork from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two featuring Karen’s rendering of Le Lit, 1892, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Ferris was so committed to the idea of creating Karen’s personal notebook that she originally worked on lined notebook paper but changed her process to working in layers to ease the labor of making corrections. The portraits featured in the exhibit demonstrate her use of layering, which add to the depth and complexity of each page, and by extension, the overall work.

Karen also copies many different artworks depicting the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes.  Judith is a daring and beautiful widow whose village has been invaded by the Holofernes army. She gains his trust through a sexual seduction, and then decapitates him to save her village.  Though Judith only appears in historical paintings, she’s featured on the character side of the gallery, because her story is so deeply pondered and brought to life by Karen’s imagination. In the published book, Karen reflects deeply the choice Judith made to use violence to save the people she loves and adds herself to the artwork as Judith’s loyal servant.

 

From left to right: Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1665, Felice Ficherelli, Art Institute of Chicago; Emile Ferris’ original artwork; Published version in My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2. 

In a later segment of the Meet Emil Ferris documentary, Ferris highlights the importance of collage and synthesis to her artistic process:

   “I wanted to give a lot. I wanted to give everything I could. I could only choose certain things, so there’s a collaging that happens where I put two things together because one image has one energy but when you put it aside another image and then there’s text, it creates another sort of energy.”

 These layering and collaging choices are observed in the drawings of Franklin/Francoise, a school friend of Karen’s who was severely beaten for cross dressing, and a character she reads about in her monster magazines that looks like a younger version of Sylvia Gronan, Karen’s neighbor and the wife of a local mobster. The collision of texts and other images adds context to the characters.

Original artwork from My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two. Franklin/Francoise (left) and Sylvia Gronan (right). Their published versions are below

Original Portraits of Stan Silverberg (Anka’s widower), Diego (Karen’s brother) and Anka as a ghost.

 

The placement of the three portraits together allowed the exhibition the opportunity to show a compassionate side of Emil Ferris. Stan Silverberg is Anka’s widower rendered in blue, as is Anka’s ghost. Karen chose blue for Anka’s inner sadness that now her widower processes.  The center portrait shows Diego, who is committed to raising Karen as best as he can while also being involved with the local mob in order to avoid the draft for the Vietnam war. He’s one the books’ many flawed heroes.  In Karen’s portrait of Diego, she is responding to the advice of her friend who advises “when somebody is in a dark place the best thing you can do for them is to always try to remember their better, most beautiful selves.”

 My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2 offers no easy answers to the many questions and ideas it weaves together, so fittingly neither does it offer much in the way of a clear or conclusive ending. But the narrative, and everything it took to make it, demonstrates what Karen realizes in Book 2 that “the greatest way to be a strong, evil defeating monster is to make art and tell stories.”

Unless stated otherwise, all photos taken by Laurie Anne Agnese