Book Review - Ilan Manouach in Review – Critical Approaches To His Conceptual Comics

Reviewed by Gareth Brookes, AHRC Techne funded PhD Candidate at UAL, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7167-8255

 
Pedro Moura (ed.) Ilan Manouach in Review – Critical Approaches To His Conceptual Comics. London: Routledge, 2023. $170. https://www.routledge.com/Ilan-Manouach-in-Review-Critical-Approaches-to-his-Conceptual-Comics/Moura/p/book/9781032399713

The artist Ilan Manouach has come to occupy a unique place in European comics. To some Manouach is a controversialist, provocateur and plagiarist, to others he is an artist working in the traditions of conceptualism and situationism to reveal concealed power structures ingrained in systems of publishing, distribution and in the reading practices of comics.

It is highly unusual for any artist to be the subject of a book such as this, particularly for an artist at the mid-point in their career (Manouach was born in 1980) with a relatively small, and, for the most part, relatively recent body of work. There are 21 books listed on Manouach’s website and there are 14 essays here, which, including introduction and afterword, amounts to eighteen contributors.

Any reader approaching Ilan Manouach in Review with only a passing acquaintance with his art will leave suitably enlightened. With so many chapters surveying a limited body of work, there are necessary repetitions. For example, the details of the publication and reception of Manouach’s controversial work Katz (2012) - a reworking of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) in which both Nazis and their Jewish victims are depicted as cats - are repeated a number of times. This is also the case with Riki Fermier (2015), a work in which all characters in the children’s comic Rasmus Klump are carefully erased save the periphery character of Riki the Pelican, who wanders around a depopulated farm, occasionally responding to disembodied voices. Noirs (2014) is also dealt with several times, in this work colour difference in the racially problematic 1963 comic Les Schtroumpfs Noirs/The Purple Smurfs is eradicated by replacing all print toners in the printing of Manouach’s version with cyan. In many cases these repetitions complement one another, and the reader is able to trace analytical resonances not only between scholars, but between fields. At other times reading repeated descriptions of a single work can feel like a chore and make this a volume best enjoyed chapter-by-chapter over a number of weeks.

The book is organised into three parts: Part 1 – Textuality and Surfaces, Part 2 – Reading Practices, Part 3 – Rethinking the Past and Futures of Comics. The strongest chapters are those in which scholars bring their specific research interests to bear on a focused area of Manouach’s practice and analytically respond to the erasures and reversals he performs. Reading Childly by Maaheen Ahmed considers ‘childness’ and the construction of the implied child reader as a tool to critically approach Manouach’s interventions of erasure in Riki Fermier and Cascao (2019). Ian Hague’s critique of the tactile project Shapereader (2015 - Present) designed for comics readers with visual impairment, is disrupted by Covid-19 in a way that proves enlightening. Simon Grennan tests his formulations of ‘graphiotactic saliency’ and the notion of point of view as definitive component of storyworld through a consideration of Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge (2019). Barbara Postema discusses history and nostalgia with regard to the Bande Dessinée format and traces relationship of this to Manouach’s work. Benoît Crucifix considers ‘rogue archives’ in the context of Manouach’s online Conceptual Comics Archive.

In most cases the chapters I connected with were by scholars with whose work I was already familiar, and I found my interest most engaged by observing the different ways these scholars approached Manouach’s comics. Through their accumulated responses I found myself considering Manouach’s work in terms of a practice-based body of research, intended to provoke theoretical response, and perhaps completing itself through analysis of this kind.

Of all the contributions I found the chapter Can Comics Think by Daniel Worden to be the most interesting and original, adopting what one might call a practice-based approach to the analysis of the huge volume Crucible Island: Pirates, Microworkers, Spammists, and the Venatic Lore of Clickfarm Humor (2019). In this comic Manouach outsources the captioning of 1,494 desert island cartoons to micropayment contract workers through the Amazon owned microworker platform Mechanical Turk. In the final section of his chapter Worden outsources the analysis of Crucible Island to microworkers who are paid $5 to produce a 100-word response. In both Manouach’s outsourced comic and Worden’s outsourced analysis, the disconnectedness of this digital industrial approach is mixed with moments of humour and humanity often reflecting the desires of the precariously employed microworkers. Worden’s approach does a great deal to illuminate the tensions and intentions active in Manouach’s engagement with these exploitative industries.

Given the oblique nature of the subject matter, it is inevitable that this book says as much about comics studies as a practice as it does about the practice of the artist under consideration. There is a sense of comics studies trying to come to terms with a creator who is really a conceptual artist making self-reflexive work about comics. Manouach’s interventions undoubtedly represent an important contribution to comics, critiquing the hidden power structures embedded in the form, but the strategies he employs are drawn from a post-post-modernist, post-internet stance which holds that the only sensible response to the monstrous number of comics available in the world is through recycling, reappropriation and reframing. Comics studies has barely begun to consider these ideas. Benoît Crucifix’s recent study Drawing From the Archives, Comics Memory and the Contemporary Graphic Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2023) is a notable exception, and Crucifix’s contribution to the volume under consideration extends the scope of his work.

Another interesting question raised is how comics studies goes about accommodating a practice in which so much is based on erasure. Drawing theory usually considers trace, or the index of the body making marks on paper. The authorial presence based on removal represented in the negative trace of Manouach’s diverse dismantling practice presents an analytical vacuum to be filled. The book could very well have been titled ‘Where is Ilan Manouach?’ and the great pleasure of these essays lies in the various ways comics scholars go about finding him.

One can’t help but wonder what Manouach makes of all this. The impulse to respond to work that approaches fine art practice with what some may consider a disproportionate amount of analysis, in order to either accommodate Manouach’s practice in comics scholarship, or rise to the challenge of his conceptualist gestures, perhaps betrays a shift in comics studies toward contemporary art theory. The reification that comes with this is something that Manouach both critiques and invites through his work, and I suspect that the reifying power relationship between comics practice and academia may be too tempting a subject for Manouach to ignore. Will this volume at some point become the subject of one of Manouach’s conceptualist reversals? If so, I look forward to it.