Ilan Manouach in Review: Critical Approaches to His Conceptual Comics [First Edition] 1032399716, 9781032399713

Citation preview

Ilan Manouach in Review

This book takes an interdisciplinary and diverse critical look at the work of comic artist Ilan Manouach, situating it within the avant-garde movement more broadly. An international team of authors engages with the topic from diverse theoretical approaches, from traditional narratology and aesthetic close readings of some of Manouach’s books, engaging with comics’ own distinctive history, modes of production, circulation and reception, to perspectives from disability studies, post-coloniwal studies, technological criticism, media ecology, ontography, posthumanist philosophy and issues of materiality and media specificity. This innovative and timely volume will interest students and scholars of comic studies, media studies, media ecology, literature, cultural studies and visual studies. Pedro Moura is an independent scholar, teacher, and comics scriptwriter from Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a PhD from the University of Lisbon and KU Leuven.

Routledge Advances in Comics Studies Edited by Randy Duncan Henderson State University

Matthew J. Smith Radford University

Christina Knopf SUNY Cortland

Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative Edited by Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw Immigrants and Comics Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis Edited by Nhora Lucía Serrano Superheroes and Excess A Philosophical Adventure Edited by Jamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books Red Ink in the Gutter Edited by John Darowski and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns Vertigo Comics British Creators, US Editors, and the Making of a Transformational Imprint Isabelle Licari-Guillaume Precarious Youth in Contemporary Graphic Narratives Young Lives in Crisis Edited by María Porras Sánchez and Gerardo Vilches Destruction, Ethics, and Intergalactic Love Exploring Y: The Last Man and Saga Peter Admirand Ilan Manouach in Review Critical Approaches to his Conceptual Comics Edited by Pedro Moura For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Advances-in-Comics-Studies/book-series/RACS

Ilan Manouach in Review Critical Approaches to his Conceptual Comics Edited by Pedro Moura

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Pedro Moura The right of Pedro Moura to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moura, Pedro (Independent scholar), editor. Title: Ilan Manouach in review : critical approaches to his conceptual comics / edited by Pedro Moura. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge advances in comics studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023015194 (print) | LCCN 2023015195 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032399713 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032450056 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003374961 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Manouach, Ilan, 1980- | Comic books, strips, etc.--Belgium--History and criticism. | LCGFT: Comics criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PN6790.B43 M27355 2023 (print) | LCC PN6790.B43 (ebook) | DDC 741.5/9493--dc23/eng/20230606 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023015194 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023015195 ISBN: 978-1-032-39971-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-45005-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37496-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

What is the human brain, if not an immense and natural palimpsest? Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises

 

 

 

The articles for Ilan Manouach in Review were commissioned and produced by Echo Chamber ASBL, a Brussels-based non-profit organization with the mission to produce, fundraise, document and archive radical and speculative artistic practices in contemporary comics. The anthology also received generous funding from Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and its «Soutien public à la bande dessinée», in 2022. www.echochamber.be Note on images: if not otherwise stated, all images belong to Ilan Manouach, used with kind permission.

Contents

List of Figures ix List of Contributors xi Foreword xvi Introduction: A Critical Situatedness of Comics

1

PEDRO MOURA

PART 1

Textuality and Surfaces

11

1 Katz, Noirs & Tintin akei Kongo: Ilan Manouach’s Critical Manifesto 13 XAVIER GUILBERT

2 Ilan Manouach’s Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge: Ontography and the Past and Future of Stories

24

SIMON GRENNAN

3 Whitewashing the Smudge: The Politics of Erasure and Unreadability in Ilan Manouach’s Cascao 45 ANA MATILDE SOUSA

4 The Void that Challenged Narrative: A Poetics of Emptiness in Riki Fermier 64 GREICE SCHNEIDER

5 Replacing and Reorganizing: A Discursive Arc about Cultural Production LORENZ OHRMER

76

viii Contents PART 2

Reading Practices

95

6 Reading Childly: Riki Fermier and Cascao 97 MAAHEEN AHMED

7 Disability, Comics and the Shapereader

112

JOSÉ ALANIZ

8 Shapereader and the Limits of Touch

130

IAN HAGUE

9 Blanco: On Blank and Illegible Books

145

MORITZ KÜNG

PART 3

Rethinking the Pasts and the Futures of Comics

155

10 Manouach Contrabandier: Countering Practices to Industrial Publishing

157

MORVANDIAU

11 Haunted by Tradition: Ilan Manouach and the Ghosts of BD Past

173

BARBARA POSTEMA

12 [CoCo]: Conceptual Comics and Online Archives

189

BENOÎT CRUCIFIX

13 Can Comics Think? Automation on The Cubicle Island 204 DANIEL WORDEN

14 Ilan Manouach: The Comic Book Hacker

225

MARIA CLARA DA S. R. CARNEIRO AND LIELSON ZENI

Afterword: Like a Robot Bereft of Its Function

240

XAVIER LÖWENTHAL

Index 243

Figures

2.1 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019. Front cover 26 2.2 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019. Pages 2 and 3 31 2.3 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019. Pages 20 and 21 32 3.1 Cover of Ilan Manouach’s Cascao 47 3.2 Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953. Traces of drawing media on paper with label and gilded frame; 25 1/4 × 21 3/4 × 1/2 in. (64.14 × 55.25 × 1.27 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchased through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photograph: Ben Blackwell 49 3.3 Example of pages from Ilan Manouach’s Cascao 55 4.1 Covers of Petzi Fermier and Riki Fermier 69 4.2 Ilan Manouach, Riki Fermier (La Cinquième Couche, 2015), 7 72 6.1 Pages 32–33 from Cascao 98 6.2 Riki Fermier, p. 4 106 6.3 Vivre ensemble, p. 3 108 8.1 Shapereader’s presentation of ‘the rain’ 133 8.2 Shapereader’s presentation of ‘a darkening mountain’ 133 8.3 Shapereader’s presentation of ‘to listen,’ ‘to float’ and ‘to creep eastward’ 138 11.1 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019. Copyright page with multiple ownership signatures 174 11.2 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019, 45 177 11.3 Ilan Manouach. Noirs (2014), 5 181 12.1 Screenshot of the welcome page for the “Conceptual Comics” collection at Monoskop, featuring a grid gallery of the uploaded contents, 2021 195

x Figures 12.2 Excerpted image from the PDF file of Jérôme Puigros-Puigener’s Gone with the Wings, Brussels, Habeas Corpus, 2010 196 12.3 Screenshot of the edit function for the “Conceptual Comics” collection at Monoskop 199 12.4 Screenshot of the welcome page for the “Conceptual Comics” collection at UbuWeb 200 13.1 Cover of Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island: Pirates, Microworkers, Spammists, and the Venatic Lore of Clickfarm Humor 205 13.2 Detail from Aaron Koblin, The Sheep Market (2005). Courtesy of the artist 208 13.3 The “Mechanical Turk” on the cover of The Magazine of Science, and School of Arts 160 (April 23, 1842) 211 13.4 Tom Cheney, Caption Contest Cartoon, New Yorker (January 20, 2014) 215 13.5 Cartoon from Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island, page 8 216 13.6 Mischa Richter, “Of course, you understand you can’t possibly stay here tonight,” New Yorker (April 29, 1944) 217 13.7 Cartoon from Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island, page 13 218 13.8 Robert Weber, “What’s Our Immigration Policy?,” New Yorker (December 15, 1997) 219 13.9 Cartoon from Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island, page 1339 220 13.10 Saul Steinberg, “R,” New Yorker (January 15, 1966) 221 13.11 Cartoon from Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island, page 1127 222

Contributors

Maaheen Ahmed is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. She is author of Openness of Comics and Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics, both published by the University Press of Mississippi. She recently edited Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics (ACME series, Presses universitaires de Liège). José Alaniz, Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington–Seattle, authored Komiks: Comic Art in Russia in 2010 and Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond in 2014 (both published by the University Press of Mississippi). He chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) from 2011 to 2017. His research interests include Cinema Studies, Death and Dying, Disability Studies, Critical Animal Studies and Comics Studies. Current book projects include Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia and a study of history in Czech graphic narrative. Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro is a full Professor at the Federal University of Santa Maria in Brazil, where she teaches French and French literature. Her research interests are theory of comics, constrained writing and translation. She translated many graphic novels, organizes the prize for comics Grampo, and edits the website Balbúrdia. She was one of the authors of the books Style(s) de (la) bande dessinée (Classiques Garnier, 2019) and Post-Comics – Beyond Comics, Illustration and the Graphic Novel (Het Balanseer, 2020). Benoît Crucifix is Assistant Professor of cultural studies at KU Leuven and researcher at the Royal Library of Belgium, working on the project “Popular Heritage Lost & Found.” His previous research projects focused on the transmission and remediation of comics heritage and on the intersections between children’s drawings and comics culture. His monograph Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He has co-edited Comics Memory: Archives and Styles (2018) and Abstraction and Comics (2019).

xii Contributors Kenneth Goldsmith is a poet living in New York City. He is the author of poetry and essay books, including Uncreative Writing and Duchamp Is My Lawyer. He is a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and the founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (http://ubu.com). Simon Grennan is an awarded scholar of visual narrative and a graphic novelist. He is author of Thinking about Drawing (Bloomsbury 2022), A Theory of Narrative Drawing (Palgrave 2017), Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval (Book Works 2018) and Dispossession (one of The Guardian Books of the Year 2015), a graphic adaptation of a novel by Anthony Trollope (Jonathan Cape and Les Impressions Nouvelles 2015). He is co-author, with Roger Sabin and Julian Waite, of Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (Manchester University Press 2020), Marie Duval (Myriad 2018), The Marie Duval Archive (www.marieduval.org), and Key Terms in Comics Studies (Palgrave 2020) and co-editor, with Laurence Grove, of Transforming Anthony Trollope: “Dispossession,” Victorianism and 19th Century Word and Image (Leuven University Press 2015), among others. Since 1990, he has been half of international artists team Grennan & Sperandio, producer of over forty comics and books. Dr Grennan is Professor of Art and Design at the University of Chester, Principal Investigator for the two-year research project Marie Duval presents Ally Sloper: The Female Cartoonist and Popular Theatre in London, 1869–85 (2014) and Co-investigator of Remediating Stevenson: Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement (2022–25), both funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK. www.simongrennan.com Xavier Guilbert is a graduate of one of the top three engineering schools of France, and has spent five years living in Japan. Since 1996, he’s been an active contributor of the collective webzine du9 – l’autre bande dessinée, of which he is now the editor-in-chief. He is recognized as an expert on comics in general, with a special focus on manga. He has published articles in Le monde diplomatique and Neuvième art, and regularly writes in ATOM magazine. He has been the curator of various manga-focused exhibitions, including Mangapolis: Contemporary Japanese Cityscapes in Manga (2012), and three major retrospectives at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, in collaboration with Stéphane Beaujean: Osamu Tezuka: Manga no Kamisama (2018), Taiyô Matsumoto – Drawing Childhood (2019) and Yoshiharu Tsuge: Being without Existing (2020). Ian Hague is a Coordinator in Contextual and Theoretical Studies and Research Coordinator in the Design School at London College of Communication (UAL). His research looks at comics and graphic novels, and how they engage with questions of materiality and experience. Ian is the author of Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics

Contributors  xiii and Graphic Novels (Routledge 2014) and the co-editor of Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels (Routledge 2015), Contexts of Violence in Comics (Routledge 2020) and Representing Acts of Violence in Comics (Routledge 2020), as well as numerous shorter pieces. In 2009 he founded Comics Forum (www.comicsforum.org). Find out more about Ian at www.ianhague.com Moritz Küng is a Barcelona-based independent curator, critic, and editor working at the intersection of visual art, architecture and artists’ book publishing. He curated the Belgian pavilion for the 25th São Paulo Art Biennial (2002, with Richard Venlet) and the 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2008, with Office KGDVS), as well as exhibitions for the 26th International Biennial for Graphic Design in Brno (2014, with Mevis & van Deursen), and the 25th Kortrijk Biennial for Interior Design (2016, with Heimo Zobernig and Johannes Schwartz). He is the author of two catalogues raisonnés: Peter Downsbrough, The Book(s) (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2011), and Heimo Zobernig, Books & Posters (Walther König, Cologne, 2016). Next to that, he published the monographs SANAA & Walther Niedermayr (Hatje Cantz, 2007), Christian Kerez: Conflicts, Politics, Construction, Privacy, Obsession (Hatje Cantz, 2008) and Pieter Vermeersch, Variations (Ludion, Brussels, 2019), among others, as well the Cahier Bauhaus Museum Dessau #1–10 series (Koenig Books, London, 2017–19) and Herzog & de Meuron: Exploring 473 (SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul, 2021). He is currently working on a comprehensive exhibition and publication on blank and illegible books, Blank, Raw, Unprinted: Artists’ Books as Statement (1960–2020), to be inaugurated in 2022 at the Leopold–Hoesch Museum in Düren, Germany. Xavier Löwenthal is an artist, an author and a publisher. He is the cofounder and director of publisher La 5e Couche / 5c, with William Henne, since 1994. Morvandiau is a French comics artist and political cartoonist. Co-director of Spéléographies, biennial writing event (Rennes), he writes about bande dessinée as a journalist (Le monde diplomatique) and a researcher. Since 2011, he leads a bande dessinée workshop at the Rennes 2 University and is actually working on an art PhD entitled The Art of Contraband: A Cartography of French-Speaking Alternative Bande Dessinée (1990–2015). Pedro Moura is an independent scholar and critic from Lisbon. He has written a number of articles for both academic journals and online platforms, including his own blogs. His book Visualizing Small Traumas: Contemporary Portuguese Comics at the Intersection of Everyday Trauma was published by Leuven University Press. He is also a published author, including comics, and has been a teacher of comics-related subjects, in several institutions, in Portugal and abroad, for the last fifteen years.

xiv Contributors Lorenz Ohrmer is a Swiss artist and art historian currently residing in Belgium. Since his studies in Visual Arts at the HEAD in Geneva, where he graduated, he has pursued graphic inquiries around the notion of the non-narrative in comic books and the gray zone surrounding it, a concept he has explored with a great deal of drawn plants, fire, and aquatic abysses. His Master’s thesis in Art History explores the theoretical side of this subject. Within this context, he spoke with Matt Mullican about his “comic book” In the Crack of Dawn, which he co-wrote with Lawrence Weiner (1991). In addition to his artistic and theoretical activities, he has published several novels and comic books and established his own micro-­ publishing organization, Inorata. Barbara Postema is a Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her monograph Narrative Structure in Comics was published in a Brazilian translation in 2018. She has contributed work on comics to Image and Narrative, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and the International Journal of Comic Art, as well as collections such as The Routledge Companion to Comics and Graphic Novels, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, and Abstraction and Comics. Dr. Postema is working on a project on wordless comics, considering their history, their thematics and the ways this form allows readers to navigate non-verbal narration through sequences of images. She is a former President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics (CSSC/SCEBD) and co-editor of Crossing Lines: Transcultural/Transnational Comics Studies, a book series from Wilfred Laurier University Press. Ana Matilde Sousa is a visual artist, scholar and has a PhD in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon. Her research on contemporary Japanese art and pop culture has been published in journals and edited volumes like Mechademia: Second Arc (Minnesota University Press) and Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene (Routledge). She participates regularly in exhibitions and co-founded the Portuguese artist collectives Clube do Inferno and MASSACRE. Under the pseudonym Hetamoé, her comics have been featured by alternative publishers and other venues both in Portugal and internationally, including Chili Com Carne (PT), Kunsthalle Lissabon (PT), Monde Diplomatique—Edição Portuguesa (PT), kuš! (LV), Ediciones Valientes (SP), Éditions Trip (CA) or the Anthropocene Curriculum (DE). Website: www.heta.moe Greice Schneider is associate professor at the Department of Communications of Universidade Federal de Sergipe (Brazil) and is the author of What Happens When Nothing Happens: Boredom and Everyday Life in Contemporary Comics (Leuven University Press). She holds a PhD in Literature (KULeuven) and a MA in Communication and Contemporary Culture (Universidade Federal da Bahia). Her main interests lie in the field of visual studies, with a particular interest in the relations between image

Contributors  xv and narrative. Her publications have appeared in Studies in Comics, European Comic Art and Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art. She is the leader of the research group Lavint (Laboratório de Análise de Visualidades, Narrativas e Tecnologias) and member of Rede Grafo (Rede Integrada de Pesquisa sobre Teorias e Análise da Fotografia). She is currently working as a visiting scholar of the Department of Art History at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Daniel Worden is an Associate Professor in the School of Art at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (2020) and Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism (2011), and the editor of The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum (2021) and The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World (2015). Lielson Zeni is a PhD student at the department of Ciência da Literatura at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His doctoral thesis investigates the idea of crisis in 21th century Brazilian comics. Zeni’s master dissertation was about the literary text adaptation into comic books, a research made at the Federal University of Paraná and had published various articles on history and theory of comics. He also works as a comic book editor and writer, organizes the prize for comics Grampo, and edits the website Balbúrdia.

Foreword

“It’s a bad time for poetry,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in 1938. On the heels of the Great Depression and with the rise of fascism, poetry, as it had been conceived of as recently as a decade earlier, ceased to exist. In times of crisis, people want solutions, and ultra-modernism seemed to present only more problems. But as if to counter Brecht, a year later in 1939, W.H. Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden seemed to be saying that while there are solutions to be found, to ask poetry to solve them betrays the (dis) function of poetry, which is precisely programmed to fail. Auden’s notion of poetry’s power precisely lies in its weakness—in its ineffectuality and inability. Like Bartleby, by refusing to engage, poetry provides an obliquely perverse and deeply powerful model for counterintuitive engagement. The knottiness of a sentiment like Auden’s is obliterated by the binaries of our compressed social media discourse; a tweet isn’t designed to hold two opposing thoughts in the mind at once. As a result, art and its institutions, in desperate attempts at efficacy and concrete results, have adopted the parlance of social media as their default mode for both their programmatic and evaluative systems. The end result is that inherently complicated, labyrinthine, and productively illogical modes of thought are forced into channels of normative articulation. Artistic discourse has become indistinguishable from political discourse. As Brecht said, it’s a bad time for poetry. But this does not mean that poetry cannot and should not be political; rather, the question is one of tone and intent. Several decades ago, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created a set of what they called “oblique strategy” cards, which were exactly that: illogically, surrealist-tinged, propositions intended to nudge the mind in directions that it would not normally go. When unpacking a problem, you pick a card and it offers you, well, oblique strategies of (non)solutions such as: “Are there sections? Consider transitions” or “Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance.” This open-ended mode skates around the binaries of good/evil, right/wrong, black/white, yes/ no, which we’ve convinced ourselves are the best options for expressing politics and power. What a shame to limit oneself in this way; as John Cage once said, “how to improve the world: you’ll only make things worse.”

Foreword  xvii Over the past three decades, Ilan Manouach has been creating artworks that are at once highly political and at the same time radically oblique. His propositions alone are enough to change minds: redraw Maus where both the Jews and Germans are cats and rename it Katz; redraw, translate, and distribute in Africa Tintin au Congo into Lingala, a Congolese dialect; redraw the entire oeuvre of Charles Schulz, scribbled by a thousand unskilled Amazon Mechanical Turk micro-workers and call it Peanuts minus Schulz. It’s hard for me to think of a more political artist than Manouach, whose work critiques colonialism, fascism, and labor, along with notions of copyright, authorship, and distribution in the digital age. Manouach’s work compels us to consider the actual conditions of literary production and how intertwined they are with the flows of global finance and surveillance capitalism. Rather than naively proposing binary solutions, Manouach literally enacts problems in the most problematic ways (spoiler: the consequences are real), providing actual object lessons in politically engaged art. If any art can change anything, it will be Manouach’s. Cartooning is merely a portal for Manouach’s rigorous yet playful conceptualism. By occupying and detourning the space of comics, Manouach mines it for its immense critical potential. And it’s not just theoretical: for every provocation, Manouach produces thick, visceral books, as if to mark their presence in the real world as facts. It’s hard for me to think of another artist who is capable of producing so much meaning, while producing so much physical beauty. Marcel Duchamp once said that “there is no solution because there is no problem.” I think he meant that problems are so intrinsic to the condition of human life that trying to actually solve them is futile; when one problem is “solved,” it mutates into another form, an endless game of whack-a-mole. The best one can do is to merely expose, to show, and to demonstrate, which is exactly Manouach’s strategy. Ilan Manouach is our twenty-first century Duchamp. While he might appear to be slightly at odds with his times, it’s best to remember that Duchamp himself, when asked in 1913, for whom he was making his work, replied, “for a generation fifty years hence,” which turned out to be exactly as predicted, fueling the 1960s counterculture. By this metric—in combination with this first book of critical essays about his work—I think we should really begin to feel the full force of Manouach’s ideas some time around the beginning of the twenty-second century. Kenneth Goldsmith Istria, Croatia July 2022

Introduction A Critical Situatedness of Comics Pedro Moura

Ilan Manouach in Review: Critical Approaches to His Conceptual Comics collects individual essays dedicated to the description, study, and critical takes on the oeuvre of the Brussels/Athens–based artist Ilan Manouach (Athens, 1980). This volume offers a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches addressing Manouach’s unrelenting production, although focusing mainly on his conceptual comics output, which I will discuss in more detail below. This means that we will be discussing a non-canonical artist who operates on the margins of more established commercial circuits, a little askew to the more commonly accepted discursive forms and styles of comics-making, or even of legality. Nevertheless, I believe that a book entirely devoted to such a figure provides a more conceptually challenging contribution within the art of comics and to its scholarship. It is, therefore, a most welcome, if not necessary, act. Given the variety of the scholarship and the academic and personal backgrounds of the participants involved in this project (scholars from Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Portugal, the U.K., and the U.S.), the theoretical approaches are incredibly diverse. Even though more traditional narratology and aesthetic close readings of some of Manouach’s books are not put aside, and always engage as powerfully as they can with comics’ own distinctive history, modes of production, circulation, and reception, you will find perspectives from disability studies, post-colonial studies, technological criticism, media ecology, ontography, posthuman philosophy, and issues of materiality and media specificity, to name a few. Comic Studies is increasingly a bolstered field of action and thought within the larger discussion of cultural practices. Not only have we an ever-more integrated discourse drawing from different disciplines and a plethora of solid theoretical groundwork, outstanding studies on the medium itself in the historical, media environment, and aesthetic spheres, but also the consolidation of a wider network of international figures, required reading on specific authors and stimulating collections, conferences and platforms (Aldama 2018; Chute 2017). The very series in which this book is being presented is no exception. DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-1

2  Pedro Moura In entering the realm of Comic Studies today, we realize how its specific theoretical field is positively sophisticated, with its convoluted national histories and transnational movements, its scholarly toolbox and practical applicability, and the way comics can become a powerful tool for addressing diverse issues related to communication, media, feminism, gender, colonialism, immigration, linguistics, religion, animal and disability studies, as well as the crossing with political science, classical studies, architecture, philosophy, and so on. There is also no doubt that a canon of key artists, titles, and even genres has emerged, but that’s par for the course in such a complex effort of building social respectability (Groensteen 2006). While there is some degree of continuous negotiation and deconstruction of its field, inescapably, there will always be blind spots, whole swathes of production that fall through the cracks, remaining unattended or even unacknowledged. Scholarship with dissonant voices is thus incredibly important. Focusing on the work of a prolific, yet understudied artist from an underrepresented “area” of comics-making can be, hopefully, a ground-breaking change of pace. By “conceptual,” I do not refer solely to experiments with the medium-specific affordances of comics. This might mean, say, delving into abstraction, non-narrative approaches, or slight changes to their material presentation, all of which are most welcome, of course, as is the case of the Oubapo-related productions, for instance. However, despite being stimulating, these are artistic practices quickly subsumed to social expectations, which simply move the normative boundaries of the medium a little further. That is to say, there are always tropes, genres, formats, collections, award categories that most works have to subsume to. With a few notable exceptions, such as Maaheen Ahmed’s The Openness of Comics or Aarnoud Rommens’ edited two-volume Abstraction and Comics, works describable as “experimental” or “non-normative” are rarely at the centre of critical focus. By tackling head-on with one particular artist whose output has played with the formal, expressive, and political expansion of the comics field, this volume is significantly original. I am referring here to works that deal, at one time, through all their elements, with the apparatus of the comics industry (from the “concept” to distribution), its materiality (and all the material dimensions implied by the comics medium), and procedures (all the social practices involved, from production to reception). Indeed, Ilan Manouach’s approaches to comics, beginning in the early 2000s, have been remarkably wide-ranging and always very attentive to the interstices of the formal and expressive affordances of the medium, as well as its political, economic, and social implications. Katz (2011) re-presented Art Spiegelman’s Maus by redrawing all the characters’ heads as cats, and was presented at the Angoulême Festival of 2012, when Spiegelman himself was its president. This project was considered to be a crass plagiarism, and the French publisher managed to convince the courts to force Manouach’s publisher, La Cinquième Couche, to destroy all extant

Introduction  3 copies and digital files of the project (which led then to yet another project: Metakatz). Cascao (2017) is a facsimile of a copy of a particular issue of the Brazilian series Cascão, by Mauricio de Sousa productions, but a copy which had been bleached, erasing the pages’ art in unpredictable patterns. And Abrégé de la bande dessinée franco-belge (2018) is a complex collage re-deploying snippets and fragments from a number of cut pages from classic Franco-Belgian albuns, following a sort of musical-like composition. All of them deal with the whole original object itself (graphic novel, magazine, book), showing how the point is not a superficial, plastic substitution or operation but a reflection of the entirety of the texts’ social and political life. There is an operation that stitches these elements—which Xavier Guilbert refers to as the processes of “representation, reproduction techniques and global diffusion”—into a singular, continuous, immanent plane. For George Steiner, works of art do not possess a cumulative effect where we would have each constitutive, partially analyzable element aggregating until the whole work emerges. In other words, there is no mappable slow shift of degrees but rather a sudden change of nature. Steiner speaks of a gap between analysis and “the process of understanding” (Steiner 1989: 93). What remains is “the incommensurability of the semantic” (ibid.: 94). Ilan Manouach in Review engages with the incommensurability of his output by focusing on one facet at a time, but consistently contributing to the entirety of his ongoing project, whose meaning is not only necessarily polysemic, but constantly shifting and recurring, and facing comics as a whole. His rootedness in the comics world (which includes Comics Studies, as I will make clear) is committed, by presenting his projects as comics and by engaging with its memory and traditions, its canon, and its industry. Ilan Manouach is very critical and discriminating towards the whole field at the same time that he shows an acute understanding of, and even a heartfelt appreciation for, the comics medium and its history. Many of his work methods, discourse strategies, and theoretical references draw from the art world and related academic and theoretical reflections. Point in fact, he engages with many of the channels of art institutions, often using grants from contemporary arts funding programmes, instead of publishing grants, where most of comics funding takes place in Europe. Manouach is also an accomplished, recorded, and touring musician (he plays saxophone across multiple genres, mostly experimental too). It is not by accident then that his comics-related projects are not concerned at all with the more superficial aspects of the formal language or stylistics of comics, but their very situatedness. That is one of the reasons why his “appropriation” projects, as we’ll see, could never settle for a brief pastiche, a page or two, or a mash-up meme. Manouach is engaging with the entire apparatus: not only the text, but the book form; not only the book form, but its circulation; not only its circulation, but its readership, collecting acts, archival practices, criticism, and cultural retrieval.

4  Pedro Moura Take, for example, the notion of comics (or the more prestigious “graphic novels”) as a territory of mostly and foremost solo auteurs. Manouach puts into question these relationships within the comics industries by reilluminating tasks usually “beyond” the foreground. If, in accordance to Daniel Worden’s chapter, contemporary practices of employment may “obscure human labor,” Manouach reshuffles this, especially with the projects that deal with micro‑ working practices, such as The Cubicle Island (a collection of redrawn and re-captioned New Yorker island trope cartoons), the non-comics, pornographic film stills-capturing Harvested (in which the goal is capturing shots that include modern artworks), but also the redrawn, or “undrawn,” La Ballade de la Mer Sale (the Hugo Pratt classic revisited by an Pacific Islander artist) and Peanuts minus Schulz (reinterpreted strips). Notwithstanding … am I not showing how difficult it is not to speak of these projects by referring also, or primarily, to the powerful gravitational force of Ilan Manouach’s role and name? In any case, his practice forces us to see beyond an illusory neutrality of the comics medium in relation to who creates them, who reads them, and what value they bring to the “market.” Not only does he reveal the underlying dynamics of power within the comics industry—an invisibility created by the canon-forming eye, and even by criticism itself, which tends to be hyperfocused on individual creative geniuses—but also, through certain artistic practices (détournement, covering up, redrawing, refiguring, cut-and-paste, etc.), retrospectively exposes, in the original works, hidden meanings or voices. This difficult unearthing operation is thoughtfully displayed in Lorenz Ohrmer’s chapter, inviting ever further scrutiny and reflection. Manouach poses formidable questions about this art form through the comics themselves, especially with some of his more recent appropriative work: the cases of Tintin akei Kongo, Noirs, Riki Fermier, La Ballade de la Mer Sale, Cascao, Peanuts minus Schulz and, more infamously, Katz and Metakatz. At the time of this writing, a new project came to light, Onepiece, a bound one-volume with 21 540 pages, wider than 31 inches, collecting the pages of Eiichirō Oda’s manga bestseller series One Piece. Many of these titles are examined by the contributors of this volume, sometimes more than once, and, as mentioned, from a variety of complementary perspectives. Among the most radical of the “transformative interventions” (Guilbert) that Manouach operates is the one of erasing. This can affect formal and reading habits, inviting the reader to resistant modes of understanding the medium of comics itself, as Greice Schneider eloquently demonstrates in reference to Riki Fermier. Without fail, consequences in the materiality of comics themselves follow, perhaps the direst ramifications of which can be found at the racial and biopolitical level; such entailments are front and centre in the minutely studied chapter by Ana Matilde Sousa. These strategies of destabilizing a perceived neutrality of comic formats, especially with respect to their most popular, circulated, and mainstream examples, the “classical” and “canonical,” can be thought of and discussed by integrating Manouach’s practices into wider, artworld contexts. Either by

Introduction  5 a “reading childly” of the works, in pursuit of an othering logic, as Maaheen Ahmed performs in her chapter, or by seeking profound connections with similar, yet highly nuanced, practices in the tradition of literature and conceptual “blank books,” a field of expertise explored by curator Moritz Küng, who is curating a massive show that will include Manouach’s Blanco. The artist has also developed ongoing projects that truly expand our understanding of the medium in all its capacities. The most celebrated is, undoubtedly, the Shapereader project, a system of tactile communication in comics specifically designed for people with visual disabilities, mobilizing “different communicative channels and sensory modalities,” in the words of Ian Hague in the present volume, who examines it closely in light of the haptic problems brought about by the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Shapereader is a great example of the kind of paradoxical experiences animated by Ilan Manouach’s works, which need a critical keen eye in understanding how it both rewrites comics’ affordances, formal and aesthetic categories, material performativities, and social-economic agency, expanding their possibilities, much as at the same time it alerts us for further extant limitations and future developments. José Alaniz, for example, clearly delineates how Shapereader both challenges the ocularcentrism of comics culture and upholds a number of other ableist presumptions. Re-connecting to a broader multidisciplinary artistic practice, Benoît Crucifix alerted me (via personal communication) to the ways in which, precisely through Shapereader, Manouach operates productive displacements. After all, that project evolved into a concept that is less comics-centred, and more about working collaboratively. Rooted mostly in a multitude of workshops, Shapereader ushered a temporarily shared, common language and its uses, through the installation of collectively composed tactile stories and musical scores. The curatorial and production efforts by the artist have gone further, via a number of initiatives. For example, the Futures of Comics programme, the conceptual comics collection at the digital library Monoskop, and the research project Applied Memetic, whose mission was to produce the first graphic novel entirely generated with artificial intelligence, a goal which, I should point out, has been achieved. Not only through the Twitter-based project, with engineer Ioannis Siglidis, The Neural Yorker, and the small booklet Le VTT comme je l’aime (BD Cul) that came out in early 2022, but also the 500-plus pages Fastwalkers (Onassis Publications), just published as I typed these words, and whose impact is too early to understand. As a scholar, Manouach co-edited the collective, encyclopaedic, and kaleidoscopic Chimeras. Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (Onassis Foundation, 2022), a collection with over 150 contributors from all over the world to extend the most diverse perspectives on artificial intelligence and its impact in the world at all levels. Most of these endeavours, including this essay collection now presented to the reader, have been channelled or co-organized via Echo Chamber, an organization whose mission is to produce, research, and archive speculative works of comics and beyond.

6  Pedro Moura Putting into question the overlooked dimensions of “natural stupidity” (Goriunova, 2022) in the models that serve as the point of departure for his appropriated or detourné works, regardless of the technique employed, Daniel Worden closely examines Manouach’s hacking operations where microwork is involved. In turn, Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni concentrate on works characterized by more “analogue” appropriative gestures. Generally speaking, we can see how Manouach also remains abreast of issues related to the history and social traditions of either world comics (e.g., Peanuts, Maus) or specific traditions (the amalgam of the Bruxelles and Marcinelle schools), where these gestures of “appropriation” reach beyond mere adaptations of the superficial aspects of the original texts. Several essays in this collection address these same issues, albeit highlighting a variety of features at each step. For instance, the supposed transparency or cultural neutrality of the cited historical texts, disentangled by Barbara Postema—or, alternatively, the very act of publishing such works as a critical statement vis-à-vis the immediate comics market Manouach is in contact with, from the independent French-language comics scene of the 1990s to contemporary global digital native environments, as addressed by Morvandiau and Xavier Guilbert. Both are close witnesses (Morvandiau is a prolific comics author, Guilbert a celebrated critic) to the developments of the cultural state of affairs in the European French-speaking comics world throughout that period. This critical archival turn, a revamping mode of addressing history and past traditional material has a forward impetus too, not only in other texts (especially the microwork- and the A.I.-led titles) but also in the collecting practices by Ilan Manouach, as analysed by Benoît Crucifix. Hopefully, such outlook has overcome, even if partially, the “difficulty of imagining a future qualitatively different from the present” (Venezia 2010: 191). As mentioned, Ilan Manouach is a scholar in his own right, with an extremely important research dimension. He has been awarded a PhD from Aalto University, with a project entitled “Estranging Comics,” and has published a number of articles elsewhere. Current developments of practice-based comics research mostly centre on using more or less typical comics’ strategies to communicate scientific information or philosophic thoughts, the most famous examples being Scott McCloud’s trilogy and Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening. Manouach, however, carries it out on a completely different basis. Indeed, he is closer to Simon Grennan’s practice of undertaking theoretical inquiries by drawing (called “demonstrations” by Grennan). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Grennan engages with Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge to show how several of the appropriation projects by Manouach also activate in special ways every single depicted element. Not only the “characters” (if some traces of them remain after the détournement procedures) but whatever mark is placed within the page, from the conventions of verbal matter, to onomatopoeic, emanata, colour, and other elements, no matter what their diegetic and/or representation role was in the original texts and is now.

Introduction  7 Drawing from a notion produced by Manouach himself in one of his academic papers, Grennan theorizes how these elements constitute “ontographic” objects, allowing for a non-hierarchical relationship between them, furthering still the artist’s and the scholar’s (which both Manouach and Grennan are) theorization of the drawing acts. * Perhaps it has become a trite remark to speak of comics as a necessarily interdisciplinary field, but taking Charles Hatfield’s advice to heart, we are not “merely surrendering to … the field’s heterogeneous nature” (2010). Ilan Manouach’s output forces us to consider each and every one of his publications from multiple standpoints. Inevitably, as readers enjoy each chapter, some information may overlap, as each contributor surveys a number of titles, some of which are mentioned and studied time and again. You will see, on the other hand, how each approach stems from different backgrounds and concerns, unveiling a slightly different facet of the work. In the end, you will have a kaleidoscopic view of materially varied, subtly layered, thoughtful, sometimes baffling, always provoking, but also fun body of comics work, worth revisiting repeatedly. Organizing the present volume into sections was thus a considerably difficult task. One could almost place any chapter next to the other, highlighting a different angle instead of another, and still create a coherent, fluid portrait of this multifaceted oeuvre. Ultimately, we opted for a structure in which the first part gathers chapters dealing with various facets of the textuality of Ilan Manouach’s works, either at the “surface” of its representations and depictions, including when detourné from original, pre-extant texts, or as textual materials reshuffled in order to rethink the very political history of the medium. In the second part, chapters share the common trait of engaging with divergent reading practices, from book-bound projects to three-dimensional projects, that invite not only a broader, more inclusive understanding of what readership means, but also the very act of interpretation and interrelationship of that procedure between a work and its audience. To read means to actuate social, sensual, and political dominions, and the combination of these perspectives may enlighten the richness elicited by these experimental takes by Manouach. The third and final part underlines broader social aspects of the comics milieu, from the editorial practices in which each and every one of these creative gestures is integrated, at one time questioning and adding to them, to the issues that have us questioning how comics themselves may rethink their own history, memory, and future archiving practices. These scholarly chapters are bookended by a preface by American poet laureate and media scholar Kenneth Goldsmith, who has co-hosted with Ilan Manouach a number of art archive-related projects, and an afterword by

8  Pedro Moura long-time La Cinquième Couche and compagnon de route Xavier Löwenthal, with a personal note on the tension between writerly/comics-making automatic and cheating strategies. * On a more personal note, I have had the fortune of working closely with Ilan Manouach. First of all, I fell in love very quickly with his first books, that were already putting into crisis the usual plot-oriented, if not the very representational program of most mainstream comics (even though the artist himself now puts some distance from these books and his current practices and critical positionings). I also organized a show on experimental comics in Amadora, Portugal, in 2007, which included original art from his then yetto-be-printed Frag (La Cinquième Couche, 2008), a show that was later remade with Warren Craghead III to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2011 (called Divide & Impera: there’s a self-published companion book about it). In 2012, we put out an illustrated book with prose poems called, in its French version—take a deep breath—Variations sur l’Ange de l’histoire, essai de Walter Benjamin inspiré par Angelus Novus (un dessin de Paul Klee). Or, for short, VSAdH, EdWB, IpAN (uDdPK). This was a bilingual project, co-published by La Cinquième Couche and my own Portuguese label, montesinos. Every time Manouach produced a new book, I’ve tried to write about it, in critical assessments made mostly on online platforms. I was also honoured to participate in the Metakatz (2013) volume, after the Katz debacle. As discussed at the beginning of this introduction, I hope this volume contributes to the necessary widening of the scope and foci of Comics Studies. We need to move beyond a too well-established international canon, not because the “most important texts” are no longer worthy of attention, but because comics is always already an incredibly diverse field of creative expressions. And paying more attention to overlooked, perhaps undervalued, works will provide us with better tools to reassess comics as a whole, from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. One often comes across appraisals of “the potential of the comics medium.” But such a turn of phrase seems to postpone to a distant future the actual, extant rich history of experimental forms, both from the inside and the outside of the various global “comics scenes.” Whether by interested choice, self-defeating complaisance, or ignorance, such disregard must be subdued. One way to achieve that is by mustering critical resources unavailable elsewhere but in radically different approaches to comics-making. Moreover, from an aesthetic point of view, it is also pertinent to counterbalance the majority of “reading for content” analytical procedures. Whereas comics are not necessarily a narrative medium (even if most popular examples are), the so-called literary turn of comics-making put the genres of life story, autobiography, reportage, trauma-related stories as almost exclusively

Introduction  9 meritorious of this critical attention. Yet comics are also visual, compositional, chromatic, material, sensorial, and, further still, they are a component of the cultural, political, economic capitals of multiple, discrete if intertwined communities. I believe that the thought-provoking works of Ilan Manouach, and the many critical approaches taken in this book, are quite an exhilarating blueprint for further inquiry. Works cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. Comics Studies Here and Now. Routledge: New York and London 2018. Chute, Hillary. Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere. New York: Harper Perennial 2017. Goriunova, Olga. “Natural Stupidity.” Chimeras. Inventory of Synthetic Cognition, edited by Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt. Onassis, 2022; pp. 81–84. Groensteen, Thierry. Un Object Culturel Non Identifié. Angoulême: L’An 2 2006. Hatfield, Charles. “Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies.” Transatlantica. Revue d’études américaines no. 1, 2010; n.pg. https://journals.openedition.org/ transatlantica/4933 Steiner, George. Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? Faber and Faber: London 1989. Venezia, Tony. Archives, “Alan Moore and the Historiographic Novel.” International Journal of Comic Art 12.1, 2010; pp. 183–199.

Part 1

Textuality and Surfaces

1 Katz, Noirs & Tintin akei Kongo Ilan Manouach’s Critical Manifesto Xavier Guilbert

Providing a critical perspective on the early Ilan Manouach’s “rip-off” works (as he describes them) faces a methodological conundrum. Indeed, the curious reader is only a Google search away from the “Projects” page on Manouach’s website,1 where each of these books is duly listed, detailed and identified as belonging to the same body of work. The earliest upload dates for the pictures on this page suggest it was created in January 2018, providing an a posteriori justification for their inception. Since it would be easy to discard this “irruption of the artist” in the critical discourse, it is important to give some context as to how these works were initially distributed. Note that the following chapters of this book will explore more thouroughly some of the works I’ll mention cursorily. Starting with Katz in 2012, almost every edition of the Angoulême Festival has seen the booth of Belgian publisher La 5e Couche (aka 5c) featuring a new example of those “concept books”. 5c-co-founder Xavier Löwenthal (and well-known jokester) usually presented each project as having been mysteriously delivered to their office, claiming no knowledge of the actual author—even well after Ilan Manouach’s involvement was revealed.2 Yet, this performance in itself was integral in tying together these works as being part of a specific and coherent project within Manouach’s production, despite (or rather, because of) their being presented without the usual origin markers (e.g., publisher or author). When Katz was made available in January 2012, it was generally perceived as being a stunt—most obviously because Art Spiegelman himself was presiding over the Angoulême Festival, having been awarded the career-spanning Grand Prix the previous year. Moreover, La 5e Couche was known to be prone to that kind of move, since they had just published two books by Judith Forest, presented as autobiographical graphic novels. While 1h25 (2009) was a caustic portrait of the alternative scene of the time, Momon (2011) seemed more introspective and laden with metaphysical questions regarding the reasons behind our existence. As soon as early 2010, the rumor arose that Judith Forest was in fact the creation of William Henne, Thomas Boivin and Xavier Löwenthal, and that a comedian had been hired as a stand-in for her media appearances. By the time Momon was published, it DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-3

14  Xavier Guilbert had become a well-known fact (hence the reflexive aspect of the book), and hailed as one of the first such “literary hoaxes” of the comic book medium. Following the Angoulême Festival and as Katz was scheduled for a wider commercial release in April 2012, Flammarion, the French publisher of Maus, filed a complaint for copyright infringement against La 5e Couche. Unable to face the legal fees that would have required, the Belgian structure had no choice but to come to a compromise: the destruction of all remaining copies of Katz, physical as well as digital, which happened on March 15, 2012. When the following year, La 5e Couche published Metakatz, a collection of different texts about Katz, some felt it was only another attempt to milk some more money out of the original hoax. After all, a companion book to Maus titled MetaMaus had been published in 2011 by Pantheon, and translated by Flammarion in … January 2012. In my opinion, the next two releases cemented the project as being more than just a promotional stunt. Indeed, both Noirs (2014) and Tintin akei Congo (2015) expanded the initial impulse into a fully formed critical statement, through the careful choice of the original material and the specific transformative process that was applied. While it is difficult to ascertain the initial intent behind Katz, the initial triptych of Manouach’s “rip-offs” can be seen as an informal manifesto, and clearly stands apart from the other anonymous releases that came afterwards.3 I identify two criteria that define and illuminate Manouach’s approach for these three books:

• they are based on iconic works of the history of the comic book medium (at least seen from a Franco-Belgian perspective), but which reception has raised some controversies; • the transformative process they have been subjected to is directly linked to those controversies, and tackle in turn the questions of representation, reproduction and global diffusion. * Maus is Art Spiegelman’s magnum opus, serialized in the pages of RAW between 1980 and 1991 (except for the final chapter). A collection of the first six chapters, titled Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and subtitled My Father Bleeds History was published by Pantheon Books in 1986, to critical acclaim. It was followed by a second collection in 1991, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, with a single-volume edition released in 1996. In 1992, Maus became the first (and to this day, the only) graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Price, the Special Awards in Letters. Publication of the French translation of the book, by Flammarion, followed closely the American releases: the first volume came out in 1987, the second in late 1992, and the complete edition in early 1998. The transformative process behind Katz’ inception consisted in replacing the various animal heads used throughout Spiegelman’s book to indicate nationalities with cat heads. Ilan Manouach later indicated4 he felt that:

Ilan Manouach’s Critical Manifesto  15 [f]reezing the representation of victims and tormentors like Spiegelman did, means adopting the standpoint of the oppressed, who can only see things in this light because of his own intrinsic role. It may only be a choice of point of view, but which implies accepting the roles imposed by nature. And naturalizing history is dangerous. Likening mankind to the different species in conflict in an unbalanced biotope, dividing men in classes or groups corresponding to species within the predatory chain is implicitly accepting this lethal and Darwinian order.5 Note that within the academic world, an article arguing this point and using a few transformed excerpts as illustrations would have been a sufficient basis for debate. Within the artistic world, the gesture would have had little meaning unless it encompassed the entirety of the reference material. Interestingly enough, on Maus’ Wikipedia page, Katz is listed under “Parodies”, a misleading qualifier to say the least. Indeed, under French copyright law, Katz would have escaped its condemnation for falsification if it had been a parody. To be perfectly honest, Manouach comes through as being a little too radical in his assessment of Spiegelman’s intention in choosing that specific representation system. MetaMaus dedicates no fewer than 45 pages (out of 300) to the chapter “Why Mice?”6 and lays out a much more ambivalent position. The first incarnation of Maus appeared in 1972 as a three-page strip drawn for the Justin Green-edited Funny Aminals anthology. Art Spiegelman remembers finding inspiration in “a bunch of old racist animated cartoons from the silent and early sound era,” and in a way choosing to subvert that representation to re-appropriate it as a channel for the representation of oppression. He candidly notes that “it wasn’t clear to me then that there were echoes and precursors for this kind of imagery of Jews as vermin built into the Nazi project itself.”7 While the metaphor proved multilayered in the references it evoked (from propaganda to cartoons to ancient illustrated religious manuscripts), it also became something of a hindrance: As the book was coming to a close, I really couldn’t have cared less about my metaphor, but I was stuck with it. People would ask me, “Oh, how would you draw us Italians?” and I was always stumped. I just had to deal with each of these issues as they came up, and it led to the whole sequence in Maus II of talking to Françoise about how to represent her.8 This questioning of the validity of the depiction of people as different animal species within the book itself shows that Spiegelman himself understood the very problem that metaphor entailed. To wit: There’s a point in the later part of the book (page 291) where, after they are free of their captors, Vladek and his friend, Shivek, go to visit Shivek’s brother in Hannover. Vladek said that they had kids, and the

16  Xavier Guilbert brother, who is Jewish, was kept safe by his wife during the war. This was definitely a mixed marriage, so in my book that meant a cat and mouse coupling. One of the many problems with visualizing Hitler’s racist thinking by casting groups as different species, is that different species cannot, of course, reproduce. In fact, Nazi propaganda often depicted the Jew as the wicked seducer of German maidenhood, defiling the Aryan race. So here a Jew and German have kids. At first I didn’t know quite what to do, but drawing some creature that looked like something in between a cat and a mouse highlighted the speciousness of demarcating groups of people as separate species.9 Yet, rather than disqualifying Ilan Manouach’s take on Maus, these considerations show how legitimate his questioning of the original metaphor was, and how the transformative process used was a way to “test out” this hypothesis. Before moving to the next item in the “founding triptych,” I want to briefly address Metakatz, and how, while remaining a stimulating project, it is a flawed one. Obviously a companion book to the ill-fated Katz, it is a collection of 38 different contributions (among which no fewer than three interviews) mixed with a number of archival documents. In this aspect, it follows the approach of MetaMaus, by providing a wealth of paratext to the original story. While one can question whether a work of art should stand on its own, or require a statement of intention from the artist to be fully understood, in a way the destruction of Katz made the publication of Metakatz a necessity. Unfortunately, Metakatz fails in that it ends up being merely an evocation of MetaMaus, rather than an equivalent, and breaks Manouach’s self-imposed rule of limiting his modus operandi to a single transformative intervention. Contrary to the titles composing that “founding triptych”, Metakatz is not even close to being a fac-simile of MetaMaus (the latter is a 24 × 17 cm book; the former is 23 × 21 cm), and the only actual connection between the two projects are the title and the inclusion of recorded material (a DVD for MetaMaus, and a vinyl record for Metakatz). * Published in 1963, Les Schtroumpfs noirs is the first album in Peyo’s Schtroumpfs series (aka The Smurfs in the Anglo-Saxon world). While the little blue characters appeared for the first time in October 1958 in the 16th story of the Johan and Pirlouit series (titled La flûte à six Schtroumpfs) also by Peyo, it wasn’t until July 1959 that they featured in their own story inserted in Spirou magazine (in the shape of a “mini-récit,” a special supplemental page which readers would remove and fold up in order to create a small booklet), with the first version of Les Schtroumpfs noirs. This story, alongside with two others (Le Schtroumpf volant and Le voleur de Schtroumpfs, December 1959) were then later redrawn and collected in the album format.

Ilan Manouach’s Critical Manifesto  17 In the English-speaking world, The Smurfs seem to have struggled getting published, with only one-page strips in British children’s magazine Look-in in the 1970s and 1980s, and a limited attempt by Marvel in 1982 with a three-issue mini-series, a large format comic book and six mini comic books. That latter effort probably stemmed from the success of the Hanna-Barbera TV show, which started airing on NBC in September 1981—a run that lasted until December 1989. In spite of its enduring popularity, it took until August 2010 to see any of the original material published in the US by Papercutz, starting with The Purple Smurfs10 and The Smurfs and the Magic Flute.11 It is generally accepted that the title and the nature of the black-skinned Smurfs12 was a cause for concern in the racially cautious English-speaking market, so much so that the translation eventually resorted to change the color of the infected Smurfs to purple. While Katz proposed a radical revisit of the original, Noirs leaves the source material untouched, but a single modification.13 Here is Manouach’s description of the project, as listed on his website: Noirs is a fac-simile: same cover, same stories, same number of pages, same format, and as close to the original in the quality of paper, its weight and so on. There is one, single difference: the four offset plates (magenta, yellow, cyan and black) that form the basis of offset printing have been replaced by four plates of cyan. Apart from reactivating an old consensus and problematizing the innocuously naturalization of the ideological use of colour, Noirs sheds light on the industrial fabrication of books where offset printing, a supposedly transparent and mechanic process, that once hi-jacked (here on colour separation), can reveal to be an instrument of political action. 64 pages | hardcover edition CCCC | 297mm × 215mm | 2014 limited print run | 40 euros The resulting book is a very interesting graphical object, providing a striking reinterpretation of the original material. Most pages end up being covered in solid blue (reminiscent of Yves Klein’s monochrome paintings), with small areas of white paper left untouched (notably speech bubbles and the Smurfs attire composed of pants and Phrygian cap). Two pages are particularly striking: page 18, where the last remaining blue Smurfs face the onslaught of the black Smurfs—in Manouach’s version, the only visible elements are the clothes (the same for all Smurfs) and the facial expressions; and page 51 (part of Le voleur de Schtroumpfs) in which the Smurfs are hidden in Gargamel’s laboratory—but rendered plainly visible because of their white caps in the rip-off. Besides their purely graphical value, both these examples show how Manouach’s revisit of the book flips the original material and brings to

18  Xavier Guilbert light aspects that were previously overlooked. In the title story, discarding the color suddenly negates the difference between the two sides of the conflict.14 * Tintin au Congo is the second volume of The Adventures of Tintin, by Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le vingtième siècle for its children’s supplement Le petit vingtième, it was serialized weekly from May 1930 to June 1931 before being published in a collected volume by Éditions de petit vingtième in 1931. As in the previous Tintin chez les Soviets, the story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are sent to the Belgian Congo to report on events in the country. During the Second World War, encouraged by Casterman (who became his publisher in 1934), Hergé begins to rework his earlier books to reissue them as full-color albums, but with a lower number of pages. With the help of Edgar P. Jacobs, Tintin au Congo is entirely redrawn, the page count cut from 115 to 62, and the most outrageous aspects of the story significantly toned down15 for its re-release in 1946. Further alterations (regarding the blowing-up of a rhino on page 56) were made at the request of his Scandinavian publisher for a 1975 edition. Yet, English publishers refused to publish the book because of its perceived racist colonial attitude. In the late 1980s, Nick Rodwell (then agent of Studios Hergé in the UK) pushed for the publication of the original 1931 black-and-white edition, as he thought it would cause less controversy than releasing the 1946 color version. This eventually happened in 1991, making Tintin au Congo the last of The Adventures of Tintin to see publication in English.16 Still, the book has remained highly controversial and often considered to be synonymous with racism. In 2004 a spokesman for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s government responded to criticism by a Belgian foreign minister by saying: “It’s Tintin au Congo all over again.” On numerous occasions, objections have been made to seeing the book in the children’s section of libraries and bookstores:

• In July 2007, British human rights lawyer David Enright complained to

the United Kingdom’s Commission for Racial Equality. The Commission called on bookshops to remove the comic, on the basis that it contained “hideous racial prejudice” with depictions of Congolese who “look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.” • In August 2007, Congolese student Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo filed a complaint in Brussels, asking for the book to be banned. The court eventually ruled in 2021 that the book would not be banned, stating that it was “clear that neither the story, nor the fact that it has been put on sale, has a goal to … create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating environment” and therefore that it did not break Belgian law.

Ilan Manouach’s Critical Manifesto  19

• Also in August 2007, Swedish-Belgian Jean-Dadou Monya also called for

Tintin au Congo to be banned in Sweden, but saw his complaint rejected by the courts as it hadn’t been submitted within a year after the publication of the book (which had been released in Sweden in 2005). • In October 2007, following a complaint by a patron, the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City placed the book in a locked back room, permitting access only by appointment. • In 2011, the removal of the book from a children’s library in Kulturhuset in Stockholm ignited heated discussion in the media concerning accusations of racism and censorship. While Hergé is often presented as the unequaled pinnacle of Franco-Belgian comic books, even his most ardent commentators recognize that the first three books of The Adventures of Tintin17 are among his lesser works. Still, the combination of Tintin’s iconic status with the inherently racist content of Tintin au Congo rendered that book all the more fascinating for South African comic book artist (and anti-Apartheid activist) Anton Kannemeyer, aka Joe Dog, of the Bitterkomix collective. Starting with a short story in 1992, Kannemeyer developed over the years a whole range of material based on a re-appropriation of Tintin, some of which was eventually published in the collection Pappa in Afrika in 2010. In an interview I conducted with him in 2012,18 he explained: For me, Tintin in Africa is kind of the Bible. There are so many references that I can go back to. (laughs) It’s like a visual Bible for me. But I do think it’s a problematic book, and I know that if I say that a lot of French people will probably not agree with me. … What I think is that, that kind of iconography kind of sticks. Even if you’re not a racist, it can become a kind of undercurrent that will maintain that there’s some kind of superiority. While identifying the same core issues with Tintin au Congo, Ilan Manouach’s rip-off approach is very different, in that instead of focusing on the racially loaded imagery, he prefers to question the underlying hypocrisy of its global diffusion and its fortuitous omission of some languages for that particular book. As Manouach states on his website: Tintin Akei Kongo is the translated version of Tintin au Congo in lingala, the official Congolese dialect. The book is an exact fac-simile of the commercial edition and follows the industrial standards and layout of classical comics. The goal of this endeavour was not simply to construe the artist’s tasks through a redefinition of the possible interventions, by commissioning a translation himself; neither to emphasize the importance of discursivity and self-referentiality as a way to address comics both as a language and a form of logic.

20  Xavier Guilbert The goal is neither to fill a historical error by making accessible this work in the language of the mainly interested, the oppressed, the insulted. One should never forget the implicit consensus that stands behind the choice of languages for translated works. The fact that the original edition hasn’t found its way to the African market with a Congolese edition, reminds the reader of Tintin Akei Kongo that distribution of cultural products is not solely governed by profit and market values. Adding lingala to the 112 different translations of the Tintin Empire, Tintin Akei Kongo reveals blind spots in the expansion of the publishing conglomerates. 64 pages | hardcover edition CMYK | 2015 | 165mm x 220mm Exclusively sold in Congo Corresponding to the local (Congolese) standard, the book is surprisingly small in size when compared to the albums familiar to the Franco-Belgian reader (which measure 22.5 × 30 cm). On the back, the usual mosaic featuring the covers of the others Adventures of Tintin is absent, leaving the cover entirely blank, another way to underline in media res the statement at the core of the project. * It should be evident by now that the points addressed by Ilan Manouach regarding the three original works (Maus, Les Schtroumpfs noirs & Tintin au Congo) are well known and have been amply discussed before among comic scholars. But this is where Manouach stands out, in that he approached those books not as a scholar, but as a plastician trying to find the best way to express what is first and foremost a critical stance. While all three works raise questions about racial and racist representations, Manouach’s transformative process successively highlights key phases in (comic book) editorial production—namely creation, printing and distribution—and mobilizes them with efficient results. The careful choice of highly iconic books is done less for shock value than for allowing for immediate recognition. Similarly, staying as close as possible to the original (and therefore favoring fac-similes) ensures a clear perception of the operative alterations, even in the absence of a direct comparison with the source material. Finally, releasing each project not as a unique work (which would make it “high art”), but as multiple commercial products deliberately puts the discourse within the territory of comic books (in the “low art” category), establishing the publishing act as a critical statement. In a way, the complaint that ultimately led to the destruction of Katz is a direct validation of this strategy.19

Ilan Manouach’s Critical Manifesto  21 While this initial salvo of rip-offs is admirably consistent and meaningful, Ilan Manouach’s subsequent releases have proven to be less convincing, with the exception of Blanco: In 2005, Jean-Christophe Menu, the publisher of L’Association publishes a biting manifesto, Plates Bandes. In an attempt to insulate his own catalogue from the “sensibilities” of the mainstream, Menu christens the term 48cc to describe the industrial national standard for Francobelgian comics, from its material properties (48 pages, hardcover). In offset printing jargon, a dummy is an unprinted book, which allows the publisher to test the finished object before its manufacture especially when a book goes out from conventional formats. My book Blanco, is an ode to standardization, 48cc dummy printed in 5000 copies and distributed in bookstores. By multiplying a publishing artifact, whose use is nulled by the popularity and ubiquity of its format, Blanco celebrates the signifying force of the industrialization of comics. 48 pages | hardcover edition 2018 | 210mm x 297mm Of course, Blanco is not a rip-off per se, in the sense that it doesn’t directly refer to an identified, pre-existing work, and yet, in its Malevichian quality,20 it serves as a perfect conclusion to the initial triptych. Where Katz, Noirs and Tintin akei Kongo could be seen as analysis (in tackling a specific issue within a given work), Blanco is more synthesis in raising the question of overwhelming standardization throughout the comic book industry. Then again, where I am tempted to see an informal manifesto of sorts, through an elaborate “editorial happening,” it might have been just a joke all along. And the seemingly absurd gesture by La 5e Couche to print out 5,000 copies21 of a perfectly blank album (and actively try to sell it afterwards) could be the final twist in that elaborate prank: after managing to sell three printed books that nobody actually read (but abundantly criticized), they might as well sell an unprinted book, and it wouldn’t make a difference. Either way, it’s been worth the ride. Notes 1 Available at https://ilanmanouach.com/projects/ 2 Ilan Manouach accepted to be identified as the author of Katz in the interview I conducted with him and Xavier Löwenthal in early March 2012 for du9 [ https:// www.du9.org/entretien/katz-2/ ], considering: “We have nearly reached an agreement [over the infringement], internally they know it is me, there is no risk now [in using my name]” (private correspondence, dated March 8, 2012) 3 Including Riki Fermier (2015), Un monde un peu meilleur (2018), Blanco (2018), Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge (2018), and Cascao (2019) as of this writing.

22  Xavier Guilbert 4 Interestingly enough, the listings for Katz and for Metakatz on Ilan Manouach’s website chose to focus on the book’s interdiction and subsequent destruction rather than explain the artist’s stance behind the project. The other listings (e.g., for Noirs, Blanco or Cascao) clearly state out the intended message of each work. 5 Our translation: “Figer la représentation des victimes et des bourreaux, comme l’a fait Spiegelman, c’est s’assimiler le regard de l’opprimé, qui ne peut, par son implication conjoncturelle, que voir les choses comme cela. C’est peut-être le choix d’un point de vue, mais c’est accepter les rôles que la nature nous imposerait. Naturaliser l’histoire est dangereux. Assimiler l’humanité aux différentes espèces en conflit dans un biotope en déséquilibre, répartir les hommes en classes ou en groupes correspondant à des espèces dans la chaîne de la prédation, c’est implicitement accepter cet ordre fatal, darwinien.” From my interview with Xavier Löwenthal and Ilan Manouach’ cf. note 2. 6 Making it the third most important topic in the book after “Why the Holocaust?” and “Why Comics?” 7 MetaMaus, p.113. 8 Ibid., p.130. 9 Ibid., pp.130–131. While Spiegelman often indicates how he has tried to subvert the metaphor—such as in making all his characters the same (human-)size—there are times in that interview where he takes it at face value. For example, on pages 130–131: “It echoes some panels in the first book when I first realized there are more than just Poles, Germans, and Jews in the world. When Vladek accompanies Anja to a sanatorium, there are other animals there. There was a goat, rabbits, reindeers or moose. … I don’t know, I think there was a giraffe in the background. It illustrated the possibility of that peaceable kingdom of different animals living side by side.” 10 The US release differs in that the third story in the collection is replaced by The Smurf and His Neighbors, since The Smurfnapper (aka Le voleur de Schtroumpfs) had been previously issued in a special preview comic published by Papercutz in July 2010. 11 Therefore incorporating in the Smurf series this Johan et Pirlouit album—the remainder of the series still unpublished in the English language as of this writing. 12 Sometimes considered as “the original Zombie Apocalypse,” since it was published nine years before George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, it is possible that the inspiration for the Black Smurfs story stems from Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Yvan Delporte, then editor-in-chief of Spirou Magazine and co-writer of that story with Peyo, was indeed a well-known sci-fi enthusiast. 13 In fact, Noirs includes another modification of the original material, but from my understanding (and based on the discussion I had with Xavier Löwenthal when the book was made available at the Angoulême Festival), this one was entirely accidental, leaving one of the pages entirely blank. 14 It is particularly true for this very first story, as except for a very few exceptions, the Smurfs are largely undifferentiated at that point. Later releases introduced specific Smurfs with identifiable features (such as the tattooed Hefty Smurf, the chef outfit of Chef Smurf, the overalls of Handy Smurf, and the like), probably an influence of the cartoon adaptation. 15 Several changes to the story removed many of the references to Belgium and colonial rule. For example, in the scene where Tintin teaches schoolchildren, he emphatically explains in the 1931 version: “My dear friends, today I’m going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!” It was replaced in the 1946 version with a mathematics lesson. 16 The 1946 color version eventually appeared in English in 2005, published by Egmont.

Ilan Manouach’s Critical Manifesto  23 17 That is, Tintin au pays des Soviets (1930), Tintin au Congo (1931) and Tintin en Amérique (1932). Hergé was famously embarrassed with the Soviets, chose to exclude it from his post-War redrawing effort and refused to see it republished. For a long time, the only available version was in the 1973 Archives Hergé first volume, before Casterman published a colorized version in 2017. 18 Available online at https://www.du9.org/en/entretien/anton-kannemeyer-2/ 19 Considering how much Spiegelman himself questions his choice of the mouse vs. cat metaphor in MetaMaus (see above), Flammarion’s move to get Katz banned could also be seen as the enforcement of the monopoly of critical discourse on the work by the author himself. In this perspective, the publication of Metakatz appears as a welcome reminder that there is no such monopoly, responding to the long auctorial monolog in MetaMaus with a plurality of voices and opinions. 20 Echoing Kazimir Malevich’s own progression from Black Square (1915) to its logical conclusion with Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918). 21 A very high print run by the standards of the Franco-Belgian small press.

2 Ilan Manouach’s Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge Ontography and the Past and Future of Stories Simon Grennan Introduction This chapter will outline Manouach’s own explanation of the genesis and fulfilment of the constraints that produced Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge, in theorisations of cross-media visual correspondence systems (Bogost 2012), utilising the concept of the ontograph, or the “a graphical … representation that provides concise and detailed information about the units and the ways they relate with each other in a particular situation” (Manouach 2018, np). It will consider Abrégé in terms of three related concepts: First, what Crucifix calls “undrawing”, or the disruption of “the relationship between drawing and storytelling to refocus attention on the social and political economy of the drawn image” (Crucifix 2020, 7), relative to collage (Brockelman 2001) and to algorithm-generated typical images (Liu et al. 2007); second, Kukkonen’s concept of “counterfactuals”, or the accidental appearance of contradictions across unified storyworlds or multiverses (Kukkonen 2010, 39) and third, Wilde’s theorisation of characters without storyworlds, or kyara (Wilde 2019). Finally, the chapter will conclude that Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge accumulates redacted and arranged fragments, of which readers have memories that appear stylistically and discursively similar. These memories establish an identity for Manouache’s sources by identifying storyworlds, rather than stories. Then the storyworld includes not only the causes and consequences of the object of depiction, that is, its past and future, but also the pasts and futures of the ideas that the reader employs to make sense of the image. Constraints and Conventions Jan Baetens writes the study of constrained writing should no longer be restricted to the study of internal constraints in high-cultural texts that are detached from their cultural and historical context but opened to what I would like to call the constraint’s expanded field. (2010, 76) DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-4

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  25 Acknowledging the history of constrained writing, Baetens expands the theoretical base by applying concepts of verbal constraint, developed by writers, to visual narrative media and visual/verbal adaptations. He follows Groensteen’s distinction between “creation and recreation, i.e. constraints which can be considered generative (they produce new works) and constraints which can be considered transformational (they modify existing works)” (Groensteen 1997, 17). Further, a constraint, he writes, is a “globally active device whose nature is neither grammatical nor discursive” (Baetens 2003, 1). Baetens asks “Does the use of such a constraint mean that one suddenly becomes able to ‘produce’, almost ‘ex nihilo’, a new work?” (2003, 2). The question reveals a number of general characteristics in the use of constraints to create new cultural works. First, constraints are critiques of inspiration as a generative process. Second, on this basis, constraints invert conventional rhetorical processes by replacing with a set of rules the imperative to represent one’s self. Rather, the fulfillment of this set of rules generates the work. Third, constraints always also represent themselves. The rules are comprehensible as part of the work (Baetens 2010, 57 and 56). Finally, each work generated by following such rules also modifies the circumstances in which a constraint is subsequently fulfilled (Baetens 2003, 5). Further, Baetens notes the tradition of theorists distinguishing between constraints that maintain medium-specific or genre-specific boundaries and constraints that reform or contradict these boundaries: “‘negative constraints’ (i.e. the practical and/or institutional obstacles which are the only types of constraints recognised as such but never analysed by traditional scholarship)” (Baetens 2003, 2). So-called negative constraints include “the many material and institutional ‘obstacles’ that are mostly defined as mere ‘handicaps’ and almost never as creative tools” (Baetens 2003, 4), such as publisher’s deadlines, the material requirements of the form of books, the cost of doing business, language barriers or pay restraints, for example, among the multitudinous contingencies of any productive life. The consideration of negative constraints alongside medium-specific and genre-specific constraints constitutes exactly the “expanded field” for the practice and study of productive constraint (Baetens 2010, 76). Baetens proposes renaming these negative constraints “conventions”, following a purely social analysis of the conditions of cultural production and consumption that produce media and genres (2010, 61 and Peterson 1982). Thus, he proposes, “conventions” can also be considered as productive constraints, so that verbal and high-cultural constraints will meet other external and contextual constraints, for which mass culture is notorious. [This] approach will accommodate the idea that constrained texts often contain unconstrained elements, which also have a role to play in the reading and the writing of constrained literature. (Baetens 2010, 76)

26  Simon Grennan This view of the expanded field of constraint “not only establishes a less schematic definition of what a constraint really is and means, but also … changes the status of the non-constrained elements of a work which can now be analysed as negative constraints in their own right,” but also changes readers’ and viewers’ approaches to cultural works generated through the application of constraint (Baetens 2003, 5). “Reading under constraint no longer means trying to isolate what is constrained from what is not, but trying to see what is made possible by a rule or constraint, and what is not” (Ibid.). Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge and the Use of Conventions as Constraints Ilan Manouach’s 2019 book Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge was produced through the manipulation of conventions as productive constraints (Figure 2.1). Abrégé is also discussed in this volume by Lorenz Ohrmer and, among others of Manouach’s works, by Barbara Postema. In part, Abrégé formulated its aims according to Jean-Christoph Menu’s well-known 2005 critique of the Franco-Belgian comics industry in the book Plates-bandes (Menu 2005; Manouach 2020). Menu “departs from the prevailing assumptions according to which the format of a book is a transparent signifier whose sole function is to frame the content” (Manouach 2020). Comics, “rather than being the aspiration of an artist and a publisher, have to be thought as products defined by an industrial and a commercial ordeal” (Menu 2005, 20), such as “workflow management,

Figure 2.1 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019. Front cover.

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  27 format standardisation, economies of scale, paper bulk orders, reader attention spans, shelf space and collectors’ best practices” (Manouach 2020). The systematic colonisation of the experiences of bande dessinée (BD) readers is rooted in the commercial contingencies of the industry, to the detriment of plural BD cultures, according to Menu. For example, Manouach claims that the BD industry has successfully ghettoised BD as ‘not-literature.’ “[P] urposely, comics in French are not described as books but as albums. … Mainstream comics are no longer described so much as author productions but as situated in a constellation of descriptives and production categories (Menu 2005, 18)” (Ibid.). Manouach follows Menu in arguing that these contingencies produce a dominant subgenre of BD that has the capacity to absorb, transform and homogenise a range of story genres that appear in its pages. Menu proposes a neologism for this subgenre, or the entire commercial BD enterprise, which is an abbreviation of the French phrase ‘48 pages cartonne couleurs’ (48-page colour hardback): “48CC” (2005, 20). Menu analyses the experiences of 48CC readers (and hence, the related experiences of 48CC artists and those producers outside the commercial mainstream) by recognising the historic contingencies or the ecology in which 48CC are made and read. For Menu, these contingencies include: reader and market relationships with culture and economy; why, where and when 48CC is made, bought and read; who makes, sells and reads 48CC; reader expectations of 48CC stories, plus the size and shape of 48CC, the styles of drawing, colour palette, lettering and language. For Menu, entrenched control of these contingencies, by the 48CC industry, continues to stifle both commercial and creative diversity, colonising BD’s identity through the active suppression of alternative forms and alternative ways of creating, publishing and reading, by the mainstream industry (Menu 2005, 20). Accepting Menu’s analysis, Abrégé aimed to be “a quasi-archaeological artefact that accounts for the Franco-Belgian industry’s format dominance” (Manouach 2020). By recognising the overt connections between the historic contingencies of BD and its dominant forms, production methods and ways of reading, Abrégé was “an attempt to investigate the Franco-Belgian tradition of bande dessinée through the lenses of its objects [recognising that] Franco-Belgian comics have many distinctive marks including their signature humour, the graphic style and modes of address, but also their format” (Ibid.). Generating Abrégé “from nothing,” as Baetens says (2003, 2), Manouach’s conjuring and manipulation of 48CC conventions, as productive constraints, involved the reverse engineering of the general idea of 48CC form, or those formal aspects of mainstream 48CC produced explicitly by the historic contingencies of mainstream 48CC production. Manouach explains his production goal for the project, or the new cultural work that would fulfil his aims, in terms of two existing ideas, derived from Karl Krause and from Ian Bogost, 190 years apart. These provided the theoretical rationale for his production methods. He would undertake a

28  Simon Grennan series of activities in order to generate a new work, exemplifying Krause and Bogost’s ideas, to reveal, intervene in and transform the current 48CC environment described by Menu (Krause 1822; Bogost 2012; Manouach 2020). Krause’s and Bogost’s ideas are only obliquely related, sharing a focus on the ways in which the perception of formal properties can be interpersonally shared or socially reproduced. Krause “argued in favour of an essential language (ontoglossa) consisting of primitive sounds (ontolaly) and signs (ontography) that allow for a seamless interoperability and a flawless translation between different expression modalities” (Manouach 2020), whereas Bogost conceived of objects that share a functional capacity to display their own composition, which he called “ontographs” (Bogost 2012, 38). Both Krause and Bogost share a fundamental conception of being that conflates perceptions with perceived properties, resulting in their different theorisations of items that are irreducible, self-revealing parts of an encompassing whole. It is significant, for Manouach, that both Krause and Bogost consider the sums of these items to be mutable, in contrast to the consistent identity of their parts—a reverse conception of the well-known phrase “can’t see the wood for the trees,” in which one can’t see the trees for the wood. Bogost explains how this concept requires “the abandonment of anthropocentric narrative coherence,” such as categories of knowledge, or ideas, “in favour of worldly detail” (Bogost 2012, 41–42). Manouach comments that this “allows unusual associations between singular objects to emerge” (Manouach 2020). He provides a number of examples of Bogost’s ontographs, including “shopping lists, the ‘exploded views’ of technical drawings (McLellan 2019), the cross-section diagrams of manuals revealing the inner function of products (Warren and Woodward 2018)” (Manouach 2020). He generalises the ontograph’s function as the production aim of Abrégé: An ontograph would function as an exercise in the “democracy of objects” where every object, small and large, real or fictional, will be displayed bare, claiming equal ontological footprint. The list’s structural non-hierarchical juxtaposition would therefore allow singular and unpredictable objects to be contemplated as such: without being reducible, in infinite regress, as aggregations of smaller bits [and neither] trapped in a sort of pre-individual state and entirely existing as parts of a larger system or a meaningful arrangement. (Manouach 2020) The book’s production methodology, or the constraint under which it was generated, was designed to fulfil this production aim. Recall Baeten’s expanded field of constraint, opening the possibilities of encompassing historic and discursive contingencies of production and reading. Rather than a set of rules governing the generation of genre or medium-specific visual or verbal text, Abrégé commenced with an analysis of typification. What contingencies and properties do 48CC share that are generic?

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  29 Manouach found the answer to this question by sampling. The sources of the sample are instructive. “In one single day, I visited a dozen second-hand bookstores in Brussels, where I acquired forty-eight albums, of 48CC standard format” (Manouach 2020). Rather than buying new books or borrowing from libraries or friends, Manouach sampled recycled books that are plausibly “most used” or those that evidenced “the signs that manifest of the social life cycle of the book” and in which “the distinction between textual and pictorial elements that conventionally account for comics craftsmanship, and the inscriptions of the social-economical life of book [collapse]; each inscription is part of a material language that is expressed on the same informational level” (Manouach 2020). We also see the relationship between closed and open systems in Manouach’s sample. Ideally, in the tradition of constrained writing, the generative function of a constraint is universally applied (Mathews and Brotchie 2005, Motte 1986). Manouach faced an immediate challenge in selecting a closed sample with which to work. Genres are open samples, by definition. The 48CC genre is no exception. Where does a genre begin and end? What rationale would govern the size of the sample? Manouach’s choice of 48 albums as his sample conformed to the inversion of “argument” and “rhetoric” that Baetens recognises in the tradition of constrained writing (2010, 56). Manouach had to choose a sample size, but no starting rationale—no “argument”—was available. His choice of 48 albums was rhetorical, being a simple extrapolation of a generic characteristic of commercial BD, mentioned by Menu. Commercial albums are invariably 48 pages. Therefore, the number 48 founds the monolithic aesthetics (feeling) of 48CC, in comparison with the multiplicity of other comics forms elsewhere. In the 48CC subgenre, 48 is a number with significance far beyond page count. It is the conjuring number of the genre. Once Manouach obtained his sample, he was able to apply general rules governing his actions and choices, designed to generate the new work. He made digital copies of all pages and grouped together each page 1, page 2, and so forth, from different albums. He “started by establishing a list that indexed all the elements that I personally considered to characterise the tradition of the Franco-Belgian comics school” (Manouach 2020). Again, he bridged gaps in the system of identification by recourse to rhetoric, guided in his choices by “a partial knowledge,” creating “an intuitive subjective repertoire” “grouped by vague affinity” “following a typology of pictorial-narrative units drawn from a shared reservoir of the bande dessinée tradition” (Manouach 2020). He identified categories of items including “running jokes,” “protomemes,” “discursive representational forms,” “textual devices,” “meta-narrative devices” and “paratextual information such as author signings, collector’s insignia, paper discolouration, laid-in documents, mildew degradation, torn pages, shelf wear, general marginalia.” “All the elements were eventually attributed a numerical index” (Ibid.).

30  Simon Grennan The ideal (that is, non-existent) 48CC album is much more than a list of items, falling into categories, of course. The spatio-temporal fabric of drawn stories devolves to the relative proximity of items ranging from depictions to icons, story and storyworld, paratext, metatext and material properties. The identities of these items often derive from their relative proximity to the range of other items, as much as they conform to categories or have properties, so much so, that it is sometimes not possible to identify a category of item outside these relationships, which I refer to elsewhere as “graphiotactic saliency” (Grennan 2017, 29 and 28–37). To functionalise this challenge, Manouach produced a two-axis diagrammatic score that would eventually “allow [him] to visualise how the elements of [his] typology were distributed in the pages of the books” (2020). Rather than including gutters in the index of categories and locations, the “objects that made the initial index and that could be harvested from the collected books were to be cited in the score according to their origin (book) and their placement in the book volume (page and panel number),” so that the “isolated elements were marshalled into the empty panel structure of one of the books that were purchased, Giraud’s Arizona Love. The book was expressly selected for its varied panel composition” (Manouach 2020). Recall that Manouach’s aim in generating Abrégé was to produce “a quasi-archaeological artefact that accounts for the Franco-Belgian industry’s format dominance” (2020). In presenting 48CC “as objects, without requiring an interpretation that comes from the elucidation of the original narrative functionalities, or having to demonstrate the referential significance of distinct narrative units and building blocks,” he writes: “Its objects are freed from the imperatives of the specific narrative in which they were initially implemented,” providing “a virtually present construct of relational juxtapositions [which] claims the irreducibility of objects to their effects or compounds” (Ibid.) (Figures 2.2 and 2.3.). Enter the Storyworlds Two other challenges could not be met by Manouach’s system for isolating and locating items. These challenges are related to each other, in that they both reveal the system’s inability to identify, intervene in and transform two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional space and time. First, Manouach realised that the located items identified and placed by the system had no air to breathe, even though they occupied space on the page. The system denuded the collaged items of a single, stable storyworld, even as it had apparently denuded them of stories. Manouach again reached beyond the system for a solution, seeing an unsubstantiated analogy between the proximities of items on the page and musical score notation, in which “space is a determinant factor for sound production.” He “decided that the equivalent backdrop feature for the purposes of my experiment will be a uniform cyan of 30% saturation” (Manouach 2020).

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  31

Figure 2.2 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019. Pages 2 and 3.

32  Simon Grennan

Figure 2.3 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019. Pages 20 and 21.

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  33 The second challenge that the system was unable to meet was more serious, for the generation of an ontograph of Franco-Belgian comics. One of the corollaries of identifying and decontextualising depicted items, according to categories and relative locations, is the disappearance of an encompassing system of points of view. A large part of the composition of drawn storyworlds is the imagined coherence of the reader’s points of view, relative to the depicted story. Depicted stories generate complex, sophisticated and, above all, coherent-seeming worlds, relative to the reader’s view. Imagined storyworlds and the reader’s views literally create each other. Manouach’s “two-axis diagrammatic score” (2020) of items and locations ignores the imagined spaces of the storyworlds in his 48 commercial BD sources. This is a significant omission because these imagined spaces and the views taken upon them by readers are also generic. They are as much part of the genre of 48CC as styles of drawing, page numbers, proximities, materials, production, distribution and readership. For example, compare a spread drawn by Albert Uderzo (say, pages 6 and 7 of the English translation Asterix in Spain from 1969) and a spread drawn by Dan DeCarlo, Rudy Lapstick and Barry Grossman (say, pages 2 and 3 from the story “If the Spirit Moves You” from Archie Number 190, from the same year). Uderzo’s pages are as formally and discursively typical of 48CC of the period as DeCarlo, Lapstick and Grossman’s pages are typical of commercial US comics of the period. This is not the place for a detailed comparison of BD and US comics genres. Suffice to say that the ways in which the reader views the stories in the Franco-Belgian pages and in the US pages are different, as are readers’ expectations of the types and characteristics of the storyworlds these pages depict. Setting aside the very different real-world contingencies of these storyworlds (Gaul, 50 BCE and 1960s Riverdale, New York), on a much simpler level, Uderzo’s drawings place the reader, relative to the spaces and times of the 48CC storyworld, differently to the ways in which DeCarlo, Lapstick and Grossman place the reader, relative to the US comics storyworld. The imagined spaces of both storyworlds submit to typification. The imagined spaces are generic in entirely the same way as the drawing styles, materials, readers and so forth, are generic. Uderzo’s storyworld spaces are generically 48CC, whilst DeCarlo, Lapstick and Grossman’s pages are generically US comics. It is curious, then, why Manouach did not include a third axis on his diagrammatic score that would have located the selected items relative to the reader’s generic 48CC points of view—that is, in imagined space as well as relative to each other as items on the page. If the producers of 48CC have colonised BD reading, by monopolising ideas of the identity as well as the contingencies of BD, as Menu and Manouach propose, then the imagined spaces of the 48CC storyworlds have also been identified, controlled and made to conform, as have readers’ points of view. The omission is significant because storyworld spaces are conjured in direct relationships with readers, as imagined interpersonal spaces. More than visible forms and discursive

34  Simon Grennan contingencies (such as material, cost, environment), these imagined spaces appear to be personal—that is they are considered to belong to each reader. Arguing that the 48CC genre is colonising and homogenising the forms, social possibilities and cultural possibilities of BD, Manouach does not include a method for revealing the colonisation and homogenisation of points of view in his “axis”—that is for revealing the colonisation and homogenisation of readers’ self-imagining relative to the storyworld. Undrawing, Collage and Memory Benoit Crucifix has recently adapted Kenneth Goldsmith’s term “uncreative writing” as “undrawing,” to describe that the “practice of graphic archiveology uses existing comics … through reproduction and manipulation, disengaging from the act of drawing as making a trace” (Goldsmith 2011; Crucifix 2020, 154). Undrawing seeks to disrupt “the relationship between drawing and storytelling to refocus attention on the social and political economy of the drawn image” (Crucifix 2020, 154). “Context thus takes a renewed importance in such ‘uncreative’ works that thrive on remixing. Accordingly, it is key never to lose sight of cultural specificities” (Crucifix 2020, 157). This description of undrawing closely reflects the aims and methods of Abrégé, sharing a history of other “undrawings,” many of which make use of constraints to generate new works and to reveal discursive as well as stylistic contingencies. As De Kostick points out: “many digital works begin as acts of memory, with a user remembering a loved (or hated) mass culture text and isolating, then manipulating, revising, and reworking specific elements of that text” (De Kosnik 2016, 151, cited in Crucifix 2020, 154). Manouach’s emotional responses to commercial BD, somewhat chaperoned by Menu’s panegyric, also share ethical imperatives with undrawing. Undrawing techniques can be differentiated from the aims of undrawing projects, but this is often not the case in commentaries. Both Manouach and Crucifix consider the methods of undrawing to have an overwhelming functional corollary in revealing, destabilising and intervening in discourse, where discourse is considered to be monolithic, coersive or monopolistic. This elision of methods and aims continues to have strong historic links with the political motivations of European avant-gardism, but it also belongs to the much older, more widely practiced and more heterogeneous tradition of collage, or the creation of juxtaposed collections or groups of redacted found images. Current commentators on collage, with topics as various as folk craft and autoethnography (Christensen 2011), feminism (Walling-Wefelmeyer 2019), theatre history (Marcus 2013) and design (Rogers 2012), make claims for the practice that are also surprisingly similar in tone to the elision of aims and methods found in Abrégé and in undrawing. In bringing together redacted, that is, decontextualised, and collaged visual items, according to an imposed analytical rationale, “implicit assumptions can surface and/or be countered,” claims Butler-Kisber (2010, 114).

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  35 The resulting “disruption of aesthetic unity underscores the fundamentally relational nature of visual representation and does so by maintaining the structural elements of such representation while denying any ontological attribution of them” (Brockelman 2001, 33). This last idea sounds very like Manouach’s aim in Abrégé. As such, both the activity of making a collage and the new collaged works “represent the intersection of multiple discourses” (Brockelman 2001, 2) and “the episodic, collage format of a scrapbook undermines narrative continuity and integrity and positions representation as a constructed, contingent work-in-progress” (Tamas 2014, 88, cited in Walling-Wefelmeyer 2019, 2). However, such interrogations, disruptions, interventions and transformations of discourse are not uncomplicated by contradiction themselves, despite some practitioners and commentators claiming that constraints, undrawings or collage activities are teleologically undifferentiated from the transformation of, say, commercial BD and its readers, in the case of Manouach. Walling-Wefelmeyer quotes Lorde, cautioning against the replacement of one set of monolithic, coersive practices and ideas with the same set in disguise: “we often risk using the ‘master’s tools’ (Lorde 2018) in our prescription of particular testimonial modes” (Walling-Wefelmeyer 2019, 2). In fact, the practice of utilising constraints (or undrawing, or collage) to generate self-revealing cultural works does not produce interrogative or transformational situations on every occasion. Sometimes, the opposite occurs, and a constraint is designed to generate conformity within a strictly demarcated field. A startling example of this is provided in the work of an IBM team working on a commercial algorithm to achieve digital image collaging (Liu et al. 2007). Liu et al. aimed to construct a digital algorithm that matched as closely as possible the valorising effects of a “nice picture collage,” by arranging digital images to match a single ethical conception of the arrangement of diverse images (2007, 1226). Like Manouach, they also applied constraints from analysis of an “expanded field” and their computer algorithm put their rules into effect. However, they aimed to generate a visual representation of rules that exist outside text and encompass text. This aim ran entirely counter to Manouach’s project, which aimed to reveal what these rules might be, to interrogate, intervene and transform them. Liu et al. list the constraints that their digital algorithm applied to images, to create collages: 1) Salience maximisation, salience ratio balance, and no severe occlusion ( … ). 2) Fitting the canvas … 3) Natural preference. A picture collage must be as natural as possible. … This property is used to imitate the collage style created by humans. 4) User’s interaction. A picture collage should be capable of showing the user’s will, while the user’s interactions are formulated as the hard or soft constraints on position, orientation, or layer. (2007, 1226)

36  Simon Grennan Clarifying both the aims and methods of Manouach’s project by radical comparison, in Manouach’s terms, Liu and colleagues developed an anti-ontograph, where items were given identity only through their predetermined and unassailable place in the encompassing new work. Liu et al.’s aims differed from Manouach’s aims in Abrégé and contradict the aims of undrawers and collagists across a number of fields of practice and enquiry. However, their techniques share the (ethically neutral) capacity for creating new meaning by systematically creating new proximities for depictive images, where the redaction, the system and the new work can be compared with recalled prior situations. As Marcus comments: “each clipping or photograph in [a collage] is contextualised by the hundreds of others that the compiler placed alongside it, thus adding layers of meaning that each item would lack if encountered in its original source or in isolation” (Marcus 2013, 285). In part, I read Abrégé as redacted and arranged fragments, because I have memories of material that appears stylistically and discursively similar, establishing an identity for its sources. This relationship with memory constitutes part of the storyworld of depictions, even when they are considered to be fragments, that is, when their boundaries fall in unaccustomed places. In fact, all depictions are fragments, relative to the causes and consequences in the scenes that they depict. For example, consider Diego Velázquez’ 1656 painting Las meninas. The depiction has properties, such that a viewer imagines that they see themselves seeing the depicted scene. However, most of the scene remains unseen. Where is the rest of the painter’s body (hidden from view?—no, not hidden, because it isn’t shown! Why should it be there …)? Where is the breakfast that the Princess ate from that morning? It isn’t in the picture, but I’m sure that she ate breakfast. The viewer applies ideas that make the scene appear to be visually replete. In a sense, I am using the term “memory” here to describe resources for building a situation model that makes sense of what I perceive on the page. This definition of a storyworld conforms to Herman’s famous “who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate” (Herman 2004, 9). However, the “situation” isn’t only an idea (the model) of a story. Rather, I build a situation model of a storyworld of perceived and imagined properties from memories. These memories are not neutral, but embodied and emotional, intersubjective and political, substantiating Crucifix’s “social and political economy of the drawn image” (Crucifix 2020, 154). Then the storyworld includes not only the causes and consequences of the object of depiction, that is, its past and future, but also the pasts and futures of the ideas that the reader employs to make sense of the image. “These facts must be connected and interrelated in spatio-temporal, causal, and ontological relations,” writes Wilde, citing Thon (Wilde 2019, 234; Thon 2016, 46–56).” Abrégé is a good demonstration of this, because one of its aims is to foreground—Baetens says “putting between brackets” (2011, 111)—the variety of the discursive relationships conjured by each visual fragment.

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  37 This also demonstrates one of the founding tenets of the tradition of constrained writing, that the style of production reveals its own contingencies (Baetens 2003, 3). Counterfactuals, Multiverses, Intertextuality Two further concepts crowd in upon a consideration of Abrégé as a product of the “expanded field” of constrained writing, undrawing and collage: the multiverse and intertextuality. Both concepts offer different approaches to theorising the relationships between depictive images and stories, taking fundamentally different views of depiction. The multiverses of superhero comics, developed in part as pragmatic, post hoc responses to inconsistencies and contradictions in the production of related stories by many authors over many years, now provide an “ontological given” according to Karin Kukkonen (2010, 39). This ontology is sometimes claimed to contradict, if not destabilise, theories of fiction that insist upon the complete dominance over a storyworld of the subsets of knowledge of causes and consequences known simply as the story (by Marie-Laure Ryan, for example, 2006, 671). Here, I am using the word “story” in the sense “what is shown,” following the epistemological description of the system of discourse in my A Theory of Narrative Drawing (Grennan 2017, 146–156). Ryan argues that this assault on the story by storyworlds, which have been transformed by new media, for example, is due to the impossibility of reconciling all such knowledge with every story. Ryan considers this effect to be a refiguring of the relationships between story and discourse. On the other hand, in the case of multiverse stories, Kukkonen describes these contradictions as “counterfactuals” (2010, 39), unequivocally returning the contradictions between the “factuals” of the story (apologies to Kukkonen) and storyworld to the realm of story. Hence, she explains, if there are contradictions between knowledge of one universe and another, or within a universe, these do not effect a categorical change between story and storyworld, but simply add up to the rambling and shambolic “shaggy dog” character of a still-stable “shown” multiverse. At the Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Comics and Bande Dessinées 2018, Georgio Busi-Rizzi questioned Smolderen’s 2009 neologism for the relationship between story and discourse in the historic development of the comic strip: polygraphy, or the experience of iterations of accumulated existing traditions of drawing and writing on the printed page. What distinguishes polygraphy from graphic intertextuality? he asked. The same question is apposite for Abrégé. Is the comics storyworld only intertextual drawing? If so, does Manouach’s book simply reaffirm the stable hegemony of commercial BD, because the more cuts and shuffles Manouach undertook, the more pervasive and distinct BD 48CC became? Crucifix suggests exactly this outcome for another of Manouach’s books (Blanco, a BD

38  Simon Grennan album blank “printer’s dummy,”’ produced by Manouach in 2019): “we directly recognise it as a comic precisely because that format is so strongly embedded in French comics culture” (Crucifix 2020, 157). However, I think not. Intertextuality is a term still covertly skewed to verbal language by its literary and philosophical history. Rather, metatextual knowledge impacts as significantly upon the story as knowledge of other texts. In this conception of the structuring function of metatextual experiences (including ideas), the storyworld describes not only the causes and consequences that are conjured by the story, but also the imperatives placed upon the text by discourse relationships. In the same way as in the case of polygraphy, the storyworld does not devolve to the story, as Kukkonen claims, encompassing accidents. Considering the imperatives of discourse relationships for stories, however difficult to map, reveals their causal and consequential possibilities and prohibitions. Depiction and Unrepresented Knowledge Before considering the ways in which Abrégé is structured by unrepresented knowledge, constituting the storyworlds of the redacted depictions that it incorporates, it is useful to establish the boundaries of depiction. The categorical relationship between depiction and story is argued by Baetens: “the foregrounding of the plastic dimension of visual signs is always a possibility for those who either do not ‘enter the story’ or who try to go beyond the narrative surface” (2011, 110). Depiction is a visual experience, requiring the simultaneous experience of both the means of visual representation and its object, where “both an idea of the visual appearance of an absent object and awareness of a particularly organised set of marks on a surface as essential and indivisible simultaneous aspects of the experience” (Grennan 2017, 48; Thomas 1999; Wollheim 1980, 1987). Depiction places a viewer in a unique spatio-temporal relationship the depicted (imagined) scene, at the same time as the viewer maintains another spatio-temporal relationship with the physical medium of the depiction. Baetens does not go so far as to claim that visual depictions always show stories. However, his recognition that “narrativisation seems to be what dissolves abstraction” (2011, 95) relies on viewers’ experiences of “seeing-in” of the object of a depiction—the imagined relationship with the scene in view. With depiction, immediately a viewer imagines that they see themselves seeing a scene, the spatial, temporal and social continuum of that scene (the story) is immanent. In fact, what are ‘seen-into’ depictions are the stories of the scene. The stories visually represented in Abrégé generate consistent storyworlds that, rather than a closed set of knowledge of the causes and consequences of the story, significantly rely upon both intertextual and metatextual imagined properties shared with visual representations from both other comics, other

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  39 comics’ storyworlds and the discursive relationships that encompass them. The categorical relationship between depiction and story results entirely from situations in which readers/viewers are mandated to imagine that the see themselves seeing the object of the depiction as well as the medium in which it is depicted or, in the case of Abrégé, the faces, bodies actions and situations as well as the ink. We see what Baetens describes as abstract reading’s “double process of disciplining and de-disciplining the spectator’s gaze” (2011, 109), in which “narrative and antinarrative are not so much different forms, as different strategies of reading and looking” (2011, 110). Baetens explains that abstraction is a “mechanism for putting between brackets the contingent or accidental aspects of a given cultural from” (2011, 111). This parenthesising constitutes a strict function of the experiences of all depictive images, the significance of which is habitually ignored according convention, in favour of the experience of the object of depiction. Abrégé, the use of constraint and the practices of undrawing and collage concur with this idea. They are methods for revealing the internal contradictions of, in Manouach’s case, the contingencies of commercial BD, by intervening in and aiming to transform these contingencies through formal and discursive changes. Notwithstanding the consensually directed gaze, we immediately understand that an experience of the ecologies of Abrégé’s ink and paper is quite different to the ecologies of other imagined faces, actions and situations. Both appear before us at the same time. Seeing the face in the material, the distinct past and future of the depicted object also urgently presses upon us—all the causes and consequences that remain immanent in the collaged depictions. Considering Baetens’ description of abstract as antinarrative and depiction as narrative, through the lens of Wolheim and Thomas’ definition of depiction, I am minded to make a creative leap and consider the relationship between story and discourse as a general description of an experience of a multiverse, in which the epistemological contingencies of story and the discursive contingencies of readers’ perception and imagination generate the inviolable possibilities and impossibilities of the storyworld. Still, there is a nagging question about fulfillment. If the past, present and future of the depiction/story and the past, present and future of the abstraction/representation are distinct and simultaneous, how do they signify to each other and coalesce in reading? If I see a building, I do not also see inside it or around it. However, I believe that it has both an interior and other sides. In fact, I perceive it as having the properties of “an interior” and “other sides.” For example, Cohn neatly summarises the effect of this synecdoche, or part-whole relationship, writing “when a panel border shows someone from only knees up, a fluent reader will know the character still has legs below the knee” (2019, 4). Part-whole relationships do not only exist in the recently shown time of a story. Synecdoche is also a way to consider causal and consequential relationships between what is shown in a story and the story’s unshown past and

40  Simon Grennan unshown future. The shown story only exists in a part-whole relationship with its unshown causes and consequences. When a story is shown, the object of the represented story appears in a distinct time. This time is brought into being by everything that is explicitly shown (Lacey 2000, 16). This time is relative to wider frame of other events, because what is shown has causes and consequences, even though these remain unshown—“A picture of a forest tells implicitly of trees growing from seedlings and shedding leaves,” as Goodman writes (Mitchell 1981, 111). Every depiction requires past and future actions. Although this past and future are not shown, they are as specific as what is shown. Although unshown, specific knowledge of these other times constitutes the complete worlds, past and future, that must exist in order for a story to be shown (Grennan 2017, 149). By what means am I to explain a perception of unseen properties? I perceive the building and perceive myself imagining the properties of “an interior” and “other sides.” The object of perception, the building, requires consciousness of a perceiving subject in order for it to be perceived. This is not to say that I perceive the building as imaginary. Rather, it is to say that a constituent of the perception of the building is a type of knowledge about it, and that this knowledge is phenomenal, or perceived. I perceive the visual properties of a building that I see, but I also adjudicate the experience of these properties, according to categories that inhibit and facilitate my imagining of the unseen inside and back of the building. The knowledge of the story relies entirely upon my perception of categories (that is, ideas) as perceived properties. On this basis, neither is it possible to reduce the significance of categorisation to either memorial synecdoche or the distinct function of metynomy. Mandated imagining is the cognitive function that systematises a relationship between perception and cognition without either denaturing particular stimuli, or overlooking social convention, or falling back on a stimulus/ response model. Imagining is not a private matter. It is a constituent part of the reflexive function of seeing oneself and seeing-oneself-as, locating and defining the subject in a network of affective relationships with objects, sensations, fictions and other subjects. Depictions without Storyworlds? Lukas Wilde provides a recent case study in the degree of the survival of immanent storyworlds that manage to continue to encompass decontextualised depictions (2019). He focuses on “kyara” or depictions of characters without storyworlds, building upon the narrative distinction made between kyara and characters (Kacsuk 2016; Nozawa 2013). A character is “presumed to exist in a storyworld context—within some diegesis. A kyara, in contrast, is a ‘highly stylized or simplified visual figuration that can be easily reproduced and consumed outside of its original context (Galbraith 2009, 125)’” (Wilde 2019, 222–223). One of the most famous examples of a kyara

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  41 is the Hello Kitty figure, which is used in a seemingly infinite number of contexts, media, stories and storyworlds. As Wilde notes, “‘Kitty ‘can appear as Mount Fuji or as a grain of rice, whilst remaining recognisably ‘Kitty.’” Wilde realises that kyara are recognised far beyond Ryan’s “principle of minimal departure” (1991, 51), in which “recipients can draw on their general world-knowledge (or previous mediated knowledge) to supplement information that the representation has been withholding” (Wilde 2019, 227). Rather, far from gaining continually changed identities from the prior knowledge of viewers who find the kyara (and themselves) in similar situations, kyara appear to retain characteristics that they bring to new situations—so much so that Wilde makes a distinction between kyara as performers and their performances. “If the ‘default mode’ of kyara is not bound to diegetic coherence, their various contextualized instances can be regarded like ‘masks’ they can take on and off. Kyara (or kyara-like entities) can accordingly be seen as mediated performers” (2019, 227). He proposes that kyara are, more simply, “connected to shared assumptions about character dispositions” (2019, 228) and that they “correspond to a bundle of semes in the pre-narrative state of characters, while ‘characters’ are the result of their narrative embedding” (Köhn 2016, 94, cited in Wilde 2019, 229). A problem remains with this definition, however. Where do these shared assumptions lie? Wilde explains that kyara are distinct “not only from the medial representations on which they are based, but also from the characters ‘themselves’” (Wilde 2019, 231). In other words, kyara are visual representations of shared processes of characterisation, rather than characters themselves. Kyara “are then conceptualised as normative abstractions of actual reception processes or, simplifying things a little, as mental character representations as they are presumable meant to be for a given community of recipients” (Ibid.). In effect, kyara inculcate the function of recognition rather than inculcating recognition itself. They underwrite the immanence of a depicted situation with the immanence of recognising ‘the kyara’. As such, kyara indicate their own recognisable storyworld (their own sets of shown, un-shown and imagined causes and consequences), whilst inhabiting other storyworlds. “‘Kitty’ always remains a possible ‘Kitty’ because s/he/they/it is the intersection of any possible recontextualisation that a community will still accept as the same kyara” (Ibid.). Kitty’s appearances as a mountain or a grain of rice simply accumulate the possibilities of “Kitty” elsewhere, in other places, times, ages and genders (“ad infinitum”), without these situations ever being recalled as the causes or consequences of “Kitty.” A direct parallel can be made between kyara and the depictions isolated and relocated by Manouach’s constraints in Abrégé. Wilde writes that “the intersubjective kyara is thus merely the intersection of any possible recontextualisation that a community will still accept as the same kyara” and, as “‘cultural practices’ they consolidate a (sub)cultural community” (Wilde 2019,

42  Simon Grennan 237). Unlike Manouach, he recognises no critical function in recontextualisation. “The detachment of ‘characters’ from mandatory, coherent storyworlds and authorial intentions, the emphasis not on the narrative but on the pre- and meta-narrative state, does not have to be parodistic or ‘critical’ by default” (Wilde 2019, 240). On the other hand, Manouach concludes that the Abrégé “mimics the 48CC by collapsing the distinction between ‘primary’ artefacts (the original book product multiples of an industrial fabrication) and second-order commentary” (2020). Manouach proposes that the book reveals BD to be largely dominated by the 48CC genre. However, the omission of storyworld spaces from his method in generating Abrégé is significant, because these imagined spaces and the views taken upon them by readers are also a function of commercial colonisation. They are also generic. Works Cited Baetens, Jan. “Comic Strips and Constrained Writing.” Image & Narrative 7. http:// www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/graphicnovel/janbaetens_constrained.htm, 2003 [Accessed 02/02/2021] Baetens, Jan. “Expanding the Field of Constraint: Novelization as an Example of Multiply Constrained Writing.” Poetics Today, 31(1), 2010, pp. 51–79. Baetens, Jan. “Abstraction in Comics.” SubStance, 40(1), Issue 124, 2011, pp. 94–113. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s like to Be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Brockelman, Thomas P. The frame and the mirror: On collage and the postmodern. Northwestern University Press, 2001. Butler-Kisber, Lynn. “Collage Enquiry.” In Lyn Butler-Kisber, Qualitative Inquiry: Thematic, Narrative and Arts-Informed Perspectives. Sage, 2010, pp. 114–131. Charlier, Jean-Michel and Jean Giraud. Arizona Love. Alpen, 1990. Cohn, Neil. “Being Explicit about the Implicit: Inference Generating Techniques in Visual Narrative” Language and Cognition, 11(1), 2019, pp. 66–97. Christensen, Danille Elise. “’Look at Us Now!’: Scrapbooking, Regimes of Value, and the Risks of (Auto)Ethnography.” The Journal of American Folklore, 124(493), 2011, pp. 175. Crucifix, Benoît. “Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing” in Aldama, F. L. (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Comics Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 148–164. De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. MIT Press, 2016. Galbraith, Patrick W. The Otaku encyclopedia: An insider’s guide to the subculture of cool Japan. Kōdansha, 2009. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2011. Grennan, Simon. A Theory of Narrative Drawing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Groensteen, Thierry. “Un premier bouquet de contraintes.” Oupus 1. L’Association, 1997, pp. 13–15. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge  43 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich. “Ueber die Wesensprache (lingua et character essentialis, auch Pasilalie und Pasigraphie bisher genannt).” Literarischer Anzeiger, 30, 1822, pp. 233–236. Kukkonen, Karin. “Navigating Infinite Earths: Readers, Mental Models and the Multiverse of Superhero Comics.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 2, 2010, pp. 39–58. Kacsuk, Zoltan. “From ‘game-like realism’ to the ‘imagination-oriented aesthetic’: Reconsidering Bourdieu’s contribution to fan studies in the light of Japanese manga and otaku theory.” Kritika Kultura, 26, 2016, pp. 274–292. Lacey, Nick. Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies. Palgrave, 2000. Liu, T., Sun, J., Zheng, N.N., Tang, X., Shum, H.Y. “Learning to detect a salient object.” Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’07), 2007, pp. 1–8. Lorde, Audre. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Penguin, 2018. Manouach, Ilan. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. Lendroit Editions, 2018. Manouach, Ilan. “Comic Books as Ontographs: The Composition Process of ‘Abrégé de Bande Dessinée Franco-Belge.’” European Society of Comparative Literature Journal, 2020, np. [draft provided by the author 20/08/2021]. Marcus, Sharon. “The Theatrical Scrapbook.” Theatre Survey, 54(2), 2013, pp. 283–307. Mathews, Harry, and Alaistair Brotchie, eds. Oulipo Compendium. Atlas, 2005. Menu, Jean-Christophe. Plates-bandes. L’association, 2005. McLellan, Todd. Things Come Apart 2.0: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living. Thames & Hudson, 2019. Mitchell, W. J. T. On Narrative. University of Chicago Press, 1981. Motte, Warren F., ed. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Nozawa, Shunsuke. “Characterisation.” Semiotic review: Open issue 3. https://www. semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/16/15, 2013 [Accessed 3 February 2020]. Peterson, Richard A. “Five Constraints on the Production of Culture: Law, Technology, Market, Organizational Structure, and Occupational Careers.” Journal of Popular Culture, 16 (2), 1982, pp. 143–153. Rogers, Matt. “Contextualising Theories and Practices of Bricolage Research.” The Qualitative Report, 17(7), 2012, pp. 1–17. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Indiana University Press, 1991. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Tamas, Sophie. “Scared Kitless: Scrapbooking Spaces of Trauma.” Emotion, Space and Society, 10(1), 2014, pp. 87–94. Thomas, Nigel J. T. “Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.” Cognitive Science, 23, 1999, pp. 207–245. Thon, Jan-Noël. Transmedial narratology and contemporary media culture. University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Walling-Wefelmeyer, Rosa. “Scrapbooking Men’s Intrusions: ‘It’s Nice to Have a Place Where You Can Rant about Things That People Normally Tell You You’re Over-reacting About.’” Women’s Studies International Forum, 75, 2019, np.

44  Simon Grennan Warren, Mike and Jonathan Woodward. Cut in Half: The Hidden World Inside Everyday Objects. Chronicle Books, 2018. Wilde, Lukas R. A. “Kyara Revisited: The Pre-Narrative Character-State of Japanese Character Theory” Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 5(2), 2019, pp. 220–247. Wollheim, Richard. Art and Its Objects. Cambridge University Press, 1980. Wollheim, Richard. Painting as an Art. Princeton University Press, 1987.

3 Whitewashing the Smudge The politics of erasure and unreadability in Ilan Manouach’s Cascao Ana Matilde Sousa

The act of erasing is a necessary part of many of Ilan Manouach’s conceptual appropriations and détournements of commercial comics, through which the author tempers with their (often, medium-) specific features. Works like Tintin akei Kongo (a Lingalian translation of Tintin au Congo from the 1930s) or Katz, for instance, entail the erasure of existing text or drawings to replace them with new ones, creating what one can call counter facsimiles, that is, reproductions as close as possible to the genuine article but with certain elements “hijacked” that turn these copies into “insubordinate, counter images” (Evans 13) of the originals. At other times, that which is erased are entities of a more immaterial nature, namely, the axiomatic tenets of artistic creation like “authorship” or “looking” (in the case of the retinal arts), opening the field of comics to innovative compositional practice. Such is the case in practice-based research projects like Peanuts minus Schulz, consisting of “the reproduction of Schulz’s work by commissioned artists, using digital tools and mediated by a digital labor management platform” (Manouach, “Peanuts minus Schulz” “Peanuts minus Schulz,” para. 1). Also, Applied Memetic, a project to produce an AI-generated graphic novel (“Applied Memetic,” para.1) and Essaim, a web platform and publisher of “authorless books that can be assumed on a collective nebular basis” (Manouach, “Metakatz,” para. 1). Or even Shapereader, consisting of tactile comics for readers with visual impairments (Shapereader, para.1). However, even in works of a more traditionally compositional nature, like the Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics, erasure is vital to the process, as Manouach composes original comic panels and pages by borrowing bits and pieces (“graphemes”) from the language and iconography of bande dessinée: parts of characters, speech balloons, and so on, isolated by erasing their adjacent graphic and narrative contexts. Here, the erasure is implicit, while in other cases, erasure is the primary device on display, activated in relation to the various meanings that it has gained in contemporary media. An example where Manouach employs such strategic erasures is Riki Fermier (5e Couche, 2015), a détournement of a childhood classic of Danish origins: Rasmus Klump, also known as Petzi and other variants throughout Europe and the world. As the author explains (Manouach, “Riki Fermier,” DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-5

46  Ana Matilde Sousa para.2), this appropriation of the comic book Petzi Fermier follows in the tradition of lipogramatic word games (i.e., writings that omit one letter or letter group) and experimental works based on that principle, such as Carmelo Bene’s Romeo e Giulietta, which cuts off or erases the character of Romeo from the play by making adjustments to the text. Similarly, Riki Fermier is a counter facsimile of Petzi Fermier, from which every character, including the protagonist, Petzi, is visually purged except for Riki, the pelican—according to Manouach, “the only animal … that can be described as a filler” (Manouach, “Riki Fermier,” para. 1) for its passivity in the story. Manouach also redirects the speech balloons to Riki, who wanders around alone and speaks to himself throughout it all. One can see and read the comic clearly, but the erasure makes it a theater of the absurd, replacing the original coziness with an eerie sense of unfamiliarity. Differently than Riki Fermier and the previously mentioned works, Manouach’s repertoire of erasures also includes the practice of rendering comics unreadable, a practice of which Noirs (5e Couche, 2014) and Cascao (La Crypte Tonique, 2019) are the hallmarks, but that one can extend to include others like Blanco (5e Couche, 2018) as well. In Noirs, Manouach parodies Les Schtroumpfs noirs (“The Black Smurfs”) by the Belgium duo Peyo and Yvan Delporte, the 1963 beginning of this popular French-language series, in which the racially homogeneous smurfs fall victim to an infectious disease that turns their skin black and reduces them to violent, irrational creatures—a storyline that lends itself to disturbingly racist readings. Manouach’s Noirs is a replica of the original book, except that the magenta, yellow, and black offset plates were all printed in cyan. This eliminates the blue/black difference from the original plot, staging a battle where the Smurfs attack their own kind. Along with speech balloons, the only Smurf parts that stand out against a blue background are white eyes and caps, undermining the readers’ ability to discern what is going on or who is fighting whom. Noirs highjacks the comic’s use of color and its technology (offset printing) into an uncanny territory of unreadability, where their neutrality is disputed. And then there is Cascao, on which I will focus for most of this article (also the subject of a “childly reading” by Maaheen Ahmed in another chapter of this collection). Manouach developed Cascao during his stay at Casa do Sol in São Paulo, Brazil, à propos of the Baiacu artistic residency, in 2017. It was printed in Baiacu, an anthology published later that year by Todavia press, organized by editors Rafael Coutinho, Laerte and Angeli, that gathered the work of the residency artists; afterward, Manouach reprinted it as a standalone book, in 2019. The title references Cascão, known in the English-speaking world as Smudge, created by the Brazilian comic author Mauricio de Sousa in 1961 as a deuteragonist in his hugely popular series Turma da Mônica, or Monica’s Gang. Cascão is a boy who never takes a bath because of his pathological fear of water, thus, his name and appearance: cascão is the Portuguese word for dirt buildup on the skin, represented by parallel black lines on each side of the character’s cheek.

Whitewashing the Smudge  47 During the Baiacu residence, Manouach soaked the pages of an issue of the periodical magazine Cascão with bleach to disintegrate the images. In “manouachesque” fashion, this ruined, “whitewashed” (Manouach, “Cascao,” para.1) original was facsimiled to create an object resembling it as closely as possible, namely, a 36-page-long book in the typical formatinho size of 13.5 × 19 cm (Figure 3.1). Within Manouach’s oeuvre, Cascao is unique in its less surgical, messier form of erasure, even compared to Noirs, which also engages with blurriness or indistinctness to perform a racial critique. At first glance, Cascao’s conceptual and political agenda is also harder to make sense of than that of Noirs, which is more clear-cut and programmatic. Indeed, its enigmatic description on Manouach’s website reflects this, presenting the concept of “whitewashing” without clarifying its relation to the character Cascão. In the following pages, I will try to unpack what this relationship might be, considering the character’s contested racialization in the Brazilian context. I will advance my interpretation of how Cascao, in line with Manouach’s conceptual practice of “making comics” (in this case, a fraught expression), addresses particular questions regarding the specificities of comics as a medium and their position in the art historical canon, while contributing to

Figure 3.1 Cover of Ilan Manouach’s Cascao.

48  Ana Matilde Sousa expanding on the complex and nuanced relationship between art creation and destruction. * In modern art, the practice of erasing has become historically linked to the avant-garde. On the one hand, through its founding myth of the tabula rasa, that is, the clean slate of primal, ancestorless freedom that, as Rosalind Krauss puts it, energized the modernist artist’s many masks, from “revolutionary, dandy, anarchist” to “aesthete, technologist, mystic” (Krauss 157). On the other, through iconic works of erasure like Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, in which the younger man painstakingly erased a work on paper by one of the world’s most revered artists (Cain, paras. 6–8; Figure 3.2). Both attitudes, in their own way, call one’s attention to erasure as a creative act, one that, by entailing the appropriation of something that exists only to destroy it, deny it or otherwise “no-image”-ify it (Rauschenberg, para.7), can occupy different positions on the iconoclastic, and problematic, scale—ranging from the Marinettiesque unapologetic purging of the old to a realization that it takes two to tango, that is, that the eraser and the erased co-constitute the erasure as a collaborative endeavor. Indeed, as immortalized in the art historical annals, de Kooning gifted Rauschenberg not only with a sketch but with his express permission for its obliteration (Scott 80). One could suppose that Rauschenberg adhered by the trope that a vampire must be invited in, but the fact remains that he always resisted those interpreting his Erased Drawing as some kind of violent oedipal coup, instead calling it a “celebration” (SFMOMA, Robert Rauschenberg Discusses … 12’54’) of the monochrome artwork (Stiles, para.10). Manouach’s conceptual comics exude a more corsairian energy. In engaging with the discourse, conventions and delimitations of comic books, the author relies not only on appropriation but on openly pirating existing books to create “unsolicited, unauthorized and unwelcomed” (Manouach, “Un Monde…,” para. 1) counter facsimiles. The most notable, or notorious, case is Katz (2011), a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus, except that all animals are redrawn as cats. Despite its transformative nature, the large publishing group Flammarion, the copyright holders of Maus’s French edition, aggressively prosecuted Katz, eventually leading to the destruction of the entire print run and a new book by Manouach, Metakatz, a “collective reader” (Manouach, “Metakatz,” para. 1) reflecting on the affair. In Cascao’s case, Manouach did ask Mauricio de Sousa Productions (known as MSP), the company responsible for the product licensing of Mauricio de Sousa’s characters and stories, for permission to appropriate and publish the result of his work at the Baiacu residency. Nevertheless, the iconoclastic pleasure arising from the desecration of a childhood classic remains one of the predominant feelings in Manouach’s Cascao.

Whitewashing the Smudge  49

Figure 3.2 Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953. Traces of drawing media on paper with label and gilded frame; 25 1/4 × 21 3/4 × 1/2 in. (64.14 × 55.25 × 1.27 cm) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photograph: Ben Blackwell

One should note that what Manouach appropriated was a reissue by Panini Comics of Cascão #39, an issue of the Cascão comics magazine published in 1984 by Editora Abril, which was one of the largest media conglomerates in Latin America (also headquartered in São Paulo), as part of their line Coleção Histórica Turma da Mônica (“Monica’s Gang Historical Collection”) that ran between 2007 and 2015 (“Coleção Histórica”, Figure 3.3). Interestingly, this Historical Collection was itself a series of almost facsimiles, reproducing, in chronological order, the first children’s comic magazines, or gibi (a word in Brazilian Portuguese to which I will return later in this chapter), featuring the characters Mônica, Cebolinha (Jimmy Five), Cascão, Chico Bento (Chuck Billy), and Magali (Maggy). The art was restored, and there were some minor changes to the cover; for instance, they removed a small seal with points in the top corner of the magazine, which was part of a special promotion at the time, and changed Abril’s label to those of the collection and Panini. Another significant change was replacing the original ads in the magazine’s middle (pages 11 to 13) with explanatory texts and fun facts about the book and its stories. In the spirit of true facsimiles, the number and size of the pages remained intact. The collector’s box accompanying these reissues and the fact

50  Ana Matilde Sousa that they center on what many a fan considers Turma da Mônica’s “golden age,” namely, its run in Abril—indeed, Cascão #39 featured stories and drawings by some heavyweight MSP artists like Sidão, Kazuo Yamassake, Sérgio Tibúrcio Graciano, Alvin Lacerda or Olga Yuhara—lends a feel of archival respectability to the Historical Collection (“Cascão N° 39/Abril”; Naranjo comments section). This makes Manouach’s act of “art vandalism” (Walden 1) all the more effective, not just as an attack on the series’ nostalgic appeal, but on Mauricio de Sousa and his Productions’ place as a national institution within the cultural patrimony of Brazilian quadrinhos. As mentioned in my article’s introduction, on his website, Manouach offers a particular framework as a conceptual justification for Cascao. Below, I reproduce the author’s full blurb: Whitewashing is a casting practice in which white actors are cast in non-white roles. From Laurence Olivier playing Othello to Burt Lancaster representing an Apache, film history is saturated with white performers in roles based on nonwhite persons or fictional characters. In comics, figures such as Yoko Tsuno, Zorino or Dragon Ball and other ethnically diverse identities are usually flattened on a supposedly neutral whiteness. Often carried out for the sake of a dubious narratological economy, the minimization of the roles played by these colored figures during cultural, historical or fictitious events, especially when they are crucial, makes this practice a form of censorship. I whitewashed with bleach a magazine of Cascão, from the famous Brazilian entertainment empire Turma da Monica. This work has been developed during a residency in Brazil in 2017 and has been previously published in the collective anthology Baiacu in Sao Paulo. (Manouach, “Cascao,” para.1) Before delving any further into what it means to whitewash Cascão, the dirtiest character in fiction—Manouach’s blurb leaves this association deliberately open, as if putting the burden of investigation on the reader—one can expand upon the origins and applications of this concept (“Whitewash”). Originally, whitewash is a type of thin, translucent paint used to coat surfaces for sanitary purposes in areas prone to accumulate dust and dirt. However, the term has acquired a sense of metaphorical hygienization of incriminating facts, deliberately concealed to protect specific persons or entities; hence, several neologisms have emerged to describe different “washings” depending on the information being manipulated or suppressed (green, pink, red, purple, blue …). More recently, whitewashing has also become synonymous with the racist habit of skin-whitening in the beauty, advertising, and entertainment industry, in which models with darker complexions are lightened through camera tricks, makeup, and digital manipulation (Sweta). Or, alternatively, in the case of film, where white actors play the roles of nonwhite characters. In line with this definition, Manouach advances an

Whitewashing the Smudge  51 additional type of whitewashing: the flattening or collapsing of ethno-racial traits into the whiteness of “neutral” character templates in comics and cartoons, particularly noticeable when these need to fit the production lines of corporate house styles. Is the character Cascão, or Smudge, whitewashed? And if so, how? In the twenty-first century, MSP entered a diversification—or, some would argue, tokenization—frenzy, assigning a representative character to various racialized or disabled groups. Still, the original gang is an all-white “normal” ensemble, meaning, a group of abled middle-class children from the fictional Limoeiro neighborhood in São Paulo, inspired by one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods, Cambuí, where Mauricio de Sousa lived for some years (de Sousa 07:18:11). Although Jeremias, the first black child in Turma da Mônica, was created back in 1960, even preceding Cascão, any enthusiasm for this early inclusivity bout is tempered by the character’s blackface look, softened over the years to more acceptable forms. Moreover, what were, until recently, the rare appearances and relegation to minor roles of non-white characters (Simões, para. 2) stuck out like a sore thumb, especially considering that, in Brazil, half of the population identifies as black or pardo, that is, of mixed ethnicity (“Afro-Brazilians,” para. 1). In this sense, from the onset, Turma da Mônica presented its readers with a whitewashed version of the Brazilian demographic. Out of all the original cast, Cascão is the one character whose racial identity has been contested, with readers of African or multiracial descent (Lola Ferreira; Santos, “@andrezadelgado Já respondi …”; Madison; Duarte) assuming that the character is pardo, in part, because his hair appears to be crespo, that is, kinky hair, a major racial marker in Brazil which is often stigmatized (Travae paras. 11–14). So much so that, when the live-action film Turma da Mônica: Laços (in English, Monica and Friends: Bonds) came out in 2019, there was a social media backlash against the casting of Cascão as a young actor with “regular,” non-afro-textured hair (CineLoucura Show; Medeiros). Surprised by the controversy, Mauricio de Sousa declared that “Cascão was never drawn black” (Rodrigues), although he admitted to having made concessions such as changing the real hair from that of the drawn character (Rodrigues, para. 3; Prado, para. 2). It is noteworthy that Cascão’s crespo hair is depicted as being not only texturally unique among the characters of Turma da Mônica but that the technique of its execution is itself distinct. The mastermind of this technique was Sérgio Tibúrcio Graciano, a black pioneering MSP artist who joined the studio in 1966 as a handyman but eventually distinguished himself as an inker/finisher, working at MSP for fifty years until he retired in 2016. To simplify the execution of Cascão’s hair, which up to that point was drawn with a pen, Graciano used his inked fingerprint to “stamp” the hair on the paper (PublishNews, para. 1). Mauricio de Sousa approved, and this became the standard method for drawing the character’s hair from then on—they even joked that it was a genuine “digital” technology (PublishNews, para.1;

52  Ana Matilde Sousa Ribeiro, para. 1). This detail is both poetic and significant, for the hair, as a literal inkblot or smudge on paper, embodies the rambunctious nature of Cascão’s “dirty matter” (Parikka 1) that does not abide by the clear lines used to represent the other characters in the stories. Not only that but the fact that a black artist devised this solution points to and reinforces an idea of the resilience of racialized body parts to whitewashing in media. Some commentators pointed out that if Cascão had been initially a black or pardo character, in that case, there would have been a very questionable association between Cascão’s skin color and his defining characteristic: dirtiness (Travae, para.10). However, even as it stands, Cascão is not entirely free from an association with racist stereotypes and jokes. For instance, a 2008 story in the magazine Mônica (1st Series, #6) reveals that Cascão is actually a blue-eyed blond boy, whose cherubic features are darkened into black hair and black irises by his poor personal hygiene (Duarte; EliaStanislaw). That same year, in another comic strip, published in the TV & Leisure section of the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, Mônica, Cebolinha, and Cascão are at the hairdresser, who is in a good mood until it gets to Cascão’s turn; then, he gets nervous and grabs a pickaxe and a hammer to tackle Cascão’s hair, stiffened by all the dirt in it. (This comic strip prompted an open letter of protest from the Brazilian Committee of Journalists for Racial Equality, stating that By hierarchizing and treating the child with kinky hair in a differentiated manner, the work in question commits a clear act of discrimination, which directly affects the self-esteem of black children, who identify with the character precisely because of the characteristics of his hair. (Comissão de Jornalistas pela Igualdade Racial, para. 3) These and other observations make a case for the veiled racism in such humorous depictions, complicating the argument that “Cascão is not black,” often used to silence the critics. Still, for some readers who are black or pardo and identify with Cascão, his hair is only part of the reason for this identification. As one commentator on Twitter puts it, I always saw Cascão as a character who had much more fun on the street than at home, creating several toys out of recycled materials and apparently he was the humblest of the gang. I lived in a COHAB [social housing] surrounded by two favelas and my reality was very similar. (Santos, “@macharretti @andrezadelgado Sempre vi …”) Others agree: “I remember being disappointed when I realized that Cascão was not black. Despite his dirtiness, the stories of his pranks, how he was humbler, made me like him a lot” (Madison). More recent anthologies, like

Whitewashing the Smudge  53 MSP por 50 artistas (“MSP by 50 artists”) and subsequent titles in this collection—aimed at celebrating Mauricio de Sousa’s universe by inviting artists to reinterpret his stories and characters outside the house style of MSP—reinforce these understandings by depicting non-white versions of Cascão (Moura para. 9). Notably, one artist, André Kitagawa, presents a story that reframes Cascão’s water phobia in light of class relations. In this story, titled A piscina (“The pool”), Cascão refuses to enter a pool with the rest of the gang, only to return there, months later, alone, and collect leaves in the then empty tank. As scholar Pedro Moura explains, this sequence reveals the “embarrassment of a poor boy to hang out with the richer kids,” as “only in the absence of their privilege does he feel free to express his joy and access a socially prohibited space” (Moura para. 10–11). All in all, unsurprisingly, considering Brazil’s racial inequalities in income and employment (Salata; Gradín), black or pardo identification with Cascão happens at the intersection between race and class, as these readers are disproportionally more likely to have experienced disadvantaged social-economic conditions and poverty than white Brazilians. While not directly addressing Cascão’s class and racial tribulations or, more broadly, those of the Turma da Mônica franchise, Manouach’s framing of his own Cascao as a play on whitewashing in the Brazilian context goes a long way to make us, readers, suspect a latent history of political erasure. Or, to use the author’s words, censorship at the service of a “dubious narratological economy.” This streamlining of content and form, which echoes the processes of industrially mass-produced comics from “entertainment empires” such as that of MSP, adds a layer of significance to making these books unreadable. Smudge, here, is less a simple character in comics but “smudge” as a verb, entailing the “performativity or operation” (Arya 121–122) of smudging in a broader, metaphorical sense—just like George Bataille emphasized that his concept of the informe (formless) had no fixed meaning but existed as an operational principle. My evoking the name of the enfant terrible of French philosophy is not in vain. The idea of cascão as a crust of dirt on the skin is decidedly Batailleian, aligned with his vision of matter as a “chaotic turbulence” (Kendall 82) working against human idealizations (and which he formulated, memorably, as “something like a spider or spit” (Bataille 31). Additionally, Manouach’s messy smearing of Cascão #39 evokes formlessness as “the process of unraveling, where form and meaning is undone, boundaries are undone, and matter is left to exist in the unbounded potential that it harbors” (Arya 122). Unraveling, undone, unbounded: the words aptly describe the images in Manouach’s Cascao, or, at any rate, what is left of them after the original MSP publication suffered through the author’s chemical attack. Broken and faded, the cover, which originally showed Cascão looking bewilderedly at a bathtub—a cover illustration that the Historical Collection describes as “intriguing”—is severely corroded. At the bottom of the page, the tub appears relatively intact, while the figure of Cascão is torn through by a white crack,

54  Ana Matilde Sousa and, at the top, the title “Cascão” is mangled to the point that reading is next to impossible. As one opens the book, a succession of pages awaits that have received this same treatment, with washed-out colors, blurred outlines, rips, tears, and white patches where the pictures were “cleaned” by the bleach. “Cleaned” is, of course, a euphemism, for in practice what Manouach’s action does is not to reform, as the idea of “cleaning” as an improvement or enhancement suggests, but de-form, that is, it destroys or renders illegible the narratives not only of Cascão but of the other characters that make up this volume: Cascão’s parents, Seu Antenor and Dona Lurdinha, the black boy, Jeremias, others like Cebolinha and Mônica, and a roll of supporting characters like the dogs Bidu and Franjinha, the ghost Penadinho (Bug-a-Booo), and the vampire Zé Vampir (Vic Vampire). The latter two belong to Bug-a-Booo, or Turma do Penadinho, a gang of harmless ghouls designed by Mauricio de Sousa to present to children a light-hearted approach to death (de Sousa, para.1 3); so, in keeping with the theme, a whitewashed and kid-friendly approach to an otherwise difficult topic. Back to the connection that I initially drew to the Erased de Kooning Drawing, if there is one thing that transpires from both this work and Cascao is that nothing is ever really erased. Erasing takes time and remains necessarily unfinished. For instance, in Rauschenberg’s case, the laborious twomonth-long removal of graphite and charcoal lines, at the cost of many erasers (Cain, para.9), left behind shadowy traces, smudges. Because of this, in 2010, a team from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art submitted the erased drawing to an infrared scan and digital enhancement that brought to light de Kooning’s original work (SFMOMA, Robert Rauschenberg …, para.1). While this shows well the ability of the erased to reemerge or resurface, as de Kooning’s drawing did after nearly sixty years, in Manouach’s Cascao, the temporal experience of erasure is perhaps more palpable because of its medium: comics. Visualized in this way, as a succession of panels and pages, erasure indeed emerges as an erasing—and smudge as a smudging—an operation which entails not a sudden, innocuous “poof!” but a slow disaster (Knowles) embedded in the fabric (or, in this case, paper) that sustains it. This comes through in the different rhythms of the whitewashing perpetrated over the comic’s thirty-six pages. Some pages can be read with little difficulty, having stayed relatively intact despite some “bruises” here and there, while others are indecipherable. Within these, on some pages, the images are so punctuated by tears that they cannot be read, while on others (for example, page 21), they are there but faded to the point that it is impossible to tell what is happening in each panel, because of the discoloring action of the bleach. Other pages are so eaten up that they are nearly reduced to empty, blank paper (e.g., pages 29, 30, and 31, among others, Figure 3.3). The words “empty” or “blank” are inaccurate, however. Rather, in Cascao, Manouach’s intervention turns representational absences into conspicuous presences by bringing out the tactility of the comic book page. Thus, the whitewashing, which usually translates as an attempt to hide or make

Whitewashing the Smudge  55

Figure 3.3 Example of pages from Ilan Manouach’s Cascao.

56  Ana Matilde Sousa something seem less important than it is, is made ostensibly visible. It becomes just as evident as the awkward argument that “Cascão was never black,” despite the character’s racialized and, sometimes, racist undertones. The comic’s own material resistance to erasure, manifested in the remnants of images on the pages, also reframes the politics surrounding Cascão’s whitewashing as biopolitics, that is, as the attempted subjugation of a fictional body characterized, precisely, by their resistance to submit to the regulatory discipline enforced by parents and friends—case in point, taking a bath. Ironically, in 2020, Cascão became the face of a hand hygiene campaign to combat the spread of COVID-19 among the Brazilian population, the rationale being that even a slob like him would gladly revise his standards of cleanliness when faced with the deadly pandemic (“Até Ele?!”). One can draw a parallel between Cascão’s resistance to being (white) washed and his black or pardo fans’ insistence on identifying with the character, despite his negative associations to dirtiness, for physical and behavioral traits that make him closer to the reality of many Afro-Brazilians, like his fondness for playing outside or making toys out of junk. That is why an apparently minor detail like Cascão’s crespo hair being erased from Turma da Mônica’s live-action movie became a source of disappointment: it triggers the remembrance of familiar struggles against the “empirical violence” (Bradley 7) of biopolitical erasure, what Foucault called an “indirect murder” (Foucault 256; Bradley 7). In this sense, Manouach’s Cascao may conjure the reading experiences of racialized groups who are wiped away from whitewashed mediatic milieus, namely, the formation of a searching gaze. Like the readers of Cascao who are forced to search for meaning in the fragments of images visible among the paper cracks, whitewashing in comics may prompt those who do not fit into the “neutral whiteness” of cartoon characters to work around it or read between the lines for identification or remnants of their obliterated identities. Like Rauschenberg’s take on erasure as an affirmative celebration of art’s growing limits and definitions, there is also a kind of “pure” visual beauty in Cascao’s subsemiotic liberation of comics’ “unbounded potential” from symbolism and narrative by rendering the book unreadable—or, at least, unreadable in the more normative ways in which it was initially intended to be read. As the elements of comics collapse into one another, in a formal undoing of their “proper” place in the chain of meaning construction, the characters’ black contours are ruptured and erased, leaving behind faint shadows in yellow or blue. The once saturated colors fade into light pastels or whites and the panels, whose borders are dissolved, merge with the gutters as the pictures become indistinguishable from the blank paper page. The speech bubbles and dialogues are smudged and distorted beyond recognition. However, seeing Manouach’s Cascao as a mere celebration of matter would be at odds with what appears to be an ominous, even fatalistic anticipation of the ultimate destiny of discardable cultural commodities directed at children: as wastepaper in the landfill, decomposing into methane greenhouse gas (Subak

Whitewashing the Smudge  57 and Craighill) or, in the best-case scenario, in fossil-fuel-powered recycling facilities, where various types of (sometimes, toxic) chemicals are used to break down the ink colorants and whiten the pulp’s cellulose fibers (Ullmann). I do not mean to decry the merits of paper recycling, which is beneficial in terms of its environmental impacts compared to virgin paper (Villazon). However, Cascao still makes one acutely aware of the endless material costs and life cycles of our waste-intensive entertainment industries. As new media theorist Jussi Parikka puts it, “not all matter can be seen as liberating … there is a whole materialism of dirt and bad matter, too” (Parikka 98–99). Indeed, a fundamental difference between Rauschenberg’s erased drawing and Manouach’s Cascao is that “a de Kooning was worth something” and “Even a throwaway sketch had value, both monetary and art historical” (Cain, para.5). Not that the comics of Mauricio de Sousa, who has received the moniker of the “Walt Disney of Brazil” (Luana Ferreira) for his influence in the history and industry of quadrinhos, are worthless. It is just that the probability of a cheap issue of Turma da Mônica ending up in the trash can is doubtlessly greater than that of a drawing by Willem de Kooning, which is more likely to end up in a museum or private art collection. Therefore, in a way, the Erased de Kooning Drawing ended up in the same place where it began: the fine arts. On the contrary, Manouach’s Cascao performs an alchemic transformation from “low” to “high” brow; an “undoing of boundaries,” to recall Bataille’s formlessness, producing an object on the threshold between comics and something else. The something else being, for instance, that nebulous category dubbed the artist’s book, that is, a work of art in the shape of a book, or which self-consciously engages with the book as a medium, presumably distinguished from comics and other types of “regular” books by context and intentionality (Evenhaugen, para. 5). Entering an overarching debate on such definitions—at what point does a comic book become “art”? And when it does (become art), can one still call it a comic book?—is not only beyond the scope of this article but would cut against how Cascao and Manouach’s conceptual comics problematize the mediatic segregation imposed by such rigid boundaries. Blanco, described by Manouach as an “ode to standardization” (Manouach, “Blanco,” para. 1), illustrates this to the extreme. It is an unprinted, white dummy in the standard size of Franco-Belgian comics, a 48-page-long hardcover album, whose run of 5,000 copies was commercially distributed in bookstores (a more in-depth analysis of Blanco can be found later in this collection in chapter 8 by Moritz Küng). Blanco plays on the culturally loaded weight of that specific format as a fetishized token of the mainstream comics industry, which, “emptied” of content and color, somewhat resembles another kind of Rauschenberg, his famous White Paintings, or even the sculptures of minimalist artists like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd. Blanco and Cascao share the same evocation of museum-worthy “high” conceptualism, with its explorations of medium specificity through an emphasis on form, process, and/or the rejection of the artist’s touch. They also engage with

58  Ana Matilde Sousa comics’ troubled relationship to the intellectual elite, ironically, rescuing comics from the lowly cultural realms they have historically inhabited by— literally—erasing their “comicness.” As the ninth art whose embeddedness in juvenile consumer culture has long kept it from fully integrating the art canon, it is indeed possible to conceive of comics as something that (metaphorically, and according to such deep-seated canonical notions) pollutes the pristine, white paper. Thus, purging these comic books of “comicness” would be akin to a rite of purification, restoring their physical medium to a state of original purity. Whereas Blanco’s erasure is crisp white and coolly detached, however, Cascao’s is messier and angrier, with the use of sterilizing bleach coming through not just as an off-screen disappearance but as immediate destruction, happening right before one’s eyes. It recalls the infamous adage that “it became necessary to destroy the village to save it.” Here, one treads dangerously close to “a politics of death” (Murray 718), a thanato or necropolitics of who or what is made to die; or, to be more specific, a nihilopolitics (Bradley) of who or what is erased. One can even compare the whitewashing of Cascão to comics’ own trajectory of legitimization: from “dirty” children or pulp entertainment to a growing critical and institutional recognition, sometimes, at the cost of their sanitization to fit into notions of “national culture” (Kinsella, para. 6). Moreover, the material effects of rinsing Cascão in bleach, that is, of making it unreadable, are not the only dramatic change to the original book. There is an equally significant transformation in terms of its readership and print run, going from mass-produced comics for kids to limited editions aimed at a niche of discerning adult readers—an aspect common to many of Manouach’s appropriations and détournements of popular comics. Thus, after becoming a comic book that one cannot read, or that does not fit the general normative expectations of what comics should look like and how comics should be read, Manouach’s Cascao is reborn as an ambiguous artifact, closer to an artist’s book, that defies, and destabilizes, “comicness.” It is as if the mediality of comics is, itself, smudged. * In Ilan Manouach’s Cascao, the use of a whitening and sterilizing chemical on Cascão, the dirtiest character in fiction, engages with the overlapping meanings of “whitewashing,” including how skin-whitening has been portrayed as an ideal standard in advertisements, cosmetics, and cinema; one is reminded, for instance, about the disturbing history of soap ads (mostly older ads, but there have been some recent examples and polemics; Astor 2017), which used racist imagery associating dark skin with dirt to promote their effectiveness. In doing so, Cascao raises several questions concerning the politics of suppression, and its mirror image, neutralization or normalization, at work in beloved comic franchises directed at children and teens (in this case, Turma da Mônica). Comparing to other works of conceptual comics where Manouach employs unreadability and omission as strategies for

Whitewashing the Smudge  59 détournement, like Noirs, Riki Fermier, or Blanco, the politics of Cascao are less obvious, as is the complex relationship of black and mixed-race readers in Brazil with a character with racialized, possibly racist, undertones. The cover of Cascão #39 is thus an especially fitting target for Manouach’s whitewashing: Cascão, looking at a bathtub—the bane of his existence, the instrument of disciplinary biopolitics to contain the character’s “dirty matters”—with a confounded expression. While the meanings of whitewashing in Manouach’s Cascao are embedded in this racial backdrop, one can extend these to an exploration of the medium specificity of comic books, entering a broader artistic tradition of “act[s] focused on the removal of marks rather than their accumulation” (SFMOMA, Robert Rauschenberg …, para. 1), one which finds an exemplary expression in works like Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing. By literally rinsing Cascão with bleach, Manouach inverts the original intent of “whitewashing” as hygienization or sanitization to, instead, showcase its damaging material results. This deceivingly simple act creates something like a rabbit-duck paradox, allowing for the coexistence of two opposing interpretations. From the point of view of comics as popular entertainment, resulting in their historically assigned lowly place in the artistic hierarchy, this unreadable book is trash, ready for the landfill or recycling facility; perhaps even a waste of a collector’s item, since the object that Manouach transforms is a newer archival/facsimile reissue of the 1980s original, published within MSP’s “prestige” Historical Collection (for the new challenges and practices of archiving this sort of ephemera, see Chapter 12 by Benoît Crucifix). However, by cleansing the “comicness” out of the comic book, Manouach’s Cascao metamorphoses and is reborn into a different (supposedly, traditionally, higher) class of artifact: an artist’s book, a work of conceptual art no longer aimed at children but the intelligentsia. A similar illusion is at work in characters like those of Turma da Mônica— but one could also evoke, for instance, Mauricio de Sousa’s friend Tezuka Osamu—as their flattened cuteness serves as a platform onto which readers project themselves. See, for instance, the YouTube videos in which Japanese passers-by, when questioned about the race of various round-eyed, colorful-haired manga and anime characters, unhesitatingly classify them as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or, sometimes, a surprisingly diverse range of mixed-race identities (That Japanese Man Yuta). Such intricate racial-mediatic entanglements are uncannily captured in the etymology of gibi, a common term for comics magazines in Brazilian Portuguese. Gibi was the title of a famous Brazilian comics magazine from the 1940s that, in one of its early issues, ran a story starring a black(face) character called Gibi—incidentally, a slang word for moleque or negrinho, meaning “kid” or, specifically, a “black kid” (Gibiosfera, para. 7; Nação HQ, para. 1). Gibi was adopted as the magazine’s mascot, and, eventually, his name (“black kid”) became synonymous with comics magazines in general in Brazil. These cheap commodities, whose materiality is so distinct from the nobler objects in Manouach’s

60  Ana Matilde Sousa other projects (albums, graphic novels, tomes), highlight the perilous intersections of race and the comic book medium. Against this backdrop, the whitewashing of Manouach’s Cascao problematizes the very notion of grouping both humans and the arts into socially constructed categories, which have been used and abused throughout history to artificially hierarchize one and the others. Works Cited “Afro-Brazilians”. Minority Rights Group, https://minorityrights.org/minorities/ afro-brazilians/. [Accessed 8 January 2021.] “Applied Memetic”. Echo Chamber, https://www.echochamber.be/en/projects/ appliedmemetic/. [Accessed 21 January 2021.] Arya, Rina. Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Astor, Maggie. 2017. “Dove Drops an Ad Accused of Racism.” The New York Times, October 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/business/dove-ad-racist.html. “Até Ele?! Cascão Entra Na Campanha Contra o Coronavírus e Lava as Mão.” Globo.Com, 4 May 2020, https://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2020/04/05/ ate-ele-cascao-entra-na-campanha-contra-o-coronavirus-e-lava-as-maos-vejaanimacao-exclusiva.ghtml. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Edited by Allan Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bradley, Arthur. Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure. Columbia University Press, 2019. Cain, Abigail. “Why Robert Rauschenberg Erased a De Kooning.” Artsy, 14 July 2017, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-robert-rauschenberg-erased-de-kooning. “Cascão N° 39/Abril.” Guia Dos Quadrinhos, http://www.guiadosquadrinhos.com/ edicao/cascao-n-39/cas0031/16956. [Accessed 9 January 2021.] CineLoucura Show. O Cascão é Ou Não Negro? Turma Da Mônica, o Filme. 2018. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM2BfoKQhtk. “Coleção Histórica.” Planeta Gibi, https://www.planetagibi.com/turma-da-monica/ minisseries/colecao-historica. [Accessed 15 January 2021.] Comissão de Jornalistas pela Igualdade Racial. “Carta de repúdio.” Cojira - DF, 21 May 2008, https://cojiradf.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/carta-de-repudio/. de Sousa, Mauricio. Como a Morte Nasceu. 11 September 2004, https://web.archive. org/web/20100107001122/http://www.monica.com.br/mauricio/cronicas/ cron285.htm. Duarte, Rebeca Oliveira. “O Negro Segundo Maurício de Souza.” Encrespo e Não Aliso!, 20 March 2012, http://encrespoenaoaliso.blogspot.com/2012/03/o-negrosegundo-mauricio-de-souza.html. Elinhas. “Passando Pra Lembrar Que o Cascão, Naturalmente, é LOIRO Mas a Sujeira Deixa o Cabelo Dele Preto.” Twitter, 21 October 2018, https://twitter.com/ df_porto/status/1054095979337695233. Evans, David. “Introduction: Seven Types of Appropriation.” Appropriation, edited by David Evans, The MIT Press, 2009, pp. 12–23. Evenhaugen, Anne. “What Is an Artist’s Book?” Smithsonian Libraries / Unbound, 1 June 2012, https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2012/06/01/what-is-an-artists-book/.

Whitewashing the Smudge  61 Ferreira, Lola. “@andrezadelgado Sério? Caraca, sempre pensei que ele era:(por causa do cabelinho).” @lolaferreira, 19 June 2019, https://twitter.com/lolaferreira/ status/1141362263946878976. Ferreira, Luana. “‘The Cartoonist Called the ‘Walt Disney of Brazil’.” BBC News, 11 September 2016. www.bbc.com, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-37284939. Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey, Picador, 2003. Gibiosfera. “Gibi: Você Sabe Qual a Origem Desta Palavra?” Gibiosfera, 2010, http:// www.gibiosfera.com.br/blog/2010/02/gibi-origem-palavra/. Gradín, Carlos. “Why Is Poverty So High Among Afro-Brazilians? A Decomposition Analysis of the Racial Poverty Gap.” The Journal of Development Studies, vol. 45, no. 9, Routledge, October 2009, pp. 1426–52. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/00220380902890235. Kendall, Stuart. “Expenditure.” Georges Bataille: Key Concepts, edited by Mark Hewson and Marcus Coelen, Routledge, 2015, pp. 75–87. Kinsella, Sharon. “Adult Manga: Pro-Establishment Pop-Culture and New Politics in the 1990s.” Media, Culture and Society, vol. 21 (4), July 1999, pp. 567–72, doi:10.1177/016344399021004007. Knowles, Scott Gabriel. “Slow Disaster.” Slow Disaster, https://slowdisaster.com/. Accessed 10 January 2021. Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. MIT Press, 1986. Madison. “@andrezadelgado Lembro de me decepcionar quando percebi que o cascão não era negro. Apesar da sujeira, as histórias das brincadeiras dele, a forma que mostrava ser mais humilde faziam com que gostasse muito dele. Preciso ler a msp do Jeremias, um personagem que ganhou reconhecimento devido.” @nosidaamn, 20 June 2019, https://twitter.com/nosidaamn/status/1141600736054300673. Manouach, Ilan. “Blanco.” Ilan Manouach, https://ilanmanouach.com/projects/. [Accessed 17 January 2021a.] ———. “Cascao.” Ilan Manouach, https://ilanmanouach.com/project/umupm/. [Accessed 8 January 2021b.] ———. “Metakatz.” Ilan Manouach, https://ilanmanouach.com/project/metakatz/. [Accessed 8 January 2021c.] ———. “Peanuts Minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, vol. 9, no. 1, 1, Open Library of Humanities, September 2019, p. 16. www.comicsgrid.com, doi:10.16995/cg.139. ———. “Riki Fermier.” Ilan Manouach, https://ilanmanouach.com/project/cascao/. [Accessed 14 January 2021d.] ———. “Un Monde Un Peu Meilleur.” Ilan Manouach, https://ilanmanouach.com/. [Accessed 4 January 2021e.] Medeiros, Lucas. “Público exige Cascão negro no filme da Turma da Mônica e autor toma decisão.” TV Foco, 21 June 2018, https://www.otvfoco.com.br/publico-exigecascao-negro-no-filme-da-turma-da-monica-e-autor-toma-decisao/. Moura, Pedro. “Antologias MSP.” Ler BD, 17 de abril de 2014, http://lerbd.blogspot. com/2014/04/antologias-msp.html. Murray, S. J. “Thanatopolitics.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 718–19. Nação HQ. “71 Anos de Lançamento da Revista Gibi.” Nação HQ, 12 April 2010, https://nacao.net/2010/04/12/71-anos-de-lancamento-da-revista-gibi/.

62  Ana Matilde Sousa Naranjo, Marcelo. “Coleção Histórica Turma da Mônica chega ao final.” Universo HQ, 7 December 2015, http://universohq.com/noticias/colecao-historica-turma-damonica-chega-ao-final/. Parikka, Jussi. “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, March 2012, pp. 95–100, doi:10.1080/14791420.2011.626252. Prado, Pedro. “Mauricio de Sousa se diz surpreso com polêmica despertada pelo filme com atores da Turma da Mônica.” Pipoca Moderna, 21 June 2018, https://pipoca moderna.com.br/2018/06/mauricio-de-sousa-se-diz-surpreso-com-polemicadespertada-pelo-filme-com-atores-da-turma-da-monica/. PublishNews. “‘Pai’ do cabelo do Cascão morre.” PublishNews, https://www. publishnews.com.br/materias/2019/02/11/pai-do-cabelo-do-cascao-morre. [Accessed 17 January 2021.] Rauschenberg, Rovert. Robert Rauschenberg in Conversation with the Legendary Tanya Grosman. Interview by Tanya Grosman, 1976, https://www.temporaryart. org/artvandals/08.html. Ribeiro, Antônio Luiz. “Sérgio T. Graciano.” Guia Dos Quadrinhos, http://www. guiadosquadrinhos.com/artista/sergio-t-graciano/4739. [Accessed 17 January 2021.] Rodrigues, Thayná. “Mauricio de Sousa desfaz polêmica sobre elenco de ‘Turma da Mônica - Laços’: ‘Cascão nunca foi desenhado negro.’” Extra Online, 21 June 2018, https://extra.globo.com/tv-e-lazer/mauricio-de-sousa-desfaz-polemica-sobreelenco-de-turma-da-monicalacos-cascao-nunca-foi-desenhado-negro-22806197. html. Salata, André. “Race, Class and Income Inequality in Brazil: A Social Trajectory Analysis.” Dados, vol. 63, no. 3, Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos (IESP) da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), 2020. SciELO, doi:10.1590/ dados.2020.63.3.213. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Robert Rauschenberg Discusses Erased de Kooning Drawing at SFMOMA, May 6, 1999. 1999, https://www.sfmoma.org/ research-materials/. Santos, Edgar. “@andrezadelgado Já respondi um monte sobre isso: reconheço também que uma galera negra - me incluo - se vê no Cascão porque a realidade dele é mais próxima.” @edgarisantos, 19 June 2019a, https://twitter.com/edgarisantos/ status/1141366618330677251. ———. “@macharretti @andrezadelgado Sempre vi o Cascão Cm Um Personagem q Se Divertia Muito + Na Rua Do q Em Casa e Criava Vários Brinquedos c Material Reciclado e Aparentemente Era Mais Humilde Da Turma. Eu Morei Num COHAB Cercado Por 2 Favelas e Minha Realidade Era Muito Parecida.” @edgarisantos, 19 June 2019b, https://twitter.com/edgarisantos/status/1141441465203249152. Scott, Helen E. “Iconoclasm as Art: Creative Gestures and Criminal Acts Inside Museums and Galleries.” Art and Destruction, edited by Jennifer Walden, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 77–93. Shapereader. https://ilanmanouach.com/. [Accessed 21 January 2021.] Simões, Nataly. “Mauricio de Sousa: ‘Não conhecia a realidade dos negros’.” LeiaJá, 6 October 2019, https://www.leiaja.com/cultura/2019/06/10/mauricio-de-sousa-naoconhecia-realidade-dos-negros/. Stiles, Kristine. “White Painting.” Rauschenberg: Collecting and Connecting, 2014, index.html.

Whitewashing the Smudge  63 Subak, S., and A. Craighill. “The Contribution of the Paper Cycle to Global Warming.” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, vol. 4, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 113–36. Springer Link, doi:10.1023/A:1009683311366. Sweta, Srivastava Vikram. “Dark Skin Is Dirty.” Sayfty, 18 September 2014, https:// sayfty.com/dark-skin-is-dirty/. That Japanese Man Yuta. Do Anime Characters Look White to Japanese People? (Interview). 2017. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_Xd2xLAjDM. Travae, Marques. “Public Demands Black Cascão in Turma Da Mônica Film.” Black Brazil Today, 7 July 2019, https://blackbraziltoday.com/public-demands-blackcascao-in-turma-da-monica-film/. Ullmann, Maryann. “Chemicals Used in Paper Recycling Mills.” Bizfluent, 26 September 2017, https://bizfluent.com/facts-5731899-chemicals-used-paper-recyclingmills.html. Villazon, Luis. “Is Recycling Paper Bad for the Environment?” BBC Science Focus Magazine, https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-recycling-paper-bad-for-theenvironment/. [Accessed 17 January 2021. Walden, Jennifer. “Introduction.” Art and Destruction, edited by Jennifer Walden, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 1–8. “Whitewash.” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/white wash. [Accessed 15 January 2021.]

4 The Void that Challenged Narrative A Poetics of Emptiness in Riki Fermier Greice Schneider

Introduction. From Petzi to Riki At first sight, all it takes in order to address the gaps and bridges between popular comic strip series and high art is a remaining lonely pelican. But what has been accomplished in Ilan Manouach’s self-conscious work of modernist appropriation is deceptively simple. The following chapter aims to approach the strategies of emptiness and the ambiguous reading found in the conceptual work by Ilan Manouach. It all starts with Rasmus Klump, a worldwide popular Danish comics strip series from the 1950s about the adventures of a bear cub and his animal friends on a farm. The children’s series by Carla Hansen and Vilhelm Hansen has been translated worldwide, sold millions of copies and has been turned into an animated TV series. More than 50 years later, from what seems to be another galaxy, visual artist Ilan Manouach transposes this unpretentious book published by giant Casterman to a very different context of publishing, in the independent, artsy La Cinquième Couche. This displacement sheds light on the specific rules and cultural constraints of the field (Bourdieu, 1984) that affect the material aspects of comic books. Manouach uses ellipsis to challenge the materiality of comics by playing with appropriation and constraints, erasing all the characters, except the unimportant supporting character named Riki, a pelican. The empty panels and remaining balloons leave an impression of purposelessness and desolation, greatly distinct from their initial intent. To understand this book, I will first approach the tensions between different fields of production and consumption, in the way Riki Fermier can be understood as an example of modernist appropriation. Besides, I will address how constrained writing—and specifically the process of undrawing (Crucifix, 2020a)—creates deliberate resistance to narrativity and linearity. The last section will be devoted to a close reading of the book, focusing on its formal aspects and the use of ellipses to produce an ambiguous and self-reflexive reading. An interesting point of departure to read Riki Fermier is taking a step back and looking at its circulation contexts. We can find a great deal of insight in an excerpt of the work, included in Le Coup de Grâce (“The Death Blow”), DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-6

The Void that Challenged Narrative  65 an anthology for the 2006 Quinzaine de bande dessinée published by La Cinquième Couche. In its preface-manifest, the authors question the supremacy of what they call “monoform” comics, signaling a shift of discourse about the shape of comics. La monoforme impose un déroulement causal et souvent linéaire à des histoires niaisement racontées / La monoforme prend le lecteur, cet idiot apeuré, par la main, l’inquiète et le rassure. Veut lui faire croire à l’ordre et au mérite / La monoforme prétend qu’il n’ya qu’un sens, unidimensionnel et unidirectionnel [The monoform imposes a causal and often linear unfolding on stupidly told stories / The monoform takes the reader, this frightened idiot, by the hand, worries and reassures him. Wants to make him believe in order and merit / The monoform claims that there is only one sense, one-dimensional and one-way]. Two aspects call attention in this opening text. The first remark encompasses the context of reading, the position it occupies in the field, and the tensions between highbrow and lowbrow evoked by its acts of reappropriation. This tension becomes apparent, for example, in the book’s paratext—this “zone between text and off-text” (Genette, 1997) that already guides our reading experience. In this case here, the choice of opening the anthology with an art manifesto—a public declaration of principles that uses shock rhetoric to achieve a revolutionary and often political effect—already indicates an ambition to evoke other modernist avant-garde art movements that frequently use such a format. This self-proclaimed characteristic stated in its preface manifest could be seen as an example of a well-known attempt to make comics unpopular, to “erase the popularity of comics, through the assumption of dispositions more frequently associated with the traditional fine arts” (Beaty, 2012). In a way, the conceptual comics of Manouach certainly complicate the interactions between these two fields, raising conditions for a real dialogue between comics and the art world (Groensteen, 2011). Secondly, the preface-manifest designates an adversary—the monoform, a concept developed by filmmaker Peter Watkins to refer to “fast-paced, monolinear narrative” films created with the aim to “lock mass audiences into their seats” (2012). It proposes an adamant rejection toward conventional narrative ways of dealing with comics and strongly rejects aspects such as linearity, causality, narrative immersion, illusion, seriality, and questions the supremacy of the “monoform.” Instead, they propose exploring alternative ways to articulate images and words, far from causal chains and concerns with story progression and continuity. In the participation call, the editors Ilan Manouach and Xavier Lowenthal set the tone: “we long for startling transitions, improbable links, new kinds of narrative associations. We find conventional narrative functions boring and stifling.”

66  Greice Schneider In a way, all this repudiation of narrativity, predictability, distraction, and serialization—most tropes of “mainstream” comics—replicates a modernist romantic discourse very common to many contemporary graphic narratives, in which we find “a continued desire to disassociate themselves from the mass media forms in which they were first produced” (Ball, 2010, p. 106). Manouach attacks narrativity, challenges consolidated reading habits, and proposes to look at very conventional popular comics with a fresh set of eyes, inviting other interactions with these objects. We are asked to suspend our narrative impulse and to read these comics in an abstract manner (Baetens, 2011). By refusing narrative immersion and media transparency and promoting disengagement from a narrative arc, Manouach highlights opacity and self-reflexivity and calls attention to the material aspects of comics as an artifact and the reading habits and cultural production of comics. The debate on abstract comics (Molotiu, 2009; Baetens, 2011) can help us to think about the operation we find in Riki Fermier. To do that, it should be clear that abstraction in comics is opposed not only to figurative but also to narrative (Baetens, 2011). In this case here, abstraction should be measured not as figuration but as narrative potential. Or, in other words, “abstraction in comics can be defined as the process of challenging normally dominant features of comics—by putting those features to other, less orthodox uses” (Baetens, 2011, p. 96). Groensteen prefers to label this juxtaposition of figurative images that do not produce a coherent narrative as infra-narrative (2011, p. 180). Such a move challenges comics’ boundaries and shakes the very backbone of what defines comics. According to the author, to deny narrative would be to deny the very definition of comics (2011, p. 197) since the concept is rooted in its narrative capabilities. The comics reader takes semantic and narrative coherence for granted. S/he presumes that ‘the positioning of any panel necessarily has some point.’ When images set out consecutively fail to offer any immediate coherence, the reader is naturally inclined to minimize what seems like a “breach of contract” by formulating hypotheses intended to confer intelligibility on the string of panels—to convert an amalgam into a narrative sequence. It is only when these attempts fail that s/he makes the decision to assign these images to the always improbable category of infranarrative comics. (Groensteen, 2013, p. 19) That does not mean that Riki Fermier cannot be read narratively, but rather, that narrative is not the dominant effect evoked in the experience of reading it. In the end, the way we choose to approach this book is deeply determined by a series of expectations and instructions that rely on the contexts of publications. The marginal position of Ilan Manouach in the comics field allows him to explore the periphery of what it means to read a page as comics and

The Void that Challenged Narrative  67 what challenges can be posed when we subtract a few elements. In the section that follows, I will discuss the consequences of such appropriation, and how constrained writing can provoke an ambiguous shifting. A Word on Appropriation and Constrained Writing Before proceeding to our closing reading of Riki Fermier, it is crucial to address the notions of appropriation and constrained writing as two of the main strategies found in the work of Manouach. The long history of appropriation of comics in the art world sheds light on several tensions between institutional fields. Such a move has consequences because it makes visible the questions of authorship and cultural legitimacy, as discussed in the previous section. In Comics versus Art, Bart Beaty approaches the shifting contexts of comics from the perspective of a sociology of culture, and he points out that in some cases the vernacular language of comics can be used “as a springboard to abstraction” (2012, p. 190). Here, appropriation is directly tied to a conceptual move to discuss the agents involved in the comics field. Riki Fermier is only one of a series of examples that employs appropriation in Manouach’s work. Noirs (2014) tackles color and the printing process in this fac símile version of the Smurfs album Les Schtroumpfs noirs, leaving only plates of cyan. Cascao (2019), the magazine from Brazilian popular comics Turma da Mônica, has been whitewashed with bleach. In Peanuts minus Schulz (2021), Manouach addresses political questions of labor. All this is made in the context of remixing materials and appropriation of older works, a practice that has become increasingly popular with the spread of new technologies of image-making and the emergence of digital comics. However, Manouach goes beyond the usual digital comics exercises (such as Calvin minus Hobbes and Garfield minus Garfield). His experiments recontextualize these works to shed light on questions of authorship, cultural habits, and editorial agency. In Chapter 6, Maaheen Ahmed presents a unique perspective on the same Petzi book by emphasizing the tension in Manouach’s appropriation of it from children’s comics to adult audiences. This conceptual repurposing of popular comics also follows some strict rules and self-imposed constraints. As many of Manouach’s works, Riki Fermier follows the steps of Oulipo (L’Ouvroir de littérature potentiel – Laboratory of Potential Literature) and its comics successors Oubapo (L’Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle – Laboratory of Potential Comics), in the use of constrained writing. In a way, these oubapian exercises can be treated as an attempt to move away from the comics market conventions and get closer to the avant-garde art world (Beaty 2007, 2012; Kuhlman, 2010). When conceiving Riki Fermier, Manouach established three ground rules for this work, which are explicitly announced: first, he chose to apply “one and only one operation on the totality of the book.” Second, as discussed above, the author chooses to “remain as close as possible to the original edition.” This appropriation provides the background for repetition and

68  Greice Schneider difference and invites a game of comparisons. Finally, the third rule was to “problematize and reactivate an element of the story or the book that is left unquestioned.” In the manner of Georges Perec’s La disparition, the author uses a process of lipogrammatic operation consisting of the subtraction of one element in order to alter its meaning. The primary step here is a process of undrawing, as a mode that allows him “to explore modes of making comics without drawing, developing means of producing comics that put the human hand at a remove, acknowledging the presence of other agencies and letting the materials speak for themselves” (Crucifix, 2020a, p. 2). As Jan Baetens states, the use of constrained writing poses an exciting challenge to the reader, who has to identify and deal with the rules of the game: “reading a text with constraints remains a form of reading dangerously” (2003, p. 16). By adopting constrained writing, Manouach suggests a reflection about the very making of comics, highlighting the ambiguities in our reading experience and debating questions of comics’ production and cultural legitimacy. Do we keep reading Riki Fermier as a narrative until the end? Do we shift between reading as a formal exercise and reading ‘seriously’ as a story of flying buckets and strange supernatural events? How do we deal with this self-conscious object? In the end, we are left with an always-shifting game. At first sight, it is still possible and somewhat amusing to try to read Riki Fermier narratively, as a contemplative story full of indeterminacy. However, such reading would miss the point. As the subtraction of the main characters affects the plot readability and blocks the narrative flow, the book becomes opaque—we are turned to the material constraints of comics and their relations to certain context of production. In the next section, I will discuss how this ambiguity works in formal terms. Reading Riki Fermier Having discussed the roles of appropriation and constrained writing in the work of Manouach, I will now turn my attention to some of the main formal strategies used in Riki Fermier and how this ambiguity enriches our reading experience. On the one hand, this focus on erasure might evoke a minimalistic feeling, following certain tendencies of contemporary comics that embrace a “poetics of reticence, ambiguity, and indeterminacy” (Groensteen, 2013). Nevertheless, beyond that, the absence of characters also shifts our attention to some material aspects of the book taken for granted and makes us aware of comics conventions and reading habits. At first glance, for obvious reasons, Riki Fermier resembles a classic popular album filled with many recognizable formal conventions. It is figurative; it hints at tropes of traditional narrative genres. As an object, the album format itself prepares the reader and hints at a familiar experience in the bande dessinée tradition. The stability of the album format is evident in the fixed number of 32 pages arranged in a regular page layout. Another element

The Void that Challenged Narrative  69 that maintains constancy and reinforces its ties with publishing conventions is the conventional use of the regular page layout (Peeters, 1998, p. 52) composed of six panels, what Franquin calls the gaufrier. In short, to the casual eye, Riki Fermier looks like a prime example of a very popular, cheap, minor comic. And at the same time, for those familiar with Petzi, the cover also immediately announces an explicit constraint. However, it is precisely the choice of such a commonplace format with a well-known object that lays the terrain for estrangement and contrast, since “variation can only be perceived against the background of sameness” (Fischer, 1994, p. 9). This radical shift of attention proposed by Manouach is possible only through a perception of predictability that builds certain strong established reading expectations. In other words, the repetition of such regularity and familiar schemes helps to reinforce what is absent, what is missing, what is not there (Picado and Schneider, 2020). At the same time that Manouach puts into evidence many comics conventions, the book also proposes a particular set of constraints, achieved through this lipogrammatic process. By doing this, Manouach highlights a contrast between excessively familiar comics conventions immediately followed by invitation to move away from plot-driven reading and consider another contemplative kind of attention (Schneider, 2016). The process of undrawing the main characters can halt and repel our natural tendency to narrativize comics and slow down our reading experience. This tension between familiarity and estrangement is already somehow hinted at on the cover (Figure 4.1). Some conventional elements come to mind—the bold red title presenting our protagonist Riki, followed by a subtitle that announces the theme of this specific book (farmer/fermier). On the top-left of the page, a small icon of Riki’s head followed by the number 17

Figure 4.1 Covers of Petzi Fermier and Riki Fermier.

70  Greice Schneider suggests that this is not a single book but part of a series. The scenery is completed by a green field, taking up two-thirds of the bottom page. It creates a flat-color palette that highlights the two-dimensional nature of the drawings and evokes the cheap printing methods used in classic comics. If Riki Fermier has this paradigmatic property, at first sight, it looks just like any other album and stands for a BD tradition. However, once we start moving our eyes to the inferior part of the cover, we realize something peculiar and unexpected. Two-thirds of the page is occupied by a large empty green field in which Riki, an isolated pelican, is placed on the left-down corner walking toward the outer limits of the page—almost as if abandoning the pericamp. This intriguing cover gets even more unusual if we compare this emptiness with the original cover of Petzi Fermier, published by Casterman. In the same green field, now crowded with a numerous group of characters, we see Petzi, the bear-protagonist, surrounded by other animals—a cow, a penguin, a duck, a horse, and Riki, the pelican, assuming only a role of supporting character, almost in the periphery. Moreover, the back cover also reinforces such contrast by highlighting the serialized nature of the comics albums. The page is composed of 20 small covers, displaced in five columns and four rows. In each book, Riki does something different—he goes to the pyramids and the North Pole; he becomes an alpinist and a detective. The title is always constant—but Riki, the ostensible protagonist, appears in only twelve covers, while eight covers are presented with empty scenarios – like the sear or the pyramids. In one case, Riki dans l’île aux tortues, we are left with nothing but the title over the white page. The lipogrammatic operation, in these cases, plays a double function of constantly shifting our attention between two levels: on the one hand, in the story world, we can become touched by the sad and empty world of a lonely pelican, but at the same time, all the conceptual reappropriation turns our attention to broad conventions as a commentary on comics traditions. On the introduction, on the first page of the book, the reader is explicitly addressed and warned about what s/he will find—creating a set of expectations and planting a doubt. The page shows a single panel in the middle—our pelican in the farm—followed by a small text, charged with a dual nature: first, it once again reminds us of the serialized nature of the classic album by proposing a recap of the previous adventures of Petzi (and not Riki). However, more interestingly, the question posed in the end can also evoke an ironic effect awakened by the self-conscious double reading of Manouach’s work. The question about the quiet, peaceful, and serene nature of the following story is, at the same time, a “serious” question already present in Petzi, but also gains another nuance, as a wink to the game involved in the constrained fiction proposed by Manouach. Is this world peaceful as it sounds? Après avoir fait beaucoup de fumée, et un tour de locomotive sur un bout de rail circulaire, Petzi et ses amis vont être amenés à vivre une expérience un peu plus paisible.

The Void that Challenged Narrative  71 Mais la vie des labourers est-elle vraiment paisible? Vous le saurez en lisant cet album… [After having made a lot of smoke, and a locomotive ride on a piece of circular rail, Petzi and his friends are going to have a slightly more peaceful experience. But is the life of the plowman really peaceful? You will know it by reading this album …] Let us now consider the role of characters—or their absence—so central do the lipogrammatic operation made in this book. While in Petzi the development of events in the story depends on the multiple interactions found in this numerous gang of characters that move our reading forward, Manouach’s Riki is all alone, a single cartoonish character who is left with no living being to interact with. A few reasons can explain why Riki is Manouach’s chosen residual character—one of the few active “rules” in Riki Fermier and the one that arouses this mood of indeterminacy and amplitude caused by graphic emptiness. First, that the only remaining character after Manouach’s undrawing is not among the protagonists enhances the mood of loneliness and passiveness. The pelican’s role in the original story was peripheral—it is not a coincidence that he has frequently placed in the margins of the panels, near the gutter (sometimes even trespassing its frontier). To quote Manouach, he “is the only animal in the original story that can be described as a filler.” That is why this only character appearance may cause a sense of solitude, apathy, and even strangeness. Besides, and more importantly, choosing Riki also guarantees a predominance of empty panels (or at least many panels without any characters). As an example, in the first panel of page 7 (Figure 4.2), Riki exits the scene, crossing over the gutter and leaving the reader with six panels that are gradually overtaken by large blocks of flat, pale green (in contrast to the blue sky).1 Furthermore, it also creates a haunting experience in this ghost farm where inanimate objects look like they suddenly gained life. In the last third of the album, devoted to building the farm, the pages are occupied by flying bricks, paintbrushes, sacs, buckets, and plows. As in Disney’s Fantasia, many tools appear to move around and do the work by themselves magically. Simultaneously, as these tools float in the air, standing still as uncanny scenes, Riki Fermier also calls attention to the materiality of comics as a collection of fixed images, deprived of movement. In short, once again, the lipogrammatic operation makes the reader oscillate between two modes of reading: on the one hand, we are faced with a haunted fictional world-making, and, on the other hand, our attention is turned to the material aspects of the comics themselves. This tension is also apparent in the choice to preserve all speech balloons, provoking a paradoxical sense of acoustic babble2 and spatial emptiness. Despite the absence of characters, and the sense of void and desolation, Riki

72  Greice Schneider

Figure 4.2 Ilan Manouach, Riki Fermier. (La Cinquième Couche, 2015), 7.

Fermier is filled with chatter—practically all panels contain speech balloons (181 out of 183).3 Groensteen defines a balloon as “a space delimited by a trace that surrounds the words pronounced by the characters” (“espace délimité par un trait, qui renferme les paroles que prononcent les personnages”) (2007b, p. 207). A speech balloon is a way of manifesting sound graphically. Someone is saying something. A balloon signals the existence of

The Void that Challenged Narrative  73 an utterance—and, therefore, also implies the existence of a speaker. Even when the character is invisible (or too distant), the balloon indicates his/her presence, signaled by the appendage. In that case, “the balloon can have no other reason to exist than to catch the gaze and to manifest, by ricochet, the presence of a character in the midst of the frame” (Groensteen, 2007a, 77). What is notable in Manouach’s book is that, despite the suppression of characters, all their verbal utterances remain, and all appendages are redirected to Riki. First, reading the plot, the absence of their correspondent characters contributes to enhancing a ghostly sensation of a haunted farm, as we “read” voices but we do not see who is speaking (even though other characters are mentioned in the speech balloons). Such a reading would then evidence several strange contradictions between what we see and what we read. In a scenario of void and desolation, these graphic utterances talk about happiness, content, and joyful experiences. On the other hand, balloons are “containers of verbal and non-verbal information” (Forceville, 2010, p. 66). The bizarre and incoherent presence of these orphan speech balloons turns off an implicit reading contract that conceals their position on the page, stressing the opaque and conventional nature of these traditional (and usually discrete) elements from comics. A second reading would then quickly move our attention to the abundance of these flat white balloons and stressing the graphic nature of these text containers segmented along with the pages. A similar phenomenon happens with the graphic trace once we remove the primary elements responsible for moving the story forward (the characters). Here, we have the shock between maintaining a conventional graphic trace such as the Clear Line and the absence of storytelling devices usually associated with this graphic choice. Typically, the Clear Line promotes a familiar and linear reading experience, improving recognition, contour, and readability by emphasizing figuration. Additionally, the use of a flat-color palette to fill in the line work improves readability and enhances the reader’s narrative immersion. However, we do not have the straightforward plot associated with comics that use this graphic style (including the original Petzi). On the contrary, Riki Fermier turns our attention to the lines, colors, and forms themselves. Unlike traditional comics, based on adding graphic information on the page, Manouach’s agency relies on a process of subtraction. Benoît Crucifix draws attention to that: “Manouach’s line of work is perhaps better described as a continuous process of withdrawing or undrawing, disengaging himself from the stylistic singularity that usually shapes the making and reading of graphic narratives.” (Crucifix, 2020b, p. 1) Riki Fermier is a great example of a constrained work that raises awareness to the process of legitimation that is usually taken for granted. Far from being just a trick, this cleverly simple gesture completely transforms a once

74  Greice Schneider very traditional and recognizable comics album into a meta-commentary on how these comics are made in the industry, and how readers expectations are shaped by many of these conventions. If “a text written under constraint is likely to be thematically autorepresentative” (Baetens, 2003), Riki Fermier cleverly illuminates the rules of the field and its own industrial constraints. According to Baetens, the analysis of comic strips can bring clarity to the status of one specific type of constraints which literary theory often considers as “false” or “‘lacking of significance”, namely the many material and institutional “obstacles” that are mostly defined as mere “handicaps” and almost never as creative tools. In the low-art field of comics strips (ruled less by Creative Geniuses than by the culture industry) obstacles of this kind are much more ubiquitous and drastic than in the high-art field of literature. (Baetens, 2003) We could say that besides the strange misadventures of a lonely pelican, the main subject of Riki Fermier can be found precisely in these ubiquitous (but often unnoticed) institutional obstacles. The tension and ambiguity provoked by the experience of reading Riki Fermier depends on understanding the institutional modes of circulation, from popular comics to a conceptual experimentalism. A formal analysis gives insight to media-specific elements that are turned visible to those familiar with comics. By repelling the temptation to an inescapable narrativity, Manouach’s book highlights a set of otherwise muted editorial constraints used in the comics industry. Notes 1 Surdiacourt (2012) has explored the several narrative consequences of the use of empty panels in comics. 2 Graphic narratives rely on the construal of acoustic perspective (Surdiacourt, 2015, p. 14). Sounds and sound effects can only be represented indirectly and can only be evoked by visual and/or verbal means. 3 It is also noteworthy that, in older editions of Petzi, speech was conveyed by caption—that later were replaced by word balloons in more recent editions.

Works cited Baetens, Jan. “Comic Strips and Constrained Writing.” Image [&] Narrative, 2003. Baetens, Jan. “Abstraction in Comics.” SubStance, 40(1), 2011, pp.94–113. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Ball, David M. “Comics Against Themselves: Chris Ware’s Graphic Narratives as Literature.” In The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. University Press of Mississippi, 2010, pp. 103–123. Beaty, Bart. Unpopular culture Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto University Press, 2007.

The Void that Challenged Narrative  75 Beaty, Bart. Comics versus Art. University of Toronto Press, 2012. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press, 1984. Crucifix, Benoît. “Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing.” The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies. Oxford University Press, 2020a, p. 148. Crucifix, Benoît. “A Chamber of Echo: On the Post-Comics of Ilan Manouach.” PostComics : Beyond Comics, Illustration and the Graphic Novel, KASK School of Arts & Het Balanseer, 2020b, pp. 77–86. Fischer, Andreas. Repetition. Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994. Forceville, Charles, et al. “Balloonics: The Visuals of Balloons in Comics.” The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. McFarland Jefferson, 2010, pp. 56–73. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Grennan, Simon. A Theory of Narrative Drawing. Springer, 2017. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2007a. Groensteen, Thierry. La Bande Dessinée Mode d’emploi. Les Impressions nouvelles, 2007b. Groensteen, Thierry. Bande Dessinée et Narration: Système de La Bande Dessinée 2. Presses Universitaires de France, 2011. Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narrative. University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Kuhlman, Martha. In the Comics Workshop: Chris Ware and Oubapo. University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Manouach, Ilan. Riki Fermier. La Cinquième Couche, 2015. Menu, Jean-Christophe. La Bande Dessinée et Son Double: Langage et Marges de La Bande Dessinée: Perspectives Pratiques, Théoriques et Éditoriales. L’Association, 2011. Molotiu, Andrei. Abstract Comics: The Anthology : 1967-2009. Fantagraphics Books, 2009. Peeters, Benoît. Case, planche, récit: lire la bande dessinée. Casterman, 1998. Picado, Benjamim, and Greice Schneider. “O Princípio Iterativo Na Arte Dos Quadrinhos: Aproximações Narratológicas a Uma Poética Da Repetição.” Revista FAMECOS, vol. 27, 2020, pp. e34008–e34008. Rommens, Aarnoud, et al. Abstraction and Comics= Bande Dessinée et Abstraction. La Cinquième Couche| Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2019. Schneider, Greice. What Happens When Nothing Happens : Boredom and Everyday Life in Contemporary Comics. Leuven University Press, 2016. Surdiacourt, Steven. “Blacks and Blanks. On ‘Empty’ Panels.” Comics Forum, 2012, http://comicsforum.org/2012/05/25/image-narrative-4-blacks-and-blanks-on-emptypanels-by-steven-surdiacourt/. ———. Comics and Storytelling. Towards a Mediumspecific Narratology. PhD thesis, KU Leuven, May 2015. Watkins, Peter. “The Media Crisis.” Tate Modern, 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/ whats-on/tate-modern/peter-watkins-films-1964-99/media-crisis-perspectivepeter-watkins

5 Replacing and Reorganizing A Discursive Arc about Cultural Production Lorenz Ohrmer

Ilan Manouach has produced many works that are based on the modification of previously existing originals. Due to his repeated creation process of cutting and replacing elements from the originals, one can legitimately wonder about the relationship between the various resulting books. Indeed, an important part of his production is impregnated with the same creative gestures. Elsewhere in this volume, other diachronic and contextual perspectives are presented about Manouach’s output of these “modifications” or “appropriations”, namely Xavier Guilbert’s overview (Chapter 1), Morvandiau’s Franco-Belgian market and publishing context (Chapter 10), and Barbara Postema’s integration within broader traditional ideologies (Chapter 11). In this chapter, I will seek out what kind of common logic is present in his different artworks. I will deploy three different but complementary concepts in order to read this coherent body of work by Ilan Manouach: the concepts of “hidden power,” as theorized by Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, that of “voice”, as a continuation of Spivak’s Subaltern studies, and also Foucault’s concept of the “apparatus.” My starting hypothesis is the following: the recurring gesture of détournement is intended to introduce continuity between the various books. I’m referring here to the definition of détournement by Guy Debord (Debord and Wolman, 1956) as this programmatic text can be applied in its entirety to Ilan Manouach’s creative process. This continuity through a same gesture of détournement constitutes Manouach’s discursive arc. This notion, in turn, is intended here as parallel with the idea of a narrative arc. As Debord points out, when an original artwork is hijacked, it is emptied of its former substance that is no longer of any importance. One can say that Manouach uses the tool of diversion as Debord theorized it more than 60 years ago. “Clashing head-on with all worldly and legal conventions, [détournement] cannot fail to be a powerful cultural instrument in the service of a well-understood class struggle” (Debord and Wolman, 1956, my translation). Indeed, Manouach is only punctually touching the script as a matter of concern. Thus, I do postulate that arcs are constituted around his deflection gestures. They intend to express different facets of a same reality: cultural production in a historical DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-7

Replacing and Reorganizing  77 context marked by capitalism and industrialisation. I would name this arc “cutting, replacing and reorganizing the game of power.” By mobilising the concept of narrative/discursive arc, I want to demonstrate that what is happening at a book and micro-level is also happening at a macro-level throughout this series of publications. To observe this mechanism, which is present in all his works, material descriptions as well as some heuristic tools are useful. They will be described below. In order to verify this hypothesis, this chapter offers to focus in terms of close analysis on a limited number of publications: É de bande dessinée, Blanco, Noirs and Riki fermier. The aim is to verify the existence of the discursive arc of cultural production. While using as my first mobilizing concept the notion of hidden power coined by the two political scientists Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (Bachrach and Baratz 1962: 947–952), I will show the existence of a hierarchy between all narrative components in cultural production. Indeed, Manouach reveals it by transforming original works, as mentioned before. He erases dominant elements from the original narratives and thus reveals hidden symbolic traits, such as narrative power as well as hidden voices. Consequently, Manouach replaces what he erased by giving way to subaltern elements, making subtle changes in the structure of what is presented. The notion of “subaltern” and “dominant” are used in this chapter as coined by Antonio Gramsci. Since Manouach’s approach is clearly a critique of the social class system and since Gramsci was focussed on a cultural approach, terms such as “subaltern” or “hegemonic” apply particularly well to this analysis. Voice is the second concept I will mobilize here. I will develop below how it is formed by “living” characters that are acting throughout the books’ pages. Manouach’s gesture reveals subaltern identities that can finally act and raise their voices to tell their story. When they are able to sound out loud, new powerful voices can exert a power that had been often hidden. But how could readers possibly imagine what other stories could take place instead of the one actually in their hands? Art critics and fan fictions alike can for sure point out some bits of these parallel narratives. Still, there is a hierarchy between the book that was edited, printed, promoted and sold in regard to the versions that were not. The existing edition encloses only one story with its very own dynamics of power. In that cultural production, what is shown and what is hidden? Who performs the action and who disappears behind it? Once the focus on invisible dominations is established, it will be interesting to examine what was hiding them. Indeed, by doing this, they hide other voices that own their very own ideas, subjectivities and realities. A power that is hidden by dominant action is itself hiding some subaltern elements of the narrative. Both of the ideas mentioned above that of hidden power and of voices, come into play within the arc of cultural production that encloses what Manouach wants to express throughout his series of books.

78  Lorenz Ohrmer Finally, narrative and discursive arcs take place in a kind of apparatus, my third concept. As Michel Foucault defines it (Foucault 1994: 299–300), it is composed at the same time by aesthetic, semantic and material elements such as the paper of the book itself. One gesture and several books to reveal narrative dynamics The common point of all Manouach’s publications is a same gesture: cutting and replacing. This does reveal hierarchies hidden in one peculiar topic: the industrial mass-cultural production in a capitalist context. In that way, a discursive arc is de facto created between Manouach’s multiple publications, in which he proceeds through similar interventions. To see it from a broader point of view to more precise, one can see that a series of books forms, in conjunction, an arc, 1 2 the books are linked with the same production gesture; they make up a system, 3 the different books show different aspects of the same system/apparatus. In each example, Manouach replaces and reorganizes elements and structures of the comic books, graphic novels or other publications. By doing so, the artist reflects on what cultural industries have produced as a system of discourse and symbolical hierarchy. With the gradual inflection of his series of books, the author is (re-)building his own system, that is, an apparatus pastiche. Ilan Manouach proceeds by removing elements that can be described as dominant and, in this way, modifies the dynamics of the remaining subaltern items, as we shall see below. However, it would be a mistake to reduce his approach to simple “deletion”. He replaces the main characters with backgrounds, for instance, or emphasizes the representation of objects or secondary characters, or even directing the reader’s attention to purely material aspects of the book such as its printing or its format. What these actions have in common is the fact that hegemonic elements are erased, and then are filled in by that which the artist diverts. This can be qualified as an arc of reorganization of discursive power. Discursive power is intended here as what can be visible, read and understood, and ultimately can be remembered. It is also what makes the magic of meaning work and what makes the stories go on. In this arc one can find the following titles, both in print and in digital edition (and are quite amenable to possibly add some later productions): Blanco, Lapinot: Un monde un peu meilleur, Noirs, Riki fermier, Tintin akei Kongo, Cascao, Katz, Metakatz, Harvested, Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge, La Ballade de la Mer Sale, Cubicle Island, Peanuts minus Schulz, It’s Not You, It’s Me, The Neural Yorker, and Shapereader (many of which are discussed in the present volume). Building up his approach book after book, artwork after artwork, Manouach criticises the standardization of narratives, their material way of

Replacing and Reorganizing  79 presenting and both their graphical and discursive content. With the arc’s corpus specified, it is now possible to approach the sharp and mathematical-wise reasoning underlying it. Manouach thus dissects the book industry and cultural production point by point. Every facet in this way dismantled and reorganized delivers, among other things, a critique on cultural standardisation that can be described as Marxist materialist. All Manouach’s publications are parts of the same system. His process shows how hierarchy in literature and comics touches a wide range of subjects such as industrial mass production, colonialism or structural sexism. The aim of products of this standardisation is to impose one discourse upon others and to promote ideas and social groups as dominant upon subalterns. These products are here hijacked and diverted by Manouach in order to reveal what was hidden, in their very own organisation. Now that it is established that all his books are linked with the same gesture, it is possible to explore how variations integrate to this discursive system. Various topics are explored inside this global arc. Manouach adapts his intervention to the specific topic of every piece. He provides a tremendous and overall symbolic effectiveness through these variations. The symbol’s strength as defined here is reflected in a twofold movement. To begin, symbols divide the reality continuum. There is now a distinction between “what is outside and what is within” (Massenzio 1999: 61, my translation). The second, dialectical, becoming and acting component is the understanding that develops from this symbolic partition. In some books, these gestures can be “pictorial,” such as the bleaching of Cascao, or they can be perceived on a conceptual level, such as the replacement of an author by bots and micro-workers in Cubicle Island. The elements upon which Manouach acts can be graphic, such as onomatopoeia, drawings of characters or a setting such as an object or even a simple blue-sky background; they can also act at the level of the script, or the creation of a narrative. For instance, Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge refers directly to grammar in its title. There is an attempt here to isolate the elements structuring narratives from the 48 CCs, the typical publishing format within the Franco-Belgian comics markets, as a kind of language. They can also be material, such as a kind of paper, an album format or a printing technique. Eventually, these three levels (graphic, material and conceptual) interact in the presentation and modification of narrative. On a psychological level, Manouach criticizes, especially in Riki Fermier, the standardization of narratives that attempt to coach emotions in the very young readers. Indeed, Petzi and his friends are in a constant joy, bordering on euphoria. On a social level, Petzi (Hansen & Hansen 1958) shows little children a mechanism in which characters described as positive are buoyed up by retainer characters such as Riki the pelican. In Tintin akei Kongo, Manouach stresses the editorial fact of avoiding translating a racist book into the language of the colonised people it ostensibly portraits. Cascao is a graphical counterpart of Tintin akei Congo.

80  Lorenz Ohrmer Ilan Manouach says about it: “I whitewashed with bleach a magazine of Cascao, from the famous Brazilian entertainment empire Turma da Monica.” (Manouach, last accessed 13.10.2022) The artist, in an ironical gesture, is bleaching an already bleached story. Indeed, the comic books for kids from the Brazilian author Mauricio de Sousa mostly featured white characters. Mônica, Cascão, Cebolinha and their friends are usually marked as white. Nevertheless, they are designed for the diversity of Brazilian children. Beyond verbal language, comic pictures as a vehicle of power become the subject of a “grammar” with the Abrégé. The signs and representations of an action of power over an object (as opposed to an acting subject) are taken up as grammatical rules. The material aspect of the large print runs album is explored by the questions posed by the hardcover format with both Blanco, an album supposedly “without content,” and Lapinot, distorted in non-standard formats. With Noirs, which is a reprint of Les Schtroumpfs noirs (translated into English as The Purple Smurfs) but with only one printed colour, cyan, the reader can see how materiality can affect a narrative (there is no longer a distinction between the black Smurfs and the blue Smurfs). Cubicle Island and Peanuts minus Schulz mobilize bots and micro-workers to generate their creative content. The origin and selection process of solitary so-called genius authors are here questioned as well as the process to create any artistic content. These two books deserve a special position in this list. Indeed, in this case, it is about replacing the author with bots and micro-workers. It is not about replacing aesthetic content or material components of a book anymore. In these cases, there is no longer a more direct and material intervention by the artist himself on the content through the process of cutting and pasting. However, the act of replacement and reorganization remains. The content is affected by the act of replacing the figure of the author. Lastly, the counterpart to the creation of a discourse is its destruction by censorship. In this field, Katz and Metakatz are redrawn and rewritten misappropriations of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and MetaMaus. Katz was destroyed in what could be called a performative act by the publishers of the 5e Couche following the legal action brought by the copyrights holders of the French translation of the original graphic novel (ilanmanouach.com/project/katz). This event raises the paradox around the attention drawn to the emptiness created by the disappearance of a message. Harvested, for its part, is tied to another dimension of censorship. It is focused with the construction of art history, while being based on pornographic videos. The isolated frames in the book are “harvested” from porn scenes, employing a type of film that is generally outside the realm of art. By presenting them inside the book like a collection, they emphasise shooting backdrops that integrate artworks such as oil paintings or sculptures. In other words, Manouach draws the reader’s attention to the origin and nature of the “authors,” processes of their selection, the “grammar” of dominant discourses, the selection of certain languages and not others, the production of a script, presentations of a story on a given industrial medium

Replacing and Reorganizing  81 (ink and paper) and how this shapes the reading experience, and, finally, the selection of reviewersand its censorshipto create a reception and historiography of these same narratives (such as through the book you hold now in your hands, as I shall develop below). Cut & replace: how to reveal hidden power In their attempt to define power, political scientists Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz agree that power must be observable. Nevertheless, some of the exercise of power is not necessarily reflected, for instance, in political decisions. It may be reflected upstream, as it were, forging from the get-go those subject matters up to debate and those that will not be questioned at all. Some instances and individuals have the possibility of participating in the power to avoid making certain decisions, while others do not (Bachrach and Baratz 1962: 949). According to them, it is impossible to find objective criteria to distinguish routine decisions from “important” decisions without observing where this hidden power is exercised. The distinction between what is important and what is not cannot be found without analyzing the mobilization of upstream bias in the community (ibid.: 950). In a process that reveals the biases at stake prior to the album realization, Manouach shows us, through his inverted method, how it is possible to reveal a hidden tendency by subtracting the hegemonic voices that carried it. This revelation does not only operate at the level of the content, but also in the form, format and methods of making the book. Voices supported by air (uncovering) In order to become aware of this system, the notion of “voice” here is useful. It is possible to develop it by bringing together, on the one hand, the experience of reading performed over time, and on the other hand, the conditions of existence of a book, necessarily material (e-books need a device and even a given reader has a living body). The voice could be defined as a content that tends to say something precise. I would turn to Aristotle’s hylomorphic principle in order to explain what follows. Aristotle understands the relationship between the soul and the body neither as dualistic (which would posit body and soul as two separate entities) nor as materialistic (which would posit the soul as a body with matter). He defines it as hylomorphic, that is, a concrete thing made up of matter (hylê) and form (morphê). Now, the body is matter, while the soul is form. A body has a potential (dunamis) of life and “the soul is the realisation […] (entelecheia) of a natural body with potential life (Aristotle, De Anima II 1, 412a 27–28).” Thus, people exist (ousia) when their undivided body and soul are “realised.” One can see how hylomorphism could become a heuristic tool, and be extended itself to elucidate other subjects, such as ideas, symbols or books.

82  Lorenz Ohrmer In other words, in order to exist (ousia), a book would have to have a material body, that is, paper, and a “soul” or “form”, which could be its multiple “voices” (characters, symbols, ways of writing or drawing a story). These voices constitute potential discourses (dunamis). It is the reader’s understanding that activates (energeia) theses voices. Voice, being a form, is inseparable from sound and therefore needs the material support of atmospheric particles. A voice expresses interactions between existing beings, and it wants to be heard (i.e., it wants to be activated). It establishes links between the book’s material aspect and its content as well as with the reader and their comprehension. Thus, it is possible to ask whether there is a single, dominant discourse and a single comprehension of it. Multiple voices may appear, be hidden or disappear into the paper as the reader goes through the pages. One can also wonder: how are the different forms of expression arranged? Is it possible to modify the structure of an original work, change its purportedly hegemonic narrative by bringing out other types of voices who tell us something else altogether? And are they necessarily opposed to the “original” voice, after a binary fashion? If these alternative narrations appear, what is their nature? How are they dissonant, polyphonic, or harmonic? Stressing the material, “corporeal” aspect of the voices allows us for a way out of the dichotomy between either the study of the diegesis or the visual analysis of a comics text, perhaps providing the answer to the fair assessment that [o]ne reason why comics have not been widely studied as a form of visual culture is that the most critically successful works in the field are most often valued as literature. For many critics and scholars, comics, despite their pictorial content, are fundamentally akin to narrative literary texts. (Beaty, 2012: 44) Thus, voices are something inherent to the book itself, composing it. A voice can also highlight the origin of it, from its author to its cultural industry. During remakes and misappropriations, several voices blend and resonate together. One can retain from Philippe Marion the notion of graphiation (Marion 1993: 35)and extrapolate from it— the idea of a material intervention by an artist. For his part, Jan Baetens emphasizes the fact that the creation of a comic strip is culturally conditioned: Just as the linguistic notions of enunciation or narration have gradually become more flexible in order to bring about a polyphonic production, with several superimposed voices or instances, so it should be possible to go beyond the somewhat monolithic conception of the graphiateur that Philippe Marion uses, perhaps too strictly, in the singular. (Baetens 1998: 39–40; my translation)

Replacing and Reorganizing  83 These “voices,” in order to operate in terms of discourse, need to be arranged and in a certain order assembled. They are arranged inside the book, which can be seen as its material framework. I can draw here a parallel between books and Foucault’s definition of apparatus. This term has spread through research since he used it in his reflection upon the mechanisms of power (jeu de pouvoir). It coins its very strategic aspect, which aims to develop power to one side, block it or stabilize it (Agamben 2006). Books as well as comics are a heterogeneous set of elements assembled with the aim of generating meaning, while apparatus designates a heterogeneous set of elements too. The paper, ink, layout, bookbinding, authors and readers, speech balloons, frames and margins, the script, characters, texts and drawings could here be compared to the elements of an apparatus: architectural developments, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, philanthropic proposals (Foucault 1994: 299–300). The reason, which allows me to implement a political and strategical dimension to literature and comics is the following: Manouach’s diversions reveal how deeply political and oriented discourses are within the mainstream original publications, even though they may look like the most innocuous children’s book. Since the gesture of Manouach clearly reveals that there is a dominant narrative in the original books, one can deduce that they respond to a strategy and an urgent need to reinforce the policy from which they originate. In Manouach’s case, there is an urgent need to reveal its very mechanisms to show how dominant, and sometimes even violent, they can be. Yet, Foucault stresses the very strategic dimension of any apparatus, “aiming to respond to an emergency” (Foucault 1994: 299–300). Manouach’s work responds to an emergency to fight hegemonic narrative. In the case of books, there is a reading apparatus, which comprises a system of production and representation of a script (the authors and the cultural industry), a finished object (the book, a website or any other support), and readers. A narrative can include many different voices, whether or not this is intended by its authors. These different voices can be heard, perceived and understood through the act of reading. They can be either activated or not by the readers, who are always a culturally situated public. Both authors and readers are actively taking part in a game of power about what would constitute a hegemonic culture. Manouach hides or reveals voices. He dissects or rearranges comics and illustrated books. It is possible that his project of covering and replacement will end up extending over the entire system of expression of the voices of power through its detourné copy. Formulation: taking shape Manouach proceeds with books as others would do with clay. Everything in the book is useful material to formulate his proposals. One could compare his approach to that of Lawrence Weiner, for instance, who describes himself

84  Lorenz Ohrmer as a sculptor while working with statements, whose words have become matter (Foster et al. 2004: 574–575). Manouach uses books to formulate his statements. There is a strong poïetic dimension in his way of formulating statements through books. Comics can be approached as a language, that is to say, as a mechanism that produces meaning. The link between comics seen as a language and Manouach’s work is as follows: Manouach lies down and organizes the heart of his work through the whole body of his books. An instance of this is the Abrégé de bande dessinée, materialized by the full-colour hardcover, both its format and content, from its paper and cardboard, its sheer presence. Everything constructs the substance of what is being said here; it opens up the possible understandings. The fluorescent orange cover and its glossy print replicas of speech balloons, onomatopoeias and characters from the 1980s (for example, a Black Smurf or Billy the cat) give the book a “collector’s item” or special edition look. This could be related to business practices in this publishing industry sector, where old comics become collector’s items. Moreover, it recalls to the more childish collection of products derived from the entertainment industry such as playing cards or shiny stickers. Some visual elements actually look as if they had been “glued” to the orange cover. Inside the album too, elements that have been cut away from a range of hardcover comic albums, bought second-hand by the author (personal email, 2018) are stuck to the blue background that fills almost all the panels. The Abrégé works like a mash-up made of a lacunar collection, composed of several series, gathered together on the same pages. It is clear that there is no script that can withstand Manouach’s mash-up treatment. The whole reading experience consists in turning pages made of a classical grid, all the panels of which are coloured sky blue. Elements of grammar: game rules However, the reader may realize by observing the whole set in detail that the chosen elements are not haphazardly placed. Manouach appears to respect the exact location of the occurrence of these elements in terms of page number and positioning in the comic panels. To check on this, one can look for the appearances of cut-outs from easily identifiable sources such as Tintin in the Congo and Les Schtroumpfs noirs. Let’s take a double page (pp. 16–17) to detail our point. One can see a concentration of “racialized,” exotic and sexualized elements, as well as symbols of power or demonstration of strength throughout, such as follows:

• • • • •

a little black boy from Tintin in Congo, the crocodile from the same album, with Tintin’s gun in its mouth, a sculpture from Easter Island, 5 pairs of headless breasts, one of which has black skin, two American flags partially shown,

Replacing and Reorganizing  85

• • • •

the Daltons’ prisoner’s uniform, without their heads, one dollar (a greenback with the inscription “1000”), red-coloured heads (usually employed to show anger), Bubbles filled with specific onomatopoeias (MILLE MILLIONS DE [spiral, star, Chinese ideogram, star], [pig head, flash of lightning, spiral, grenade] ÉTAIT LUI!), sometimes written in red or bold characters, or a combination of all these elements (all of which can usually be interpreted as anger too). • Also, onomatopoeia that refer to specific significations such as:

• blows, • barking (GROAF! GROAARRF!), • exclamations or human

screams (HIIIIIIII!, OW! OUHLAOUHLAOUHLAOULAHHH! AÏE! HA … HA …, AH! … AH!), • incomprehension or surprise (?!?, ?, ?!, ?!, !), • falls or shocks (BLAM, DOM, BLANG, BOM! SLPATCH!, POUF, SPROTCH), • gunshots (PAN), • bites (GNAP!), • engines (VROO, BRAOUM, ROWAAARRROOOOOOOOOOOO), • and jumps (ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ HOP).

• • • •

And emanata which express actions such as jumps, racing, motorized movements (car, motorcycle, etc.) and “seeing stars” for pain.

All of these elements are subject to the hegemonic power in the acts they are subsumed to. They can be read as being “subaltern” and in opposition to hegemony and power exercise. If subaltern groups are “erased” from historiography just as these elements are made invisible within the hegemonic discourse, Manouach’s operation here brings these erased voices back to the forefront, freed from their dominators. All that remains are the effects of this domination (fights, blows, explosions or dominated characters or parts of dominated characters) and those who have suffered it. The list that has just been given necessarily leads to understanding and reading the Abrégé as a symbol system where a game of power takes place. Manouach reveals it through his process of selective cuts. Grammar sets the rules of language while telling a story involves a power game. For its part, the apparatus makes it possible to favour some voices over others. Dominant voices, thus, cover the others. This is their very own hidden power: to hide other narratives. By making all the acting subjects disappear from his Abrégé, Manouach reveals the violence of the actions suffered by subordinate voices (objectification of women’s bosoms, humiliated colonized people, characters beaten or bitten, prisoners depersonalized by their striped uniforms).

86  Lorenz Ohrmer The prison we’re in It is also possible to make voices, which hitherto had been silenced, speak. This is what happens in Riki Fermier. By observing more precisely the subordinate heterogeneous elements that are preserved and highlighted here, another script appears from the operations carried out over the original discourse. Manouach’s approach reveals subaltern elements and their voices by making their original system malfunction. These voices appear melancholic, in a state of ghostly solitude, making what they have suffered resonate with sadness. “Riki tends by nature to disappear. He is, from the start, a being in danger of extinction” (Martinie 2017: 124; my translation). Comics have been of course perceived and analysed as a system by research (Groensteen 2011). To the semiotic concept of ”system” coined by Groensteen, one can add a political dimension. With its mechanics of signification, this medium is caught up in a game of power. A part of this game is predetermined by its very “grammar” and its already chosen rules. A hidden power lies here in what pre-exists. In addition, drawing and writing are socialised acts, as was stressed before. As natural and personal as it may seem, drawing is the result of learning codes that are valid in a given society. Moreover, the history of art is marked by pastiche, reformulation and re-appropriation (Baetens 1998: 41–42). One of the elements in this composite network named apparatus is the script and its implementation by characters. Let me draw a parallel with power within a state: the latter is formed by laws and decisions formulated in speeches; it is embodied and enforced by administrative employees or police officers as well as by anyone who has the possibility of influencing the choice of topics publicly debated. Remove the “administration” role or the “police” role, for instance. Now replace them, even if in a minimal way. Then, observe how the society evolves. Some passive roles can transform themselves into significant ones—even if they stay passive. Hidden roles can be put under the spotlight. They can show and tell how they have been dominated. Let’s go back to Riki Fermier. In the “political” space of this book, the script is changed. There is no longer a dominant “voice” through a red thread (maybe knitted from the same wool as Petzi’s panties). These holes allow for a rearrangement of the remaining script elements. What is removed gives room to the background. Indeed, Manouach does not obliterate these dominant voices without replacing them by something. This is what he tells us: “There are not real absences, only replacements, and Riki Fermier is a haunting reading experience” (Manouach, last accessed 15.02.2021). In the original artwork from Clara and Vilhelm Hansen, Petzi is a bear cub who is always cheerful. His friends constantly support him so that he can carry out actions (cultivating a field, restoring an old farm, and so on). Once Riki is isolated in Manouach’s version, the reader is confronted with a ghostly

Replacing and Reorganizing  87 stroll throughout the pages, oscillating between a feeling of loneliness (Riki speaks by himself throughout empty landscapes) and the revelation of the settings and objects that make Petzi’s action possible. Absence doesn’t equal void; so what remains here? A secondary character, Riki, who is the hero’s sidekick. “The only animal in the original story that can be described as a filler” (ibid.). In the original story, Riki is watching and commenting on his friends’ actions. His role is more of a passive one. He’s wandering through the landscapes, he visits the old farm his friends want to renovate, he watches and walks through the fields they decide to cultivate. He disappears for several pages when his removed friends plough the fields and sow seeds (pp. 8–13). The only action Riki takes is to carry some bricks for the old farm in his beak (p. 21). His role remains substantively the same: he comments on what is going on and holds objects and tools in order to help the other animals take action and reconstruct the house (pp. 23, 27, 30). Another remaining element is the dialogues, turned into a monologue. Speech balloons have been redirected to Riki’s character. Riki Fermier, with its erasing and replacing process, offers a variety of different effects. The act of modification, erasing and filling/replacing, highlights other “voices” than that of Petzi, the main character. Petzi’s speech bubbles are not erased, however. His voice is simply made less intelligible. Riki the supporting character takes it over. The fact that the main voice is deleted gives an effect of equivalence between all the subordinate voices. I then realize to what extent the joyful community formed by the characters is a key piece of the Hansen script. The direct reference at the original implies a focus on Manouach’s gesture: erase and reconstruct. Manouach reinvents the backgrounds behind the removed characters. He draws the connections, fills in and colours these areas according to what seems to him to be the most realistic in the style of the author of Petzi. Manouach uses these stylistic skills for misappropriation. He finds himself as a worker in the comic book industry, adopting the style of the master, but for a different purpose: questioning the original story. Petzi’s underlying discourse could be reduced to “you have to be happy to work together and help the boss to realise his project”. This is of course a dark description of this children’s book. However, reducing it in this way allows us to ask: why joy at all costs? And why, in this story of collective action, is it necessary to have a main character and a supporting one? Couldn’t animal friends be presented as equals, leaving no character to simply comment on the actions of others? In this story, in-group joy masks individual isolation and other emotions. The speech balloons’ texts remain unchanged, however. Joy is still here but is refurbished as strange; sometimes it even seems to be the expression of madness. Manouach reveals to us the modalities of this almost forced smile, by replacing the characters. Can I then consider the euphoria of Petzi and his friends as an educational tool made of social injunctions? This excess of joy would then mask a deep melancholy.

88  Lorenz Ohrmer Through the reading experience, the reader browses the pages just like Riki wanders through them. They are both all on their own. Being alone to read is part of all books’ apparatus. It is indeed indispensable in order to perform the act of reading. You have to isolate yourself, at least cognitively. This state of affairs is mobilized here in order to make it happen. The reader and Riki echo each other. Two inner voices: one inside a head, the other inside a book. Both are in opposition with Manouach’s gesture: his voice isn’t here, but his “hand” is present. It tends to be hegemonic in this frame he offers us. His hand acts on the apparatus in contrast to Riki’s subjected voice. Similarly, the reader can only decide whether or not to understand a pre-existing layout. The CMYK flattened picture that we’ve seen as graphic style is vital in determining what may and cannot be communicated. But there is another, more fundamentally material, and frequently undetected factor that influences a book’s authoring possibilities: the printing technology itself. There couldn’t be nice Blue Smurfs and nasty Black Smurfs in a monochromatic book. However, this is precisely what Manouach did with his Noirs. This is an identical replica of the original Smurfs album; however, all of the illustrations are produced in cyan only, rather than the full four-color process. As the presentation of the book puts it, “The new CMYK is CCCC. Four plates of cyan” (La 5e Couche, last accessed 03.03.2021). According to his arc of replacements, Manouach “flattened” the yellow, magenta and black voices. By doing so, he revamps a completely different script within Peyo’s Les Schtroumpfs noirs. (The book was translated into English as The Purple Smurfs, but for the sake of this research, they shall be referred to as “black Smurfs”). At the time Peyo was creating his work, the conditions of possibility of the colour hardbound albums gave shape mechanically to part of this specific script. Otherwise, the Smurfs simply could not have been coloured. It would not have been possible to script a story based on the distinction between blue and black. Here one can see a shift. All layers are turned into cyan and then printed on white paper. This kind of superimposition leads to the crushing of the voices of the different Smurfs: the Blacks and the Blues. In doing so, the result is a cacophony, a “cyan/blue” noise. Now similar in terms of colour, all voices are equal, as much as unreadable. There are no more Black Smurfs biting the Blue ones but only Blue Smurfs fighting each other. Their identity and their voice tone being now the same (cyan ink) blur the script. Thus, the equivalence of the Smurfs’ voices implies they are in a constant battle to make their own voices heard. Ironically, even though their essence is now the same, they still fight. For once the hierarchy between them is suppressed (there are no more “good” and “bad” Smurfs); the script is no longer intelligible. “Voice”, “rhythms” & “music” What outline do chaos and unintelligibility take when they are at play? The shape of a saturated noise as in Noirs. This can be embodied with a silence or the passivity of the objects on which a subject acts (as in the Abrégé de

Replacing and Reorganizing  89 bande dessinée). Silence and noise. Noirs and Blanco. Through a radically different aesthetical experience, the same result can be obtained. That is, reorganising the script of an original work through its matter and “grammar” up till its breaking point. In the clamor, nothing can be heard anymore. On the score, rounds and eighth notes give their sound and also their rhythm. Sometimes the voices can no longer enounce anything. The reader then enters the realm of music, or graphical choices and expressions. Something remains expressed. This something still behaves according to rules. Solfeggio becomes a substitute for grammar. Melodies offer patterns. Beyond the script and more generally what is enounced, there are still forms that are expressed and read. Unlike Riki, the Abrégé doesn’t have a script anymore. Instead of “voices,” the reader encounters a kind of music here. In Riki Fermier, there is a character inside the book and the script. As for the objects, they can count as quasi-characters. They are the ones who take action. As the bricks “fly” to land on the farm’s walls, and the paint pots and brushes “paint” the walls by themselves, they get the action back, at Petzi’s expense. In contrast, in the case of the Abrégé, there is not even more action, only their result. This mash-up is a process of reducing books to their most violent aspect: domination. Manouach takes elements (characters, onomatopoeia, etc.) and sticks them in the same place as in the original comic book. The selected elements are placed on a blue sky background identical to that of the background found in many 48CC comic strips. This light cyan background thus becomes a very important part of the visual identity of the Abrégé de bande dessinée. Following the example of Riki Fermier, the background becomes the “main character” of the album. A character of a different kind, where one can wonder if he is saying something and what his “voice” would be. In any case, the blue background can be described as operative. It gives the book a deep structure and gives support to the images that are stuck on it. This blue background fills the whole of the vignettes, which themselves cover the pages. It works like the continuous effect of a drone in music, as Manouach himself points out. I can see here a constant; I can “hear” it permanently. This colour is indeed visible on each page, setting the pace. The cloudless blue sky is full and continuous throughout the pages. It is then possible to create an opposition to this continuity and fullness of the printed blue with the white of the paper from Blanco. It is only made of the immaculate paper of an album 48 CC. One can see by its simple material condition how it’s a continuation of the same reflexion on standardised Franco-Belgian comic books. Indeed, Blanco is the very reduced form of a 48 CC, without pictures or frames. Nothing printed, only white paper assembled in the shape of an album. In offset printing jargon, a dummy is an unprinted book, which allows the publisher to test the finished object before its manufacture especially when a book goes out from conventional formats (Manouach, last accessed 18.01.2021).

90  Lorenz Ohrmer There’s nothing to see, and the dummy seems to be the reader who “studies” its blank pages. At least he or she can taste a bit of the irony hiding behind Blanco. The white paper echoes here with the cyan in the vignettes from Abrégé: two underlying structures layering one upon another. Both constitute the framework for a potential script in a standardized Franco-Belgian album. As opposed to the white of Blanco, the pages of the Abrégé are filled up with a compact group of frames. Only the margin remains unprinted, as is customary for this kind of industrial albums. The blue background does not leave any free space inside the frames. Thus, I have a “white noise” on the one hand, which is the quality of the paper specific to this kind of industrial album, and on the other hand a “drone” made of cyan ink. It seems that the author is going back, further and further, to minimal narrative elements that set up the diegesis of a 48 CC. Manouach explains: “My book Blanco, is an ode to standardization, 48cc dummy printed in 5000 copies and distributed in bookstores” (sic, Manouach, ibid). The voice of the “white noise” is that of industrial logic and its standardization. Manouach’s approach seems to make sense when seen as a whole. As with a piano scale, one can go from the script with Riki Fermier to the elements of language of the Franco-Belgian comic books gathered in the Abrégé de bande dessinée, to, finally, the very support of the discourse (Blanco). These three albums look at and explore the entirety of the elements that make telling a story with the medium of comics possible, as conceived within the framework of the book industry with a large distribution in French-speaking Europe, and propose a thorough decomposition that heralds new ways of understanding the medium itself, its milieu and many hidden voices. Voices in a loop After digging into the matter description, I come back to my starting point: apparatus, voices and how they exert a hidden power over each other. The grammatical example showed how some voices stifle others, which stay passive. They are silent as if dead, even after being left alone. What remains is the body of the dissected hardcover comic books, speaking of what they have been through. Now that all hegemonic voices have been removed, they can finally speak for themselves and be heard. Riki’s script, for its part, shows that once the dominant voices have been removed and replaced, subordinate voices take their place, act and say something else. However, they remain wounded, melancholic and amputated from the hegemonic group. Noirs, printed in cyan, brings a third dimension: by removing yellow, magenta and black, one can see the equivalence of the black and the blue Smurfs. Even though all plates have been flattened into a unique cyan layer, the now indistinct blue voices brought about cacophony. No voice is intelligible anymore and the struggle to be heard is set. I can conclude from Noirs

Replacing and Reorganizing  91 that difference needs to exist, as much as hierarchy needs to be gone. In his semiotic analysis of the historical traces of the American Conquista, Tzvetan Todorov develops an idea that inspired this passage about Noirs. Indeed, he underlined how Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas saw the native populations as similar to the Europeans, and couldn’t fully understand them as having an independent culture. Las Casas failed to defend the autonomy of the people while, even though he felt solidarity, he was projecting his own system of values and symbols on them. It strikes me as I draw this quick parallel between Manouach’s book and this work on colonialism that the book Noirs is thus titled, that is, “Blacks”. Todorov and Manouach both seem to uphold the notion of difference and equality between people, stories as well as their voices. Voices promoted by the script cry out for standardization: that of affects (Petzi and the big “boys don’t cry” group), that of the shape of expression (the “civilized” clear line style), and, finally, even the medium that carries the voice of standardization is itself normalized (the album, with its precise format and number of pages, dictated by the material reality of printing machines). All this is done with the aim of controlling multiple parts of the population, by using tools such as standardized narratives. Establishing such a standard can be quite violent if one thinks about it. There’s an inherent violence in the very process of industrialised book production. Who can become an author? Who will play the role of unqualified employee handling this product in the warehouses of a big company? Peanuts minus Schulz deals in its title already with this situation. Now that I have demonstrated how Manouach’s work reveals a profoundly political aspect of the book industry, I can take it a step further by looking at how his logic is applied to the workers in the cultural economy with Cubicle Island. As we’ve seen, Manouach’s apparatus consists of a chain, with each publication making up a link. The book is manufactured; its content is graphed according to cultural norms and the gesture of one or more hands; its script is subjected to a form of grammar and put into action by the instances that constitute it (its characters, settings and/or objects); the elements present in the book are pre-selected beforehand (as Harvested shows); finally, the authors are also pre-selected by their social status (as in the process of constituting Cubicle Island) and the readers are also pre-selected. The people entitled to write a review of these books and constitute a historiography are also pre-selected, and their discourse will then be validated or censored. Manouach reveals the voices hitherto hidden in the originals. One can therefore argue that he works around the hidden exercise of power. It is not only the voices that are hidden; it is the power to hide them. The chain of voices it reveals continues, from the most material aspects, to the selection of who will become an author or not. The fact that Manouach thus declines the material realities linked to production conditions of books

92  Lorenz Ohrmer through the question of standardization links his work to a Marxist materialist critique of popular culture such as comics. His hijackings reveal a hidden power. By making a different printing choice than the default CMYK, Noirs demonstrates how it is possible to totally change what can be distinguished and how distinctions can be created. Grammar, printing and format choices are made a priori and are not noticed or noticeable unless the author decides to draw the reader’s attention to this point. The reason for this is economic and cultural: current modes of production are those of a post-industrial revolution context and a globalized capitalist economy. This context, which some people may choose to leave unchallenged while others undergo it, is clearly questioned here. Moreover, the readers, as part of the apparatus, are questioned: can they and do they want to change what is told to them? And by what means? Faced with this organized and programmatic chain of publications, one may wonder what the next step will be. The book you are holding in your hands may be it. It could be a command to question who is entitled or not to write historiography, thus revealing the hidden power at the heart of the mechanisms of (self-)promotion and historiography. Moreover, Manouach had already proceeded to a form of organization of the historiography of his own work with Metakatz: Artists, critics, lawyers, social scientists, destruction facility specialists and anonymous blog users were invited to contribute their feedback and investigate other rip-off practices in comics, research the use of animal metaphors in storytelling or produce derivative works. (Manouach, las accessed 01.03.2021) This current chapter could thus be taken up again in a militant refrain, be the object of an auto-da-fé or be demolished by his opponents: in so doing, it would reveal the hidden power of whoever could act on it, as on the rest of Manouach’s work. As mentioned before, not just anyone can become an author: you have to be part of a class with a cultural and/or economic heritage that allows you to do so. Indeed, even in the age of self-publishing, blogging, and fan-fiction writing, an author must have some cultural resources (capital culturel; Bourdieu 1979) in order to be noticed and visible. They can be alternative or subculture sources, but they have to exist. No construction can be built without foundations. In the same way, not anyone can read and understand Manouach’s publications, for the same reasons: you need to have a cultural background that includes access to the original books and an understanding of the culture of misappropriation from contemporary art. As a result, I can say that there is a limitation to how far one can act in this way: class distinction. To read this chapter or to access a deeper understanding of Ilan Manouach’s approach, one must distinguish oneself by one’s cultural capital (Bourdieu 1979). This is at the heart of the challenge he proposes to us.

Replacing and Reorganizing  93 Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Che cos’è un dispositivo. Nottetempo, 2006. Aristotle. De Anima. Translation and edited by Richard Bodéüs. Flammarion, 2018. Bachrach, Peter and Morton S. Baratz. “Two Faces of Power.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 56, no. 4, 1962. Baetens, Jan. Formes et politique de la bande dessinée, Peeters & Vrin, 1998. Beaty, Bart. Comics versus Art. University of Toronto Press, 2012. Bourdieu, Pierre. La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Éditions de Minuit, 1979. Debord, Guy-Ernest, and Gil J. Wolman. “Mode d’emploi du détournement.” Les Lèvres nues no 8, 1956. Foster, Hal, et al. Art since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. Thames & Hudson, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Dits et écrits, tome III: 1976-1979. Gallimard, 1994. Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderno 3 § 14, 1930. Einaudi, 2021a. Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderno 19 (X) 1934-1935 (Risorgimento italiano). § 24, vol. III. Einaudi, 2021b. Groensteen, Thierry. Système de la Bande dessinée. Puf, 2011. Marion, Philippe. Traces en Cases. Université Catholique de Louvain, 1993. Martinie, Marin. L’image a minima, figures de réductions de la bande dessinée. Master thesis, dir. Serge Verny. ENSAD, 2017. Massenzio, Marcello. Sacré et Identité ethnique, Frontières et ordre du monde. (Sacro e Indentità etnica. Senso del mondo e linea di confine. 1994, Franco Angeli, Milano) Translation and edited by Cahiers de l’Homme, Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences sociales, 1999. Todorov, Tzvetan. La Conquête de l’Amérique : la Question de l’Autre. Le Seuil, 1982.

Part 2

Reading Practices

6 Reading Childly Riki Fermier and Cascao1 Maaheen Ahmed

At first glance, Ilan Manouach’s Riki Fermier [Farmer Riki] (2015) and Cascao (2019) blend in almost seamlessly with Manouach’s repertoire of critically reworked comics pivoted on one major constraint: erasure of all characters besides the pelican Riki, a minor character from the French translation of the Danish children’s comic Rasmus Klump (Petzi in French); and bleaching an issue of the popular, commercial Brazilian children’s comic magazine Cascão. The former hails from the 1950s and has acquired international success, the latter, a vast commercial enterprise with several sister publications, many derived products and activities, that continues to date. In sourcing their material from popular children’s culture, Riki Fermier and Cascao are closely connected to Noir (2014), a reprinting of the first Smurf book, Les Schtroumpfs noirs, with only one color (cyan) instead of the traditional CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and key or black). While Noir leaves the bodies and words of the Smurfs largely intact (albeit difficult to decipher), Manouach’s reworkings of Petzi Fermier and Cascão generate an existential crisis: cheerful, serene Riki is caught up in one-ended conversations throughout the album’s 30 pages. A marginal character, only one of several in a cast of supporting anthropomorphic animals around the bear, Rasmus Klump, the pelican Riki almost walks off in the first panel on page 7 and only returns, after several panels and pages empty of characters until the end of page 14. In Manouach’s version, however, it is Riki, and not Petzi, who is the farmer, the purported agent and title character. Bleaching in Cascao also makes things uncomfortable. The seemingly random treatment leads to strange coincidences and the stories seem even more confusing than they would be (especially for a reader who cannot understand Brazilian Portuguese). This is because Cascão’s face is not always blotted out, especially when he is expressing surprise (3), despair (4–5) or joy (32–33; Figure 6.1). In many ways the uncomfortable nature of both works stems from their connections to children’s culture. What happens when a book for children— marked by simplicity, a transition object relegated to a particular period, to be rejected, forgotten, or passed on to other children in the process of growing up—is subjected to abstracting and critical practices? On the one hand, it highlights the close ties between capitalism and a one-size-fits-all children’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-9

98  Maaheen Ahmed

Figure 6.1 Pages 32–33 from Cascao.

Reading Childly  99 culture (that with all the innocence and smiles of a Smurfette reproduces hegemonic structures). On the other, it only increments our uncomfortable realization that children are both omnipresent and absent in these comics; present as implied readers, as protagonists (or targets) in a marginalized culture that comics are often relegated to, but essentially absent in that constrained presence. Unpacking this tension can help us better understand the possible connections braiding children, childhood and comics. This chapter focuses on Manouach’s incitation to re-read and think with comics and about comics-making through, in a first step, the lens of childness or a critical—and inevitably problematic (see Rudd 2019)—construction of the implied child reader (Hollindale 1997). It argues that Manouach’s Riki Fermier and Cascao function on three superposed levels based on their connection to children’s comics: a they activate the possibility of rethinking the contrast between childness and childishness through comics, a medium occupying the uncomfortable status of presumably being for children (and other ‘others’ incapable of appreciating grown-up culture) while also being prohibited for children, depending on the genre; b they offer childish re-readings of the comics through their free reworking of the material, playing the game of pretend or what if (Riki Fermier) or playfully spilling bleach on the pages (Cascao) and thus transposing the presumed childishness of the works to a self-reflexive level; c they ultimately encourage a de-constrained reading, nudging readers to listen to voices often silenced or ignored (such as Riki, a minor, secondary character) or visualize and materialize the silence itself by glossing over the dominant voices (Cascao). Manouach’s acts of unpeeling and repackaging children’s comics call for reading childly. But this is only one aspect of a broader practice that is comparable to Kenneth Goldsmith’s concept of ‘uncreative writing’ (Crucifix). Goldsmith’s concept follows the train of thought set in motion by Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of the ‘unoriginal genius’ or the poet creating ‘poetry by other means’ be it through Walter Benjamin’s fragments or patchwork writing or the constrained writing of the Oulipo’s literary experiments. Manouach’s Cascao and Riki Fermier present a different kind of patchwork writing where the artist is more of a bricoleur rather than the creator of (purported) original work; ‘work’ and ‘work of art’ themselves are problematic terms as Sol Lewitt (who did not like work) once suggested (16). Work, particularly the invisibility of comics work and the constituents of both comics and work are problematized by Manouach’s two comics. Such a problematization has a destabilizing effect that throws into question the very concept of comics. In a second step, this chapter considers some of these reflections on the notion of comics, the extent to which comics can remain comics, through the prisms of Riki Fermier and Cascao.

100  Maaheen Ahmed “A child of four could have done that”… In his commentary on Manouach’s Blanco, a blank album in the classic 48cc format (48 pages, hardbound), Jessie Bi (Jean-Christophe Boudet) mentions and immediately rejects the familiar slur against abstract and conceptual art, “a child of four could have done that”. Avant-garde and modernist artists had already been confronted with similar remarks: the wild colors of the Fauves were likened to “the naïve sport of a child who plays with a box of colors he just got as a Christmas present”, Paul Klee’s work was likened to that of a seven-year-old (cited in Higonnet 88). The Cubists and Dadaists were likewise not spared in a 1921 caricature in Le petit monde, in which a boy’s building blocks allude to the former and a hobby horse evoke the latter; the Dadaists played on the nonsensical name that seems to predate language and refers to toy horses (Higonnet 88). The child and children’s art have an established presence in the appraisal of artistic practice, as a standard for what artists in general should not do; or now only do within specific movements or categories, such as art brut or outsider art. Abstract and conceptual art is also reproached with a certain childishness. This slur is infused with prejudices associated with childhood: simplicity, unskilled, even essentially incomplete because the child is considered as being in the process of becoming an adult. Children, however, were also a source of inspiration, as Margaret Higonnet explains, for modernist artists (including Klee and Picasso) but also critics and philosophers such as Walter Benjamin (also a collector of children’s books) and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Just like Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary texts knitted through associative thinking, LéviStrauss’ bricolage is closely connected to children’s play. “The creative impact of children’s play on Modernism”, for Higonnet, “lies, at least in part, in the pleasure of taking things apart” (93); this also neatly matches “[t]he revolutionary theme of making and breaking the world” (94) cherished by modernists but also part of the political realities marred by revolutions and two World Wars: “Bricolage, then, is children’s way of shaping a ‘small world’ by working across media ‘in a new, intuitive relationship’—a kind of recipe for Modernist experiment. These informal processes of children’s bricolage appear everywhere” (Higonnet 95). While several modernist -isms (Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism ) had established connections—not always positively connoted—between children and the art world, conceptual art’s calling for an undoing that is so de-skilled that it seems comparable to child’s fare takes such connections to a new level. The undoing can also seem random, just like children’s scribbles. Consider John Baldessari’s lithograph, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971), which comprises the same sentence scribbled repeatedly, like a familiar school punishment, in which the wrongdoer re-writes a sentence decrying his misdeeds over and over again. Baldessari’s scribbles go beyond the lithograph, cut off arbitrarily at the bottom. A staple of childhood experience is mobilized to comment on contemporary art making. The comment comes with a

Reading Childly  101 twist—the familiarity of the punishment, its relegation to the world of childhood will make the reading viewer nod in complicity. One of the many fascinating works collected and freely accessible in the conceptual comics digital library Monoskop (monoskop.org) created by Manouach, is Dominique Goblet and Nikita Fossoul’s Chronographie. It comprises a series of portraits that the mother and daughter drew of each other every fortnight, starting in 1998 when Fossoul was only seven and continuing until 2008. Chronographie is in many ways a unique book, a rare, extended dialogue between mother and daughter and a shared moment of contemplation mediated through portraits. We watch Fossoul grow and change parallel to her graphic skills. Chronographie is one of the rare moments when a child is given a direct voice and further, almost as much voice and space as the adult. This contrasts strongly with productions for children made by adults, such as coloring books. The conceptual comics archive also includes a coloring book. The Black Panther Coloring Book, originally issued by the FBI in 1968, and reworked by the Argentine publisher Ruldo y contexto. The propaganda booklet portrayed African Americans and the Black Panther movement as indiscriminately violent. Ruldo y contexto’s version reverses the narrative to highlight the persecution of Black communities in the U.S. and to portray whites, especially police officers and other repressive and exploitative forces, as pigs. The drawings and texts are amateurish. The fact that the skin of all characters appears almost white and has to be colored in a story about the history of violence based on skin color is painfully ironic. Such unfinished, propagandist and child-­ oriented elements enhance the uncomfortable status of the original book as a means of indoctrinating children through the artistic pastime of coloring. Although (seemingly) childish works can enter the spheres of legitimation (museums and galleries for instance), creations by children remain relegated to specific social and institutional spaces, notably that of the school. The Black Panther Coloring Book would not have made it to the conceptual comics archive were it not for its consciously reworked political content. With Riki Fermier, and its earlier version more poignantly retitled Vivre Ensemble (Living Together), and Cascao, two remnants of children’s culture enter the sphere of conceptual comics. They are simultaneously far removed from arts and crafts by children, and closely connected to them, because they rework comics for children and especially because of the ‘childish’ tactics of reworking the comics (seemingly random erasure of characters; spilt bleach). Children’s literature criticism and, more broadly, childhood studies have long been concerned about the agency or space accorded to children. Both discourses are also fully aware of the slight contradiction between their automatic subscription to adult points of view and considering children, both fictional and real, and children’s culture. Recently, children’s literature scholar David Rudd has emphasized how Peter Hollindale’s concept of ­childness—the essence of childhood that the adult self succeeds in grasping and conveying, despite no longer being a child—is an impossibility.

102  Maaheen Ahmed Hollindale’s childness remains an adult construction and often far removed from the immediate reality of being a child (or childlikeness?). Turning to cognitive studies, Maria Nikolajeva points out that for children it is the right hemisphere of the brain that is dominant, whereas for adults, the left hemisphere takes over. Building on the work of philosopher and psychologist Iain McGilchrist, Nikolajeva summarises the differences between the two hemispheres as follows: the right hemisphere is emotional, while the left is rational; the right is concrete, the left abstract; the right sees the whole in a context, while the left attends to details out of context; the right explores, the left categorises; and, perhaps most relevantly, the right hemisphere prioritises freshness, novelty, change, plurality and ambiguity. Both are equally important in our perception of the world, yet each perceives the world differently. (28) Despite this schism between hemispheres, childness is not completely impossible. While it is essentially impossible for adults to reproduce a child’s perception or experience, it is possible to communicate with children and to offer characters and storyworlds that children can engage with (see Nikolajeva 34). Further, there is a difference to maintain between childness, which is child-less for Rudd, and childishness. While both affirm an adult order over a child’s, the former tries to give (a sense of) agency to children, the latter attaches them to clichés. Stereotypes of childishness belittle traits associated with, or assumed to be attached to, children. As we saw above, diverse art movements have effectively repurposed childish styles and practices. A recent art show highlights how the childish persists in, and is mobilized by, the artistic imagination. The childish can have critical weight. In winter 2010–2011, the Fruit Market Gallery in Edinburgh ran a small exhibition curated by David Hopkins and titled “Childish Things”. The American artists Mike Kelley’s and Paul McCarthy’s contributions are particularly useful for understanding the strange nexus between children, mass and popular culture and the art world. At the nexus is the notion of play, of childish play, that is also a kind of détournement—a détournement that happens regularly in playpens and playgrounds and is activated and reproduced in the worlds of art. In Mike Kelly’s Innards (1990), the blank canvas is replaced by a blank sheet. The ‘innards’ are small, colorful, knitted toys scattered across the space. The juxtaposition of innards with the toys creates an uncomfortable effect: the child’s world of play is rarely associated with the abject even though the abject often infiltrates children’s realities. A similar effect is created by Paul McCarthy’s Children’s Anatomical Educational Figure (also made around 1990). A giant, smiley doll with clownish blue hair sits on the floor. Its tan colored body aside, the doll seems to adhere to the conventions of toyhood. However, its front is unzipped and some of its

Reading Childly  103 organs (also stuffed) spill out. The doll continues to smile. McCarthy brings another dimension of uncomfortableness, this time created through the overlap, and conflation, of education and entertainment in materials for children. The generally invisible reality of human organs is here made visible and translated into a childish idiom—softness and abstraction—deemed suitable for children. Nevertheless, the final result remains disturbing and seems to critique the very childishness it incarnates: the massive smiling doll with its insides spilling out is a contradiction, not so much because children are unaware of bodily realities but because adults impose a sterilized, ‘protective’ form of reality on them. “Childish Things” also includes another, more recent work by McCarthy, Cisum fo dnuoS ehT/The Sound of Music Upside Down (2008). Here the iconic musical comedy, a widely exported staple of popular children’s culture, The Sound of Music, is played with the image upside down and the dialogue and sounds running backwards. The world turned upside down is a familiar carnivalesque trope. Turning things upside down is also a child-like reversal and rejection of adult logic, the right hemisphere triumphing over the left one. The characters are suspended in an impossible space, the sky or the ceiling is the ‘floor’ that they can never touch. They move backwards rather than forwards and their words and songs are incomprehensible. Nothing in the film holds, especially on a narrative note: everything is suspended on disjunction rather than continuity. The bleaching in Cascao and the removal of all characters except Riki in Riki Fermier create similar effects of rupture and confusion that force the reader to look at the workings of the medium, to understand it as an elaborate device of constructing narratives and storyworlds. The unpronounceable Cisum fo dnuoS ehT reverses and destabilizes all the predictable and comforting indicators of The Sound of Music, laying bare its innards, as it were: the upbeat genre of the musical comedy contrasts starkly with the story’s context, set in Austria with the Second World War and the Anschluss looming over the horizon. Perhaps only a reversal can do justice to the brutal context. This brief detour through the “Childish Things” exhibition illustrates how childhood objects and childish practices can raise issues tangential to childhood. The exhibition indulges in a childish questioning of the medium: objects from childhood are reworked, often only lightly as in the case of Innards where the title adds a disturbing dimension to the piece to raise bigger questions around the artifices of media but also issues of power. The reworkings or détournements of Petzi Fermier and Cascão are likewise not childish, even though the objects themselves are. But the détournements imitate childishness to a certain extent. Cascao’s bleaching seems as random as a child’s gesture. It also evokes the differing value systems of children and adults: the printed word is less sacred for the child than the adult. Although Riki Fermier is more surgically reworked by the careful, traceless removal of all characters besides Riki, it is the resulting non-logic of the comic that feels childish.

104  Maaheen Ahmed A critical comics materiality When questioned about his move away from drawing to détournements shortly after publishing Vivre ensemble, Manouach explains how he subscribes to a much broader view of drawing: Dessiner c’est agencer des formes, articuler des silences, bouleverser des fonctions, créer de nouveaux besoins narratifs, en gros réaménager un espace (Boivin and Manouach, 289) [To draw is to arrange forms, articulate silences, disrupt functionalities, create new narrative needs, to rearrange, in effect, a space]. In Manouach’s détournements, space is literally and symbolically rearranged and, one can argue, rendered deliberately messy—messy to read but also showing how messed up the originals were. These détournements and undrawing practices are discussed in detail elsewhere in this book, as are Cascao and Riki Fermier: Greice Schneider looks at Riki Fermier through the lens of ­constrained writing, the sociology of the comics field and the particularities of the medium; Ana Matilde Sousa considers the artistic practices of erasure and the racially loaded whitening in Cascao. I will look at just a few aspects of the undrawing in these two works, focusing first on the articulation of silence and the rearranging of space to draw connections with the symbolic presence of children. I will then move to a few considerations that this practice permits for the medium of comics at large in productively destabilizing its constituents. In retaining the word balloons of all the Petzi characters, Riki Fermier elaborates several levels of silence. The most notable of these is the pelican’s own silence, which persists for several pages at a stretch. Riki is almost completely absent from page 7 to page 14. All the entertaining of the young chicks and the grain planting takes place without him. While he helps a little more with the roof and is regularly present in the panels, he is often marginal to the action. There is also the paradoxical silence of the characters that have vanished from the panels without leaving a trace, apart from the disembodied word balloons. It we are to look for other silences, we will find that of the simultaneously implied and missing child reader the most deafening. The Petzi books are for children, the Riki Fermier ones seem like they are for children, have a childish (cheerful, gullible) protagonist and have restructured the original story in a logic that seems more childish than adult because it seems irrational. The symbolic presence of children, then, makes itself heard in part through the silence. Craig Dworkin builds on the implication of John Cage’s iconic, largely silent piece, 4’3” from 1952, that there is no such thing as silence. He adds: we can never find a perspective on a message free from the medium of its conveyance, because in the process of transmitting a message the network of recording and playback mechanisms always produce an

Reading Childly  105 account of their own instantiation as well. The media are always legible in the message (if not quite, pace McLuhan, the message itself). Michel Serres makes the same point when he declares that “noise is part of communication’. (134) Going further in his discussion of Zen for Record (1966), Dworkin declares: “it teaches us that ‘medium’ is as unrealizable as ‘silence’” (137). While I agree with Dworkin’s conclusion, I would not venture so far as to say that we can reach a similar realization with Riki Fermier and Cascao. Both works are successful disruptors that undo the assumption of narrative continuity. I elaborate on the noisiness of this noise further below. For Manouach, comics are haunted by the phantom of cinema (Boivin and Manouach 289), which results in the assumption of visual and narrative continuity, to the extent that discontinuity and abstraction, which are also part of comics, are pushed to the sidelines (291). The aim then is to dialogue with conventions. Even though Riki Fermier superficially adheres to the basic comics conventions of panel, word balloons, gutters and even a recognizable protagonist, a brief look across the publishing history of the Petzi comics highlights the mutability of assumed conventions. Starting in the 1950s the Danish Rasmus Klump by Vilhelm and Carla Hansen unfolded in a layout that could seem somewhat alienating today in the sense of a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt: the panels have rounded edges, the layout is quite irregular and dynamic and, most noticeably, the dialogue appears outside of the panels, preceded by the speaking character’s head. In this particular episode, when the friends start building a roof for the farm, we see Riki quite regularly but we don’t hear him. Riki, like the reader, like us, must content himself with smilingly following the bustling activity. Additional symbolic or implied presence of children is discernible in the educational inclinations of the comics, both Petzi and Riki Fermier. In this simplified world, a group of smiling anthropomorphic animals succeeds in planting an entire field with grain, demolishing an empty house to recuperate its bricks and replacing a hay roof by a brick-and-mortar one. The stories end with the promise that the friends (or Riki alone) will come again to help with the harvest. A cursory glance through Riki Fermier reveals the extent to which Riki is almost always at the edge of the panels and often just disappears into the gutters or the margins of the pages (Figure 6.2). This matches the marginal positioning of Riki as a secondary and by and large dispensable character. In this way, Riki weaves together the dynamics of marginalization at work regarding the medium of comics itself—as non-artistic, non-literary, popular and dispensable medium—but also with reference to its assumed audience, children. Children and children’s culture, like comics, are at the fringes of cultural production and powerplays. Ironically, as commercial enterprises, they are often relatively successful, even very successful in the case of Petzi and Cascão.

106  Maaheen Ahmed

Figure 6.2 Riki Fermier, p. 4.

Such connections whereby children, comics, and child characters are all marginalized acquires a different dimension in the first version of Riki Fermier, Vivre ensemble, which came out in 2008. The cover and title page have close connections with the migrant crisis: the cover shows a beach with a washed up, deflated plastic boat, similar to the many transporting migrants

Reading Childly  107 and often not reaching European shores. Inside, we see Riki drowning in the hay of the roof that he and his friends will replace with a solid brick roof. He is also drowning in expendability, which once again evokes the treatment of refugees. The Casterman label is all but swallowed in the ocean of hay. One of Belgium’s biggest comics publishing houses, Casterman refused to give Manouach permission to reuse the French translation of Rasmus Klump. The opening panel of Vivre ensemble, printed without the opening lines of the original comic, introduces an alienation that contradicts the comic’s title of living together, and gives it an ironic twist. We are confronted by, and share, Riki’s silence and bewilderment. Unlike most stories, especially for children, this bewilderment only increases in the course of the story. In Vivre ensemble, another destabilizing element is the color palette. This too is dominated by an unpleasant yellow-green tone, contrasting with the bright clear colors and contrasts of the Petzi comics (Figure 6.3). It evokes the issue of poor quality, uncaring reprints and the low production costs of many comics that guarantee their survival in a competitive market. Both détournements of Petzi Fermier include reproductions of additional Riki Fermier covers situating Riki in a broader set of adventures where it’s always the pelican who is the protagonist and sole actor in the adventures. The stories that can be gleaned from the covers of these non-existent comics revel in absurdity, similar to Vivre ensemble, where Riki is all alone, or Riki Fermier, in which Riki does not actually work in the field. Such absurdity can be considered childish in its countering of rational, adult logic. Absurdity acquires a different dimension in Cascao, where noise in the form of bleach hampers the easy reading of most of the comic, but some dialogue and the alternating stories with children and talking dogs remain discernible. The small comic brings together five stories, mostly with Cascão as the protagonist. Stories such as “A Question of Perspective”, which is announced on the cover where Cascão seems to despair before a bathtub, is based, like most of the stories in these publications (one can imagine), on tried-and-tested formulae of humor: in this first story, it is a comedy based on misunderstanding. Cascao is printed on thicker, glossier paper than the Panini Comics editions, bestowing on the unreadable comic a longevity that the original comics cannot indulge in (probably to maintain the profitability of the enterprise). The stories are spaced by relatively aggressive advertisements masked under the cheerful demeanor of Cascão, who confirms, for instance, that the reader can’t miss out on this collection. Both Riki Fermier and Cascao generate a certain amount of noise hampering the smooth machinery of easy-to-read comics. Noise itself is the stuff of children’s books, where onomatopoeia animate objects and animals. This is evident in Mary Liddell’s avant-garde children’s book, Little Machinery (1926), where the eponymous, tireless robot is set loose in the natural world. Despite comprising of industrial debris, Little Machinery is very much a child, and an energetic noisy one at that. For Higonnet, “[t]he narrator suggests that

108  Maaheen Ahmed

Figure 6.3 Vivre ensemble, p. 3.

child-like pleasure in noise is analogous to art for art’s sake” (104). Disrupting the reading process, the noise in Riki Fermier and Cascao forces our attention on the mechanisms of comics readability and the very materialities of the medium—the interweaving of color, characters, panels, pages and so on. The critical comics materiality channeled by Riki Fermier and Cascao is based on incursions into, and transformations of, the surface of the pages to shake up the established, simplified order familiar to children’s culture.

Reading Childly  109 It highlights the fragmentation that lies at the heart of comics. Further, it pushes to the foreground the negotiations that take place to string together a comics narrative to make it coherent and readable. Building on the childish elements listed above—shuffling up the givens of the comic, questioning its governing logics—Manouach’s comics highlight the relational aspects within and without the comic, situating every aspect through the lens of its relationship with the rest (see Boivin and Manouach 292). This also includes the material conditions of comics production and the industrialized nature of comics work, especially for large-scale publishers such as Casterman and Panini. Manouach’s most recent publication, Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice (“Uncreative Writings” series), further problematizes the issue of labor. It brings together 700 pages of reworked Peanuts strips by digitally commissioned microworkers from all over the world. Jan Baetens highlights the activism embedded in this approach: “It is the tremendous merit of Ilan Manoauch to help focus on the real stakes of the digital turn in comics (and art in general), which are not technological but cultural, that is artistic, social, economic, and political.” In his interview with Boivin, Manoauch emphasizes that what counts are the connections between things, connections that unfold both within and around the medium and that extend across artistic, social, economic and political concerns. To wrap up this chapter, I would like to turn to the figure of the ragpicker, with a childlike twist, who dances at the nexus of these connections. Conclusion: could the Ragpicker be a child? One year before Baudelaire wrote “Le vin des chiffonniers”, he published a prose description of the figure: Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crashed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or: gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry. This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse, and both go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping (Benjamin, Writer, 108). While Baudelaire exemplified the ragpicker-poet, Benjamin incarnated the ragpicker-critic (Benjamin, “Rag-picker” 252): “Benjamin conceived his

110  Maaheen Ahmed work on the nineteenth century as an appropriation of rags” (253). Correspondingly, the methodology for Benjamin’s lifework, The Arcades Project was “literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show … the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, but in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (“Rag-picker” 252). Such collaging modernist practices persist in our times as affirmed, for instance, by Perloff in Unoriginal Genius. Further, such practices are not completely separated from the modernist fascination with the child (see Higonnet). Reading (looking at, flipping through, forwards and backwards) Riki and Cascao suggests that the ragpicker can be a child, working on the margins, with a value system tangential to the adult world order. What is assumed worthy of being discarded is re-evaluated and recuperated. As discussed above, this has a special significance for comics, and more so for children’s comics. Riki Fermier and Cascao unsettle the continuity of words and images (and panels and pages and serialized stories …), make the gaps in sequentiality more blatant, and more relevant, than the transitions. They are remnants of recuperated children’s culture that slip into the adult realm. Has the symbolic child hovering behind these comics (of course not the only symbolic figure as other chapters in this Reader confirm), become a ragpicker? Forcing us to assume the task ragpicking too? Note 1 This chapter is an outcome of the COMICS project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 758502).

Works Cited Baetens, Jan. “Peanuts Minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice / Le Travail Distribué Comme Pratique Organisationnelle.” Leonardo, March 2021, https://leonardo.info/review/2021/03/peanuts-minus-schulz-distributed-labor-as-acompositional-practice-le-travail. Benjamin, Walter. “Rag Picking: The Arcades Project.” Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, edited by Ursula Marx et al., translated by Esther Leslie, Verso, 2007, pp. 251–265. ———. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Translated by Howard Eiland et al., Harvard University Press, 2006. Bi, Jessie. “Blanco d’Ilan Manouach.” Du9, June 2018, https://www.du9.org/ chronique/blanco/. Boivin, Thomas, and Ilan Manouach. “La bande dessinée d’Ilan: L’héritage cinéma, l’usage de repères et la place du sens.” Multitudes, vol. 2, no. 37–38, 2009, pp. 285–307, https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2009-2-page-285.htm. Crucifix, Benoit. “A Chamber of Echo: On the Post-Comics of Ilan Manouach.” PostComics: Beyond Comics, Illustration and the Graphic Novel, KASK School of Arts & Het Balanseer, 2020, pp. 77–86.

Reading Childly  111 Dworkin, Craig Douglas. No Medium. The MIT Press, 2013. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2011. Hansen, Carla and Vilhelm. Petzi fermier, Brussels: Casterman 1967. Higonnet, Margaret R. “Modernism and Childhood: Violence and Renovation.” The Comparatist, vol. 33, 2009, pp. 86–108, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26237210. Hollindale, Peter. Signs of Childness in Children’s Books. Thimble Press, 1997. LeWitt, Sol. “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Art Forum, Summer 1967, pp. 79–83, https://www.artforum.com/print/196706/paragraphs-on-conceptual-art-36719. Ilan, Manouach, Vivre ensemble, Brussels : La Cinquième couche, 2009. ———, Riki fermier, Brussels : La Cinquième couche, 2015. ———, Cascao, Brussels: La Crypte Tonique, 2019. Nikita, Fossoul, and Dominique Goblet. Chronographie. L’Association, 2010. Nikolajeva, Maria. “What Is It Like to Be a Child? Childness in the Age of Neuroscience.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 50, no. 1, March 2019, pp. 23–37, doi:10.1007/s10583-018-9373-7. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. University of Chicago Press, 2010. Rudd, David. “Childness or Child-Less: Signs Taken for Wonders.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 50, no. 1, Mar. 2019, pp. 8–22, doi:10.1007/ s10583-018-9371-9.

7 Disability, Comics and the Shapereader José Alaniz

Conceptualist artist Ilan Manouach’s Shapereader, an ongoing project launched in 2015, consists of a set of tactile ideograms (“tactigrams”), which when grouped on 50 cm × 35 cm boards, function as haptic equivalents to semantic elements in graphic narrative for storytelling and other purposes: comics without vision. Designed for use by the blind (as well as those who choose to forgo a sighted epistemology for the duration), Shapereader poses unique challenges to the ocularcentric fundaments of comics as art form, as communicative medium and as reading experience. This essay examines Shapereader through the lens of Comics Studies and Disability Studies, seeking to cast into relief (as it were) its radical redefinition of graphic narrative as well as its ableist presumptions. The next chapter, by Ian Hague, discusses this same project under the focus of touch’s communicative capacities. I will argue that Manouach’s haptic conlang (constructed language) represents both a more and less inclusive species of graphic narrative: critically, it decenters the visual, unlocking alternatives by drawing on such key features of comics as spatial arrangement, juxtaposition, thickness and texture; on the other hand, it does so partly by reaffirming age-old preconceptions about a blind Weltanschauung. Shapereader and disability Shapereader took root while Manouach was on a solitary retreat in Lapland, a northern region of Finland. As he recounted, my whole visual landscape consisted of layers of dense snow imprinted by different animal traces, leftovers of a frenetic night activity. I wanted to produce a sensual work, that could bypass verbovocovisual stimuli and address directly the plexus of deep linguistic structures in the brain, solely by the universal use of touch. (Brownlee, “Comic”)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-10

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  113 In 2013, while at the Saari Residence in Mynämäki, Finland, Manouach secured a Multilingualism and Art grant from the Finnish Institute Koneen Säätiö to fund a work which would “translate imagery into tactile formations.” As he put it in 2016: “The Shapereader is a tactile image.” Manouach claimed that among other things, he was inspired by embossed book illustrations for the blind dating back to the 18th century (Manouach, Presentation). The artist laser-printed the original 210 tactigrams of his conlang onto six laminate “communication boards.” Rosetta Stone–like, the boards decode the symbols into braille. The symbols themselves bear no visual or tactile resemblance to their referents; Shapereader privileges a Sassurean non-representational semiotic contingency premised on research into the visually impaired’s identification of tangible graphics (see Klatzky et al.). As Manouach describes it: the communication boards contextualize and arrange tactigrams, according to their semantic content and narrative function, sorting them in the following categories: settings, characters, elements, actions and affects. Two additional categories, graphic and textual devices, provide tactile equivalents for different pictorial conventions such as modes of locution (speech, thought balloons, radio emissions) and popular tropes of comics iconography (sweat droplets, movement lines, puffs of smoke). (“Tactile”; emphasis in original) Using the Shapereader symbolic system, one may arrange the tactile figures onto grids on plates (read: comics pages) in innumerable syntactic sequences to create stories. As noted by a journalist: Anxiety is written out as block of jagged zig-zags, and “to observe” is a pattern of star shapes spread out against a blank background. The dialogue is printed in standard braille, and readers can refer to a braille index in the book to determine the meanings of each pattern.” (Debczak, “Artist”) Manouach highlights the facility of his conlang for expressing the nuances of affectual experience, such as joy, fear, sadness, remorse, unease, aggression and suspicion, among other emotions: Each affection is available in three incremental intensities and this change of magnitude is intuitively translated by the gradual thickening of the shape’s core pattern. These affections can be combined synergetically allowing for an unprecedented realistic, fine-tuned and rich description of the emotional states of the plot’s characters. These shapes are distributed spatially according to the basic assumptions of contiguity and proximity. Semantic clusters, not unlike linear syntactical

114  José Alaniz structures, determine the belonging to the same group: i.e. the shape that stands for a specific person will be more likely surrounded by patterns that describe both the person’s affective state, his actions and/or the elements that he is interacting with. (Shapereader.org) In other words, by creating such contiguous syntactic clusters and varying the thickness of the symbols, one may blend emotions, for example conveying a character’s (certain degree of) surprise along with (a certain measure of) shame. As Manouach told a Seattle audience in 2016: “You can produce rich mixtures of these feelings. In text it’s hard, but with this tactigrammatic formation it’s very handy. It’s a very easy language, very capable” (Presentation). Manouach put these principles into practice for the first Shapereader “­tactile novel,” Arctic Circle, exhibited at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2016.1 The work consists of 57 50cm × 35 cm × 0.6 cm laser-engraved laminate plates/“pages,” along with the six communication boards,2 recounting in 6,000 tactile syntactic patterns and Unified English Braille the story of two scientists investigating climate change in the Far North. They drill into the ice in search of clues, encountering indigenous people, traders, fauna and other stakeholders in the region’s climate.3 Similarly to how the scientists dig their ice column and interpret the evidence, the reader of Arctic Circle deciphers the tactigrams to derive meaning. For instance, one panel of Arctic Novel sets down four “tiers” of information to depict a scene in which two characters, Bruce Perry and Ernst Baxter, react to a panda which they are holding in the ice lab. Perry’s tactigram is surrounded by others which indicate disgust, a heightened level of anxiety and surprise; a “graphic devices” symbol tells us he is exuding sweat drops. “It is obscene that you brought this poor animal to such conditions,” reads Perry’s braille “speech balloon” (actually the whole of the top tier). Baxter’s tactile ideogram, on the other hand, sits between two others which show a mid-level degree of joy and serenity. “Without a doubt,” his braille dialogue reads. In Manouach’s own words: From its design, interface and community engagement, Arctic Circle transcreates comics in the tactile sensorial and experiential realm and challenges the medium’s assumptions about how comics should be (printed and flat), how they typically address their reader (through vision), and who the reader is assumed to be in order for this exchange to happen (able-bodied and sighted). (“Tactile,” emphasis in original)4 As indicated in this passage, from its conception Manouach crafted Shapereader-native works like Arctic Circle specifically as a means to make comics accessible to blind and visually-impaired readers, in a haptics-­centered format which eschews a sighted poetics altogether.5 In his writings on his

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  115 own work, Manouach expands on this component of the project, arguing that it “emphasizes a sensorial epistemology that takes the body in consideration in its acknowledgment of the sensuous pleasure of cognizance and the particular gratification that derives by the awareness of tactile subtleties and nuances.” This embodiment-centered “transcreation” of comics, Manouach maintains, “expands the possibilities” of the medium (“Tactile”). That said, Manouach insists that Shapereader is still comics—that is, that visuality is contingent in graphic narrative, not a sine qua non.6 He goes so far as to assign tactile equivalents to various actions which sighted comics readers engage in, for example, likening the broad hand movements of “lateral motion” across a Shapereader work’s surface to “the reading subject’s global state of attention to the tabularity of a comics page” (“Tactile”). Similarly, he invokes the old bromide of the “universal language,” something long applied to visual media like cinema and comics: Shapereader is unbound by the particularities of ethnic and native alphabets and Braille code. Its design, based on criteria of simplicity, easiness of memorization and distinguishability, addresses all users, regardless of their nationality, language, educational level, or subsistence under any visual handicap. By circumventing the verbovocovisual apparatus, it transposes semantic and syntactical structures cognizance to the reader’s finger tips. (Shapereader.org) Such pronouncements have earned Shapereader comparisons to pictorial languages like Blissymbolics, which began as a mid-20th-century attempt by engineer Charles K. Bliss to invent a sort of visual Esperanto for universal comprehension across borders, though today it is used primarily for the education of children with cognitive and other disabilities (Maltby, “Blissymbolics”). But here we come to a yawning fault line between the stated goals of the Shapereader project and what most people mean by access in the context of disability. In Manouach’s conception, the conlang’s “meaning signification proceeds through clustering and the use of productive chains of signifiers that ultimately propel the text of Arctic Circle to a structural instability” (“Tactility”). Similarly, in Shapereader community workshops attended by both the blind and sighted,7 Manouach invites participants to construct their own tactile stories using “empty signifier” tactigrams, whose meaning is “entirely arbitrated by the participants themselves.” He explains: In the beginning, the empty signifiers represent undetermined qualities of signification; they are void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning through collective negotiation. The workshop is an exercise in harnessing Shapereader’s potential for a non-representational, free-floating and community-specific system of signification with the goal not to simply reflect the community’s expression by a collectively designed

116  José Alaniz story, but to provide the very same genetic material for textual production; a repertoire of empty symbols that can be reiteratively attributed different meanings and functions according to each community’s specific needs, preoccupations and desires. The sign’s contingency of arbitrariness actualized through the activation of empty signifiers and free-floating chains of signification, propels the “text” to a structural instability that is weaponized here as a productive construction for community binding. (“Tactility”) In other words, Shapereader’s openness to infinite signifying uses according to a given community’s specifications, that is, its drive to “thematize the sign’s arbitrariness” (“Tactility”), makes it paradoxically both the most universal of languages and arguably the most private; in theory two people or even a single person could come up with their own unique signifying structures using Manouach’s tactigrams, a sort of linguistic solitaire.8 And though a like elasticity (read: “structural instability”) characterizes the elliptical language of comics as well—as shown in Kuleshovian classroom exercises whereby students rearrange the same panels to produce very different narratives or emotional effects9—some might find it hard to relate such “thematizations” of the contingent sign to the needs of blind and disabled people as a whole. Sensitive to such critiques, Manouach has explained, Shapereader, unlike braille, is not a project based solely on effectiveness and performance. This is something I want to be very clear on most of the time because people, especially in the disability community and Disability Studies, always focus a lot on the notion that it has to be efficient. Shapereader is a language and it acknowledges the sensuous pleasure of common sense. (Manouach, “Presentation”)10 While notions of “efficiency” have indeed been duly interrogated by Disability Studies scholars as they relate to the differently abled (especially in a neoliberal context),11 Manouach’s preoccupation with the arbitrary nature of the sign renders Shapereader a “poetic” response to the matter of comics’ accessibility for the blind, in contrast to others’ more “prosaic” approaches, like ekphrasis (audio descriptions of printed comics)12 or less elaborate raised-line graphic narrative works which call for a similar tactile engagement (and which may also be enjoyed by sighted readers).13 Two such “comics for the blind” in particular have garnered scholarly attention in recent years: Phillip Meyer’s Life (2013) and Max’s A Boat Tour (2017).14 Created while studying design at Sweden’s Malmo University, Life utilizes raised dots similar to braille, embossed printing and basic comics layouts over seven pages which recount how two “parents” separate from

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  117 their “child,” then fade away to death. Unlike Arctic Circle, Meyer’s work requires no glossary and features many more “empty” panels to tell its much simpler story; an especially effective use of such flat space between “parents” and “child” makes for a poignant emotional climax to the story. As comics scholar Brandon Christopher puts it: [L]ife exploits the impossibility of a gestalt finger reading of the panel. Unable to see the wandering “child,” the blind reader must carry out a manual exploration of the page. … While a sighted reader can immediately see that the “child” circle has moved to the corner of the panel, a non-sighted reader must explore previously empty space in the hope of finding the missing child. Blind and sighted readers therefore have a different experience of the child’s wandering, with the blind reader arguably having a more emotionally affecting experience, if only fleetingly.15 (“Rethinking”) Sight-decentering 21st-century graphic narrative productions like Life, Boat Tour and Shapereader indeed takes us a considerable distance towards, in Christopher’s words, the “liberation from the visual imperative” (“Rethinking”). This stance emphasizes traditionally marginalized material qualities of comics, including texture, smell, weight, rustle, and the like. The digital age has brought new features to consider, like vibration and sound effects, explored by scholars such as Ian Hague in his Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (2014). More recently Ezster Szép in her Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability (2020) has stressed the embodied nature of comics production and comics consumption, advancing what she calls “holistic readings.” These stress “how a comic as an object can be interacted with, exploring how attention to the thingness of comics can broaden the possibilities of both making and reading” (166). Add to this the increasing role played by the haptic in contemporary media, whose development even accelerated due to the 2020– 2021 Covid-19 global pandemic (see Ravindran, “Getting”). Still, despite such encouraging challenges to the ocularcentrism which has long dominated both comics and Comics Studies, I follow Benjamin Fraser in worrying that comics by sighted artists “for the blind” may carry over too much of the sighted world’s social construction of blindness; I read Shapereader’s quasi-utopian aspirations to a “universal language” of touch as symptomatic of such presumptions. In his discussion of Max’s work, Fraser writes: [The] culture of sightedness can be understood … as a performative culture. Its normative trappings rest upon the construction of “blindness” as the opposition of sight and invite attempts at passing. … From this essential opposition there follow a host of discursive and figurative

118  José Alaniz strategies though which sighted culture has historically marked and marginalized the trope of the “blind” person, imbuing them with the quality of lack, and paradoxically exceptionalizing their moral qualities and “inner vision. (4) No one has argued more trenchantly against that sort of vision-centered understanding of blindness than blind Disability Studies scholar Georgina Kleege. I have in mind her most despised bugbear, what she sneeringly calls the Hypothetical Blind Man: “one of the stock characters of the Western philosophical tradition,” who has “long played a useful, though thankless, role as a prop for theories of consciousness.” For Kleege, the invocation of the HBM by such stalwart figures as Voltaire and Diderot only underscores his primary function: “to highlight the importance of sight and to elicit a frisson of awe and pity which promotes gratitude among the sighted theorists for the vision they possess” (More Than: 15). Blind scholars like Kleege find their correlate in blind cartoonists such as Portland’s Sabine Rear, who in intersectional works like Reverse Flâneur (2017) and her public presentations chips away at damaging shibboleths, among them the most stubborn ocularcentric misconception of all: the sighted/blind binary itself. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of the blind population is completely without vision; the rest (i.e., the overwhelming majority of people designated as blind) have some partial capacity to see (Fraser, “Tactile”: 5; Hammer, Blindness: 109). Exemplifying Rosemarie GarlandThompson’s concept of “disability gain,” Rear’s practice, in the words of Hannah Thompson and Vanessa Warne, “recast[s] blindness as a multifaceted aesthetic position,” redefining blind people as “active subjects rather than passive objects of medical and societal curiosity … reject[ing] pathologizing myths and stereotypes of blindness to explore instead blind people’s experiences as active cultural creators, consumers and critics” (“Blindness Arts”). All of which leads me to argue that comics for the blind—at least a substantial or predominant portion of them—should be comics by the blind. The challenge of the tactile That said, Manouach’s Shapereader project is not without value—far from it—for the blind community whose needs it purports to address.16 Its ultimate achievement, though, may come from how it mobilizes tactility and other material facets to force a reconsideration of what comics really are and do; that is, to challenge the (ableist?) presumed visual underpinnings of the medium. (That in and of itself makes it more than worthwhile!) Such a challenge springs from political and aesthetic concerns which long predate a modern disability rights framing, while also drawing on the experience of blind people for a feminist critique of vision. For example, discussions

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  119 of what historian Heather Tilley calls the “Victorian tactile imagination” take in embossed illustrated books for the blind and raised alphabet systems both before and after the 1824 invention of braille, as well as a more general haptic engagement with the world in defiance of the privileging of sight as the most “detached” and “objective” of the senses under patriarchy.17 As Elizabeth Walden puts it, [L]ike the eye itself which sees but does not see itself seeing, the Western tradition has mistaken its construction of a transcendental perspective for an access to an unmediated comprehension, if not of the world, at least of consciousness or thinking itself. [Bringing attention to traditional Western sensory hierarchies] responds to a patriarchal tradition that values detachment, distance, and objectivity with a recognition that the latter are possible only in the context of connection, proximity, and material participation: this is to respond to a model based on analogy with sight, with one based on analogy with touch.18 (“Vision, Touch”: 118–119) An emancipatory feminist politics of the haptic, in short, foregrounds the sensual, affectual, phenomenological and non-verbal, resisting a logocentric “rush to signification” (Fischer, “Tactile”: 21)—and recalling the Shapereader’s “structural instability … weaponized here as a productive construction for community binding” (Manouach, “Tactility”). “Because the haptic sense requires interaction, it is inherently relational,” writes Jennifer Fischer. “And it follows that because haptic artworks require interaction, they cannot be reduced to objects” (“Tactile”: 19). Said oppositional stance overlapped, in the early 20th century, with the preoccupations of Modernism and the avant-garde, which embraced tactility as a pre-eminent value to overturn bourgeois convention. Here we find Shapereader’s true ideological and aesthetic roots. Most notably, the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1921 manifesto Tactilism (Il Tattilismo) and the works that emerged in its wake insistently advance an alternative to the “vision as mother of the senses”19 model in art. Marinetti’s “tactile boards” (tavole tattili) anticipate Manouach’s aesthetic strategies and add some of their own. Consisting of mixed media (fur, silk, sandpaper, tin foil, etc.) on cardboard, these works were passed around at gatherings for direct haptic engagement with their varying textures.20 Such activities led to (1) a new appreciation for the role played by the non-visual senses in aesthetic reception and pleasure and (2) the destruction of the fragile boards, of which only one survived to the present (Antonello, “Out”: 43). The tactile boards also shared with Shapereader the mission to foster an “authentic form of communication” predicated on bodily presence—a major facet of Futurist theater (Antonello, “Out”: 50). Furthermore, like Shapereader, the tactile boards told stories. Art historian Pierpaolo Antonello argues that Marinetti’s Sudan-Paris (1921) with its coarser and smoother

120  José Alaniz segments, is “structured with a very obvious vertical, topological linear narrative.” He goes on to say that “the intrinsic discontinuity of tactilism and of tactile experience,” which “cannot perceive aesthetic or natural forms in their totality, as with sight,” leads to “an intrinsic temporality in the haptic perception of an object, which resembles the act of reading a text or listening to a tune, rather than the holistic visual appreciation of a painting or a sculpture” (“Out”: 44). In other words, the haptic, which lacks the all-encompassing “simultaneity” of vision, leads to narrative-like works which one reads in discrete sequential units (not unlike comics panels—though as mentioned comics also function along a global, tabular dimension which the eye may take in all at once, what scholar Charles Hatfield has called comics’ dual “sequence vs. surface” mode of expression).21 However, this very model of vision—whereby it bestows an immediate, “simultaneous” perception of an object—has itself undergone rigorous critique from art historians and Disability Studies scholars alike. Rudolph Arnheim, who calls haptic art a “neglected resource of human cognition and creation” (“Perceptual”: 133), has noted: The two hands, with their many independently mobile joints, make for a whole orchestra of touch stimuli to whose simultaneity vision has no equal. At any moment the eyes are limited to a single projective view of the world whose one-sidedness can be corrected only by the viewer’s perambulation in time. In the days of Cubism, some painters played with the vain hope that modern physics would supply them with a fourth spatial dimension capable of letting them visualize the all-around shape of things in a single percept. Any blind sculptor can grasp the front and back of a vessel or its hollow inside and its convex outside in a single sensory input, which makes for an integrated percept of the whole.22 (“Perceptual”: 137) Kleege, who unlike Arnheim is blind, makes a similar point about the blind perception of art: The point is always made that touch is sequential while vision is comprehensive and instantaneous. The hand must move over and around an object, while the eye can take it in at a glance. I refuted this, showing her how I could wrap my palms and fingers over and around considerable chunks of the form. My point was that my habtic [sic] exploration was not merely to trace the form’s outline with my fingertips, but to envelope the three-dimensional volumes with my palms and fingers. Then I described for her the art class exercise called “Blind Contour Drawing,” where the student endeavors to move her eye sequentially around the contours of the object she is drawing, and to move her hand holding the charcoal in the same sequence to create the drawing

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  121 without looking at it. I was making the point that while the eye seeks the outline of the object, the hand does not. The hand embraces the object in its multi-faceted complexity. (Kleege, “Some Touching”) This leaves haptic, “tactigrammatic” or relief-based comics for the blind, as discussed, at the center of contemporary disputes over the primacy of the visual, both in and out of art.23 Yet as I have tried to show, Manouach’s rationales for the Shapereader project emerge as much from the modernist lineage going back through Marinetti24 as they do from the blind community’s demands for access to art—as borne out by statements like this: Broadly speaking, visuality’s role as the undisputed conduit of art experience for the generic audience has also been gradually eroded, giving rise to a growing number of works that challenge our sense of touch; the use of soft materials in contemporary sculpture, like fur, felt, foam, fibers and fabric is an evidence for a need to rehabilitate an haptic sensibility towards an embodied understanding of the aesthetic experience.” (shapereader.org) In truth, contemporary art has no shortage of artists (disabled and not) creating works that invite direct or indirect touch, such as those in the “Vital Signs” exhibit examined by Fischer: Sandra Rechico’s Shards II (1997–2000; it calls for gallery attendees to walk on glass) and Wendy Jacob’s somatic sculpture Squeeze Chaise Longue (1998, see “Tactile”); and more recent “Tactile Aesthetics” examples like Fayen d’Evie’s Not All Treasure Is Silver and Gold, Mate (2015, embossing and knife cuts on paper) (d’Evie/Kleege, “The Gravity”). Further proof of institutional moves toward greater access include the increasing use of “oculardiverse” docents and the popularity of museum touch tours for the blind, such as the 2017 show “Haptic Encounters” at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum (Wilson “How a Blind”) and the “translation” of paintings into 3D-printed versions for haptic engagement (I used my fingers to explore one such rendition of a Van Gogh sunflowers still life at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 2017).25 While such change is welcome, it bears remarking that museum policies which disallow the touching of objects are themselves of historically recent vintage (see Classen, Deepest: Chapter 6). In sum, to the extent that Shapereader’s decentered critique of vision resonates with the lived needs of blind and disabled people both within and without the art world, it will be embraced by those communities. If, however, it merely or mostly carries over flawed sighted preconceptions of a blind ontology, its primary lessons will redound to the sighted (though in a different sense unseeing) comics-reading majority. Manouach himself said as much to an interviewer:

122  José Alaniz My dream is to find other uses for Shapereader that are not in the comics world and probably not even the art world. … I want to open this project into different communities. I think if it ends as a comics project, it will kill it. It started from there, but it’s important to go somewhere. The possibilities included Graphic Medicine, linguistics and signaletics (Kartalopoulos: “Ilan Manouach”: 47). Along the way, I submit, a project inspired by a blind (or blind-adjacent) perceptual schemata should strive to “transcreate” a blind engagement with reality. In other words, it should impart at least a sense of what Kleege lauds prominent blind cultural figures for doing: What Milligan, Keller, Husson and other blind authors have in common is an urgent desire to represent their experiences of blindness as something besides the absence of sight. Unlike the Hypothetical [Blind Man], they do not feel themselves to be deficient or partial—sighted people minus sight—but whole human beings who have learned to attend to their nonvisual senses in different ways. (More Than: 27–28)

Coda: ‘Es obligatorio tocar’ What does the 21st-century drive for greater blind access to comics mean for comic art, and how does Shapereader in particular fit into this process? To attempt the beginnings of an answer, I want to focus on two occasions which brought together disabled and non-disabled thinkers to hash out the matter. The first: a March 23, 2021, online roundtable, “Adapting Comics for Blind and Low-Vision Readers,” organized by San Francisco State University’s Comics Studies program, the Program in Visual Impairments and the Longmore Institute on Disability. Co-hosted by Nick Sousanis, non-disabled author of Unflattening (2015)26 and SFSU comics instructor, the event brought together several experts on comics and blind accessibility. What struck this virtual audience member the most was their emphasis on narrative content (i.e., accessing the story) above all other concerns. To that end, participants were more than willing to dispense with things like shot, angle, page composition, stylistic quirks like the quality of a brush stroke and other qualities that matter for a visual appreciation of comics in favor of a largely or even exclusively narrative-driven description.27 Content was king—albeit “content” defined somewhat narrowly from a sighted perspective. If the drawn line is less important, there’s no need to narrate it, one participant opined (though some age-old questions in ekphrasis are always who decides what is and isn’t important, and based on what). In short, the roundtable mostly saw comics as a vehicle for imparting stories.28

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  123 “Ultimately,” said participant Josh Miele,29 “in comics and any medium that is for information transmission and also enjoyment, accessibility is not just about getting at the information. Accessibility is about creating a similar experience to what the original intent offered.” By separating “presentation” from “information,” Miele added, one could “abstrac[t] it away from the visual.” But again, in comics what is the “presentation” and what is the “information”? Tags, digital markers and other metadata could serve to answer that question, the panel agreed, so that each reader may access whatever part of the work they wish and ignore others—which did indeed sound sort of like what I do as a sighted person when I read comics. My second example comes from Manouach’s own practice: his Shapereader workshops, held in various cities since 2016 as part of the project’s community outreach.30 These events, as noted, featured blind and blindfolded nonblind participants collaborating under Manouach’s supervision to read Arctic Circle and to create new Shapereader works with “empty” tactigrams whose meaning the participants themselves collectively determined. If Shapereader amounts to a “speculative, trans-disciplinary project that promotes an embodied, non-retinal, narrative experience” (Manouach, “Tactile”), the workshops would seem its best testing ground. Yet as occurred with the “Adapting Comics for Blind and Low-Vision Readers” roundtable, I find myself fascinated by what the attendees chose to focus on according to news reports. For example, here is how two blind workshop participants at Spain’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) reacted in 2016: Both David San Miguel and Iria Aragunde, two assistants at the workshop which Manouach conducted last week at MUSAC to introduce Shapereader, confirm that the comic left them cold. San Miguel has been blind since he was 12 years old (he is now 39), and he remembers that as a child he read “the usual: Mortadela and Filemón, Spider-Man …” They are both used to reading through audiobooks. They don’t know other technologies like Manouach’s, and San Miguel in particular doesn’t like the word “pioneer.” “Artists are like animals that have to defend their own territory in order to survive,” he explained. “If they don’t, they’ll be compared to other artists. I think that it’s better not to suffer that comparison. That’s the camp he moves in, the one where you can touch onomatopoeias and sensations.31” (De Las Heras Bretín, “Un Cómic”) Yet the (presumably sighted) journalist reporting on the event had a different, more emotionally engaged response, captured in her description of the dark venue: “es obligatorio tocar” (it is necessary to touch). Sighted attendees to another workshop at Helsinki’s Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in 2017 likewise reacted to Manouach’s sensorial challenge in ways they could not predict:

124  José Alaniz In my group of three people, we struggled to live up to the potential of the communication blocks. Our sensory skills were not great. Our communications skills, although better, were not terrific either. How do you build a language, when you cannot decide on what you want to say? This was a major challenge, and a somewhat surprising one, also. Interestingly enough, the group ended up discussing language, rather than stories. Even though the story should have come first. I believe that was our main fault: we focused too much on the symbols, too much on the means to communicate, rather than what we wanted to communicate. (Aarniosuo, “The Truth”) This sighted self-reflection provoked by “a tactile equivalent of the comics medium that specifically addresses an audience of visual disabilities that has been historically excluded by comics culture” (Manouach, “Tactile”) reminded me of Shapereader’s crucial intervention into what makes information information, what makes presentation presentation, and what makes comics comics. But something about it also brought a different reminder: of Kleege’s Hypothetical Blind Man. Just as that vexed philosophical straw man is not really about philosophy (nor about blindness), popular stories about the blind are not about the blind at all, “but rather about a need to guarantee the privileged status of the sighted—a need that in turn emerges from fears about the fragility and unpredictability of embodied identity,” as remarked by Susan Mintz (“Invisible”: 75). In a similar way, just as these workshop participants—the building blocks of a completely “free” conlang lying before them, to tell any story they want—end up talking not about stories but about language, Shapereader despite its professed focus may ultimately tell us less about blindness than about vision. Notes 1 Manouach has also exhibited Shapereader at El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), Seattle’s Short Run Comix & Arts Festival, the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in Helsinki, among other venues. 2 The boards containing the tactile language have at times been compressed into tea bricks, a nod to ancient practices whereby tea was converted into this form for transport. 3 The 200 tactigrams created for the story include “Walrus” (a chunky pattern of broken-up boxes), “arctic moss” (flowy fan shapes) and “snow goggles” (thin, vertical lines) (Debczak, “Artist”). 4 For all their tactile underpinnings, the Arctic Circle plates look arrestingly beautiful, like embossed abstract art. They vaguely recall the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and would look good adorning one’s living room wall. If they “count” as comics, these are comics by way of H.R. Giger. The communication boards have an oddly antique character, like portions of an ancient mosaic unearthed in an archaeological dig. In discussing his tactigrams

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  125 during Shapereader presentations, Manouach shows slides of Ancient Sumerian, Ancient Egyptian and Chinese ideograms. 5 According to the Kone Foundation: “Shapereader is an experimental approach to graphic novel storytelling, and its purpose is to ‘translate’ graphic novels for visually impaired readers. Through this constructed language its reader will find possibilities to access, experience and enjoy visual narratives even with no, or impaired, vision” (“Ilan”). 6 Manouach’s “visual as contingency” thesis resonates with recent work by comics scholars such as Jared Gardner, who investigates the history of printing and its impact on the contemporary definition of the medium. For example, Manouach writes, “Undergirded by the visual primacy hypothesis, the main argument against non-retinal comics asserts the centrality of conventional craftmanship (drawing, inking, coloring, etc.), as a defining feature of comics as a medium. Craft is undoubtedly a distinctive trait of professional integrity but the argument suffers from a narrow medial perspective; one that frames socially constructed, culturally activated or popular representations of an artform, as being constituent traits of a medium. This conceptualization of comics stems from structures that might have been inherent of constraints from original forms of completion (early printing technologies, newspaper distribution, etc.) and although their functionality is not anymore essential, they are still conventionally “required” (“Tactile”). 7 These community workshops represent the most public-facing aspect of the Shapereader project, involving collaborations, exhibits and outreach, including to the blind. 8 On so-called twin languages and other forms of idioglossia, see Crystal, Dictionary of Linguistics. 9 See for example Scott McCloud’s rearrangement and compression of the building blocks of comics stories (Understanding: 84-85 and 105). 10 Manouach said this in 2016. Following up on this question with him in 2021, I received this response: “Knowing me, this [comment] seems more like an inner debate I have been having with a similar lineage of tactile systems of communication such as Blissymbolics, where embodiment in its communicatory potency could only be thought in terms of efficiency. I believe the term, through the combined works of Gender Studies and New Materialism … has been reconsidered in a perspective that goes beyond its functionality could be applied in speculative systems such as SR and research fields such as Disability Studies” [sic] (Manouach, “E-mail communication”; emphasis in original). 11 For example, see Alaniz/Smith, “Introduction,” for an application of “crip time” to comics. 12 These include the audio edition of Daredevil, vol. 3, no. 1 (September 2011), read by writer Mark Waid; and Chad Allen’s audio comic Unseen (2019). Some webcomics platforms such as Comic Easel and Smackjeeves.com also provide some descriptive audio functionality. 13 Apart from Meyer’s and Max’s works, we may point to Jorge Grajales and Bernardo Fernández’s braille comic Sensus: El universo en sus ojos (Mexico, 2014) and Einar Petersen’s crowdfunded Braillant: Implant (Denmark). The Dutch company Dedicon produces comics in alt-reading formats for blind readers, including tactile books, as does the French publishing house Les Doigts Qui Rêvent. 14 On the initiative which launched the latter, see www.llull.cat/monografics/ blindwiki/. With the rise of Graphic Medicine and a graphic narrative canon rich in disability representation, 21st-century comics scholarship has grown more engaged with questions of physical and cognitive difference. In their introduction to Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, the editors note that,

126  José Alaniz despite covering the representation of numerous physical and cognitive disabilities in the volume, they worried the book might strike some as “potentially exclusionary in nature toward blind/visually impaired readers.” On the other hand, they claimed, the book’s dearth of illustrations led to them asking for more detailed descriptions from authors, a potential boon for the blind and visually impaired (Foss et al., “Introduction”: 8). 15 Foss et al. hailed the “transformative possibilities suggested by the exciting appearance” of Life (“Introduction”: 9). Incidentally, in form and plot the work somewhat recalls El Lissitzky’s early Soviet 2-D children’s book About Two Squares (1922). 16 Manouach makes explicit reference to this project’s social activist role, e.g.: “Lately, a general public awareness pointing to the conditions of the discrimination in arts for people subsisting under handicaps is a long overdue response from the part of the art world. For the persons with visual disabilities, access to visual arts is particularly problematic: Despite the museum’s efforts in restructuring physical access and reevaluating alternative means to providing information, touch is the only way for the members of this community to complete the mental image of an art object” (shapereader.org). 17 Indeed, these scholars see the very separation of human perception into five discrete senses—with their concomitant hierarchization—as proceeding from a patriarchal mindset (see Tilley, “Introduction”: 5 and Fischer, “Tactile”). Note the Swiss-French caricaturist Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers’ Les cinq sens (1828), which depicts “touch” as a nude woman, contrary to the other senses, which he represents as grotesque dressed men (see Fischer, “Tactile”: 23). 18 “Separation” ultimately leads to alienation and the Debordian spectacle under capitalism (Walden, “Vision, Touch”: 120; Antonello, “Out”: 51). In contrast, see Sandomirskaja’s enthralling discussion of the Soviet education of deaf-blind children, and the value attached to touch (“Skin to Skin”). The continuing need to educate on these matters, and on the history of deaf-blind figures like Helen Keller, remains acute, as evidenced by a recent TikTok video (see Cosslett, “Helen”). 19 I take the phrase from Ashley Montagu, quoted in Antonello, “Out”: 48. 20 As Marinetti described it, “These tactile boards have arrangements of tactile values that allow hands to wander over them, following colored trails and producing a succession of suggestive sensations, whose rhythm, in turn languid, cadenced, or tumultuous, is regulated by exact directions” (quoted in Antonello: 38). It bears mention that Marinetti’s French Dada rival Francis Picabia had exhibited his own sculpture à toucher in 1916 (Antonello, “Out”: 38). 21 See Hatfield, Alternative: chapter 2, and Kuhlman, “Design.” 22 Arnheim relates the blind haptic engagement with art to his concept of “dynamic perception” (“Perceptual”: 136). See also Švankmajer’s comments on blindness and the “Touch-Vision relationship” in his conception of tactile art (Touching: 82). 23 As Christopher puts it: “[T]he emergence of the tactile comic challenges critics and theorists of comics both to reconsider preconceptions about the inherent visuality of the form and, more importantly, to reconsider the role that these preconceptions might play in limiting the diversity of readers who can access comics (“Rethinking”). 24 That lineage includes such examples from fine art and popular culture as Czech artist Vladimír Boudník’s haptic “explosionist” works, featured in “At The World Cafeteria,” the Věra Chytilová-directed episode from Pearls of the Deep (1966) and the tactile sculpture in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971). 25 These examples of tactile art come in addition to other works suitable for blind and disabled art patrons, such as ET Russian’s multisensory comics installation Casting Shadows (2016).

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  127 26 Sousanis gathers resources devoted to disability-related comics at his website, Spin, Cut and Weave. 27 In this regard see Christopher’s bracing discussion of the “problematic” audio description of Daredevil, vol. 3, no. 1 (September 2011) by Mark Waid and Paolo Rivera (“Rethinking”). 28 Which presumably makes Unseen, an audio comic series by a blind writer, Chad Allen, and featuring a blind heroine an appealing object for this audience. 29 Miele, a blind scientist, helped develop braille maps for San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system and worked on narrative description technology for video. See Jamieson, “Joshua.” 30 From the project’s website: “It allows for a universal dissemination as it makes use of the raw tactile sense, and doesn’t involve any technical training except of some simple mnemotechnics that can be learned on the go, as the Shapereader workshops have demonstrated so far” (shapereader.org). 31 Translations mine unless otherwise noted.

Works Cited Aarniosuo, Athanasía. “The Truth About Language: Ilan Manouach’s Shapereader.” Helsinki International Artist Program (December 11, 2017). https://www.hiap.fi/ the-truth-about-language-ilan-manouachs-shapereader/. Alaniz, José and Smith, Scott T. “Introduction: Uncanny Bodies.” Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability. Penn State University Press, 2019, pp. 1–34. Antonello, Pierpaolo. “‘Out of Touch’: F.T. Marinetti’s Il Tattilismo and the Futurist Critique of Separation.” Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde and Its Legacy. Ed. Elza Adamowicz and Simona Storchi. Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 38–55. Arnheim, Rudolph. “Perceptual Aspects of Art for the Blind.” To The Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays. University of California Press, 1991, pp. 133–143. Brownlee, John. “A Comic Book Artist Reinvents His Craft For Blind Readers.” Fast Company (July 8, 2016). https://www.fastcompany.com/3061632/a-comic-bookartist-is-reinventing-his-craft-for-blind-readers. Christopher, Brandon. “Rethinking Comics and Visuality, From The Audio Daredevil to Philipp Meyer’s Life.” Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 38, No. 3, 2018. https:// dsq-sds.org/article/view/6477/5089. Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. University of Illinois Press, 2012. Cosslett, Rhiannon Lucy. “Helen Keller: Why is a TikTok Conspiracy Theory Undermining Her Story?” The Guardian (January 7, 2021). https://www. theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/07/helen-keller-why-is-a-tiktok-conspiracy-theoryundermining-her-story. Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 6th Edition. Blackwell, 2008. De Las Heras Bretín, Rut. “Un Cómic Para Tocar.” El País (September 26, 2016). https://elpais.com/cultura/2016/09/21/actualidad/1474487226_552605.html. d’Evie, Fayen and Kleege, Georgina. “The Gravity, The Levity: Let Us Speak of Tactile Encounters.” Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 38, No. 3, 2018. https://dsq-sds. org/article/view/6483/5090. Debczak, Michele. “Artist Creates a Tactile Comic Book For Blind Readers.” Mental Floss (July 22, 2016). https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/83553/artist-createstactile-comic-book-blind-readers.

128  José Alaniz Dunne, Carey. “A Conceptual Artist Designs Tactile Comic Books For Blind Readers.” Hyperallergic (August 5, 2016). https://hyperallergic.com/312333/a-conceptualartist-designs-tactile-comic-books-for-blind-readers/. Fischer, Jennifer. “Tactile Affects.” Tessera Vol. 32 (Summer, 2002), pp. 17–28. Foss, Chris, et al. “Introduction: From Feats of Clay to Narrative Prose/thesis.” Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 1–13. Fraser, Benjamin. “Tactile Comics, Disability Studies and the Mind’s Eye: on ‘A Boat Tour’ (2017) in Venice with Max.” Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics (May, 2020), pp. 1–13. Hammer, Gili. Blindness Through The Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body. University of Michigan Press, 2019. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Jamieson, Wendell. “Joshua Miele: Inspiration from An Unthinkable Crime.” Reader’s Digest (May 23, 2016). https://www.rd.com/article/joshua-miele-inspiration-froman-unthinkable-crime/. Kartalopoulos, Bill. “Ilan Manouach, Defamiliarizing Comics.” World Literature Today Vol. 90, No. 2 (March-April, 2016), pp. 44–47. Klatzky, Roberta L., Lederman, Susan J. and Metzger, Victoria A. “Identifying Objects by Touch: An ‘Expert System’”. Perception & Psychophysics Vol. 37, No. 4 (1985), pp. 299–302. Kleege, Georgina. More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art. Oxford University Press, 2018. ———. “Some Touching Thoughts and Wishful Thinking.” Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 33, No. 3 (2013). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3741/3284. Kone Foundation. “Ilan Manouach: Shapereader.” October 20, 2017. https:// koneensaatio.fi/en/ilan-manouach-shapereader/. Kuhlman, Martha. “Design in Comics: Panels and Pages.” Comics Studies: A Guidebook. Ed. Charles Hatfield and Bart Beaty. Rutgers University Press, 2020, pp. 172–192. Maryanne, Maltby. “Blissymbolics.” A Dictionary of Audiology. Online. Oxford University Press, 2016. Manouach, Ilan. “The Tactile Comics of Shapereader.” Forthcoming. ———. E-mail communication. January 3, 2021. ———. Presentation on Shapereader. Short Run Comix & Arts Festival. Seattle. November 2, 2016. ———. n.d. Shapereader.org McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Mintz, Susan. “Invisible Disability: Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen.” Feminist Disability Studies. Ed. Kim Q. Hall. Indiana University Press, 2011, pp. 69–90. Ravindran, Shruti. “Getting Back in Touch.” The Believer Vol. 17, No. 4 (October/ November, 2020), pp. 51–62. Sandomirskaja, Irina. “Skin to Skin: Language in the Soviet Education of Deaf-Blind Children, the 1920s and 1930s.” Studies in East European Thought Vol. 60, No. 4 (2008), pp. 321–337. Szép, Ezster. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading and Vulnerability. OSU Press, 2020.

Disability, Comics and the Shapereader  129 Švankmajer, Jan. Touching and Imagining: An Introduction to Tactile Art. I.B. Tauris, 2014. Thompson, Hannah and Warne, Vanessa. “Blindness Arts: An Introduction.” Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 38, No. 3 (2018). https://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/6485/5092. Tilley, Heather. “Introduction: The Victorian Tactile Imagination.” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Vol. 19 (2014), pp. 1–17. Walden, Elizabeth. “Vision, Touch and Feminist Epistemology.” Tessera Vol. 32 (Summer, 2002), pp. 118–125. Wilson, Emily. “How A Blind Professor Is Helping Other Sight-Impaired Museum Visitors Experience Art.” Hyperallergic (January 17, 2018). https://hyperallergic. com/421929/haptic-encounters-contemporary-jewish-museum-san-francisco/.

8 Shapereader and the Limits of Touch Ian Hague

Ilan Manouach’s Shapereader works from the premise of a tactile language: a series of plates forming an index are encountered through the fingertips and used to learn and understand the deployment of the symbols on those plates in larger sequences that comprise narratives such as Arctic Circle.1 As Manouach explains it, Shapereader is driven by a notion of community: Shapereader is a community-specific tactile conlang (constructed language). It was initially designed for the purposes of visually impaired subjects in regards to tactile textual production. It consists of an expanding repertoire of free-floating tactile ideograms (tactigrams) intended to provide haptic equivalents for all the semantic features, the conceptual functions and textual attributes of a story. Its design prioritizes simplicity and ease of memorization and addresses all users regardless of their nationality, language, educational level, or subsistence under any visual handicap.2 By circumventing the verbo-voco-visual apparatus, it transposes semantic and syntactical structure cognizance to the reader’s fingertips. Shapereader promotes an embodied textual experience.3 In this chapter, I take Shapereader as a starting point to consider the notion of touch as a communicative medium, and in particular as a means for starting to identify the limits of touch’s communicative capacities. Here, I am interested partly in what Shapereader is and how it works, but also in how it might point to the ways that touch can fail and what this might mean for projects like Shapereader not necessarily in terms of what they do communicate, but what they can communicate (or not). While this may appear to be a critique of Shapereader, this is not my aim: rather, in addressing Shapereader in this way, I hope to be able to (1) outline the shape of touch’s communicative capacities, (2) understand what Shapereader is (and is not) doing to fill that shape, and then (3) identify the capacities that remain possible but are as yet unaddressed by Shapereader’s specific instantiation of tactile communication. To do this, I explore four different aspects of Shapereader’s engagement with tactile communications: knowledge, experience, spatial configuration and fragility. DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-11

Shapereader and the Limits of Touch  131 Touch and Knowledge Let us begin by considering the most obvious of Shapereader’s properties: its tactile nature. In producing a tactile work, Manouach makes a statement that may appear straightforward but is in fact remarkably contentious: touch is a viable means of communication. Although there are certainly examples of tactile communication (perhaps the most famous of which is the Braille tactile language system), it is by no means the case that touch and tactility are well accepted as means of communication in a world that has been described as ‘ocularcentric’, that is, dominated by vision.4 We could add hearing to sight as the two primary sensory modalities for communication today. Both sight and hearing, though, are distance senses, and as such they are emblematic of the ways in which communication is understood: as something that happens at a distance and is somewhat ethereal, floating through the air as patterns of light and sound or transmitted electronically. Touch, by comparison, is intimate (it cannot happen at a distance or be transmitted) and slow. Today, touch is often restricted and controlled (‘do not touch’ being a common refrain in museums, although this is beginning to change, limited to particularly close or intimate relationships (hugging, sexuality), or used ceremonially/socially but in only a small capacity (handshakes, a kiss on the cheek).5 Touch is not often seen as a means of communicating knowledge, and although there are clear cases in which touch is understood as a means of coming together, these are often ritualised and controlled. By suggesting that touch could be used for communication, Manouach is challenging the orthodoxy of an audio-visually dominated communications culture and opening up a new channel for consideration. This is an important conceptual move because in doing so, Manouach doesn’t simply use existing terms to offer a new argument; he introduces a new set of terms into the conversation altogether and creates the potential for a new repertoire of communicative techniques and strategies. That said, Shapereader’s emphasis on and intervention into the possibilities of tactility are not unlimited in their potential to transform communication, because the basis for Shapereader’s operation remains closely connected to existing communication concepts. This is made clear in Manouach’s explanation of Shapereader as a system that seeks to ‘[circumvent] the verbo-voco-visual apparatus’ in order to ‘[transpose] semantic and syntactical structure cognizance to the reader’s fingertips’. Shapereader is a tactile alternative to information that would otherwise flow through the eyes (in written language or ‘seen’ comics) or the ears (in spoken language); it is not an assertion that tactile knowledge is meaningful in and of itself. In stating that Shapereader ‘prioritizes simplicity and ease of memorization’, Manouach indicates that the project proceeds from a specific epistemological position, one which retains a Cartesian separation of body and mind. The requirement for the reader to remember particular shapes, and to put those shapes into syntactical relationships to each other, presupposes that the reader must hold

132  Ian Hague ideas in their mind rather than engaging with knowledge through the bodily experience of touching. This is a subtle but important distinction, which situates Shapereader as a modern project, as David Howes makes clear in a discussion of Henry David Thoreau’s writing on knowledge that comes from touch: Thoreau’s speculations were in line with a longstanding philosophical tradition of attributing some form of intelligence to the sentient body – a tradition stretching back to antiquity. It is only with the rise of body-mind dualism associated with the work of the philosopher René Descartes that such bodily ways of knowing became alien to mainstream Western thought.6 The separation that occurred with the rise of body-mind dualism, and the devaluation of the ‘body’ aspect of that split, is part of what led to the elevation of the more ‘dominating, rational, orderly’ distance senses over the contact senses that Manouach’s work starts to resist and (implicitly) critique.7 But Shapereader does not in itself get to the fullest extent of this critique because it retains the notion that the body is a way to get to the mind. We may be able to change the specific bodily channel we use to get to the mind, but the mind remains our target. An alternative approach, which might start to overcome this limitation (but brings its own, which I discuss below), would be rooted in an epistemology of touch on its own terms. This would mean accepting touch as knowledge rather than limiting our understanding to touch as a route to knowledge. To explore this idea further, let us consider an example from the Shapereader repertoire: ‘the rain’ (Figure 8.1). Here, we see a texture with a clear tactile referent that most people will be very familiar with. The relationship played out here between object and body is one of connection between stimulus (the shapes) and idea (the concept of the rain). Now consider the experience of actually being in the rain (try to recall an experience of being in the rain; don’t confine yourself to the intellectual imagining of the concept). Consider what and how your skin knows in this situation. The experience of temperature, wetness and other sensations (such as slipperiness underfoot) provide knowledges that exceed but are not separate from the concept ‘the rain’. These bodily knowledges are inaccessible to an epistemology rooted in Cartesian body-mind dualism, because they sit outside the mind, but that does not make them less real. This example demonstrates the epistemological limitation of Shapereader, but it is important not to overstate this critique, because while Shapereader makes use of touch, it is not about touch, at least not consistently. By this I mean that while the criticism outlined above is reasonable in relation to ‘the rain’, we could not make the same argument about all (or even most) of the concepts in the Shapereader repertoire. Had the example I used been ‘a darkening mountain’ (Figure 8.2), it is difficult to see how this concept could have been

Shapereader and the Limits of Touch  133

Figure 8.1 Shapereader’s presentation of ‘the rain’.

Figure 8.2 Shapereader’s presentation of ‘a darkening mountain’.

134  Ian Hague accessed ‘directly’ through touch given that ‘darkness’ is a visual idea and ‘mountain’ exceeds what we could reasonably represent using any single sense. In much the same way as visual and verbal communication and knowledge structures must rely on conceptual knowledge (ideas) to operate, so too must Shapereader have some way to refer outside its own frame of experience. The rain, after all, is not a purely tactile phenomenon, it also has visual, auditory, olfactory and even gustatory qualities that Shapereader has here had to ‘translate’ into a tactile form. The body-mind dualism is inescapable for certain purposes, including those to which Shapereader directs itself. In this epistemological border zone, then, we discover one of the ‘limits of touch’ referred to in the title of this chapter. On the one hand, Shapereader’s focus on touch opens up a new channel of communication, but on the other it employs this channel in a relatively restrained way, finding tactile answers to questions that were previously asked visually and aurally, but not yet starting to frame new, tactile, questions. In the longer term, Shapereader or its descendants may start to map these areas. For now, they remain unfilled spaces awaiting exploration. Sharing Experiences Another of the properties Manouach outlines in his description of Shapereader is its relative accessibility in endeavouring to be open to all readers ‘regardless of their nationality, language, [or] educational level’. Here, Manouach echoes assertions made by various critics and scholars around the accessibility of comics. Scott McCloud, to give one famous example, suggested in Understanding Comics that: ‘As the Twenty First Century approaches, visual iconography may finally help us realize a form of universal communication’.8 More recent scholarship, however, has thrown this idea into question, with Neil Cohn’s work on linguistics suggesting that the ability to understand comics is neither universal nor spontaneous, and involves processes of learning, much like a language.9 Going beyond language, David A. Beronä’s work on wordless comics has shown that images are also culturally encoded. He quotes Seymour Chatman’s observation that ‘the conventions are there and are crucial, even if self-evident and self-instructional … that they are conventions is clear enough’ before going on to observe of the reader’s engagement with Hendrik Dorgathen’s wordless comic Space Dog that the ‘comic becomes more like a game of Pictionary when players have to decipher a phrase from the pictures presented by other team members’.10 Without a degree of shared cultural understanding, communication becomes difficult, if not impossible: images are not acultural or transparent communicators of meaning. In an ocularcentric culture, this presents a substantial challenge to the idea that tactile communication systems could be produced that achieve the openness and accessibility Manouach claims for Shapereader. The basis of this challenge is quite straightforward: if sight, a sense whose modality has given

Shapereader and the Limits of Touch  135 rise to a vast number of communicative forms of enormous diversity and range over thousands of years, has as yet proven incapable of producing a universal form, what hope can a relative novice such as touch have of doing so? One response to this challenge may come precisely from touch’s novelty. Whereas visual forms of communication are now so highly elaborated as to be heavily coded and laden with previously accrued symbolic meaning, touch is starting from a (relatively) low base: we have few cultural touchstones for tactility. To demonstrate this bluntly, consider how easily you can bring to mind a visual (or indeed aural) stereotype, and then think about whether you can locate an equivalent tactile stereotype. You may be able to do so, but can you find them as easily or as numerously as their visual equivalents? This lack of tactile convention suggests that Shapereader’s ambitions may be realisable, to some extent, because it is in a position to form tactile associations, rather than following those determined by existing cultures. This does, however, point to a secondary complication: the risk of creating a codified cultural form that ultimately undermines its own ambitions of universality. This is evident in the way that Shapereader ‘prioritizes simplicity and ease of memorization’, as we discussed earlier. The notion that the tactigrams on Shapereader’s index plates must be learned or referred to in order to derive the meaning of narratives like Arctic Circle immediately bifurcates the work’s audience into those who understand it and those who do not. The former group might be further stratified by fluency. In attempting to escape the limitations imparted by language, Shapereader has come full circle and created its own (indeed Manouach describes it as a ‘tactile conlang [constructed language]’), with all the complications that brings. An additional complexity comes from the fact that although Shapereader’s tactigrams are simple and easy to memorise, they cannot be internalised or easily produced by its users, meaning that while its syntactic structures and promotion of an ‘embodied textual experience’ do work to suggest a linguistic experience, it is closer to that of an extinct or a dead language than a modern language, that is, it is a language with no or few speakers. As its name suggests, Shapereader has the capacity to produce a community of readers, but at present there is little possibility of it producing a community of speakers or writers. Ultimately, these issues speak to another of the limits of touch: the difficulty of sharing a tactile experience. Although Shapereader was produced through collaboration within communities, once it leaves those communities, it has ceased to be ‘spoken’ and its usability as a viable language form diminishes quickly because it cannot be shared by a community of ‘speakers’. This does not inhibit its ability to operate as a work of art or a text/ experience, whose authorial power lies almost exclusively with Manouach, but the principles of ‘tactile conlang’ and ‘embodied textual experience’ are certainly at odds with each other here. If tactile communication is to develop into a more active form in future, it may be instructive to turn not to language itself (efforts to create new languages are rare and even less ­

136  Ian Hague often successful) but to a recent example of cultural shift: Web 2.0. This shift, which was characterised by a move from static web pages created by experts with specialised skills and substantial resources to user-generated content, has, for good and ill, resulted in an explosion of creative practice (understood loosely to include very basic forms such as functional communicative speech and writing) across the globe. Historically, tangible productions have been inhibited by material factors: the price of production and the skills required, but as new technologies such as 3D printing become increasingly accessible and mainstream in the coming decades, it is conceivable that tactile communication strategies could start to become available to the general public. If this does happen, Shapereader (whose material form is not a massive distance from what might be achievable in a 3D printer) may well provide an instructive guide for the forms tactile languages and works might take in the future. Spatially Distributed Touch A third aspect of Shapereader that bears consideration is its use of and interaction with space. In its physical structure, Shapereader comes close to the types of layouts seen in comics: textures are arranged in grids, which the reader encounters in sequence. This sequential encounter forms the narrative. In this regard, Shapereader does come close to the concept of ‘sequential art’, but the nature of touch produces an interesting set of additional considerations that speak to broader concerns about the nature of narrative in comics more generally. Chief among these, I would suggest, is what Charles Hatfield has described as the ‘tension’ between ‘sequence and surface’, that is, between images seen in sequence as part of a narrative, and the overall arrangement of images on the page’s surface.11 I have written more on this distinction in relation to visual elements of comics elsewhere so will not repeat myself here, and other theorists such as Thierry Groensteen have also considered these types of relationships, drawing attention to the meaningful differences between strings, series and sequences, for example, along with larger elements such as layout.12 When it comes to touch, however, the relationship between sequence and surface operates somewhat differently. Fundamentally, the notion of a tension between sequence and surface is premised on a visual understanding of meaning, since in Hatfield’s work (and that of other theorists who identify similar concepts), it is discussed in terms of seen images and a form that is understood as largely, if not exclusively, visual in nature. Nevertheless, there are certain ways in which we might find comparable concepts addressing the other senses. Musical harmony, in which it is possible to simultaneously hear both a single ‘complete’ sound and the multitude of instruments and voices that combine to produce it, may be a close concept in the auditory mode. In the case of this and visual sequence/ surface, it is often possible to attribute a spatial quality to this tension: the elements in tension are differentiable spatially as well as in their specific

Shapereader and the Limits of Touch  137 properties. The surface is larger than the element in sequence, for example, and the “complete” sound is spatially larger than and locationally different to that made by a single instrument, in ways that are detectable by the relevant sense organ. Crucially though, although these senses do situate us in space, they also tell us something about the space itself. When it comes to the contact senses, or those that sit on the boundary (smell can lay claim to being either a distance or a contact sense, depending on how we frame it), the picture is somewhat different, since these senses generally do not extend us very far into space – instead, they give us information about things in contact with our bodies. Nevertheless, it is possible to conceptualise comparable concepts of tensions for the other senses. The multiple notes that unfold a perfume’s scent over time while also sitting within an overall accord or bouquet suggests an olfactory equivalent, and the possibility of detecting particular quantities of the four or five primary tastes while also encountering an overall flavour (which incorporates smell) finds us a loose conceptual equivalent in gustation. What is missing in both cases, though, is the spatial element of the experience, since both smell and taste sit within the body. Technically it might be possible to say that, for example, we smell or taste differing quantities of stimuli in different parts of the nose or mouth (and there is a directionality to smell that gestures towards its potential to be understood as a distance sense), but this is not particularly meaningful in the way that detecting both the nature and position of a particular sound within an orchestra performance might be. Like smell and taste, touch is a relatively focused sense that tells us about our immediate corporeality and its close environment rather than extending a great distance in space. We feel the temperature of the air or water that surrounds us but not the air we might be able to see fifty metres away (indeed sight can sometimes tell us more than touch about distant temperatures as when we see a road “rippling” in the heat). This presents something of a challenge for a project such as Shapereader, because while it can undoubtedly represent a sequence (by presenting a series of textures in a given order), it is less clear whether it can engage with the notion of surface. To do so, it would need to be possible for the reader to encounter some or all of the textures in a given work at the same time as focusing in on a particular part of the surface to locate oneself in the sequence (while reading panel two in a visual comic, one remains aware of panels one and three). In principle, this is not impossible since a reader could conceivably encounter one texture through their palm, and another through their fingers, but Manouach’s description of the reader’s engagement with Shapereader through their fingertips does suggest a certain directionality of touch that would seem to preclude this multi-tactile engagement. Another option might exist in the possibility of using multiple fingers simultaneously to feel multiple textures, and then varying the reading “focus” through pressure. This might be somewhat akin to the experience of playing a chord on a piano, in which multiple keys are pressed simultaneously to create a harmonised sound.

138  Ian Hague In terms of conventional comics theory then, Shapereader would appear to offer some possibility to produce a tactile experience that in some ways replicates (or at least gestures towards) the conventional, that is, visual, experience of reading comics, but it is clearly limited in this capacity. Moreover, it has a reduced set of resources open to it in this regard because techniques such as layouts in which large-scale arrangements of information come together meaningfully to create pieces that exceed the hands’ capacity to experience as a whole are unusable in this format. This does not, however, mean that Shapereader is inherently ‘lesser’ in terms of its communicative potential, because it makes use of tactile qualities such as texture (which can be understood visually but is not exclusively visual). Although the Shapereader boards are made of a consistent material, and therefore retain a consistent material texture, the arrangement of the shapes themselves does produce a variable tactile texture between tactigrams. These tactigrams include terms such as ‘to listen’, ‘to float’ and ‘to creep eastward’ to give just three examples. If we take a closer look at these tactigrams (see Figure 8.3) we can see that each of them has a similar physical feel in terms of its surfaces, but they all nevertheless feel different to each other because the surfaces themselves are arranged differently (i.e., they all feel hard, but only ‘to creep eastward’ feels sharp). Similarly, the boundaries (the panel borders and gutters) of the Shapereader layouts are shaped and arranged meaningfully, in a way that parallels the distinction between panel layouts in a comic and

Figure 8.3 Shapereader’s presentation of ‘to listen,’ ‘to float’ and ‘to creep eastward’.

Shapereader and the Limits of Touch  139 the arrangement of text in sentences in a prose novel. In this regard Shapereader does make use of space understood through touch, but our understanding of that space is significantly different to that proposed by the sequence/surface distinction because of the differing affordances of sight and touch. Shape and space are not exclusively visual, but their navigation through touch requires different approaches to navigation through sight, and the mechanisms for this navigation are what Manouach begins to develop in Shapereader. On the one hand, comics theory’s advanced understanding of the relationships between space and narrative would seem to offer much to the development of a wide range of forms, including that found in Shapereader, and Shapereader appears to present productive possibilities for advancing our understanding of comics narratives. On the other hand, that very theory’s emphasis on visual concepts, and in some cases the explicit rejection of comics’ non-visual properties and possibilities, would seem to hive off Shapereader into a different sphere of cultural production, which we might loosely term ‘tactile narratives’, whose conceptual parameters are less well developed than that of ‘graphic narratives’ (although this is not to say that there is no context for this: there are some well-established language systems to refer to in this regard that may then be relatable to concepts of narrative, including Braille, Hands-on Signing/Co-active Signing, Deafblind Manual, Block and Tadoma).13 At the very least, it is clear that comics theory’s ocularcentrism is a limiting factor in the ability of that theory to engage with expanded forms of comics that utilise different communicative channels and sensory modalities. In a sense, this appears to point to another of our limits of touch: the minimal amount of theoretical work that currently exists on non-visual aspects of comics means we have relatively little to help us understand and explain tactile narratives. Moreover, while I have confined my remarks here to a small section of comics scholarship, this situation is replicated in culture at large. To put it bluntly: we don’t yet know what to do with tactile narratives. A less forthright version of this might read: we don’t yet have cultural contexts into which we can comfortably place works like Shapereader. That said, this situation is beginning to change, for two reasons, which I do not have space to fully unpack here but have covered in detail elsewhere. The first is the development of an increased emphasis on sensory and (particularly) material aspects in comics scholarship.14 The second is the increasing prevalence of creators who are utilising new production technologies (including but not limited to digital comics platforms) to produce alternative or multisensory modalities for comics communication, and Shapereader would fall into this category.15 In the future, we may see a substantial expansion of the contexts, theoretical and cultural alike, into which we might place works like Shapereader. For now, Shapereader is an instructive example of the complexities that arise when works appear that confound existing categories.

140  Ian Hague Touch’s Fragility The final points I would like to touch on in considering Shapereader are the changing audiences and modes of reception that Shapereader implies by comparison with conventional comics, that is, not the object itself but its users and possible users. This might be seen as a corollary of all three of the ideas discussed so far in this chapter (knowledge, conceptual shareability and spatial contexts). Manouach’s positioning here is clear: Shapereader is a community produced work, intended ‘for the purposes of visually impaired subjects in regards to tactile textual production’. In explicitly engaging with visually impaired readers, Manouach challenges the primacy or exclusivity of the visual mode in comics communications and opens up new possible audiences for comics and related forms. On its own terms, this is a worthwhile endeavour for a variety of reasons ranging from the ethical to the commercial, and it does go some way towards opening up new spaces in the theoretical and cultural contexts I discussed above and have explored in more detail elsewhere.16 Fundamentally, Shapereader emphasises, it is possible for blind and visually impaired readers to engage with comics in meaningful ways through the sense of touch. That said, Shapereader does not fall into a simple deficit model of disability that frames sight as something “missing” and attempts to compensate for this perceived lack. Rather, Shapereader implies through its appeal to ‘all users regardless of … any visual handicap’ that its objective is the addition of a new sensory modality to an existing repertoire. This modality may be of more relevance to a particular segment of the comics reading audience, but it is by no means exclusive to them, and nor is it unavailable to those who do not have ‘any visual handicap’ at all (though it may be experienced differently). Yet this notion of an expanded audience must be balanced against the final of our limits of touch, which is its fragility. I have already mentioned aspects of this fragility in my discussion of the shareability of the Shapereader repertoire and the difficulty of producing new ‘speakers’ or ‘creators’ of the Shapereader language, but here I want to focus on the other side of this coin: reception. At the most basic level, Shapereader is difficult to access, and this difficulty comes largely from its tactility. Because the contact senses require contact between the body and the sensed object, accessing tactile materials is simply not possible at a distance (this is also related to the points made about touch and space above). Writing now, in early 2021, we have not yet developed transmissible textures (although there are some examples of haptic technology that can produce replicable or transmissible tactile experiences, such as the vibration systems found in many video game controllers). This means that without visiting a Shapereader installation, there is no way to access the text or experience the work. Of course, this problem is not unique to Shapereader per se; the issue is replicated for any piece of installation art or architectural work. But such works do not claim to be a language, produced by a community effort, and they are not, therefore, subject to

Shapereader and the Limits of Touch  141 questions on the terms of language. That said, if we do define Shapereader, or at least the physical instantiation of Shapereader, as an installation, it does largely get around this issue. At the time of this writing, however, there is a more pressing concern that marks up the fragility of touch in a more stark and urgent way. I am writing this in January 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic that has exacted a brutal toll on people and communities around the world. This has made activities such as travel extremely challenging, and on a purely practical level (albeit one which demonstrates the point I made above about the challenge of access) has meant that in preparing this writing, I have not been able to experience a full example of a Shapereader text. Ilan Manouach was kind enough to supply me with a small example of the physical form of the Shapereader repertoire (which was also used to create the images illustrating this chapter), but encountering the work in full has simply not been possible, which is the reason I elected to approach this chapter from the position of limits and omissions: speaking about absences was the only way I could see to develop a meaningful engagement with the absent text. But Covid-19 has done more than made access inconvenient: it has also reformulated the way that we think about touch in fundamental, and potentially damaging, ways. Cultural constraints around touch and touching have been strengthened by medical and political discourses that caution against contact. Tactile interactions have been framed as dangerous and contaminating, with the consequences of unconsidered touch (of objects as well as people) presenting a significant risk to health: touch has literally become a risk to life. And so, Shapereader’s final indication of the limits of touch is a sad one. The production of a work whose entire existence is predicated upon a community striving to come together and communicate through the sense of touch demonstrates just how fragile that communication can be. Moreover, it prompts us to consider the fragility of the community that forms around the tactile encounter. This would potentially include communities with visual impairments but, perhaps even more so, those with dual impairments such as deafblind communities, which are still more reliant on touch as a mode of communication and connection. These groups have been heavily impacted by Covid-19, in ways that sighted individuals often struggle to grasp.17 For communities organised around touch, tactility is not an optional extra; it is an essential quality of existence, and it behooves us to remember this as we think about the multisensory form. * Over the course of this chapter, I have taken Ilan Manouach’s Shapereader as a focal point for a discussion of the possibilities of touch as a communicative system. Although I have mentioned certain communities, particularly the visual and dual-impaired communities, I do not claim to know enough to speak for these communities, and nor would I suggest that the work I have

142  Ian Hague undertaken here represents a specific intervention on matters particular to those communities. Rather, my approach here has been to consider Manouach’s stated aims, and to think through what they might mean for the notion of touch as a mode of communication and engagement, particularly in relation to notions of comics. I have done this by looking at four key areas: knowledge, shared experiences, space and fragility. In each of these cases I have attempted to show not only what Shapereader does do and can do, but also how the things it does not or cannot do might enhance our understanding of the tactile narrative project as whole: marking up the borders of the field with varying degrees of definition and suggesting spaces into which the field might develop beyond the specific possibilities realised by Shapereader itself. It remains to be seen how tactile narratives will develop in future, and how the challenges presented by phenomena like Covid-19 will be overcome. Nevertheless, the existences of experimental works, and creators like Manouach, who are engaged enough to produce them, give us good reasons to be hopeful. Notes 1 José Alaniz’s chapter elsewhere in this volume also deals with Manouach’s Shapereader, and I draw the reader’s attention to that chapter for more on this topic. 2 I am conscious that the term ‘handicap’ is a contentious one, which some readers may find offensive (Rose, Damon. “Don’t call me handicapped!” BBC, last updated October 4, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3708576.stm). It is not my intention to offend here, and I retain it here and later in the article only for the purposes of accuracy when quoting from Manouach’s writing on Shapereader. I do, however, apologise for any offence this decision may cause. 3 Manouach, Ilan. Shapereader: Exploring Embodied Textualities (Echo Chamber asbl, n.d.), 9. 4 Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 5 Azimi, Roxana. “Museums are letting visitors get to grips with the exhibits”. The Guardian, last modified October 16, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2015/oct/16/museums-visitors-touch-feel-art. Cf. Manouach, Ilan. “About.” Shapereader, accessed January 22, 2021, https://shapereader.org/. 6 Howes, David. “Skinscapes: Embodiment, Culture, and Environment.” The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005), 27–39. 27. 7 Classen, Constance. “The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity.” Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005), 70–84. 70. 8 McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993). 58, emphasis in original. 9 Cohn, Neil. Who Understands Comics? Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). 10 Beronä, David A. “Pictures Speak in Comics without Words: Pictorial Principles in the Work of Milt Gross, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker, and Peter Kuper.” The Language of Comics: Word and Image, edited by Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 19–39. 29.

Shapereader and the Limits of Touch  143 11 Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005). 48–58. 12 Hague, Ian. “Adapting Watchmen.” In Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts, ed. Steven Allen and Laura Hubner (Bristol & Chicago: Intellect, 2012) 37–55. Groensteen, Thierry. “Narration as Supplement: An Archaeology of the Infra-Narrative Foundations of Comics.” The French Comics Theory Reader, ed. Ann Miller and Bart Beaty (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 163–181. 176. —. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 21–23. 13 Deafblind UK. “Communication.” Deafblind UK, 2021. Accessed January 20, 2020, https://deafblind.org.uk/information-advice/living-with-deafblindness/ communication/. 14 Hague, Ian. “Sidebar: Materiality.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan (New York & Oxon: Routledge, 2017) 159–161. 15 Hague, Ian. Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (New York & Oxon: Routledge, 2014). 16 Hague, Ian. Comics, 2014. Further writing on this subject, including a discussion of Shapereader, can be found in Lord, Lacey. Comics: The (Not Only) Visual Medium. MSc Dissertation (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016). 17 Pollack, Dorianne. “As a Blind Person, COVID-19 Has Changed My Daily Life in Ways Most People Don’t Consider.” Huffpost, last updated January 18, 2021, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/blind-visually-impaired-coronavirus-pandemicimpact_n_60019b5ac5b6ffcab963c825.

Works Cited Azimi, Roxana. “Museums are letting visitors get to grips with the exhibits”. The Guardian, last modified October 16, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2015/oct/16/museums-visitors-touch-feel-art. Beronä, David A. “Pictures Speak in Comics Without Words: Pictorial Principles in the Work of Milt Gross, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker, and Peter Kuper.” The Language of Comics: Word and Image, edited by Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 19–39. Classen, Constance. “The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity.” Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005), pp. 70–84. Cohn, Neil. Who Understands Comics? Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Deafblind UK. “Communication.” Deafblind UK, 2021. Accessed January 20, 2020, https://deafblind.org.uk/information-advice/living-with-deafblindness/ communication/. Groensteen, Thierry. “Narration as Supplement: An Archaeology of the InfraNarrative Foundations of Comics.” The French Comics Theory Reader, ed. Ann Miller and Bart Beaty. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014, pp. 163–181. ——— The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007, pp. 21–23. Hague, Ian. “Adapting Watchmen.” Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts, ed. Steven Allen and Laura Hubner. Bristol & Chicago: Intellect, 2012, pp. 37–55.

144  Ian Hague ———. Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels. New York & Oxon: Routledge, 2014. ———. “Sidebar: Materiality.” The Secret Origins of Comics Studies, edited by Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan, New York & Oxon: Routledge, 2017, pp. 159–161. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Howes, David. “Skinscapes: Embodiment, Culture, and Environment.” The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005, pp. 27–39. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Lord, Lacey. Comics: The (Not Only) Visual Medium. (MSc Dissertation). Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. Manouach, Ilan. “About.” Shapereader, accessed January 22, 2021, https:// shapereader.org/. ———. Shapereader: Exploring Embodied Textualities. (Echo Chamber asbl, n.d.) 9. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. Pollack, Dorianne. “As A Blind Person, COVID-19 Has Changed My Daily Life In Ways Most People Don’t Consider.” Huffpost, last updated January 18, 2021, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/blind-visually-impaired-coronavirus-pandemicimpact_n_60019b5ac5b6ffcab963c825. Rose, Damon. “Don’t call me handicapped!” BBC, last updated October 4, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3708576.stm

9 Blanco On Blank and Illegible Books Moritz Küng

In the research phase of a comprehensive project on blank and illegible books—the exhibition and accompanying catalog Blank. Raw. Illegible … Artists’ Books as Statement (1960–2022) that will be inaugurated in the summer of 2023 at the Leopold–Hoesch–Museum in Düren, Germany—I also learned about Ilan Manouach’s book Blanco (in French meaning “dummy”, or in Spanish meaning “white”). Published in 2018, it keeps what its title promises. Neither with text nor with pictures, that is, stripped of any content, the cover appears in monochrome white and its book block of 48 pages remains unprinted and empty. Without any hesitation, Blanco became listed among all the other 259 artists’ books that the exhibition and the catalogue will present. The aim of this project is to unfold a broad panorama about a topic that British poet, artist, writer, publicist and teacher Michael Gibbs (1949–2009) beautifully summarized in his small three-volume compendium All or Nothing: An Anthology of Blank Books as following: Blankness is as much a state of mind as it is a material condition, and as such it can be deceptive, hallucinatory, intentional, poetic or spiritual, it can be legible or illegible, present or absent, perfect or imperfect. But it is never empty. (2005: 47) If Gibbs discussed just 23 specific works—reaching from Vasililisk Gnedov’s Poem of the End (1913) to Jan Voss’ Dieter Roth in Greenland (2005)—the apparently random large number of 259 exhibits in Blank. Raw. Illegible … refers to the number of universal artists’ books that have been presented in Book as Artwork 1960/72, a groundbreaking exhibition about the then still new medium, that took place in 1972 at Nigel Greenwood Inc. in London, curated by Italian critic Germano Celant and gallery assistant Lynda Morris. Obliging myself to implement a certain order/logic in the bulk of all these seemingly similar books that repeatedly deal with the notion of the voided book space and/or with intangible information, I have established 15 different chapters that might offer a certain, however subjective orientation. And in order not to ruin the typical subtle properties of each book (or the DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-12

146  Moritz Küng intentions of the author) with an overarching general or inaccurate term, I’ve decided to use instead 15 titles of the selected books. As for example: papierselbstdarstellung (1976, after Luciano Bartolini, for material aspects), life and work (1969, after Piero Manzoni, for artists’ monographs), Various Colors in Black and White (2005, after Pierre Bismuth, for mono- and multi-chromatic books), Anatomy of a Book (2010, after Fiona Banner, for tautological book concepts), or Utopia in Utopia (2011, after the graphic design collective Åbäke’s interpretation of Thomas More’s originally written Latin fiction (1516), for illegible texts). As for the book Blanco, it is listed in the first chapter wit– white– (1980, after one of herman de vries’ blank books that celebrate the “everywhereness” of the color white). Last but not least, the 259 examples in Blank. Raw. Illegible … intend to emphasize the relentless interest of artists in the nature of the blank book object that turned out to be inspirational for more than six decades. At first sight and with its apparently lacking content and its indifferent or neutral appearance, the blank book can deploy numerous conceptual perspectives and concepts such as pre-existence, purity, lack of information, whiteness, nihilism, denial, perfection, imperfection, censorship, or even mortality. However, it primarily represents a duality of the “absolute,” embodying simultaneously two opposing but complementary concepts: on the one hand the idea of initiation (a point of departure, or birth), on the other hand that of a climax (a finale, or death). Consequently, a blank book represents both a dematerialization of knowledge and a linguistic universality. Comparing and juxtaposing these particular books reveal major material and contextual differences, which is not least due to the individual biography of the author, or more apparent through the book’s title, since this often indicates a first tangible orientation. The hard facts of Ilan Manouach’s book Blanco are as follows: it appears as a hardback with unprinted, varnished paper cased into a board with strong glue, with 48 white and unprinted pages in a most common DIN A4 proportion (29.7 × 21 cm). The book has neither titles, texts, nor illustrations … but includes a paratext, or rather an epitext, that is printed in black-and-white on a white adhesive label, pasted on the lower edge of the back cover. Often detached from the book block—or in this case detachable from the cover— the epitext performs narrative or commentary functions either complementing, echoing or helping reveal the narrative in one way or another. The label states (my translation from French): The dummy [Le blanco] is the copy of an unprinted book, which allows the publisher to test the variants of the final object (stiffness, tactile aspects of the paper …), when it comes to the usual formats. Blanco is very much in the tradition of Franco-Belgian comics. The publisher l’Association christened this format 48cc (48 pages, cardboard cover, full color) to differentiate themselves, before having second thoughts. Due to its ubiquity, the 48cc is overlooked: it merges with the comic

Blanco  147 strip itself and consequently there is no need to produce a dummy. Blanco multiplies what is usually a unique artifact and shows the restrained but meaningful industrial processes. Printed in 5.000 copies, it’s an ode to the genius of standardization. An additional short colophon references not only the title of the book, the author, the selling price (€12), the publisher, the legal deposit number and ISBN code, but also the somewhat unexpected clause “reproduction prohibited, even in the URSS.” Given the title Blanco and its interpretation, Manouach’s book seems semantically redundant (a blank book dummy). However, as a tautology, the book also embodies a contradiction per se, since the dummy—in the common praxis a unique piece to examine the book’s physical details before going to print—is produced in an unusually large edition of 5,000 copies. Along with the mentioned reproductions clause, it’s an indication that the admittedly unorthodox comic is meant seriously (and not as a joke), and that Manouach, as writer/publisher in union, seems to be confident in its commercialization. Blanco allegedly not only celebrates the signifying force of the industrialization of comics, but also pays tribute to the underground cartoonist and publisher of l’Association, Jean-Christophe Menu, who wrote the biting manifesto Plates-Bandes (literally meaning “flowerbeds”) in an attempt to insulate his own catalogue from the “sensibilities” of the mainstream. According to the Wikipedia entry on Menu, the manifesto’s title is a pun involving part of the word for comics (bande dessinée, or drawn strip), a concern that independent comics are headed for blandness and platitude (plat, literally flat or insipid), and a gauntlet thrown down to mainstream publishers for encroaching on indie territory (the colloquial expression “trampling someone’s flowerbeds” means to step on someone’s toes). These specific contexts indicate the author’s pronounced sensibility for the détournement. As Pedro Moura commented “Détournement is a politically-conscious form of utilizing the tools of the hegemonic spectacle of commerce and politics, tap into its power to objectify and concentrate attention, and give it a new purpose.” (2014). In relation to three of Manouach’s earlier comic book works in which he altered the illustrations, or the texts, or the book’s format of acknowledged comic book creators, it might become apparent that Blanco can be seen as a “conclusive exaggeration.” Noirs, a 2014 guerilla version of Peyo’s Les Schtroumpfs noirs (1963) that tells the story of a lazy Smurf who got stung by a fly, which turns him into a black, aggressive and violent Smurf, obsessed to bite the other usually blue Smurfs so that they too turn black. As the virus spreads and more and more blue Smurfs turn black, the disease provokes great social unrest (one black Smurf even has the idea of painting his body blue to disrupt the blue Smurf ranks).

148  Moritz Küng After some turbulences, fighting and an explosion, a vaccine in the form of tuberose pollen provokes a collective sneeze and turns the black Smurfs blue again. Compared with the original album, printed in full color (i.e., in CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key [black]), Manouach’s bootleg edition is instead printed only in blue, and thus four plates of cyan (in “CCCC” as Pedro Moura noted in his review for Du9; 2014). Consequently, the monochrome printed Noirs not only sabotages the comic’s narrative and, more broadly, its “ethnic” (racial) differences, but also the panel illustrations, which in some cases have become nearly unrecognizable, up to the point to appear almost as a monochrome blue plane (page 21, panel 2). Could the latter be understood as an ode to Yves Klein and his International Klein Blue, and by extension to the abstract monochromatic paintings in art? Tintin akei Kongo (2015), on the other hand, is a version of Hergé’s Tintin au Congo (1931), the second volume in the series of The Adventures of Tintin, which became, 60 years after its release, increasingly controversial for both its racist colonial attitude toward Congolese people (as being infantile and stupid) and for its glorification of big-game hunting. Despite this, Tintin au Congo is considered one of the most successful albums and has been translated into no fewer than 112 languages, but unfortunately never in the most common language of its origin country. Manouach’s Tintin akei Kongo stays true to Hergé’s version, but is instead written in the Congolese language Lingala, which highlights a blind spot in the expansion of publishing conglomerates. It seems that the book’s paternalistic and clichéd vision of the African continent is being subversively reversed and sent back to the sender as criticism. The third of Manouach’s détournement mentioned here concerns Lewis Trondheim’s album Un monde un peu meilleur, a reboot of his album series Les formidables aventures de Lapinot, created between 1997 and 2004, that depicts animals in human form, strolling through different habitats, such as contemporary urban environments, Paris at the turn of the 20th century, Victorian England, or Wild-West settlements. The main character is the slender rabbit Lapinot, who is accompanied on his adventures by his friends: a cat, two mice, a dog and a duck. However, after the series came to an end, Trondheim published 13 years later in 2017 the album Un monde un peu meilleur, the first in the new series Les nouvelles aventures de Lapinot that takes place in a parallel universe. Once again, Manouach stayed true to the original in his own version but, as in the previous examples, altered just one single element: the book’s format. By outstretching the standard 48cc into a square format of 29 × 29 cm, the panels became deformed and flattened throughout and the characters appear consequently fatter and flabby as if stricken with sudden obesity. The transformation not only demonstrates the impact of the format when reading a work, but might also reflect the state of health of our society today. Juxtaposing Manouach’s three previous books with Blanco raises the question in how far this blank book can be considered a détournement or derivative too? Does Blanco represent less the result of an altering, rerouting

Blanco  149 or hijacking process and instead more an origin or absolute starting point? Either way, while Manouach’s epitext in Blanco explicitly refers to the meta-environment of comic art, books and industry, his book object reveals an even more complex reading if its properties are compared with blank books made by visual artists; be it the color white, the feel of the paper, the sound when leafing through it, the dual identity as a staged prop or a functional notebook. What first comes to mind is the series of six different blank books that Dutch artist herman de vries (1931) made thus far in the course of more than fifty years, between 1960 and 2014. His series of blank books is exemplary of how the typology of the blank book can keep artists busy, and without falling into redundancies. The first book issued, Untitled [wit is overdaad], was self-published and made in Arnhem, in 1960, in an edition of 120 copies, and consequently published a second time in 1961. The 20-page brochure (14.2 × 10.9 cm) includes as its only printed element a short poem in a combination of four different languages (Dutch, French, English, German) that is printed in a pale, nearly invisible white ink on white paper on the third unpaginated page: wit wit is overdaad blanc est surabondance white is superabundance weiss ist übermässig wit wit wit is overdaad. de vries continued this celebration of the “everywhereness” of the color white in 1962 with the 200-pages book titled wit (Dutch for “white”) that was published in collaboration with M.J. Israel in Arnhem in only five copies (21.5 × 20 cm) of which only one remains today, which is in the Hanns Sohm archive of the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. The book contains four white collages made by the artist and a contribution by the poet J.C. Van Schagen on page 5. Although advertised in the colophon, the poet’s text is invisible, and the page remains blank. This ephemeral contribution not only deepens the concept of the book, but also the abstraction of its subject. Five years later, 1967, Edition Hansjörg Mayer in Stuttgart published the Dutch-German titled wit weiss—according to the artist a revised edition of the previous wit. With a print run of 500 copies, the book has an increased number of 250 pages (16 × 12 cm), while the poet Van Schagen is once more mentioned as author of the invisible introduction. Again, 13 years later in 1980, de vries published with the Artists Press in Bern a second revised edition, wit– white– (including two dashes). With its 362 unpaginated pages, it is the most voluminous book (21 × 14.8 cm) with the original Dutch title additionally translated into English, Japanese and Sanskrit, the latter

150  Moritz Küng represented with a symbol meaning “white” (in the sense of bright, pure and immaculate). In order to achieve a completely blank and voided book, here the title was no longer printed on the cover as in the previous 1967 edition, but on a removable belly band that contains on its flaps the following paratext written in three languages (Dutch, English, German): About this universal book, which neutralizes all contradictions whose content is intelligible to everyone which resolves all problems and isolates nothing of reality at the expenses or for the benefit of any aspect, remains to be said that it represents a positive contribution to the synthesis of all. Although advertised in an edition of 5,000 copies, only 100 were actually printed. After another 32 years have passed, wit– white– from 1980 was reissued in 2012 by the French publishing house Zédélé Éditions in Brest within its newly created series Reprint Collection (an initiative and collaboration with the two artists’ book experts Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Clive Phillpot). As an almost true-to-original replica (354 pages, 21 × 15 cm), the belly band contains here an additional French translation of the artist’s statement, while an extra bookmarker summarizes all the previous blank book editions in a bilingual overview (English, French). Allegedly printed in 1,000 copies, this version has now been defined as Open Edition with a non-specified, unlimited number of copies (knowingly a euphemism in the printing world). The most recent blank book in the series of de vries is titled white and published in 2014 as part of the four-volume monograph all white no thing on the occasion of two simultaneous solo exhibitions in Schiedam, the Netherlands: all (at the city museum), and no thing (at the cultural center De Ketelfabriek). Bound together in an envelope, this edition (16.8 × 12.3 cm, 1,000 copies) contains two catalogues of the respective exhibition venues, a gatefold with two DVDs, and the 96-pages blank book with a belly band. British artist Keith Godard (1952) published in 1973 Sounds, a “paper sample book” of 64 pages that was twice reissued in 1992 and 2007 (20 × 20 cm, edition size not noted). It offers the reader the sensual experience of turning the pages, feeling the texture of the paper and listening to the variety of sounds that emerge during the act of leafing through without the distraction of words. Intended to be a tactile score, the sequences of different sheets of paper—craft paper, tissue, glassine, offset, and the like—figure in their own right while ending in crescendo: the last two pages made of stiff cardboard are pasted together with two Velcro strips and consequently make the most striking noise when detached from each other. The colophon in the front of the book as the only text reads: “Except for what you are reading on this page this book has no words or printed images. It is as the title suggests a book about sounds. These pages in sequence make a quite drama of subtle noises. By turning, rustling and fumbling the pages you will find all that is intended.”

Blanco  151 The Italian Luciano Bartolini (1948–1994) intended something similar with his 1976 book papierselbstdarstellung (28 pages, 23 × 18 cm, 150 copies) by emphasizing the material rather than the sensual properties of a book. Assembled from brownish sandpapers of different granulations, the central part of the book is interspersed with some thinner uncoated gray papers. Next to the tautologic title—a German expression coined by the artist, meaning self-portraying paper—the haptic emphasizes the distinct characteristics and feel of the different papers. However, only two years later, in 1978, Bartolini paraphrased with ‘come feticcio’ (48 pages, 20 × 14 cm) the blank book as a fetish which is probably the most adequate description of the phenomenon. Published on the occasion of the group exhibition Annotazione di definizione de un feticcio (“Annotation of definition of a fetish”) at Galleria Schema, Florence, the unprinted book block was adorned with a gilded edge to underline the subtle irony of this book work and its title, set between quotation marks. In a review of the artist’s works, Marco Meneguzzo noted: Bartolini’s characteristic delicacy applies not only to the physical character of the material, but also to the suppleness of the action, deliberately nonideological and nonpolitical yet always tending to diverge from its own norm or violate its internal logic. (2000) The book Nudisme that American artist Jason Fulford (1973) self-published in 2010 is a surrogate and as such referencing a film prop. The handsome edition (64 pages, 23 × 15 cm) is a replica as it was used in a scene at the beginning of Jean Cocteau’s movie Le testament d’Orphée (1960), a contemporary interpretation of the Greek drama Orpheus and Eurydice that was set in an Existentialist, post-war Paris. At the moment when a leading literary figure (an editor, played by Henri Crémieux) meets in a street café the protagonist (the poet Orphée, played by Jean Marais) so that the former could show the latter the latest publication of his protegé, the following short dialogue unfolds: (Orpheus, observing the crowd): (Editor, whispering in his ear):

(Orpheus):

 ho is this young drunkard who has W just treated me so kindly and who seems not to despise luxury? That’s Jacques Cégeste, a poet. He’s  eighteen, and the world adores him. The Princess who accompanies him commands the magazine where he just published his first poem. This Princess is really beautiful and  elegant…

152  Moritz Küng (Editor, revealing a printed matter): S he’s foreign, she can’t do without our circles. Here, that’s her magazine… (Orpheus): I only see blank pages! (Editor): It’s called Nudisme. (Orpheus): Mmm, but it’s absurd. (Editor):  Less absurd than if it were full of absurd writing. No excess is absurd … in fact, your biggest flaw is simply knowing where you might be going too far. (Orpheus, annoyed): The audience itself. (Editor, sipping his vermouth): Is that so… As scholar Craig Dworkin noted at the very first page of his book No Medium: “Orpheus’s dismissal is the typical response of an establishment put upon by the avant-garde and unwilling to assimilate a gesture (ce geste) [derived from the name of Orpheus’ opponent Jacques Cégeste] of radical reduction” (2013: 5). Somewhere between the pages one encounters a smaller piece of yellowish paper that reproduces both a film still of the scene and a shorter excerpt of this dialogue. Nudisme seems—within its conceptual framework and by alluding to another source and book mockup—to be closest to Blanco. However, Manouach’s book could also refer to one of the most common categories among blank books that appear regularly for decades, the blank notebook made by an artist. To mention just a few: Journey Book by Sigurdur Gudmundsson [Paris, 1977], Notizen by Olaf Nicolai [Rome, 1998], Exercise Book by Karen Willey [Arnhem, 2006], Today I Wrote Nothing by Dora Garcia [Brussels: 2009], Paper Rehabilitation Project by the I.T.U.– International Typographycal Union collective [Detroit, 2011], Cahier de Chantenay by Julien Nédélec [Nantes, 2014] and Empty Days by Christos Lialios & Katerina Vazoura [Athens, 2017]. The last one, for example, is intended to be used as a year calendar. The book block is assembled from twelve different signatures of 32 pages, each based on a different contrasting white paper from different suppliers and consequently varying in weight, brightness, stiffness and quality for each month (e.g., Munken Polar, 90 gsm for January; Velvet Premium3 White, 80 gsm for February; Munken Kristall 120 gsm for March; Upm Fine-A White, 70 gsm for April; Opale Fabric Pure White, 100 gsm for May, and so on). The blurb on the back cover states what eventually could be applied to any other blank and unprinted book: “The intention is to offer spatial freedom in your dealings with time. Opening into emptiness, this book can be filled as you wish. Anytime.” This brief glimpse into some of innumerable books with repeated blank pages only proves how relative (if not paternalistic) Frank Stella’s famous dictum and unofficial slogan of minimalist practice was: “What you see is what you see.” But it also shows how unique Manouach’s Blanco is in the

Blanco  153 comics arena, and how it can effortlessly and naturally connect with books by visual artists to blur the long-overdue boundaries between these two artistic realms. What is undeniable, however, is that the unprinted blank pages of all these books are ultimately full of meaning. Or to keep it with Gilles Deleuze, who stated in his lecture “La peinture et la question des concepts”: “Une page blanche ça manque de rien” (“A blank page lacks nothing”; 1981: p. 4, 3rd paragraph). Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles. “‘La peinture et la question des concepts.‘ Lecture held at the l’Université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis, 7 April 1981”, transcription by Véronique Boudon [online: https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/lectures/fr/ Deleuze_Lecture_19810407_Full_Transcript_0.pdf]. Dworkin, Craig. No Medium. The MIT Press, 2013. Gibbs, Michael. All or Nothing – An anthology of blank books. Derbyshire: RGAP– Research Group for Artists Publications, 2005. Meneguzzo, Marco. Luciano Bartolini, MAMbo [review Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna]. In: Artforum, May issue, vol. 38, no. 9, 2000, [online: https://www. artforum.com/print/reviews/200005/luciano-bartolini-567]. Moura, Pedro. “Ilan Manouach–Les Schtroumpfs Noirs,” in Du9. L’autre bande dessinée webzine, 2014, [online: https://www.du9.org/en/chronique/les-schtroumpfsnoirs-2/]

Part 3

Rethinking the Pasts and the Futures of Comics

10 Manouach Contrabandier Countering Practices to Industrial Publishing Morvandiau

The anthropologist Jack Goody (Goody 1977) reminded us that the first known traces of a complete writing system—around 3000 BC—are correlated with the notions of list, inventory and accounting. After the Neolithic period, the practice of agriculture led to problems of productivity and storage of harvests, the data of which were archived, transmitted and compared thanks to their written formalization on tablets. For its part, the Bande dessinée - which does not yet bear this name—was invented in the 19th century with Rodolphe Töpffer in a manner consubstantial with industrialization, particularly in its relationship to the evolution of technical means of reproduction and distribution, then in connection with the successive forms adopted by capitalism. Born in 1980, the Greek author and researcher Ilan Manouach develops an artistic practice that crosses questionings on language and representations with the intrinsic tensions of a sector situated at the crossroads of creation and industry. These aesthetic and political questions can also be found in his other practices. As a musician, he composes and plays saxophone in various contemporary groups and repertoires. As a publisher, he leads the publishing house Topovoros, which literally means “locavore: that which consumes local food products.” Based in the Athenian neighborhood of Exarcheia, it proposes essays by researchers and activists in (very) short circuits. Close to La 5e Couche publishing house, based in Brussels where he was a student, Ilan Manouach can deploy his research in a context where alternative publishing initiatives are flourishing. The disappearance of the press of French-speaking culture throughout the 1980s and 1990s provoked the mobilization of authors born 25 years earlier and eager to control their own creative media. This impulse was first concretized in the form of collective publications such as Lapin, Mokka, Frigo, Le cheval sans tête, Jade or Ferraille—and then by the publication of comic books that critically distinguished themselves from the traditional Franco-Belgian album. This generation of author-publishers, whose editorial structures persist to this day, distinguishes itself from the alternatives of the 1960s and 1970s by the durability and continuing influence of their actions. Having crossed and survived for 30 years to several crises, internal as well as external, and aroused the DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-14

158 Morvandiau awakening of a second generation (from the years 2000 to 2010), this movement, abundant and diverse, that I group under the denomination of contrebande, thus provides on the duration a rich matter to observations and interrogations. In the general economic context of the 1990s, which saw concentrations multiplying to the benefit of international groups, the contrebande (re) invested forgotten and new fields. Because of their low short-term profitability, these spaces were ignored or abandoned by industrial publishing: formal experimentation (from the Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle— OuBaPo—to abstract comics, including experiments crossing other disciplinary universes such as the works of Jochen Gerner, which were conceived as installations, or those of Alex Baladi and Vincent Fortemps, confronting music and dance, or those of the Knock Outsider label (dialoguing with Art Brut), critical theory, reediting of heritage works, and translation of unknown or neglected authors … All these publications resulting from the contrebande have largely contributed to the widening of its readership, to the valorization of its history and to the legitimization of the discipline. This is particularly relevant when one observes how a proper space was gradually devoted to comic art in non-specialized bookshops. Publisher and former director of the distributor Le Comptoir des Indépendants, Latino Imparato (Imparato 2006: 218) explains: Like a good part of the readers, most of the booksellers were unaware that autobiography or political or social themes could be published in comics. The big trigger was the realization that their customers, the buyers of novels or humanities, were attracted to these types of comics. (all translations mine, except where noted) It is in this very interstice that Ilan Manouach initiates projects that also work on the memory and the critical dimension of comics as well as its apprehension as a language in its own right. Proceeding to the rereading of some of the classics of the domain, he bases a part of his actions, in the line of the conceptual art of a Sol LeWitt, on a simple and recurring protocol: to reproduce identically, generally without the agreement of the author or the concerned rights holders, a given work, from A to Z, by applying to it, however, a single but systematic transformation. This transformation—varying from one book to another—induces a disruption of meaning and renews the questioning as to the original work and, more widely, as to the functioning of the sector. Intrinsically political, willingly provocative, these questionings in action are received differently by the actors of the milieu and the readers, sometimes in a peremptory way. Katz, a re-appropriation of Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece, Maus, is one of the most immediately controversial ones, because of the book’s notoriety and sensitive theme—the account of a father-witness to his son-author of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. Reproducing the original work in its

Manouach Contrabandier  159 entirety by replacing all the characters, who were originally portrayed as different species (the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Poles as pigs, etc.), as cats, Ilan Manouach points out the risk of essentializing the protagonists, while at the same time questioning the possibilities opened up by the remix in comics. In addition to Art Spiegelman’s initial refusal to authorize the project and the strong reaction by Flammarion (the French publisher) after its publication—they judicially forced La 5e Couche to destroy all of Katz’s copies—Ilan Manouach’s proposal thus elicited comments such as “This is clearly only a big fat joke” “Is this really all that’s left of the counter-­culture?” or “This is what’s been going on since the comic book writers started showing off in art school” (Löwenthal and Manouach 2013: 129–131). It seems to us, and this is what the present chapter intends to demonstrate, that the author’s work is not reducible to this undeniable propensity for provocation. Quite the contrary, it raises eminently fertile and contemporary questions about the role, the contradictions and the potentialities of the comic book sector in particular and of artistic creation in general. Doors and windows opened by contrebande Let’s first go back to the appearance of the contrebande and the gaps it opened. By not being satisfied with the confidentiality of the margins, nor with the logics of marketing and occupation of the industry, the authors of the contrebande reinvest, in a spirit of self-management, the chain of the book as a political space. They propose aesthetic alternatives—to those that we have already evoked above is added the comic strip of non-fiction (from autobiography to reportage), today often assimilated to the graphic novel— but also editorial and commercial (preponderance of non-profit structures, refusal of the overproduction, very limited recourse to the paper pulper, revision of the contracts in favor of the authors, etc.). If the contrebande is circumscribed to the French-speaking domain, it is certainly part of an intercontinental evolution of the 9th art. As Daniel Pellegrino, co-founder of the Atrabile publishing house in Geneva, sums it up: Very early on, we realized … that we were sharing things with people from all over the world through comics as we practiced them, and that in fact there were no borders! As much as comics and superheroes were very American, as much as Smurfs were very Franco-Belgian … as much as autobiography or intimate stories, you could find them all over the world, we could publish each other, without cultural barriers. (interview with the author, Geneva, Switzerland, 2017) The conception of the comic strip as a language in its own right defended by the contrebande finds, at the end of 1999, its paradigmatic expression in the publication by the editions L’Association of Comix 2000. This imposing object, whose format reminds a dictionary, gathers 324 authors from 29

160 Morvandiau different countries on 2,000 pages. Each of them deals with a theme of the 20th century in a black-and-white silent story, limited to 15 pages maximum. In addition to the Western modalities of reading sense, the work comes as close as possible to a form of international language. Structurally, the mobilization of the contrebande crystallizes around the creation of a dedicated common company of distribution, Le Comptoir des Indépendants (which operated between 1999 and 2011), and then, around the foundation of the Syndicat des Éditeurs Alternatifs (SEA) in 2015, which, to date, includes 50 publishing houses. Without being exclusive, two figures dominate the contrebande: on the one hand, from a structural point of view, that of the author-publisher; on the other hand, from an aesthetic point of view, that of the complete author, that is, the draftsman and scriptwriter of a given project at the same time. The first figure comes from the very circumstances of the appearance of the contrebande. Faced with the absence of supports for creation, authors of the same generation decide to become their own publishers but also of some of their peers. “Creating a publishing house, understanding how it is made, is a way to better think about your work,” explains Olivier Bron (interview with the author, Strasbourg, France, 2019), co-founder of Editions 2024 and president of the SEA. The second figure, the complete author, is linked to the first and logically follows the emergence and affirmation of the notion of “author” in comics. This stems from the liberation of the logic of work-for-hire and the separation of tasks historically developed within the industrial logic of production. Until the 1960s and 1970s, the characters of comic strip occupied indeed more willingly the front of the scene than their own creators. Moreover, within studio work, artists often shared their tasks, and did not sign the work, becoming anonymous either behind either the studio’s name (or the main artist’s) or of the character itself. With the sixties and the affirmation of new, singular and critical voices, which resonate with Yoshihiro Tatsumi through gekiga in Japan, Robert Crumb and underground comix in the United States and complete creators, like Gotlib, Fred or Claire Bretécher, from Pilote and Charlie Mensuel in France, the author took precedence over the hero while the very definitions of the comic strip and the distinction between drawing and script gained in porosity. This phenomenon of decompartmentalization affirmed itself evermore, and the consequent legitimization of the discipline, to which the contrebande actively contributed by its critical, editorial, and authorial advances, continues to this day. In France, on January 15, 2020, the author Catherine Meurisse was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts, an unprecedented institutional event in the comics industry. As the author and theorist Thierry Smolderen exposes it, one can treat the question of the narrative sequence, not as a uniform language (the sequential art) but rather as a(n) (open) family of graphic dialects which is constantly renewed in contact with the emergent technologies, the

Manouach Contrabandier  161 revivals, the imports. The difference in approach is subtle but important, and Töpffer already dealt with it in his critique of imitation: a “maker” will always approach the question of imitating life as if there were a good, efficient, technical solution to any problem, without realizing that the language he refers to is academic and uniform. A true author is conscious of navigating at every moment in a graphic Tower of Babel: by choosing to evoke (ironically or not) this or that visual dialect, he takes a position, and defends a point of view with regard to the question of life, freedom and variety of thought. (Smolderen 2009: 140) Distance as a tool By reinterpreting works that are central references (The Adventures of Tintin, Peanuts, Maus, Corto Maltese …), Ilan Manouach’s approach is part of a logic of distance—“formal distance” and “geopolitical” that he himself explicitly claims in an essay opening one of his recent works (“Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice”, 2021: 6). In 2020, still with La 5e Couche publishing house, he took as his source a production resulting from the contrebande, Un monde un peu meilleur, Les nouvelles aventures de Lapinot by Lewis Trondheim. This way, Ilan Manouach points out the games of influence and reciprocal intertwining that bind a historical alternative publisher with the industrial sector from which it had nevertheless historically and firmly differentiated itself. While Jean-Christophe Menu (co-founder, like Lewis Trondheim, of L’Association) denounced, in 2005, under the expression “48 CC”—for 48 pages, hardback (cartonné), color—the standardization of formats imposed by the Franco-Belgian mainstream, Lewis Trondheim chooses, in 2017, to adopt this same format for the new episode of his character Lapinot. Ilan Manouach pirates and republishes the entire book in a square format, “extended”. By choosing a title—Un monde un peu meilleur (literally, “A little better world”)—from one of the best-known and best-selling artists from L’Association’s catalog, Ilan Manouach turns his irony toward the friction between contrebande and industry, and the possible dissolution of the avant-garde in marketing becomes a little more grating. Today, according to the website of La 5e Couche, “this book is withdrawn from sale at the request of L’Association.” As an author, Ilan Manouach is certainly neither the first nor the only one to put this approach into practice. “Distancing is knowing how to manipulate its visual or narrative material as a montage of quotations referred to real history—first and foremost the contemporary history in which the playwright himself is inscribed”, writes Georges Didi-Huberman about the work of Bertolt Brecht (Didi-Huberman 2009: 68). One also remembers that, at the end of the 1950s, the Situationists found in the hijacking of comics a means to denounce the afflictions of the society of the spectacle. Although, in the Katz affair as in most of Ilan Manouach’s hijackings, these re-appropriations

162 Morvandiau are not strictly—neither legally nor in the intention expressed by the author himself—parody (which—since French law authorizes it—would undoubtedly have avoided Katz’s being pulped), the distance generated by these proposals mixes a subtle dose of irony and homage. In the analysis of the parody that he proposes about the painter Édouard Manet, Pierre Bourdieu describes this attitude with double facets: The parody functions like the irony on which the linguists worked much. For there to be irony, it is necessary that with my tongue I say one thing and with my eyes I say something else. ‘How silly of you!’ can be very nice, very affectionate, because, by my whole attitude, I deny the insult. So, for irony to work or for parody to work, you have to hold together the two states of the system. This proves how naive the theories of radical rupture are. (Bourdieu 2013: 373–374) This ambivalent and subversive posture is probably not for nothing in the often-outraged reactions of those who deride Ilan Manouach’s works. This is what a symbolic revolutionary is: it is someone who, completely possessed by a system, manages to take possession of it by turning the mastery he has of this system against this system. … This is treason par excellence. There is nothing worse. The system does not forgive those who sell out. (Bourdieu 2013: 377–378) Does Ilan Manouach, like Édouard Manet in his time, operate a complete and successful symbolic revolution? It is difficult to answer this question definitively about an artistic practice so temporally close to us. In any case, if we stick to a sociological perspective, the explanation of the place and of the possible relevance in history of the artist’s appropriations cannot be found exclusively in his personality, charisma or individual talent. Both an outsider of the comics milieu, because of his origins outside its historical centers, and an insider, due to his training at the Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels, his international professional network and his knowledge of the book chain, Ilan Manouach points out the contradictions of an artistic field which, by definition, evolves in time and becomes autonomous by regularly (re)defining its own aesthetic milestones. Within the field of painting, Édouard Manet navigated between academism and avant-garde, each of these sub-fields fighting itself to impose their own category and their own definition of the discipline upon the other. Pierre Bourdieu evokes the “cleaved habitus” of the painter, who seeks recognition, both institutional and critical, but at the same time plays with it to subvert the norms. The position of Ilan Manouach, subjected to tensions that it feeds in part, seems to us to be situated in this place when it questions Maus, created by one of the pillars of the American avant-garde

Manouach Contrabandier  163 whose name is henceforth systematically associated with this classic, or the evolution of L’Association, emblematic structure of the contrebande which, from the 1990s onwards, questioned with virulence the dominant aesthetic and operational routines of the sector. Beyond the author’s personality, let us note that Manouach’s approach is indeed anchored in a particular period for an artistic discipline that has joined, with music, cinema and video games, what is now commonly called the creative industries. Unlike the “cultural industries”, as defined by Theodor Adorno in 1947, creative industries do not systematically refer to the notion of intellectual property rights (Unesco 2012). These creative industries advocate for, like the rest of contemporary industry, continuous innovation (and, implicitly, programmed obsolescence) and consequently require a close proximity between marketing and research and development (R&D). In the field of comics, as Jean-Christophe Menu denounced in 2005 under the term of “recuperation” (2005), industrial publishing has thus generalized and amplified the idea of considering the contrebande as a real (and inexpensive) R&D department: the industry invests these thematic and editorial niches identified as commercially promising or prescriptive in terms of notoriety, and it associates itself with a part of the authors discovered by the contrebande. Only recently, the French publishers Misma and Cornelius announced respectively the departure of authors Simon Hanselmann and Daniel Clowes, spearheads of their catalogs, whose work they have largely contributed to make known in Europe and elsewhere, to major publishing groups. For 30 years, that is, concomitantly with the appearance of the contrebande, the profound global upheavals—economic, political, cultural—have been at once illustrated, embodied and accelerated by the appearance and development of digital technologies—a particularly glaring phenomenon for the creative industries. As book historian Robert Darnton notes, the impact of this contemporary revolution is greater than that of the Gutenbergian revolution. It has penetrated everyday life at an astonishing rate and on a global scale—despite an undeniable digital divide to the detriment of developing countries—while the movable metal type printing press was for three-quarters of a century confined to a scholarly elite, and for the most part within Western Europe. (Darnton 2021: 724) With the generalization of mobile technological supports, first of all that of cell phones in the 1990s, and the evolution of algorithms, the economy of attention, which had been born with the mass media at the beginning of the 20th century, reached an unprecedented turning point (Citton 2014; Beckouche 2017: 153–166). The publishing world is also strongly affected by these transformations, which affect the logistical aspects of manufacturing and marketing, the evolution of uses and the nature of the readership, as well as the artistic practices

164 Morvandiau themselves. In France, between the birth of the contrebande and today, digital creation within the comics milieu takes several successive tracks but does not really manage to find a stable economic model (Baudry 2018). Even if, as the critic Xavier Guilbert underlines, the digital comic strip represents a promising potential market, the codex has not been eclipsed by the digital creations’ profit. On the contrary, the progressive computerization of the chain of distribution and the centralization of the orders had an effect of “rationalization” of the implementations compared to the historical, with as structural consequence a decrease of the sales. Publishers have responded to this for the most part by increasing the number of books they publish each year, since they now have the capacity to do so. (Guilbert 2021: 63) In fact, in the last 30 years, the general volume of new comics’ titles in France has been multiplied by ten, and the stakes of competition, and even sheer visibility in bookstores, have been consequently reinforced. Therefore, this industrial logic of overproduction exacerbated the tensions it establishes with a contrebande that maintains, on its side, a production on a more restricted scale. If, as the sociologist Dominique Cardon notes, far from disrupting social hierarchies, as Wired and the prophets of the network have so much proclaimed, the connected expressiveness of the engaged of the Internet has undoubtedly transformed more the modalities of exercise of the domination than the social composition of the dominants. (Cardon 2012: 30) then Ilan Manouach pleads to acknowledge therefore the matter-of-factness of the available technological tools and certainly not in terms of a reified glorification based on questions of progress or innovation. Rather as an acceleration of the dissolution of industry’s entrenched roles and their old-fashioned values of artistic integrity. (Manouach 2021: 10) In his view, “the economically disinterested artist [is] a fiction” (Manouach 2021: 24), so it is not surprising that Manouach’s critical approach would provoke a reaction from both the industry’s editorial proponents and the contrebandiers. The major publishing groups, through the voice of the president of the Syndicat National de l’Édition (SNE), Vincent Montagne (who is also the general manager of the Média Participations group), tended to deny, to a larger extent, the very professional status to creators in highly precarious

Manouach Contrabandier  165 situations. In 2018, two years after a study by the États Généraux de la Bande Dessinée had shown that 36% of French authors were living below the poverty line, Montagne suggested that an “author’s job becomes a job when you can live off it” (Beytout 2018). The authors of the contrebande, in reference to the naiveté of a position that emphasizes disinterestedness—which translates into the need for authors to have an income-generating activity at the same time—distinguish themselves above all by their interest for artistic uniqueness. The reconfiguration of sharing In France, the new practices of exchange of formerly analog productions linked to the Internet, mainly between amateurs of the digital native generation, were at first seen as threats within the industry. In the fields of music and cinema but also comics—in particular in connection with the massive arrival of manga in scanlation form which concerns the same age group—these peerto-peer exchanges were denounced as piracy. In 2009, the HADOPI law, commissioned by the French government to, and brainstormed by, the boss of FNAC, a chain of French cultural supermarkets, was promulgated. The main goal of such a law was supposed to sanction and prevent such piracy outrages. However, as historian of visual cultures André Gunthert explains: During the 2000s, it became clear that another paradigm shift of equivalent magnitude [to cinema] was underway. The Internet, and particularly the interactive web, was profoundly changing cultural practices. Whereas regulated circulation of intellectual works allowed for the preservation of their control, the new fluidity of cultural goods favored their appropriation outside any legal or commercial framework. The very act of sharing has become the signature of the cultural operation. … By claiming to defend artists’ incomes, by presenting the conditions of cultural contribution as those of a craft industry subject to the adage “any effort deserves a salary,” the industrial lobbies have reduced the figure of genius that structures the modern thought of art to nothing, and have awkwardly revealed cultural production as an economic enterprise. Far from making piracy odious, the defense of intellectual property has contributed to making the Internet one of the last bastions of culture as a common good. For the appropriative practices that we observe online do not aim at a simple transfer of property, a displacement of the monopoly of exploitation from one actor to another, but on the contrary a pooling of contents designated as cultural goods by the very act of sharing. (Gunthert 2015: 96, 101–102) One of the corollaries of these technological evolutions—of which the Katz case is an edifying illustration—is a redeployed definition of the notion of author and of the technical possibilities of exploitation and transformation

166 Morvandiau of a work by one or several third parties, often under the cover of anonymity. For example, Peanuts minus Schulz was a digitally native project before being printed as a massive book, and the variations that its micro-laborers made on the work of Ilan Manouach are not only the result of the work of the artist himself, but also of the “more than a thousand artists in twenty different countries” (Manouach 2021: 8) that he subcontracted to perform the manual reinterpretation of the Peanuts strips in the book. Bear in mind that Ilan Manouach is also a musician, so that the variations that these micro-workers execute of the original work of Charles Schulz constitute, in an obvious way, a collective work of which Manouach would be, not the complete author, but the conductor. According to the poet and founder of the UbuWeb site, devoted to the avant-garde, Kenneth Goldsmith, “mimesis and copying do not abolish authorship, but rather substitute new demands on the author, who must take these new conditions as part of the landscape when conceiving a work of art: if you don’t want it to be copied, don’t put it online” (Goldsmith 2018: 18). Although Spiegelman’s Maus and Schulz’ Peanuts were not originally conceived as digital objects by their original authors, the generalisation of digital uses has changed the very relationship we have with these works. In this age of accessible and instant digitization brought within reach as soon as the first smartphone came along, we could even outperform Goldsmith’s statement by adding, “if you don’t want it to be copied, don’t show your work of art to anyone.” It is also in this logic of sharing that Manouach constitutes two online libraries related to conceptual comics, Monoskop and UbuWeb, discussed in detail by Benoît Crucifix in Chapter 12. The contrebande against the grain? Digital space, insofar as it favors the porosity of disciplines, the internationalization of the networks and the direct relation of the author to his readership, but also as it questions the specificities of the comic strip and puts back on the table the relations of the collective and individual creation, resounds with the first motivations of the contrebande. However, the digital space has not been massively invested by the contrebande. Its exploration remains limited to a few seeking heads. Among them, Lisa Mandel understands and invests quickly these new modes of diffusion, from the blogs to the social networks where she remains very active today. In 2021, under this interest, she created, on the model of the participative financing, the editions Exemplaire. Pierre La Police, author, both on print and digital, of Les praticiens de l’infernal (2012–2022), summarizes the possibilities and the obstacles he sees thus: Immediately, I thought that the iPhone could be a tool perfectly suited to distribute my comics. The format of the screen is homothetic of the one of my panels, which are all of the same format, and which I always thought should be presented individually rather than assembled in pages.

Manouach Contrabandier  167 … To publish digitally was to return to my beginnings, with my fanzines in photocopies that I distributed in small numbers, all by myself. I wanted to find this relation without intermediary, directly between author and readers. … For me, comics are the basis of a universe that I could develop into innovative video games, applications, some free, others paying. But, before continuing, I need to know if the company can be economically viable, because I want to pay my employees. (Beaujean 2011) In addition to the fragility of its economic model, the symbolic and cultural bias probably explains the limited expansion of digital comics in France, relative to, say, the United States, Korea or Japan (Baudry 2018; Guilbert 2021). On the one hand, the readership of the Franco-Belgian heritage, an older generation not that much inclined to read via digital supports, reveals a first reticence from the industrial side toward it. On the other hand, it is a little bit different for the contrebande even if the generational aspect is not excluded either. Indeed, the velocity of the digital upheavals marks an abrupt jump in the practices for a part of the historical authors-publishers of the contrebande, born in the years 1960–70, who witnessed, as adults, the effective realization of the projections of the science fiction of their adolescence. The use of FaceTime and Google Earth, the editing of images within reach of every and any user, or the possibilities of 3D printers so banal today are but recent fantasies come true within a single generation. As someone who began his own professional career in the French national press in 1996, I remember drawing comic strips in large format—able to go through a reduction which guaranteed acceptable printable definition—which I then faxed over—no email yet!—to a Parisian editorial office. But above all, and to a large extent, especially for this fringe of the sector, of humanist and libertarian inspiration, digital technology appeared as a Trojan horse for neo-liberal models and a financialized economy imported from the United States. Contrastively, Ilan Manouach’s generation, which was 20 years old in 2000 and less directly linked to this ideological heritage of the sixties, is more ready to seize the possibilities and the stakes of the digital. Within the contrebande, the duo Ruppert & Mulot propose, for example, several interactive experiences. Sometimes successively and involving other people, these experiences take place on the web, under the guises of an exhibition or a signing-performance, but also on print. Another good example is brought by Hécatombe editions, created in 2004 in Geneva, which created the Collection RVB in 2018. The departing idea is to sell at bookstores, at a modest price, a paper card containing a code allowing access to online content. They present their project as follows: We defend a quality of reading that is still too rare on the screens. Comics designed for digital, interactive but focused on reading, clickable and navigable but without becoming games. And gathered on a

168 Morvandiau platform intended to last over time, with an editorial line. We want to build a catalog. To take care of publishing works on a screen as we would in a book. Because we all come from that world and we still believe in it. (https://collectionrvb.com/apropos) Polyglot outsiders Within the contemporary creative profusion, whether it takes a digital or printed form, Ilan Manouach’s gaze stands out by its political acuity, that is to say by his will to embrace and make salient the details of a landscape that is both quotidian and globalized. Questioning the rethinking of the conditions of enunciation, production, diffusion and reception generated by digital uses, and, even if it means knowingly challenging authors, publishers and readers on the ground of established norms, he acts as a revelator of the hidden biases of our representations. Tintin akei Kongo (Manouach 2015), a reworking and translation of the adventures of Tintin in the Congo into Lingala, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first spoken language, thus masterfully highlights the choices made by those behind a successful series that has been translated into 112 languages but did not include that very same language. With his caustic words and his love of comics as a culture, Manouach seems to us to be an integral part of a family of polyglot outsiders (to our knowledge, he is fluent in at least Greek, French and English), who spur and invent forms. This group would include the Dutchman Willem, the Canadian Julie Doucet, the South African Anton Kannemeyer and the Lebanese Mazen Kerbaj. All of them have in common the combination of a culture situated at the crossroads of various multilingual and geopolitical spaces, the assiduous frequentation of multiple artistic universes (comics, political drawing, poetry, music, contemporary art) straddling the underground and institutions, and an experience of the book chain as editors (either of their own work or that of other creators). Their singular voice, tinged with irony—more inclined to shake up than to entertain, unknown to larger audiences and even to a significant part of the professionals yet highly celebrated by others—carries in itself, jointly, an impregnation and a decentering vis-à-vis the Franco-Belgian cosmogony. Whereas the didactic comic strip, largely inspired by the experiments of the contrebande and henceforth very in vogue, is often reduced to a recipe agreed, reassuring and delivered vertically, these authors, convinced of the benefits of the rupture, ask more questions than they bring answers and adopt the tone and the maieutic of the ignorant master (Rancière 1987). In this book, the French philosopher challenges the traditional vertical relationship between teacher and student. He advocates a pedagogy that emancipates rather than a teaching that controls and transmits content. Here again, one can recognize in this attitude, the

Manouach Contrabandier  169 strangeness of distancing: on the one hand, it shows to provoke a demonstration; on the other hand, it shows to produce a dismantling. … [T]he distancing is an operation of knowledge which aims, by the means of the art a possibility of critical glance on the history. (Didi-Huberman 2009: 69) Ilan Manouach’s proposals are certainly strange. Some of them push even further the use and the questioning of digital capacities by creating the work itself through the training of an artificial intelligence. The two most recent projects, The Neural Yorker, randomly generated humor drawings shared on social networks, and Le VTT comme je l’aime (2022), a comic strip published in a collection exploring the field of pornography, were created in collaboration with the engineer Yannis Siglidis. Both titles confront the cold mechanics of the computer process with humor and sexual human impulses, core movers of these most solicited editorial genres and emotional springs— alongside indignation—of the addictive algorithms of social networks. Both refer to culturally very established codes, and therefore by essence arbitrary: on the one hand, the distinguished and nonsensical humor of The New Yorker, which is expressed in the form of a drawing underlined by a short caption, on the other hand, pornography, a domain often associated with vulgarity and a form of semi-clandestinity, which usually functions by categories of gender and sexual orientation, staging the stereotypes that result from it. If other authors of comics, such as Massimo Mattioli, Mark Newgarden or Johnny Ryan have previously challenged the codes of humor and pornography, twisted the relationship between text and image and pushed the lexical and aesthetic clichés of mass media to their limits, the entry into play of an artificial intelligence increases the quirkiness of the proposals: the drawings of The Neural Yorker are only distantly related to the figurative register and therefore leave a large part of interpretation to the reader who tries to find a correspondence of the image with the text while perceiving an overall harmony of the series, whereas the short episodes that make up Le VTT comme je l’aime leave a lot of room for a descriptive text that comes under the heading of cut-up—the narrative as well as the identity and species of the characters being shifting and difficult to grasp—partly masking the images that the usual conventions of pornography would put forward at the expense of the text. In both cases, the disconcerting reading experience, amusing at times by its incongruity, at others wearying and even hypnotic (or vice versa) by the repetition of the process, is constantly referred to the status and modes of production of the works presented: What am I really reading and looking at? Who is the author addressing me? Is the digital flow generating these productions infinite? What are and where do the references and mixed representations that resonate in me come from? In 1920, Tristan Tzara wrote instructions to write a Dada poem. Even though the techniques and the stakes have respectively changed in nature and scope after a whole century, one cannot be

170 Morvandiau but struck by the similarities with Ilan Manouach’s approach, who, like the Romanian artist, wishes to usher his work into a new media and cultural era: To make a Dadaist poem Take a newspaper. Take scissors. Choose an article in the newspaper that is the length you want to use for your poem. Cut out the article. Then carefully cut out each of the words that make up that article and put them in a bag. Shake gently. Then take out each cut one after the other. Copy them carefully in the order they left the bag. The poem will look like you. And there you are, a writer of infinite originality and charming sensibility, though misunderstood by the vulgar. (Tzara, 1921) By way of conclusion To conclude, at least provisionally, it seems notable to us that, to date, all of Ilan Manouach’s conceptual and digital comics, as he defines them (even if we admit that the drawings of The Neural Yorker escape the notion of sequential art), find their full expression in the traditional form of the codex. This object, by the sheer possibility it offers of a spatialization of the narrative (understood in the broad sense) produced by the succession of fixed and interdependent images, defines historically a framework for the comic art. Ilan Manouach also inscribes his work in this framework, the critical part of which nevertheless relies in his ability to take into consideration the changing technological and anthropological realities of the last 30 years. Like Yves Citton, Manouach promotes an “ecology of attention” (Citton 2021) that takes into account the whole ecosystem articulating industrial production, consumption and mass media. As Jack Goody noted about the upheavals that appeared with alphabetic writing: What is culture, after all, if not a series of acts of communication? Variation in modes of communication is often as important as variation in modes of production, for it implies an expansion both of relations between individuals and of the possibilities of storage, analysis, and creation in the order of knowledge. (Goody, 1977: 86) By affirming that the digital comic strip “ultimately contributes to the formation of a new reader’s sensibility and (anti-)authorial ethos,” Ilan Manouach

Manouach Contrabandier  171 (Manouach 2021: 11) thus elaborates an ambitious artistic project. Always on the move, keeping one foot in creation and another in research, he diversifies his projects within an experimental, limited but resolutely international zone. In 2015, and then in 2018, he published successively two works in association with art publishers from a dozen countries, Harvested and Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics. The repertoire of tactile forms Shapereader, something designed beyond and outside of the codex form, that he has been developing since 2015, found several forms of interaction: first, by having it interpreted as a form of tactile comic strip, and second, in 2021, by inviting 18 musicians from distinct universes to reinterpret this score based solely on their sense of touch. Ilan Manouach thus works to reveal the un-thought of the territories and disciplines he explores, thus revitalizing artistic creation as a critical and universal language, by forging new links between creators, producers and audiences. Rather than turning a blind eye to a “publishing world … that has always been in the vanguard of capitalism” (Manouach 2021: 9), he prefers to question its blind spots but also its potentialities, reminding us that the author, who often sees himself as a solitary worker, is first and foremost the product of a collective history and chain, which is always open to question. Thanks to Nina Cotinat-Lucas and Tanitoc. Works Cited Baudry, Julien. Cases – Pixels, Une histoire de la BD numérique en France. Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, 2018. Beckouche, Pierre. La révolution numérique est-elle un tournant anthropologique? Le Débat n°193. Gallimard, 2017. Beaujean, Stéphane. “Le génial Pierre La Police se lance dans la BD numérique.” Les Inrockuptibles, April 2011. https://www.lesinrocks.com/actu/le-genial-pierre-lapolice-se-lance-dans-la-bd-numerique-97445-18-04-2011/ Beytout, Nicolas. Vincent Montagne: Le secteur du livre est le premier secteur de biens culturels. L’Opinion, March 2018. https://www.lopinion.fr/economie/ vincent-montagne-le-secteur-du-livre-est-le-premier-secteur-de-biens-culturels Bourdieu, Pierre. Manet, une révolution symbolique – cours au Collège de France 1998–2000. Raisons d’agir/Seuil, 2013. Cardon, Dominique. Preface to Fred Turner, Aux sources de l’utopie numérique, De la contre-culture à la cyberculture, Stewart Brand, un homme d’influence, trans. by Laurent Vannini. C&F, 2012. Citton, Yves. Pour une écologie de l’attention. Seuil, 2021. Citton, Yves (under the direction of –). L’économie de l’attention nouvel horizon du capitalisme? La Découverte, 2014. Darnton, Robert. Postface to Yann Sordet, Histoire du livre et de l’édition. Albin Michel, 2021. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Quand les images prennent position, L’œil de l’histoire, 1. Minuit, 2009. Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge Press University, 1977.

172 Morvandiau Goldsmith, Kenneth. L’écriture sans écriture, du langage à l’âge numérique, trans. by François, Bon. Jean Boîte éditions, 2018. Guilbert, Xavier. Panorama de la BD en France, 2010-2020. Centre National du Livre, 2021. Gunthert, André. L’image partagée, La photographie numérique. Textuel, 2015. Imparato, Latino. “Rotations et bibliodiversité.” L’éprouvette #1. L’Association, 2006. La Police, Pierre. Les Praticiens de l’infernal, volumes 1,2, and 3. Cornélius, 2012, 2017, and 2022. Löwenthal, Xavier, and Ilan Manouach, direction. Metakatz. La 5e Couche, 2013. Manouach, Ilan. Le VTT comme je l’aime. Le Monte-en-l’air, 2022. Manouach, Ilan. “Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice.” Peanuts minus Schulz. JBE Books, 2021. Manouach, Ilan. Tintin akei Kongo. La 5e Couche, 2015. Manouach, Ilan. Katz. La 5e Couche, 2013. Menu, Jean-Christophe. Plates-bandes. L’Association, 2005. Rancière, Jacques. Le Maître ignorant. Fayard, 1987. Smolderen, Thierry. Naissances de la bande dessinée. Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2009. Tzara, Tristan. “Pour faire um poème dadaïste.” Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer. La Vie des Lettres, numéro 4, 1921. Unesco. Politiques pour la créativité, 2012: https://fr.unesco.org/creativity/sites/ creativity/files/politiques_pour_la_creativite-fr.pdf

11 Haunted by Tradition Ilan Manouach and the Ghosts of BD Past Barbara Postema

The pages of Ilan Manouach’s collage BD album Compendium of FrancoBelgian Comics release ghosts. Hovering around a reader engaging the work are the spectres of old BD and their creators, as well as of spectres of the owners and readers of these comics past, and possibly even the spectre of the reader’s younger self. The opening pages of Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics suggest that readers encountered these comics when they were young: the ownership is inscribed on the copyright page in the form of various signatures in childish handwriting (Figure 11.1). One inscription shows the album was a gift presented for the feast of St. Nicholas. But while the comics were once treasured possessions, in which one child included his full address presumably to ensure the album would always find its way back to him, eventually the childish ownership is superseded by more mature interests. This apparently inevitable turn of events is implied by the marks on the previous of the album, the title page. Here, approximately 40 prices have been marked by hand, none of them asking for more than five Euros. Both the signatures and the prices have been taken from a random selection of Franco-Belgian comics that Manouach bought to create his compendium. The prices indicate he found the albums in the second-hand bins at comics stores or thrift shops, the comics collection of childhood having been sold or donated. The albums had been waiting in the cheap bin so the cycle of ownership could resume, commerce coming out ahead every time: after all, the fondness for such works remains, since comics are nostalgia generators. But by buying up the albums Manouach has interrupted the cycle. His interventions in these works, Compendium as well as Noirs and Tintin akei Kongo, demonstrate that the childhood fondness for such works may cloud a critical perspective. What Ilan Manouach does with his détournements of these works is rip away the veil of nostalgia and offer them up for examination with a critical eye. Since what this critical look reveals is racism and sexism embedded deeply in these treasured works, the reader may become haunted by their own past privileged innocence that never noticed what had always been there in plain view. The Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics (2018) is made up of material drawn from 48 comics from the Franco-Belgian market.1 The albums represent a range of work published between 1931 (the earliest comic DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-15

174  Barbara Postema

Figure 11.1 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019. Copyright page with multiple ownership signatures

Haunted by Tradition  175 included being Tintin au Congo) through to at least 1989 (which is when the most recent work I have been able to identify, Stan Caïman, Tome 4 was published). Other comics series from which fragments appear in the work include Astérix, Lucky Luke, Gaston, Les Schtroumpfs, Suske en Wiske, Boulle et Bill, Buck Danny, Eric Castel, Michel Vaillant, Ric Hochet, Les tuniques bleues, Agent 212, Billy the Cat, Chick Bill, Dommel, and others. In some cases, more than one album in a series may have been used. Many of the characters are readily identifiable, but the point that the work makes is not that these comics are exceptional but rather that they are ubiquitous and representative of the whole class of comics. They are familiar and recognizable, and also indistinguishable. In my own experience as a comics reader, they were the comics that were always around when I was growing up, at least until I was a teen and started to choose my own reading materials.2 The albums Manouach draws on for his collages are recognizable, but separated from their contexts they do not evoke their original stories, and in fact, in the barrage of their newly composed context, the effect can be quite overwhelming, even almost revolting. Manouach’s comic works up to that effect gradually, first lulling readers into reminiscence and nostalgia with the second-hand bin prices and the children’s signatures. Then the first “story” page (on page 3) opens with some of the expected elements that are normally used to set up the diegesis. There is a title—“Le roi des violons”—and an opening caption to ground the reader in the story’s time and place—“Okinawa, Mars 1945”. The first panel also includes image elements that perform the function of setting the scene: a football stadium and signage. But while the opening page nods to how a traditional Franco-Belgian comic might introduce a story, this page never does start a narrative, and indeed the work as a whole is non-narrative, creating a visual progression only, not a narrative sequence. In his description of the work on his website, Manouach explains: The book reads as an orchestral score whose elements, freed from the imperatives of their specific narratives, are newly layered according to the instrument families of a large ensemble. Their arrangement is directly inspired by different compositional techniques of orchestral music and can also be understood as a hybrid between graphic scores in mid-century contemporary music, concrete poetry and poema proceso, scrapbook traditions and comics.3 If we liken the work to orchestral music, then the first page ends bombastically, after a crescendo of explosions simultaneously functioning as an overture that introduces some of the recurring themes: passive women, violent men, sound and fury. The page also establishes the work’s main means by which it creates a unity out of all the disparate styles and visual elements: the flat light blue background.

176  Barbara Postema Almost all the panels of the Compendium include the blue background, creating a visual unity that ties the work together where there is no ongoing narrative to offer continuity. Some panels include so many other elements that the blue is practically crowded out, yet all panels bar one include the blue (Figure 11.2). The panel is not just exceptional in Compendium because it does not include blue; it is also the panel that contains the fewest alterations of all the panels in the work. It is a direct copy of the panel from the Tintin album, including only one additional element, a speech balloon containing punctuation marks that suggest surprise or alarm. The view in the panel is of Tintin drifting towards a waterfall in a tiny canoe, and the point of view is such that the cascading waterfall dominates the image, surrounded by rocks—the sky is not visible at all. The combination of these two points of departure from the other panels—the lack of blue and the specific point of view—leads to a conclusion to be drawn about all the other panels: the blue in these panels is that of the sky. And indeed, if one leafs through the comics from which the elements of Compendium are drawn, one recognizes that blue. It can be found in many panels of any of the 48 albums Manouach drew on for the Compendium, because it is the blue that is used for the daytime sky in all these comics. Occasionally a fluffy white cloud may interrupt that expanse, but generally all these Franco-Belgian comics use the same flat blue for the sky, and it is this sky blue that Manouach uses to unify his collage comic. The uniformity of the backgrounds creates a legibility and clarity to the work, helping suture together the range of styles represented by the included comic fragments. No single drawing style is favoured in the selected comics: they range from the ligne claire of Tintin, to Franquin, Peyo and Morris’s elegant Marcinelle School lines, to the realistic visuals of Buck Danny and Eric Castel, and the updated and more stylised Marcinelle line of the Atom style in François Thomas’ Stan Caïman. Out of these works of wildly varying genres, styles, and audiences, Manouach creates a kind of extract, or an abstract as the French title of the work suggests, Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. With fragments of realistic and caricatured comics styles present on every page, no single style dominates.4 In addition, many of the elements that are included seem almost to fall outside of a specific style, only signifying “comics,” such as the word balloons and sound effects that are strewn across every page. Like the blue background, they too provide connective tissue, and in the process create the soundtrack for the work. Since most of the spoken sounds, punctuation marks, and sound effects are in big, bold letters, often even red, the comic as a whole is loud. The loudness and the violence of the shouts and sound effects set the tone, and often dominate the images, but the visuals readily fall in line. The overall effect of the work becomes an overwhelming barrage of brutality. The violence of the images comes from a number of repeated themes. Many of the visual rhymes and repetitions are innocuous: the album is full of hands, cars, soccer balls and weapons, several motifs the work develops from the first page. Three other motifs, likewise introduced on the very first page,

Haunted by Tradition  177

Figure 11.2 Ilan Manouach. Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge. 2019, 45.

become gradually more disturbing as the work progresses. The visual patterns include angry or shouting white male faces, passive or marginalised people of colour, and objectified women. The first motif to appear is the representation of objectified women, though their initial inclusion only entails two attractive women’s heads on page 3. On page 8 the first pair of

178  Barbara Postema bare breasts appears, and two pages later a naked butt. Both are taken from Stan Caïman. After this, the breasts, butts, and eventually, completely nude full female bodies become regular figures, frequently interspersed with fragmented body parts.5 The objectification of the women’s bodies in the album is emphasised by the abstracted and hyperbolic style of Thomas’ drawings. A second theme that is already hinted at on the first page but developed more fully throughout is the Othered person of colour. Page 3 shows a stereotype of a Mexican man, with bare feet and a sombrero. The representation of people of colour throughout the album continues to be based in stereotype, and the figures are usually passive or servile. Page 4 shows a bound African boy wearing panther skin and a black butler (perhaps from Lucky Luke?) offering someone their hat and cane. Other minority figures that appear are yellow and black characters, usually with a passive or confused demeanour. The most recognizable figures in this category are characters taken from Tintin au Congo: a helpful young boy, the village chief, and the witch doctor. Notably, despite the often active or even threatening actions of these latter two characters in the original comic, in Compendium the chosen fragments show them submissive, inactive, or even fearful. Action and strong emotion in the Compendium are reserved for white male figures. This third main theme is significant especially in contrast to the previous two that I have discussed. Against the passive people of colour (all male, incidentally), and the objectified (and mainly passive) women’s figures, the shouting white male faces are a stark counterpoint. In fact, many of these faces are not white but red with anger, as can be seen one at a time on the first two story pages, and then three together on page 7. Even when not distorted with anger, the faces of white men in the album carry strong expressions, some calm, some alarmed, but with fury being the most common emotion. Some of the white male figures are shown with partial or full bodies, but in most cases it is the isolated head that is shown. The cumulative effect of this motif is white male rage, and in contrast with the objectified female bodies and passive figures of colour, the visual effect is to create a sense of male domination, perhaps even oppression. Divorced from any narrative direction, an ideology nevertheless comes through in these pages full of fragments, as they visually establish a sense of patriarchal and colonial power. In combination with the loud sound effects and emanata of explosions, this power is shown to be violent and destructive. After all that, the album ends as it started, with a collection of the classic sign-offs chosen from the included works. The final panel includes eight “Fin”s, several signatures of creators, and an invitation to read the next adventure of Buck Danny to find out more. … These paratextual elements mirror the beginning of the Compendium and draw attention to the formula the works share, whatever their style or genre. Manouach’s description of the work mentions the “variety of comics proto-memes, metanarrative devices, paratextual elements and building blocks of the European BD that have been extracted” from the comics he selected. This description of the elements

Haunted by Tradition  179 sounds dry, objective, unemotional—exactly what one expects of an encyclopaedia, after all. It is therefore striking that when read as a whole, the effect of the work is to create a new view of the included comics, no matter how one read them as a child and no matter what fond memories the individual albums evoke. The overall effect of the distilled BD form here is one of patriarchal violence and oppression, racism and sexism, based on the concentrate that Manouach has made of these works through his far-reaching interventions. As I explained, the Compendium made a point of connecting the “typical” reading of Franco-Belgian comics to childhood. That readership, often associated with innocence and impressionability, makes the presence of racist and sexist subtexts all the more disturbing. In Compendium, Manouach has teased out these meanings with his deconstruction and reconstruction, through the process of assembling the collage comic. By contrast, he addresses those issues more directly in two other works, Noirs and Tintin akei Kongo. Here he has isolated specific albums, zeroing in on their issues of racism and drawing attention to their problematic nature through intervention into the publication practices of these albums. This practice is related to his thinking about conceptual and postdigital comics, based in the idea that comics is a “materially self-reflexive medium”.6 His website explains that as the Director of Futures of Comics, Manouach and other creators explore … how comics are undergoing historic mutations in the midst of increasingly financialized, globalized technological affordances and propose … to map the social, economic, racial and gendered forces that shape the industry’s commercial, communication and production routines.7 While the focus of the project Futures of Comics is looking ahead, we can see that in Noirs, Tintin akei Kongo, and Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics, Manouach is using similar approaches to look back. The point of Futures of Comics is “exploring the very substrate of their medium not as a transparent signifier or a culturally neutral site, but as an object in their own right, replete with its own material properties, histories and signifying potential”.8 The “rip-offs” Manouach produces of Les Schtroumpfs noirs and Tintin au Congo similarly draw attention to the fact that these works are not and never were culturally neutral, and the material alterations ensure that the signifiers in these works are no longer transparent. In Noirs, Manouach intervenes in the colour printing process, turning everything in the book Smurf-blue. The album was originally published in 1963, bringing together the first three Smurfs stories created by Peyo. The very first story was “Les Schtroumpfs noirs,” in which a Smurf is bitten by a strange fly and turns violent, mean, and black. This black Smurf then goes on to infect other Smurfs by biting them, until Papa Smurf can create an antidote, and with some luck they are all cured. The change Manouach introduces, printing all offset plates in cyan, instead of the usual magenta, yellow,

180  Barbara Postema cyan and black, makes the album harder to read, as the layered blues mean white is the only remaining contrast “colour”. This new version retains its original narrative but it becomes obfuscated underneath the layers of blue ink (Figure 11.3). The work relies on readers having some familiarity with the work, so that they know the general story and notice that now there is no visual difference identifying the Smurfs who were bitten. The change is only in their behaviour and saying “Gnap!” As a result, black skin is no longer code for aggressive and dangerous. Noirs was published in 2014, just a few years after the album was published for the first time in English in 2010. This 2010 edition had already been altered from the Dupuis edition of 1963: for the North American market, Les Schtroumpfs noirs was published under the title The Purple Smurfs and the affected Smurfs turned purple, not black. These changes show that readers and editors were already aware of the racism implicit in the work but were unwilling to take it on publicly. Instead, the original anti-Black message of Smurfs turning violent, evil, and black at the same time was declawed. With his intervention, Manouach appears to say that this kind of erasure, turning black to purple, is not enough. His own alteration, making the entire work less legible, is intended to create a deeper effect: Noirs sheds light on the industrial fabrication of a book through the lenses of offset printing technology. Offset, a supposedly transparent and mechanic process, is revealed as a meaningful signifying device.9 In a previous iteration of the description of the work on his website, now no longer available, he even said that offset printing can be revealed “to be an instrument of political action”. Manouach’s unofficial reprint includes the other stories too, being a complete facsimile of the original. The work ends up with single word titles for each of the three stories, since in all three the word “Schtroumpf(s)” has disappeared. But only with “Noirs” does that remaining word of the title, which of course means black, carry special significance, now referring to something that is no longer there. The colour black is missing from the visuals due to Manouach’s intervention, and without the transformation to black, the significant racist subtext of the original story is no longer there. Simultaneously, by drawing attention to and problematising the former blackness of the Smurfs, Manouach reveals this racist subtext for what it was, now not to be denied. As with Les Schtroumpfs noirs/The Purple Smurfs, Tintin au Congo is an album for which the reception has changed over the years, and which publishers and consumers are often no longer comfortable with in its original form. Indeed, Hergé himself had already begun making changes to the work so that the colonialist ideology was less overt, or rather, more masked, as Katherine Kelp-Stebbins demonstrates in a lengthy case study on Tintin au Congo in her monograph How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies. She shows how Hergé had Tintin teach mathematics in later editions of the album, instead of the Belgian history he undertook to

Haunted by Tradition  181

Figure 11.3 Ilan Manouach. Noirs (2014), 5.

teach colonial subjects in the original text, and over time making other changes, so that besides the word “Congo” in the title, the work was “stripped of all other references to the Belgian colony”.10 Many translated editions also called the album Tintin in Africa, rather than the historically and geographically more precise Tintin in Congo. Kelp-Stebbins argues that the visual style

182  Barbara Postema of Tintin au Congo helps gloss over its more egregious colonialist messages, as she links Hergé’s ligne claire style to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of “imperialist visuality”,11 creating an orderly world with clear hierarchies that are not to be questioned. Manouach’s “rip-off” of Tintin au Congo, Tintin akei Kongo (2015) includes no interventions to the visuals at all, providing a facsimile of the commercial edition of the work. The only change that has been made to the work is that the text has been replaced with a translation into Lingala, one of the languages native to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and one into which the album had not been previously translated. Manouach explains: The fact that the original edition hasn’t found its way to the African market with a Congolese edition, reminds the reader of Tintin akei Kongo that distribution of cultural products is not solely governed by profit and market values. Adding lingala to the 112 different translations of the Tintin Empire, Tintin akei Kongo reveals blind spots in the expansion of the publishing conglomerates.12 The politics of languages and translations in publishing comes into play here, and is particularly pertinent due to the common claim that Tintin au Congo is a popular comic in African countries. Kelp-Stebbins mentions an interesting study by Nancy Rose Hunt that showed that the sales numbers of the album come mainly from tourists buying it, not local people.13 Manouach’s intervention similarly draws attention to the fact that until he commissioned the Lingala translation, the work was about people in Congo but not for them. He underscores this message with the restrictions set on purchasing the work. On Manouach’s website, Tintin akei Kongo comes with the notes “exclusively sold in Congo” and, in red capital letters, “NOT FOR SALE.” These notes help with the formation of the audience for this altered book: it is for Congolese readers, finally, in ways that the album has never been before. The new availability of Tintin au Congo in a language of the DRC only partially addresses the issues with the work. The narrative and the images still deal with paternalistic, colonialist, and above all, racist tropes and stereotypes. Perhaps the publication in a local language only makes these problems with the album more noticeable to the Franco-Belgian or any non-Lingala reader: where previously the album, when read in a familiar language, might have drawn the reader along into the momentum of Tintin’s adventure, the Lingala edition, in this language that is unfamiliar to everyone but a very small group of speakers, will leave the reader to focus on the visuals, without their soundtrack as it were. The result of this defamiliarization is to lay the problems of the narrative bare as they had never been before. In looking only at the images, Tintin turns into the stereotype of the colonial Great White Hunter. Throughout his stay in Belgian Congo he makes time to go hunting,

Haunted by Tradition  183 but his misadventures, which may have read as a running gag when the story was first published, to modern eyes read as shocking bloodthirst and waste, for example when he blows a rhinoceros to pieces with dynamite or kills a mound of gazelles because he thinks he is firing repeatedly at the same one.14 Worse, in the visual track the stereotyped depictions of the Africans are thrown into high relief, not just in the depiction of very black skin and large lips. The Congolese people are also defined throughout the album by superstition and reliance on white authority, to the point that villagers readily adopt Tintin and even his dog Milou as their chief.15 These issues were always there with the album, and have been making readers uncomfortable for decades. Even before Manouach’s intervention into the language, in contemporary commercial publishing of this particular Tintin album the problematic elements have been ameliorated through various forms of intervention. The English language edition of the album comes shrink-wrapped and with the banner “Collector’s Edition”: it is no longer aimed at the general public. The work is also accompanied by warning texts such as this one on Amazon.co.uk: In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Hergé reflects the colonial attitudes of the time. … [H]e depicted the African people according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period—an interpretation that some of today’s readers may find anachronistic. The use of the word “anachronistic” is odd here, given that the warning mentions twice that the story is “of the time” and “of the period,” so precisely the opposite of anachronistic. Where this album no longer fits comfortably is in our own current moment. Besides offering context and explanation, another way of dealing with the issues of the work has been simply hiding it from view, either by no longer including it in the offerings of bookstores and libraries, or by at least moving it from the children’s sections to the adult shelves. Nevertheless, there is a strong case to be made that Tintin au Congo is irredeemable, as Kelp-Stebbins shows in her chapter “The Adventures of Three Readers in the World of Tintin.” She details the court case that Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a Congolese student living in Belgium, brought against the album and its publishers in 2007, claiming the work was an injury to him. He explained: “I felt that there was an attack on my image”.16 Mondondo asked for publication of the work to cease, or alternatively for a paratext to be added to acknowledge the prejudices present in the work. His case in a Belgian court shows that although Manouach’s gesture of making the work available to the Congolese specifically is provocative and perhaps in some ways eye-opening to white readers, it may not be welcome to Congolese readers. The language of the work had never been the issue in terms of its legibility. As Kelp-Stebbins discusses, Hergé’s clear-line style perfected

184  Barbara Postema legibility in the comics image, even as he standardised publication formats that would shape Franco-Belgian comics for decades to come.17 Drawing from Mark McKinney’s The Colonial Heritage, she writes: McKinney indicts clear-line as an imperialist complex of visuality, declaring “ideology, historical context and form are inextricably intertwined in the ligne claire drawing school of Hergé. … [I]ts clear-ness, its legibility, is to a considerable degree an imperialist, orientalizing, eurocentric manner of reading the world”.18 Kelp-Stebbins asserts that in Hergé’s oeuvre, but particularly in Tintin au Congo, “between simplicity and detail, ligne claire masks the noise of empire”.19 Mondondo’s court case sought to turn up the volume, so the noise of empire could be heard once more. By focusing specifically on the “soundtrack” of the comic, having it translated into Lingala, Manouach’s intervention can also be seen as unmuffling the noise of empire. However, as Mondondo asserted, the most damaging aspects of Tintin au Congo come across in the visuals. The album uses racist imagery that continues to be racist stereotype, even when the comic is subjected to Manouach’s détournement. The language of the work may now be used for post-colonialist commentary, but it continues to show imagery that is inherently racist. On this point, Kelp-Stebbins draws on Rebecca Wanzo’s book The Content of Our Caricature, writing: Wanzo provocatively suggests that caricature and stereotype might be means for anti-racist and decolonial ends. However, she declares that such iconography must be read through a framework that acknowledges “Black caricature always deals in pain because historically it has been a way of inflicting injury”.20 According to such considerations, a work that retains stereotypes and caricatures of Black people can never be truly anti-racist.21 Even as “Tintin akei Kongo reveals blind spots,” it perhaps retains some blind spots of its own as well. The originals of the comics Manouach tackles in his interventions displayed uncomfortable combinations of innocence and racism. Two of the specific texts he selected, presumably because the racism they displayed was so blatant, have been altered in their official published forms as well, through colour change or simply by keeping the work out of the hands of children. By contrast, Manouach addresses those issues creatively but head-on in his détournements. He zeroes in on the issues of racist visuals by isolating the specific albums and drawing attention to their problems: intervening in the colour print process (turning everything Smurf-blue) in Noirs, or in the text (by providing a previously unavailable Lingala edition) in Tintin akei Kongo. These two works now draw attention to how the use of colour and the use of

Haunted by Tradition  185 language construct readerships that are exclusionary, and how these practices shape ideological audiences. These same concerns are also present in the Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics, where fragments of those same original two comics can be found, in addition to 46 others. Through an accumulation of graphic and typographic patterns, this work creates an impressionistic onslaught capturing a subconscious effect that reading stacks of these kinds of albums might have, with page after page of noise and violence, angry white faces, and silly Black bodies. These interventions, or hijackings as Manouach has called them, reveal that the original comics were haunted by white supremacy, and Manouach goes about exorcizing these attitudes. Nowhere is this more clear than in Blanco (2018), which shows up the innocence of whiteness in the template of the album format. This work is an unprinted copy of the standard Franco-Belgian album format of 48 pages within a cardboard cover—the only thing missing is the four-colour printing. The blanco, a dummy, is a printer’s tool to check that all the physical parameters will work. And the format is so ubiquitous in Franco-Belgian comics that if one were to abstract the form even further than Manouach did in Compendium, then the residue one would eventually end up with might be Blanco. Manouach uses the album, conveniently for sale at 5e Couche for only 12 Euros, to comment on the conventionality and industrialised nature of the Franco-Belgian comics business. But in the context of his other works, the whiteness of Blanco takes on additional significance, highlighting that besides being conventional and standardised, the business of comics in Belgium and France is also dominated by white people. The link between colonial power and the 48CC format is also made by Katherine Kelp-Stebbins. She shows how Hergé’s series The Adventures of Tintin helped establish and standardise the format of Franco-Belgian comics,22 rationalising the format in tandem with the visual regime that established order and rule.23 The ligne claire style helped the series travel across the world, just as Tintin travelled the world in his adventures.24 With Blanco, but also with Compendium, Manouach takes to task the standardised and formulaic nature of Franco-Belgian comics and the ideologies these works implicitly represent and transmit.25 As facsimiles, Noirs and Tintin akei Kongo themselves adhere to the typical BD format, and Manouach adds interventions to critique the original works. In an article on the artist, Bill Kartalopoulos writes: “In all their diverse manifestations, Manouach’s comics undercut both the protagonist-based model of classical narrative and the author-expression mode of traditional creative production”.26 None of the works I have discussed carry the name of the man who conceived them, not in the form of his name on the cover or title page, in any case.27 Perhaps this is to underscore that he only “intervenes” in the works; he has not created them—elsewhere in this same volume, Carneiro and Zeni analyze this process differently, calling it “hacking”. Manouach himself calls these works Conceptual Comics or CoCos, and he has discussed his driving force behind these works:

186  Barbara Postema Their form and modes of engagements are complex and polyvalent. CoCos distance themselves from works that celebrate artistic expression or champion unique artistic and storytelling skills. They are equally critical of the various deployments of craftsmanship in their fabrication, from the fashionable risograph to the fetishized woodblock printing.28 If these works do not celebrate the individual artistic expression or storytelling skills, they also do not exactly criticise the individual creators involved, instead taking aim at the systemic issues they represent, of commerce and ideology. In short, Capitalism. Putting a price on an empty BD is one final commentary, demonstrating how readers are complicit in this system.29 In this chapter, I have provided readings of a number of Manouach’s works that demonstrate how his textual, graphic, and printerly interventions strip away the nostalgia from these works to expose the ways that the publishing traditions of Franco-Belgian BD have sustained racist and sexist ideologies. The earliest of Manouach’s albums, both facsimiles with relatively simple interventions, draw attention to how the use of colour and the use of language construct readerships that are exclusionary and shape ideological audiences. Compendium and Blanco were published after Noirs and Tintin akei Kongo, indicating that while Manouach started with two striking individual examples, eventually his work went on to show the issues as more systemic ones that should not just be called out in two works that happen to be particularly blatant, but should be addressed to the form of Franco-Belgian comics as a whole. His work with traditional BD functions to shake readers awake out of their slumber of nostalgia and see the ghosts of patriarchy and colonialism that have been surrounding them all along. Notes 1 Manouach used 48 comics presumably as a nod to the standard BD format, derogatorily boiled down to the title “48CC” (48 pages, 4 colour, hardcover) by Jean-Christophe Menu of l’Association. 2 Stan Caïman is probably the main exception to this, since the comic has a more idiosyncratic visual style than most of the other included comics, and is by far the most “mature” work in the corpus, including graphic sex and nudity. 3 “Compendium,” Ilan Manouach, accessed January 11, 2023, https:// ilanmanouach.com/work/compendium/. 4 This is similar to the way these styles would all be found together in the pages of the weekly comics magazines Tintin and Spirou, the venues in which many young readers would have first encountered the stories: these magazines serialised stories by many different artists and in very different styles, so readers could skip from a realistically draw SF adventure to a big-nose style contemporary comedy, to a historical adventure in ligne claire and so on. The magazines did not favour any style over another, though readers might skip and choose to read only their preferred comics. I used to skip the soccer and racecar stories.… 5 The only woman who appears as a fully clothed person in the work is Tante Sidonia from Suske en Wiske.

Haunted by Tradition  187 6 “About Ilan,” Ilan Manouach, accessed January 11, 2023, https://ilanmanouach. com/about3/ 7 “About Ilan,” Ilan Manouach, accessed January 11, 2023, https://ilanmanouach. com/about3/ 8 “Talks,” Futures of Comics, accessed January 11, 2023, https://futuresofcomics. org/guests/talks/ 9 “Noirs,” Ilan Manouach, accessed January 11, 2023, https://ilanmanouach.com/ work/noirs/ 10 Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022), 35. 11 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 29. 12 “Tintin akei Kongo,” Ilan Manouach, accessed January 11, 2023, https:// ilanmanouach.com/work/tintinakeikongo/ 13 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 49. 14 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 56 and 16. 15 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 24, 30, 50, and 62. 16 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 52. 17 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 32–36. 18 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 43. 19 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 43. 20 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 53. 21 Pappa in Afrika (2010) by Joe Dog (Anton Kannemeyer) is another satirical version of Tintin au Congo, showing the harm that white imperialism has caused in Africa, particularly in the South African context, but using stereotypical depictions of Africans to do so. The weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has similarly tried to use racist iconography for anti-racist ends. While the intentions here and in Tintin akei Kongo may count for something, perhaps one has to ask who gets to decide whether the painfulness of the images is worth the cause. 22 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 32–36. 23 Kelp-Stebbins’ argument is compelling in terms of how Hergé’s switch to consistently using word balloons and his practice of publishing serialised narratives as albums as soon as they were completed, helped set a standard for the FrancoBelgian comics publishing industry. However, the format of the Tintin albums was never completely adopted as the standard BD format. For example, Tintin albums are longer than the 48CC, always running 62 pages. 24 Kelp-Stebbins, How Comics, 23. 25 Where my analysis of Compendium is focused on the readerly impact of the work, Simon Grennan, in his chapter in this same volume, concentrates on its formal elements and philosophical implications. 26 Bill Kartalopoulos, “Ilan Manouach: Defamiliarizing Comics,” World Literature Today, 90, iss. 2 (2016): 45. 27 Compendium includes Manouach’s name on the spine and the back cover blurb, but his name does not appear on the front cover or in the interior text, not even on the copyright page. 28 Ilan Manouach, “Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice,” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 9, iss. 1 (2019): 11/21. 29 Given that I am tempted to buy this contentless comic, the commentary on consumerism hits home.

Works Cited Futures of Comics. “Talks.” Accessed November 2, 2022. https://futuresofcomics.org

188  Barbara Postema Dog, Joe [Anton Kannemeyer]. Pappa in Afrika. Johannesburg, SA: Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, 2010. Kartalopoulos, Bill. “Ilan Manouach: Defamiliarizing Comics.” World Literature Today 90, 2 (2016): 44–47. Kelp-Stebbins, Katherine. How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Manouach, Ilan. “About Ilan.” Accessed January 11, 2023a. https://ilanmanouach. com/about3/ ———. “Compendium.” Accessed January 11, 2023b. https://ilanmanouach.com/ compendium/ ———. “Noirs.” Accessed January 11, 2023c. https://ilanmanouach.com/noirs/ ———. “Tintin akei Kongo.” Accessed January 11, 2023d. https://ilanmanouach. com/tintinakeikongo/ ———. “Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 9, 1 (2019): 21 pages. ———. Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics. Brussels: La Cinquième Couche, 2018a. ———. Blanco. Brussels: La Cinquième Couche, 2018b. ———. Tintin akei Kongo. Brussels: La Cinquième Couche, 2015. ———. Noirs. Brussels: La Cinquième Couche, 2014.

12 [CoCo] Conceptual Comics and Online Archives Benoît Crucifix

As governments enforced various lockdowns to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, libraries, archives, and museums were brought to rethink, increase, enhance their digital offerings, catering to their home-stuck users. The digital delivery or lending of library material shook anew the issues of copyright and access that such institutions had been grappling with since the launch of digitization programs. In parallel, the online sharing of cultural and scientific productions through “shadow libraries” (Karaganis 2018) and “rogue archives” (De Kosnik 2016) took on a renewed relevance and visibility—just a few years after a lawsuit filed by the academic publishing company Elsevier against LibraryGenesis and Science Hub had brought public attention to issues of open access, intellectual property, and privatization of scientific knowledge. Online shadow libraries have circumvented and challenged traditional curatorial and archival policies, professional practices, and legal norms to collect, upload, and openly share materials that are otherwise left forgotten, limited in circulation, or kept behind a paywall. Such archives are generally maintained by hacktivists, free culture enthusiasts, self-assigned curators, or fan networks, collaboratively establishing their own practices and rules for preservation, access, and dissemination. In 2018 at the Onassis Foundation in Athens, Ilan Manouach, together with UbuWeb’s founder Kenneth Goldsmith, co-organized a three-day cultural event in tribute of such online custodians. The Shadow Libraries symposium gathered artists, scholars, curators, archivists, and activists to discuss unofficial and amateur practices of digital preservation and distribution. The symposium set out to examine how such shadow libraries defy “current norms of intellectual property rights, market concentration and control of access” (Manouach 2022, 245). This curatorial, critical and theoretical framework underpinned Manouach’s curated collections of conceptual comics, which are precisely embedded within important shadow libraries for arts, media and culture at large. The world of shadow libraries is a tightknit one, for which workshops and conferences have played an activating role, imbued with the tradition of hacker culture and media lab (Dekker 2017, 219; Goldsmith 2020, 79). One year later, in April 2019, the shadow library and arts wiki Monoskop integrated a new page and collection devoted to DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-16

190  Benoît Crucifix “Conceptual Comics,” curated by Manouach and compiling twenty works, fully digitized and largely representative of contemporary experimental comics. In February 2021, the collection was further incorporated to the UbuWeb repository, one of the earliest and longest-standing initiatives to freely host and distribute experimental material online, marking an important reframing of comics within the avant-garde. This chapter turns to Ilan Manouach’s curatorial practice, and more specifically to the assembling and uploading of collections dedicated to “conceptual comics” within existing shadow libraries. For another way of curating experimental comics in different social contexts, see Chapter 9 by Moritz Küng. This anthologizing gesture contributes to situate and ground the self-proposed category of “conceptual comics” within an alternative history of comics, expanding its confines and integrating unexpected productions uplifted from other traditions. Beyond the assembled corpus itself, however, the technological choice to digitize small-circulation works through shadow libraries brings even more important questions of access, transformation, and cultural memory that this chapter hopes to survey. Comics Archives and Digital Cultural Memory Reflections on comics memory and preservation tend to look backwards. Dealing with popular cultural material that—when not actively discarded or destroyed—was regularly lost or neglected, comics scholars, historians, readers, fans, archivists, and other actors have been well aware of the long-term consequences that come with a history of suppression and disregard (Pizzino 2016). This makes for a complex legacy, built on a certain resentment towards institutions typical of an underdog attitude in the comics world (Beaty 2012), narrowly intertwined with a history of grassroots archiving practices and with the standardization of collecting habits. As much as comics is marked by erasure and loss, this perception of loss has been correlated with a strong nostalgic desire to recover and collect past materials which, following the professionalization of fandom, evolved into its own kind of business (Beaty 2012, 153–182). The construction and shaping of comics collections within archival institutions have ceaselessly developed in dialogue with these grassroots initiatives and their standardization. While systematic archiving of comics publishing is now regularly implemented within institutions of memory, as part of legal deposit programs and other archival policies, the valorization and indexation of comics collections often remains precariously positioned within institutions that are dependent on available funding and material constraints. They are often poorly equipped to compete with commercial dealers when it comes to financially valuable pieces of comics heritage; and the structure of the nostalgia market is strongly biased towards original art, first editions, and canonical authors, often leaving out swathes of archival material for the dustbin. If the long history of comics has left rather scarce archives, the current task of collecting recent

[CoCo]  191 productions, albeit facilitated with comics’ upward mobility, runs against other hurdles. The burden of overproduction, if not an exception in the ­twenty-first-century book business (Thompson 2010), has been a particular strong strategy in contemporary comics publishing and hampers comprehensive harvesting. This results in a situation where a range of contemporary comics practices tends to fall under the radar of systematic archiving. This is for instance the case for the whole range of small-press publications that are defined by their circulation outside of the “official” distribution channels on which legal deposit programs usually rely (Habrand 2016). If some productions do make it onto library shelves, this archiving process is strongly dependent on the producers’ willingness to deposit copies, which cannot be taken for granted within a publishing scene that cultivates an ethos of subcultural marginality. The ephemerality and the limited circulation of the small press is usually understood as an integral part of its cultural practice, and an important facet of its political thrust, as fanzine producers tend to be wary of the domestication of comics. A fanzine collection like We All Go Down, put out by the Belgian micro-collective Habeas Corpus (with whom Ilan Manouach holds multiple ties), is for instance premised on anonymity and ephemerality: no reissue, no creator names, no dates factor in its own opacity and oblivion. Perhaps as a result of their “dissenting” position (Dony, Habrand, and Meesters 2014), the archiving process for small-press, mini-comics, and zines has rather relied on grassroots initiatives and community-based practices of collecting and harvesting material. Some zine archives, such as the Fanzinothèque in Poitiers, have of course achieved a kind of structural stability premised on a local anchorage; but such strategic reliance on cultural funding goes hand in hand with the maintenance of a counter-cultural ethos. Given the importance of touch and contact within the social world of zines— both in terms of the haptic and physical aspects of objects but also in the networks of community relationships that support its distribution and circulation—such initiatives are closely interwoven with the rise of online self-publishing and yet regularly return to older “obsolete” printing technologies and handcraft techniques. Another area of comics production that is relatively overlooked by current institutional preservation is exactly the case of born-digital comics, despite various kindling initiatives such as the Library of Congress’ webcomics archive. The perils of digital obsolescence, its rotten links and permanent updating requirements, are well known, and there have been few ambitious programs to curate collections of early digital experiments in comics comparable to what has been done in the field of electronic literature (Moulthrop and Grigar 2017). As Darren Wershler and Kalervo Sinervo have remarked, nodding at Matthew Kirschenbaum’s seminal work on new media, “scholars and historians interested in the history of digital comics are facing significant forensic work if they wish to reconstruct that history” (2017, 190). This touches on both the history of born-digital productions (Baudry 2018) and

192  Benoît Crucifix that of digitized comics, which opens up its own set of questions. The two Canadian scholars have indeed carried out extensive research to illustrate the transformative role played by unauthorized scanners and pirates in the online circulation of comics, whether through peer-to-peer networks, channels, or file sharing sites (Wershler, Sinervo, and Tien 2013). As Sinervo suggests in another article, in the context of North American comics industries, the unauthorized circulation of comic book scans, although framed as piracy by proprietary and licensing companies, has not completely developed into a profitable opportunity for pirates, even though the overall work performed by fans and scanlators consists in a “free” digital labor that can lead to other forms of data mining and monetization. The focus of these bootlegging ventures relies less on economic motives than on a sense of audience participation in the circulation of serial products, but also a commitment to their archiving as scanners “perform a specific kind of preservation” (Sinervo 2021, 229). While comic book pirates and scanlators primarily engage with continuously running serial productions and ongoing narratives, there is also a significant chunk of rogue archival work done on comics heritage, from newspaper comic strips to comic book publishing. Fan scanning projects have run prior to—and now often feed on—the large-scale digitization programs initiated by bigger archival institutions, partly restrained by issues of copyright for open public access. Make It Rogue The different artistic and curatorial projects led by Ilan Manouach are positioned at the intersections of these concerns in the field of contemporary comics and online archives. The lasting importance of grassroots collecting, amateur librarianship, self-designed collecting practices—but also the standardization, commercialization, and monetization of fan labor—are all dimensions that form a rich background against which Manouach’s curatorial and creative—or rather “uncreative” (Goldsmith 2011)—practices unfold. His curated collections nod to the online sharing practices of comic book pirates, scanlators, and other unauthorized scanners, but focus on the digitization and uploading of limited-circulation print artifacts, contrasting with the bulk of bootleg scans recirculating mass-printed comics. The conceptual comics digitized by Manouach dialogue more evidently with the critical, theory-savvy, and experimental framework of the host websites, Monoskop and UbuWeb. In his doctoral dissertation, Manouach nevertheless underlines commonalities between scanlation repositories and shadow libraries: these websites [scanlating repositories] are aggregators that often supersede by a large magnitude the existing official and corporate efforts to encourage community engagement, but in reality they are not very different from existing shadow libraries such as aaaargh or Monoskop. (2022, 16)

[CoCo]  193 These various operations, as different as they may seem in their interests, are typical of what Abigail De Kosnik describes as “rogue archives,” encompassing anticanonical digital repositories maintained by amateurs who freely upload, share, and remix their contents: What I call rogue archives are defined by: constant (24/7) availability; zero barriers to entry for all who can connect to the Internet; content that can be streamed or downloaded in full, with no required payment, and no regard for copyright restrictions (some rogue archivists digitize only what is already in the public domain); and content that has never been, and would likely never be, contained in a traditional memory institution. (De Kosnik 2016, 2) Developing the concept at hand of online archives of fan fiction, De Kosnik emphasizes the wide range of transformative, appropriative, and derivative practices—which she proposes to encompass under the umbrella term “archontic production”—that is part and parcel of such repositories, forming together “the twin strands of digital cultural memory” (2016, 276). Digital networked media have, in her view, unsettled traditional chronologies of production, reception, and recording, as “each media commodity becomes, at the instant of its release, an archive to be plundered, an original to be memorized, copied and manipulated” (2016, 4). The various works of détournement, remix, and parody consigned by Ilan Manouach—as eloquently analysed in various chapters of this volume—can of course be read alongside classic intertextual or citational lines (studying at a one-to-one scale the relationship between “source” text and its “derivative”), but this would amount to reducing the material and technological dimension of these practices. Such practices have everything to do with the momentous shift brought by digital networked media to archives and cultural memory. It also circumvents misconceptions about the tension between digital and print comics, their respective merits and specificities: as much as Manouach’s works are printed as physical objects, often designed with an acute feel for their materiality (a question analyzed in detail by Ana Matilde Sousa’s reading of Cascao in Chapter 3), they are rigorously produced by digital means and explore the arcanes of the contemporary networked media economy. This appears particularly evident for more recent works such as The Cubicle Island and Peanuts minus Schulz, which both rely on crowdsourcing and micro-working platforms to generate collections of copied, reproduced, reannotated, redrawn, and otherwise modified comics images by a global swarm of precarious digital workers. Manouach treats comics heritage in its different material manifestations as a large repertoire of forms and formats open for new usages, applying different methods and protocols to revisit, revision, and reassess this heritage.

194  Benoît Crucifix In his different creative or “uncreative” works, Manouach displaces the traditional focus on craftmanship to recalibrate other gestures as ways of producing comics: collecting, scanning, erasing, reprinting, tagging, distributing, querying, and so on—all “writerly operations that do not tell their name” to cite the title of a book by the conceptual poet Franck Leibovici devoted to very similar ways of writing in the digital age. Another promotor of this kind of “uncreative writing,” Kenneth Goldsmith has suggested how much the everyday activities of sharing, downloading, uploading on the internet have made of archiving a type of “new folk art,” drawing attention to the routine gestures of collecting, saving, and recording artifacts online (2016, 91). Similar to rogue archives, such approaches tend to blur the boundaries between making and archiving: the curation of an archive itself becomes a compositional gesture. In collaborating with UbuWeb and Monoskop, Manouach marks a particular choice that specifically aligns on avant-garde and experimental practices. De Kosnik describes them as “alternative digital archives,” aiming not at universal preservation, but rather trying to “limit their scope to targeted genres, and often serve as central repositories for emerging or degraded genres” (2016, 87). If comics are frequent in all sorts of fan archives, and are also taken up by some specific repositories (such as the Digital Comics Museum, which mostly collects North American public domain comic books), comics have remained a largely unrecognized territory for critical-artistic digital archives such as Monoskop and UbuWeb, even though Ilan Manouach’s works Katz, Tintin akei Congo, and Noirs were already integrated as downloadable PDF files uploaded to the “UbuWeb Contemporary” collection in 2015. monoskop.org/Conceptual_comics Founded in 2004 in Slovakia by Dušan Barok, Monoskop is a collaborative wiki for arts, culture, and humanities, which quickly evolved to a large-scale resource hosting freely available online material. Olga Goriunova, writing about digital archives as art and knowledge commons yielding particular subject positions, describes the subject of Monoskop as a “multiform bibliographer” (2021, 57). Part encyclopedia, part annotated bibliography, part multimedia archive, it is perfectly suited to wiki software, which relies on hypertext mapping, linked data, and collaborative authorship. Another important specificity of Monoskop is its motivation “to provide a situated nodal point in the globalized information infrastructures,” as the wiki has remained specifically committed to its original mission to excavate central and eastern European art and media history (Thylstrup 2018, 93). Overall, Monoskop thus underlines a bibliographic focus on comprehensiveness and affirms the situated and subjective curatorial choices. As Thylstrup further suggests, “Monoskop operates with a boutique approach, offering relatively small collections of personally selected publications to a steady following of loyal patrons who regularly return to the site to explore new works” (2018, 91).

[CoCo]  195 The “Conceptual Comics” collection affirms the choice of personal curation and follows in the wiki logic of organizing and crosslinking subjects, connecting to other pages on Monoskop’s dedicated to avant-garde and modernist’s magazines, artists’ publishing, concrete poetry, zine culture, afrofuturism, digital libraries, code poetry, conceptual literature among other keywords. These connections display how the collection dialogues with existing resources on Monoskop and it embeds its topic within a particular field and taxonomy (literature). Each entry included in the resource follows a similarly hypertextual bibliographic description. The metadata attached to each item includes links to authors’ personal pages, publishers’ pages, extra resources, connecting users to resources outside of the website. What is more striking or specific about the “Conceptual Comics” collection, however, is the particular emphasis on a visually striking layout, as the page opens onto a gridded gallery of images displaying the items included in the collection (Figure 12.1). The clickable, hyperlinked images allow users to navigate the interface in a non-linear way, typical for new media’s “database logic” (Manovich 2001), but which again underlines the image as a primary entry point—echoing the tabularity of a comics page. The items of the archive are otherwise relatively fixed, cannot be reordered according to particular criteria, but unfold as a scrollable list. The importance of visual display appears further clear in the particular digitization protocol opted by Manouach. As many online custodians, sharing their scanning methods and tools in an open-source spirit, Manouach has built an overhead scanner specifically for this project, in order to provide

Figure 12.1 Screenshot of the welcome page for the “Conceptual Comics” collection at Monoskop, featuring a grid gallery of the uploaded contents, 2021.

196  Benoît Crucifix high-quality photographs of the printed books and paper artifacts, collated into single high-resolution PDF formats. This contrasts with the more heterogeneous formatting of books and documents hosted at Monoskop, which alternatingly features publisher PDFs or EPUB books, scanned or xeroxed books, digital files harvested from archives and libraries, text copy-pasted to html pages, or links to documents hosted at other repositories. Contributing to the multimodality of the Monoskop resources, the [CoCo] collection opts for a consistent aesthetic and technological display that emphasizes the visuality and the materiality of the various books. The metadata for each item, accordingly, stipulates format, size, and mode of fabrication, stressing again the importance of material format and technical constraints for these particular comics. To give one example: a small booklet by Jérôme Puigros-Puigener, consisting in four-color ballpen redrawings of war comics covers retitled “gone with the wings” (Figure 12.2), is presented as a 10.5 × 14.8 cm-sized, Xerox printed, 40-page booklet with Japanese-style binding. Given the thicker pagination for the relatively smaller format, the book had to be kept open by hand during the digitization process. The visible presence of the hands in the file is here not the same as the occasional misplaced fingers in GoogleBooks scans, which tended to invisibilize the manual labor required in the scanning process. Here the presence of the hands both offers information on the actual handling of the objects, but also bears witness to the human labor of digitization itself.

Figure 12.2 Excerpted image from the PDF file of Jérôme Puigros-Puigener’s Gone with the Wings, Brussels, Habeas Corpus, 2010.

[CoCo]  197 By opting for a digitization procedure that emphasizes the materiality of the scanned comics, Manouach reflexively draws attention to the transformative process of digitization and dissemination. The choice is notably different from the medium-specific formats for comics, CBR or CBZ, commonly used by rogue archivists because of their ease of use, their capacity to compress multiple images, and their openness for further fragmentation and reuse. At the same time, such formats and their reading applications also focus on enhancing readability and, by extension, narrative immersion. If the PDF format “looks back toward the fixity of analogue print artifacts” as much as it “participates in the mystification of digital tools,” according to Lisa Gitelman (2014, 131), the actual use of the format is here geared toward recognizing the specific materiality of the scanned artifacts. Comics in general cannot be easily reflowed, and this is even truer in the case of experimental works in particular, which similar to artists’ books, tend to “sabotage the message function” (Stewart 2011, 102). At the same time, the wide margins, the presence of hands holding the objects, the variation in lighting all remind users of digitization as a situated work, presented as an act worthwhile and meaningful in itself. By uploading works that, at a quick glance, could be thought to defy digitization, the curated collection on “Conceptual Comics” brings open visibility to a type of experimental comics that otherwise cultivate their own scarcity, as they tend to circulate only in relatively small circles, hand to hand, in festivals, and in a few specialized bookstores. Digitization, here, is not primarily a question of preservation but of making these items freely available and publicly accessible. This gesture has profound consequences, as Leibovici argues: “re-publishing is above all re-publicizing, that is making public again, having a question become public again, that is, producing a new public for this question” (Leibovici 2020, 108). In the case of Manouach’s curated collection, the aim is clearly announced by the introductory note: “This library is a resonating chamber for conceptual works and unconventional practices little known outside their communities and also a springboard for establishing the conditions for affective lineages among similarly minded practitioners” (Manouach 2020, n.p.). By curating a collection of works and making them freely accessible, Manouach contributes to produce a self-defined historical object—“conceptual comics”—and offers a framework to group together a range of diverse but affiliated productions. At the moment of writing this chapter, the collection features in total 78 works, covering more than a dozen countries across three continents. The comics included in the collection cover a strikingly varied array of material formats, graphic styles, contexts, covering an international scope of experimental comics production, mostly seized from the last fifteen years, but also reaching farther out back in the past to include historical examples such as Luiz Antônio Pires’ Cordel Urbano from 1973—or recent reprints of older works such as Stefano Tamburini’s Snake Agent, originally published bet­ ween 1980 and 1984. The inclusion of Tamburini’s work is telling of the

198  Benoît Crucifix collection’s interest in carefully chosen operational procedures and technologically minded productions: it is a comics narrative entirely composed from Xeroxed pages from a run of Secret Agent X-9 comic strips, productively using the photocopying machine as a way of distorting the reproduced images. Many of the collection items can be seen as a continuation of this kind of gesture, as it includes many comics produced according to uncreative protocols, relying on appropriation, republication, or tactics of redrawing and undrawing (Crucifix 2019). Several artists, such as Jochen Gerner, Francesc Ruiz, and Martín Vitaliti, have variously experimented with such acts of imitating, reproducing, remixing the comics archive. Their work is frequently presented in galleries and museums, and plays out the contrast between the mass-printed existence of comics and the physical space of the gallery. Ruiz, for instance, is an artist from Barcelona who primarily develops installation and exhibition projects in which he engages with comics as mass-printed objects, reprinting, duplicating, and creating pseudo-comic books to raise issues about the marketing and commercial circulation of comics. On Monoskop, one can thus find included in the collection a series of publications by Ruiz made in such curational settings, providing information on the specifics of the installation and on its original contexts. Manouach also opens up a more speculative and prospective approach to the online archive, by including and documenting practices for which there are no publishing outcomes to link to. The collection indeed includes two micro-essays, respectively profiling Zou Luoyang, editor of a zine conscientiously produced for the landfill, and Inès Chuquet, a comics collector interested in the biological life growing on cheap print commodities. Both profiles, which one cannot link back to authority files, invite to speculative and theoretical forays into alternative approaches to comics preservation, as a counterresponse to the standardization and commercialization of “mint” condition copies in comics fandom. Manouach indirectly advocates for the kind of “post-preservation” approach to cultural heritage outlined by Caitlin DeSilvey for architectural and landscape monuments, and which explores “ways of valuing the material past that do not necessarily involve accumulation and preservation” (2017, 17). The rogue archival work done by Ilan Manouach, uploading and making freely available a range of otherwise scarce small-press publications, similarly opens up a critical space to explore alternative ways of engaging with comics heritage. Finally, as much as the “Conceptual Comics” collection is a relatively personal and subjective curation, the wiki structure also potentially allows it to grow, in accordance with the open principles defended by Monoskop. Registered users can technically contribute information and deposit works, or copy the source code and easily reconstitute and reshare the entire collection elsewhere (Figure 12.3). Even if the history of brought changes does not compare to the most-debated Wikipedia pages, unsurprisingly, this technical structure does imply an openness in the anthologizing gesture that

[CoCo]  199

Figure 12.3 Screenshot of the edit function for the “Conceptual Comics” collection at Monoskop.

undermines a canonizing approach: the criticism of inclusion and exclusion is partly pre-empted by the fact that additions are possible and welcome, making the collection a potentially living and growing body of works. Less than two years after its debut on the Monoskop platform, the “Conceptual Comics” collection was also imported to the long-standing archive of avantgarde UbuWeb, formatted in basic html and maintaining an early internet aesthetics, and for which the banner includes an image excerpted from Manouach’s Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics (Figure 12.4). Conclusion The addition of a dedicated collection charting “conceptual comics” to UbuWeb is both a recognition and a cultural validation of avant-garde and experimental practices in comics, but also and most importantly a

200  Benoît Crucifix

Figure 12.4 Screenshot of the welcome page for the “Conceptual Comics” collection at UbuWeb.

[CoCo]  201 vindication that there is an important and productive dialogue between the history of comics and the avant-garde as out-of-sync as they may seem (Crucifix 2021). By coining the term “conceptual comics,” Manouach not only seeks entry within the sphere of avant-garde productions and critical discourse, from which comics were traditionally excluded or derided as “kitsch,” but rather affirms a continuity with comics traditions and finds in the medium and its contemporary digital networks a means to extend and expand avant-garde and experimental approaches. In uploading a curated collection of experimental works defined as “conceptual comics,” Manouach’s anthologizing gesture makes visible a community of creators and publishers who belong to different cultural, geographic, and linguistic traditions but who share a marginal positionality within the comics world. Manouach further theorizes the dearth of a critical discourse to situate such works (contrasting with the discourse-heavy context of the contemporary art world) as placing a specific demand on readers: They operate on the margins of distribution and reception and their unrootedness in the medium’s spectrum is more than an abstraction: artists uncomfortable with entrenched roles invite readers, in the absence of critical discourse, to engage with the works in non-specified, at times forensic ways of examination. (Manouach 2020, n.p.) Manouach’s curated collection of “Conceptual Comics” can be understood as providing a new context and hence also providing a productive critical framework. In doing so, it effectively responds to the lack of attention for avant-garde productions in the field of comics studies. As Benjamin Woo has observed, “genuinely aesthetically difficult comics circulating in avant-garde art worlds certainly do exist, but they are rare among the most celebrated and canonical works of comic art” (2018, 38). By acting as a curator of conceptual comics collections for shadow libraries such as Monoskop and UbuWeb, Manouach explores a way of building critical recognition for experimental comics that does not adapt to the canonizing and legitimizing mechanisms of contemporary comics studies, built on the foundation of the graphic novel. By incorporating comics within shadow libraries, Manouach adopts rogue archivists’ refusal of traditional canon-building, while recognizing the ubiquitous presence of selection and curation in a digital environment where the “pleasures of playlisting” has given rise to new forms of “transmediaphilia” (Collins 2017, 369) and where curation algorithms allow for the “data mining of taste” (Morris 2015). Manouach’s curated collections leverage shadow libraries’ “infrastructural maneuver,” explicitly bypassing copyright or tactically maintaining a legal gray zone (Thylstrup 2018, 97), to kickstart the archival preservation of a certain kind of comics works that still remains largely out of purview for traditional institutions of cultural memory. Final words to

202  Benoît Crucifix the curator: “In an age where public libraries are an endangered institution, media collections run by amateur librarians emerge as new, vital topographies of sharing and a possible direction for an alternative of institutional reconfiguration in the comics industry” (Manouach 2021a, 129). Works Cited Baudry, Julien. 2018. Cases·Pixels: Une histoire de la BD numérique en France. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais. Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics versus Art. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Collins, Jim. 2017. “Transmediaphilia, World Building, and the Pleasures of the Personal Digital Archive.” In World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries, edited by Marta Boni, 362–76. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Crucifix, Benoît. 2019. “Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing.” In The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 148–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021. “Uneven Developments: Bande Dessinée, Rear-Guard and Neo-AvantGardes.” In Neo-Avant-Gardes: Post-War Literary Experiments across Borders, edited by Bart Vervaeck, 180–94. Edinburgh: Edinburgh university press. De Kosnik, Abigail. 2016. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dekker, Annet, ed. 2017. “Copying as a Way to Start Something New. A Conversation with Dušan Barok about Monoskop.” In Lost and Living (in) Archives: Collectively Shaping New Memories, 212–26. Making Public. Amsterdam: Valiz. DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2017. Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dony, Christophe, Tanguy Habrand, and Gert Meesters, eds. 2014. La bande dessinée en dissidence alternative, indépendance, auto-édition / Comics in dissent: alternative, independence, self-publishing. Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège. Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2011. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2016. “Archiving Is the New Folk Art.” In Wasting Time on the Internet, 89–113. New York: Harper Perennial. ———. 2020. Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of Ubuweb. New York: Columbia University Press. Goriunova, Olga. 2021. “Uploading Our Libraries: The Subjects of Art and Knowledge Commons.” In Aesthetics of the Commons, edited by Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, and Shusha Niederberger, 41–61. Zurich: Diaphanes. Habrand, Tanguy. 2016. “L’édition hors édition: vers un modèle dynamique. Pratiques sauvages, parallèles, sécantes et proscrites.” Mémoires du livre 8 (1): 1–53. Karaganis, Joe, ed. 2018. Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2008. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leibovici, Franck. 2020. des opérations d’écriture qui ne disent pas leur nom. Paris: Questions théoriques.

[CoCo]  203 Manouach, Ilan. 2019. The Cubicle Island. Brussels: La Cinquième Couche. ———. 2020. “Conceptual Comics.” Monoskop. October 10, 2020. https:// monoskop.org/Conceptual_comics. ———. 2021a. “Outlining Conceptual Practices in Comics.” European Comic Art 14 (2): 102–29. ———. 2021b. Peanuts Minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice. Paris: Jean Boîte éditions. ———. 2022. “Estranging Comics. Towards a Novel Comics Praxeology.” Aalto: Aalto University. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Morris, Jeremy Wade. 2015. “Curation by Code: Infomediaries and the Data Mining of Taste.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (4–5): 446–63. https://doi. org/10.1177/1367549415577387. Moulthrop, Stuart, and Dene Grigar. 2017. Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Sinervo, Kalervo A. 2021. “Pirates and Publishers. Comics Scanning and the Audience Function.” In The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Their Publics, edited by Benjamin Woo and Jeremy Stoll, 208–33. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Stewart, Garrett. 2011. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Thompson, John B. 2010. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity. Thylstrup, Nanna Bonde. 2018. The Politics of Mass Digitization. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wershler, Darren, and Kalervo A. Sinervo. 2017. “Marvel and the Form of Motion Comics.” In Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey, 187–206. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Wershler, Darren, Kalervo A. Sinervo, and Shannon Tien. 2013. “A Network Archaeology of Unauthorized Comic Book Scans.” Amodern, no. 2. http://amodern. net/article/a-network-archaeology-of-unauthorized-comic-book-scans/. Woo, Benjamin. 2018. “Is There a Comic Book Industry?” Media Industries Journal, 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.3998/mij.15031809.0005.102.

13 Can Comics Think? Automation on The Cubicle Island Daniel Worden

In The Cubicle Island, Ilan Manouach examines a long-standing cartoon premise—being stranded on a desert island—by appropriating hundreds of “desert island” cartoons and producing new captions for them on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Especially through the “desert island” cartoon trope’s association with The New Yorker magazine in the mid-­ twentieth century, The Cubicle Island gestures to the long history of these cartoons as varied expressions of Cold War anxiety, shifting gender and class relations, and imagined states of pre-capitalist nature via narratives like Robinson Crusoe.1 The experience of reading The Cubicle Island’s crowdsourced cartoons produces a sense of the cartoon format’s flexible meaning in contemporary capitalism. In the sheer number of desert island cartoons in the project, Manouach proposes how widespread and collective alienation has become during late capitalism, and the appropriated cartoons’ microworker-authored captions demonstrate how these cartoons can refract contemporary experiences through juxtaposition of new and old, collective and elite, creative class and working class. As a conceptual comics artist, Ilan Manouach has a longtime interest in the scale of global comics production today. From Metakatz (2013) and Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics (2018) to Peanuts minus Schulz (2021), his work has appropriated comics and revised them through digital manipulation, emphasizing the comics medium’s commercial reality as a popular medium. For example, Maria Clara Carneiro and Lielson Zeni’s chapter in this volume examines how Manouach’s conceptual comics engage in a “hacking of the bande dessinée system,” and these comics projects exhibit a reflexive awareness of the comics medium as an economic, political, and social form. In keeping with this artistic project, Manouach published The Cubicle Island as a large book, weighty and dense at 1,500 pages (Figure 13.1). Yet its massive material presence is complicated by the cheap and fast ephemerality of the book’s contents – a two-page introduction followed by 1,494 desert island cartoons that have been captioned by microworkers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. It is not a book meant to be read, so much as understood. The Cubicle Island is a work of conceptual art, and it uses desert island cartoons and automation to construct an overwhelming DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-17

Can Comics Think?  205

Figure 13.1 Cover of Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island: Pirates, Microworkers, Spammists, and the Venatic Lore of Clickfarm Humor. Brussels: La Cinquième Couche, 2019. 1,500 pages, hardcover edition, 178mm × 254mm

multiplicity of cartoons. The sheer number of cartoons undermines any sense of individuality that one might associate with the desert island premise, and the desert island premise itself is ironized by the project’s full-length title, which invokes work, waste, and digital proliferation: The Cubicle Island: Pirates, Microworkers, Spambots, and the Venatic Lore of Clickfarm Humor.

206  Daniel Worden In order to properly account for Manouach’s conceptual comics project, even a critic’s singular voice seems inadequate, hence this essay’s final section which brings in microworkers to assist with interpretation. The Cubicle Island relies on the discrete individual’s voice—the captions and cartoons in the project are all made by unique people—yet the sheer proliferation and randomization of those voices through crowdsourcing creates a dialectic, from the individual and the economic platform into the possibility of collective expression. Yet The Cubicle Island offers little resolution to the feelings of alienation, exploitation, and precarity evoked by the desert island cartoons. Unlike the original New Yorker cartoons and captions, Manouach’s crowdsourced captions are often despondent rather than humorous, evidence of how a cartoon trope about alienation has shifted from an outlandish scenario to a point of identification. As artist Hito Steyerl has argued, the structure of digital labor and especially of a “Human Bot Employment Agency” like Amazon Mechanical Turk exploits workers through gamification and technological fantasies (Steyerl 2017, 136). In its utopian register, automation is supposed to liberate humans from work, yet instead, even leisure activities like video games have become work for some. Steyerl speculates about what automation might mean: It seems that automation didn’t necessarily free people from labor. Instead, it turned some workers into robots. This leads to some interesting problems: What’s the difference between a human and a robot? And how does this apply to games? And, on top of that, to art as well? All these can be condensed into one single question: “Can creatives think?” (Steyerl 2017, 154) Steyerl’s provocation is answered in Manouach’s The Cubicle Island through the production of conceptual art in the comics medium. As a modern art medium, comics have relied on auteurship and its accompanying rhetoric of “genius” and “masterpiece” in the twenty-first century, from museum exhibits of the “Masters of American Comics” to the dominant prestige of single author/artist graphic novels. Yet most comics do not resemble the auteur memoirs and trippy confessions that inaugurated the serious consideration of comics in museums and universities. Manouach’s The Cubicle Island brings the factory conditions of much comics production into the foreground, and his use of desert island cartoons highlights the constitutive roles of genre, pastiche, and repetition in the comics medium. A rarefied fine art medium as well as a commercial medium, comics become clearly both expressive and industrial at the same time through Manouach’s conceptual aesthetics. Indeed, as Manouach himself has written in an article about his crowdsourced Peanuts minus Schulz project, the production of comics on microworker platforms “make comics’ dynamics between art and industry painfully(?) transparent” (Manouach 2019, 17, parentheses in

Can Comics Think?  207 original). Manouach’s crowdsourced comics are clearly products of a massive labor system, a compellingly honest gesture in a comics medium that is so reliant on the concept of the “artistic genius” even from within its most corporate structures. Manouach’s The Cubicle Island follows in a tradition of contemporary digital artworks that use the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Digital artist Aaron Koblin’s 2005 work The Sheep Market, for example, “is a collection of 10,000 sheep created by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Each worker was paid $.02 (US) to “draw a sheep facing left’” (Koblin, n.d.). In this massive collection of sheep drawings, the viewer experiences both the idiosyncratic individuality of unique sheep images, as well as the sublime realization of massive, inhuman scale afforded by the crowdsourcing platform (Figure 13.2). As Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson note of Koblin’s work, it signals a broader shift from postmodern critiques of medium, to an interest in the production of art within media formats, as “specific processes, such as … Koblin’s hands-off commissioning of an archive, have resurfaced as central to the workings of contemporary art” (Adamson and Bryan-Wilson 2016, 12). Koblin’s relationship to digital labor structures like Amazon Mechanical Turk is like his use of digital technology to create intentionally handmade artifacts, such as the collaborative Johnny Cash Project (2010) that compiled individual drawings from around the globe into a music video. In an interview with the art book publisher Phaidon, Koblin described The Sheep Market as, “I hope, a delightfully critical take on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk is an online workplace that uses the idle cycles of human minds. They ask people to do tasks that are hard for computers to do but easy for humans, and they pay you to do these tasks” (Phaidon 2014). Koblin’s characterization of Amazon Mechanical Turk as a tool for maximizing human efficiency—taking advantage of our mind’s “idle cycles” —makes it clear that The Sheep Market is, in part, about how digital technology has inflected our sleep cycles and our dreams. Yet it uses a platform that is designed to occupy the mind, to monetize time that workers might otherwise spend at leisure, at rest, asleep. Workers no longer dream, and even when they do count sheep, they do so as freelance laborers. This is the “delightfully critical” nature of The Sheep Market. Visually stunning and conceptually sharp, The Sheep Market demonstrates how crowdsourcing and digital platforms can create works of art that appeal to both traditional and conceptual aesthetic norms, wherein exploitation itself becomes visible as the basic condition of lived experience in an automated world. Along with its use in art projects, the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform has also already become a centerpiece of scholarly research in the social sciences. For example, in a 2017 study in the Journal of Consumer Research, Joseph K. Goodman and Gabriele Paolacci describe how consumer researchers have increasingly turned to the internet to recruit study participants and collect data, and in particular to crowdsourcing. On websites such as Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Prolific, researchers

208  Daniel Worden

Figure 13.2 Detail from Aaron Koblin, The Sheep Market (2005). Courtesy of the artist.

Can Comics Think?  209 act as “employers” and hire and compensate “workers” to participate in computerized tasks (e.g. surveys, choice tasks, and/or simulated shopping environments). … These platforms grant unprecedented efficiencies, providing researchers with participants who can be accessed at any point in time, are more demographically diverse, and are less expensive to reach than traditional research participants. (Goodman and Paolacci 2017, 196) In order to contextualize Manouach’s The Cubicle Island, I will first set out the history of the “Mechanical Turk,” originally an actual device rather than a digital platform. Since the 1770s, the Mechanical Turk has functioned as a colonialist trope that intentionally confuses the mechanical with the human, and mistakes labor for truth. The concept’s continued invocation in art and research foregrounds the inherent exploitative nature of labor within capitalism, its uncanny displacement of the human from human tasks. This connection is most evident in the Mechanical Turk’s contemporary incarnation as a digital platform. Launched in 2005, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing platform in which microworkers perform discrete tasks for pay. In a 2006 article, The Economist described it as “artificial artificial intelligence,” a platform that is part toolkit for software developers, and part online bazaar: anyone with internet access can register as a Turk user and start performing the Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) listed on the Turk website (mturk.com). Companies can become ‘requesters’ by setting up a separate account, tied to a bank account that will pay out fees, and then posting their HITs. Most HITs pay between one cent and $5. So far, people from more than 100 countries have performed HITs, though only those with American bank accounts can receive money for their work; others are paid in Amazon gift certificates. (Economist 2006, 13) The Mechanical Turk platform is not artificial intelligence, but instead human labor, yet the MTurk platform asks you to interact with others as machines, thus giving it the feel of artificial intelligence instead of managerial oversight. The platform’s name refers to the Mechanical Turk device created by Hungarian inventor Wolfgang Von Kempelen in the eighteenth century. As historian Minsoo Kang has described, the Mechanical Turk device was never meant to exhibit “true” artificial intelligence, but was instead created as an elaborate illusion: According to the account by Karl Gottlieb von Windisch, Kempelen attended a magic performance that was given at the royal court in 1769 by a Frenchman named Pelletier who used magnets to create his

210  Daniel Worden illusions. After the act Kempelen told the empress that he could construct a machine “whose effects should be more suprizing [sic], and the deception more complete, than any thing her Majesty had then seen [sic].” A year later, he fulfilled his promise by presenting to her his chess-player, a life-sized figure in Turkish costume sitting behind a large cabinet with a chess board on top. Before the demonstration got under way, the inventor performed an act that is essential to understanding the device’s problematic place in the history of automata. Kempelen aped [inventor Jacques de] Vaucanson by opening up various small doors on the cabinet to reveal the wheels and gears within to demonstrate that, like the flute player [automaton created by Vaucanson], his invention had nothing but machinery inside. After the device beat a series of opponents in several courtly performances, news of the astounding object spread to England and France through letters written to Gentleman’s Magazine and Le Mercure de France by Louis Dutens, an English clergyman who witnessed a performance in Vienna. (Kang 2011, 176–177) Exhibited throughout Europe and North America, the Mechanical Turk functioned much like Amazon’s MTurk platform, insofar as a human hid inside the Mechanical Turk, controlling the movements of the machine (Figure 13.3). MTurk likewise relies on human microworkers to generate the appearance of automation. On the surface, Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk and Amazon’s MTurk both appear to be automated, when in fact they merely obscure human labor. The Mechanical Turk’s ruse—it is not an automaton, but instead an elaborate trick—is its central meaning. Even during its time, the machine was not plausible. The American writer Edgar Allan Poe, for example, wrote a long essay about the Mechanical Turk, arguing that it had to be directed by human intelligence: “It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else. Indeed, this matter is susceptible of a mathematical demonstration, a priori. The only question then is of the manner in which human agency is brought to bear” (Poe 2011). As Minsoo Kang explains, the Mechanical Turk was received as a puzzle to be solved, rather than a work of technological wonder: Since the vast majority of writings on the chessplayer took up the challenge of trying to uncover its trickery, the fascination with the object signified not the obsession with and celebration of the mechanical … but rather the exact opposite, namely the disillusionment with and skepticism toward the grand claims of mechanistic philosophy. The chess-player was not an automaton in the sense of a self-moving machine but an articulate puppet that did an excellent job of pretending to be an automaton. As radical political thinkers of the period also derided the state-machine notion that was related to the world-machine and body-machine ideas,

Can Comics Think?  211

Figure 13.3 The “Mechanical Turk” on the cover of The Magazine of Science, and School of Arts 160 (April 23, 1842). Hathi Trust Digital Library

212  Daniel Worden one can interpret the French Revolution as an act of breaking open the false Leviathan-automaton of the monarchy and exposing the mere human players hiding within. So when Robespierre referred to the executed Louis XVI as a “crowned automaton,” he was speaking not just about a single individual who had been beheaded but the entire absolutist-mechanistic order that the revolution had taken apart. (Kang 2011, 183) The Mechanical Turk’s failure to convince audiences of its artificial intelligence makes it symbolic of a broader rejection of Enlightenment rationality, and by extension, the automaton becomes an embodiment of the Romantic valuation of the sublime over the beautiful, the passionate over the rational. The machinery is fake, the spirit inside is real. A product of colonial wonder in its “Turk” costume, the automaton is more spectacle than machine, most of its machine parts mere decoration that hide the human figure behind the controls. By adopting the “Mechanical Turk” name, Amazon signals its own duplicity, as a purveyor of digital services that must by necessity rely on human laborers to deliver the appearance of automation. No longer a colonial spectacle but an instrument of platform capitalism, MTurk democratizes the machinery through microworkers, turning an automaton entertainment into a workplace.2 The Mechanical Turk is an early example of what Sianne Ngai has theorized as the “gimmick,” an aesthetic form central to capitalism. As Ngai theorizes, the “capitalist gimmick, however, is both a wonder and a trick. It is a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain” (Ngai 2020, 54). And if the original Mechanical Turk is an early gimmick, then MTurk is a contemporary gimmick, an artificial intelligence that is also not actually artificially intelligent. While the Mechanical Turk was an automaton that contained a hidden operator, MTurk is a sleek digital platform that exploits workers. As Ngai notes, “the flip side of historically low unemployment rates is the rise of low-paid precarious service jobs. The flip side of capitalist awe is the rise of the gimmick” (Ngai 2020, 265). Like the desert island comics that make up Ilan Manouach’s The Cubicle Island, gimmicks are identifiable because they are repetitive. The Mechanical Turk was a gimmick in part because it clearly borrowed from earlier Enlightenment automata, and MTurk is a gimmicky platform because it facilitates the repetition of discrete tasks. Yet by its very nature, a gimmick loses value over time. As Sianne Ngai posits, “the perpetual reuse of a device for producing an effect is often exactly what transforms it into an impoverished gimmick” (Ngai 2020, 66). Manouach’s use of desert island cartoons—one of the most tired tropes in cartoons—challenges the viewer to find meaning in the gimmick itself, in the sheer repetition and the creative impoverishment of a tired cartoon premise. In this way, Manouach’s The Cubicle Island accomplishes a similarly “delightfully critical” expression of MTurk’s possibilities as

Can Comics Think?  213 evident in Aaron Koblin’s MTurk-sourced The Sheep Market (Phaidon 2014). Manouach’s task for microworkers—to write a caption for a desert island cartoon—mimics The New Yorker’s regular “Cartoon Caption Contest” feature.3 In so doing, Manouach draws a clear connection between the MTurk microworker and The New Yorker reader, a line that connects two class-based identities that do not necessarily recognize one another. As Iain Topliss notes in a history of New Yorker cartoonists: “As a magazine for the middle classes, The New Yorker is an almost embarrassingly hegemonic document. It might be described as the house organ of a key fraction of the American middle class” (Topliss 2005, 4). Turning New Yorker cartooning into microworker labor, of course, is not that big of a shift from the magazine’s typical practice of paying freelance artists for individual cartoons that meet with editorial approval. The difference is one merely of scale, and with that comes a much lower rate of pay. Making visible the economics at work to foster a sense of middle-class leisure in The New Yorker’s readership, Manouach’s The Cubicle Island also demonstrates how leisure time has become increasingly monetized by digital platforms, just as Koblin’s sheep symbolize the digital takeover of sleep. The freelance cartoonist, the microworker captionist, the “Caption Contest” participant, the editorial intern reading through the slush pile, and even the leisure-time reader are all monetized roles today, and MTurk provides a platform through which those activities can be bought and sold in bulk. The Cubicle Island, then, provides a space for microworkers to reflect upon their own circumstances, and presents those reflections as art. As I read through the microworker-captioned cartoons in the massive book, I was most interested in the captions that offered some sense of reflexivity and autobiographical relation to the absurd desert island cartoon scenarios. Perhaps the most important element of The Cubicle Island is its disavowal of authorship, and its presentation of microworkers as both an aggregate mass and a series of unique individual perspectives. The Cubicle Island makes comics a collective expression precisely because those expressions come through the anonymizing, exploitative MTurk platform. Because, of course, the connective capacities of MTurk do not need to be anonymous, exploitative, or money-based at all, The Cubicle Island provides a space in which the reader can ask what kinds of art could be made if our systems were not exploitative, if they did not strand subjects on desert islands? For me, as a critic, I wonder how I can account for the collective possibility that I detect within The Cubicle Island, especially since it is produced by an exploitative system that seems to facilitate reflection on capitalism’s structuring of everyday life. In order to articulate this critical perspective, I have decided to crowdsource the interpretation of the cartoons themselves. In May 2022, I used the MTurk platform to solicit comparative analyses of desert island cartoons. I selected four cartoons from The Cubicle Island— cartoon images with microworker-supplied captions—for which I could

214  Daniel Worden readily find original sources. I presented each cartoon from The Cubicle Island alongside its original version from an issue of The New Yorker magazine. The cartoon pairs were shuffled into a random order and delivered to MTurk microworkers who selected this HIT, or Human Intelligence Task, for the pay of $5.00 (US). Following Manouach’s conceptual practice, I engaged in this MTurk exercise to provide another point of reflection on comics and capitalism. I thought that there may be a glimpse of the utopian possibilities of a conceptual critical practice here, wherein different kinds of voices can appear in scholarship in unusual forms. Alternately, these responses also serve as evidence of how the very acts of criticism and interpretation have been monetized, in a way that extends from MTurk to student and faculty roles in neoliberal higher education. In an attempt to focus responses, I used this prompt on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform: Please write 4 brief 100-word essays that compare and contrast each pair of cartoons. One of the cartoons was published in The New Yorker magazine, and the other one is a revision of the same cartoon, published in the conceptual artist Ilan Manouach’s The Cubicle Island. For the conceptual project and book The Cubicle Island, Manouach paid microworkers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to write new captions for hundreds of “desert island” cartoons. Please write a 100-word essay about each pair of cartoons and how the different captions create different meanings in each cartoon. Does the revised cartoon offer any new insight on commentary on life in capitalism today? The image pairs and MTurk microworker responses to the prompt above conclude this essay. The responses are each by distinct individuals on the MTurk platform, and I have not edited the responses for grammar, sentence structure, or style. Respondent #1 explicates the cartoons simply; Respondent #2 praises the artistic qualities of the cartoons; and Respondent #3 reads the cartoons as expressions of hope and despair in capitalism. The three interpretations stage a provisional dialectic, perhaps a way to think about how to get off the island.

Can Comics Think?  215

Figure 13.4 Tom Cheney, Caption Contest Cartoon, New Yorker (January 20, 2014). Courtesy of The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank

216  Daniel Worden

Figure 13.5 Cartoon from Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island, page 8.

1. The first cartoon shows the lady standing above the tree and one joker standing beside the tree in the island area. The story tells a short information about how the homes are vanishing and all the peoples exit the home. 2. This cartoon was so marvelous, and this cartoon gave more than a thousand meanings. Art is one of the best hobby, but some people review their talent. This will give peace in my mind 3. Capitalism will have an end, it’s an inevitable little island that we will have to abandon when the game is done. Something that is so competitive cannot last without having more intervention. The original sketch explains this in just simple humor, as let’s wait for it to burst, and the other one is like this is the issue, let’s get the hell out. Do you want to stay, or do you want to wait until it’s too late and die on the island that you’ve landed on. This is a great metaphor for capitalism in general because that’s how it feels.

Can Comics Think?  217

Figure 13.6 Mischa Richter, “Of course, you understand you can’t possibly stay here tonight,” New Yorker (April 29, 1944). Courtesy of The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank

218  Daniel Worden

Figure 13.7 Cartoon from Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island, page 13.

Can Comics Think?  219 1. The cartoon 2 shows 2 people staying on the island beach, and they decide to stay one fantastic night together in the island beach. It is an amazing and marvelous day they utilize in that day. 2. This cartoon was so beautiful, which helps for my mind relax and everything. Some peoples like this cartoon. This cartoon will love and care, one of gorgeous art. 3. The revised art is a great way on how to look at working on platforms such at MTurk. It is inevitable that you have to wait until your big break in life, which is like waiting for the super big fish to come, but it never comes. On MTurk, and similar platforms, that fish will never come, so we are happy just getting as many small fish as we can in our bucket. But unfortunately, some days, you don’t even get that, that’s why it feels like we are isolated on an island with nothing. But we still wait for that great day of fishing that leaves us happy at the end of the day, and proud of ourselves.

Figure 13.8  Robert Weber, “What’s Our Immigration Policy?,” New Yorker (December 15, 1997). Courtesy of The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank

220  Daniel Worden

Figure 13.9 Cartoon from Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island, page 1339.

Can Comics Think?  221 1. The cartoon 3 shows the rain. In that place the heavy rains are falling in that place. It gives amazing vibes of climate, and also it gives a good feel and an enjoyable one. All of the tree is fast, and the rains are heavy. 2. In this cartoon, determined people’s talent and spiritual, this type of art will give more than 1000 meanings for people. All will understand peace of mind. 3. The revised art is an excellent metaphor of life as capitalism. We can never forget about our job because it’s always there from the cellphone, to the call-in days and lack of vacations. It feels like there is no such thing as a vacation anymore and that someone is staring over your shoulder if you are having a fun time and not at your desk. In the revised art it’s darker and the clouds are darker because that’s how it feels. It possibly couldn’t be a nice day out for when you are gone fishing, because the one chance you get for that, the day would be terrible.

Figure 13.10 Saul Steinberg, “R,” New Yorker (January 15, 1966). Courtesy of The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank

222  Daniel Worden

Figure 13.11 Cartoon from Ilan Manouach, The Cubicle Island, page 1127.

Can Comics Think?  223 1. The cartoon 4 shows the village land, drawn by an “R” initial shape, and they are manufacturing the foods materials in that land. It is very good and amazingly creative. They are in the argic land. 2. This cartoon will give 1000 meanings, easy to learn. Their difference will give more meanings, so it was so beautiful and easy to learn this cartoon. 3. In the revised art, it becomes a metaphor of the sedentary life being a shipwreck. Modern society feels like a bunch of people out on boats waiting to crash on desert islands that they don’t see. From people tired, looking for something out in the great sea of life, but finding absolutely nothing. Hoping to find the reward, but knowing it’s not there. Capitalism is the dream that everyone is focused on chasing from the time they are a child, but so many people forget about the beautiful palm trees they can see along the way. And there is something really sad about that.

Notes 1 The Cubicle Island even adopts the same font as The New Yorker magazine for its captions. On the “desert island” cartoon, The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons offers a capsule summary of the trope’s history in the magazine: “these cartoons made their first appearance in the nineteen-thirties, and in these older versions, the desert island is quite large, and a ship is sinking in the background …. Later the island became an icon—not an island, but the idea of one—the classic tiny lobe of land with a single palm tree” (Makoff 2018, 252). 2 On automation and platform capitalism, see Benanav 2019a, Benanav 2019b, Smith 2020, and Srnicek 2017. 3 For an analysis of The New Yorker’s caption contest, see Smith 2021.

Works Cited Adamson, Glenn and Julia Bryan-Wilson. 2016. Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing. New York: Thames & Hudson. Benanav, Aaron. 2019a. “Automation and the Future of Work—1.” New Left Review 119: 5–38. ———. 2019b. “Automation and the Future of Work—2.” New Left Review 120: 117–146. Economist. 2006. “Artificial Intelligence.” Accessed 8 August 2022. https://www. economist.com/technology-quarterly/2006/06/10/artificial-artificial-intelligence Goodman, Joseph K. and Gabriele Paolacci. 2017. “Crowdsourcing Consumer Research.” Journal of Consumer Research 44 (1): 196–210. Kang, Minsoo. 2011. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Koblin, Aaron. n.d. The Sheep Market. Accessed August 8, 2022. http://www. aaronkoblin.com/project/the-sheep-market/ Makoff, Bob, ed. 2018. The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons, Vol. 1. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal.

224  Daniel Worden Manouach, Ilan. 2019. “Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as Compositional Practice.” The Comics Grid 9 (1): 1–21. Ngai, Sianne. 2020. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Phaidon. 2014. “Google’s Aaron Koblin on Digital Revolution.” Accessed 8 August 2022. https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2014/july/02/google-s-aaronkoblin-on-digital-revolution/ Poe, Edgar Allan. 2011. “Maelzel’s Chess Player.” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Comprehensive Collection of E-Texts. Accessed 8 August 2022. https://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm. Smith, Jason E. 2020. Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation. London: Reaktion. Smith, Philip. 2021. “‘Getting Arno’: The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Competition.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 12 (3): 240–253. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Malden: Polity. Steyerl, Hito. 2017. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. New York: Verso. Topliss, Iain. 2005. The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

14 Ilan Manouach The Comic Book Hacker Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni

Introduction “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one” (Debord, 2002). Ilan Manouach masters the practice of détournement – the Situationist strategy of remixing a cultural object by applying a minimal change to it, aiming at revealing, in this transformation, a new way of seeing this same object, exposing its political dimensions and cultural impacts (deleting a false idea, replacing it with the right one). By adopting détournement as a declared practice, he affirms his engagement in the politicization of art. An attempt at disrupting a system is implied because it shows its flaws: differently to cyber hacker goals (Coleman 2011), this hacking is not performed to secure or reform the system, but to subvert it. For example, since the reception of Katz, the reception of Maus was affected: Maus can no longer be read without questioning the contrast between cats cruelly killing mice versus cats cruelly killing cats (Moura 2014). Another consequence of his détournements is the exposition of economic and social values implicated in a comic book, often signaled by symbolic meanings, as if those symbols were removed from historic context. A comic book is a reading material that depends on the distribution of elements on the page, plus the page-to-page distribution, with meanings composed by the dialectical articulation among juxtaposed parts—but that also depends on the context of distribution. A comic book, as every “semantic information … needs a form that structurally corresponds to its aesthetic-informational purposes,” and changing the pages can disturb or disarticulate the discourse, the narration (CIRNE 1975, 95, our translation). Likewise, the process from the making to the reception is stressed in the proposition of the book as an atom, since in this comprehension the book mediates a dialogue between producer and reader, core of a cultural practice: the system of comics as a whole. And by “system” we mean the articulation among author, book and reader supplemented by all the other actors and practices surrounding this triangle.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-18

226  Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni The systemic triangle we mention is described by the Brazilian theorist Antonio Candido in Formação da literatura brasileira, a study on the history of Brazilian literature, where the idea of literature as a cultural practice is developed, by means of the dynamic relations among those three aspects (author, book, and reader), in a materialistic view of literature. In this sense, “system” is not seen as a medium or language as proposed by Groensteen, but in the same perspective proposed by Candido, which intends to include social aspects in the analysis of literature history. As he points out, aesthetics is embodied in social meanings, in a dialectical relation between form and context. Candido criticizes both sociological criticism and structuralism, because, while the first despises aesthetics, the latter anchors its criticism only in the form. According to this method, form and history should not be disassociated in the analysis of a work, because an aesthetic conception filters elements of social order (Candido 2006, 25). Thus, literature and comics are cultural practices that depend on the existence of producers (authors, editors, publishers, etc.) and receptors of the products, all being points of the triangle: authorship and readership mediated by books or other cultural objects. Candido also indicates that the existence of a system relies in tradition, which forms a group of people producing, reading, and reproducing objects and meanings that sustain the same system. In the words of Karl Marx, capitalism fetishizes commodities, eclipsing the human relations that produce each object, and a materialistic view of art, as offered by Candido, brings the understanding that even the values of a work of art are not inherent to each object of art. Values and meanings are created by social and economic dynamics, and they change along history. Understanding art as a system implies accessing all the human relations that create and value the art object; so, in order to understand that each form has internal meanings that relate to external meanings (context and history of the art form), it is necessary to change each other each time by the dialectical and dynamic relations within (Candido 2006, 17). In the age of mechanical reproduction, labor and consumption have an important role in the meaning of a book as any cultural practice, and by re-staging the process of creation and selling it to an audience, Manouach provokes a questioning of this structure, and, at the same time, he aims at unveiling the capitalist practices that form and constrain the semiotic/cultural system. Consumption is part of the apprehension of art, and by this action of refabricating books, a form of politicization of comics books is underwritten (Cirne 1970, 15). Publishing can be described as a hybrid object-human networked activity that develops around compound technologies of inscription and activates an entanglement of legal, institutional, economic, political, and personal bodies. Through a series of industrial innovations and various modes of production routine optimizations, which have also benefited other segments of the creative industry, the publishing world has always been in the vanguard of capitalism (Manouach 2019b).

The Comic Book Hacker  227 Manouach’s practices seem to be activated from a “what if” sentence: “What if we do not distinguish cats and mice?” “What if this book is translated into the language of people portrayed in a racist manner?” “What if there is not a single line to mark out neither characters nor objects in this book?”: such investigations aim, constantly, at the creative process of a book, as well as the labor and value conditions related to it, a materialistic vision of the artwork. He erases or modifies a single aspect in a whole book and presents a new mise en scène of the object (a new book, a new printing, a new distribution, a new context, leading to a new enunciation), which disrupts the meanings related to the industrial comics fabrication. This minimal change can be seen as a hack in the comic system, revealing its fragilities and incongruences, and, at the same time, enabling a critical reading of the hacked work. One of the most evident fragilities revealed by Katz was the importance given to authorship, as the legal procedure effaced the figure of the author, replacing him by a company. As a consequence, incongruence is shown: does authorship relate to an artistic expression or to the profit generated by the artwork? In the history of art, authors often honor other authors by copying style or themes, which has helped the development of genres and tradition; in a capitalist world, authors became trademarks and the copy a taboo, and every object an autonomous work detached from history. In the present essay, we analyze to what extent the strategies of “hacking the system” help develop a critical approach of the historical processes in the comic book industry. A comic book system Ilan Manouach operates a hack in the system, disrupting a set of processes, revealing the system itself in action, that is, the reunion of cultural practices involving comics. System, for Candido, is distinguished from manifestation, as a system is “linked by common denominators (CANDIDO, 1981, 23, our translation)” which allow recognizing typical values inside a determined cultural practice. Such values involve language, themes, images, certain elements of social and psychic nature, manifested historically and which give the literary system an organic aspect, nourished by characteristics of the society which creates it, and which is formed by it—a systemic and dynamic creation of forms and meanings. Among actors of a system there exists a set of literary producers, more or less aware of their role; a set of receptors, formed by different types of audiences, without which the works do not survive; a transmission mechanism (in general terms, a language translated in styles), all the parts connected to one another. (Candido 1981, 24, our translation) According to Candido, this set of elements constructs “a form of inter-human communication,” through which individuals are connected, and which

228  Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni originates “elements of interpretation of the different reality spheres” (Candido 1981, 24, our translation). We identify all elements of the system mentioned by Candido (producer-work-receptor) in a “comic book system,” and this explains why a single infected object provokes discussions regarding different parts of the same system, from the intertwined surface of a comic book to tangled actions around its distribution. In this sense, even though we believe Rodolphe Töpffer may be credited as the foundational creator of the comics, the manifestations of his works did not give rise to a tradition, which would begin to be developed later in the 19th century, with the existence of a readership in formation by the mediation of an object (for instance, the press products where comic strips and full pages of comics were published, as in the United States, but also the illustrated magazines in Europe and Brazil). The word “system” implies that all points of the triangle are necessary in order to enable one another: an author and conditions for publishing and distribution are needed to produce the object that reaches the readers, whose rising numbers demand new productions, leading to new works, which, finally, enables the whole chain to expand the system itself. For example, underground comics changed the system of American comics when authors subverted funny stories to convey adult content, but, more than that, they developed new forms of selling and distributing comics. Another example, located in Brazil, can serve as illustration: even though a community of comics readers has existed since the beginning of the 20th century, the absence of an infrastructure to produce comics works (in this case, publishers interested in Brazilian authorship) have delayed the formation of a Brazilian comic system: until the 1960s, newspapers and comic publishers presented mostly translations of American or European comic strips and magazines. Thus, foreign strips were less expensive for publishers and newspapers owners than native productions (Cirne 1970). When Brazilian authors started producing their work independently (creating, printing, distributing), they managed to develop a dynamic relation with an audience—which was already pre-formed by foreign comics (the same way authors were formed by foreign content), in a peripheral relation correlated to many other dynamics in an imperialistic capitalism. So, between the first Brazilian comics published by Angelo Agostini in 1869 and the publication of the magazine Pasquim in 1969, a gap of a hundred years of Brazilian authors was neglected by the owners of the means of production. Both examples, the American underground and the Brazilian comic system, expose the manner in which this change in the production point enables a shift in other points of the author, book and reader triangle: they developed new forms of comics and comics consumption, as the adult readership was often neglected by industrial American and European comic systems. The Industrial model relies on a repetition of structures to form (and conform) readership, as the insistence on specific genres for young readers. For instance, this model obliterates the passage of time, and, as consequence, of history:

The Comic Book Hacker  229 older readers are replaced by younger ones, but the repeated characters of comic book series never change, never get old—if they still sell. The repetition of these elements (quotations, pastiches, mannerisms, paid tributes, shared themes, and tropes) is constitutive of the history of a system, and of the system itself: for instance, small parts of a system help the formation of tradition and canons (as aforementioned, the continuity that marks the existence of a symbolic system). Katz, Manouach’s most well-known project, for example, invites a rereading of the hacked book, questioning the position of the book inside this system, that is, its reverberations in the present and the formation of a canon, and its persistence in time despite an exposed flaw. Is a book still canonic if one sign is shifted? Does being canonic mean being sacred? The dialectic relations among all actors placed in the game are verified by these sign shifts. Katz

In the traditional alternative area of the comics Festival in Angoulême (the space known as New World), a black-covered book would not call so much attention: Katz (Manouach 2011) was only another obscure book resembling Maus (Spiegelman 2005), without a single mention of an author below the title—in same the year Art Spiegelman presided at the festival, 2011. We, as spectators visiting the space could only guess that the black-covered book was meant to be a homage or a joke, and only a few months later we could access its implications. A discussion on Katz took place for a few months, in a forum opened by its publisher, La 5e Couche and in other public forums, while Flammarion, the French publisher of Maus, sued La 5e Couche for plagiarism. Katz copied the graphic novel Maus, though all characters were transformed into cats—the animal which originally represented Nazis in Maus. Consequently, the previous distinction between mice and cats in Maus was blurred in the collage Katz, an anonymous publication at the time (the publisher La 5e Couche represented it until Ilan Manouach was revealed as its creator). The process from the presentation of Katz to its legal end brought various exchanges of ideas on the meanings of parody, plagiarism and works of art. The primal accusation against Katz was that the copyright of Maus was used without permission or payment, and the trademarked material would be damaged by the La 5e Couche book. The commercial circle was wrecked by an act of piracy. This act provoked an action (a legal one) from the author Spiegelman—or, more accurately, from the French press house Flammarion, representing the author of Maus in France: in this way, the act revealed that an author is not limited to a person, but he is also his legal representatives; the person/author Art Spiegelman fades below the legal signature of contracts. Although the fetishization of art (we mean the capitalist mechanisms that efface human dynamics in the production and reception of a commodity) conveys that the work of art is a creation of a singular and original individual, an object of art,

230  Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni as every commodity is anchored on social dynamics, where an individual never creates ex nihilo, nor alone: even artists working for themselves depend on other actors in a book chain. Also, the recognition of authorship depends on the economic values given by a social group; the legal procedure Manouach faced after Katz made clear the bond between cultural work and economic values. The developments after the lawsuit included the stripping of the book Katz and the erasing of its files, followed by the burning of remaining pages in an auto-da-fé, an exhibition of the ashes—and finally the production of a new book assembling essays and documents about the project: Metakatz (Manouach and Löwenthal 2013), which reaffirms the impact of the black-covered book, Katz (and Maus), in the comics scene. The debate regarding the representation of the Holocaust and its victims in Maus/Katz would be supplemented by discussions regarding authorial rights and the permission of reusing a work of art. The above-mentioned web-forum, created with the purpose of debating Katz, allowed anonymous people to give their opinion on the work, when the name of the “pirate” was still unknown: “If it is détournement, it is quite weak. Is less more? A Bauhaus bande dessinée?” (our translation) or “A mere point of rhetoric taking dimensions of a plane surface.” In addition to that: I have seen that awful book. I don’t get it. What’s the point? To laugh about a masterpiece? Some kind of jealousy around Spiegelman’s success? To laugh about the Holocaust? Another antisemitic attempt? To make money as Spiegelman is now president of Angouleme festival? Is it really about wearing a mask or not? If it is the case, I don’t understand why the “author” is anonymous. Isn’t it a mask too? A coward mask… (Maus; Katz 2011) The hacking Manouach performs in the comic book world is materialized in the insertion of a minimal change in the process of making a book and its surroundings: actions and discourses around a book also take place in a dynamic relation of its system, feeding the systemic connection among book, authorship, readership. In this particular conceptual practice of Katz, he performed an operation in the models practiced by “Pierre Menard,” as previously mentioned by Natacha Michel (Manouach and Löwenthal 2013, 39–40). “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote” is a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges, a tale about a writer, Menard, who wants to rewrite Quixote, the masterpiece by Miguel de Cervantes. The only way to re-create Quixote, as Menard would conclude, was to not only copy the whole book, word by word, but to live the same life as Cervantes. What Manouach would not expect was that the hacked system reacted so intensively on trying to expel the infected Maus-transformed-in-Katz. Hence, the process of re-staging Maus was afterward followed by the process of

The Comic Book Hacker  231 disappearance of Katz, and finally followed by the creation of the archive of both processes (forums, videos, photographs, the exhibition of the ashes in a gallery and the meta-book Metakatz), a contemporary strategy in art, questioning the relations between past and present, where both overlap in the same object, and each layer of the strata (the modified object and the object resulted from the modification) is read on the other. By tackling a well-known and important art piece of the realm of comics, the work of Ilan Manouach has given him the aura of a provocateur. However, his détournements and other strategies of infecting mass-produced comic books configures, in fact, a “radically conceptual approach to comics in the post-print era” (Crucifix 2020, 77). The expression “radically conceptual approach” may be a valuable form of describing the operations made by Manouach: radical, as the etymological use of the term, defining the aim of reaching the core of a situation or structure, to arrive at the root of a cause, to deepen the reading by reversing the structures that construct the sense—a subversive act—and conceptual describing a method of art where art and discourses on art are dissolved in the same object (Archer et al. 1998, 74). Manouach chooses the term “conceptual comics” to describe his own work, pointing at how comics are intrinsically related to their industrial aspects (Manouach 2019b, 10). He focuses his work of art on the processes of making a work of art, for instance, the creation of a book and the insertion of this object in the publishing scene. When answering, in the forum (Maus; Katz 2011), a question regarding the reason a whole book, and not its excerpts, was parodied, the producer(s) of Katz answers: The medium we use is the comics, and it is not a simple compilation of images. Its device is the book, and it is not a compilation of paper sheets followed one after another. … It is not just a problem of optics. We consider the book original, or its story as an atom, something we cannot split. The minimum operation will affect all its surface, it will absorb all its being, not one single part will remain intact afterwards, because there are no parts. (Maus; Katz 2011, our translation) The choice to modify Maus is important because it tackles a book related to the tradition of comics: the book by Spiegelman was considered relevant for the critics due to the number of studies it received, the prizes it won, in both comics-related realms and beyond, formed new readers and new authors of comics, started a tradition or genre—even though it was not the first autobiographical work in comics. In sum, the book was a milestone for other authors. The success of a book like Maus forces the system to search similar works—authors will be influenced by the book, publishing houses will try to reach the audience of that book, which shows how a work can modify the same system where it belongs. At the same time, canonizing a book is often an attempt to crystallize its meanings, as if history could not change the

232  Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni perception of a work. Positioning Maus in the history of comics—a materialistic view of art—implies understanding this book as part of a precedent line of authors, works, and readers, ever in a dynamic relation, ever changing. By altering Maus, Manouach verifies meanings crystalized and meanings attached to the book throughout time, and also verifies what sustains it as a milestone: the artwork or social and economic values? At the same time, he shows that even though a work may change the way authors and readers appreciate aesthetics, the macrostructure of a system is not changed: in a capitalist world, profit may command and bond the triangle points of a system. Noirs

Noirs is an example of other cultural hackings by Manouach, where he shows the flaws of a Smurfs album (Manouach 2014). In the 1963 album Les Schtroumpfs noirs, the first of the Smurfs series, the little blue creatures fight against black (and somewhat zombified) Smurfs. The work led to accusations of racism, and consequently, it would be published with alterations in the United States, when compared to the European version—which exemplifies, by instance, how a different point of the system, in this case, the readership, may affect the work. Curiously, in the United States, although Dupuis published the series in English in Canada, and then Random House in the U.S. throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, this particular title would only be published in book form in 2010 by Papercutz. Perhaps revealing its racially-conscious policies, and, following the change operated in the (in English, earlier) cartoon version, it changed “black” to “purple.” (Moura 2014) The Noirs version presents a simple modification in the printing process, which clearly results in an “error in the system”: instead of the four printing colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black), the book was printed only in cyan, the only ink color contrasted with the white paper; hence, the difference between evil/black creatures and good/blue ones is blurred. In the offset process, each of the four colors above-mentioned is distributed in a different plate, and Manouach used cyan in all the four printing plates, a material hacking of a printing machine. Characters and background were thus submersed in a cyan inkblot, where all elements were mixed. Still withdrawing from the crime scene, Manouach avoids applying any marks in this hacked book, not an extra line is drawn, while the splitting lines among characters disappear together with the color shift. This simple variation makes not only all elements disappear (characters, backgrounds, framing lines), but reveals latent racist meanings rooted in this cultural object: the black color as evil and light colors as good, a dichotomy disseminated in

The Comic Book Hacker  233 Les Schtroumpfs noirs. The technical changes intersect artistic and ideological levels that take part in naturalized ideas: obscuring a visually clear significant repeated as a norm “forces us to rethink narrative, color, technique and how embedded in meaning and ideological relations all these factors are. … He rescues and modifies the book so we can give new meaning to the work” (Silveira 2020, 97, our translation). As Silveira points out, Manouach operates a defamiliarization of a wellknown work of art, leading us to rethink the “original,” where “the deviation of purpose reveals predominantly what was absolutely visible, but ignored until now; revealing obviously offensive elements” (Silveira 2020, 91, our translation). Different strategies applied by Ilan reveal similar offensive elements in Tintin akei Congo for example, where the blurring of a sign conveys the latent offensive meaning of the altered books. Tintin akei Congo

Tintin akei Congo consists in a translation from French to Lingala, carrying a conceptual purpose: Manouach hacks, once more, an important object for the Franco-Belgium comic system: an icon of the genre, Tintin by Hergé. A hack in the works of Hergé is meaningful, as Tintin is a valuable trademark, its copyright is strongly defended by lawyers, several books about the character are published every year, and its cultural importance to the European comic book scene is indisputable. Among all works from Hergé, the choice was Tintin au Congo, a book filled with paternalist, colonialist, and racist statements, with various essays, papers, and manifestations discussing these themes. In a similar way as in Noirs, Tintin akei Congo reuses title, signature, press house marks, and is translated to Lingala, one of the national languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), formerly Zaïre. The territory where the DRC is today was colonized and exploited, first personally by the Belgian king and then later by the Belgium nation (the home of Hergé) for decades, and part of this imperialistic mentality can be read in Tintin au Congo. The language aspect in the work is accompanied by another practice: the distribution of the printed book is only available in the Democratic Republic of Congo (or only in praesentia in comic fairs); the version is only available for the Congolese public. By means of this constraint, the system is infected in another of its dimensions: the sale chain, in the sense that author and publisher, both agents and part of the capitalist model, opt not to sell in Europe, in order to maximize a conceptual value of the translation, instead of valuing possible economic exchanges. These three détournements present a gradual distancing move of the artist, a withdrawing action as pointed out by Crucifix. In Katz (2011), Manouach redraws the characters’ faces, panel by panel, inserting himself in the position of illustrator; in both Noirs (2014) and Tintin akei Congo (2015), he assumes

234  Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni positions in the side of producers of comics that are often taken for granted, that is, other roles in the chain of the book. By modifying the color printing, he positions himself as a worker in the printing process; and in Tintin, he commissions the translation into Lingala to another professional, as the distribution is delegated to a different chain, also signaling a geographic division of labor. Strategies of hacking As a hacker, Manouach is motivated by “some version of information freedom,” thus, acting to free information to the public, and consequently, by his actions, he produces technological improvements to the same system that he hacks. In this sense, hacking “embodies values, and thus acts politically” (Coleman 2011, 512, 516). The hacker cyber culture understands knowledge as the property of none, and the “copy of information does not injure anyone, given the immaterial nature of data” (Amadeu 2010, 34, our translation). The actions of Manouach are explicitly political, aiming at exposing the mechanism limiting the work of art into the spheres of company holders; that is, he exposes the process from which a book is constrained to ideology (in the sense proposed by Roland Barthes, assembling all mythologies/­ meanings disseminated within a society). In this sense, a cultural object depends on its circulation in society and is occupied with the meanings shared by all groups, and, therefore, should not be a private object, but an object belonging to the public state. In interviews, Manouach has stated that “They belong to all people,” so everyone should “be able to alter them in some way, to adjust them to our needs, to cut them, to represent them to the audience,” an “active reading” that sees the reader as a constructor of the values of the cultural object (Hulot 2014). In this sense, art made for the masses is hacked to come back to the masses. These affirmations meet the notion in cyber activism culture that transmits a division in culture between holders of production and cultural consumers (Amadeu 2010, 37). For instance, by inserting minimal changes in a comic book, or, in other words, by infecting the object with a small sign shift, he presents the naturalized repetitions of biased ideas (and forms). An infected sign affects all characters in a book (for example, the racial stereotypes that he attacks in Tintin akei Congo and Noirs), or the alienation of the manufacturing process of a work that implies the idealized lone author. To hack the system of comics, Ilan Manouach used the situationist tool détournement in the three works we analyzed. Another practice of hacking that has been recently employed by the artist is an infection directly in the position of the creator, blurring the role of an author by the distribution of tasks to anonymous people or even to automatons, engaged to create new “original” works (Peanuts minus Schulz, Cubicle Island). The present text focuses on analyzing works affected by a détournement, to emphasize the connection of Manouach’s works to the revolutionary thought of Guy

The Comic Book Hacker  235 Debord, who considered this practice from the point of view of a strong critic of the capitalist model that impregnates all aspects of life. The term détournement has been used in the history of comics as a mere transformation of a previous work, a “satirical” or “artistic” one. By coincidence, in 2012 in Angoulême, an exposition in the Cité de la bande dessinée et de l’image mentioned the word, a détournement of “amateur paintings”; in 2011, the museum exposed Parodies: la bande dessinée au second dégré, curated by Thierry Groensteen. The catalogue mentions Spiegelman in seven occasions, as in page 114, “We owe to Art Spiegelman a very original détournement of Rex Morgan” (our translation). As Groensteen explains, Spiegelman was one of the few underground American artists who is dedicated to the art of parody (Groensteen 2010). Détournement can, furthermore, be described as a type of parody where the parodied work is assaulted for a political reason (hijacked, as Manouach wrote). Manouach performs what Genette describes as “the most rigorous form of parody, or minimal parody, consisting in literally reworking a wellknown text and giving it a new meaning,” playing with the parts of its structure (Genette 1982, 24, our translation). Genette exemplifies this proposition with the performance made by the fictional character Pierre Menard, “a purely semantic” parody, in which the historical distance between both enunciations (the first enunciation by Cervantes and the second one by Borges/Menard) of identical writings gives different meanings to the second enunciation, and the transformation of the first book has in itself a meaningful role, pointing at new significances for the book by Cervantes in a new temporal dimension, as the state of art of the same book in different times. Parody implies a quotation of a work in its entirety, and as Antoine Compagnon points out, the act of quoting suggests inserting part of a semiotic system into a new one, resulting in different combinations and, consequently, new semiotic values. The quotation engages a repeated utterance and a repeated enunciation (Compagnon 1979, 107), and by repeating all steps in a chain of publishing, Manouach emphasizes that the meaning of a book depends on the fabrication by authors, editor, publisher, on the distribution process to a determined audience or market, and on reception itself, that is, the discourse in context (enunciation) implies all the verbal and non-verbal exchanges surrounding a communicative medium. By the use of détournement, the economic exchanges surrounding the medium are both underlined and undermined as part of the enunciation itself. The name of an author testifies that a specific assembling of texts belongs to one individual; this belonging implies a network of meanings indicating the values of that specific text. These values relate to a legal dimension of a text—the work of an author is a commodity and can also implicate him legally in a matter of transgression—to the cultural relevance of the text, where the name of an author may signify an authority argument or releasing a whole chain of inferences (Barthes 1984). An important difference between the practices operated by Menard and Manouach is that the latter withdraws

236  Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni from the process (Crucifix 2020), avoiding to sign the work, but both operate by performing minimal changes, differing/deferring the first context of appearance of the object, implying new meanings conveyed by the composite of time (the new context of publication) and new signs applied (signature by Menard, minimal changings operated by Manouach) on the significant—the work as a palimpsest of meanings. When Menard signs Quixote, he implies a new form of reading Quixote; when Maus disappears under Katz, the work of Manouach implies a new form of reading Maus; Noirs erases Les Schtroumpfs noirs, Tintin akei Congo replaces Tintin au Congo; each operation may paste new meanings (Katz), may evidence eclipsed ones (Noirs), or may displace them by replacing the enunciation language (Tintin akei Congo). According to Guy Debord, détournement is a critique strategy, meant to make an object contradict itself (Debord 2002, 50). Debord claims that détournement is not a quotation, implying that a quote appeals to the authority of the quoted author, while détournement must be a “violent subversion,” a dialectical practice where “the real values of culture can only be maintained by negating culture.” (Debord 2002, 51) We still understand, following Compagnon, that détournement implies a quote, thus a repetition of a semiotic object; but in détournement the quote is embedded in a specific political meaning, being more related, in this sense, to the “gesture” in conceptual art, where the act itself is full of meaning. In an updated view of Marxist theories, Debord understands that the capitalist world is “an immense accumulation of spectacles,” meaning the social relations mediated by images—as commodity for Marx. Thus, spectacle means both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. … It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content, the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. (Debord 2002, 7) Described by the French author d’après Marx, the fetishism of the spectacle (commodity in Marx theories) obliterates the whole chain of the production connecting the spectacle to society: thus, all human transactions that create the spectacle (and commodity) are eclipsed by the fetishized spectacle/commodity. We perceive the spectacle as autonomous from those transactions and from history. The politicization of art thought by Debord (and also Walter Benjamin) aims at revealing art as inseparable from its production. For instance, when Manouach re-stages Maus, Tintin, the Smurfs, the détourné work reveals the existence of a chain of production involving authors and editors, and money value attached to this chain and work of art. The hacking strategies operated by Manouach may be defined as a methodic vandalism that positions the hacked work politically, enabling a

The Comic Book Hacker  237 “Menard effect,” where parody reveals new meaning to a canonic or apparently innocent work. We claim here that he hacks a system, because each operation disrupts the system of comics: understood in common sense (the alienation process of eclipsing human transactions) as a mere “entertainment form,” the comics system is often disconnected from political meanings. Unfetishizing comics may deepen the understanding of comics as a commodity and a spectacle: a form valued not by labor, but by social relations implied in the commodity/spectacle; unfetishizing a comic book means revealing the system to which it belongs. Conclusion By hacking the system, Manouach demonstrates that every single part in it has a role in the construction of meanings, and the displacement of an internal piece inside a comic book disrupts the cultural system where the work is inserted (the comic book system triangle formed by authors, object, and readers), reflecting also on the ideological model (capitalism) that values every practice by the elaboration of cultural and economic values and hierarchies all mixed. The new mise en scène of book publishing, by the remaking of the whole process, is a precious statement confirming these connections, and reminding us that the experience of reading is not reserved to a limited individual practice depending on material objects and history. All the hacked books have their cultural reverberances modified, and so other books in this same system are, consequently, modified, because of the dynamic relations inside a system: authorship, readership, processes of connections between them, labor relations, technological implications of the idea of copy-paste in the production line, and the formation of a historical line marking a continuity in the system. We have known, since Roland Barthes, that the meaning of a work is completed by the reader, and the text assembles ideas disseminated throughout the full history of a book, not limited to its first context of appearance— so the context, and all participants of the context (book, author, reader) participate in constructing values around a work. As subjected to context, an artwork does not escape ideological signifiers implying forms of prejudice, and, in this sense, revisiting a work is questioning to what depth it can repeat racism, classism and other forms of prejudice, and how this repetition allows the same ideas to be normalized (participating in the discourses that structure the whole system). And Debord formulated an important tool to unveil those naturalized ideas and practices eclipsed by commodities or spectacles: détournement. Détournement is “the flexible language of anti-ideology, … a reminder that theory is nothing in itself, that it can only be realized through historical action and through the historical correction that is its true allegiance” (Debord 2002, 61). It is a “necessary plagiarism” in which a

238  Maria Clara da S. R. Carneiro and Lielson Zeni consolidated work is rephrased, to explore crystalized meanings operating to erase economic and social practices attached to the plagiarized object. Considering that property rights are one of the axes of capitalism, by hacking copyrighted works, Manouach highlights the way property constraints mean and refrain a full understanding of the place of a work of art. Also, it evokes the work of art as a workflow with different actors besides the sacred vision of an Author, disrupting once more art as an artisanal and singular work. Each minimal change operated by Manouach in the hacked system unveils the logics of how the system itself operates. Pointing at the process, he recollects that a book is a real object, made by real material transformations, by human labor. Thus, even an immaterial substance as a concept of art is incarnated in a material object; its process, although emanating metaphysical meanings, is connected to every single dimension of a material object. By re-staging the operation of art, he reviews the archive of a system, remixing it and rebranding its parts to apprehend the present. Works Cited Amadeu, Sérgio. “Ciberativismo, Cultura Hacker e Individualismo Colaborativo.” Revista USP, no. 86, 2010: pp. 28–39. Archer, Michael. L’art Depuis 1960. Translated by Anne Michel et al. London: Thames & Hudson, 1998. Barthes, Roland. La Mort de l’Auteur. Paris: Seuil, 1984. Candido, Antonio. Formação Da Literatura Brasileira: Momentos Decisivos. 6a ed., vol. 1, São Paulo: Itatiaia, 1981. ———. Literatura e Sociedade. Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2006. Cirne, Moacy. Bum! A Explosão Criativa Dos Quadrinhos. 2a ed. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 1970. ———. Vanguarda: Um Projeto Semiológico. Vozes, 1975. Coleman, Gabriella. “Hacker Politics and Publics.” Public Culture, vol. 23, no. 3 (2011): pp. 511–16. doi:10.1215/08992363-1336390. Compagnon, Antoine. La Seconde Main: Ou Le Travail de La Citation. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Crucifix, Benoît. “A Chamber of Echo. On the Post-Comics of Ilan Manouach.” PostComics. Beyond Comics, Illustration and the Graphic Novel, Het Balanseer and KASK School of Arts, (2020): pp. 77–86. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. Canberra: Hobgoblin, 2002. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: La Littérature Au Second Degré. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Groensteen, Thierry. Parodies - La Bande Dessinée Au Second Degré. Paris: Skira – Flammarion, 2010. Hulot, M. “Katz: The Chronicles of Its Pulpification.” Ough. Last modified October 30 2022. http://www.ough.gr/index.php?mod=articles&op=view&id=908. Manouach, Ilan. Katz. Brussels: La 5e Couche, 2011. ———. Noirs. Brussels: La 5e Couche, 2015a.

The Comic Book Hacker  239 ———. Tintin akei Kongo. Brussels: 5e Couche, 2015b. ———. Abrégé de Bande Dessinée Franco-Belge. Brussels: La 5e Couche, 2019a. ———. “Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, vol. 9, no. 1 (2019b). doi:10.16995/ cg.139. Manouach, Ilan, and Xavier Löwenthal, ed. Metakatz. Brussels: La 5e Couche, 2013. Maus and Katz. 2011. Last modified October 30 2022. http://mausandkatz.blogspot. com. Moura, Pedro. “Les Schtroumpfs Noirs by Ilan Manouach.” Du9 (2014). Last modified October 30 2022. https://www.du9.org/en/chronique/les-schtroumpfs-noirs-2/. Silveira, Guilherme Lima Bruno E. “Transparência e Opacidade Em Les Schtroumpfs Noirs de Ilan Manouach.” Desenredos, vol. 12 (2020): pp. 75–98. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A História de Um Sobrevivente. Translated by Antonio de Macedo Soares. São Paulo: Quadrinhos na Cia, 2005.

Afterword Like a Robot Bereft of Its Function Xavier Löwenthal

I first met Ilan after he self-published a photocopied comic that mentioned a strange email address as a colophon (2003). This is the first “book” of Ilan that I have published, the prelude to a long series. La mort du cycliste (“The Death of the Cyclist”) was a musical and poetic comic, anything he would disavow today: survivals of mere academism and modernism. The next one, Les lieux et les choses qui entouraient les gens, désormais (“The Places and the Things Surrounding People, from Now On”), was of the same ilk. It was only with Frag that Ilan reached the turning point that would lead him to the very negation of the notion of author and reader, which we are witnessing today. A character in the book (a skeleton, like all the characters in what was still a story) has more or less this line: “if there was only one signifying cloud left, a single cloud whose shape could evoke something, I would cut it up with scissors into small, totally insignificant pieces, until it couldn’t mean anything at all!” There was something akin to the “suspicion theory” and the impossibility of doing poetry after Auschwitz, in this radical statement. The next book was to open a breach: “Living Together,” a hijacking of Petzi, in which he had patiently hid, in Photoshop, all the characters except one, the pelican Riki. This story of settlement and pioneering, based on friendship and solidarity, took a dramatic tone, with the pelican doing all the dialogue on his own. This was long before we conceived of the “Essaim” (“Swarm”) charter, as we would name the books in our catalog that were hijacked or mashed up. The book was later reissued, in accordance with this charter: “one modification, and only one, applied to the entire work, which revives its scope and meaning.” We had, through cunning and cowardice, changed the format of the book, changed its translation, and had a cover put on it that gave no indication of its content. The bias then consisted in questioning the limitations imposed on creativity by legal provisions relating to intellectual property. The latter admits only a few exceptions, one of which is the right to parody. But for a parody work to be legal, it must be distinct from the parodied work and, above all, it must be “funny.” As this notion has no legal validity, we had every right to dispute it, especially as appropriation, misappropriation, quotation, and parody are DOI: 10.4324/9781003374961-19

Afterword  241 commonly accepted in other fields, foremost among which is jazz and ­hip-hop—a fortiori in a cultural field essentially linked to mechanical reproduction and imitation. Vivre ensemble was therefore the first in a long series, which would evolve in its conception. If, initially, the question was related to intellectual property code, to freedom of adaptation and to appropriation, it would find further developments: first, sociologically, which concerns the creation, production and reception contexts; second, politically, which concerns the ideological contours of these processes, often unconscious and internalized; third, addressing the collective nature of these processes, until the negation of the very notion of author. And, finally, in relation to the reader: works conceived by no one (down to the program that generates them, which itself is the result of a deep, cross- and bandit feedback learning process, putting algorithms in competition) and not readable by anyone. In 2006, with Le Coup de Grâce, Ilan and I wrote a short call for projects which ended with these words: “like a robot deprived of its function, it is useless and free.” This was to encourage writers to produce less suffocating narratives, not resorting to the identifying process of story-telling, hackneyed from media narrative to publicity. These hijacks very often function as revealing of the blind spots of our cultural systems. Thereby, the affixing of “faces” of cats on all the characters of Maus in Katz does not eliminate the risk of an essentialist interpretation of the original work (the Jews are not, by essence or naturally, victims and the Germans or the Nazis are not, in essence, their tormentors, as are the mouse for the cat); Noirs (“Blacks”) does not resolve the potentially offensive “racial” interpretation of The Black Smurfs by folding all the offset printing plates down to one, cyan, but emphasizes it. Tintin akei Kongo reveals what unconscious mechanisms govern the choice of adaptation or translation languages: they are ideological before being commercial. Blanco and Un monde un peu meilleur attest to the preeminence of format and standardization in the mass-market industrial arts. The first foray into “distributed” and automated work was Harvested: the first few minutes of American pornographic film productions were automatically converted into thousands of jpegs, uploaded on servers and sorted online by “farmers” in China, according to a single criterion: does the image presents, in its set, a work of art? The layout of the book entrusted to a robot, according to a template. The result: a nearly self-generated art book without any author. A book of art and exploitation. Ilan would further refine this process with Cubicle Island: thousands of New Yorker’s cartoons of deserted islands (an archaic meme), automatically downloaded, stripped of their watermark and caption and re-captioned by microworkers scattered around the globe. Some of these workers use the same processes to fulfill orders, so robots responded to the robot, sometimes better than humans. The resulting 1,500 pages were digitally printed in Poland. I sometimes suspected Ilan was cheating a bit, interfering in the process, which was therefore not as automated or systematic as he wanted to pretend.

242  Xavier Löwenthal But, after all, the best constrained works, from the automatic writing of André Breton to the Oulipian productions of Raymond Queneau, were also clearly “cheated.” But now he is developing algorithms capable of learning “on their own”, in order to produce manga and anime, with no other intervention but the demiurgical original fillip. One may wonder what it takes for a publisher to go along with such processes, which will undoubtedly disqualify him as much as they do the author and the reader. Whenever Ilan calls me with a new idea, my first reaction is to be a little skeptical. Why should we make a book that no one will read? Why should we ask a question that no one needs answered? Why should we realize a concept that will annoy others? Patiently, Ilan asks me to let the idea ripen for a bit before answering. Its relevance never fails to prevail. Soon, the editor that I am will be like a robot deprived of its function: useless and free.

Index

0-9 3D-­printing 121, 136, 167 48 CC (format) 79, 89–90, 161 Abrégé de la bande dessinée franco-­belge (Eng. Compedium of Franco-­Belgian Comics) 3, 24–42, 45, 79, 84–5, 171, 173, 176–186, 187n27, 199, 204 abstract comics 66 abstraction 30, 66 absurdity 107 accessibility 16, 123, 134 Adorno, Theodor 163 Agostini, Angelo 228 algorithm 24, 35, 163, 201, 241–2 alienation 107, 204, 206, 234, 237 Amadora (International Comics Festival) 8 Amazon Mechanical Turk 204–214 American underground (comics) 160, 168, 228, 235 Angoulême (Comics Festival) 2, 13–4, 114, 229–230, 235 Anima, De (Aristotle) 82 Antonello, Pierpaolo 119 apparatus 2, 76–8, 83, 91, 115, 130–1 Applied Memetic 5, 45 appropriation 3, 6, 19, 46, 48, 64, 67–8, 86, 158, 165, 198, 240–1 Archie (Comics magazine) 33 Arctic Circle 114–7, 123, 124n4, 130, 135 Arnheim, Rudolph 120, 126n22 artificial intelligence 6, 169, 209, 212 Auden, W.H. xvii auteurship/authorship xvii, 45, 67, 166, 194, 206, 213, 226–7, 230, 237 author-­publisher 157, 160 avant-­garde 48, 65, 67, 100, 107, 119, 152, 161, 166, 190, 194–5, 201

Bachrach, Peter 76–7, 81 Baetens, Jan 24–9, 36, 38–9, 66, 68, 74, 83, 86, 109 Baldessari, John 101 Ballade de la Mer Sale, La 4, 78 bande dessinée (BD) 27, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 42, 45, 68, 70, 147, 157, 173, 178, 179, 185, 186, 204, 230 Baratz, Morton S. 76–7, 81 Barok, Dušan 194 Barthes, Roland 234–7 Bartolini, Luciano 146, 151 Bataille, George 53, 57 Baudelaire, Charles 109 Bauhaus 230 BD see bande dessinée Beaty, Bart 65, 67, 82, 190 Bene, Carmelo 46 Benjamin, Walter 99–100, 109–110, 236 Beronä, David A. 134 bias 81, 167, 240 biopolitics 56, 59 Black communities 101 Black Panthers 101 Blanco 5, 21, 37, 46, 57–9, 77–90, 100, 146–153, 185–6, 241 bleaching 47–59, 67, 79–80, 97–103 blind ontology 121 Blissymbolics (Bliss, Charles K.) 115, 125n10 Bogost, Ian 25, 27–8 Boivin, Thomas 13, 104–5, 109 Borges, Jorge Luis 230, 235 braille 113–9, 127n29, 131, 139 Brazilian authorship 228 Brecht, Bertolt xvi, 161 Breton, André 242 bricolage 100 Brooklyn Public Library 19 Busi-­Rizzi, Georgio 37

244 Index Cage, John xvi Candido, Antonio 226–8 canon, comics 1–8, 125n14, 190, 193, 199, 201, 229, 231 canon, art and literature 47, 58, 193, 199, 237 Casa do Sol in São Paulo, Brazil 46 Cascao (work by Ilan Manouach) 3, 22n4, 45–60, 67, 78–80, 97–110, 193 Cascão (Brazilian magazine and character) 3, 24–42, 45–60, 67, 79, 80, 84–5, 97–110 CBR /CBZ (file format) 197 censorship 19, 50, 53, 80, 146 children 51, 56, 80, 115, 175, 183–5 children’s publications 17–9, 49, 58, 64, 87, 97–110, 126n15, 126n18 children’s culture 97–110 Chronographie (Dominique Goblet and Nikita Fossoul) 101 Cinquième Couche, La 2, 8, 13, 14, 21, 45, 46, 64, 65, 80, 88, 157, 159, 161, 185, 229 class struggle 76 Clowes, Daniel 163 CMYK 88, 92, 97, 148 cognitive studies 102 Cohn, Neil 39, 134 Cold War 204–214 collage 3, 24, 30, 34–9, 149, 173, 175, 179, 229 collective publications 157 Collector’s Edition 183 colonialism xvii, 79, 91, 186 Comics Studies 3, 8, 112, 117, 201 comix see American underground Compagnon, Antoine 235–6 Compendium of Franco-­Belgian Comics see Abrégé de la bande dessinée franco-­belge Comptoir des Indépendants, Le 158, 16 conceptual shareability 140 conceptualism xvii, 57 conlang (constructed language) 112–5, 124, 130, 135 constrained writing 24–5, 29, 37, 64, 67–8, 99, 104 consumer culture 58 contrebande 158–168 copyright xvii, 14, 15, 48, 80, 173, 189, 192–3, 201, 229, 233, 238 counterculture (1960s) xvii Coup de Grâce, Le (anthology) 54, 241 Covid-­19 pandemic 5, 56, 117, 141, 189

Craghead III, Warren 8 crowdsourcing 193, 206–9 Crumb, Robert 160 Crucifix, Benoît 5, 6, 24, 34–8, 64, 68, 73, 99, 233, 236 Cubicle Island, The 4, 78, 79, 80, 91, 193, 205–223, 223n1, 234, 241 cultural industry 78, 82, 84, 163 Deafblind Manual 139 Debord, Guy 76, 126n18, 221, 235–7 defamiliarization 182, 233 Delporte, Yvan 46, 22n12 dematerialization 146 Democratic Republic of Congo 18, 20, 168, 182–3, 233 Descartes, René 132 détournement 4, 6, 45, 58–9, 76, 102–4, 107, 147–8, 173, 184, 193, 225, 230, 234–7 dialectic 206, 214, 229 diegesis 41, 82, 90, 175 Digital Comics Museum 194 digital comics/digital comic strip (postdigital, born-­digital) 67, 139, 167, 170, 191 digital turn of comics 109 digitization 166, 190, 192, 195–7 disability gain 118 Disability Studies 2, 112–120 discursive arc 77–78 discursivity 19 dual-­impaired communities 141 Duchamp, Marcel xvii dummy (printer’s dummy) 21, 38, 57, 89–90, 145–7, 185 Dworkin, Craig 104–5, 152 ecology of attention 170 economy of attention 163 Editora Abril 49 ekphrasis 116, 122 ellipsis 64 embodied textual experience 130, 135 Enlightenment 212 Enright, David 18 enunciation 82, 168, 227, 235–6 ephemera/ephemerality 59, 191 epistemology of touch 132 Erased de Kooning Drawing 48, 49, 54, 57, 59 erasure 45–8, 53–6, 58, 68, 97, 101–2, 180, 190 experimental comics 8, 190, 197, 201

Index  245 facsimile 3, 45–9, 59, 180, 182, 185–6 fanzine (also, zine) 167, 191, 195 Fastwalkers 5 feminism/feminist critique/feminist politics 2, 34, 118, 119 fetish 151 Fischer, Jennifer 119, 121 Forest, Judith 13 formatinho (Brazilian publication format) 47 formlessness 53, 57 Frag 8 Fraser, Benjamin 117–8 Fulford, Jason 151 Funny Aminals 158–168 Futures of Comics 179 gamification 206 Gardner, Jared 125n6 Garland-­Thompson, Rosemarie 118 gaufrier 69 Gender Studies 125n10 Gibbs, Michael 145 gibi (Brazilian publication format) 49, 59 gimmick 212 Godard, Keith 150 Goldsmith, Kenneth 166, 189, 192, 194 Google 13, 167, 196 Graciano, Sérgio Tibúrcio 50, 51 Gramsci, Antonio 77 graphiation/graphiateur 82, 83 Graphic Medicine 122, 125n14 graphic novel 3–5, 14, 45, 48, 60, 78, 80, 125n5, 159, 201, 206, 229 Great Depression xvi Great White Hunter 182 Grennan, Simon 6, 7, 30, 37, 38, 40 Groensteen, Thierry 2, 25, 65–6, 68, 72–3, 86, 136, 226, 235 hacker cyber culture 234 hacking 6, 185, 204, 226–238 Hands-­on Signing/Co-­active Signing 139 Hanna-­Barbera (TV show) 17 Hanselmann, Simon 163 Hansen, Carla & Vilhelm 64, 79, 86, 87, 105 haptic 114, 141 Hatfield, Charles 7, 120, 136 hegemony 37, 85 Henne, William 13 hidden power 76–92 Higonnet, Margaret 100, 107, 110

hijackings 45, 76, 79, 92, 149, 161, 185, 235, 240–1 historiography 81, 85, 91, 92 holistic readings 117 Hollindale, Peter 99, 101–2 Holocaust 230 Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) 209 Hunt, Nancy Rose 182 hypertext 194, 195 Hypothetical Blind Man 118, 122, 124 I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (John Baldessari) 100 IBM 35 identity/racial or multiracial identity 51 ideograms 85, 113, 114, 125n4, 130 ideology/ideological perspective 17, 119, 167, 178, 180, 184–6, 233, 234, 237, 241 imperialist visuality 182 indexation 190 industrialization (of comics) 21, 147, 157 installation art 5, 126n25, 140, 141, 158, 198 intellectual property 63, 165, 189, 240, 241 iPhone 166 Israel, M.J. 149 Jacobs, Edgar P. 18 Jessie Bi (Jean-­Christophe Boudet) 100 Johan and Pirlouit 16, 22n11 Johnny Cash Project 207 Kang, Minsoo 209, 21 Kannemeyer, Anton (aka Joe Dog) 19, 168 Katz xvii, 2, 4, 8, 13–21, 22n4, 23n19, 45, 48, 78, 80, 158, 159, 161, 162, 165, 194, 225, 227, 229–232, 235, 236, 241 Kelp-­Stebbins, Katherine 181–5, 187n23 Kempelen, Wolfgang Von 209–210 kitsch 201 Klee, Paul 8, 100 Kleege, Georgina 118, 120–2, 124 Klein, Yves 201 Koblin, Aaron 207, 213 Krause, Karl 27–8 Krauss, Rosalind 48 Kukkonen, Karin 24, 37, 38 kyara 25, 40–1

246 Index lawsuit 189, 23 legal deposit 147, 190, 191 Leibovici, Franck 194, 197 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude 100 Lewitt, Sol 57, 99, 158 Liddell, Mary 107 Lieux et les choses qui entouraient les gens, désormais, Les 240 ligne claire (also clear line style) 52, 73, 91, 176, 182–4, 185, 186n4 lingala language xvii, 19, 20, 148, 168, 182, 184, 233, 234 lipogram/lipogrammatic operation 46, 68–71 Little Machinery 107 Löwenthal, Xavier 8, 13, 22n13, 65, 159 Manet, Édouard 162 manga 4, 165, 242 manifesto 13–21, 65, 119, 147 Manouach, Ilan, works by, Abrégé de la bande dessinée franco-­belge (Eng. Compedium of Franco-­Belgian Comics) 3, 24–42, 45, 79, 84–5, 171, 173, 176–186, 187n27, 199, 204; Applied Memetic 5, 45; Arctic Circle 114–7, 123, 124n4, 130, 135; Ballade de la Mer Sale, La 4, 78; Blanco 5, 21, 37, 46, 57–9, 77–90, 100, 146–153, 185–6, 241; Cascao 3, 22n4, 45–60, 67, 78–80, 97–110, 193; Cubicle Island, The 4, 78, 79, 80, 91, 193, 205–223, 223n1, 234, 241; Fastwalkers 5; Frag 8; Futures of Comics 179; Katz xvii, 2, 4, 8, 13–21, 22n4, 23n19, 45, 48, 78, 80, 158, 159, 161, 162, 165, 194, 225, 227, 229–232, 235, 236, 241; Lieux et les choses qui entouraient les gens, désormais, Les 240; Metakatz 3, 4, 8, 14, 16, 22n4, 23n19, 45, 48, 78, 80, 92, 204, 230, 231; Mort du cycliste, La 240; Neural Yorker, The 78, 169, 170; Noirs 147, 148, 173, 179, 180; One Piece 4; Peanuts minus Schulz xvii, 4, 45, 67, 78, 80, 91, 109, 166, 193, 204, 206, 234; Riki Fermier (also Vivre Ensemble) 4, 45, 46, 59, 64–74, 77, 78, 79, 86–7, 89, 90, 97, 99–110, 241; Shapereader 5, 45, 78, 112–124, 130–142, 171; Tintin akei Kongo 4, 14–21, 45, 78, 79, 148, 168, 173, 179, 182, 184–6, 194, 233–6, 241;

Un monde un peu meilleur 78, 148, 161, 241; VTT comme je l’aime, Le 5, 169 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 48, 59, 119, 121 Marion, Philippe 83 Marvel Comics 17 Marx/Marxism 79, 92, 226, 236 Maus: A Survivor's Tale xvii, 2, 6, 14–6, 30, 48, 80, 158, 161, 162, 166, 225, 229–232, 236, 241 McCloud, Scott 7, 125n9, 134 McGilchrist, Iain 102 Meneguzzo, Marco 151 Menu, Jean-­Christophe 21, 26–8, 29, 33, 34, 147, 161, 163 metadata 123, 195, 196 Metakatz 3, 4, 8, 14, 16, 22n4, 23n19, 45, 48, 78, 80, 92, 204, 230, 231 metanarrative 179 metaphor 15, 16, 22n9, 23n19, 50, 53, 58, 92, 109, 216, 221, 223 metynomy 40 Meyer, Phillip 116–7 Michel, Natacha 230 microwork/microworkers 4, 6, 109, 204, 206, 209, 210, 212–4, 241 migrant crisis 106 mimesis 166 Mintz, Susan 124 misappropriation 80, 82, 87, 92, 240 mise en scène 227, 237 Modernism xvi, 100, 119, 240 modernist practices 110 Mondondo, Bienvenu Mbutu 18, 184 “monoform” comics 65 Monoskop 166, 189, 192, 194–201 Montagne, Vincent 164, 165 Monya, Jean-­Dadou 19 Mort du cycliste, La 240 Moura, Pedro 53, 147, 148, 225, 232 multisensory modalities 139 multiverses 25, 37–9 Neural Yorker, The 78, 169, 170 New Yorker, The 169, 204, 213, 214 neutrality (of comics) 4, 6, 46 Ngai, Sianne 212 Nikolajeva, Maria 102 Noirs 147, 148, 173, 179, 180 objectified women 177–8 ocularcentrism 5, 112, 117, 118 oculardiverse 121

Index  247 Oda, Eiichirō 4 One Piece (Manouach détournement) 4 online archives xii, 192, 193, 198 onomatopoeia 79, 85, 89, 107 ontograph/ontography 1, 25, 28, 33, 36 Open Edition 150 Osamu, Tezuka 59 OuBaPo (L’Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinée Potencielle) 2, 67, 158 OuLiPo (L’Ouvroir de littérature potentiel) 67, 99, 242 Panini Comics 49, 107, 109 Pappa in Afrika 19, 187n21 paratext 16, 29, 30, 65, 146, 150, 178, 183 parody 15, 162, 193, 229, 235, 237, 240 participative financing 166 pastiche 3, 78, 86, 207, 229 PDF 194, 196, 197 Peanuts (Charles Shultz) 6, 109, 161, 166 Peanuts minus Schulz xvii, 4, 45, 67, 78, 80, 91, 109, 166, 193, 204, 206, 234 peer-­to-­peer networks 192 Pellegrino, Daniel 159 people of colour 177, 178 Perloff, Marjorie 99 Petzi (also Rasmus Klump) 45, 46, 64, 67, 69–73, 79, 86–7, 89, 91, 97, 103–7, 240 Peyo (Pierre Culliford) 16, 22n12, 46, 88, 147, 176, 179 “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote” (J. L. Borges) 231, 235–6, 237 piracy (digital) 165, 192, 229 plagiarism 2, 225, 229, 238 Poe, Edgar Allan 210 polygraphy 37, 38 pornography 4, 81, 169, 241 postdigital comics 179 Pratt, Hugo 4 printing technology 79, 88, 180, 191 protomemes 29 Purple Smurfs, The (Peyo) 16, 17, 20, 46, 80, 88, 180, 232, 233, 236 quadrinhos 50, 57 Queneau, Raymond 242 racial critique 47 racism 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 46, 50, 52, 56, 58, 59, 79, 148, 173, 179, 180,

182, 184, 186, 187n21, 227, 232, 233, 237 Rag-­picker (Baudelaire) 109–110 randomization 206 Rasmus Klump see Petzi Rauschenberg, Robert 48, 54, 57, 59 Rear, Sabine 118 refugees 107 Rex Morgan 235 Riki Fermier (also Vivre Ensemble) 4, 45, 46, 59, 64–74, 77, 78, 79, 86–7, 89, 90, 97, 99–110, 241 Rodwell, Nick 18 Rudd, David 99, 101, 102 Ruppert & Mulot 167 Ryan, Marie-­Laure 37, 41 scanlation 165, 193 Schneider, Greice 4, 69, 104 Schtroumpfs (also Smurfs) 16, 17, 20, 22n10, 22n11, 22n14, 46, 67, 80, 84, 88, 97, 99, 147, 148, 159, 175, 179, 180, 184, 232, 233, 236, 241 Schtroumpfs noirs, Les see Purple Smurfs, The Schulz, Charles xvii, 45, 166 Second World War 18, 100, 103 semiotic 56, 86, 91, 113, 226, 235, 236 sensorial epistemology 115 sexism 79, 173, 179, 186 sexuality 131 shadow libraries 189–201 Shapereader 5, 45, 78, 112–124, 130–142, 171 Siglidis, Ioannis 5, 169 smudging 53–4 Snake Agent (Stefano Tamburini) 197 sociology of culture 67 Sousa, Mauricio de (and Mauricio de Sousa Productions, MSP) 3, 46, 48, 50–2, 54, 57, 80 Sousanis, Nick 6, 122, 127n26 speech balloon 45, 46, 71, 72, 73, 83, 84, 87, 114, 176 Spiegelman, Art 2, 13–6, 22n9, 23n19, 48, 80, 158–9, 166, 229–235 Spirou (magazine) 16, 22n12, 186n4 standardisation/standardization 21, 27, 57, 78, 79, 90–2, 147, 161, 190, 192, 198, 241 Steiner, George 3 storyworld 24, 30, 33–42, 102, 103 structuralism 226 Subaltern studies 76

248 Index subordinate voice 85, 87, 90 superheroes 37, 159 Syndicat des Éditeurs Alternatifs 160, 164 Synecdoche 39 Szép, Ezster 117 tactigrams 112–6, 123, 124n3, 124n4, 130, 135, 138 tactile communication/tactile comics 5, 46, 114, 119, 120, 121, 126n23, 130, 131, 134, 135–6, 171 Tadoma 139 Tatsumi, Yoshihiro 160 tautology 146, 147, 151 Testament d’Orphée, Le (Jean Cocteau) 151 Thompson, Hannah 118 Tilley, Heather 119 Tintin akei Kongo 4, 14–21, 45, 78, 79, 148, 168, 173, 179, 182, 184–6, 194, 233–6, 241 Todorov, Tzvetan 91 tokenization 51 Töpffer, Rodolphe 157 Topliss, Iain 213 Topovoros 157 tradition (comics) 3, 5, 6, 27, 29, 37, 45, 59, 68, 70, 73, 74, 97, 117, 147, 157, 175, 185–6, 190, 194, 201, 228–9, 231 Trondheim, Lewis 148, 161 Tzara, Tristan 169, 17

UbuWeb 166, 189, 190, 192, 194, 199, 201 Uderzo, Albert 33 Un monde un peu meilleur (Manouach détournement) 78, 148, 161, 241 Un monde un peu meilleur (Lewis Trondheim) 148, 161 undrawing 4, 24, 34–9, 64–71, 73, 104, 198 universal language 115, 117, 171 Velázquez, Diego 36 verbovocovisual stimuli 112, 115 Verfremdungseffekt 105 video games 140, 163, 167, 203 Vingtième Siècle, Le 18 visual dialect 161 vries, herman de 146, 149–150 VTT comme je l’aime, Le 5, 169 Warne, Vanessa 118 webcomics 125n12, 191 Weiner, Lawrence 83 Weltanschauung, a blind 112 white male 177, 178 whiteness, as blankness 146, 185; as racial mark and “neutral” 50, 51, 56 whitewashing 45–60 Wikipedia (as platform) 198 Wilde, Lukas 24, 36, 40, 41, 42