European Comic Art

Setting aside historical factors and focusing exclusively on a formal definition of comics as juxtaposed images, comics may be further refined by analysing the divisions, orders and relationships of those images. The images may also have both representational and abstract levels that together produce narrative’s intrinsic patterns and its extrinsic feeling of story. Although narrative comics and abstract comics sound like opposites, a representative narrative may be understood non-representationally because it is composed of abstract marks, and a sequence of abstract images can still create the experience of story through implied conflict and transformation. Analysed according to image representation, image relation, and image order, comics divide into six formally distinct categories: representational and abstract narratives; representational and abstract arrangements; and representational and abstract non sequiturs.

This article returns to the origins of the case mémorable in the pages of Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée and revisits the debates between Pierre Sterckx and Benoît Peeters over the relationship between single panels and narrative, which were articulated around a conceptual tension between linear and tabular. It proposes that the concept of the ‘memorable panel’ pinpoints important issues concerning the recirculation of single images, isolated from their contexts, and the discourse of memory that becomes associated with them. A close reading of Olivier Josso Hamel’s Au travail, in which the cartoonist redraws his own set of memorable panels, further calls for a reconsideration of Sterckx’s concept in the light of a creative practice that intimately engages with the memory of such panels in a complex relationship to their original narratives.

‘Scenariographics’ is defined as the deployment of the (non-specific) codes of the medium by individual comics artists in order to achieve effects that are specific to their work and therefore difficult to transpose to any other medium. L’Étoile mystérieuse, is used as a case study: a close reading of Hergé’s comic demonstrates how the artist creates a complex semiological web, drawing upon the resources of comics syntax and layout, onomatopoeia and emanata, visual metaphor, infra-narrative elements and intertextual motifs, blurring boundaries between dream life (more often nightmares) and wakefulness, realism and the fantastic. Moreover, through the coexistence and transposition of different levels of reality, including the everyday, the supernatural and the psychic, Hergé creates meanings that have political resonance in an album produced for a collaborationist newspaper.

It is well known that from 1920 to 1950, Belgian comics, embedded in a Catholic milieu, sometimes promoted anti-Communism. Au pays de la grande angoisse, drawn by Renaat Demoen and published from 1950 to 1951 in Zonneland and Petits Belges, fits into this category. Nonetheless, its ideological stance can be differentiated from that of series appearing in major Franco-Belgian magazines. Au pays de la grande angoisse is Flemish, intended only for the Belgian market, and therefore not subject to the control of the French Control Commission set up by the July 1949 law. Its critique of Eastern bloc countries is more explicit and more violent. Moreover, the story appeared in comics with a religious affiliation. It sets out to denounce the atheism of the Communists and to glorify the resistance of the believers. Ultimately, Au pays de la grande angoisse is as much a Christian comic as an adventure comic.

The comics anthologies Ally Sloper and Escape magazine began publication in the 1970s and 1980s. They inherited a complex national situation, one in which locally produced comics always had to compete with foreign imports, primarily superhero comics from the United States. Each of these pioneering anthologies sought to create a space for small press and independent English comics and a wider sense of the history and potential of the medium, but in doing so, they had to negotiate a history and market shaped by the consumption of comics from the United States. Placing the anthologies within this larger situation, this article interprets the work of these various editors in terms of the national and cosmopolitan strategies they deployed as they sought to further develop English comics.