European Comic Art

Following the first Glasgow gathering in June 1999, further bande dessinée conferences saw the creation of IBDS (2001), plans for a new journal (2005, with European Comic Art first appearing in 2008) and a shared gathering with the Graphic Novels and Comics Conference (2011 onwards). The initial part of this overview will be an unashamed nostalgia-fest as we look back on IBDS events from 1999 to 2019. As befits a good comic, the fun will nonetheless lead to more serious considerations. The evolution of IBDS stands as a marker of the evolution of comics studies, both in terms of the variety of works studied and approaches taken, and with respect to the acceptance of the discipline (if it is such). More generally, a retrospective on the last twenty years allows us to question the very nature of the canon – literary or otherwise – as it now stands, and to look forward speculatively to the developments of future decades.

This article analyses how a late twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century development in bandes dessinées, which combines historical novels with biographies, expresses paradoxical attitudes towards mythologies surrounding Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. Firstly, I demonstrate that the paradox stems from a simultaneous desire for and suspicion of master narratives, identified as intrinsic to postmodernism by Linda Hutcheon. Then I establish how eight graphic novels perpetuate pre-existing mythological master narratives about Gauguin and Van Gogh. Nevertheless, those mythologies simultaneously arouse scepticism: myths do not express exemplary universal truths; myths are artificial and fictionalised constructs whose status in reality is dubious. The albums convey tension between desire and suspicion regarding myths by a variety of devices. These include sequenced panels, circular plots, unreliable witnesses, fictional insertions, parodies and mock realism.

The recent boom in feminist comics by Swedish artists has produced a body of work that has only recently come to the attention of English-language readers. This article focuses on the comics of Liv Strömquist, specifically Fruit of Knowledge: The Vulva vs. The Patriarchy (2018), the first of her book-length works to be published in English translation. Strömquist's text is situated in the broader context of feminist comics, particularly the work of Julie Doucet. Drawing on Swedish sources including reviews, interviews and comics scholarship, the article examines how Strömquist uses the comics medium to challenge and re-signify dominant representations of gender, sexuality and the body.

This article explores the work of Stefano Tamburini (1955–1986) in relationship to the ‘high arts’ in the 1980s. By concentrating on Tamburini's least known works (to this day, among his many works, only the RanXerox saga is actually available for English-speaking readers), it is possible to regard his art as a bridge tying comics with the aesthetic and theoretical preoccupations of many of the leading artists of the postmodern trans-avant-garde of the late-1970s and early-1980s in Italy. This article demonstrates how Tamburini offered a model of comics in dialogue with the rest of the contemporary art world, often taking the lead and generating fruitful exchanges both with the field of literature and the visual arts.

The Tintin and Corto Maltese series are among the most famous European adventure comics. The adventure genre – both in novels and comics – is deeply related to nineteenth-century colonialism. This article compares the ways in which colonialism and the relationship to the colonial Other appear in Hergé's and Pratt's creations, focusing on Tintin and Corto Maltese's adventures in Africa and Latin America. The comparison between Tintin and Corto shows that although Hergé developed an ambivalent view of European colonialism, Eurocentrism is constant through all his work. Pratt's Corto, in contrast, shows a more critical, though ambiguous, view of colonialism, and a more egalitarian, though also ambivalent, conceptualisation of the colonial Other.