European Comic Art

This edition of European Comic Art was not planned as a themed issue, but during the editing process, we noted that all four articles may be regarded as offering variations on mise en abyme, the use of an image within an image or text within a text, whereby the inner picture or story illuminates the outer work. This is a term whose heraldic origins link it to visual depictions, and a figure that the comics medium, with its single and multiple frames, can deploy to particular effect. We will show in our conclusion how the frame within a frame occurs in the articles introduced below, either literally or metaphorically.

Dispensing with semiological terms inappropriately applied to comics, this article uses the concept of the ‘cube-panel’ to show that the comics panel is indissociable from drawing itself. There is no ‘code’, only drawing. The cube-panel is exemplified in Inside Mœbius. Rather than sampling from a wider, out-of-frame space, it represents a retreat from that space, a prison or refuge, both suggestive of an inner life. The title promises just such a revelation, but it is in the nature of a Mœbius strip, and of a graphic representation of the author's self, for that inside to be inseparable from an outside. Two examples of the inside–outside pairing recur throughout: the desert, representing a creative void, and the bunker, in which the artist externalises himself.

Thierry Groensteen looks back over the years during which he edited Les Cahiers de la Bande Dessinée, transformed from the earlier Schtroumpf into a publication that promoted analysis and brought challenging and ambitious comics to the attention of readers, in a context where an earlier generation of comics studies pioneers had deserted the medium, and the experimentation of 1970s comics had given way to the dominance of more commercially viable series. Groensteen details the complex labour of putting a journal together, the recruiting of contributors, the coexistence of disparate theoretical approaches, and the hostility from certain quarters of the comics milieu that considered the journal pretentiously intellectual. The legacy of Les Cahiers endures in the form of major works for which it laid the foundations.

This article analyses the various components of a graphic novel, El Perdón y la furia [Forgiveness and Fury] by Antonio Altarriba and Keko, about the Baroque painter José de Ribera. It does so within a framework drawn from art history and studies the transgressive role of images through citation, intertextual borrowing, or creation by Keko in the manner of Ribera. A comparative analysis of the artist's biography and the graphic narration uncovers a series of parallels between historically attested and fictitious events that can be seen as the common thread in a thriller based on the fight against power. It concludes by returning to the same themes within a contemporary setting, while Ribera's story and that of his present-day fictional counterpart simultaneously reveal human truths.

It has repeatedly been suggested that the art in the graphic novel Persepolis by Iranian French artist Marjane Satrapi contains numerous connections to ancient Persian art forms, to the point of this becoming a ‘truism’, although the claim has not been subjected to in-depth analysis. The present formal analysis employs Gombrichian schema theory to identify visual elements in the graphic novel potentially connected to Persian visual cultures to discern if and how they might relate to their proposed influences and how they integrate with styles and visual conventions in comics. The results indicate that there are indeed connections, although integrated into the art form of comics through combination and accommodation, and that this reinforced the Persian theme of the graphic novel and potentially enriched the art form of comics.

John Etty, Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil's Political Cartoons (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019). 276 pp. ISBN: 978-1496821089 ($30)

Livio Belloï and Fabrice Leroy, Pierre La Police: Une esthétique de la malfaçon (Paris: Serious Publishing, 2019). 200 pp. ISBN: 9782363200266 (30€)