European Comic Art

The articles in this issue range over work from Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and England, and over diverse subject matter: children escaping repressive adult surveillance, memories of war, the clash of ideas among dinner-party guests, the mythology of the colonial explorer, and the environmental catastrophe. All share a preoccupation with counter-narratives, retellings and redrawings.

Luke Pearson's comic for children, Hilda and the Black Hound (2017), introduces characters who live at the margins of society and who respond to those marginalising forces not with outright resistance but with what Monalesia Earle has called ‘misdirection’. As the characters move around and through the gutters of the comics page, they similarly slip between and around the authority that stands in their way. Literary theories related to formalism, children's literature and the Gothic illuminate how the movement on the page hints at a form of disobedience.

The contemporary Italian comics artist and author Gipi offers us a narrative approach that speaks to, and for, the twenty-first century. He uses a multi-planed presentation of events that allows for memory and history to be pluri-temporal and pluri-vocal. Gipi's storytelling navigates a path through micro-histories and history, as he effectively reinserts individual memories and experiences into our continual recreation and reinterpretation of the past. His technique brings together an amalgam of voices and perspectives, real and imagined, that remain distinct yet melded together in his reconstruction and retelling of events. Ultimately, it responds to the question of how we can reimagine and recount history, and comments on the ethical implications of our involvement in the making of history.

The graphic novel Duelo de caracoles [Duel of snails] (2010) by Sonia Pulido (images) and Pere Joan (script) recounts a meal of snails shared by friends, a simple premise upon which Pulido overlays complex layouts that elevate the snail to the conceptual level of metaphor, symbol and allegory. A brief analysis of Estudios psicológicos [Psychological studies], a single-page comic featuring snails by Apel·les Mestres i Oñós, outlines basic principles of layout and the representation of subjectivity/interiority that inform subsequent discussion. Pulido and Pere Joan's comic privileges Thierry Groensteen's categories of the shown, the intervened and the signified. Pulido's poetic mode of composition captures the polyphony of group dynamics, occasioning multiple interpretations of the page within and beyond the inter-iconic space.

This article analyses the works of Olivier Schrauwen with a particular focus on his comic Arsène Schrauwen, which plays out in the colonial context of the Congo. It argues that Schrauwen's comics exploit the formal qualities of the colonial adventure genre that is frequent in traditional European comics as a way of subverting and satirising them. It further argues that through a constant reliance on meta-references to other works and tropes recognisable from adventure tales, in combination with the adoption of a strict colonialist world view, Schrauwen humorously ridicules the asymmetrical binaries between coloniser and colonised.

What role do comics have to play in cultural conversations about and in the face of environmental collapse and mass extinction? This article takes bande dessinée as a case study to propose the concept of ecological storylines as part of an ecographics that recognises the specificities of comics as a drawn and narrative medium as well as its shifting place in culture. This is developed with reference to a range of graphic texts and along three axes. The article first explores drawing as material practice in ecographic engagements with radioactivity, gender and landscape. It then turns to redrawing as a mode of contestation as well as repair on a postcolonial planet, before closing with a discussion of flowlines across panels, pages, human and non-human bodies and across cityscapes, seascapes and petroscapes.

Philippe Delisle and Benoît Glaude, Jijé: L'Autre père de la BD franco-belge (Montrouge, France: PLG, 2019). 180 pp. ISBN: 9782917837337 (€15)

Nhora Lucía Serrano, ed., Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis (New York: Routledge, 2021). 268 pp. ISBN: 9781138186156 (Hardback: £120; e-book: £27.74)

Johannes C. P. Schmid, Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics (London: Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, 2021). 292 pp. ISBN: 9783030633035 (e-book: £43.99)