European Comic Art

The modest landmark of the fifth edition of European Comic Art (ECA) entitles us to a mini-retrospective: thus far, we have devoted the journal to explorations of comic art as: innovatory medium in relation to form and subject matter (1.1); expression of national identities (1.2); associated with the development of caricature (2.1); part of a text/image current that underwent significant development in the nineteenth century (2.2). We now move on, in 3.1, to consider the internal workings of comics as an art form, and in particular the question of narration, by means of both theoretical overview and detailed examination of works that display the narrative resources of the medium in striking ways. From their earliest days, comics have been an inexhaustible source of narrative invention, as a deceptively simple mechanism – based on discontinuous frames and on interplay between text and image – has been manipulated to dazzling creative effect. The virtuosity and metanarrative awareness of practitioners, from Rodolphe Töpffer to Marc-Antoine Mathieu, have challenged critics to find theoretical discourses capable of accounting for the complexity and subtlety of comics as a narrative art form. This issue of ECA aims to take the debate forward.

This article provides the base for a narratology that is specific to comics. It takes into account the irrefutable presence of an agent responsible for graphic enunciation, the monstrator, and on the basis of a case study (Franquin, Jidéhem and Greg's album, The Shadow of Z) it deducts that the instance of the recitant is responsible for verbal enunciation. The necessity to distinguish these two instances from that of the fundamental narrator is collaborated by the different positions that can be adapted with respect to storytelling.

This article aims to compare the narrative techniques employed through the combination of text and image in Tardi's adaptations of Le Der des ders and Voyage au bout de la nuit . Le Der des ders is a classic format bande dessinée, and Voyage is a cross-media work where Tardi's uncaptioned illustrations are juxtaposed with Céline's text. We argue that both Le Der des ders and Voyage constitute successful adaptations in their use of the specificity of the media, respectively comic book and illustration. We will look at the narrative use of text and image in Le Der des ders in terms of complementarity, and in terms of fragmentation with regard to Voyage. In Le Der des ders, text and image form one narrative; in Voyage, on the other hand, there is a binary narrative: the text, and, juxtaposed with it, confronting it, its visual version.

This paper discusses the recent growing presence of the everyday in comics from different traditions, works where ordinary situations and apparently insignificant events take the place of extraordinary worlds and adventure stories. Drawing predominantly from the French perspective of Everyday Studies (Lefebvre, Blanchot, Perec, De Certeau), the ambiguous dynamics of the everyday will be here studied in relation to the contrasting concepts of boredom and strangeness. This paper addresses not only comics that bring these two attitudes as a theme, but also those which manage to awaken emotional responses in the reader, specifically ennui and contemplation. The aim here is to identify different strategies proper to the language of comics capable of arousing everyday moods in the reading experience, particularly in those cases where the temporal dimension is manipulated, reinforcing a sense of slowness.

Colin and Cilluffo's graphic novel, World Trade Angels, is an illustration of the creation, through language and image, of a new vocabulary and a new imaginaire, after the events of 11 September 2001. No previously existing language is adequate; the authors introduce a new verbal, temporal, and pictorial vocabulary to try to represent the unrepresentable of that day. Significantly, in this work, divisions, grills, grates, bars and squares all multiply until the representation of the entire city is seen as a reproduction of the façade of the towers and a reflection of that façade that no longer exists. And as a synecdoche of that grillwork that quickly becomes a penetrable portcullis or an inescapable set of prison bars, the authors introduce the leit-motiv of a fire escape, but one that leads not to safety but to perdition and repetition. It is this set of figures I explore in this article.

Improvisation and performance are not traditionally associated with the comics form, but experiments with them are increasingly found in the area of alternative, or smallpress, comics. This essay analyses one example of improvisation in comics, Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot's La Maison close. The work was created by Ruppert, Mulot and several other artists for the 2009 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée (FIBD), in Angoulême, France. It was produced by cartoonists who improvised a narrative within a general framework provided by Ruppert and Mulot: a series of drawn settings representing a bordello. The resulting story played with conventions of autobiography, as worked out in alternative comics over the past couple of decades. La Maison close was first presented to the public at the FIBD, then was put online for a year, and now has been published in book form. The contrast between the book and the first version demonstrates the degree to which the original was innovative: the printed volume smoothes out the original, improvised story, forcing it into a more conventional plot.

This article concerns the way in which a comics scriptwriter works collaboratively with different artists. It traces the development of a working method with François Schuiten, the artist of the Cités obscures ['Cities of the Fantastic'] series, and the extension of the series itself beyond the two-dimensional page into other formats. The constant exchange between artist and scriptwriter is stressed: each is involved in the conception of both the plotline and the visual aspects of the work. Hergé is cited as an example of an artist whose ease in conjuring images out of words and ideas from images may be termed 'graphic thinking'. It is noted, however, that the tendency of publishing houses to favour scriptwriters who predetermine the course of the album limits such inventiveness. The open-endedness that, in ideal conditions, characterises the work of the comics scriptwriter, and the thoroughgoing nature of the collaboration, is compared with the more rigid, and limited, role assigned to a film scriptwriter. A more flexible and creative process is not impossible to achieve in cinema, but it is concluded that this is rare, and that it is the comics medium that affords the greater degree of freedom and independence.

The 2010 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée was a somewhat smaller celebration of the form than had been typical from recent years. The global economic recession hit the festival in a very direct fashion, with a great deal of public sabre-rattling in the press between the festival and the town over who would pay which bills. In the end that bickering was resolved and the show, under the presidency of Blutch, rolled out under the grey skies and wet snow of the final weekend of January.