European Comic Art

The preparation of European Comic Art 8(1) has been overshadowed by the shocking and tragic murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski on 7 January 2015. As a way of memorialising these artists, we have invited Jane Weston Vauclair to contribute an article to this issue, assessing the significance of the magazine in the history and current state of French social and political satire. Indeed, beyond doubt is the iconic status of Charlie Hebdo as representing a distinctively French, but known to an international readership, tradition of disrespect for the sacred and the hypocritical, and for beaufitude in all its forms. However, the very untranslatability of that term, invented by Cabu, suggests that comic art, and perhaps satire in particular, may not always travel easily across borders. Mark McKinney has argued in his blog post on the Berghahn Books website2 that the meanings of the Charlie cartoons are far from transparent and universally readable, but have to be understood within a particular cultural and political context and reference system.

Charlie Hebdo became a global name following the tragic events of 7 January 2015 in Paris. Following this, two competing, somewhat reductive forms of commentary on Charlie Hebdo rapidly emerged in the global media. Could Charlie Hebdo effectively be sidelined as a case of egregiously irresponsible and offensive satire, even if the attacks per se were inexcusable? Or could its cartoonists instead be championed as martyrs to free speech, having proved to have a backbone of conviction and courage that had been lacking elsewhere in the media? This article argues that a dual set of tensions have come to the fore through Charlie's vertiginous global exposure. These are tensions between the local and the global, and between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility. It looks to highlight how Charlie Hebdo's contributors have been engaging with these tensions, both in the 'survivor's issue' of 14 January 2015 and in other spaces of commentary.

In this interview Karrie Fransman discusses some of the aesthetic choices that she made in creating her comic book Over Under Sideways Down, the story of a young asylum seeker, which deals with a series of harrowing events: exile, journey and displacement, and then the struggle to attain the right to remain in the UK. Fransman considers the ethical and artistic issues raised by the telling of Ebrahim's story, which includes episodes of pain and loss and which, moreover, he had already recounted many times over to disbelieving interviewers, who had the power to grant or refuse him refugee status. Fransman expresses her pleasure in discovering that the rendering of his story into comics form has helped Ebrahim to feel that he has gained control over it. She reflects on the process of condensing the narrative and heightening key moments, her concern to avoid turning violence into spectacle, and her use of resources of the medium, such as symbolism and metonymy, to convey the intensity of emotion.

In recent years, more attention has been paid to the cultural contributions of the Vietnamese diaspora as its representatives become better integrated in French and American society. To continue shedding light on this community, the present article explores the efforts of a French cartoonist of Vietnamese heritage, Clément Baloup, who uses postmemorial narrative in comics to transcribe and transmit the varied experiences of the overseas Vietnamese of the '1.5 generation'. While challenging current understandings of transnationalism, hybridisation and patterns of acculturation, this article demonstrates the value of studying the cultural signifier highlighted in Baloup's creations – ethnic foodways, which are sometimes deemed insignificant on account of their associated biological functions. I argue that foodways are symbolically important because they determine insider/outsider status with respect to the group, they facilitate interpersonal communication and the act of testifying and their significance is constantly evolving to reflect new sociopolitical contexts and environments.

In this artist's statement, originally written for a keynote lecture given at the American Bande Dessinée Society conference held at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) on 3 November 2012, Clément Baloup recounts his artistic trajectory through comics, moving from his experience as a comics reader to his art work as a professional cartoonist. He speaks about other cartoonists who influenced his work, ranging from Baru to Baudoin, Mazzuchelli to Miller, and Sacco to Spiegelman. He then describes three aspects of his comics about the Vietnamese and their history: the stories that he has created, his research and writing process, and the cartooning techniques involved in making each book.

Zeina Abirached, born in 1981 in Beirut, is a cartoonist who studied at the Académie libanaise des beaux-arts [Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts] (ALBA) in Beirut and the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs [National Graduate School of Decorative Arts] in Paris, France. In this artist's statement, originally written for a keynote lecture given at the American Bande Dessinée Society conference held at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) on 3 November 2012, she presents her four comic books published to date, all of them autobiographical: [Beyrouth] Catharsis [(Beirut) Catharsis] (2006), 38, rue Youssef Semaani [38 Youssef Semaani Street] (2006), Mourir, partir, revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles (2007), published in English as A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Live, To Return (2012), and Je me souviens: Beyrouth (2008), published in English as I Remember Beirut (2014). She focuses especially here on the dimensions of time and space, history and geography, and memory and autobiography in her work. She also discusses the influence of OuLiPo, and especially the writings of Georges Perec, on her comics.

Both in literature and art, exponents of modernism sought new forms of expression that took into account changes in the social, economic, technical and political conditions of the time. A similar trend towards questioning outmoded forms of representation and establishing new ways of seeing has become apparent in European comics since the 1980s, a development that was initiated primarily in Italy and France. In Murmure (1989), Lorenzo Mattotti invokes expressionism and centres his mystical tale on the individual's inner being. In rejecting the representational norms traditionally applied to comics, Nicolas de Crécy also shows his allegiance to modernism yet reflects in his absurdly hyperrealist work, Foligatto (1991), the grotesque images of Otto Dix. The following article demonstrates how the two artists, despite the deliberate reversion to early twentieth-century art common to both, have, each in his own way, established a new approach to seeing in comics.

In this article, I set out to establish the principles underlying the composition of images on the comics page, not by predetermining in advance what such principles might be, but by empirical investigation of the works of artists. I arrive at three major categories of page composition: to the terms 'regular' and 'rhetorical', used respectively by Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters, I add the category of 'semiregular', the transformation of a regular composition as the effect of merging or splitting of panels. However, in both rhetorical and semiregular compositions, panels within the same strip may be vertically aligned according to a further principle that I designate as 'fragmentation'. I propose a notation system to account for patterns produced by fragmentation, including second- (and nth-) degree fragmentation, whereby a vertically aligned panel is split into two (or more) horizontally aligned ones, one or more of which may then be vertically split and so on. The article ends with a consideration and critique of the work of Groensteen, Peeters and Neil Cohn on page composition.

CONFERENCE REVIEW

Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women – Communities of Experience? One-day symposium, JW3, Jewish Community Centre for London, 12 November 2014

BOOK REVIEWS

Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen

Julia Round, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach

François-Emmanuel Boucher, Sylvain David and Maxime Prévost, eds, Mythologies du superhéros: Histoire, physiologie, géographie, intermédialités

Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner, Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present

Annessa Ann Babic, ed., Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment

Jane Tolmie, ed., Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art