European Comic Art

Within Europe and beyond, the centenary of the Great War began to be commemorated in 2014. As with any act of retelling history and re-creating memories, the events orchestrated around this centenary involve a certain tailoring of narratives and a process of forgetting that reflects more on the present milieu than the past. As noted by the sociologist and philosopher Elena Esposito, recent neurophysiological findings posit memory ‘as a procedural capability realizing a constant recategorisation’. Especially relevant for this issue of European Comic Art is her claim that the memory of society as a whole ‘is constituted, first of all, by the mass media and ruled by their always changing forms’. As emphasised by the articles in this issue, popular media during and after the First World War (music hall, illustrated magazines, comics, cartoons, pulps) were propagators of images that have persisted, often with altered significance, into our times.

The forms taken up by French comics in the Offenstadt brothers' wartime weeklies echo other representations of the Great War produced behind the front lines, including the music hall, popular imagery and illustrated newspapers. The Offenstadt brothers' picture stories, which staged comic operas starring soldiers and conformed to French propaganda instructions, were a hit with soldiers and civilians (including children), aside from some offended Catholic critics. This essay contextualises their success, focusing on the reception of the comics, particularly those by Louis Forton.

The publication of comics from the 1950s onwards in East Germany started as a defensive reaction against Western comics. It did not take long for the medium to be used as an instrument for socialist propaganda. This was especially the case with the historical-political comics in the magazine Atze. This article provides an overview of the representation of the First World War and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 in Atze. It shows that Atze's stories closely followed the historical perspective prescribed by the communist party as well as the concept of the socialist picture story developed in the 1960s. These stories unfolded across series of individual images that generally avoided word balloons and sound effects and were accompanied by detailed text. Using a realistic style, such stories tried to convey a strong sense of authenticity but they remained unable to develop complex characters or stories. However, in refl ecting the changing political climate of their times, these comics provide a rich source of material for studying the portrayal of history in East Germany.

The U.S. publisher EC Comics produced several war comics between 1950 and 1955. These comic books, especially the issues published during Harvey Kurtzman's editorship, are still considered masterpieces, as rare examples of war comics attempting to present an unvarnished account of the ordeals of war. This article focuses on the treatment of the Great War in comics. While current stories about the First World War usually underline its inhuman realities for the soldiers, the EC stories offered a more ambivalent representation. The now traditional stories of trenches and suffering infantry soldiers were counterbalanced by stories of heroic air fights and chivalrous aces. This approach towards the First World War as a 'noble war' progressively increased during the run of these comics, refl ecting the shifting balance that characterised the production of EC war comics: that between the constraints of the market, artistic ambition and the popular cultural mythology of air aces.

This article examines the image of the First World War in British political cartoons, from the aftermath of the conflict to the present day, as an active process of remembrance. Through an analysis of cartoons in newspapers and periodicals in Britain, this study assesses how a distinct vision of the war is formed within society as a means of addressing contemporary concerns beyond the events of 1914–1918. The use of such war imagery in television, film and fiction has been recently critiqued by scholars who have lamented the way in which this popular memory obscures the history of the conflict. However, a study of political cartoons reveals that rather than constituting a cliché, specific representations of the war, namely the image of the battlefields, the trenches and suffering soldiers, acquire new meanings and constitute a dynamic process of remembrance which uses the past to critique and assess the present.

Christophe Dony, Tanguy Habrand and Gert Meesters, La Bande dessinée en dissidence/Comics in Dissent

Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda, eds., 'Comics & Media': Special issue of Critical Inquiry 40(3) (Spring 2014)

Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction