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Outlining Conceptual Practices in Comics

2021; Berghahn Books; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3167/eca.2021.140206

1754-3797

Ilan Manouach,

Digital Storytelling and Education

This article examines how the shortcomings of institutional representation in comics, and the shifting role of existing institutions in the industry, can engender a new comics practice. ‘Conceptual Comics’ mobilise the historical legacy of conceptual art in its capacity for institutional critique, self-reflexivity, alternative forms of skilling, and the prioritisation of context over content, to renew comics making and reading. My case study, Noirs [Blacks] (2015), a facsimile détournement of Les Schtroumpfs noirs [ The Black Smurfs ], closely approximates the original, with the same cover, number of pages, and format, but replaces four different composite colour plates by four uniform plates of cyan, resulting in a monochromatic deviation. Noirs demonstrates how a form, when no longer conventionally operational, can foreground industrial fabrication normally intuited as a transparent and mechanic process.