Outlining Conceptual Practices in Comics
in European Comic ArtSearch for other papers by Ilan Manouach in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
All currencies in US Dollar
Abstract
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.