Reviews

Book Reviews

Thierry Groensteen, M. Töpffer invente la bande dessinée, coll. Réflexions

faites (Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2014). 320 pp. ISBN: 978-
2-87449-187-0 (paperback, €24.00)

My own discovery of Rodolphe Töpffer in 1960 was prompted by some

remarks by Ernst Gombrich in Art and Illusion published that year, sug-
gesting the history of the picture story from William Hogarth to Töpffer
would be a topic worth pursuing. Gombrich’s interest in Töpffer was
primarily as a physiognomist (one should say, in the French manner,
physiognomonist), as an explorer of the doodle as a creative stimulus,
and as a theorist of what Gombrich called ‘Töpffer’s law’, by which the
merest scribble of a face is subject to expressive interpretation on the
part of the reader. Gombrich was perhaps the first of his generation, of
his distinction, to take caricature seriously. My own interest in Töpffer
carried me first towards his picture stories, his caricatural graphic nov-
els (the term scarcely existed then); his own term was just that, romans
(or nouvelles) en estampes. In 1960 I could find editions of these only in
a rare copy of Töpffer’s complete works, graphic and prose, in the Edi-
tion du Centenaire, started in 1943 with distribution much hindered by
the war, but held by the British Museum library. There were no earlier
(least of all first) editions available anywhere in the U.K.; I resigned my-
self to sitting under the celestial blue dome of that library, embarrassed
by having to stifle periodic outbursts of laughter.
Rodolphe Töpffer, schoolmaster of Geneva, founder of the modern
comic strip, is, surprisingly, a relatively recent discovery. But since the
1960s studies of Töpffer and the whole history of the comic strip or

European Comic Art Volume 7 Number 2, Autumn 2014: 115–140

doi:10.3167/eca.2014.070206 ISSN 1754–3797 (Print), ISSN 1754–3800 (Online)
116 Reviews

picture story or graphic novel have blossomed. American comics (since

1896, supposedly the moment of the invention of the genre) had been
reviewed, descriptively, by a few American historians and connois-
seurs. I myself found more than enough material to fill a bulky PhD
dissertation dealing with the narrative prints of Hogarth, with much
before and much after (PhD 1964, book 1968–1973), stopping short
of Töpffer. In the 1970s and 1980s comics studies took off, and I was
drawn again and again to this remarkable figure who became more
multifaceted all the time (he was a novelist, art critic, art theorist, travel
writer and much else). All over Europe descriptions, theories or semi-
ologies of comics burgeoned, whether in the old, scruffy comic book
format or the new, big, luxurious graphic novels worthy of that new
term. In 1988 Art Spiegelman, famous for his Maus series, canonised
Töpffer as the ‘patron saint’ of the ninth art; French cartoonist Wolinski
marvelled that the modest Swiss schoolmaster could have produced a
new art genre ‘perfect’ from the start.
The graphic novel, recalling Töpffer’s own terms, is now well estab-
lished as a major artistic-literary genre. In the 1980s in France, Thi-
erry Groensteen quickly became the major theorist and historian of the
bande dessinée, meaning ‘drawn strip’—a better term than comic strip,
which only became truly comic with Hogarth, the ‘Great Age’ of En-
glish caricature (1780–1820) and Töpffer. Groensteen’s groundbreaking
Système de la bande dessinée appeared in 1999, and he has maintained
an impressive flow of related books and articles over two decades. He
was also for many years director of the Cité internationale de la bande
dessinée et de l’image in Angoulême, the most capacious museum of
its kind in the world.
With him and others, Töpffer studies thrive, although we still lack a
much-needed biography of the master, after the first two written simul-
taneously in the late nineteenth century. A major step has been taken
towards this in the multivolume compendium of Töpffer’s correspon-
dence, six volumes of a projected eight out so far, edited by Jacques
Droin, a former juge de la cour in Geneva, who has dedicated his retire-
ment to this task.
The present work by Groensteen is a reworking and amplification of
his Töpffer: L’Invention de la bande dessiné (1994), with the considerable
contribution of coauthor Benoît Peeters replaced by a major chapter
on the heirs of Töpffer, notably featuring ‘the firework called Doré’,
‘Cham, the prolix heir’ and ‘Christophe reignites the smouldering fire’.
Groensteen also includes, transcribed verbatim, certain canonical, ex-
planatory and theoretical texts by Töpffer that will be appreciated by
 Reviews 117

those less familiar with the Swiss. The most important of these are the
Essais d’autographie, in which Töpffer explains his special method of in-
formal drawing with lithographic pen that ends up the right way round
in print, and his Essai de physiognomonie, which propounds his all-im-
portant theory of the doodled face and a new visual aesthetic. Groen-
steen reproduces the original manuscript version of the latter as it was
actually printed, together with a regular print version; the latter is no
doubt helpful to those unwilling to bother with reading the author’s
own charming and perfectly legible script, the exact reproduction of
which in the form of captions under the drawings of his graphic novels
is an essential constituent of the author’s unique fusion of word and
image.
Groensteen’s section on antecedents, after some arbitrary glimpses
of really remote examples running from Lascaux to medieval manu-
scripts, dallies sufficiently with Hogarth, who was recognised explicitly
by Töpffer as his only precursor. The century separating those I call
grandfather and father of the comic strip is actually full of Hogarth
imitations, derivatives and offshoots, generally scanted in the Töpffer
literature, which likes to cite Rowlandson’s Dr Syntax, which is not a
comic strip, although featuring a caricatural, continuing pedant figure
Töpffer would have known. Oddly, Groensteen uses single cartoons by
James Gillray, the great master and worthy successor of Hogarth as
satirist, but not his occasional narrative strips ( John Bull’s Progress; De-
mocracy, or a Sketch of the Life of Buonaparte), ignoring also narrative
comic strips by George Cruikshank and the many other Progresses ‘Pro-
gresses’ and Lives ‘Lives’ done by lesser artists unjustly forgotten, nota-
bly Richard Newton, who died at the age of twenty-one. Yet the role of
this medley of ‘Great Age’ caricaturists as stylistic precursors to Töpferr
is important despite difference of format (single, multiscene etched
plates, unlike Töpffer’s extensive lithographic albums), differing in
the radical simplification of Hogarth’s teeming compositions and the
self-conscious development of a rhetorical vocabulary of pose and ges-
ture. In Germany, the numerous, highly narrative, miniaturist almanac
etchings by the ‘German Hogarth’, Daniel Chodowieki, are omitted in
favour of David Hess’s single cartoons and a very new discovery: the
unpublished (except on the Internet) Lenardo and Blandine engravings
(1783) of Joseph Franz von Goez.
Groensteen’s excellent introduction to the genesis, character and
popular reception of Töpffer’s seven or eight stories need not detain
us here. If I may just make a correction to much of the literature that
is not as minor as it may seem: Töpffer did not ‘publish’ (13) or ‘go
118 Reviews

public’ (68) with the world’s first true graphic novel/comic book, L’His-
toire de M. Jabot, in 1833, as is so often said, on the basis of the date
printed on it. It is true that he did in 1833 have some copies printed
and distributed among his friends, hence the date. Then he changed
his mind, at this critical moment, when he realised that such a ‘folly’
risked compromising his reputation and dignity as head of a Geneva
private school and a university professor. For this and a variety of other
reasons, some technical, in very complicated circumstances, he delayed
a general distribution until 1835. Groensteen gets the date matter right
on page 55: Jabot was ‘printed in 1833, distributed only in 1835’. It is
all the odder that the date 1833 should survive, in that Töpffer himself
says explicitly in his ‘Notice sur l’Histoire de M. Jabot’, published in
1837, which Groensteen reproduces in its entirety (from page 219):
‘this book although it bears the date 1833, was only published in 1835’.
If I insist here (partly in self-defence),1 it is because birth dates matter,
especially the exact moment when the first modern comic strip was
born and delivered to the world.
‘Autographie’, carefully described by Töpffer as an artistic novelty
and in common use only (and ‘coarsely’) for petty commercial circu-
lars, actually served to reproduce manuscript handwriting, music and
original drawings. It was known less well in Geneva than Paris, where
Töpffer’s first disciple, usually called imitator, Cham (Amédée de Noé),
must have used it for his first albums (1839–1840), in which the cap-
tions are by a professional calligrapher and the capital Ns inscribed
internally to the drawing are correctly drawn, not reversed, as in all the
stone lithographs I have seen (Daumier, for instance), in a hitherto un-
explained habit. It is unfortunate that when Cham came (in 1845) to re-
draw Töpffer’s Cryptogame on wood for L’Illustration he did not bother,
as Groensteen observes, to allow for the reversal, so that figures that
should run from left to right end up, after reversal, doing the opposite.
To his reproduction demonstrating this, Groensteen adds a slightly
misleading caption (76): the original Töpffer pen drawing to the left is
actually the autolithographic version that Cham would not have seen,
but was made by the author afterwards to add to his completed works
in the same medium in a sequence cut short by his death. An original
Töpffer drawing at the prelithography sketch stage is given on page 85.

1 I give a lengthy and rather technical account of the matter in ‘The Gourary Töpffer
Manuscript of Monsieur Jabot: A Question of Authenticity. With the Dating and Dis-
tribution of Rodolphe Töpffer’s First Published Picture Story, and the World’s First
Modern Comic Strip’, European Comic Art 2(2) (Autumn 2009), 173–203.
 Reviews 119

I do not understand why Cham did not simply trace the Töpffer
drawings given to him, as did, evidently, the plagiaries made in Paris in
1839 (and subsequent foreign-language copies based on them), which
were given to an incompetent hack with poor results. By contrast, the
tracing undertaken by a competent German in 1845, for transfer to
autolithography in the collected Franco-German edition of Töpffer
(by Kessmann), and that done by the author’s son, François, for the
Garnier edition of 1860 are almost perfectly faithful. The reason for
Cham’s deciding against tracing may be because he realised that the
Illustration version must involve a certain amount of adaptation for the
large French audience. Töpffer, in his letters (they never met in per-
son), strongly urged Cham to feel free to be himself, to preserve his
own (Cham’s? actually Töpffer’s) liberty of line. Groensteen gives us
something of the intense correspondence that passed back and forth
between the two artists, testimony to the passion for detail the Swiss
brought to his art, now really reaching the ‘big public’ for the first time.
For lack of space I give only these alluring examples of subjects
broached in part III, called ‘Elements of a Töpfferian Poetic’, which
testify to Groensteen’s particular interests and expertise: outline draw-
ing (dessin trait), mechanics and instalment, the Töpfferian building
yard (chantier), page spacing (i.e., montage) and grammar of the frame,
hero and type, ubiquitous figures, the fixed idea, avatars of the body,
from scribbling to story, the physiognomonic key, and more. Preceding
this part, Groensteen has inserted four drawings I did not know and
believe are unpublished despite the fact they are in the Geneva public
library in the Suzannet collection dedicated to Töpffer (no. 132). They
were apparently missed by the Edition du Centenaire, which includes
several other series of sketches for aborted stories. These drawings ap-
pear to have no title other than the makeshift one given by Groensteen,
‘Histoire d’une institutrice’. The schoolteacher in question is subject to
the unwanted attentions of gentlemen at a ball, and brightens up only
when surrounded by her young pupils – a promising beginning.
I will end with a not entirely relevant complaint (since the book is ba-
sically about Töpffer), which is that Groensteen is rather unfair about
his first imitator, Cham, even as he devotes several informative pages
to him. Cham was actually much more than a mere imitator, although
this word is always used. To say that he has not ‘one tenth of the wit
of his model’ (165) is to misread, or not read at all, Cham’s numer-
ous picture stories (about twenty-two, by my count) and to be deterred
by his unfathomably immense journalistic œuvre, adorned with all
those witty captions for which he became famous. His comic strips
120 Reviews

and graphic novels, of varying lengths and on various subjects, are, to

any who give them the time, simply hilarious. They are not as subtle
as Töpffer’s, and they are often crass, but they are funny and imagina-
tive nevertheless. Cham may have been forgotten since he died, and
since the late nineteenth century. His popularity and acknowledged
reputation in his lifetime as chief Charivari cartoonist is demonstrable
nonetheless. The light of his all-too-immense œuvre is beginning to
pierce through the shadow of Daumier and Gavarni, with whom he
was always compared, not always unfavourably, in his own time. No
one would argue that the unsurpassable Töpffer is not definitely supe-
rior to Cham, but these comparisons are odorous – to use a Chames-
que (or is it Shakespearean?) malapropism. So if we have, thanks to the
likes of Groensteen, done well by the Swiss, it is now Cham’s turn for
a bit of the limelight.
DAVID KUNZLE
UCLA

Ole Frahm, Die Sprache des Comics [The Language of the Comic], Fun-
dus 179 (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2010). 400 pp. ISBN: 978-3-86572-
656-8 (paperback, €22.00)

In his wide-ranging and well-illustrated Die Sprache des Comics, Ole

Frahm posits that repetition is the central property of the comics me-
dium: repetition of a character within a story, repetition of information
between picture and text, repetition of a strip or book on the page or
newsstand, repetition of basic ideas across strips and books, and ulti-
mately repetition of all of these elements across media. The result is a
‘parodistische Ästhetik’ [parodic aesthetic – ‘parodic’ in a Nietzschean
sense]: ‘Comics lachen über sich selbst wie über alles Höhe’ [Comics
laugh at themselves as they do at all that is elevated], and their form
‘kennt keine andere Zeichnung der Figuren denn als Karikatur’ [knows
no representation of the characters other than as caricature] (8–9). Due
to their inherent self-referentiality, however, comics need no external
original to be parodied; they thus become komisch in both senses – that
is, ‘funny ha-ha’ and ‘funny peculiar’. Frahm’s central thesis is that this
aesthetic ‘die rassistischen, sexistischen und klassenbedingten Stereo-
typien reproduziert und zugleich aufgrund ihrer immanent erkenntni-
skritischen Anlage reflektiert – durch den operationalisierten Modus
der Wiederholung in der Konstellation von Bild und Schrift einerseits,
die Serialisierung von Bildern, Figuren und Geschichten andererseits’
 Reviews 121

[reproduces racist, sexist and class-bound stereotypes while at the same

time reflecting upon them, on the basis of [comics’] immanently criti-
cal epistemological stance – via the operationalised mode of repetition
in the picture/text constellation on the one hand, and the seriality of
pictures, characters and stories on the other] (11–12).
In his foreword, Frahm distances his work from similarly titled
books by Barbieri, Saraceni and Groensteen, amongst others, and other
linguistically inspired works, including that of Scott McCloud.2 Frahm
rejects all of these approaches due to their humourless and ahistorical
semiotic idealism, which seeks to ennoble comics into a generalised
Saussurean langue (13–16). By contrast, Frahm looks back within pre-
vious German scholarship to Ulrich Krafft, who argues that comics’
synthesis of picture and text takes place ‘erst im jeweiligen Comic-Text,
auf der Ebene der parole’ [only in the individual comic text, at the level
of parole].3
Frahm likewise takes issue with attempts to extend comics’ pedigree
back to prehistoric cave paintings, or even to the early nineteenth cen-
tury; Frahm condemns these approaches as apolitical, and singles out
for criticism the studies of Eckart Sackmann, whose edited annual se-
ries is both too purely descriptive and too focused on Germany despite
comics’ international nature.4 Here Frahm offers as a countermodel
another work from the German past, Alfred C. Baumgärtner’s Die Welt
der Comics,5 admiringly citing Baumgärtner’s explicit political and so-
cial engagement against racism and fascism in the adventure comics
popular in Germany during the 1950s and 1960s and his willingness to
blame society rather than the comics themselves (22–24).6

2 Daniele Barbieri, I linguaggi del fumetto [The Languages of the Comic] (Milan: Bompi-
ani, 1991); Mario Saraceni, The Language of Comics (London and New York: Routledge,
2003); Thierry Groensteen, Système de la bande dessinée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1999), published in English as The System of Comics, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick
Nguyen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); Scott McCloud, Understand-
ing Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994). Frahm refers to both
the French and English versions of Groensteen’s book.
3 Ulrich Krafft, Comics lesen: Untersuchungen zur Textualität von Comics [Reading Com-
ics: Investigations into the Textuality of Comics] (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), 112.
Quoted in Frahm, Sprache, 13.
4 Eckart Sackmann, ed., Deutsche Comicforschung [German Comics Research] (Hildes-
heim: comicplus+/Verlag Sachmann und Horndl, 2004–). Frahm himself, however,
excludes manga and other non-Western comics from his discussion.
5 Alfred C. Baumgärtner, Die Welt der Comics: Probleme einer primitiven Literaturform
[The World of Comics: Problems of a Primitive Literary Form] (Bochum: Kamp, 1965).
6 Frahm overlooks, however, both Baumgärtner’s view of fantasy as an abdication of
civic responsibility and his declarations that readers of these comics must be linguistic,
historical and political illiterates whose asocial and violent tendencies stem from an
122 Reviews

Frahm thus sweepingly rejects any attempt to theorise comics into

respectability or out of their material, social and historical context;
many of his criticisms are cogent, however, and in fact they often coin-
cide with points made a year later in a published conversation among
Greg M. Smith, Thomas Andrae, Scott Bukatman and Thomas La-
Marre.7 In particular, Frahm’s book can be seen as a response avant la
lettre to LaMarre’s call for ‘a “media theory” of comics that would allow
us to pose questions about the aesthetic regime of comics, dealing with
the material orientations and horizons specific to comics rather than
stripping away the materiality of comics in order to evaluate them as
representations’.8 It is exactly such a theory that Frahm had already
attempted to provide.
How well, then, does Frahm meet LaMarre’s challenge? Consider-
ing that his book preceded that challenge, he does so very well indeed,
though not consistently well. Much of Die Sprache des Comics had been
previously published in other venues (27), and even though older ma-
terial was heavily rewritten for the book, the result remains not entirely
cohesive. Thus Frahm does not so much build an argument step-by-
step as come at it repeatedly from different directions, focusing on dif-
ferent aspects; though this structure, too, has its strengths.
The book’s introduction, ‘Weird Signs’, deals with self-referentiality
and repetition as exemplified in Sidney Smith’s Old Doc Yak (1917), Al
Feldstein and Al Williamson’s The Aliens (1953) and Martin tom Dieck
and Jens Balzer’s Salut Deleuze! (1997) (31–57). The body of the book is
then divided into two main sections, ‘Elemente parodistischer Ästhe-
tik’ and ‘Politiken parodistischer Ästhetik’. The first of these is further
divided into the elements of ‘Figur’ [Character], ‘Zwischenraum’ [Inter-
vening Space], ‘Linien’ [Lines] and ‘Panel’; while the second, political,
half contains the sections ‘Geschichte’ [History], ‘Mythos’ [Myth], ‘Ste-
reotyp’ and ‘Enthauptungen’ [Decapitations].
‘Figur’ is by far the strongest section of the book, describing the im-
plications of the reduplication of characters within stories, ranging from
Erich Ohser/e.o. plauen’s classic 1930s pantomime strip Vater und Sohn
[Father and Son] through Harold Knerr’s long-lived Katzenjammer Kids
(already both a duplication and a continuation of Rudolph Dirks’s orig-

inability to comprehend the modern world. See, for example, Alfred C. Baumgärtner,
Die Welt der Comics: Probleme einer primitiven Literaturform, 4th expanded ed. (Bochum:
Kamp, 1971), 36, 63, 73, 81–82, 90.
7 Greg M. Smith, ‘Surveying the World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conver-
sation’, Cinema Journal 50(3) (2011), 135–147. See, in particular, 138–139, 144–145.
8 Ibid., 143.
 Reviews 123

inal strip), George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–1944), Hergé’s Tintin

album Le Sceptre d’Ottokar [King Ottokar’s Sceptre] (1939), a Superman
story from 1955 and a Mighty Thor story of 1963, a 1955 Italian Don-
ald Duck story, Tom Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes (1993) and finally
the indistinguishable, multifunctional Schmoos from Al Capp’s classic
Li’l Abner. This section is particularly compelling not only because it
perfectly elucidates Frahm’s premise that the continual repetition of a
character in drawings only further problematises, and never stabilises,
its identity – ‘Es sind die gleichen Figuren, aber nicht dieselben’ [They
are the same characters, but not the selfsame] (52) – but also because
his knowledge of and love for the comics under analysis, especially the
old ‘funnies’ and above all Krazy Kat, shines through every sentence.
Within the rest of the book’s first section, neither ‘Zwischenraum’
nor ‘Panel’ achieves the same intensity, because these chapters are too
brief in their attempt to generalise from instances that are too particu-
lar (depictions of axes in the former case and of windows in the latter),
while ‘Linien’ analyses depictions of war from Krazy Kat through 1950s
EC Comics to a beautiful reading of Jacques Tardi’s C’était la guerre des
tranchées [It Was the War of the Trenches] (1993) that, however convinc-
ing, never seems entirely beholden to Frahm’s thesis (144–181).9
The second, political, half of the book is more equally weighted:
‘Geschichte’ is of interest because Frahm analyses German comics at
some length: although he shares Baumgärtner’s dismissal of Hansrudi
Wäscher’s Nick (1958–1963) – somewhat unfairly, I think – he uses
the West German comic as a springboard to a well-contextualised read-
ing of Johannes Hegenbarth/Hannes Hegen’s East German Mosaik as
proletarian comic history, featuring the Digedags, three time-travel-
ling sprites (1955–1975) (211–245). ‘Mythos’ provides a well-organised
cross-media analysis of how Siegel and Shuster’s Superman (1942) de-
picts the myth of radio during a period when Superman’s adventures
were also being broadcast over the airwaves (246–266). ‘Stereotyp’,
perhaps the book’s most provocative section, looks at anti-Semitic ste-
reotypes in Hergé’s L’Étoile mystérieuse [The Shooting Star] (1942) and
provides an interpretation of the album’s later revisions that explains
how the plot and artwork come to criticise anti-Semitism; notably, how-
ever, Frahm does not seek to absolve Hergé of using such stereotypes
in the first place (267–291). Finally, ‘Enthauptungen’ is interesting in

9 Frahm also briefly analyses a Nazi propaganda comic for comparison, which is partic-
ularly illuminating; this example is made available, however, thanks to the researches
of Eckart Sackmann, whose work was previously dismissed by Frahm (21), but here
reveals itself to be valuable after all. Frahm, Sprache, 175–181.
124 Reviews

its handling of parody as a form of unauthorised, transgressive repeti-

tion, as shown in ‘Tijuana bibles’, MAD and underground comics; this
is also the only section that analyses a comic by a woman artist, Julie
Doucet’s Dirty Plotte (1992) (292–322).
A concluding section posits that comics are difficult for critics to
deal with not because they offer too little, but rather because they are,
in Art Spiegelman’s terms, a co-mix, offering what Frahm calls ‘zu viel
Vermischtes, zu viel Serie, zu viel Komik’ [too much mixture, too much
seriality, too much of the comical] (326). Frahm’s celebration of this
surfeit is variable in its successful application of his own thesis, but
consistently readable, learned and provocative; its organisation also
may make it suitable for intermediate-level readers whose German
may limit them to reading only a section at a time (though there is no
index, the appended list of illustrations serves as a basic guide for find-
ing comics analysed). Any synopsis can do this volume’s shortcomings
justice, but hardly its many strengths. In terms of forging an approach
to comics outside the currently prevalent range of theories, Die Sprache
des Comics is an excellent beginning.
PAUL M. MALONE
University of Waterloo

Daniela Petrini, ed., Die Sprache(n) der Comics: Kollokium in Heidelberg,

16.–17. Juni 2009 [The Language(s) of Comics: A Symposium Held in
Heidelberg, 16–17 June 2009] (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2012).
218 pp. ISBN: 978-3-89975-280-9 (paperback, €34.90, £29.00, $45.95)

Die Sprache(n) der Comics collects the proceedings of an interdisciplin-

ary symposium held at the University of Heidelberg in 2009 under the
aegis of the International Science Forum of that institution, with the
support of the Italian Cultural Institute of Stuttgart. Edited by Daniela
Petrini, the volume brings together the papers presented at the sym-
posium by twelve scholars from Germany and Italy: Sergio Brancato
(media and cultural sociology), Gino Frezza (film studies and cultural
sociology), Fabio Gadducci (informatics, although a comics historian in
his spare time), Christian Grünnagel (Latin, Italian and Spanish liter-
ary and language studies), Wolfgang K. Hünig (English language stud-
ies), Marcus Müller (Germanistic studies), Daniela Petrini (French and
Italian literary and language studies), Nelson Puccio (Italian literary
studies), Fabio Rossi (Italian literature and language studies), Chris-
 Reviews 125

tina Sanchez-Stockhammer (Latin and English literary studies), Martin

Schüwer (English and German language studies) and Mirko Tavosanis
(Italian language studies).
Before I address the book’s contents and accomplishments, I must
note that although the authors come from the two aforementioned
countries, contributions come in three languages: German, Italian and
French. This was most certainly done in order to keep all the linguis-
tic nuances of the various essays. To a point, this strategy is to be ap-
plauded, since it implicitly pushes readers to realise that those who
want to have a good grasp of European scholarship in the field of com-
ics studies need to have a good reading knowledge of, at a minimum,
the major languages of the European Union: it is not always possible
to translate valuable works into English. At the same time, the absence
of French scholars is somewhat puzzling: one of the two authors of the
essays written in French is German and the other is Italian, and there
is no indication that any French institution was involved in the project.
Petrini’s introduction and the eleven essays of the book provide a
compelling framework for the study of a key sector of studies on comic
art: the ways comics ‘speak’, ‘talk’ and show their linguistic contents by
relying on several dimensions of verbal communication. This is not,
of course, a new topic, but the studies upon it are never enough, since
languages (including the languages of comics) are in perennial evolu-
tion and there are always new elements to either discover or rediscover
and analyse further. Some of the essays demonstrate this very cogently,
including: Schüwer’s, which focuses on comics lettering; Grünnagel’s,
on a stylistic comparison between one of the old Astérix stories (1961)
by Goscinny and Uderzo and the recent BD series Vae Victis! (1991–
2006) by Rocca and Mitton; and Gadducci and Tavosanis’s panoramic
essay on nonstandard verbal language – e.g., peculiar orthography, jar-
gon, interjections – in Italian comics. The book also contains examples
of theoretical scholarship, such as Frezza’s ‘Figurazione del parlato e
immagine statica-dinamica nei fumetti’ [Visualisation of the Spoken
Word and Static-Dynamic Image in Comics] and Brancato’s ‘Fumetto
post-seriale: Trasformazioni del fumetto fra storia e autobiografia’
[Postserial Comics: Transformations of Comics between History and
Autobiography]. In addition, the volume includes a number of linguis-
tics-centred writings, including Petrini’s ‘Le Rôle des déictiques dans
la narration du roman graphique contemporain français’ [The Role of
Deictics in the Narrative of French Contemporary Graphic Novels] and
Sanchez-Stockhammer’s chapter, which centres on a quantitative con-
126 Reviews

tent analysis devoted to recording whether the verbal language of com-

ics is ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ for readers to understand. These and the other,
equally interesting essays give a composite picture of a well-defined
and self-contained subfield of study in literary scholarship: the spoken
and verbal languages of comics. The collection, therefore, does not in-
clude digressions on comics’ visuality and graphic storytelling, with
the understandable exception of Müller’s chapter on the linguistic syn-
ergy of verbal text and image composition in Lucky Luke (‘Halt’s Maul,
Averell! Die Inszenierung multimodaler Interaktion im Comic’ [Shut
up, Averell! The Staging of Multi-Mode Interaction in Comics]) and
Hünig’s on the analysis of verbal and iconic text in German and British
propaganda caricature cartoons of World War II. On the whole, we are
thus dealing with a rather specialised collection of writings that belong
not so much to ‘comics scholarship’ but to the field of linguistics and
literary studies applied to comics as a very particular form of litera-
ture. This is to be expected in view of the current state of international
academic studies on comics, which comics scholars know very well:
university departments mainly or solely approach (or are allowed to
tackle) comics as a research object from the perspective of institution-
ally ‘classic’ disciplines.
The fact that all these essays coming from German and Italian schol-
ars are presented ‘as they are’, that is, in the idiom in which they were
thought and written, can, as I noted above, be seen under a positive
light: readers with a command of all three languages will have direct
access to the meanings and insights conveyed by the different authors.
Indeed, it would have been really prohibitive to translate many of the
passages in Rossi’s ‘Dannate lingue del Paz! Osservazioni linguistiche
sui fumetti di Andrea Pazienza’ [Damn Paz’s Languages! Linguistic
Observations on Andrea Pazienza’s Comics], which deals with the par-
ticular linguistic idiolects of famous Italian comics creator Andrea Pa-
zienza, who used to play skilfully with his native idiom. Translating
Puccio’s essay on the linguistic strategies by which Disney characters
and stories have been renamed or originally created in Germany and
Italy would also have been all but impossible. What is surprising, how-
ever, is that the essays do not speak with each other and do not thor-
oughly take note of the comics scholarship of the other two countries
overtly involved in the book: if we check the bibliographic references
of each chapter, we will very rarely find works by any of the other con-
tributors. If, as appears quite normal, almost all authors make some
reference to scholarship composed in (or translated into) English, in
 Reviews 127

the chapters by German authors there are virtually no Italian sources,

while in the essays by authors based in Italy no German sources and
only some sporadic references in French are mentioned. The only ex-
ception is Petrini’s contribution; its bibliography consists of French,
Italian and German sources. On the whole, however, the book is note-
worthy for the paucity of references to important sources in Italian,
French and Spanish that have played a crucial role in the history of
European comics scholarship as it relates to the fields of linguistics and
semiotics. In other words, the essays neither seem to have been organ-
ised following a central thesis, nor do they seem to have been edited in
a coordinated fashion. Inasmuch as contributors do not seem to have
taken each other’s work into account, the book does not appear to be an
organic volume and is more similar to an issue of an academic journal
with no central topic except for a general macrodisciplinary framework.
As a result, from a multidisciplinary standpoint, the ‘simple’ interdisci-
plinary strategy of this book’s approach can arguably be seen as a limit,
since so many aspects coexist in comics at the same time. Nonetheless,
not only does this kind of disciplinary juxtaposition help accomplished
scholars to further their own analytical approaches, it also – and this is
extremely important as well – assists young researchers and students
in recognising, decomposing and recomposing the several tiles of the
languages of comics, namely, in this instance, their verbal/alphabetical
dimensions.
MARCO PELLITTERI
Kōbe University

Hannah Miodrag, Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse

on the Form (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013). 240 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-61703-804-4 (hardback, £58.00, $55.00)

In this study, anchored in literary and linguistic theory, Hannah Mio-

drag addresses the sometimes overly general use comics criticism
makes of ‘discourses’ (cultural, educational, literary, political, sociohis-
torical, readership-centred) and what she believes is lost by the habitual
sidelining of the mixed nature of the language of comics. She hopes
to lessen the ‘defensiveness’ that she believes underpins dominant ap-
proaches to the study of the formal structure of comics. Comics criti-
cism participates in a rivalry of art forms – what W.J.T. Mitchell refers
to as a ‘war of signs’ (7). Drawing on this contention, Miodrag does
128 Reviews

not aspire to ‘rehabilitate’ comics beside the supposed benchmark of

other concurring art forms, but wishes instead to incorporate the more
consistent and established critical standards of adjacent scholarly disci-
plines promoted by both Anglophone and European theorists. Fusing
the established critical standards in linguistic and literary theory from
Mitchell, Neil Cohn, Scott McCloud, James Elkins, R.C. Harvey, David
Carrier, Bart Beaty, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Umberto
Eco and Thierry Groensteen, she puts forth a revised critical semiotic
framework that is more ‘attuned’ to the specificities of the visual and
verbal modes of comics as a ‘symbol system’ (11). The central thrust
of her book is to demonstrate via a close analysis of both texts and the-
ory the precise differences between the visual and verbal modes. She
adopts a formalist approach, because in her view, it is precisely in the
conception of the formal structures of comics that the field’s greatest
critical weak point lies.
In part I, entitled ‘Language in Comics’, Miodrag investigates how
specifically linguistic features (arbitrariness, constitution in so-called
minimal units and constraints by the langue) enable the recourse to
literary tricks such as the use of homophones and alliterations. She
appraises these features in Georges Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–1944),
demonstrating how vital these linguistic attributes are to the medium.
She argues that to fail to pay truly literary attention (to its use of words)
is to overlook a fundamental dimension of comics as a form of litera-
ture (40). Her keen demonstration of Herriman’s play with the sounds
and meanings of words and phrases in Krazy Kat is both insightful and
compelling. In chapter 2, Miodrag applies her analysis of these features
on Lynda Barry’s cartoons. She stresses that Barry’s work is ill served by
an Anglophone critical conception that tends to ignore the truly literary
formal features of language. She thus sets out to correct the common
insistence that words are always of secondary importance in comics
and defends the thesis that comics are a ‘hybrid text’. In chapter 3,
she counterbalances her argument in favour of adjusting existing dis-
courses, with the analysis of Posy Simmonds’s comic art as an exam-
ple. According to Miodrag, this ‘linguistic virtuoso’ greatly utilises the
fragmentary nature of the comics page as an effective strategy for the
creation of linguistic effects (55). Delving into Simmonds’s ‘non-picto-
rial visual apparatus’ and unique use of a collage style in Gemma Bovery
(2001), Miodrag demonstrates how Simmonds challenges the concep-
tion of the traditional page layout by putting verbal text to use within
its ‘fragmentary, gap-riddled, multi-component form’ (67). In doing so,
 Reviews 129

she hopes to correct the more general critical ‘logophobia’ that tends to
flatten word/image distinctions in comics and does not fully consider
this medium as a form of literature.
Part II, titled ‘Comics and Language’, offers a revision of what
Miodrag identifies as false assumptions regarding the medium’s hy-
brid form. In particular, she discusses the confusion brought about by
such critics as Carrier and Harvey when characterising the conjunction
of words and images. She argues that there is no such thing as a ‘com-
icsy’ combination of words and images, and that speech balloons do
not ‘bridge the word/image gap’, as Carrier claimed (106). In correcting
these errors, she resourcefully resorts to Will Eisner’s key concept of
‘sequential art’ developed in 1985, a concept expanded by McCloud in
1993 and in Cohn’s 2010 grammar when analysing panel sequences.
She purposefully juxtaposes this evolution in Anglophone criticism to
its European counterpart, noting that Groensteen’s notion of ‘arthrol-
ogy’ foregrounds the merits of both systems by highlighting nonlinear
relationships and the notion of comics as webs. Drawing on film criti-
cism for a more adequate terminology, Miodrag goes on to analyse two
examples: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins’s Watchmen
(1995) and Véronique Tanaka’s Metronome (2008). In chapter 6, using a
wide range of examples, Miodrag then casts considerable doubt on the
notion, prevalent within comics theory, that ‘space equals time’. She
argues that Ware’s use of multi-instant panels and Gianni De Luca’s
technique of polymorphism illustrate how sequential theory acts more
like a default mode, precluding the notion that comics does function
as a network (163).
In part III, ‘Images as Language’, Miodrag discusses how the com-
ponent parts of images may (or may not be) units of language. She sets
out to deconstruct David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp (2009) because it
exemplifies a visual lexicon that critics often seem determined to ig-
nore and revolves around arbitrariness and motivation (181). Assessing
Saussure’s linguistic semiotic model as a useful tool for interpreting
images, Miodrag points to its limitations in analysing some aspects of
visual signification, namely, ‘the slippery aspect of images’ expressive
aesthetics’ (196). Chapter 8 focuses on this stylistic aspect and provides
analyses of the pictorial styles of Charles Burns’s Black Hole (2005) and
Hannah Berry’s Britten and Brülightly (2008). Having previously argued
against the ways in which a linguistic framework has been applied to
both visual signification and the comics medium, Miodrag notes that
art criticism seems better attuned to the study of some aspects of aes-
130 Reviews

thetic style than the language-based semiotic approach. Miodrag thus

devotes a large section to composition in comics; she looks at the ways
in which the form integrates individuated panels into a larger whole
and focuses on the page as a semantic unit (221). To make her case, she
also draws on Jason’s The Left Bank Gang (2006), Eisner’s New York: Life
in the Big City (2006), Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986),
Winsor McCay’s Dream of the Rarebit Friend: The Saturdays (2006) and
Barry’s ‘Imagination Stoppers’ in Salon (2004), describing in each case
the many nested layers involved and the particular relationships that
exist between them in a given composition (previously discussed in
chapter 5).
Miodrag’s book challenges the established current formal model and
succeeds in providing a modified conceptual framework in which she
establishes a set of relations with critical discourses such as linguistics,
semiotics and art criticism. Although readers may regret that some
comics panels appear at times difficult to read because of their small
size, this study is invaluable for comics specialists overall. It offers a
comparative lens on how to read the medium. Its foundations, rooted
in both Anglophone and Francophone models, encompass a cross-
generic scope that will be useful to the analysis of bande dessinée, manga
and other genres that rely on stylistic innovations. This book is a great
addition to a range of disciplines: media studies, comparative litera-
ture, cultural studies, art history and comics studies. Miodrag does a
masterful job of addressing the importance of comics criticism since
its emergence in the late 1960s. Her study points to new and promising
directions for the study of this discipline.
ANNE CIRELLA-URRUTIA
Huston-Tillotson University

Ian Hague, Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics

and Graphic Novels, Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Stud-
ies 57 (New York: Routledge, 2014). 214 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-71397-9
(hardback, £80.00, $125.00)

Taking up a rarely explored area of comics criticism, Ian Hague’s Com-

ics and the Senses seeks to ‘challenge the idea that comics are a purely
visual medium, arguing that they are in fact possessed of a wide vari-
ety of properties that address themselves to readers’ senses of hearing,
touch, smell and in some instance taste’ (3). This aim is original and
 Reviews 131

the argument intriguing. However, it is also somewhat problematic to

the extent that it hinges on the apprehension of highly intangible and
ephemeral factors. Generally speaking, the focus on the direct, physi-
cal effects of senses other than sight does not appear relevant for the
majority of comics, even though Hague’s work does contribute to our
understanding of the usually ignored possibilities of such effects, as in
the case of edible comics.
Clearly written, with careful explanations and background informa-
tion (which are perhaps a bit too detailed when it comes to the func-
tioning of the different sense organs), the book is easy to read. Its main
chapters include a discussion on ‘ocularcentrism’, or idealised seeing,
in comics studies, after which the author elaborates on the main senses
of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. The book concludes with a
‘multisensory’ analysis of Alan Moore’s comics.
The proposed multisensory approach entails considering the act of
reading comics as a performance and factoring in the reader’s corpo-
real involvement with the comic and its physical form or materiality.
This performative approach strikes this reviewer as incomplete. Focus-
ing on the extent to which comics are apprehended through the senses
of feel and smell in order to ‘go beyond the visual’ (21) leads to a setting
aside of the possibilities that a synesthetic analysis could present.
Chapter 1 begins with an overview of comics theories that under-
scores the incompleteness of comics definitions and the tendency to
ignore the material aspects of comics. Hague cites Ernesto Priego’s di-
agram, where materiality is a node, bordered by text, physical interface,
space, habitat and the human body, but then opts for a more performa-
tive approach based on the ‘relationships between the various elements’
and temporality (23, 36). Hague subsequently goes on to discuss the
materiality of comics primarily in terms of their format, cover size and
paper texture, which is elaborated in chapter 2 and brought up in sub-
sequent chapters.
The second chapter focuses on the comic as a material object, as
opposed to ‘the idea of a comic’, and underscores the physical process
involved in seeing comics as well as the ways in which comics them-
selves can channel this seeing (35). Hague also discusses the size of
comics in this chapter, drawing in part on the ‘Notes on Sculpture’ by
Robert Morris (50–51, 54), who is known for his monumental pieces
and land art. Hague’s reliance on Morris’s ‘Notes’ is original, but is also
somewhat problematic given that Morris’s remarks on the relevance of
size were made with reference to very large sculptures rather than the
132 Reviews

book form. Johanna Drucker’s work on artists’ experimentation with

the design and materiality of the printed word, which she later extrap-
olates to graphic novels, is likely to be of greater relevance to comics in
general.10 The chapter’s last section briefly touches upon 3-D comics
and the possibility of creating comics for the blind, the latter of which
lend themselves particularly well to Hague’s approach thanks to their
dependence on the sense of touch (56–57).
Chapter 3 begins by focusing on the sounds made within comics
as well as by them, as with the turning of their pages. It then goes on
to address the production of sounds in comics. This section includes
analyses of the digital versions of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim,
Reinhard Kleist’s Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness (75–76) and the rarely
studied audio version of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photog-
rapher (82–84). Hague’s explorations of these unusual works exemplify
the more holistic view of comics he argues for.
Concentrating on tactility, the fourth chapter opens with a discussion
of the fetishisation of comics by comics collectors and of the fetishisa-
tion of touch in comics scholarship, especially in studies that contrast
comic books with digital comics (92–96). Hague returns to the Scott
Pilgrim comic in order to study touch in digital comics (110–112). He
then moves on to Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd’s Jack Cole and Plastic
Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits! to elaborate on the use of different
material textures and bindings (101–102). Hague also discusses In the
Shadow of No Towers in this section and links its heavy format to the
traumatic weight of the event (104–105). In closing the chapter Hague
touches on the use of instructions in comics, ranging from more gen-
eral calls to comics readers to perform certain actions (such as Grant
Morrison’s call for a ‘wankathon’ [115–116]) or instructions in the form
of comics. The former is an example of ‘generic directed touch’ be-
cause it aims at the production of tactile experience without specifying
the steps involved. Instructions in the form of comics, on the other
hand, illustrate ‘specific directed touch’ because they spell out the en-
tire process.
The fifth chapter takes up the senses of both smell and taste, with
the former being associated with a sense of nostalgia, which can be
‘manufactured’ by comics imitating older styles (126–128) or generated
through the choice of format (129). In order to illustrate comics’ ability

10 Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1995); Jo-
hanna Drucker, ‘What Is Graphic about Graphic Novels?’, English Language Notes 2
(2008), 39–56.
 Reviews 133

to evoke the sense of taste, Hague focuses once again on unusual, rarely
analysed books. These include J.B. Winter’s organisation of Imaginary
Food: An Edible Twenty Four Hour Comic, a work drawn collectively us-
ing food decorators on tortillas (135), and Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique
Bakery, the covers of which release smells when scratched (136).
Although the last chapter offers insightful analyses of Alan Moore’s
comics, ranging from V for Vendetta to Snakes and Ladders (one of the
lesser-known adaptations by Eddie Campbell of Moore’s performance
pieces), Hague’s basic claim regarding the importance of senses other
than sight in the reader’s perception of comics remains unconvincing.
Indeed, most of the analyses of Moore’s comics revolve around con-
siderations of their format, layout and visual stimuli and their ability
to trigger certain effects, all of which are channelled through vision
and usually entail idealised seeing. Moreover, terms introduced in the
previous chapters as a part of the approach, such as ‘generic directed
touch’ or bleeding, are not used in the analyses included in the last
chapter. The only exception is the term ‘FocusMotion’, which refers to
the traditional left-to-right eye movement and focus during the reading
process and to its manipulation through unusual layouts (48–49).
All this is not to say that Hague’s book does not make a valid point:
caught up in visuals and words, scholars, like most readers, do tend
to overlook the tactile, olfactory and audible aspects of comics. Mov-
ing away from ocularcentrism, however, makes the analyses of comics
seem incomplete. While studies on the reading experience of comics
allow us to understand how comics are interpreted and the range of
influences they may wield or are subjected to, the ways in which such
studies are to be conducted is a tricky issue. The direction of read-
er-response criticism that is taken by Comics and the Senses is not very
convincing as it stands. Selecting senses relevant to the medium and
allowing room for synesthetic effects could lead to more pertinent
analyses.
Even if this book does not fulfil the claims made at the beginning,
which would be difficult given the nature of the medium, it remains
a thought-provoking read, especially in its attempt to underscore the
performativity of comics reading experiences and the role of comics
formats in moulding those experiences.
MAAHEEN AHMED11
Université Catholique de Louvain

11 The author is the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship cofunded by the Belgian Fonds
Spécial de Recherche (FSR) and the Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission.
134 Reviews

Exhibition Review

Albums: Bande dessinée et immigration, 1913–2013, Musée de l’his-

toire de l’immigration, Paris, 16 October 2013 to 27 April 2014. Exhibi-
tion catalogue: Collectif, Albums, des histoires dessinées entre ici et ailleurs:
Bande dessinée et immigration, 1913–2013 (Paris: Musée de l’histoire de
l’immigration and Futuropolis, 2013). 192 pp. ISBN: 978-2-75480-998-6
(hardback, €26.00).

From October 2013 to April 2014, the Musée de l’histoire de l’immi-

gration in Paris was host to a large exhibition, Albums: Bande dessinée et
immigration, 1913–2013, which catalogued one hundred years of repre-
sentations of immigration in sequential art. This exhibition presented
an impressive array of over four hundred items, ranging from original
bande dessinée extracts and sketches to filmed interviews with artists,
photographs and archival documents shedding light on the depiction
of immigration within the medium.
The exhibition divided its study of this subject into three principal
sections. The first, and largest, considered the history of immigration
in sequential art through case studies of key artists spanning chrono-
logically from George McManus to Marjane Satrapi. This was followed
by a second section examining via artistic examples the different depic-
tions of migration across genres – comedy, science fiction, ‘fables’ and
the Western – before finishing with larger studies of autobiographical
accounts of immigration and of the political engagement of the re-
cently developed BD reportage genre with issues of immigration. The
final, smallest, section closed the exhibition by examining the tropes
used to depict the figure of the actual migrant.
Both the setting of this event within a large Parisian museum and
its widespread advertisement in public spaces around the city required
it to appeal to a broad audience. This appeal was ably achieved by the
corresponding breadth of scope of the exhibition, which both targeted
well-known bande dessinée artists such as Marguerite Abouet and Farid
Boudjellal in its series of case studies and provided a wealth of sin-
gle-page BD extracts in its study of genres and character typing, which
served to shine a light, if briefly, on lesser-known artists. One nota-
ble example of this was the short discussion and display of artwork by
Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, a Japanese immigrant settled in San Fran-
cisco, who first published a bande dessinée recounting the experience of
emigrating from Japan to the United States in 1927.
 Reviews 135

The exhibition also succeeded in the difficult task of engaging both

an adult and juvenile public in the issue of representing immigration
in the bande dessinée. Although much of the archival documentation
presented, such as the short video projection of interviews with im-
migrant workers in Nancy used to complement the case study of the
artist Baru, spoke to a mature audience, the engagement with younger
visitors to the exhibition ranged from simple explanations of key issues
to activity sheets adapted from Boudjellal strips. The last day of the ex-
hibition also featured a drawing workshop specifically for children led
by nouvelle manga artist Aurelia Aurita.
Although a large collection that ultimately considered immigration
on a worldwide scale, a notable focus on the United States, both as a
receiving hub for immigration and as an important national contribu-
tor to the development of sequential art, was visible in this exhibition.
The opening case studies of the spatially dominant historical section
were dedicated to American artists George McManus and Will Eisner,
with the chronology reaching the late 1950s before the introduction
of the first Francophone creator, René Goscinny, to the exhibition. In-
deed, the explanatory panels opening this first chapter (entitled ‘Les
Amériques, à l’école de la bande dessinée 1913–1980’) contained text
that even seems to imply a dearth of sequential art production outside
of the United States prior to the 1960s, when Goscinny ‘imported’ the
medium:
Durant la première moitié du XXe siècle, le continent américain est le fer
de lance de ce tout nouveau médium créé en Europe au siècle précédent
. . . René Goscinny apprend auprès de ses amis américains le métier de
scénariste. Il rapporte en Europe, dans les années 1960, l’idée d’une bande
dessinée d’avant-garde et lance ainsi l’école française de bande dessinée.
[During the first half of the twentieth century, the American continent
was the spearhead of this brand-new medium, created in Europe the pre-
vious century . . . René Goscinny learned his trade as a scriptwriter from
his American friends. He brought the idea of an avant-garde bande dessinée
home to Europe in the 1960s and went on to launch the French school of
bande dessinée.]

This focus on American artistic creation was not upheld throughout

the later historical subsections of the exhibition, with the case studies
of artists from the 1980s onwards exclusively examining the work of
Francophone creators. However, the final conclusion to the collection,
centred around Shaun Tan’s Là où vont nos pères [Where Our Fathers
Go], once again stressed the importance of the United States with its
136 Reviews

placement of photographs and documents relating to the arrival of mi-

grants at Ellis Island alongside those concerned with the bande dessinée.
This circularity of structure, which saw the exhibition both open and
close in the same place, was effective in leaving its visitors with the no-
tion of immigration as a continual process and a consistent part of the
human experience for Europeans as well as those migrating from other
lands. However, the focus on North America was perhaps overstated,
particularly since, although Tan recognises the influence of visual doc-
umentation from Ellis Island in La où vont nos pères (amongst other
archival documents), his bande dessinée is a universal story of migration
that unfolds in an imaginary world.
In the description of the exhibition released by the Musée de l’his-
toire de l’immigration, the text refers to the recent growth of interest
in large-scale exhibitions concerning bande dessinée and its artistic and
historical links to the wider world before announcing the intention of
this exhibition to make its own contribution to this phenomenon. It
ably succeeded in this mission; although the breadth of scope of the
collection did not allow all artists and issues to be studied in great detail
(some interesting theoretical areas of study, such as those concerning
the formal suitability of the bande dessinée medium to the represen-
tation of migration, were only very briefly and sporadically touched
upon), the wealth of information conveyed by the exhibition made it a
very useful step in the historical study of the medium. The exhibition
catalogue (published by Futuropolis) serves to confirm this impression
of utility. At 182 pages, with countless colour bande dessinée examples,
this volume adds some detail to the broad strokes painted by the exhibi-
tion and will serve as a helpful tool in the establishment of future areas
worthy of more detailed research.
CATRIONA MACLEOD
University of London Institute in Paris

Conference Review

To Draw or Not To Draw? Or, How Literary Can Comic Art Be? Re-
view of Graphisches Erzählen: Neue Perspektiven auf Literaturcomics
[Graphic Storytelling: New Perspectives on Literature and Comics], a
symposium held at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, 5–7 March
2014.
 Reviews 137

Organised by Mara Stuhlfauth, Dr Florian Trabert and Johannes

Waßmer, three scholars affiliated with the University of Düsseldorf,
the symposium was devoted to studying comics from the joint per-
spectives of litterae humaniores and contemporary comic art. Both pro-
fessional scientists and comic strip artists came to Düsseldorf for the
occasion. In addition, the symposium built on two seminars that had
been taught the previous term, which led to significant student involve-
ment. The seminars had a theoretical as well as a practical component.
Students had to find ways of integrating traditional approaches to the
study of literature with theories of reading that drew on comic art. In
the process they learned about the drawing of comics and about pan-
els and other technical aspects of comic art. Because all the students
had enjoyed the combination of theoretical and hands-on exercises, the
symposium organisers included two student panels on the relationship
between comic art and literature.
On the first day of the conference, Monika Schmitz-Emans (Uni-
versity of Bochum, Germany) gave a presentation on Nicolas Mahler’s
comics Alte Meister [Old Masters], Frankenstein in Sussex and Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities]. She analysed their sa-
tiric dimensions and the extent to which Mahler relies on programmatic
confusion. She also noted that scholars tend to draw on literary defini-
tions of the author to define authorship in comics, which confuses the
two practices and can blur the line between comics and literature, a
phenomenon reinforced by the adoption of the term ‘graphic novel’ in
American scholarship. The next speaker, Wolfgang Reichmann of the
University of Klagenfurt, Germany, gave a talk entitled ‘Was lesen wir
denn da? Über Nicolas Mahlers visuelle Verdichtung und intertextu-
elle Fortschreibung von H.C. Artmanns Frankenstein in Sussex’ [What
Are We Reading? About Nicolas Mahler’s Visual Condensation and
Intertextual Extrapolation of H.C. Artmann’s Frankenstein in Sussex].
He explored the ways in which comics can broach philosophical issues
and bring readers to think about their own lives, noting that it is the
imagination that connect Nicolas Mahler’s Museumscomic and Lewis
Carroll’s and H.C. Artmann’s Alice in Sussex.
Dr Florian Trabert (University of Düsseldorf, Germany) lectured on
‘Comics sind gefährlich: Flix’ Don Quijote als Meta-Comic’ [Comics Are
Dangerous: Flix’s Don Quijote as Metacomic]. Flix (Felix Görmann’s
nom de plume) is a well-known German comic strip artist from Mün-
ster whose Don Quijote was published in 2012. Dr Trabert argued that
studying Flix’s Don Quijote allows one to see that comics artists and
138 Reviews

comics scholars engage in analogous creative activities. In the ensuing

discussion, participants also considered the adoption of existing titles
in the context of copyright law.
In the afternoon three students from Heinrich Heine University
gave presentations. Lisa Krause talked about panel structure in Paul
Auster’s City of Glass by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. Robin
Aust focused on ‘Die Visualisierung des Nichtvisuellen: Intermedial-
ität in Paul Austers Stadt aus Glas’ [Visualising the Nonvisual: Interme-
diality in Paul Auster’s City of Glass]. Denise Pfennig gave a talk titled
‘Zwei Welten: Manuele Fiors’ Ikarus’ [Two Worlds: Manuele Fiors’s
Ikarus]. The highlight of the first evening was Felix Görmann’s reading
of his comic Faust, a 2010 revision of his first comic, Who the Fuck Is
Faust?, published in 1998. Flix played the various characters with gusto
and his reading of the panels was excellent. Audience members found
the lecture and subsequent discussion thrilling.
The second day began with a talk by Mara Stuhlfauth (Heinrich
Heine University, Düsseldorf) on ‘Interkulturalität in Posy Simmonds
Gemma Bovery und Flix’ Faust’. Stuhlfauth focused on gender and na-
tional stereotypes. She noted that Gemma Bovary is a detective story,
characterised by a prevalence of written text, while Faust, a Goethean
tragedy that has been reinterpreted as a comedy, offers a commentary
on today’s society.
Joanna Nowotny and Bettina Jossen of Zurich gave a presentation
titled ‘Gregor Samsa als Bug Boy: Eine japanische Kafka-Adaption un-
ter den Vorzeichen des ‘Hikikomori’-Diskurses’ [Gregor Samsa as Bug
Boy: A Japanese Adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphis under the Sign of
the Hikikomori Discourses]. The comic, which relies in part on allegory,
describes the metamorphosis of a bullied school boy who gradually
turns into a monster. The comic does a very good job of showing the
impact of societal rejection on the boy’s psyche. The speakers in turn
described the comic and its main character’s emotions very effectively
to a frightened audience. Thorsten Hoffmann from the University of
Frankfurt gave another interesting talk: ‘Das nicht, bitte das nicht!
Körperdarstellungen in Comic-Versionen von Schnitzlers Fräulein Else
und Kafkas Die Verwandlung’ [Not that! Please not that! Representa-
tions of the Body in Comic Adaptations of Arthur Schnitzler’s Miss Else
and Kafka’s Metamorphosis]. In this instance, the focus was on literary
representations of the body and on the ways in which the comics artists
succeed in showing Else’s wretched mental condition. After another
presentation, by Dietrich Grünewald from Koblenz, Germany, and the
 Reviews 139

second student panel, featuring Anja Joszt and Sascha Winkler, the day
ended with a lecture by Paul Meyer (University of Halle) on the comic
Huck Finn by the famous German comic strip artist Olivia Viehweg.
Viehweg is twenty-six years old and studied visual communication
in Weimar, Germany. She has been drawing comics since childhood,
starting with Disney figures and gradually developing her own style,
which is primarily Western but occasionally draws on Japanese manga.
The last day of the symposium began with a lecture by Johannes
Waßmer (University of Düsseldorf) on ‘Am Ende war das Wort: Zum
Verhältnis von Bild und Sprache in David Bollers und Reinhard Piet-
schs Webcomic Die letzten Tage der Menschheit’ [At the End Was the
Word: On the Relationship of Image and Text in David Boller and Rein-
hard Pietsch’s Web Comic The Last Days of Mankind]. Giovanni Remon-
ato of the University of Verona then lectured on Magdalena Steiner’s
comic adaption of Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Quali-
ties]. The frame plays an indispensable role in Steiner’s work, both nar-
ratologically and thematically. More generally, Steiner deals with the
issue of violence in today’s society, focusing on the desire for power
and domination as motivating factors. For Remonato, Steiner satirises
very effectively some of the social problems already addressed in Mu-
sil’s novel, including media sensationalism and the hatred of women.
Dr Peter Scheinpflug (University of Cologne) gave an interesting
presentation on intermediality in Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s The
Unwritten, an American series launched in July 2009. The main char-
acter is Tom Taylor, who is eaten by a whale at the end of the story. The
comic is inspired by figures like Frankenstein, Harry Potter, Moby Dick
and Pinocchio and relies on atypical panels arrangements and white
backgrounds.
The final speaker was Svenja Scherer from the University of Kiel
(Germany). She delivered a lecture titled ‘Comics im Mittelalter–Mit-
telalter in Comics: Zur Verbildlichung des Sagenstoffs von Dietrich
von Bern’ [Comics in the Middle Ages – The Middle Ages in Comics:
The Pictorial Representation of the Saga of Dietrich von Bern]. The
focus was on a comic by Peter Wiechmann and Rafael Méndez that is
set in the Middle Ages and is based on a story from circa 1470. Panels
follow one another in quick succession in ways evocative of medieval
combinations of text and image, an observation that allowed Scherer
to contrast medieval and contemporary practices in fascinating ways.
In summary, the three-day symposium was a great success and gave
ample evidence of the growth of the field of comics at the University of
140 Reviews

Düsseldorf and in German language and literature studies more gen-

erally. Some fifty to sixty visitors attended each event. The local press
was also in attendance and a grand time was had by scholars and artists
alike, all of whom hope to reconvene at a later date for a similar event.
CAROLIN KIRCHHOFF
University of Düsseldorf