Seeing Comics Through Art History by Maggie Gray, Ian Horton - Bibis - Ir

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS
SEEING COMICS
THROUGH
ART HISTORY
Alternative Approaches to the Form
Edited by
Maggie Gray · Ian Horton
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
Series Editor
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, UK
This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It
feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within
Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor
field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becom-
ing a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those
capital letters have been earned.
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the
comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and infor-
mative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is
international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all back-
grounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production,
distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of
two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter
works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-
reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and—
not least—considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a
long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding.
Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University
of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction
and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the team that put
together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards of key academic
journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for international media, and consults
on comics-related projects for the BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British
Museum and The British Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the
International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference.
More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14643
Maggie Gray • Ian Horton
Editors
Seeing Comics through

Art History
Alternative Approaches to the Form
Editors
Maggie Gray Ian Horton
Kingston School of Art London College of Communication
Kingston University University of the Arts London
London, UK London, UK
ISSN 2634-6370 ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
ISBN 978-3-030-93506-1 ISBN 978-3-030-93507-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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Cover illustration: Mark Beyer’s Duck-Rabbit / John Miers
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our commissioning editor and all-round legend Roger
Sabin for his support and encouragement for this project and tireless support
for comics scholarship in the UK and beyond.
We also owe a great debt of thanks to our editor Camille Davies, and Jack
Heeney, Immy Higgins and Liam MacLean at Palgrave Macmillan.
We thank Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto, Jaqueline Berndt, Felix Giesa and
Christina Meyer organisers of the Comics|Histories conference 16–17 July
2021; Ian Hague and Hattie Kennedy organisers of the Comics Forum confer-
ence on Art and Design 7–8 November 2019; and the organisers of Storyworlds
and Transmedia Universes, the Joint International Conference of Graphic
Novels, Comics and Bande Dessinée 24–28 June 2019, where papers related
to this project were delivered and insightful feedback received.
For their feedback we thank our anonymous peer reviewers, and for their
support and advice, Josh Rose, Guy Lawley for all matters about print, Jared
Gardner and the Caricature, Cartooning and Comics 1620–1920 crew, and all
the other members of the Comics Research Hub (CoRH!!). We also thank all
those who submitted proposals for this volume we were unable to include.
We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to all
our contributors for their work and commitment, particularly in light of the
extraordinary challenges of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, and its
impact on research and more importantly on everyday life, family, friends and
communities.
Maggie would like to thank Ian for being a joy to collaborate with and for
putting up with her ropey Wi-Fi. And Ed for everything.
Ian would like to thank Maggie for making editing such fun. And Bettina,
Oscar and Sasha for putting up with the piles of comics and dusty art-historical
tomes taking over our home.
v
Contents
Ways of Seeing Comics: Art-Historical Approaches to the Form 1

Maggie Gray and Ian-Horton
Part I Old Skool Art History 11

The Lives of the Artists 13
Tobias J. Yu-Kiener

Connoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case of
Jack B. Yeats 33
Michael Connerty

Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories 53
Maaheen Ahmed
Part II Perception, Reception and Meaning 73
Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction 75

John Miers

Aesthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes of Interaction in
Comics 97
Nina Eckhoff-Heindl

Reading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through
Perception of the Image121
Christine Mugnolo
vii
viii CONTENTS

Colour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens
of Art History141
Barbara Uhlig
Part III The New and Newer Art Histories 161

Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta
Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics163
Margareta Wallin Wictorin and Anna Nordenstam

Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the
Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States185
Małgorzata Olsza
Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport

Manga207
Ylva Sommerland
Part IV Comics for/Beyond Art History 223

Afrofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History and
Decolonisation in Black Panther225
Danielle Becker

What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and
Comics Studies247
Jeanette Roan

From Giotto to Drnaso: The Common Well of Pictorial Schema in
‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics269
Bruce Mutard
VAST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials of

Augmented Abstract Comics and Animation Installations as a
Method to Communicate Health Experiences289
Alexandra P. Alberda, João Carola, Carolina Martins, and Natalie Woolf

From Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within
Art History to Study the Photobook313
Michel Hardy-Vallée
Index337
Notes on Contributors
Maaheen Ahmed is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent

University, where she leads COMICS, a multi-researcher project on connec-
tions between children and comics funded by the European Research Council.
She is author of Openness of Comics and Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of
Romanticism in Comics (2016 and 2020).
Alexandra P. Alberda is the Curator of Indigenous Perspectives at the
Manchester Museum (University of Manchester). Her doctoral thesis, Graphic
Medicine Exhibited: Public Engagement with Comics in Curatorial Practice and
Visitor Experience since 2010 (2021), explores the intersections of the comics
medium, health and exhibition to understand potential methodological
approaches and sociocultural values of these experiences. Her collaborative
projects have explored such topics as public health, health exhibitions, data
storytelling and visualisation, comics, and creative-led knowledge exchange. As
a research illustrator, she has worked on a number of projects, such as The Data
Storytelling Workbook (2020).
Danielle Becker is a South African art historian who is primarily interested in
art historiography and the way in which the discourse has developed in relation
to colonial, postcolonial and decolonial forces. Becker completed her Masters
in Art History at the University of Manchester (2010) and her PhD at the
University of Cape Town (2017) with a thesis titled South African Art
History: The possibility of decolonizing a discourse. She has lectured at a num-
ber of South African institutions since 2010 and has most recently been a
Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University and a postdoctoral
fellow at Rhodes University.
João Carola graduated in Graphic Design at ESAD.cr, in Caldas da Rainha.
Back in Lisbon, he completed the Comics and Illustration course at Ar.Co,
school where he now teaches. He has collaborated with short comics and illus-
trations with a number of publications. The longest collaboration is with the
anarchist newspaper A Batalha. In 2019 he co-edited with Dois Vês the
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
collective All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (Chili com Carne),
which was nominated for the category of Alternative Comics at the
Angoulême International Comics Festival.
Michael Connerty teaches film, animation and visual culture at the Institute
of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. His book The Comic
Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) examines the work of
that artist in the context of Victorian and Edwardian comics history.
Nina Eckhoff-Heindl is a MSCA-Fellow in the program “a.r.t.e.s.
EUmanities” at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities, University of
Cologne (Horizon 2020: Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No. 713600). She is
doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Cologne (Germany) and
the University of Zurich (Switzerland) with a project on aesthetic experience
and the visual-tactile dimensions of comics. Her research as well as her
publications focus on Modern and Contemporary Art, Image Theory,
Aesthetics, Comic Studies, Disability Studies and Holocaust Studies.
www.ninaheindl.com, nina.heindl@uni-koeln.de
Maggie Gray is a senior lecturer in Critical & Historical Studies at Kingston
University with a specialism in comics, cartooning and visual narrative. She is
author of Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance
and Dissent (2017) and sits on the organising committee of the Comics Forum
conference and the editorial board of the journal Studies in Comics and is a
member of the Comics & Performance Network and an associate member of
the UAL Comics Research Hub (CoRH!!). With Nick White and John Miers,
she co-runs the Kingston School of Art Comic Club.
Michel Hardy-Vallée holds a PhD in art history from Concordia University
in Montréal. His main research interests include the history of Canadian pho-
tography in the twentieth century, the photographic book, visual narration,
interdisciplinary artistic practices, aesthetics and the archive. He has advised on
photographic prints acquisitions by museums and private collections and
has taught the history of photography. He is adapting his doctoral dis-
sertation about Canadian photographer John Max into a monograph and
has contributed chapters to volumes about photographic narrative and
graphic novels. His most recent article was published in the journal History
of Photography.
Ian Horton is Reader in Graphic Communication at London College of
Communication. In 2014, along with Lydia Wysocki and John Swogger, he
founded the Applied Comics Network. He is a founder member of the Comics
Research Hub (CoRH!!) at the University of the Arts London, co-editor of
Contexts of Violence in Comics and Representing Acts of Violence in Comics and
associate editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. His book Hard
Werken: One for All (Graphic Art & Design 1979–1994) (co-authored with
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Bettina Furnee) is the first academic study of this influential avant-garde Dutch
graphic design studio and was published by Valiz in 2018.
Carolina Martins is a PhD student in the Doctoral Programme of Materialities
of Literature (University of Coimbra) with the thesis Augmented Reading: spa-
tial combinations in graphic narrative installations, which proposes an analysis
of the potential of architectonic space as a narrative agent, as well as an analysis
of the possibilities of interaction between that space and the spaces of the
page and the screen for the development and unfolding of the narrative.
She is also a cultural producer, working mainly in the field of contempo-
rary dance. As an artist she expresses herself through writing, photogra-
phy and collage.
John Miers recent comics work deals with his experience of living with mul-
tiple sclerosis. His first comic on this topic, So I Guess My Body Pretty Much
Hates Me Now, was produced during a postdoctoral residency in University of
the Arts London’s Archives and Special Collections Centre at London College
of Communication and voted “Best One-Shot” in the 2020 Broken
Frontier awards. He is lecturer in illustration at Kingston School of Art
and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art.
Christine Mugnolo is Associate Professor of Studio Art at Antelope Valley
College. She earned her doctorate in Visual Studies at the University of
California, Irvine, in 2021. Her dissertation titled The Adolescent in American
Print and Comics focuses on the relationship between the invention of the
newspaper comic strip, early twentieth-century humour and the experience of
adolescence. Her studio practice seeks to combine figurative and narrative
practices developed by modern comics, video games and Western painting and
drawing traditions.
Bruce Mutard is a comics maker, publisher and researcher. His graphic novels
include The Sacrifice, The Silence, A Mind of Love, The Bunker and Post
Traumatic. His latest graphic novel Bully Me was published as Souffre Douleur
in France in 2019. He completed his PhD at Edith Cowan University with his
thesis The Erotics of Comics in 2021 and likes to make comics as scholarship. He
is director of the Comic Arts Awards of Australia and editor/publisher of
the Australian Comic Annual. He has been a curator and program director
at the Perth Comic Arts Festival.
Anna Nordenstam is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of
Gothenburg, Sweden. Her main research areas are feminist comics, children’s
and YA-literature, and educational perspectives on literature. She is one of the
editors of Comic art and feminism in the Baltic Sea region. Transnational per-
spectives. Routledge, 2021, edited by Kristy Beers Fägersten, Anna
Nordenstam, Leena Romu and Margareta Wallin Wictorin.
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Małgorzata Olsza is an assistant professor at the Department of American

Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her PhD thesis
was devoted to the poetics of the contemporary American graphic novel. She
also holds an MA in Art History. Her research interests include American
graphic novels, comics and comix, contemporary American art and visual
culture. She has published on different aspects of American comics and
comix in Polish Journal for American Studies, Art Inquiry: Recherches Sur
Les Arts, ImageText, and Image [&] Narrative.
Jeanette Roan is an associate professor in the History of Art and Visual
Culture Program and the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at
California College of the Arts. She received her PhD in Visual and Cultural
Studies from the University of Rochester. She is the author of Envisioning Asia:
On Location, Travel, and the Cinematic Geography of U.S. Orientalism (2010).
Her work has also appeared in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and
The Comics Journal, and she has presented at the International Comics
Arts Forum and the Comics Studies Society annual conferences.
Ylva Sommerland is a librarian and a PhD in Art History and Visual Studies.
Sommerland is working at the National Library of Sweden. Her areas of
research are queer theory in art history and comics. Her fields of expertise as a
librarian are national bibliographies, book art and metadata.
Barbara Uhlig studied protohistoric archaeology and art history at the
Universities of Munich, Salzburg and Eichstaett. She has written several articles
on colour and the comics of Lorenzo Mattotti. Since 2015 she has been con-
tributing to The Complete Crepax, a 12-volume project by Fantagraphics
that collects Guido Crepax’s oeuvre in English for the first time. Her
main research interests lie in colour theory, subversive art, text-image
relationships, protest movements and the development of Italian comics
since the 1960s.
Margareta Wallin Wictorin is Reader in Art History and Visual Studies and
Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her main
research areas are feminist, educational and postcolonial perspectives on graphic
art and comics. She is one of the editors of Comic art and feminism in the
Baltic Sea region. Transnational perspectives. Routledge, 2021, edited by Kristy
Beers Fägersten, Anna Nordenstam, Leena Romu and Margareta Wallin
Wictorin.
Natalie Woolf graduated in fine arts from Leeds Metropolitan University,
subsequently setting up an applied surface design business, exhibiting interna-
tionally as an artist and designer. She holds a Doctorate in Design Products
from the Royal College of Art (RCA) London, which then led to public arts
commissions and consultancy work for councils and private developers across
the UK. Relocating to Portugal allowed more time for her own arts prac-
tice and growing interest in “expanded drawing” across different media.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
She a professor in the Hybrid Spaces Animation Arts Masters course and
the drawing programme curator for “DELLI” at Universidade Lusófona.
Tobias J. Yu-Kiener studied Art History and History at the University of
Vienna and University College Dublin. For his PhD at Central Saint Martins,
University of the Arts London (UAL), he has researched biographical graphic
novels about iconic painters and their supporting national, international and
transnational networks. He is a member of the Comics Research Hub (CoRH!!)
at the London College of Communication and co- organiser of the long-
running Transitions comic symposium at Birkbeck College, University
of London.
List of Figures
The Lives of the Artists

Fig. 1 [Uncredited] (a & w), “Leonardo Da Vinci”. Blue Ribbon Comics Vol.
1, No. 22 (March 1942), M. L. J. Magazines Inc., [p. 3], Leonardo da
Vinci frees birds on a market 20
Fig. 2 [Uncredited] (a & w). “The Story of Painting [2]”. Treasure Chest of
Fun and Fact Vol. 4, No. 14 (March 1949), Geo. A. Pflaum Publisher
Inc., p. 13, Jan van Eyck invents oil painting 22
Fig. 3 Edmond Baudoin, Dalí (2012), SelfMadeHero, p. 108, Salvador Dalí
inspired by and as successor of Jan Vermeer, Diego Velázquez, and Jan
van Eyck 25
Fig. 4 Typex, Rembrandt (2013), SelfMadeHero, p. 127, Hendrickje doing
household chores and attending to Rembrandt’s sexual needs to
facilitate his artistic work 28
onnoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case

C
of Jack B. Yeats
Fig. 1 Illustration from Morelli, Giovanni. 1883. Italian Masters in German
Galleries, translated by Louise Richter. London: George Bell and Sons 36
Fig. 2 Jack B. Yeats, “Chubblock Homes and His Little Dog Shirk in Quest
of Porous Plaisters”, Comic Cuts, 29 June 1895 42
Fig. 3 A selection of sketches based on Jack B. Yeats characters. (The author’s
sketchbook)43
Fig. 4 Jack B. Yeats “The Little Stowaways” (panel) 7 September 1907, Puck44
Fig. 5 Jack B. Yeats, “Roly Poly’s Tour” (panel), Comic Cuts 7 August 1909 45
Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories

Fig. 1 Final page of the short story, “Concert en O mineur pour harpe et
nitroglycérine”, Les Celtiques, p. 74 60
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 2 Excerpts from the shadow theatre performance with an incredulous

Merlin witnessing Viviane’s seduction by the American cat. Les
Celtiques, “Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes”, Les Celtiques,
p. 10062
Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction

Fig. 1 Rabbit or Duck? Anon (1892), Die Fliegende Blätter, October 23 76
Fig. 2 The Duck-Rabbit, from Wittgenstein (2009, p. 165) 77
Fig. 3 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, p. 1 85
Fig. 4 Ivan Brunetti (1994) Schizo #1, p. 4, panels 1–3. Fantagraphics 86
Fig. 5 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, p. 15 88
Fig. 6 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now p. 3 89
Fig. 7 John Miers (2020) Mark Beyer’s Duck-Rabbit92
esthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes

A
of Interaction in Comics
Fig. 1 Miniature of the imprisonment of Jesus. Codex Egberti, Ms-Lat.
24, Fol 79v-80r (between 980 and 993 AD). (From Anderlik 2005) 102
Fig. 2 Chris Ware. Rusty Brown. Autumn. © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware
2005, 60) 104
Fig. 3 Frank King. Gasoline Alley (Construction site). Chicago Tribune, April
22nd, 1934. (From Maresca 2007, n. p) 106
Fig. 4 Frank King. Gasoline Alley (Autumn walk). Chicago Tribune,
December 5th, 1927. (From Maresca 2007, n. p) 108
Fig. 5 Chris Ware. I Just Want to Fall Asleep © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware
2007, endpapers) 110
Fig. 6 Chris Ware. I Just Want to Fall Asleep, 2002. Ink, coloured pencil and
white gouache on Bristol, 20 x 28 in © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware
2017, 241) 112
eading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through

R
Perception of the Image
Fig. 1 R. F. Outcault, “The Residents of Hogan’s Alley Visit Coney Island”,
24 May 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art
Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library 128
Fig. 2 R. F. Outcault, “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley”, 15 March 1896,
New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection,
The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library 132
Fig. 3 R. F. Outcault, “The Day After the Glorious Fourth Down in Hogan’s
Alley”, 7 July 1895, New York World. San Francisco Academy of
Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research
Library134
Fig. 4 R. F. Outcault, “A Wild Political Fight in Hogan’s Alley-Silver Against
Gold”, 2 August 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of
Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Cartoon Research
Library138
List of Figures xvii
olour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens

C
of Art History
Fig. 1 Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. Pay
attention to the reduced drawing style and the use of primary colours 151
Fig. 2 Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. The
drawings are more fleshed out, the colours have shifted to green and
orange. Criss-crossing lines appear 153
Fig. 3 Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. The
drawings are overly detailed, almost grotesque. The colours are mixed
with black 155
eminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta

F
Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics
Fig. 1 © Anne Lidén, “Lena i livet” [Lena’s life], Kvinnobulletinen 1 (1971),
p. 10169
Fig. 2 © Lotta Sjöberg, “Valfrihet” [Individual choice], Galago 1 2013, p. 61 176
owards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History

T
and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States
Fig. 1 Carole (artwork) and the It Ain’t Me Babe Collective, the two first
pages of “Breaking Out” in It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970, Last Gasp
Ecofunnies193
Fig. 2 Lee Marrs, “So, ya wanna be an artist” in Wimmen’s Comix #2, 1973,
Last Gasp Ecofunnies 195
Fig. 3 Barbara “Willie” Mendes, the back cover of It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970,
Last Gasp Ecofunnies 198
Fig. 4 Joyce Sutton, the top row from “The menses is the massage” in Tits &
Clits #1, 1972, Nanny Goats Productions 200
eal Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined

R
Gravity in Sport Manga
Fig. 1 Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1 San Francisco, CA: Viz Media,
pp. 54–55216
Fig. 2 Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1 San Francisco, CA: Viz Media,
pp. 42–43217
frofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History

A
and Decolonisation in Black Panther
Fig. 1 Jonathan Maberry (writer), Phil Winslade (penciller). Captain
America: Hail Hydra, Issue #3 (March 2011) 236
Fig. 2 Stan Lee (writer). Jack Kirby (penciller). Fantastic Four, Issue #53
(August 1966) 237
Fig. 3 Reginald Hudlin (writer), Ken Lashley (penciller). Black Panther:
The Deadliest of the Species, Issue #6 (December 2009) 238
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 4 Don McGregor (writer), Billy Graham (penciller). Jungle Action, issue
#18 (November 1975). Showing the introduction of Madame Slay as a
character240
Fig. 5 Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer), Daniel Acuña (penciller). Black Panther,
issue #5 (October 2018) 241
Fig. 6 Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer), Brian Stelfreeze (penciller). Black Panther,
issue #2 (May 2016) 242
hat Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies,

W
and Comics Studies
Fig. 1 Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and
Quarterly, 2014), p. 25 256
Fig. 2 Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and
Quarterly, 2014), page 30 257
Fig. 3 Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 14 260
Fig. 4 Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 149 263
AST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials

V
of Augmented Abstract Comics and Animation Installations
as a Method to Communicate Health Experiences
Fig. 1 VAST/O installation layout, 2021. (Illustration by Alexandra P. Alberda
and Photography by Alexandre Ramos). Note on illustration: grey lines
indicate features that were behind walls that visitors could not see
without moving in the space (made transparent here), the large arrow
indicates the entry into the space, and the music notes represent the
audio installation in the basement that played the sound of breathing.
The fading music notes indicates the loudness of the sound and how it
could faintly be heard at the top of the stairs as visitors descend.
(Collaged images at the bottom show where the later examined works
existed in the space) 293
Fig. 2 The Arrival montage, 2019. In collaboration with Carolina Martins:
Wall installation art “Landscape-1-2-3-loop” by Natalie Woolf, pillar
installation art “like glass” by João Carola. Landscape mural: brown
paper glued on wall, white acrylic paint, and pencil markings; like glass
pillar: alcohol-based pigmented paint on Crystal Acrylic Plates; Video/
Audio animation: projected hand painted animation on wall.
(Photography by Alexandre Ramos) 294
Fig. 3 “Anxious Hands” by Natalie Woolf, 2019. Hand-drawn animation
projected on floating translucent screens and walls behind Entrance.
Photography by Alexandre Ramos. Note: this photograph is taken
from behind the first screen. Visitors stood in the background of the
image having the animation projected around and onto them 295
Fig. 4 Entrance—The “Domestic Set” and Transition montage, 2019.
Water-based acrylic painted on walls. (Installation art by João
Carola, Carolina Martins, and Natalie Woolf. Photography by
Alexandre Ramos) 302
List of Figures xix
Fig. 5 The “like glass” art by João Carola and poetry by Carolina Martins,
2018–19. Alcohol-based pigment hand painted on Crystal Acrylic
Plates. (Photography by Alexandre Ramos) 304
rom Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within

F
Art History to Study the Photobook
Fig. 1 Spread 04 of John Max, Open Passport, Toronto: IMPRESSIONS
special issue No. 6 and No. 7 1973. Offset lithography on paper,
28.5 × 22 cm. (Author’s collection) 322
Fig. 2 Spread 37 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973 323
Fig. 3 Spreads 13 and 14 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973 325
Fig. 4 Spreads 03 and 46 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973 328
Ways of Seeing Comics: Art-Historical
Approaches to the Form
Maggie Gray and Ian Horton
Abstract This chapter introduces Art History’s distance from the develop-
ment of comics scholarship as an interdisciplinary field and the impact this has
had for Comics Studies, particularly in terms of the respective dominance of
methods drawn from Literary Studies, Linguistics, narratology and semiology.
It notes the ‘hidden history’ of art historians’ contributions to the foundations
of comics scholarship, and what the range of art-historical methodologies
offers Comics Studies in terms of addressing overlooked aspects of visual style
and form, aesthetics, perception, materiality, visuality and the image. In addi-
tion to considering what Art History offers Comics Studies, including the
questioning of some of its deep-rooted categories, concepts and procedures, it
also appraises what comics and Comics Studies affords and asks of Art History.
It outlines the structure and contents of the edited collection, and its focus,
limitations and purpose.
Keywords Art-historical methodologies • Comics Studies and Art History •

History of Comics Studies • Interdisciplinarity • Practice as research
M. Gray
Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, UK
I. Horton (*)
London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, London, UK
e-mail: i.horton@lcc.arts.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Gray, I. Horton (eds.), Seeing Comics through Art History, Palgrave
Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_1
2 M. GRAY AND I. HORTON
This book draws together the work of a range of scholars applying art-historical
methodologies to the study of comics. In one way or another as well as being
researchers, they are also practitioners—educators, artists, designers, curators,
producers, librarians, editors, writers and combinations of these. Some under-
take practice-based research, and these pages carry much evidence of the value
of comics making as a mode of research itself. Among them are many trained
art historians, but several come from, have migrated into or straddle other dis-
ciplines, such as Comparative Literature, American Literature, Cultural Studies,
Visual Studies and a range of subjects within Art and Design practice. Of the
methodologies they employ, many have not previously been used in Comics
Studies.
It is notable, given the interdisciplinarity of comics scholarship, that Art
History has largely been aloof from its development. While it emerged from
Cultural Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Education and Communications
theory, in close dialogue with extramural practitioner and fan scholarship, and
became more securely entrenched in academia in the 1990s via Literature
departments, today the field includes voices from Law and Criminology,
Medicine, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, History, Geography, the
Digital Humanities and many more disciplines.1 The relative absence of art-
historical work on comics is similarly remarkable given the expansion of Art
History’s object of study to incorporate a broader range of media and material,
firstly in response to the rise of Cultural Studies and Film Studies, and particu-
larly in view of the challenge from—and under the auspices of—Bildwissen-
schaft, Visual Studies or Visual Culture Studies since the late 1990s.
As Comics Studies sits on the threshold of securing institutionalisation as a
discipline in itself, with a growing number of dedicated departments, under-
graduate and postgraduate programmes, alongside well-established journals,
book series and annual conferences, it arguably needs Art History. Frameworks
of analysis and theories of comics’ form remain dominated by approaches
drawn from Literary Studies, Linguistics, narratology and semiotics, with
which the academic study of comics gained greater legitimacy. These methods
became ensconced alongside the rise and celebration of the graphic novel, yet
at the same moment a ‘turn to the visual’ was observed among comics creators,
many of them art school trained (Beaty 2007, p. 7; Groensteen 2007, p. 163).
While there are oversimplifications and misconstructions aplenty in debates
about words and pictures, comics as a literary form and comics as visual art,
comics scholarship has struggled to deal with aspects of image-making, graphic
techniques, design and materiality, and the aesthetics, perception and interpre-
tation of the visual.2
Chapters in this book demonstrate how art-historical approaches and meth-
ods can inform and develop understanding of neglected areas such as the effects
of drawing style, colour and material processes. They also demonstrate how Art
History can enhance knowledge of how comics are read as images; how we
interact with and experience them as images; how they perform, move and
disrupt as images and what images are and do. Applying art-historical
WAYS OF SEEING COMICS: ART-HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO THE FORM 3
methodologies also casts light on, and helps question, categories, concepts and
procedures often taken for granted in Comics Studies—demanding critical
reflection on models of authorship and intentionality, attribution and a grow-
ing emphasis on the authenticating mark; the exclusionary operations of the
comics canon and archive; the essentialising of grid, gutter and page; and the
social positioning of the researcher. The range of methodologies engaged in
this volume further indicates the diversity of approaches within Art History,
belying characterisations of it in Comics Studies that focus on its more conser-
vative, traditional or formalist strands. Drawing Art History into comics schol-
arship involves acknowledging the intra-disciplinary divergences, points of
contention and (often strident) debates over conceptual and methodological
frameworks that can get flattened out in models of interdisciplinarity.
The dissociation of Comics Studies and Art History has by no means been
absolute. Research, writing, cataloguing and curation by art historians contrib-
uted to the formation of comics scholarship and provided several of its founda-
tional texts in the 1960s and 1970s. Art historian Pierre Couperie played a key
role in the organisation of the Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative exhibi-
tion at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris in 1967, and its catalogue which
included some of the earliest attempts to identify a comics canon, the medi-
um’s stylistic development and formal elements. Gérard Blanchard’s 1969 his-
tory of bande dessinée also sought to identify a comics canon and legitimise the
form through examining its origins in earlier art practices by employing an
iconographic approach. Writing by Ernst Gombrich on caricature and cartoon-
ing, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, influenced his PhD supervisee David
Kunzle, whose History of the Comic Strip, published in two volumes in 1973
and 1990, remains a major work for comics scholars. While marginalised in the
field, Art History has since shaped ongoing debates about comics’ origins,
formal structures and relations to print cultures and movements in fine art. In
the twenty-first century, art historians have become more prominent in Comics
Studies, contributing, for instance, to the theorisation of abstract comics, and
debates about the relationship between comics and visual art have drawn on art
histories of the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism.
We examine this ‘hidden history’ of art-historical comics scholarship in the
companion volume Art History for Comics: Past, Present and Potential Futures,
in relation to the shifts that took place within Art History over this period, as
traditional approaches of stylistic analysis and iconology were challenged by
Cultural History and the social history of art. That book also moves on to
explore how the approaches and frameworks underpinning these seminal works
might be applied in contemporary Comics Studies in light of the developments
and debates around them that have taken place within Art History in the inter-
vening years.
Both volumes are intended to prompt and provoke consideration of what
seeing comics through Art History and its varied methodologies can offer the
study of the medium, particularly in addressing some of the oversights of
Comics Studies when it comes to questions of visuality, materiality and
aesthetics. At the same time, they aim to examine what Comics Studies offers
art historians. Chapters in this book explore overlooked intersections of the
histories of art and comics, from the dialogue between women’s underground
comix and feminist fine art to the relationship between the schemata evident in
Western narrative painting, caricature, cartooning and comics stretching back
to Giotto’s fresco cycles. They also open up resonant questions about the rela-
tionship between words and images in art-historical texts, connections between
academic and popular writing about art, and the interactions of Art History
and the museum in canonical feedback loops and systems of knowledge pro-
duction. Furthermore, they intervene in urgent critical debates within Art
History about decolonising the discipline, queering the archive, and how Art
History can be a form of activism, particularly through curatorial practice and
collaboration. They offer art historians models of how comics theory can be
applied to the study of series, sequences and space, as well as ways to approach
serialisation and media memories, humour, the narrative effects of depiction,
the tactile experience of images and the benefits of thinking with and through
rather than at them.
To support the further application of art-historical approaches to the study
of comics, each chapter has a similar structure. They introduce and contextual-
ise the methodology or methodologies at hand, providing references to, and
critically evaluating, key theorists and texts. They then examine how these
approaches have been applied to comics in recent research projects and/or use
them to analyse a specific comics corpus, and finally reflect on the benefits and
challenges of these approaches for Comics Studies more broadly.
The comics under consideration cover a range of genres, formats, historical
periods and cultural traditions. They include work from nineteenth-century
American newspapers and British comics magazines, 1940s educational comic
books and 1960s and 1970s Marvel titles, 1970s bande-dessinée adventure
series and underground comix, 1990s alternative comics and twenty-first-
century graphic novels, superhero comics and sport manga. They also include
feminist comics and cartoons in journals, anthologies, albums and on social
media, comics biographies and autobiographies, literary adaptations and com-
ics derived from and used in arts education. They examine work that pushes the
boundaries of comics, most prominently in the form of augmented abstract
comics and animation installation, as well as work in other media, notably pho-
tography, but also illustration, painting, sculpture, ceramics, film. This speaks
to the way seeing comics through Art History opens up opportunities to exam-
ine coextensive, interacting fields and forms of visual art and image-making.
Chapters are grouped together in sections that roughly align with the devel-
opment of Western Art History. We start with ‘Old Skool Art History’ and
some of the discipline’s earliest approaches. Tobias Yu-Kiener examines art-
historical traditions of life writing stretching back to Pliny the Elder, and par-
ticularly inaugurated during the Renaissance by Giorgio Vasari and Carel van
Mander, in relation to the artist’s biography genre in comics, tracing the influ-
ence of, and challenges to, the art-historical canon, biographical anecdote and
life-and-work model. Michael Connerty focuses on methodologies of art con-

noisseurship, and particularly the approach of Giovanni Morelli in the nine-
teenth century, as a means of identifying and cataloguing an artist’s work—in
this case the strips Irish painter and cartoonist Jack B. Yeats produced for
British comics magazines in a context in which comics were rarely signed.
While these approaches have fallen out of favour in Art History, the final chap-
ter in this section turns to a figure whose work has received renewed interest,
Aby Warburg. Maaheen Ahmed adopts Warburg’s Mnemosyne picture atlas as a
guide to reading comics as collages, and combines his mapping of cultural
interchanges with ideas of how media remember each other to examine comics
both fictional (Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese: Les Celtiques) and non-fictional
(Manu Larcenet’s autobiographical Le Combat Ordinaire).
Warburg’s work can be seen to mark a turning point in Art History whereby
in the twentieth century it became more influenced by psychology, sociology
and anthropology. The following section ‘Perception, Reception and Meaning’
explores methodologies developed by art historians increasingly preoccupied
by questions of how images are perceived, experienced and interpreted. John
Miers deploys work on psychologies of perception, including Gombrich’s col-
laboration with psychoanalyst Ernst Kris on caricature, as well as the writings
of psychologist Rudolf Arnheim and philosophers Richard Wollheim and
Kendall Walton on visual perception, to attend to the effects of drawing style
with reference to his own autobiographical comic, So I Guess My Body Pretty
Much Hates Me Now. Nina Eckhoff-Heindl engages with the aesthetics of
reception approach advanced in the 1970s and 1980s by Wolfgang Kemp, Max
Imdahl and Gottfried Boehm to examine how viewers interact with artworks,
to explore the reception of Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, Autumn by its ‘reading-
viewers’. Christine Mugnolo draws on the work of Hans Belting and Svetlana
Alpers that challenged how art historians considered the relationship between
images and audiences in terms of agency, embodiment and affect, to appraise
how Richard Felton Outcault’s Yellow Kid engaged his readers. Finally in this
section Barbara Uhlig applies art-historical work by Ernst Strauss, Lorenz
Dittman and John Gage to one of most overlooked aspects of comics—colour,
in a hermeneutical analysis of Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky’s Dr. Jekyll
& Mr. Hyde.
From the 1970s onwards Art History faced substantial upheaval in the wake
of Marxist and feminist approaches that challenged many of its deep-rooted
frameworks, categories and assumptions, and institutional and ideological
agendas. This was followed by strands of queer and postcolonial Art History,
strongly influenced by structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction,
resulting in a set of approaches that themselves became institutionalised under
the umbrella term ‘the New Art History’. The next section ‘The New and
Newer Art Histories’ turns to some of these methodologies. Margareta Wallin
Wictorin and Anna Nordenstam analyse what lessons the feminist Art History
of Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, and particularly
Pollock’s discussion of various strategic positions from which to address the
canon, holds for a multidisciplinary, feminist Comics Studies. This is grounded

in extensive research into Swedish feminist comics, from strips and cartoons in
second-wave feminist journals to contemporary comics using embroidery and
collage both reproduced in print and shared on Instagram. Małgorzata Olsza’s
chapter also takes cues from Nochlin, Pollock and Parker, alongside critic Lucy
Lippard, to contest the historiography of underground comix, and processes of
canon formation and models of authorship in Comics Studies. At the same
time, her examination of continuities between American women’s under-
ground comix, and feminist art, art criticism and Art History, enables titles like
It Ain’t Me Babe, Wimmen’s Comix and Tits & Clits to ‘break in’ to a more
expansive understanding of feminist art practice in the 1970s. Ylva Sommerland
turns to queer Art History and cultural theory to queer the art-historical
archive by opening it up to the non-normative cyborg bodies of Takehiko
Inoue’s sport manga Real, drawing on Arnheim’s concept of visual weight and
Roger Callois’ theory of play to analyse how the performance of bodies resist-
ing gravity is visually presented, and how players both lose and find themselves
in transition in the game and the ‘free unreality’ of comics.
Chapters in the final section of this volume ‘Comics for/Beyond Art
History’ are less concerned with what art-historical approaches offer and ask of
Comics Studies, than what the methods, frameworks and theories of comics
and comics scholarship propose for art historians. Danielle Becker examines
Afrofuturism and animism as methods for the decolonisation of Art History as
a discipline, particularly with regard to African art, through an analysis of the
Marvel superhero Black Panther. Jeanette Roan revisits the history of Visual
Culture Studies’ relationship to Art History, arguing it better accommodates
comics as an object of study and, as an interdiscipline, provides a productive
methodological model for Comics Studies. At the same time, in drawing com-
ics and Visual Studies together, she argues that Lynda Barry’s pedagogically
oriented comics What It Is and Syllabus constitute image theory themselves. In
a tradition of producing and communicating knowledge through the making
of comics, Bruce Mutard presents a history of narrative pictures from Giotto’s
frescoes to Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina as the development of what
critic and curator Susan Vogel calls the ‘Western Eye’, also drawing on Michael
Baxandall’s concept of the Period Eye and Gombrich’s idea of schema. A chap-
ter by the artists and researchers Alexandra P. Alberda, João Carola, Carolina
Martins and Natalie Woolf, who collaborate on the graphic medicine project
VAST/O, reflects on how an activist art-historical methodology, as articulated
by Astrid von Rosen, can be developed in the gallery. Analysing the way their
immersive augmented abstract comics and animation installation affectively
engages viewers with lived mental health experience, they pull on recent schol-
arship on gallery comics, space, affect and abstraction, alongside the work of
Rosalind Krauss, in deconstructing the grid and gutter. The last chapter of the
book by Michel Hardy-Vallée contends that comics scholarship fills gaps in art-
historical interpretations of narrative pictures and pictorial sequences, particu-
larly in attending to the situation of images in space and image-to-image syntax,
inverting the structure of other chapters to apply the comics theory of Thierry
Groensteen in an analysis of the photobook Open Passport by Canadian pho-
tographer John Max.
While there are affinities between the chapters grouped into these sections,
there are also many resonances and points of dialogue across sections. Figures
like Warburg, Gombrich, Arnheim, Boehm, Nochlin, Pollock, Alpers and
Belting traverse chapters, as do themes of interdisciplinarity, visual culture, the
canon, the archive, the body, performance, humour, narrative, drawing and
caricature. We have included internal references to suggest such points of cor-
respondence between chapters, and readers can also use the index to follow
connections. As much as there are links and interrelationships, there are also
margins, gaps and blind spots. This book is by no means comprehensive in its
coverage of the range of methodologies developed within Art History, past or
present. While chapters engage with postcolonial Art History, specifically
Becker’s, and address race, class, disability, gender and sexuality, there is scope
for much more work drawing on Art History in these areas, particularly Critical
Race Art History, and examining their intersections. Also evident is the absence
of more emergent art-historical approaches engaging migratory, network and
planetary aesthetics, biopolitics and ecocriticism. It should be noted that while
aesthetic theories are referenced, and there are many crossovers, the focus is
more on Art History than the philosophy of art. This book is also partial in
terms of the comics analysed, most hail from the epicentres of production—
North America, Western Europe and Japan—which have dominated scholar-
ship, although this has been challenged by work on Latin American, African,
Middle Eastern, Eastern European, South and South East Asian comics and
comics from other areas of East Asia.
This is not the first attempt to examine the history and possibilities of art-
historical approaches to comics. A key forerunner is the special issue of the
Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History ‘Writing Comics into Art History
and Art History into Comics Research’ edited by Ylva Sommerland and
Margareta Wallin Wictorin, both of whom we are delighted have contributed
to this volume.3 Like them we believe “there is huge potential for interesting
comics research based on a variety of perspectives and methods from art his-
tory” (Sommerland and Wallin Wictorin 2017, p. 4), as demonstrated by the
chapters in this book. We hope the avenues opened up for future research
applying art-historical methodologies to the study of comics, and drawing
approaches from comics scholarship into Art History, including practices of
making comics as a means of art-historical inquiry, will be pursued.
Notes
1. On the roots and foundational works of comics scholarship, as well as its subse-
quent development, see Smith and Duncan 2017. This edited collection concern-
ing The Secret Origins of Comics Studies includes a chapter by Ian Horton on The
Historians of the Art Form.
2. See, for example, Jared Gardner’s discussion of the challenges of the line and
drawing style to narrative theory and narratological analysis (Gardner 2011). On
the exclusion of comics from Art History, and antagonisms between the art world
and the comics world, see Beaty 2012 (although more focused on art criticism
than Art History). See also Roeder 2008. On the relevance and value of Art
History for comics studies, see Sommerland and Wallin Wictorin 2017, and
Miodrag 2013 (particularly Chapter 8 Style, Expressivity and Impressionistic
Evaluation, pp. 197–220). We should stress we do not disregard the value of nar-
ratological, semiotic, literary or linguistic approaches to comics, nor seek to efface
comics’ non-visual aspects—chapters in this volume engage with questions of
narration, semiosis and language, and with the multisensory experience of comics.
3. Important conference interventions should also be mentioned, notably the ‘Art
History considers Manga’ symposium at the 1998 Japan Art Society conference
(see Watanabe 1998), the two panels on ‘Comics in Art History’ organised by
Patricia Mainardi and Andrei Molotiu at the 2010 College Art Association con-
ference, and the roundtable ‘Learning To Look: The State Of Art History And
Comics Scholarship’ at the 2018 Comics Studies Society conference organised by
Josh Rose.
References
Beaty, Bart. 2007. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the
1990s. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2012. Comics versus Art. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.
Blanchard, Gérard, 1969. La Bande Dessinée: Histoire des Histoires en images de la
préhistoires à nos jours [La Bande Dessinées: The Story of Stories in Pictures from
Prehistory to Today] Verviers: Marabout Universite.
Couperie, Pierre. 1968. A History of the Comic Strip. Trans. Eileen B. Hennessy.
New York: Crown Publishers.
Gardner, Jared. 2011. Storylines. Substance 124, pp. 53-69.
Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Horton, Ian. 2017. The Historians of the Art Form. In The Secret Origins of Comics
Studies, eds. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, pp. 56–66. New York and
London: Routledge.
Kunzle, David. 1973. History of the Comic Strip. Volume 1: The early comic strip: narra-
tive strips and picture stories in the European broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
——— 1990. History of the Comic Strip. Volume 2: the nineteenth century. Berkeley, Los
Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press.
Miodrag, Hannah. 2013. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the
Form. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Roeder, Katherine. 2008. Looking High and Low at Comic Art. American Art.
22:1, pp. 2–9.
Smith, Matthew J., and Duncan, Randy. eds. 2017. The Secret Origins of Comics Studies.
New York and London: Routledge.
Sommerland, Ylva, and Wallin Wictorin, Margareta. 2017. Writing Comics into Art
History and Art History into Comics Research. Konsthistorisk tidskrift / Journal of
Art History 86:1, pp. 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2016.1272629.
Watanabe, Toshio. 1998. Art History and Comics. The Art Book 5:4, pp. 18–19.
PART I
Old Skool Art History

The Lives of the Artists
Tobias J. Yu-Kiener
Abstract Art-historical writing traditions and narrative tools have influenced

the artist’s biography comic genre since its first appearance in the 1940s. This
chapter identifies and traces the history of three main elements of the tradi-
tional artist’s biography, namely, the canon of Art History as well as the anec-
dote and the life-and-work model as narrative devices.
Further, it outlines and analyses the influence of Pliny the Elder, Giorgio
Vasari, Carel van Mander, and the nineteenth-century artist’s monograph on
biographical comic strips about artists from the 1940s and respective graphic
novels from the 2010s, using two corpora. Moreover, it establishes how anec-
dotes about Leonardo da Vinci’s life turned into genre-specific tropes that have
been used in comics for 80 years.
Finally, the challenges the artist’s biography comic genre faces after this
period dominated by Art History are defined, such as an apparent difficulty to
overcome established art-historical traditions of life-writing and a liminal posi-
tion between art-historical text and leisure reading. However, the genre also
holds the power to question, negate, and even correct the established art-
historical canon. In including non-canonical artists and exploiting the full
potential of the comic medium, it can provide new approaches beyond the
current art-historical frame and possibly develop new genre-specific tropes and
narrative devices.
Keywords Artist’s biography • Anecdote • Life-and-work model • Pliny the

Elder • Giorgio Vasari • Carel van Mander
T. J. Yu-Kiener (*)
Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London, London, UK
e-mail: tobias.j.yukiener@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_2
14 T. J. YU-KIENER
This chapter analyses art-historical writing traditions’ influences on the artist’s

biography comic genre since its first appearance in March 1942. It first traces
the creation and development of the canon of Art History and the main tradi-
tions of art-historical biographies. Then, in analysing first-century Pliny the
Elder, sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance author Giorgio Vasari and his
seventeenth-century North European successor Carel van Mander, the use of
the anecdote as an essential narrative tool is established. Subsequently, the
nineteenth-century artist’s monograph and its life-and-work model is explored.
Two corpora showcase the prevalence of these art-historical traditions in the
artist’s biography comic genre. Corpus One analyses biographical comic strips
from the 1940s, demonstrating how anecdotes about Renaissance artist
Leonardo da Vinci’s life turned into genre-specific tropes. Further, one par-
ticular narrative, “The Story of Painting”, reveals the author used Pliny, Vasari,
and van Mander as sources. Corpus Two comprises two biographical graphic
novels from the 2010s, about Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí and Dutch Old
Master Rembrandt van Rijn. It assesses the continuous impact of Art History’s
biographical traditions and the genre-specific tropes.
A concluding section discusses the challenges and the opportunities for the
artist’s biography comic genre, how it might overcome or influence art-
historical life-writing traditions.
Art-Historical Traditions
For centuries, artist’s biographies have been dependent on three main ele-
ments: the established canonical artists, the use of anecdotes, and the life-and-
work model. The canon has determined who was considered important enough
to write about, while the anecdotes and the life-and-work model have defined
how an artist’s life was narrativised.
Pliny the Elder recorded the first European canon in his Historia Naturalis
in the first-century CE. According to Pliny, fifth-century BCE Greek sculptor
Polykleitos of Sikyon “made the statue which [fellow] sculptors call the ‘canon,’
referring to it as to a standard from which they can learn the first rules of their
art” (1968, pp. 42–3). Ever since Polykleitos, the artistic canon has been
extended, re-defined, and scrutinised, evolving and developing into more
regional and national canons under the umbrella of the Western canon of art.
On the one hand, for artists to be(come) canonical has meant “to be [deemed]
indisputable in [artistic] quality” (Perry 1999, p. 12). On the other hand, and
more pragmatically, canonical individuals have been chosen for their “enduring
popularity [with the general public as well as professionals] and continuing
economic and aesthetic value which their works are seen to hold” (Perry
1999, p. 15).
A small number of stakeholders have decided on the canon’s makeup and
subsequently publicised, and thus enshrined it. Artists have tried to insert
themselves in the canon by referencing canonical predecessors. In this context,
Antiquity’s artistic schools (Pliny 1968, Liber XXXV, Fig. A, B), the Medieval
THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS 15
guild system, and the Renaissance’s academies were important possible “canon-
ical entry point”.1 The increasing institutionalisation of an artist’s training
made it easier for artists to establish themselves as successors of canonical mas-
ters. However, it also constituted a selection process, as not every individual
would be accepted into such an exclusive place of artistic training.
Another crucial factor in the canonisation of individuals were commissioners
and collectors, often linked to such places of learning. Latest since the
Renaissance, with its new patronage system, producing early court artists, rul-
ers and wealthy individuals have decided whose work they commission and
include in their collections. With the opening of public museums in the late
eighteenth century, aiming to educate the public, these art-historical institu-
tions became “guardians of the canon” through curatorial choices.
Similarly, art and cultural historians, together with publishers, have deter-
mined the canonical status of individuals and artworks. For example, Johann
Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt
(1818–1897), and Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), through their respective
works, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums [The History of Art in Antiquity]
(1764), Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien [The Civilisation of the
Renaissance in Italy] (1860), and The Drawings of the Florentine Painters
(1903), shaped the perception of specific artistic periods, and hence the canon.
Further, developments in print technology, allowing for cheaper reproduction
and distribution of artworks, led to familiarisation, thus canonisation by repeti-
tion through affordable art books for mass audiences (Silver 2019, pp. 3, 11).
In drawing from while simultaneously contributing to the canon, consequently
reproducing, reconfirming, and strengthening its composition, those stake-
holders have created canonical feedback loops.
This canon of art is grounded in European notions of greatness and aes-
thetic quality derived from Greek Antiquity. It is fundamentally Eurocentric—
religiously, culturally, and artistically—and dominated by white men as critics
and artists. Conversely, it inevitably has marginalised (if not excluded) women
and non-European artists and art, as highlighted by social and feminist art his-
torians, such as Linda Nochlin (1973) and Griselda Pollock (1999, 2003).
Nochlin (1973, p. 199) argues that the lack of access to the necessary artistic
training, education, and reward had been a significant cause of the disadvan-
tages faced by non-white and non-male individuals. Pollock (1999) points out
that the canon is “selective in its inclusion and … political in its pattern of
exclusion” and ultimately a “mode of worship of the artist” (1999, pp. 6, 13).2
The anecdote, a short narrative about a particular event or details of an indi-
vidual’s life, revealing part of their personality or extraordinary skill, has long
featured in writings about artists. It already appears in fourth-century BCE
Duris of Samos’ Lives of Painters and Sculptors—“inaugurat[ing] the biograph-
ical literature on artists” (Wittkower and Wittkower 1969, pp. 3–4).
Nevertheless, the oldest, extensive, and most importantly, complete record of
artists’ lives is Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (first-century CE), Liber
XXXIII-XXXVI [Natural History, Books 33–35]. Most likely inspired by
16 T. J. YU-KIENER
Duris, one of his primary sources, Pliny uses the anecdote as a narrative device
when recording important visual artists from previous centuries, combining his
own accounts with historical sources.
Typical anecdotes from Antiquity follow a specific pattern and cover particu-
lar aspects of an artist’s life: (1) the artist’s origin, youth, and predestination;
(2) the person’s artistic skill, speed, and superiority; (3) the individual’s charac-
ter and personality. As a subject-specific narrative tool, such anecdotes about
different artists are often strikingly similar, even identical. It is thus crucial to
stay sceptical of their truthfulness.
Artistic skill is usually discussed in talking about an artwork so well executed
that it allows the artists to fool animals, people, or—most prestigious—fellow
artists. Such stories link directly into anecdotes of artistic competition. Perhaps
the most famous artistic rivalry in Antiquity is between Zeuxis of Herakleia and
Parrhasios of Ephesos, with the former believing a curtain, painted by the lat-
ter, real (Pliny 1968, pp. 108–111).
Interestingly, the artist-genius motif already appears in anecdotes from
Antiquity, with divine inspiration and artistic revelation—the marks of a
genius—being the result of an ascetic and abstentious life (Kris and Kurz 1980,
p. 145). Such devotion for art is recorded for Protogenes, living on “lupins
steeped in water” that “satisfied at once his hunger and his thirst” to not waste
any time away from work (Pliny 1968, pp. 136–139).
Throughout the Middle Ages, ancient biographical traditions and the use of
anecdotes were continued in hagiographies, the life stories of Christian saints
(Sousslouff 1997, p. 38; Kris and Kurz 1980, pp. 57–58). Only with Tuscan
Renaissance biographers, most prominently by Giorgio Vasari in Le Vite De Piu
Eccellenti Pittori, Sculptori E Architettori [The Lives of the Most Excellent
Painters, Sculptors and Architects] (1550 and 1568), the anecdote was revived
as a narrative device to record artists’ lives. According to Catherine Sousslouff,
such biographical narratives depended on only two aspects: anecdotes about
the artist’s life and descriptions of their artworks (1997, p. 26). Further, the
artist’s autochthony—an innate ability, skill, or talent based on a person’s place
of birth or upbringing—became highly important (pp. 44–56). It served a
political function in promoting notions of patriotism and nationalism.
Despite earlier texts, the Vasarian model influenced biographers the most.3
Vasari discusses an artist’s entire life, using empirical data from archival research,
historical documents, oral history and earlier written records, in situ inspection
and critique of artworks, and personal encounters. However, critiquing his
sources only inconsistently led to mistakes, oversights, and misinterpretations
(Guerico 2006, pp. 26–28; Kisters 2017, p. 27). Sandra Kisters argues that “a
large number” of artists had died already or were not personally known to
Vasari, who also writes “about several artworks without having seen them him-
self”, and “uses anecdotes told or written to him by others” (2017, p. 26).
Nevertheless, Vasari was the first to consult written documents to narrate an
artist’s life. Furthermore, he matched the artworks with their creator’s
personality, revealing an underlying idea that the latter portrays himself in the
former, thus constituting an early version of a life-and-work model.4
Inspired by Vasari, Carel van Mander created Het Schilder-Boeck [The Book
of Painting] (1604 and 1618), focussing on Dutch, Flemish, and German art-
ists. The “Dutch Vasari”, as he is sometimes called, stresses “the standard of
craftsmanship of his fifteenth-century predecessors and the value of training,
experience, and hard work above genius and scholarship” (Woods 1999,
pp. 126–7) but uses anecdotes extensively to narrate artists’ lives.
One of the most popular anecdotes from the Renaissance concerns a close
relationship, even friendship, between artist and client, such as in the biogra-
phies of Giotto di Bondone, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans
Holbein, expressing the fame and individual glory of, and respect given to the
portrayed artists (Vasari 1998, pp. 27, 298; van Mander 1969, pp. 37, 87–88).
Some artists are even godly, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who “is so divine that
he leaves behind all other men and clearly makes himself known as a genius
endowed by God” (Vasari 1998, p. 284), Michelangelo Buonarotti, who “the
most benevolent Ruler of Heaven … sent to earth” (Vasari 1998, p. 414), and
Holbein, born under a “fortunate celestial influence” (van Mander 1969, p. 83).
During the late eighteenth century, books focussing on a single artist were
published, such as The Life of the Celebrated Painter Masaccio (Thomas Patch
1770), Testimonies to the Genius and Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Samuel
Felton 1792), and Some Anecdotes of the Life of Julio Bonasoni (George
Cumberland and Luigi Majno 1793). Then, the term monograph referred to a
treatise focussing on a single defined topic, usually in Natural History (Guerico
2006, p. 3). It was first used for an artist’s biography by Ludwig Schorn in
1819, reviewing Adam Weise’s Albrecht Dürer und sein Zeitalter [Albrecht
Dürer and his Epoch] (1819) (Guerico 2006, pp. 3–4).
Regardless of terminology, from the beginning of the nineteenth century,
the artist’s monograph was widely adopted in Europe as a form of writing,
introducing the life-and-work model to artist’s biographies (Guerico 2006,
p.5). It was heavily influenced by and dependent on the Vasarian biographical
model, and the notion of a linked, thus reciprocally explanatory, artist’s work
and life. It combined biography and literary fiction, utilising documents and
sources concerning the artist’s story, and critically evaluated artworks and their
attribution, compiling comprehensive lists of works (Guerico 2006, pp. 4–5).
During the first half of the nineteenth century, connoisseurship, aiming to
verify originals and create a complete list of an individual’s works, the catalogue
raisonné, was a distinguishing feature of the artist’s monograph (Guerico 2006,
p. 40). The oeuvre was seen as a “multidimensional whole”, holding and reveal-
ing information about the development of the artist’s personality and artistic
practice (Guerico 2006, pp. 80, 91–96). In the second half of the century,
biographical aspects became more important again, eventually being placed
above (Art) History and connoisseurship. Gabriele Guerico observes that “the
study of the oeuvre required specialised means, and therefore found its warm-
est reception among art historians and connoisseurs. In contrast, the study of
18 T. J. YU-KIENER
biography verged on the novelistic and reached a much broader audience”

(2006, p. 149).5
The field of Art History quickly adopted the artist’s monograph as one of its
essential sources and products (Sousslouff 1997, pp. 38, 77–88). Despite some
scholarly criticism, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of an
artist were based on the Vasarian model and its fourteenth- and fifteenth-
century predecessors, depicting artists as heroes (Sousslouff 1997, p. 93).
From the 1880s onwards, several multi-volume series on Renaissance and
Modern artists introduced numerous artists’ lives and works to a wide
readership.6
With the dawn of the twentieth century, art-historical scholars explored the
artist’s role in society and culture more broadly. Also, more concepts of artists
appeared, such as the clinically mad genius, the unappreciated, the loner, the
revolutionary, the nobleman, the bohemian. Positioning artists “ideal and
absolute” and their biographies “isolated from other kinds of biographies” tex-
tualised artists “differently from other human beings”, creating a mythical,
legendary, and heroic status for them, a situation that remained unchanged
until the mid-twentieth century (1997, pp. 101, 109, 111–112).
Thus, like their predecessors, the artist’s monograph created a canonical
feedback loop, confirming and enshrining the individual’s position and status.
Consequently, those publications became crucial in the commodification of
artists by the art market (Kisters 2017, pp. 9–15; Salas 2007, p.47). Using
eulogy and novelistic devices, monographs (re-)confirmed canonical status,
uniqueness, importance, and economic value while also pushing for the (re)
discovery of neglected individuals (Guerico 2006, pp. 236–237).
For centuries, the core elements of art-historical biographies, the canon, the
anecdote, and the life-and-work model, have prevailed. When examining the
artist’s biography comic genre, one immediately recognises apparent parallels
to those long-established biographical traditions in Art History. Their continu-
ous use in the comic medium is explored here using two corpora.
Corpus One: Biographical Comics of the 1940s

In March 1942, the new artist’s biography comic genre was instigated by the
American publisher M. L. J. Magazines, Inc., releasing a comic narrative on
Leonardo da Vinci in Blue Ribbon Comics Vol. 1, No. 22. It inaugurated a
publishing boom of at least 25 biographical comic strips about canonical visual
artists, released between 1942 and 1949 in educational youth magazines in
America. Leonardo da Vinci was portrayed most often, appearing in at least
four graphic narratives, a choice heavily influenced by the established Western
artistic canon and its fascination with creative Renaissance individuals. Indeed,
almost one in two biographical comic strips about canonical artists featured a
Renaissance artist. In drawing from while also contributing to the canon of
Art History, those narratives about Leonardo da Vinci participated in a canoni-
cal feedback loop enshrining his position further. As the first of a new kind of
comic genre and featuring the most popular subject of the decade, they also
qualify as fitting representatives of the early form of the artist’s biography
comic genre.
The narratives “Leonardo da Vinci” (Blue Ribbon Comics Vol. 1, No. 22,
March 1942), “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter and Scientist. Pioneer in
Engineering” (Real Life Comics Vol. 3, No. 2, November 1942), and “500
Years Too Soon!” (True Comics No. 58, March 1947), frequently employ the
anecdote as a narrative tool and confirm the popular image of the artist as a
genius, likely inspired by Vasari’s biography. The comparison reveals multiple
anecdotes already found in the sixteenth-century biography. For example,
Leonardo da Vinci surpassing his master Andrea Verrocchio at an early age,
constituting the motif of artistic destiny, is mentioned twice by Vasari:
“Leonardo da Vinci, then a young boy and Andrea’s pupil, assisted him in this
work, painting an angel by himself, which was much better than the other
details” (1998, p. 236); and “This was the reason why Andrea would never
touch colours again, angered that a young boy understood them better than he
did” (p. 287).
Directly linked to artistic destiny are stories about genius, expressed through
exceptionally high levels of versatility and the ability to excel in many fields. In
addition to representing him as a painter, sculptor, and draughtsman, comic
strips about Leonardo da Vinci show him as a botanist, biologist, anatomist,
physiognomist, inventor, musician, astronomer, city planner, and landscape
designer as well as military, civil, aerial, and naval engineer. Vasari describes
how Leonardo da Vinci also revolutionised these fields with his contributions:
a genius endowed by God …a very fine geometrician …not only work[ing] in

sculpture but in architecture [… making] many drawings of both ground-plans
and other structures …discuss[ing] to make the River Arno a canal from Pisa to
Florence [… who] drew plans for mills, fulling machines, and implements that
could be driven by water-power …construct[ing] models and designs showing
how to excavate and bore through mountains …and [who] with the use of levers,
winches, and hoists, showed how to lift and pull heavy weights, as well as meth-
ods of emptying out harbours and pumps for removing water from great depth
[… giving humankind] a more perfect understanding of the anatomy of horses
and of men. (1998, pp. 284–6, 298)
Furthermore, the comic strips feature anecdotes about Leonardo da Vinci’s

powerful clients and friends, such as Francis I of France, already favoured by
Vasari (1998, pp. 293, 298). The narrative “500 Years Too Soon!” (1947)
shows Leonardo da Vinci living a hermit-like life, starting work even before the
monks rise and refusing to eat to not pause his work—a clear reminiscence to
Protogenes’ asceticism described by Pliny (1968, pp. 136–139).
Leonardo da Vinci’s obsession with flight is another crucial element of the
comic strips, depicting the artist building and testing his flying machine, risking
his own or his assistant’s life. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci in two
20 T. J. YU-KIENER
volumes (Edward MacCurdy 1938) and Leonardo Da Vinci. The Tragic Pursuit
Of Perfection (Antonina Vallentin 1938), published in Toronto and New York,
respectively, and featuring writings on flight and sketches of flying machines,
might have contributed to the corresponding focus. However, Vasari appar-
ently inspired scenes showing Leonardo da Vinci releasing birds on the market,
as in “Leonardo da Vinci” (1942) (Fig. 1) and “500 Years Too Soon!” (1947).
[W]hen passing by the place where birds being sold, he [Leonardo da Vinci]
would often take them out of their cages with his own hands, and after paying the
seller the price that was asked of him, he would set them free in the air, restoring
to them the liberty they had lost (Vasari 1998, p. 286).
The above observations reveal that many anecdotes, already used by Vasari,
reappeared in biographical comics about Leonardo da Vinci in the 1940s. At
least seven motifs can be identified: Artistic Destiny, Genius, Revolutionising
an Art-Form, Powerful Clients, Obsession, Risk-Taking, and a Hermit-like
Life. Naturally, the lines between them are at times blurred.
Between 1942 and 1972, these motifs, at least partly deriving from Vasari,
were not only used to tell Leonardo da Vinci’s life but the lives of other artists
too. While some were also painters, such as Winslow Homer, many worked in
different media, such as the architect and city planner Christopher Wren, the
engineer and architect Alexander Gustave Eiffel, the inventor of photography
Louis Daguerre, the illustrator John James Audubon, and the sculptresses
Malvina Hoffman and Vinnie Ream. Thus, by featuring no longer in one spe-
cific artist’s life story but biographical graphic narratives about visual artists in
Fig. 1 [Uncredited] (a & w), “Leonardo Da Vinci”. Blue Ribbon Comics Vol. 1, No.
22 (March 1942), M. L. J. Magazines Inc., [p. 3], Leonardo da Vinci frees birds on
a market
general, those themes turned into genre-specific tropes of the artist’s biogra-
phy comic.
One narrative of the 1940s merits special attention in the context of art-
historical biography writing traditions being employed in the comic medium.
The two-episode series “The Story of Painting” (Treasure Chest of Fun and
Fact Vol. 3, No. 13–14, February–March 1949) is remarkable, featuring sev-
eral canonical painters and citing numerous anecdotes already found in the
writings of Pliny, Vasari and van Mander. The 12-page narrative briefly dis-
cusses the origins of painting before featuring anecdotes about artists, such as
Apollodorus, Zeuxis, and Apelles. Nevertheless, the story confuses the anec-
dote about Zeuxis painting grapes.
The story runs that Parrhasios and Zeuxis entered into a competition, Zeuxis
exhibited a picture of some grapes, so true that birds flew up to the wall of the
stage […] After this we learn that Zeuxis painted a boy carrying grapes, and when
the birds flew down to settle on them, he was vexed with his own work. (Pliny
1968, pp. 110–1)
However, the comic strip credits Apollodorus with painting the fruits, while
Zeuxis is depicted dying from laughter, looking at one of his works.7 A scene
showing Apelles discussing with Alexander the Great an equestrian portrait and
letting the horse judge its quality is a combination of several anecdotes.
The charm of his [Apelles’] manner had won him the regard of Alexander the
Great, who was a frequent visitor to the studio … but when the king happened
to discourse at length in the studio upon things he knew nothing about, Apelles
would pleasantly advise him to be silent …It were vain to enumerate the number
of times he painted Alexander and Philip …A horse also exists, or did exist,
painted for a competition, … when he saw that his rivals were likely to be placed
above him through intrigue, he caused some horses to be brought in and showed
them each picture in turn; they neighed only at the horse of Apelles …He also
painted … a portrait of Antigonos in amour advancing with his horse. (Pliny
1968, pp. 124–5, 128–31)
After a discussion of Medieval painting, the section on the Renaissance fea-

tures further anecdotes. For example, Giotto di Bondone is depicted painting
a kneeling man drinking water who appears remarkably lifelike, constituting a
new artistic quality and authenticity, and drawing a perfect circle without using
a compass. Vasari described both episodes in almost identical wording:
And among these scenes, an especially beautiful one concerns a thirsty man whose
desire to drink is clearly evident and who drinks from a spring kneeling down
upon the ground with such great and truly marvellous emotion that it almost
seems as if he is a real person drinking …Giotto …took a sheet of paper and a
brush dipped in red, pressed his arm to the side to make a compass of it, and with
22 T. J. YU-KIENER
a turn of his hand made a circle so even in its shape and outline that it was a mar-
vel to behold. (1998, pp. 19, 22)
The narrative then traces the evolution of Renaissance painting before sin-
gling out Michelangelo Buonarotti as particularly important, showing the art-
ist working on the Sistine Chapel, designing the scaffolding and a unique hat
allowing him to work at night. Once again, Vasari seems to have inspired
the scenes:
And so Michelangelo ordered scaffolding built on poles which did not touch the
wall, the method for fitting out vaults he later taught to Bramante and oth-
ers …His sobriety made him very restless and he rarely slept, and very often dur-
ing the night he would rise, being unable to sleep, and would work with his
chisel, having fashioned a helmet made of pasteboard holding a candle over the
middle of his head which shed light where he was working without tying his
hands. (1998, pp. 439–40, 475)
Briefly mentioning Leonardo da Vinci, the narrative also features an anec-

dote about the Van Eyck brothers inventing oil painting (Fig. 2), told by Carel
van Mander with remarkably similar wording:
Johannes [Jan van Eyck] had painted a panel on which he had spent much time …
he varnished the finished panel … and placed it in the sunlight to dry. The parts
of the panel may not have been joined or glued sufficiently, or the heat of the sun
may have been too strong; the panel burst at the joints and fell apart. Johannes …
took a resolve that the sun should not damage his work ever again […] He had
already examined many oils and other similar materials supplied by nature, and
had found that that linseed oil and nut oil had the best drying ability of them all
Fig. 2 [Uncredited] (a & w). “The Story of Painting [2]”. Treasure Chest of Fun and
Fact Vol. 4, No. 14 (March 1949), Geo. A. Pflaum Publisher Inc., p. 13, Jan van Eyck
invents oil painting
[…] So Johannes found, after many experiments, that colors mixed with these
oils could be handled easily, that they dried well, became hard, and, once dry,
could resist water. (1969, p.5)
In its summarising verdict, “The Story of Painting” (1949) closely follows

Vasari in arguing that Giotto di Bondone and Michelangelo Buonarotti deserve
extra remembering for their extraordinary artistic achievements.
This first corpus shows that the comic strips of the 1940s featuring canonical
artists continued multiple established art-historical traditions of the artist’s
biographies. In portraying confirmed members of the Western artistic canon,
the narratives strengthened and enforced the canonical status of those artists
and their artworks, creating canonical feedback loops. Frequently, the comic
strips use the anecdote as a narrative device, while often strikingly similarly
worded episodes indicate Pliny, Vasari and van Mander as the sources. However,
limitations regarding length, complexity, and artistic quality, with the drawings
lacking depth and details and poor-quality printing, prevented these early bio-
graphical comic strips from employing the life-and-work model.
The popularity of Renaissance artists reveals the influence of twentieth-
century art-historical perceptions on the artist’s biography comic genre during
the 1940s. The graphic narratives about Leonardo da Vinci demonstrate how
anecdotes from the artist’s life, many inspired by Vasari’s Lives, have turned
into several genre-specific tropes.
Corpus II: Biographical Graphic Novels of the 2010s

After its establishment in the 1940s in educational US youth magazines, the
artist’s biography comic genre evolved throughout the second half of the twen-
tieth century, incorporating longer and more complex narratives, often no lon-
ger suitable for juveniles due to explicit content. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, another publishing boom began, comprising at least 200
biographical graphic novels about canonical visual artists, released between
2000 and 2019.8 Two such publications, Dalí (2012) by French comic artist
Edmond Baudoin and Rembrandt (2013) by Dutch illustrator Typex
(Raymond Koot), are chosen to demonstrate the continuous use of art-
historical life-writing traditions in contemporary comic production and the
prevailing of genre-specific tropes. However, the narratives’ length and com-
plexity aim for a more mature readership than their 1940s predecessors and
allow for a more in-depth, personal and critical engagement with the artists and
their works, and the use of the life-and-work model.
In 2012 the Centre Pompidou in Paris commissioned the seasoned graphic
novelist Edmond Baudoin to create a graphic novel about the Spanish Surrealist
Salvador Dalí. The 136-page narrative about the artist’s life and art took only
18 months to complete and features a 20-page appendix including a biography
and bibliography. In its approach, Dalí is very similar to an art-historical artist’s
monograph, covering the individual’s entire life, employing the life-and-work
24 T. J. YU-KIENER
model and creating a list of the most famous artworks. Also, it relies on tradi-
tional anecdotes to trace the artist’s life, including his training, and the creation
of artworks. For example, Dalí befriends the Surrealist Federico Garcia Lorca
and Luis Buñuel in Madrid, with the three being in almost constant competi-
tion (Baudoin 2012, pp. 45–46). Also, he becomes increasingly eccentric due
to his growing fame and wealth, leading to substantial conflicts with his clients,
such as the New York department store Bonwit Teller (Baudoin 2012,
pp. 87–88). Pliny already recorded the eccentricity of Zeuxis and Parrhasios
(1968, pp. 106–107, 114–115), as Vasari did for Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo Buonarotti (1998, pp. 288, 296, 427, 438, 466). Also, the
theme of the uncompromising artist who has conflicts with (potential) clients
has a long tradition.
Furthermore, Dalí contains several genre-specific tropes of artist’s biogra-
phy comics. For example, showing Dalí drawing and painting at a very young
age constitutes the trope of artistic destiny (Baudoin 2012, pp. 32, 37). Dalí
also features the trope of a powerful client in a commission by Pope Pius XII
(Baudoin 2012, p. 114). Unsurprisingly, the graphic novel depicts Dalí
obsessed with his art and his wife Gala, and himself and his own immortality
(Baudoin 2012, pp. 75, 115, 118–119). Taking personal, artistic, and financial
risks to pursue various obsessions is another trope featured in Dalí (Baudoin
2012, p. 88, 125).
The narrative establishes an emotional link between the artist’s life and
work, following the life-and-work model of the artist’s monograph. Indeed, as
Dalí’s art was autobiographical, the approach seems only natural. For example,
after falling out with his sister Anna Maria due to her book on their shared
childhood, Dalí painted Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own
Chastity (1954) and disowned her (Baudoin 2012, p. 116–117). Also, the
graphic novel first explains Dalí’s symbolism behind the crutches, the tower,
and more (Baudoin 2012, pp. 26–37, 100). It then refers back to them
throughout the narrative, presenting the artworks as expressions of crucial
emotional and psychological topics in the artist’s life. Finally, in its entirety, the
graphic novel introduces and discusses a large proportion of the artist’s oeuvre,
listing the works in the appendix and mirroring a traditional artist’s monograph.
The life-and-work model, an essential narrative device of traditional art-
historical biographies, links an artist’s story and artistic output on an emotional
level. Baudoin uses the principle, “reverse-engineering” Dalí’s famous
paranoiac-critical method: The Spanish Surrealist based his artworks on his
dreams, interpreting the latter with the former. Baudoin turns the process
around, trying to guess, illustrate, and interpret Dalí’s original dreams that had
inspired the paintings, calling it “the paranoiac-critical method of [Dalí’s]
paranoiac-critical method” (2017). This approach resembles the core idea of
the life-and-work model, trying to understand an artist through their artworks
and comprehending the latter by knowing the former. Further, in showing
Salvador Dalí placing himself in the lineage of canonical painters (Fig. 3), Dalí
visualises an essential element of the canon of Art History: referring to
canonical predecessors and their art, trying to gain status as their canonical
successor.
In contrast to traditional art-historical writings, Baudoin inserts himself into
his narrative in an autobiographical manner. First, he tries to keep his distance,
using proxy narrators. However, later, Baudoin shows himself working on and
narrating Dalí, talking to a fictional character, comparing his and Dalí’s life,
and explaining his approaches. The use of several parallel voices, narrating dif-
fering aspects of Dalí’s story simultaneously, constitutes another difference to
Art History’s biographical traditions.
The second example of this corpus was commissioned by the national
museum of the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, asking Typex to
Fig. 3 Edmond Baudoin, Dalí (2012), SelfMadeHero, p. 108, Salvador Dalí inspired
by and as successor of Jan Vermeer, Diego Velázquez, and Jan van Eyck
26 T. J. YU-KIENER
create a graphic novel about the Old Master Rembrandt Harmenszoon van
Rijn, whose artworks are the highlights of the museum. In April 2013, the
massive 238-page semi-fictional graphic novel Rembrandt was published. Each
of the 11 chapters is named after either a person (Elsje, Jan, Saskia, Geertje,
Hendrickje, Cornelia, Titus, Rembrandt) or an animal (Hansken, Conus
Marmoreus, Rattus Rattus) significant for the respective episode and to
Rembrandt, examining a close relationship or a critical moment in the artist’s
life. The narrative omits the artist’s childhood almost entirely, diverging from
the traditional art-historical biographical model.
On the one hand, the book is essentially an anthology of anecdotal episodes
grouped into chapters. On the other hand, the narrative features several tradi-
tional anecdotes from art-historical biographies and contains multiple genre-
specific tropes of the artist’s biography comic. For example, the motif of
competing artists features more than once. Rembrandt’s rivalry with his life-
long artist-friend Jan Lievens and his apprentice Govert Flinck is depicted, with
Flinck fooling his master by painting a guilder on the floor that the latter
attempts to pick up (Typex 2013, pp. 57, 91)—which is obviously reminiscent
of Zeuxis attempting to pull aside a curtain painted by Parrhasios (Pliny 1968,
pp. 110–111). Further, when Rembrandt continues working rather than drink-
ing with his friend Lievens, paints while his wife Saskia is dying, and does not
attend his long-term partner Hendrickje’s funeral, he is depicted as hermit-like
and obsessed with his art (Typex 2013, pp. 53, 92–93, 181). Typex’s portrays
Rembrandt as arrogant, eccentric, and stubborn, which leads the artist to take
significant personal and financial risks in declining profitable business opportu-
nities, rejecting work and losing (potential) commissions due to his temper
(Typex 2013, pp. 226–230). As mentioned above, such motifs have a long tra-
dition in artists’ biographies.
The graphic novel does not draw an emotional connection between the art-
ist’s personal story and creative output, avoiding the life-and-work model.
However, this was not the case during the research phase. Typex (2017) stud-
ied the numerous self-portraits in preparation for the commission, as “the only
way to get really close to Rembrandt is to look at his self-portraits”. Panel bor-
ders designed like mirror frames and a large actual mirror, featuring through-
out the book, are subtle reminders of the importance of self-portraits for
Typex’s understanding of Rembrandt as an artist and human being (Typex
2013, pp. 17, 94, 142–143, 160, 222, 237). This notion that understanding
an artist’s work equals understanding his personality and innermost feelings is
the quintessential idea of the life-and-work model but does not explicitly fea-
ture in the publication.
Typex shares with Vasari the utilisation of their own experiences as artists
when writing about a colleague. Identifying with his subjects, for Typex (2017)
“the life of an artist in Amsterdam” formed an autobiographical “starting
point”, while he also “was bankrupt just like Rembrandt” exclusively working
Rembrandt over three years. Besides, he included his family and friends when
the original characters’ appearance was not well enough known (Typex 2013,
pp. 25, 185, 198).
Naturally, there are differences to a traditional art-historical biography, with
the semi-fictional nature of the publication being the most obvious one.
Neither the museum nor the graphic novelist were aiming for an accurate
book. Consequently, Typex (2017) freely combines and rearranges various
events and dates from Rembrandt’s life, making the narrative paramount and
not wanting the “facts to get into the way of the story”. Another dissimilarity
is the focus on the role of the people around Rembrandt. In particular, women,
such as his wife Saskia, his long-term partner Hendrickje, and his daughter
Cornelia, receive considerable attention. Thus, the life of the Old Master is
being told through their eyes (Fig. 4).
The graphic novels of the 2010s, represented by Dalí (2012) and Rembrandt
(2013), make use of the life-and-work model, with the former linking the art-
ist’s emotional state and artistic output explicitly. However, both comic artists
used the life-and-work model for their research, trying to understand their
respective subjects through their art.
The two case studies feature many art-historical anecdotes, such as the com-
petition between artists, conflicts with clients, and eccentricity. In addition,
they employ several genre-specific tropes of the artist’s biography comic, such
as artistic destiny, powerful clients, obsession, and risk-taking, confirming the
tropes’ prevalence and importance.
Both graphic narratives draw from the established canon of Art History for
their subjects while contributing to the same canon in confirming and enforc-
ing Salvador Dalí and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s canonical status
and the canon’s significance in general. Consequently, the biographical graphic
novels of the 2010s, just as the biographical comic strips of the 1940s, create
canonical feedback loops. Further, Dalí explicitly depicts the referencing of
canonical artists and their work to gain canonical status, a critical element of
the canon and its history. It creates a lineage of canonical, hence legitimate and
artistically valuable, artistic practice and practitioners, increasing the economic
value of predecessor and successor as well as their art.
Conclusion
The main aspects of biographical life-writings about artists, namely, the canon
of Art History, the anecdote, and the life-and-work model, have since 1942
found a new home in the artist’s biography comic genre. However, the 80-year-
old genre faces multiple challenges. It has somewhat emancipated itself from
the art-historical traditions but remains predominantly reliant on these norms.
Firstly, the portrayed artists still mirror established Art History in depicting
canonical white male artists and marginalising women and non-white artists.
Also, just like traditional art-historical writings, the graphic narratives create
canonical feedback loops.
28 T. J. YU-KIENER
Fig. 4 Typex, Rembrandt (2013), SelfMadeHero, p. 127, Hendrickje doing house-

hold chores and attending to Rembrandt’s sexual needs to facilitate his artistic work
Secondly, the graphic novels of the 2010s do attempt to take a new angle on
an individual but eventually fall back on established narrative devices already in
use for centuries, such as the anecdote and the life-and-work model. Further,
the genre-specific tropes, still in use in the twenty-first century, result from a
standardisation process during the 1940s, which relied on Renaissance authors
inspired by anecdotes from Antiquity. These first two points prove that
respective comic narratives have been following the same outdated patterns for
80 years, no longer befitting a twenty-first-century publication.
Thirdly, neither a straightforward art-historical text nor a clear-cut, purely
entertaining leisure reading, the genre is still searching for its place in the book
market. The former would require an academic level of research and execution,
including a bibliography and referencing. However, mainly considering a pub-
lication’s economics, the latter would oppose lengthy research periods and
higher printing costs due to appendices. Both examples from the 2010s are of
substantial length, with Dalí including a bibliography and a summarising biog-
raphy, and were commissioned by major art institutions. On the one hand, it
shows that graphic novelists engage in-depth with the portrayed artists for the
reader’s benefit. On the other hand, it proves that the art and museum field is
willing to engage with the medium and the genre. However, without support
from art museums, such comprehensive publications pose a financial risk for all
stakeholders. Simultaneously, if graphic novels about artists are bound to insti-
tutions often regarded as the guardians of Art History, they will remain tied to
art-historical traditions of biography writing.
The challenges faced by the artist’s biography comic genre boil down to the
simple questions, “What does it want to be?” and “Whom does it want to
talk to?”
However, the artist’s biography comic genre holds much potential as well.
In being intrinsically graphic, comics are possibly the most suitable medium to
talk about visual artists. Traditional art-historical writings attempt to describe
an artistic output in a literary medium, relying on verbal descriptions of art-
works or photographic reproduction, often standing separate from the text. In
contrast, graphic narratives offer a unique way to explore and explain an indi-
vidual’s artistic oeuvre in being able to depict it. Comics can show the various
steps in the creation of an artwork, and describe and interpret an artist’s life far
more immersive than purely literary approaches. Finally, as a popular medium,
graphic narratives can engage audiences otherwise not interested in visual art-
ists’ biographies and art-historical topics.
Nevertheless, possibly the genre’s most significant advantage lies in the fact
that it is not art-historical writing. Although it has been the case for 80 years,
there is no obligation to continue following the art-historical traditions and
using respective narrative devices. If the genre frees itself from these conven-
tions, it could advocate for a more inclusive art world. Indeed, it has already
started to do so as graphic novel biographies about comic artists, such as
Wilhelm Busch, Joe Shuster, Winsor McCay, and Shotaro Ishinomori (石ノ森
章太郎), treat their subjects just like canonical artists.9
Firstly, when no longer relying on the canon of Art History when choosing
a subject, biographical graphic novels can provide a stage for less well-known
or less established artists, including comic artists. Consequently, such publica-
tions would no longer create canonical feedback loops. On the contrary, they
would question, negate, and possibly correct the established canon, thus break-
ing the perpetual canonical confirmation cycle.
30 T. J. YU-KIENER
Secondly, leaving the traditional art-historical anecdote behind would allow

the genre to create something entirely new. This assessment is particularly evi-
dent when considering that the genre-specific tropes developed out of anec-
dotes about Leonardo da Vinci’s life and have since been applied to hundreds
of artists. Consequently, each of those graphic narratives has—in a way—been
telling the story of Leonardo da Vinci. Therefore, the Renaissance artist has
become the twentieth-century comics standard to identify and measure an art-
ist—not unlike Polykleitos’ statue setting an example in sculpture some
2500 years earlier. Here the artist’s biography comic genre could change the
public perception of what defines an artist in developing new tropes and pos-
sibly new narrative devices.
Typex’s Rembrandt is an excellent example of such a novel approach. The
book does not explore the Old Master in a traditional way. Instead, it primarily
tells the subject’s story through the eyes and experiences of the people, mostly
women, around Rembrandt. Rembrandt highlights less the painter and print-
maker’s successes but others’ sacrifices that allowed them to happen. Thus, it
does not negate the former’s artistic achievements but gives credit to the latter,
who have far too often remained unmentioned in the canon.
Such new approaches of the artist’s biography comic genre, potentially lead-
ing to new genre-specific tropes, hold power to change the definition and per-
ception of past and present artists fundamentally, thus possibly revolutionising
the art-historical canon itself.
Notes
1. The first academy, the Academia del Disegno, founded in Florence in 1563, fol-
lowed by academies in Perugia (1573), Bologna (1582) and Rome (1593)
(Barker, Webb, and Woods, 1999, pp. 14–16).
2. For further detail on these feminist art historians, cf. Wallin Wictorin and
Nordenstam, chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on
Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”, and Olsza,
chapter “Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study
of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States”.
3. Earlier biographies include Filippo Villani’s Cronica or Storia Fiorentina
[Florentine History] (1380s), featuring famous Florentine artists including
Giotto di Bondone, Gianlorenzo Ghiberti’s I Commentarii [The Commentaries]
(1440s), featuring the lives of some artists and himself, and Antonio Manetti’s
The Life of Brunelleschi (c.1480).
4. For further detail on Vasari, cf. Mutard, Chapter “From Giotto to Drnaso: The
Common Well of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics”.
5. For further detail on connoisseurship, cf. Connerty, chapter “Connoisseurship,
Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case of Jack B. Yeats”.
6. Examples included the Illustrated Biographies of the Great Artists series (1879–95),
the Librairie de l’Art series (1886–1906), the Künstler Monographien series
(1894–1941), and the Great Masters in Painting and Sculpture series
(1899–1910).
7. Frequently mentioned, the legendary death of Zeuxis, is unfortunately never sup-

ported by any source: When painting Aphrodite, the old lady who had commis-
sioned the painting insisted on modelling for it. The discrepancy between the
Goddess’ supposed divine and youthful beauty and the wrinkled old lady made
the artist laugh so hard he died.
8. For an extensive discussion of twenty-first century publishing booms of biograph-
ical graphic novels about iconic visual artists, and their origin in respective comics
strips of the 1940s and art-historical traditions of biography writing, see Tobias
Yu-Kiener, “European Biographical Graphic Novels about Canonical Painters:
An Analysis of Form and Function in the Context of Art Museums” (PhD thesis,
University of the Arts London, 2021).
9. Thierry Smolderen & Jean-Philippe Bramanti (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006), McCay
Vol. 1–4; Sugar Sato (2012), Shotaro Ishinomori; Willi Bloess (2016), Wilhelm
Busch lässt es krachen [Whilem Busch lets it rip]; Julian Voloj & Thomas Campi
(2018), Truth, Justice and The American Way: The Joe Shuster Story.
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Connoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip
Art: The Case of Jack B. Yeats
Michael Connerty
Abstract This chapter examines the relevance for comics historians of certain
methodologies traditionally associated with art connoisseurship. The main
focus is on the approach employed in the nineteenth century by Giovanni
Morelli, which emphasized the importance of minor and unconsciously ren-
dered details that offer clues regarding the identity of the artist. In the case of
comic strips produced in the UK in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, there is often no signature or other indication of authorship, and
attribution, particularly of long-neglected work, can be challenging. The
author uses his own experience researching the overlooked corpus of Irish
painter and cartoonist Jack B. Yeats as a case study of the application of this
methodology in identifying and cataloguing the work of an individual artist.
There is also consideration given to the various ways that comics have increas-
ingly been framed as art, consumed, collected, and assessed in ways more con-
ventionally associated with the fine art world.
Keywords Connoisseurship • comic strips • Jack B. Yeats • Victorian

comics • Giovanni Morelli
M. Connerty (*)
Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: michael.connerty@iadt.ie

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_3
34 M. CONNERTY
For many the figure of the ar.t connoisseur conjures up unpleasant connota-
tions of elitist gatekeeping and market-oriented materialism. The various “two-
dimensional caricatures of the bogeyman connoisseur” (Opperman 1990,
p. 10) emphasize different, sometimes contradictory, characteristics, but all are
arguably rooted in the common suspicion of a powerful individual who can,
apparently on a whim, dramatically reduce the monetary value of artworks
being sold at auction, or irreparably damage institutional reputations by rub-
bishing claims regarding the authenticity of their collections. There is also a
class dimension to the caricature of course, owing to historical conceptions of
connoisseurship as a suitable activity for a “gentleman” (Freedberg 2006,
p. 31), and its relationship to collecting, with all the hierarchies of taste and
cultural condescension that might suggest. One of the chief criticisms aimed at
connoisseurship in general, and individual experts in particular, is that, as prac-
titioners of an inexact science, heavily reliant on personal intuition, connois-
seurs are open to various institutional and commercial pressures in making
their determinations, prompting one commentator to suggest that “the science
of art could be taken in hand seriously only after all works of art had become
public property” (Friedlander 1960, p. 180). While there may well be some
historical factuality underlying these familiar characterizations, this is no basis
on which to disregard the very real value of the activity itself, or to diminish the
utility of many of its methods. Claims to authority with regard to matters of
taste and aesthetics have not helped, but the connoisseurial skills of identifica-
tion and attribution involve a specific form of expertise that is as indispensable
to the production of comics histories as it is to the wider field of Art History.
In what follows, as well as examining the relevance of connoisseurship for
comics scholarship and for comics culture more generally, the principal focus
will be on the methodology of attribution devised by perhaps the best-known
connoisseur of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Morelli. The Morellian
method offers an empirical approach to attribution that is of practical value in
the cataloguing of a corpus of work by an individual artist, particularly so where
a creator has been critically neglected or side-lined by established histories of
the medium, as has been the case with Jack B. Yeats, a prolific contributor to
various British comics between 1892 and 1917, and a central focus of this
chapter.1 Yeats is best known as a painter, particularly in Ireland where he is a
national figure, regarded as one of the most important artists of the twentieth
century. Historicization of a comic strip or an artwork is achieved through the
construction of contextual networks that may be social, political, cultural, aes-
thetic, and so on, and different weightings and emphases may be accorded to
any of these in the assessment and appraisal of individual works, or of group-
ings of works, but attribution remains a central activity for scholarship, for
curation, for dissemination and reprinting, and for archiving. The work of the
connoisseur in ensuring that a work of art meets the claims that are being made
for it in the marketplace is important for all kinds of legal as well as ethical rea-
sons, while curators and museums have an obligation not to mislead visitors
regarding the details of attribution and dating (O’Connor 2004, p. 5). It is
CONNOISSEURSHIP, ATTRIBUTION, AND COMIC STRIP ART: THE CASE… 35
equally important to the scholar seeking to construct histories of artistic activ-

ity, of the relationships of artists to systems of patronage, the market, and each
other, that they should present reliable, verifiable information regarding the
origins of works of art.
Clare Diamond argues that it is not possible to disentangle “the develop-
ment of fine art as a discrete category of creative expression [from] the concur-
rent emergence of art as a market commodity” (2015, p. 26). She suggests that
the art market has evolved, not as a result of some recent degeneration into
crass commercialism, but that the consumerist function of art emerged in the
eighteenth century, at the same time as the valorization of its autographic
aspects, and associated concepts like authenticity and originality, all of which
lend individual works their monetary value. In the case of comics, one notes
that the recent accommodation of the medium within the academy is concur-
rent with its increasing commodification within the fine art world, and the
increasing economic value placed on original artwork and rare publications.
Following conventions in the literary and visual arts, artist identity and author-
ship are key considerations in the trade in this material, as much as they are in
the scholarly assessment and historicization of it, though this emphasis was not
always applied by the publishers who originally commissioned and distributed
the work. Indeed, as Bart Beaty has pointed out, the concept of the comics
“artist” is itself a relatively new one (2012, p. 74). Interestingly, from the per-
spective of Comics Studies, Diamond locates many of the legal and commercial
changes to the commodification of art, and the conferring of rights in relation
to the copying of works of art, to the lobbying of legislators pursued by William
Hogarth in the early 1700s (2015, p. 34). Hogarth was arguing for the recog-
nition of intellectual property rights for engravers, in response to the perennial
problem of bootlegging, the profiting from imitation, or reproduction without
permission, of work by others. He was as concerned by the risk to professional
and artistic reputation owing to inferior craftsmanship in copies bearing the
original engraver’s name as he was by any financial losses incurred, though this
was certainly a consideration. The legislation that followed Hogarth’s protests
enshrined a link between authenticity and monetary value, which would
become central to the connoisseur’s profession in later years (Fyfe 1985).
Art connoisseurship has a long history that can be traced from classical
antiquity through the Renaissance, and figures like Giorgio Vasari, to the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries when an increase in collecting and art com-
merce also saw the publication of a number of theoretical works on
authentication and attribution by writers like Filippo Baldinucci and André
Félibien (Scallen 2003, p. 27). By the nineteenth century, there was a well-
established culture of connoisseurship that saw experts building their reputa-
tions via the publication of catalogues raisonnées and the curation of exhibitions
focused on the work of individual artists or schools. Advances in travel pre-
sented greater opportunities to visit various key galleries, religious sites, and so
on, in order to engage directly with works of art. In the 1870s Giovanni Morelli
visited the best-known collections in Europe and reevaluated the attributions
36 M. CONNERTY
that were the foundation of many displays in galleries and museums. The nov-
elty of his method resided in his insistence on the importance of the micro-
elements of a work of art in reaching conclusions regarding identification.
Rather than relying on the overall impression, he insisted on paying close
attention to the rendering of, for example, eyes, ears, hands, or small details of
clothing. Morelli made careful sketches in his notebooks in order to compare
specificities in the rendering of ears by, for example, Mantegna and Botticelli
(see Fig. 1). To quote a typical example in which he is reattributing to Michele
the authorship of an altar painting in the Church of St. Anastasia in Verona:
“This painter is more pointed in the foldings of his draperies, as well as in the
fingers of his hands, which are always rather stumpy in Cavazzola” (Morelli
1883, p. 54). Rather than recurring themes and subject matter, Morelli focused
on minute, apparently trivial, details, which he considered to be habitual, and
unconscious, and the more uniquely revealing of the artist’s identity for those
Fig. 1 Illustration from Morelli, Giovanni. 1883. Italian Masters in German Galleries,
translated by Louise Richter. London: George Bell and Sons
reasons. These details, because they are relatively inconsequential, are not exe-
cuted with the same degree of deliberation as the more immediately striking
elements of a picture and are therefore less likely to be picked up and copied by
pupils, followers, or other imitators, thus offering a more reliable means of
attribution. There is an important sense in which this aspect of connoisseurship
cannot be “taught” according to generally applicable rules but is based on a
knowledge of idiosyncrasies and specificities that can only be acquired over
time and through exposure to as great a sample of work as possible. Morelli
regarded immersion in the work of a particular artist to the point of intimate
familiarity as central to the activity of connoisseurship, and it would be difficult
to argue that this is not the key factor in the ability to distinguish work by indi-
vidual comics artists also.
The Morellian method was most famously taken up by Bernard Berenson,
who did acknowledge that documentary materials relating to history and tradi-
tion might help to confirm an attribution, though this was, for him, always
supplementary to an identification based on style. He singled out his own pre-
ferred features of paintings as being more likely to be characteristic, for exam-
ple, looking at the rendering of hair rather than of eyes, which he felt to be too
central a component as to elude imitators. He insisted on an understanding of
“the works of art themselves as information, and evidence, in a word, as mate-
rial in the study of art” (1902, p. 119). Berenson’s insistence on the irrelevance
of such factors as pictorial symbolism or historical context is one of the chief
reasons why Morellian analysis, and his development of it, fell out of critical
favour over the second half of the twentieth century, when such considerations
became more central for art historians. He claimed not to be interested in Art
History per se and focused on the aesthetic enjoyment of the individual work
of art, arguing that everything one might need to know inhered in the work
itself, through which one might discover the “sense of being in the presence of
a given artistic personality” (1927, p. 83). In his time, Berenson exerted a sub-
stantial influence on the purchases made by American galleries in the building
of their European collections during the first half of the twentieth century.
Although Morelli’s approach has been criticized as being unscientific—his
rival Wilhelm von Bode referred to him as a “quack doctor” (Bode 1891;
quoted in Scallen 2003, p. 98)—his particular method, and connoisseurial
attribution generally, can be compared to other professional activities that are
accorded the status of a science. Handwriting analysis, for example, produces
conclusions regarding the authorship of a given signature or page of written
text that are regarded as irrefutable in courts of law, and such conclusions are
based on a similar engagement with the formal properties of graphic material
(O’Connor 2004, p. 7). Other commentators have also presented arguments
in favour of connoisseurship based on analogy, one of the most convincing, and
most often cited, being Ginzburg’s discussion of Morellian attribution as a
deductive pursuit, comparable in many respects to the methodologies of both
psychoanalysis (a relationship that Freud himself acknowledged) and criminal
detection, as personified by Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional character, Sherlock
38 M. CONNERTY
Holmes. Ginzburg situates Morelli within a “conjectural paradigm” that

includes these and other late nineteenth-century developments in the sciences
(Ginzburg 1980). Morelli himself had been trained in medicine initially, and
the practice of hypothesizing from symptoms to their causes was a factor in the
development of his theories in relation to art attribution. One of the more
obvious parallels with criminal detection is that the connoisseur is working with
the visible traces of activity, left behind inadvertently, and builds from these
towards the identification of a specific person responsible for them—a murder-
ous fiend in one case, a previously unrecognized artist in another. The link is
made explicit by Doyle in a story titled “The Cardboard Box”, originally pub-
lished in The Strand in 1892, in which Holmes engages in what Ginzburg
describes as “morellizing” when he examines a box full of severed ears
(Ginzburg 1980, p. 8). Somewhat similarly, Richard Neer compares connois-
seurship to archaeology, insofar as both are concerned with the evidence of
style in placing artefacts in the context of specific time periods, though of
course the archaeologist is less interested in individual identity than in differ-
ences between societies and cultures (2005, p. 7). Nonetheless, both activities
are based on the premise that style itself constitutes a form of evidence—a
“clue” in the sense outlined by Ginzburg. Berenson himself was at pains to
emphasize the scientific underpinnings of his own approach, which was pre-
mised on “the isolation of the characteristics of the known and their confronta-
tion with the unknown” (1902, p. 123).
Many of the cartoons and strips that appeared in British publications like
Comic Cuts, Illustrated Chips, and The Funny Wonder during the 1890s were
not signed, with no indication given regarding the identity of the artists, and,
of course, as in the fine art world, the writing of history and the building of
archives favour work to which a name can be assigned. There are various rea-
sons why an individual comic strip might be unattributed in the original publi-
cation in which it appears. One, quite common during this early period, is that
this was not, perhaps, the original publication in which it appeared, and the
name was removed as part of an attempt to disguise its origins, no permission
having been sought for the republishing. There may have been financial, con-
tractual, or other professional reasons that obliged artists to keep their contri-
butions to one publication hidden from the editors of another to which they
also contributed. It may well have been that they sought anonymity because
they aspired to work in a more respectable area of the fine art world, as a
painter, for example, and feared that any association with the apparently super-
ficial and ephemeral form of the comic strip might have negatively impacted
such ambitions. This seems likely to have been a key factor in Yeats’ own with-
drawal into anonymity and, in some cases, pseudonymity as a cartoonist, when
he began to actively pursue recognition as a painter in both London and Dublin
during the first decade of the 1900s.
Anonymity presents difficulties for the historian however, as a name offers
the possibility of additional context in the form of biographical
detail (Konstantinos 2017, p. 5). Is there anything about the artist’s national,
ethnic, or religious background that might offer perspectives on the work? Did
she receive technical training and where? (I use the feminine article here, but
of course gender is another one of the elements elided by this anonymity).
What other publications did the artist contribute to? Did she enjoy a long
career as a comic strip artist? Or belong to a social network or professional
community? Of course, these are all useful questions, and it is one of the schol-
arly frustrations of this period that they must often be left unanswered—even
in cases where we do know the identity of the artist. Anonymous comic strip art
can be, and has been, categorized in various ways—national origin, style, tech-
nical elements, thematic content, subject matter, and so on—though the canon
of comic strip art remains very much a canon of attributed work. It is certainly
the case that many fine examples of the medium fail to get the scholarly or criti-
cal attention that they deserve, as a direct result of their status as unattributed
works. Undoubtedly certain types of cartoonists were held in higher esteem
than others, and, for much of its history the comic strip seems to have been
regarded as a debased form relative to the editorial newspaper cartoon, for
example, or to the kind of material that appeared in the more celebrated Punch
and other humour periodicals. A telling article titled “Style in Comic Art”
published in The Strand in 1909 focuses on the work of “Mr. George Morrow”,
“Mr. Heath Robinson”, “Mr. John Hassall,” and others—great cartoonists all,
but none of them comic strip artists. There is not the space here to go into the
well-rehearsed history of critical condescension towards the comic strip, which
would prevail throughout most of the twentieth century, but it is worth noting
here as a factor in the relegation of many names to relative obscurity, or, frus-
tratingly for the scholarly researcher, irretrievable anonymity.
At the time of original publication, there was no sense of the value of this
material for posterity. The comics, like the early tabloid newspapers which they
resembled in many respects, were entirely ephemeral—tomorrow’s fish and
chip wrappers—and there appears to have been little attempt to archive original
art or to preserve records that might tell us more about the contributing art-
ists, the work they produced, or the nature of their professional relationships
with the various publishers of the time. We can compare this with the practice
of record keeping that characterized Punch magazine during the same period.
Punch at the end of the nineteenth century was already an established institu-
tion within British political and cultural life and was reasonably self-conscious
about this. It made practical use of its carefully curated archive, representing
much of its graphic material in the form of annuals and themed books, and,
importantly, making celebrities out of many of its artists, particularly those who
earned the title of “principal cartoonist”, such as John Leech and John Tenniel.
Thus, it is now far easier for scholars to build a picture of the professional
activities of these cartoonists and the industrial context within which they oper-
ated (Scully 2018).
40 M. CONNERTY
The Identification of the Yeats Corpus

Yeats is an unusual case in comics-research terms because, as a renowned and
successful painter, he has already been subject to connoisseurial scrutiny from
a fine art perspective, while his substantial contributions to British comics dur-
ing the late Victorian and Edwardian periods have received scant attention.
Hilary Pyle, who had been the custodian of the Yeats Archive at the National
Gallery in Ireland, produced an extensive catalogue raisonnée, as well as various
biographical and critical texts dealing with Yeats’ work. One of these texts, The
Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats (Pyle 1994), is effectively a supplement to the
catalogue raisonnée itself and focuses on Yeats’ work in print and illustration.
Given that we are here concerned with the application of art-historical meth-
odologies to the study of comics, it is interesting to note that there is a substan-
tial lacuna at the centre of Pyle’s otherwise exhaustive catalogue of Yeats’s work
for print media, in that beyond a brief allusion to his work for the comics, and
the reproduction of two strips, there is no attempt to engage with or catalogue
the many hundreds of strips that were published, between 1892 and 1917. In
relying on earlier texts, particularly, as in this case, those associated with Art
History, the researcher should be wary of repeating mistakes of attribution and
analysis contained therein, which are often rooted in basic misunderstandings
of the nature of comics production and reception, and the historical contin-
gency of both. Pyle’s (I must stress, excellent) volume was written at a time
before she would have been able to draw on the substantial body of Comics
Studies literature that might have nudged Yeats’ strips to a less peripheral posi-
tion relative to his painting, and before comics might have been widely consid-
ered an acceptable form for accommodation within the purview of Art History.
Pyle’s text is not at all unusual in minimizing the importance of Yeats’ comic
strip work—indeed the majority of art-historical accounts fail to acknowledge
the material at all. Much of the work of connoisseurship and attribution, in this
case, is to be found in the non-scholarly output of cartoonist, collector, and
enthusiast Denis Gifford (Gifford 1975). This kind of archival work and canon-
building by independent researchers and practitioners has been an important
feature of comics historiography more generally, and Gifford’s catalogues are
indispensable sources for anybody interested in the period.
Attribution and identification were central to my own research into the
comic strip work of Jack Yeats because not only had the material not been fully
catalogued and assessed up to this point, but it had in fact been overlooked,
neglected, and, to some degree, swept under the carpet, over the intervening
century. My search for material took place for the most part in non-specialist
archives and library collections, such as the British Library and The Bodleian in
Oxford, where the comics featuring Yeats’ work were contained in hefty, col-
lected volumes, covering a year at a time. I was able to use Gifford’s catalogues
as a partial guide initially, and thus, following Morelli and Berenson, was in a
position to compare previously identified work with unattributed examples,
gradually learning to identify the specific idiosyncrasies that might offer
confirmation. Much of the work of attribution is concerned with comparison

of unsigned works with those that have been signed, and the signature itself is
an important indicator of authorship in comics as it is in fine art. Even where it
is present, the signature of a comic strip artist might not be consistent through-
out their career, and Yeats used several at different times. Some strips and car-
toons are straightforwardly signed Jack B. Yeats, others are signed Jack B. or
Jack Bee, and others again are signed with the word Jack accompanied by a
small drawing of a bee. However, his strips and cartoons were as likely to con-
tain no such indicators of authorship. The work for Punch magazine, most of
which was executed after his time with the comics, came mainly in the form of
single-panel cartoons and were all signed pseudonymously as W. Bird. In the
comics, the inclusion of a small bird somewhere within a panel, while not quite
qualifying as a signature, is a recurring motif that may have been deliberately
intended to denote a common, if not identifiable, authorship—and serves as a
useful clue for the researcher for this reason. In the case of some of his early,
single-panel cartoons, for example, those contributed to Ariel, a topical
humour magazine that ran for a year from January 1891, the text is often writ-
ten in Yeats’ own hand, and forms an important element of the overall image.
This text is often necessarily brief—a snappy phrase rather than an exchange of
dialogue or lengthy descriptive passage. It also means that, in contrast to the
cartoons with type-set captions, we can identify Yeats as the author of the text,
effectively on the basis of handwriting analysis, by noting consistencies with
examples in the authorized archive.
Whether or not we agree with Bill Blackbeard’s positing of the recurring
character as itself an essential feature of the form (Blackbeard 1974, p. 41: qtd.
in Groensteen 2007, p. 125), a perhaps obviously helpful feature from the
researcher’s perspective is the requirement of comic strip series that any central
protagonists should be instantly recognizable. Yeats achieves this, for example,
with his use of spot black in depicting the overcoat of his character Chubblock
Homes, drawing the viewer’s eye in every panel in which he appears (Fig. 2).
Repetition is a key feature of the medium, particularly as it operated in the
context of the busy pages of weekly comics in the 1890s. The recurring pro-
tagonist needs to be familiar, and convincing to the reader as the same charac-
ter who was last encountered in the previous week’s issue. Comics artists strove
for continuity, duplication, and consistency in their rendering of characters
from week to week, and this applied to secondary figures, environment, and
overall tone too. So, while an artist might deviate quite dramatically from the
style that typified a particular series, it was important that a specific look and
feel should be retained within the context of the series itself. This tends to
mean that once an artist has been identified as the author of a series, one can
assume that each instalment of that series can be attributed to them. However,
there are some exceptions to this, in the case of a small number of his Chubblock
Homes strips being executed by other artists, for example, and there are numer-
ous cases, during this period, of artists replacing each other for long periods of
time. Of course, these transitions would later become a commonplace with
42 M. CONNERTY
Fig. 2 Jack B. Yeats, “Chubblock Homes and His Little Dog Shirk in Quest of Porous
Plaisters”, Comic Cuts, 29 June 1895
regard to, for example, syndicated newspaper cartoons and long-running pop-
ular comic book characters. With Yeats the greatest difficulties relate to the
identification of strips (and also single-panel cartoons, and humorous illustra-
tions) that were not part of series and did not include recurring characters, and
there were a great many of these. Here style provides one of the very few clues.
A practice that I found useful as part of my own research was to copy exam-
ples of what I considered to be typical Yeats panels. The act of imitative draw-
ing involved a form of experiential “learning by doing” that I would credit as
providing a central foundation for my archival searches (Fig. 3). The practice
itself necessitated a high degree of attention to detail, the kinds of detail that
Morelli would have singled out in relation to the identification of personal style
in the drawings and paintings of the Renaissance. In the case of Yeats
Fig. 3 A selection of sketches based on Jack B. Yeats characters. (The author’s

sketchbook)
specifically, there is a distinctive way of rendering eyes that, in my experience,

is unique in the context of British comics of this period. Though I am not
remotely qualified as a draughtsman or cartoonist, I nonetheless found that the
process of actively engaging with Yeats’ character designs, and considering, for
example, the relative positioning of facial components, physical proportions,
the rendering of dynamic action, and quality/thickness of line, fostered a famil-
iarity with his style that I could not otherwise have achieved. Importantly, and
thankfully, this is regardless of the success or otherwise of my drawings as
objectively convincing facsimiles. Yeats has a very idiosyncratic way of render-
ing eyes whereby he emphasizes lines to the side of the eye rather than the
more conventional above and below, or, more common still, the full circle sur-
rounding the pupil: he favours an open “c” shape, as well as lines that slant
diagonally from the centre of the brow towards the cheek, lines that are more
often employed by cartoonists to suggest sadness or anxiety (Fig. 4). Yeats’
combining of these kinds of shapes and lines with, for example, an upturned
mouth, produces a very distinctive effect. In the thousands of individual car-
toon faces produced by him over the course of his career, he certainly does not
always employ these stylistic tics, but they are present in enough of them for
44 M. CONNERTY
Fig. 4 Jack B. Yeats “The Little Stowaways” (panel) 7 September 1907, Puck
this to have been a valuable identificatory feature, and one that I gained a more
intimate familiarity with through repeated attempts at mimicry in my notebook.
It is important to note a negative corollary of this. I became more aware of
what Yeats did not tend to do, stylistically speaking, and more adept at recogniz-
ing some work as having been produced by not-Yeats. There are time constraints
affecting every researcher, practical limits to how many hours can be spent look-
ing at material from a given era. An examination of all the comics published in
the UK in 1900, for example, would entail looking at well over 10,000 indi-
vidual pages, many of which would have contained multiple strips and cartoons.
Morelli’s methodology claims to offer a way to differentiate between artists
working within the conventions of the same iconographic traditions—Florentine
altarpiece painting, for example—and the specifically chirpy style and form of the
British comic strip was established from very early on, with many artists drawing
from a common pool of cartooning and graphic expression. Adherence to these
stylistic approaches was presumably encouraged, demanded even, at editorial
level, meaning that strips executed by different artists share many characteristics.
I did find it useful therefore to also familiarize myself with the work of some of
Yeats’ contemporaries, again by making careful copies of their work, particularly
the variations in facial characteristics. Not all of the work I thus copied was
attributable to particular artists, though this was less important as I was seeking
to establish for myself some of the broad stylistic conventions of the period,
against which I could set the recognizable differences in aspects of Yeats’ work.
To depart a little from the Morellian focus on “trifling” details, the minor
anatomical features that function as “tells” for the researcher, there are other
components of artworks that have offered identificatory clues to connoisseurs

where they occur regularly throughout an artist’s oeuvre. Idiosyncratic
approaches to framing and composition may suggest the style of a particular
artist. For example, in Yeats’ case, particularly in his series “Signor McCoy the
Circus Hoss” (Big Budget, June 1897–January 1899), but in many other strips
focused on dynamic action, there is a tendency to avoid the left-to-right, single-
plane staginess of many of his contemporaries, favouring background-to-
foreground action that lends a dimensionality to the image. Formal habits of
design, such as Yeats’ predilection for circular inserts to present either simulta-
neous or asynchronous action (Fig. 5), can draw the eye to a particular artist,
even on a double-page spread stuffed with competing strips. There is such
compositional homogeneity in the strips of this era that it can be difficult to
differentiate between artists on that basis—the majority of panels, for example,
show the full figures of the protagonists, with very rare instances of cropping,
or use of “close-ups”. However, different artists will tend more or less towards
sparseness in the rendering of backgrounds or the use of negative space; some
are more interested than others in location and architectural detail. Artists have
individual approaches to the way they approach the various expressive compo-
nents of comics—distinctive ways of rendering shock, fear, confusion, elation,
and so on in the facial expressions of their characters. They will often have
recourse to specific physical gestures and will present the dynamics of bodily
movement in recognizable ways. Different artists exhibit preferences for the
use of particular emanata; some don’t rely on these graphic indicators at all.
Fig. 5 Jack B. Yeats, “Roly Poly’s Tour” (panel), Comic Cuts 7 August 1909
46 M. CONNERTY
Artists have different ways of employing speech balloons, will position them
differently, and will fill them with more or less dialogue. During the period
under discussion, the presence or not of speech balloons can, of itself, help to
date a strip. There are some examples of their use in the 1890s, but they would
become far more prevalent during the first decade of the new century, follow-
ing the influx of reprints of American material by artists like Frederick Opper,
who popularized their use in the newspaper comics of the time.2
Morelli intended that his method allowed for the inevitable stylistic fluctua-
tions and evolving preoccupations that occur over the course of an artist’s
career, and penetrated through them, identifying habitual idiosyncrasies that
were retained, he felt, irrespective of broader changes in artistic approach. This
is quite a bold claim to make, particularly were we to apply it to a cartoonist
who produced many hundreds of drawings for different types of publication,
satisfying different editorial and readership demands, over more than 40 years
that saw substantial changes in the conventional tone, form, and mode of pre-
sentation of cartoons and comic strips in the UK. In respect of much of his
cartooning, illustrative, and comic strip work, it could be said of Yeats that the
Morellian approach is only effective within discrete areas of his practice—that
we might not expect to find the same idiosyncrasies of style and facture appear-
ing across the totality of the corpus, in examples ranging from his single panel
gag cartoons to the late expressionist oils. However, within a specific context,
his contributions to the comics published between 1892 and 1917 by Alfred
Harmsworth and C. Arthur Pearson, for example, the guiding principles of
Morellian attribution, are extremely effective. Not all of Yeats’ strips are exe-
cuted to the same degree of quality or finish. Regardless of the reasons for this,
it means that strips executed a short time apart might exhibit quite different
features in terms of figurative rendering or adherence to Yeats’ own character
design specifications. The subtle differences between these examples should
certainly not be taken as indicators of a different hand. The ability to recognize
rushed or sloppy work is a feature of the kind of familiarity associated with the
connoisseur’s engagement with a particular artist. It is perhaps especially rele-
vant in the examination of comic strip work, contributed on a weekly basis over
many years, and one should be open to lapses in consistency and, again, we
must be wary of how style may be adapted to meet the demands of different
genres, publications, and readerships. Yeats himself produced cartoons in a
variety of modes that range from the more or less naturalistic, heavily worked
style associated with the humour periodicals of the 1870s and 1880s, to the
minimalist cartoonishness of the new comics that emerged during the 1890s.
The vast majority of Yeats’ cartoons were published in black and white,
something that is also largely true for his contemporaries. However, a number
of strips, for example, those published in Puck in the early years of the twenti-
eth century, appeared in colour—some using three-colour printing processes,
some featuring only one additional colour, usually red. It is unlikely that Yeats
would have played any part in the assigning of these colour elements to par-
ticular portions of his drawings, and those decisions would have been
undertaken by the engravers who made the printing plates. There are cases,
particularly later on, where cartoonists would have provided colour guides with
their artwork, but this was not the norm at the time we are discussing.
Therefore, the application of colour is not suggestive of anything characteristic
of the artist, and thus problematizes our conception of “authorship” in these
cases, as well as complicating the business of attribution from a practical per-
spective. The same is true of the use of Ben Day patterns, the grids of dots that
can be used to introduce shading and tonal variety to comic strip images, which
were likewise applied subsequent to the submission of the artist’s work, and by
a different hand.3 Imperfections in printing processes can of course also affect
the fidelity of the published image. Ink and paper quality are additional ele-
ments, particularly given the deterioration of both over time, a factor exacer-
bated in the case of the comics published by Harmsworth’s Amalgamated
Press, which were produced using the cheapest available materials. All of these
factors are inconsequential relative to the degree of mediation that pertained to
the reproduction of cartoonists’ work only a short number of years earlier,
when it was commonplace for engravers and others involved in the process to
quite dramatically alter the appearance of what made it onto the published page.
The dating of material is, often, closely related to its attribution, indeed one
will often confirm the other, and is another one of the traditional preoccupa-
tions of the connoisseur. Confirmation of the year in which a work of art, or a
comic strip, was produced will impact substantially on the assessment of that
work from a scholarly perspective. As we have seen, the prevalence of bootleg-
ging meant that one could not always be certain as to the date of initial publica-
tion. Is the cartoon or strip anachronistic, outmoded or passé in the context of
the publication in which it appears or, rather, highly innovative and well ahead
of its time? The precise dating of any example allows us to consider the social
and political, as well as cultural and artistic, context in which it was produced.
This is a pressing issue with regard to much of the material that appeared in
British comics during the 1890s, for example. So much of it was reprinted from
earlier sources—often derived from other national contexts—and it is impor-
tant to be able to recognise the difference between the contemporary material
and that which had already appeared elsewhere, not least to gain an under-
standing of how artists were responding to the specific reader demands and
editorial imperatives of their time (Connerty 2017). Our understanding of
issues related to racial and ethnic representation, of changing attitudes towards
women, of class demographics and readerships, and of the various ways that
comics were responding to contemporary social and political conditions, are all
predicated on the specific temporalities of examples being analysed.
Another major difference between comics and the fine art with regard to
connoisseurship derives from the prominent role played by text in the majority
of strips and cartoons produced during this era. In the case of British comics,
this text appeared in the form of captions below the panels to which they refer,
something that was also true of single-panel cartoons, which additionally
included a brief, often punning, title above the image. The style in which this
48 M. CONNERTY
text was written was arguably more formulaic and governed by convention
than were the images themselves. There is very little to differentiate the accom-
panying text in an episode of Tom Browne’s “Squashington Flats” in Comic
Cuts from that attached to an example of Frank Holland’s “Chokee Bill the
Burglar” in Illustrated Chips, both of which are written in a lightly comedic,
uncomplicated, and accessible manner consistent with the overall tone of the
publications in which they appeared. Attempting to locate any such differences
that might exist would require the mobilization of a different mode of analysis
entirely, responding to literary rather than visual cues. This is a not insignificant
problem in establishing the precise nature of the contributions made by indi-
vidual artists to the comics that published their work, and to the assessment of
the full extent of their artistry. It is likely that in many cases, cartoonists and
comic strip artists provided, in verbal form, the gist of a gag or a narrative to a
sub-editor who then set it down according to the house style of the publica-
tion, and indeed the prevailing style of British comics generally. In the case of
Jack Yeats, there is good reason to suspect that he may have had more of a hand
in devising the text also, as he was publishing fiction and short plays for chil-
dren during the early 1900s and would later author an additional number of
novels and plays.
It is important here to note a key distinction between the conventional focus
of the art connoisseur and that of the comics scholar. In the main, connoisseurs
of art are concerned with identifying original works, and the authenticity of
that work as having been produced by the hand of a given artist is paramount
in any assessment that they make. Thus, the science that supports (some would
argue “supersedes”) connoisseurship may include the analysis of paints, with
specific pigments revealing information that can date the work or place it in a
geographical location. The constituents of canvases and frames can similarly
yield important information. In the case of published comic strips, as opposed
to the original drawings from which they were derived, these factors are largely
irrelevant. However, original comics art may contain clues, in the form of
agency stamps, for example, that point towards a specific roster of artists, or
indeed signatures that did not appear in the work as published. In the case of
Yeats’ original drawings for Punch, held in the National Gallery archive, the
reverse of the cards feature Yeats’ own address, presumably for payment pur-
poses. The question of authenticity, in the sense of assessing whether or not a
particular artefact is genuine, obviously applies more readily to original art than
to published comics and is a contemporary issue that would not have applied
to the same degree in Yeats’ time, when less value was placed on original work
by cartoonists.
The bootlegging of comic strip material for wider commercial distribution
was an issue from early on, with, for example, Rodolphe Töpffer’s Histoire de
Mr. Vieux Bois (1837) plagiarized and retitled as Adventures of Mr. Obadiah
Oldbuck (1841, 1849) by Tilt and Bogue in England, and subsequently by two
separate publishers in New York (Kunzle 2007, p. 162; 175, Gardner 2017).
This kind of international piracy has remained an issue in various parts of the
world, for example, in the case of the widespread distribution of illegally

reprinted manga in China during the 1990s (Lent 2015, p. 37). In the case of
original artwork, due to the relative difficulties in producing convincing fakes
of entire strips or comics pages, and because such artwork is unique and may
be widely known to be already in the possession of particular collectors or
archives, it is much more common for forgeries, when they do appear, to come
in the form of one-off sketches and drawings by well-known artists. These may
be based on published images, or on original work available via the Internet or
other sources, but have the advantage to the forger of not being falsifiable due
to the existence elsewhere of the same piece, as with specific pages, for exam-
ple. The comics collecting market is still relatively small, and the sale of work
by key artists is unlikely to go unnoticed, making duplication of this kind more
difficult to attempt. Artists whose styles are simple or minimalist and whose
work may appear to be superficially easy to imitate, like Charles Schultz or Matt
Groening, are more likely to be copied in this way than somebody whose style
is more complex, such as Bernie Wrightson. This is all very much the domain
of the stereotypical connoisseur introduced at the very beginning of this chap-
ter, but of course, whether or not the answers are being sought in relation to
commerce or scholarship, methodologies may be equally applicable in
either case.
Consideration of comics in terms of connoisseurship begs the question of
not only the assessment of comics as art but also of the representing of comics
material within the space of the auction house or gallery. Andre Molotiu has
argued that the appreciation of comic strip art in these fine art contexts, par-
ticularly original rather than printed work, implies very different aesthetic cri-
teria and modes of looking (2010). Examination of a piece of comics art on a
gallery wall, which in its original form is often at least twice the size that it
appears in published form, encourages both the apprehension of the whole
page as a single image and a focus on small details of execution, both in prefer-
ence to the conventional zig-zag reading down the page for narrative compre-
hension. The researcher or scholar as Morellian connoisseur is engaging in an
analogous activity in that by isolating specific graphic elements from their rep-
resentational function within the panel, and, by extension, the narrative func-
tion of the panel within the broader context of the strip, the sequential
component of comics is relegated in importance. Indeed, the narrative qualities
of the work tend to be not only de-emphasized, but effectively ignored alto-
gether, highlighting oppositions between the literary and visual arts modes of
analysis that broadly characterize the two central approaches to comics scholar-
ship. There are many examples of this decontextualizing of comics material,
such as the contemporary proliferation of single panels posted in isolation to
blogs and image hosting sites, or where such images are repurposed entirely
as memes.
The Internet has to some extent opened up the activity of attribution to a
wider community that includes consumers and fans as much as scholars,
democratizing this aspect of connoisseurial investigation via calls for help in the
50 M. CONNERTY
identification of “mystery” artists. A sample thread on the Certified Guaranty

Company (CGC) forum, in which a member seeks help in identifying the artist
behind a number of panels from a 1940s romance comic, is illustrative of how
the Morellian approach is instinctively adopted for this purpose (“Can you
identify the artist of these comic book panels?”, 2010). Responses focus on a
range of details: a character’s mouth; the positioning of an eye socket; the ren-
dering of fingers; as well as idiosyncrasies of composition and layout, as part of
arguments in favour of this or that artist. This approach to identifying artists,
often successful, exploits the range of reading experience in a group of enthu-
siasts and independent researchers rather than that of the individual expert of
traditional art historiography. Open discussion among contributors to com-
ments threads or listserv groups lend the process a transparency and a recourse
to demonstrable evidence that was perhaps not always a factor in traditional
connoisseurship. This is certainly not to deny the value of scholarship and
expertise but to note the possibilities opened up by the wider sharing and dis-
semination of images, the increased accessibility of digital archives, and the
building of dynamic communities of knowledge and research. This “democra-
tization” of connoisseurship is also reflected in the ways that connoisseurial
engagement is encouraged by contemporary publishing practices such as the
production of lavishly illustrated artist’s editions featuring original art, and the
high-quality reprints of, for example, early American newspaper strips at origi-
nal scale. These are only the most recent ways that the comics publishing
industry has worked to foster a culture of collecting and discernment, as well
as an acceptance of its substantial economic implications. Indeed, as Jean-Paul
Gabillet notes, the repackaging of comics in the form of expensive coffee table
books represents a departure from comics’ popular cultural origins as afford-
able and accessible publications (Gabillet 2016, p. 23). Though reasonably
new to comics, this kind of vaguely academic presentation has been common
since the 1950s with regard to specialist genres in music publishing, such as
jazz and folk, which encouraged a scholarly approach to the music via the
inclusion of detailed sleeve notes, or booklet inserts, that offered biographical,
generic, and, particularly in the case of reissued material, cultural and historical
context, encouraging the consumer to consider specialist knowledge, expertise,
and education as important components of the overall package.
The connoisseurial attitude towards comic strip art is something relatively
new. For this reason, its application to the comics of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century is inevitably an act of recovery, of rediscovery, and vali-
dation. The connoisseur thus conceived aspires to a level of intimacy with the
work of a period that becomes a foundation for a kind of authority: the ability
to make substantial claims regarding comics history, identification, and attribu-
tion, which are necessarily open to refutation, but which are rooted in an
empirical accumulation of evidential material and a thorough engagement with
a given corpus. This authority might also be said to derive from structures of
trust and collegiality within the Comics Studies community (Freedberg, 2006,
p. 38). This is still a reasonably youthful field, much of the historical territory
remaining to be mapped out, and, while acknowledging the importance of

socio-cultural structures, industrial contexts, and other determining factors,
the figure of the individual comics artist remains central to that activity. Without
recourse to theoretical rationale or historical foundations, many who operate
within the arenas of either comics art commerce or scholarly historical research
will cite the recurrence of superficially inconsequential stylistic details as key to
the identification of unsigned work by any artist. What the Morellian method
offers is a refinement and codification of what is essentially a common-sense,
deductive approach to the attribution of comic strips and cartoons.
Notes
1. My research into the work of Yeats was conducted as part of my PhD studies at
Central Saint Martins UAL, 2014–18, and subsequently as the basis for my book
The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
2. For more on the appearance of American reprints in British comics during this
era, see Michael Connerty, “Happy Ike, The Pink Kid and the American Presence
in Early British Comics,” International Journal of Comic Art 19:1 (Spring/
Summer 2017): 525–37.
3. For a thorough account of Ben Day and related print history see Guy Lawley’s
blog Legion of Andy, at https://legionofandy.com/2015/09/09/ben-day-dots-
part-4-pre-history-origins/#arrival
References
Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Berenson, Bernard. 1927. Three Essays in Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Berenson, Bernard. 1902. The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. London: George
Bell and Sons.
Can you identify the artist of these comic book panels? 2010. Certified Guaranty
Company (CGC) online forum thread. Accessed at https://www.cgccomics.com/
boards/topic/191559-can-you-identify-this-artist-mystery-artists/ 10 May 2021.
Connerty, Michael. 2017. Happy Ike, The Pink Kid, and the American Presence in
Early British Comics. International Journal of Comic Art. 19:1, pp. 538–546.
Diamond, Clare. 2015. Connoisseurship in a globalised art market: reconciling
approaches to authenticity. Eras Journal. 17:1, pp. 25–44.
Freedberg, David. 2006. Why connoisseurship matters. In Munuscula Amicorum:
Contributions on Rubens and His Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, ed. K. van
Stighelen, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 29–43.
Friedlander, Max. 1960. On Art and Connoisseurship. Boston MA: Beacon.
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painters and engravers in London 1760–1850. Media, Culture and Society. 7,
pp. 399–425.
Gabillet, Jean-Paul. 2016. Reading facsimile reproductions of original artwork: the
comics fan as connoisseur. In IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE. 17:4, pp. 16–25. http://
www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/1318.
Accessed on 23 November 2020.
52 M. CONNERTY
Gifford, Denis. 1975. The British Comic Catalogue 1874–1975. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press.
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method. History Workshop. 9, pp. 5–36.
Gardner, Jared. 2017. Antebellum Popular Serialities and the Transatlantic Birth of
“American” Comics. In Media of Serial Narrative, ed. Frank Kelleter. pp. 37–52.
Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press
Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
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temporary art institution. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. 9:1, pp. 1–10.
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Press of Mississippi.
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thetic object. The Hooded Utilitarian. http://www.hoodedutilitarian.
com/2010/10/permanent-inkby-andrei-molotiu/. Accessed 26 June 2013.
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Richter. London: George Bell and Sons.
Neer, Richard. 2005. Connoisseurship and the stakes of style. Critical Inquiry.
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the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts, ed. Ronald
D. Spencer. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–27.
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University Press.
Scully, Richard. 2018. Eminent Victorian Cartoonists Vols 1–3. London: The Political
Cartoon Society.
Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging
Memories
Maaheen Ahmed
Abstract This chapter takes the pioneering visual epistemology of the art his-
torian Aby Warburg as the starting point for a guide to reading comics. It
transposes Warburg’s montage of images in the incomplete Mnemosyne Atlas to
comics along two axes: it treats comics pages as collages and examines the sym-
bolic and emotional charge of comics images. The Mnemosyne Atlas acquires
special relevance through reading comics as collages of words, images, panels
and of different media or imitations thereof. Combining the ideas propelling
the Mnemosyne Atlas with the concept of media memories, or the ways in which
media remember and reference each other, this chapter reads two French-
language comics (Hugo Pratt’s Les Celtiques and Manu Larcenet’s Le Combat
ordinaire), to show how these insights can be applied to a spectrum of comics
ranging from genre fiction to personal stories.
Keywords Aby Warburg • Hugo Pratt • Manu Larcenet • Memory •

Collage • Montage
The German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) can be credited with
introducing a new, modern method of visual analysis that moved beyond artis-
tic canons to understand human expression across diverse image-making
M. Ahmed (*)
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
e-mail: Maaheen.Ahmed@ugent.be

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_4
54 M. AHMED
activities. He founded the Warburg Institute in Hamburg, which moved to

London in 1933 with the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Together with
colleagues such as Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, Warburg
honed a new methodology for analysing images, first called iconography and
later expanded into iconology. As elaborated by Panofsky, iconography is the
description of images based on their content and their context, whereas iconol-
ogy adds an additional level of meaning by focusing on the symbolism activated
by the artwork (Panofsky 2019). This chapter focuses on the related but more
intuitive methodology that Warburg honed through his incomplete Bilderatlas
Mnemosyne [Mnemosyne Picture Atlas]: “[w]hereas iconology encourages
detailed paraphrase, Mnemosyne embraces the concision, ambiguity, and insta-
bility of metaphoric expression” (Johnson 2012, p. xi). Warburg’s project
shares similarities with Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk [Arcades Project], for
which the method was “literary montage. I have nothing to say, only to show”
(Benjamin quoted in Johnson 2012, p. 18). Based on juxtapositions and asso-
ciations, this methodology is a productive mode of understanding the often
sequential and frequently syncopated art of comics. Building on the collage-
like aspects of comics and the emotional expressivity of images, this chapter
elaborates on how Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, composed of montaged images
with shared tropes, paves possibilities for reading comics.
The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

Warburg worked on the Mnemosyne Atlas from 1927 until his sudden death
from heart failure in 1929. At the time of his death, the Mnemosyne Atlas com-
prised of 63 plates, measuring around 200 × 150 cm (with notes permitting the
reconstruction of up to 79 plates).1 To fulfil his aim of mapping the transfer of
images and the recurrence of similar themes across centuries of European and
global visual culture, spanning antiquity to the early decades of the twentieth
century, Warburg would have needed an indefinite number of plates. Themes
covered by the existing plates include cosmologies, pathos and figures such as
the Muses, the nymph and Fortuna.2
Georges Didi-Huberman considers the Mnemosyne Atlas as a reflection of
contemporaneous methods in the humanities, especially those established by
Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, founders of the Annales School, which pro-
pelled the study of mentalities (psychology of an epoch) and a transdisciplinary,
de-centred approach to history and historiography (Didi-Huberman 2011).
Matthew Rampley draws similar parallels between Walter Benjamin, Warburg
and contemporaneous developments in psychoanalysis: both Benjamin and
Warburg sought to explore collective memory’s “proximity to the process of
repetition-compulsion outlined by Freud” (1999, p. 112). In order to recon-
struct connections and bridge individual and collective experience, both turned
to montage (Didi-Huberman 2003b, p. 191). The Mnemosyne Atlas, despite
its vastness, offers some lessons that can be useful for reading comics. Two
components in Warburg’s iconographical project seem especially pertinent: the
emotional charge of images and the technique of montage or collage.
READING COMICS WITH ABY WARBURG: COLLAGING MEMORIES 55
The evolutionary biologist Richard Semon’s concept of the Engramm had a

strong influence on Aby Warburg’s cultural memory work: engrams are psychic
imprints resulting from powerful shocks. They reflect Warburg’s interest in the
transposition of intense emotional experiences, initially “stored as ‘mnemonic
energy’”, engraved in collective consciousness and channelled into art (Assmann
2011, p. 198, 358). Warburg sought “to explore the specifically visual forms
of the engram”, which he called dynamograms (Rampley 1999, p. 104).
Dynamograms underpin Warburg’s Cultural History project of tracing visual
memories and their transformations across diverse forms of cultural produc-
tion, from popular, everyday images to paintings and sculptures. They capture
the expressive affordances of images and their ability to move their viewers.
Warburg’s Cultural History was a form of psychohistory, based on emotions
and their expression, seeking to construct a historical archive of intensities
[archive historique des intensités] (Didi-Huberman 2001). Dynamograms pre-
cede the Pathosformeln and can be seen as the graphic containers of those for-
mulae, as in the case of ornamental lines indicating movement in comics
(Schankweiler and Wüschner 2019, p. 110).3
Pathosformel captures the visualization of emotions in images: “models of
sense” or the emotive gestures embedded in images (Didi-Huberman 2003b,
p. 626), “[p]athos formulae are the visible symptoms—corporeal, gestural,
presented, figured—of a psychic time irreducible to a simple thread of rhetori-
cal, sentimental or individual turns” (p. 622). The Pathosformel is situated at
the crossroads where visual heritage—accepted means of visualizing and trans-
mitting emotions—and individual artistic style meet. These “formulas” have a
broad scope; they can be as specific as the loaded expression or pose of a spe-
cific character or they can be present across groups of images that speak, for
instance, of a specific era or period style as in the case of the hyperexpressive,
corpulent bodies of Baroque art. Anchored in the figurative, the Pathosformel
is an invitation to consider how images convey emotions, following certain
conventions and, in a manifestation of individual style, breaking away from
others. This lies at the heart of the Mnesmosyne project, “the images of which
are intended, most immediately, to present nothing but a traceable inventory
of pre-coined expressions, which demanded that the individual artist either
ignore or absorb this mass of inherited impressions surging forward in this dual
manner” (Warburg and Rampley 2009, p. 280). The emotionality of comics
images is encoded through the styles and forms of their stories, which are in
turn informed by a history of image making. The kinds of Pathosformel in com-
ics are often tempered with a certain distance in keeping with the exaggeration
and irony of caricature that pervades most comics drawing.
Writing on Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Johnson points out that “the medi-
ation of memory, be it personal or cultural, still functions metaphorically”
(Johnson 2012, p. 4). Correspondingly, the many monsters encountered in
comics—Frankenstein’s creatures, or the Swamp Thing, which give form to
collective anxieties (rapid technological and scientific progress, human
encroachment on and alienation from the natural world)—function as mne-
monic metaphors, laden with emotional and historical import.
56 M. AHMED
Reading Comics as Collage

Art and memory have a filial, affective relationship: Mnemosyne, the goddess
of memory, was the mother of the nine Muses. Memories—of the maker, of the
reader and the viewer, of overlapping contexts—breathe life into the arts.
Elaborating on scholarship on memory and Warburg, Karin Kukkonen (2008)
has argued for the importance of contextual knowledge in comics such as Bill
Willingham et al.’s Fables, which rework popular fairy tales. Taking inspiration
from the Mnemosyne Atlas, it is possible to visualize the functioning of memory
in popular culture as a collage of images and, by extension, contexts. As a form
and practice, the collage is echoed by comics pages, with their orchestration of
diverse verbal-visual elements and images, and by images that mix media (see
also Ahmed 2016, pp. 53–74; Dittmer 2010, pp. 228–233). In both situa-
tions, the collage reflects the imbrication—and intervention—of memories and
associations within the comics story.
“Every medium”, writes Aleida Assmann, “opens up its own access to cul-
tural memory” (2011, p. 11). Comics offer access to an essentially visual cul-
tural memory comprising both still and moving pictures, experimental narrative
temporalities and fantastic tropes, which is transposed into a distinctive comics
idiom. This idiom is a child of modernity, a “sponge” of iconic images but also
techniques,4 such as sequence, ellipses and the materialities of production and
reproduction.
Emphasizing the anarchic, fragmentary nature of early comics—a fragmen-
tation generated by seriality as well as panels—Jared Gardner suggests that
comics “was dedicated to diagramming the serial complexities of modern life
and fixing the fragments of modernity on the page” (2012, p. 7). In an earlier
article, Gardner also links the interaction of memories to create a visual archive
in comics:
The comics form is forever troubled by that which cannot be reconciled, synthe-
sized, unified, contained within the frame …The excess data – the remains of the
everyday – is always left behind (even as the narrative progresses forward in time),
a visual archive for the reader’s necessary work of rereading, resorting and refram-
ing. (2006, pp. 801–802)
The collage form of comics—the arrangement of panels on a page, the jux-

taposition of words and images within panels and on pages—coexists with dif-
ferent levels of memory, of associations channelled by drawing styles but also
representations and compositions. Collage, established in aesthetic discourse
through modern art, “is not just a loss of order–it shatters order” (Assmann
2011, pp. 270–271). However, collage also goes further since “[p]resenting
history as montage involved ‘telescoping the past via the present,’ whereby the
linear notion of history was replaced by the idea of the dialectical image”
(Rampley 1999, p. 102). The image is caught in a diachronic dialogue, looking
towards the past and the future, just like Benjamin’s Angel of History.
Collaging can be seen as the practice structuring both the Mnemosyne Atlas
and comics. It is also the act performed by the comics reader in piecing together
different elements, but this performance does not necessarily result in closure.
The connections in comics are more constructed and less reader-dependent
and intuitive, but they remain a way of communicating and generating knowl-
edge through images while channelling cultural memory. The worlds of comics
are vast: we encounter dream worlds, action-packed sequences, slapstick com-
edy and other pillars of “light” entertainment. These elements coexist with
more existential concerns—mortality, solitude, human relationships—that are
treated with different degrees of intensity in the two comics discussed below.
Thierry Smolderen has proposed the concept of polygraphy to account for
the diverse drawing styles and techniques coexisting in comics (see, e.g. 2014,
pp. 53–58). This can be extended to the presence of different media—from
novels and films to popular entertainment and folk rituals such as the carnival—
that influence and inform comics images and stories through direct references
but also indirectly, through structural, generic similarities. Comics collage
memories of different kinds of media. These memories travel through evoca-
tions of other media, styles and images and often activate different degrees of
narrative weight and emotional power. The concept of media memories offers
a means of expanding on the collage-like aspects inherent in comics (see Ahmed
2019). Approaching Warburg’s Mnemosyne project through media memories
enables mapping the vast network of visual influences, the meaning-making
processes connected to those images and the related emotional charge layer-
ing comics.
I will trace the media memories conveying and entangling personal and col-
lective memories in two very different comics: Hugo Pratt’s Les Celtiques
[Celtic Tales] and Manu Larcenet’s Le Combat ordinaire [Ordinary Victories].
These comics are separated by almost three decades of French-language comics
production that reflect different degrees of interaction with the emergence and
importation (from the English-language context) of the graphic novel, which
privileges experimental and self-contained stories (see Baetens and Frey 2014).
They are particularly intriguing to discuss in tandem because of their respective
proximity to genre fiction (Les Celtiques) and graphic memoir (Combat ordi-
naire). For examining them more closely, I propose a Warburgian comics read-
ing hinged on two questions:
1. What kinds of connections are enforced through images? I focus on the

connections with media that are activated by images and the genres they
inhabit.
2. How do visual style and textual narration converge to generate and man-
age emotions?
In contrast to Warburg’s project, the starting point for the atlas of images I
work with below is located within each comic rather than without. Further,
through the notion of media memories, I attune this reading to allusions
58 M. AHMED
generated and references to other media. The mapping of cultural memory is

consequently a mapping of both (popular) cultural memories and of the vista
of memories that comics create for themselves and that are channelled primar-
ily through images, style, characterization and storytelling. This is, of course,
only one possible means of reading comics with Warburg. Other potential
readings could focus more on style and specific Pathosformel or work with a
bigger corpus and a database of images to draw connections with images
in comics.
Les Celtiques: Genre Fiction

and Mythological Dreaming
Many of the short stories collected in the Casterman editions of Les Celtiques
first appeared in the magazine, Pif Gadget, in the early 1970s. A reformatting
and rebranding of the periodical Vaillant (1945–1969), Pif Gadget
(1969–1993) stood out from other comics magazines through rejecting the
practice of serializing stories and offering instead as announced by its subtitle,
“tout en récits complets” [all as complete stories]. One of the publication’s
main attractions, Pratt’s Corto Maltese adventures, combines the media memo-
ries of genre fiction (adventure, romance, fantasy) with references to myth,
literature and historical contexts. The stories collected in Les Celtiques unfold
during the last two years of the First World War. Casterman published the Les
Celtiques stories in a new series, “Les grands romans de la bande dessinée”, in
1980 and would continue to republish (occasionally in colour) at least four of
the six stories.
The title of the third story in Les Celtiques “Concert en O Mineur pour
Harpe et Nitroglycérine” [“Concert in O minor for Harp and Nitroglycerin”]
reflects the short story’s confluence, or even blending, of the individual and the
collective, since nitroglycerine is used for heart medication as well as explosives.
A confluence of music and chemistry, the title also reflects the combination of
romance and adventure. In this story, Pratt’s iconic, solitary sailor, Corto
Maltese, finds himself in Ireland to avenge the death of his friend and fictional
Sinn Féin leader, Pat Finnucan. The year is 1917, a year after the Easter Rising,
with pro-British militias fighting Sinn Féin. The narrative opens with an
encounter between an armoured car of the militia and the Sinn Féin fighters,5
placing Corto in the centre of the conflict, while also leaving him detached and
unharmed since Corto is the archetype of the eternal foreigner, mysterious and
without ties. In “Concert” he helps Sinn Féin procure weapons, avenges his
friend’s death and then goes his own, solitary way. This solitude is reinforced
by interludes of silent panels portraying Corto, often only a shadow, in a
deserted town or the windy shore (Pratt 2000, pp. 60, 71, 73). Corto, like
many comics heroes, is an amalgam of media memories bringing together
influences ranging from the adventurer, the noir hero and even something of
the superhero owing to his ability to always transcend death and danger (see
Eco 1972). Pat Finnucan’s widow, Sinn Féin militant and one of Corto’s many
love interests (which change with each new story and setting), Moira (Banshee)
O’Dannan, calls him, not without irony, a “superhomme” (Pratt 2000, p. 66).
Like most Corto Maltese stories (and the superhero genre), romance and
adventure are combined in “Concert”. In order to ensure reiteration and
Corto’s trademark solitude, the romances are short-lived. This is also the case
with Moira who has already seen the death of Pat Finnucan and their former
friend O’Sullivan. This motif is resurrected in another story of Les Celtiques,
discussed below where Corto is told that Pandora Groovesnore, a young heir-
ess he encountered in his first adventure, The Ballad of the Salty Sea, is still in
love with him and is often seen sitting on the dunes of Cape Cod “à regarder
l’infini” [staring into infinity] (Pratt 2000, p. 104), a gesture that Corto repeats
at the end of the same page and through several other stories, expressing his
status as the eternal, solitary dreamer (Fig. 1). The pose in profile, the easiest
to draw and most familiar to comics because it suggests movement, also
expresses his mysteriousness: we only see one side of him. This final page of
“Concert” exemplifies the use of Pathosformel in comics genre fiction and in
the Corto Maltese stories in particular. Within the span of this one page, Moira
and Corto are united and separated. While Corto’s face remains inscrutable,
his body postures betray desire, dangerous and impossible for Corto, both
within the storyworld and beyond it; besides Moira’s belief that she is cursed,
having suffered the death of two husbands, Corto must remain without a fam-
ily if he is to have all his exotic adventures and romances. The gulls reappearing
in every tier of the page symbolize Corto’s connection with the uprootedness
of the sea.
On the final page of “Concert”, the Celtic harp, a symbol of Irish national-
ism and portrayed early in the story through a graffiti, reestablishes itself as a
media memory (Pratt 2000, p. 60). Moira evokes the harp at the end of the
story and traces its inspiration to the sound of the wind passing through the
bones of a whale skeleton, which appears in the foreground of the same panel,
hovering between reality and imagination (Pratt 2000, p. 74). In addition to
symbolizing Celtic folklore and Irish nationalism, the harp also incorporates
allusions to death and figures as an instrument of mourning. This symbolism is
reinforced by the Celtic crosses in the graveyards which serve as meeting places
for Corto and Sinn Féin militants (Pratt 2000, pp. 60–61, 71, 73). Further,
while appearing only as a graffiti, albeit detailed and glorifying (the handle is an
angelic figure), the harp evokes and comments on its own mediated essence as
well as the inescapable silence of the comic strip—it puts to test the limits of
word and image.
The role of media memories is even more pronounced in the fourth story,
“Songe d’un matin d’hiver” [Dream of a Winter Morning] which, as foreshad-
owed by its title, evokes Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and opens
with Oberon, the king of fairies and the sprite Puck, who meet after 300 years
at Stonehenge, worried that the Germans might succeed in invading Britain,
bringing their own supernatural creatures with them and eradicating the
60 M. AHMED
Fig. 1 Final page of the short story, “Concert en O mineur pour harpe et nitro-
glycérine”, Les Celtiques, p. 74
remains of Celtic Britain. The two turn to Morgan Le Fay (summoned from
Avalon) and Merlin (summoned from the Forest of Brocéliande), figures from
the legends of King Arthur, destined to rise and defend Britain whenever
needed. The opening scene is emblematic of the overlapping spaces of dream,
reality and legend in the Corto Maltese stories but also comics in general, facili-
tated through the freedom of drawing to traverse real and imaginary spaces
through the immeasurable evocativeness of the page, easily transformed by a

few marks into spaces of multiple dimensions and fluid borders. This easy tran-
sition between fact and fiction enables the incorporation of media memories of
fantasy and some subversion. In Merlin’s words, Corto “songe les yeux ouverts
et ceux qui songent les yeux ouverts sont dangereux parce qu’ils ne savent pas
quand leur songe prend fin” [dreams with his eyes open and those who dream
with their eyes open are dangerous because they do not know when their
dream ends] (Pratt 2000, p. 81).
The comic can be read as parallel to the large panels of the Mnemosyne Atlas:
it collages Oberon, Puck, Morgan and Merlin, uniting them through their
connections with Celtic folklore and British literature in the comics story. They
wield a nostalgic, affective hold over the story. The four figures guide Corto
through a characteristically unwitting victory saving Britain from an impending
attack by the Germans. The story ends where it began: with Corto sleeping at
Stonehenge without knowing how he got there. The circular, serial structure
of “Songe d’un matin d’hiver” mirrors the workings of both memory and
remediation (Sielke 2013, p. 48). Sabine Sielke ties this claim to sociologist
Niklas Luhmann’s observation that “[m]emory constructs repetition, that is,
redundancy, with continued openness towards what is current, with continu-
ally renewed iterability” (2013, p. 47). In interweaving historical events and
media memories of myth and literature, this Corto Maltese story, like many
others, exemplifies the processes of iteration of different memories and their
renewal through a new context. It thrives on the similarities and potential con-
nections established through different worlds of fiction.
There is an inevitable distance in comics, an implicit remove that paints
everything in the second degree, while incorporating, depending on the style,
a trace of the persona of the artist, or graphiateur (a concept introduced by
Philippe Marion, see Baetens 2001). This style is a negotiation between per-
sonal expression, training and constraints imposed by trends and the limita-
tions of the medium. In the case of Corto, the lines forming and surrounding
him are distinctly lyrical and carefree, often hurried, similar to the quick stream
of action and Corto’s elusive mysteriousness, which is compatible with the flat-
ness of serial, recurrent characters. Son of a gypsy sorceress and a British sailor,
Corto combines magic and adventure. Adventure and fantasy, and the escap-
ism associated with these genres, form part of the media memories of comics.
While the visual style of Pratt and the markers of the comics adventure genre
set the tone, the references to other literary and mythological characters situate
the Corto Maltese stories in a contrasting space where the protagonist meets
figures from “higher” literary works and legends on his turf. Pratt’s trademark
strokes and heavy chiaroscuro subject the media memories of literature and of
popular entertainment—ranging from comics to the puppetry encountered in
the fifth story—to the laws of the comic, which partakes of only as much as is
needed of each media memory to tell an action-packed story.
The fifth story, “Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes” [Burlesque
between Zuydcoote and Bray-Dunes], unfolds in an Allied army camp in
62 M. AHMED
Northwest France. The story opens with a strange shadow play in which Merlin
despairingly watches Viviane fall in love with an American captain. This captain
has the form of a skinny cat whose first words are those of the wartime song,
“Mademoiselle from Armentières”, to which the cat sardonically adds that he
will forget Viviane as soon as the war is over and he returns home (Pratt 2000,
p. 92) (Fig. 2). The still charmed Viviane, however, longs to hear about the
fairytale world of Hollywood and hopes to make a career there. The short play
ends with a dejected Merlin giving in to his mirthless sleep. The bizarreness of
the story is generated through the intermingling of the brash, modern American
world and the medieval world of Arthurian legends and folktales, which also
represent the preponderance of the Old Continent’s history. Visually, the play
recalls silhouette animation, especially Lotte Reiniger’s films, and references
early Hollywood cinema; media memories of both are interlaced in the medium
of comics. These memories are rendered porous through the imitation of sil-
houette animation, which interweaves the disparate worlds. Notably, the final
panel in the image below places the reader-viewer right behind Corto: we
watch the play with him. Different diegetic levels are collaged in this panel.
Reading the comics story is a collaged experience interweaving the diverse
media contexts of Reiniger’s films, First World War songs and Arthurian leg-
ends. This coexistence is facilitated by the medium-specificity of comics, which
includes limited claims on realism or diegetic logic. Memories of the First
World War also form part of the atlas. Caïn Groovesnore, a young boy who
Fig. 2 Excerpts from the shadow theatre performance with an incredulous Merlin
witnessing Viviane’s seduction by the American cat. Les Celtiques, “Burlesque entre
Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes”, Les Celtiques, p. 100
played a central role in the first Corto Maltese adventure, Una ballata del mare
salato [The Ballad of the Salty Sea] (published in the Italian comics magazine
Sgt. Kirk in 1967), reappears as an officer. His falling into shock after shooting
a lieutenant evokes shell shock, even though it is caused by a spell by Mélodie
(Viviane in the show). Similarly, the puppets used for the silhouette play evoke
the mechanization of bodies through their spasmodic, unnatural movements
and, by extension, the disabilities engendered by the First World War, the first
large-scale mechanized war.
Corto’s participation in the war itself remains limited: he is unfazed in
“Songe d’un matin d’hiver”, decorated with medals from both the Germans (a
parting token from a captured German spy) and the British (for helping them),
and briefly puts on the latter for the amusement of himself and the crow (the
form adopted by Puck to communicate with Corto) who had been his com-
panion throughout the story (Pratt 2000, p. 93). A silent panel with the laugh-
ing crow and the posing Corto captures three main associations well grounded
in comics: that of satire and caricature, the easy sliding between dream and
reality, and the relative simplicity and flatness of the characters, which bestows
an aura of popular myth.
“Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes” ends with the following remark
by Corto to Captain Rothschild, who confirms that all will be well (the war will
be won, Caïn’s victim will survive and Caïn himself will be released from coma,
spell and service): “tu ne voudrais pas toujours parler de guerre, n’est-ce pas?…
Et puis nous n’avons pas grand-chose à voir dans cette histoire” [You don’t
want to always talk about war, no?… After all we don’t really have much to do
with this story] (Pratt 2000, p. 118). Such often ironic, but always distanced,
participation bestows on Corto the status of a mediator between history and
popular entertainment, dialoguing with, and reworking, established images in
the idioms of comics and popular literature. The hasty succession of events,
especially towards the end of the stories, is propelled by the short story format
but is recurrent in most serial publications.
Although it is not the representation of history, but the representation of
personal memories that occupies most contemporary graphic novels, Corto,
despite his detachment, personalizes history for his readers and even catalyzes
it through his charisma and distance. He personifies the limits of individualiza-
tion in serialised fiction as already suggested by Umberto Eco’s analysis of the
superhero: the mysteriousness that shrouds most of his personality and his life
is both a layer of coolness and an obstruction for the reader to be fully invested
in his stories (we know that everything will be more or less all right in the end)
(Eco 1972). Corto mediates the memories of the popular fiction hero and
superhero while remaining a singular character with his distinctive story
moulded by Pratt’s trademark style.
Pratt’s lines materialize and adapt the mnemonic energia of both the First
World War and Celtic folklore. The rapprochement between the two is ren-
dered possible by the playful essence of comics themselves, which can afford to
unite or collage disparate worlds, liberally and capriciously. This remains a
64 M. AHMED
recurrent characteristic and media memory of comics that can traced back to its
connections to caricature. Each page can function as a collage of historical
events with mythical figures and media such as theatre and animation. Viewing
the comic from such a meta-perspective unveils the potential atlas of images
and memories propelling the comics narrative.
Le Combat Ordinaire: Drawn Photographs, Anxiety

and Ordinariness
Appearing more than 30 years after Les Celtiques, the four volumes of Manu
Larcenet’s Le Combat ordinaire [Ordinary Victories] were published from
2003 to 2008. In complete contrast to the charismatic Corto, Larcenet’s pro-
tagonist, Marco, is puerile, blundering and a few pills away from an anxiety
attack. His story is likewise understated: not so much an adventure through
exotic places but a constant struggle to deal with issues most adult readers will
easily recognize (self-doubt, death, parenthood). Larcenet’s drawing styles and
narrative techniques and Marco’s characterization are indicative of a new way
of manipulating media memories—and ultimately a new set of media memo-
ries—associated with comics as they move away from the realm of genre fiction,
often for young readers, to graphic novels for adults (in practice such distinc-
tion between readerships is increasingly less binary, given the increasing popu-
larity of graphic novels for children and young adults and crossover fiction). As
with Les Celtiques, the media memories involved bridge comics with the higher
arts. While in Les Celtiques such media memories are related to literature, in
Combat ordinaire, these memories are essentially those of image-making.
Larcenet’s Combat ordinaire exemplifies the personal, confessional comics
story that is simultaneously moving and humorous, while remaining embed-
ded in a context in which making and holding on to images, and thus indulg-
ing in a storytelling process serving to preserve and convey memories, remains
central. Combat ordinaire juxtaposes the personal issues and the anxieties of
the protagonist, Marco, a photographer, with collective memory (the Algerian
War, deindustrialised France). It focuses on the daily business of living, telling
and remembering. This ordinariness is reinforced by the comic’s obsession
with everyday moments and objects. Instead of collaging fantastic elements
and historical backgrounds as in Les Celtiques, Combat ordinaire juxtaposes the
protagonist’s struggle to overcome his anxiety and depression to drawn photo-
graphs, usually portraits and scenes from Marco’s everyday life.
Marco’s sessions with his psychoanalyst, his disclosure of his most intimate
fears and details of his life, inscribe the comic in a confessional space.
Psychological issues (the first book opens with Marco on his psychoanalyst’s
couch) and physical degradation (Marco’s father has Alzheimer’s and eventu-
ally kills himself) coexist against the background of past wars—the Algerian
War, in which Marco’s father and Marco’s neighbour fought, as well the many
wars Marco photographed. These wars form a haunting, painful, but also vague
and fragmentary, presence.
Writing about American artist Jules Feiffer in the catalogue accompanying
the 1967 comics exhibition Bande Dessinée et Figuration Narrative [Comics
and Narrative Figuration], Maurice Horn describes the depressing tones of his
works as part of the “rejuvenation” of comics (1967, p. 109). Incongruent as
depression might seem with the notion of comics, it plays a prominent role in
recent comics focusing on individual, often autobiographical, struggles of ordi-
nary—not typically comicsy (blundering slapstick protagonists, superheroes)—
people. Most of Combat ordinaire, barring Marco’s photographs and moments
of anxiety, unfolds in a cartoony style, abstracting both figures and settings
through a playful line that is reinforced by cheerful colours. The atlas of images
for Combat ordinaire saddles comics traditions, photography and a personal-
ized narrative that also extends to the kinds of Pathosformel employed: Marco’s
anxiety attacks interweave familiar comics clues (exaggerated postures, lines
indicating shaking) with visual elements that enhance the anxiousness of the
moment (warped space, a distinctive shade of red). Writing on comics with
documentary impulses Nina Mickwitz elaborates on observations about the
processual and indexical nature of drawing to conclude that “drawing occupies
a space comprising both representation and ideation” (2016, p. 32). “The
cartoon, selective and deliberate, is […] oppositional to the photograph”
(p. 35). This tension permeates the photographic moments in Combat ordi-
naire and, ultimately, questions “the hegemony of photographic realism as the
privileged model for visually depicting reality” (p. 35).
Incorporating different shades of abstraction, never acquiring the same
degree of reality as a photograph or a film, comics combine mimetic elements
with non-mimetic ones. Comics inevitably, but, as in the case of abstraction, to
varying degrees of obviousness, situate the personal in both collective and
media memories. In Combat ordinaire, the moments of self-insight are
expressed through black and white panels maintaining an allusive relationship
between words and images. This echoes both psychoanalytical methods of
reading beyond superficial appearances and the practice of collaging to read
comics. The second volume includes two pages of portraits that Marco takes of
shipyard workers, his father’s former colleagues, in an attempt to draw atten-
tion to their disappearing world. In the captions accompanying these “photo-
graphs”, which are realistically drawn, carefully hatched black and white
drawings, Marco reflects on his emotional paralysis and his realization that
taking photographs is a coping mechanism (2004, p. 20). The supposedly
objective photograph—already layered with some subjectivity through the
presence of the drawing hand—acquires emotional import while enacting the
distance that enables the protagonist’s insights (see, e.g. Mickwitz 2016 and
Cook 2012). Correspondingly, in a later sequence of portraits, Marco reflects
on the relationship between the artist and his work (Larcenet, 2004, p. 46).
Marco’s interest in “ordinary” people and his own anti-heroic persona is
emblematic of the trend of focusing on the ordinary and the everyday
66 M. AHMED
(exemplified, for instance, by Chris Ware’s comics). Unsurprisingly, for the

context of the comic, and reproducing the high art-low art binary, the “delib-
erate ordinariness” of Marco’s work is seen as a stain by a Parisian gallerist
(Larcenet, 2004, p. 36). This reaction evokes the media memory of comics as
a belittled medium struggling for legitimation. The need to be taken seriously
often, and problematically, manifests itself in seeing comics through the lens of
the established arts and comics’ attempts to imitate those established arts.
Marco’s portraits, belittled as an “industrial freak show” by an eminent pho-
tographer and Marco’s co-exhibitor (2004, p. 45), are an attempt to introduce
the shipyard workers into a space and a discourse that alienates such realities in
the quest for aesthetics. Inscribed within this constellation, and clash, of media,
the drawn photographs go further: they set into motion the media memory of
socially conscious photographic portraits of “ordinary” people usually not
deemed worthy of being photographed and immortalized by photographers
such as Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange and August Sander.6
In the third volume, Ce qui est précieux [That Which Is Precious], Marco
photographs the tools in his recently deceased father’s shed as a means of chan-
nelling his grief. These images imitating the camera objective and mediated
through drawn lines are imbued with affect: they highlight the absence of the
man who had constructed a life using those tools and allude, like much of
Combat ordinaire, to mortality and the fragility of the human condition. They
alternate with Marco’s reading of a “notebook of small things” which he dis-
covers only after his father’s death (Larcenet, 2006, p. 12). It recounts “rien
d’extraordinaire… il n’y a que des détails des moments courts… que des petites
choses” [nothing special…only details of short moments… nothing but small
things] (p. 22). It also offers material for reflection over what constitutes a life
and the possibilities of remembering and retelling a life story. Once again, it is
the form of the collage that enables such reflections.
Just before his suicide, Marco’s father sends Marco a childhood picture of
Marco and his brother, with a small note at the back: “Before I forget, I wanted
to say I won’t forget you. Papa” (2004, p. 52). In the picture we see a young
Marco disguised as Zorro, posing with his toy sword next to his brother. The
affective value of the photo established through the portraits is reinforced
through this childhood picture, which reappears several times in the third vol-
ume. The nostalgic, monochromatic tones of the photograph and the chil-
dren’s quiet joy are emotionally charged. To take the reading further, the
photo also plays on the connection between children and comics, undoing the
assumption of triviality and the presumed need to grow up that connect both.
Like the pages from the Corto Maltese stories, this half-page from Combat
ordinaire also activates a collage of media: the childhood photograph, the
father’s words scribbled at the back and the comics drawing style.
This photograph also hints towards the fourth volume’s concern with child-
hood. Planter des clous [Driving Nails]—a reference to Marco’s father’s job
and potentially the children’s nursery rhyme, Planter des choux [Planting
Cabbages]—acquires a different tone with the birth of Marco’s daughter,
Maude. It taps into the media memories surrounding the concept of childhood
and, inevitably, the relationship between children and comics: the most promi-
nent of these is exaggerated emotions, already evident in the child’s tantrums
as well as the playfulness and spontaneity associated with children’s drawings
(see Ahmed 2020).7
In Planter des clous, the sequences of reflection, which unfolded across por-
traits or realistically drawn scenes in the preceding volumes, show Maude’s
stuffed animals (Larcenet, 2008, pp. 3, 24). The first sequence is about Marco’s
love for Maude. Each panel shows a different stuffed animal as Marco admir-
ingly adds how his child has taught him about re-considering and questioning
everything. The child and the child’s perspective are juxtaposed to the eternally
smiling stuffed animals which provide unconditional comfort and companion-
ship to their young owners just like, to a certain extent, Marco’s daughter does
for him (see also Ahmed 2020, p. 139). In the second sequence however, the
stuffed animals accompany a reflection on the necessity of poetry, a poetry that
knows no cultural hierarchies and encompasses popular songs, animé and
paintings (see also Ahmed and Tilleuil 2016, p. 29). Through the collage of
images, the comic establishes connections across media, spanning time and
space. More importantly, it mobilises the affective hold of those connections.
All of Marco’s “photographs,” of his father’s tools, his daughter’s toys and the
shipyard workers are imbued with affect. Moreover, their drawn essence evokes
the history of image-making and attunes us to both the mediation of the image
and its affective affordances.
Trying to Read Comics with Warburg: Constraints,

Adjustments and Possibilities
Brian Cremins likens the magic wielded by budding superhero Billy Batson
(Captain Marvel) to the “magic” of comic books themselves, which “lies in its
uncanny ability to document and interrogate memory itself” (2017, p. 7). The
comic book is comparable to the Historama, the “super-television screen” on
which Billy and the wizard Shazam watch the events of Billy’s past together.
“That machine”, for Cremins, “is like a comic book in miniature, a device
capable of depicting past, present and future events”, often simultaneously, in
one panel (p. 7). Such a condensation of time is present in many comics panels
and is symptomatic of media memories: it offers a means of tracing the past and
present of comics creation through loaded references and techniques. This is
illustrated through the drawn photographs in Combat ordinaire and the inter-
section between fictional and historical realities in the Corto Maltese stories,
which recur in comics belonging to related genres (autobiographical and auto-
fictional graphic novels and adventure and fantasy).
Warburg’s Mnemosyne project, based on how images connect and carry with
them a shared, deep history of image-making, enables us to read the relatively
disparate comics of Pratt and Larcenet in the same breath, and situate them in
68 M. AHMED
a network of media and cultural interactions. In drawing out possible connec-

tions with Warburg’s project to map cultural memory, I have tried to show how
comics remember other media and layer their stories through those memories.
Both comics discussed above have imbibed a concern with the canonical hier-
archy of image-making and storytelling. This struggle, like the Pathosformel, is
also one of finding a means of expression and establishing emotional connec-
tions. Such connections unfold through the serial figure of Corto, who sustains
a regular readership, and through the confessional, almost intimate, mode of
Combat ordinaire.
This transposition of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas to comics encourages
thinking about and beyond cultural hierarchies, focusing on interactions and
influences between media. It is also an important step in shifting the focus
towards image-based analyses. Further, it encourages us to rethink and produc-
tively displace the interpretative scope accorded to fragmentation and gutters.
As the discussion on collage suggests, fragmentation laden with significance is
not only present in the space between panels or between words and images, it
unfolds across the medium, generating different levels of associations. This is
the case, for instance, when comics drawing imitates other media such as pho-
tographs and silhouette animation.
In this chapter, I have worked with montages of images and associations
evoked by the comics. In a more ambitious vein, such a project of reading com-
ics with Warburg furthers the line of thinking proposed by W. J. T. Mitchell in
his seminal What do Pictures Want? (2010): both take the aliveness of images,
their ability to move spectators, to travel across time and space as their point of
departure in mapping the desires of images—their modes of communication,
the messages they can transmit—which remain deeply embedded in the histo-
ries and techniques of image-making and collective memory.
One of the main challenges of transposing Warburg’s Mnemosyne project to
comics comes from the untenable scope of the original project: it is impossible
to account for diverse reading-viewing experiences and the vast historical and
cultural connections each image is inscribed in. While comics reading is often
discussed with reference to gutters and closure in comics, the above attempt to
read comics with Warburg encourages moving beyond the spaces between pan-
els to thinking about how images and styles configure stories through the
gamut of visual, historical and cultural connotations they mobilize.
A recent Spanish graphic novel, Warburg & Beach (2021) by Jorge Carrión
and Javier Olivares is animated through the collaging of lives, both famous and
lesser known: the leporello book places the stories of the modernist publisher
and bookshop owner, Sylvia Beach and Aby Warburg on opposing sides and
interweaves the lives of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Marcel
Duchamp and his partner, art collector and book binder, Mary Reynolds and
Frances Steloff, founder of the Gotham Book Mart. The comic thus sets into
motion the possibilities of meaning-making opened up by collage. That
Warburg becomes one of the protagonists of this unusual comic that renders
symbolic interactions material is only too apt.
Notes
1. The Mnemosyne Atlas was recently reconstituted and exhibited at the Haus der
Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. See the catalogue by Roberto Ohrt et al. Aby
Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – the Original (Hatje Cantz 2020).
2. The website to which Johnson 2012 is a companion volume provides an overview
of the themes around which diverse plates were organized: https://warburg.
library.cornell.edu/about/mnemosyne-themes
3. For further discussion of the archive in relation to Art History and Comics
Studies Cf. Sommerland Chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and
Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga”.
4. I am alluding to philosopher John Sutton’s discussion of spongy brains (2007).
5. The comic, conflating all differences between militant and political movements,
presents Sinn Féin as a militant party.
6. For further discussion of documentary photography Cf. Hardy-Vallée Chapter
“From Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics theory within Art History to
Study the Photobook”.
7. Children’s drawings are accorded a more central role in Larcenet’s Blast comics,
where they are used to visualize the protagonist’s moments of euphoria.
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PART II
Perception, Reception and Meaning

Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction
John Miers
Abstract “Psychologies of perception” refers in this chapter to a strand of art-

historical debate that recruits empirically derived observations about the nature
of the human perceptual system to the exploration of philosophical problems
regarding the interpretation of pictorial images. The first half presents an over-
view of this tradition beginning with Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich’s work on
caricature and taking in contributions from Rudolf Arnheim, Richard Wollheim
and Kendall Walton. Each of these writers is characterised as engaged in a bal-
ancing act between the competing aims of making falsifiable claims about per-
ceptual processes and evoking the pleasures of engaging with artworks.
The relevance of these debates to Comics Studies is framed primarily with
respect to the attention they pay to the effects of drawing style on the recogni-
tion of pictorial images. This argument is developed in the second half, which
introduces recent developments including the influence of Arnheim’s work on
contemporary metaphor theory and Simon Grennan’s recent theorisation of
narrative drawing, both of which inform the author’s autobiographical comics
presented in this section. The chapter concludes by suggesting that comics
scholarship’s focus on the narrative effects of depiction offers to art historians
a novel way of exploring artists’ representational choices.
Keywords Psychology • Drawing style • Caricature • Depiction • Seeing-in
J. Miers (*)
Kingston University, Kingston, UK
e-mail: J.Miers@kingston.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_5
76 J. MIERS
Introduction
This chapter summarises a range of work from the past hundred years that
examines the psychological processes involved in viewing depictions, with a
focus on the tension between applying empirical methods to the study of pic-
tures and responding to them as works of art. In the second half I describe how
this strand of Art History informed the stylistic and narrative choices I made in
producing a comic about my experience of living with multiple sclerosis.
Methodological Framework, Key Contributors

and Debates
If “psychologies of perception” had a single visual motif, it would be the duck-

rabbit illusion originally published in the humorous weekly Die Fliegende
Blätter (Fig. 1), adopted by the psychologist Joseph Jastrow (1899) to make
the point that perception involves mental activity as well as optical stimulus,
and schematised by Wittgenstein (Fig. 2), who gave the name “seeing-as” to
our act of perceiving either animal (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 207).
Its significance for the methodological field introduced in this chapter is due
to its use as an example in the opening pages of Ernst Gombrich’s Art and
Illusion. Gombrich introduces it as a counter to the claim that illusion, having
been rendered “artistically irrelevant” by modern art’s abandonment of repre-
sentational accuracy as a criterion of aesthetic value, “must also be psychologi-
cally very simple” (2002, p. 4). In his account, switching our reading between
“rabbit” and “duck” results in transformations of the shape, as different aspects
of the drawing become more or less prominent depending on the interpreta-
tion we apply. But in order to understand how different features of this graphic
array affect our experience as we make these shifts, “we are compelled to look
for what is ‘really there’, to see the shape apart from its interpretation, and this,
we soon discover, is not really possible” (2002, p. 5). While looking at the
shape as a rabbit, we remain aware of the possibility of seeing it as a duck, but
we cannot perceptually “experience alternative readings at the same time”
(2002, p. 5).
Fig. 1 Rabbit or Duck?

Anon (1892), Die
Fliegende Blätter,
October 23
PSYCHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION: STORIES OF DEPICTION 77
Fig. 2 The Duck-Rabbit,

from Wittgenstein (2009,
p. 165)
The question at the core of this discussion has been central to aesthetic phi-
losophy since antiquity: how are we able to gaze upon an arrangement of marks
on a flat surface and take it to be an image of something else? But rather than
appeal to the idea that the picture signifies through mimesis, Gombrich instead
directs us towards the examination of our processes of perception and categori-
sation. In short, “psychologies of perception” applies findings from the science
of psychology to the philosophical problem of depiction.
Although the visual examples most frequently referred to by Gombrich, his
contemporary Rudolf Arnheim and later contributors to this field including
Richard Wollheim and Kendall Walton come from the established canon of fine
art, non-art examples such as the duck-rabbit prove useful because they allow
the critic to isolate specific visual effects, and the reader to reflect directly on
the critic’s discussion thereof. While reading these remarks, you have been able
to engage in the perceptual games under discussion, and to form an assessment
of the nature of your perceptual experience without needing to subscribe to or
reject any philosophical assertions about the nature of reality. Such examples
do not even need to qualify as depictions: a key phenomenon discussed in work
in this field is “the face in the clouds”, our ability to “see” imagined subjects in
natural formations that were not produced with any representational intent, to
which Cutting and Massironi (1998) have given the name “fortuitous pictures”.
Examples like these, where our ability to hold an imagined subject in mind
is not impeded by our awareness that the optical array supporting those imag-
inings is profoundly unlike the thing imagined, lead naturally onto consider-
ation of the “riddle of style”, to borrow from the title of Gombrich’s
introduction to Art and Illusion. Artists may employ any number of strategies
for the arrangement of graphic marks in representing any subject, and while the
observable differences between those strategies might characterise that subject
in different ways, they do not usually provide any barrier to the act of recogni-
tion itself. Here we begin to see one of the uses this methodology has for the
comics scholar who is interested in the visual achievements of cartoonists.
Deliberate manipulation of graphic style is a key implement in the cartoonist’s
toolkit, frequently employed within a single comics text to achieve specific nar-
rative effects, and more broadly the effect of graphic style on the reader’s
78 J. MIERS
experience is a central concern for comics narratologists.1 The distortions of

caricature, in which the exaggeration of the features of a face is taken to signify
character traits or heightened emotion rather than physical deformation is an
obvious example of such manipulation, and in this light it is no surprise that
Gombrich was one of the first art historians to study this type of drawing.
A comparison of “The Principles of Caricature” (Kris and Gombrich 1938),2
with Gillian Rhodes’s Superportraits (1997) on the same theme, will serve to
elaborate the main characteristics of this methodology, as well as the different
disciplinary emphases that have been made in such work, and the general direc-
tion of travel in how this field has formed and refined itself.
Caricature is useful to perceptual psychologists because it allows for fairly
precise framing of a problem of depiction. As viewers we judge a successful
caricature on grounds of identification: whatever mockery the drawing may
make of its subject, it must first be recognisable as a portrait of that subject.
And while we expect this identification to be instantaneous and unambiguous,
we are not only aware of, but draw pleasure from, the caricaturist’s distortions.
Thus reflection on the experience of viewing a caricature allows us to examine
“from inside” our appreciation of that drawing. We are simultaneously aware
of our perception of a likeness to a specific individual and of the ways in which
the image deviates from the appearance of that individual.
Kris and Gombrich highlight caricature as a type of picture that supports a
close examination of how the artist “plays with and reshapes sensory experience
under the influence of internal and affective states” (1938, p. 319). The psy-
chological framework they apply is psychoanalysis, specifically Freud’s work on
the interpretation of dreams (1913). They argue that Freud’s work marks “a
turning point in the history of aesthetics just as it does in psychiatry”, and that
the work of psychoanalysts in establishing that there are “laws of dream con-
struction” entails that there must also be “psychological laws of art construc-
tion” (Kris and Gombrich 1938, p. 319). But they do not see their work as a
one-directional process of using developments in psychology to buttress art-
historical narratives; they also suggest that “a study such as this which starts out
as a survey of pictures of a bygone time may throw some light on the problems
of the clinician today” (p. 319).
Kris and Gombrich credit the brothers Annibale and Agostino Carracci with
the invention of caricature in the late sixteenth century. The story they tell of
its development is that this was a period in which artists’ understanding of their
work had shifted from the Aristotelian conception of producing an “imitation
of nature” to attempting “penetration of the innermost essence of reality”
(1938, p. 321). Caricature may distort the features of an individual’s face, but
in doing so it “penetrates through the mere outward appearance to the inner
being in all its littleness or ugliness” (p. 321). The ability to produce represen-
tations of the inner self rests on the same principles of dreamwork identified by
Freud, in which “a single feature often stands for the whole, and a person is
represented by one salient characteristic only” (p. 323).3
Thus underlying features of cognition are applied to problems of pictorial

representation, and in pursuing this programme art historians may also arrive
at findings that are useful to the psychologist from whom they take inspiration.
Superportraits also departs from the observation that caricatures can seem
more true than naturalistic portraits. However rather than drawing on Freud,
Rhodes takes her cue from cognitive psychology, and applies a wider range of
cognitive functions, and a greater concern with empirical evidence. Her
approach is based in norm theory: she argues that we construct normative
mental representations of commonly encountered objects, and that it is cogni-
tively efficient to store mental representations of members of an object class by
coding the ways in which they deviate from stored norms. For example, an
individual with a large nose will be recognisable because that nose contrasts to
our norm for the size of noses. Therefore a drawing that exaggerates the size
of that nose will be easy to recognise because it makes easier the process of
comparison we would typically use to recognise that individual.
Both texts focus on a type of depiction that enables the examination of psy-
chological processes, but the shift towards a greater appeal to empirical verifica-
tion in Rhodes is characteristic of the type of engagement with psychology that
has become more common since Kris and Gombrich’s essay.4 The source of
Rhodes’s empirical evidence reveals a difference between these two texts that
points to diverging analytical aims rather than simply a linear process of devel-
opment in methodological exactitude. Kris and Gombrich invoke Plato,
Nicholas Poussin and Annibale Caracci in a sweeping art-historical contextual-
ization of caricature that takes in its stride the decorations of Mannerism and
the distortions of form and space that were prevalent in then-contemporary
art. In contrast, Rhodes’s examples of caricatures are not produced by artists
seeking to reveal their sitters’ innermost nature by creating “the perfect defor-
mity”, but instead by a computer: the examples she discusses are produced by
Susan Brennan’s caricature generator, which “is used to create caricatures by
amplifying the differences between the face to be caricatured and a comparison
face” in a process which “simulates the visualisation process in the imagination
of the caricaturist” (Brennan 1985, p. 170).
For scholars whose interest in pictures is primarily as a set of visual stimuli
that support psychological conclusions, Rhodes’s choice of corpus is an “addi-
tional strength” because it allows the operationalisation of caricature through
the “construction of scaled caricatures, controlled experimentation, and repli-
cation of studies” (Cabe 1999, p. 152). From this perspective, Kris and
Gombrich’s psychoanalytic account and invocation of beliefs in the ability of
pictures to uncover truths about reality might look over-reliant on an old-
fashioned critical model of discerning connoisseurship in method, and credu-
lously tolerant of a naive reliance on the notion of mimesis in argumentation.
Gombrich and Kris emphasise that caricature should be engaged with as an art,
and for scholars who take this view, by removing the subjectivity of the artist’s
interpretive play, Rhodes has bled her subject dry of the very thing that makes
it worthy of study in the first place. Kris and Gombrich argue in their opening
80 J. MIERS
paragraph that it is precisely because academic psychology “deals in the main

with the cognitive functions and with stimuli from without” rather than inter-
nal and affective states that it has “added comparatively little to our under-
standing of art” (1938, p. 319).
While these countercriticisms themselves have an element of caricature, they
do highlight a tension that runs through much psychologically oriented aes-
thetic philosophy: on the one hand, not letting an interest in the demonstrable
phenomena of perception blind the analyst to the experience of engaging with
art as art, while on the other preventing the examination of subjective experi-
ence from becoming a trapdoor into sloppy thinking. This tension is evident
throughout Rudolf Arnheim’s “Agenda for the Psychology of Art” (1952),
which sets out a number of questions that remain salient for theorists of pic-
tures, including the overarching question of “the concrete conditions which
make a beholder accept a pattern as an image of something else, say, a human
figure” (p. 313), and concerns with foreshortening and overlapping, distortion
and depth perception. Arnheim’s agenda is at root an exhortation to greater
cross-disciplinary fertilisation: “more intimate contact between art and psy-
chology is the first pre-requisite for progress” (p. 310). He begins by attribut-
ing what he sees as the failure of psychology to respond adequately to the
examination of works of art and artistic processes to psychologists’ lack of first-
hand experience of artistic activities. Psychologists are likely to waste time on
“side issues, bad taste in the choice of examples, and the clinging to conven-
tional notions about art” (p. 311) unless they learn “to handle the brush or the
chisel […] to a degree which will keep the feeling of genuine artistic experience
alive” (p. 310). Artists, for their part, need to overcome their “suspicion against
the undertakings of the psychologists” and “remnants of the romantic preju-
dice that art excludes reason” in order to “obtain from psychology a more solid
foundation for the generalisations that play such an important role in all studio
practice” (p. 311). His agenda is also an indication of the methodological shift
away from the psychoanalysis that interested Kris and Gombrich and towards
the cognitive psychology on which Rhodes and contemporary scholars in this
field draw. He claims that part of the reason artists and art educators are uncon-
vinced of the value of psychology is that they have been put off by the “orgy
on a bare mountain which the psychoanalysts have been celebrating in recent
years” (p. 310).
But, he maintains, building a solid analytical foundation must leave room
for intuitive judgement: for Arnheim, the tendency towards excessive quantifi-
cation is as much of a stumbling block as suspicion and ignorance, and limiting
our results to “what can be measured and counted” will mean that “we are
likely to miss the vital core of our problems” (p. 312). Among the misguided
analyses at which he takes aim are “attempts to derive a formula of beauty from
mathematical proportions” and the treatment of compositional structure “as
though it consisted of rigid geometrical patterns” (p. 312).
Gombrich conducts a similar balancing act throughout Art and Illusion,
although the formalism he avoids is not an insistence on quantifiable
measurements but the overstatement of equivalences between pictorial and lin-

guistic signification. His earlier work on caricature with Kris hinted at the idea
that artistic production involved creating something like a lexicon of visual
devices that could reliably produce certain types of illusion: in the same breath
as praising the “sublime freedom” of the pen strokes in a caricature by Gian
Lorenzo Bernini, they observe that the face depicted is “distilled down to a few
lines as if it were restricted to a formula” (2002, p. 323). Gombrich develops
this in greater detail, with a wider historical and stylistic scope, in the elabora-
tion of Art and Illusion’s core principle of “making and matching”, in which,
as Patrick Maynard puts it, “depiction is largely a matter of building a toolbox
of effective devices – dodges – passed on, studied, borrowed, stolen, or
invented, though occasionally systematised” (2005, p. 98). Seeing the devel-
opment of styles of pictorial representation as a process of building language-
like formulae allowed art historians to comprehensively reject the idea that
representational accuracy “had progressed from rude beginnings to the perfec-
tion of illusion” (Gombrich 2002, p. 4), which for Gombrich had ethical as
well as analytical value: seeing historical styles as indications of the sophistica-
tion “of collectives, of ‘mankind’, ‘races’, or ‘ages’ […] weakens resistance to
totalitarian habits of mind” (p. 17). Such was the influence of Gombrich’s
approach that W. J. T. Mitchell (1987, pp. 75–94) would later credit him as the
initiator of the “conventionalist turn” of the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury, although for Gombrich the comparison of the visual arts to verbal lan-
guage functioned more as a metaphor than an explicit endorsement of a
programme of study. Mitchell argues that Gombrich never abandoned the idea
of the pictorial image as being in some regards “natural”, and in the later
decades of his career “his argument [was] no longer with the naïve “copy the-
ory” of representation but with what he [tended] to regard as the oversophis-
ticated relativism and conventionalism of semioticians and symbol theorists”
(1987, p. 81).
The idea is that there is something natural in pictures that escapes quantifi-
cation is invoked at the beginning of a passage in which Gombrich describes art
historian Kenneth Clark’s attempt to “‘stalk’ an illusion”: “works of art are not
mirrors, but they share with mirrors that elusive magic of transformation which
is so hard to put into words” (2002, p. 5). Clark stepped forwards and back-
wards in front of a Diego Velázquez painting hoping to observe the moment
at which globs of paint “transformed themselves into a vision of transfigured
reality” (ibid), but found himself unable to hold the visions of paint as paint,
and paint as image, in his mind at once. This account, which suggests that
attention to the depicted subject replaces attention to the depiction’s surface,
is one of the few central arguments in Art and Illusion that has been rejected
in subsequent scholarship. The theories of depiction proposed by philosophers
Richard Wollheim (2015 [1968]) and Kendall Walton (1990, pp. 293–352)
both rest on the idea that viewing pictorial representations involves simultane-
ous attention to marked surface and depicted subject.
82 J. MIERS
Wollheim elaborates his core concept of “seeing-in” by contrasting it to

Wittgenstein’s “seeing-as”, and his argument departs directly from the
Gombrich passages discussed above. Gombrich’s error, according to Wollheim,
is in conflating the duck-rabbit with Clark’s anecdote. “Everyone would recog-
nise […] that we cannot simultaneously see the duck and the rabbit” (2015,
pp. 157–158), but this holds for special cases such as bistable images and not
for representational seeing in general. The “seeing-as” approach fails “to assign
to the seeing appropriate to representations a distinctive phenomenology”
(2015, p. 158). When looking at a Velázquez, we may see the brushstrokes as
Venus, or Pope Innocent X, but we also see those figures in the painted sur-
face, and we attend to both at once. Seeing-in has a twofold phenomenology
that “permits unlimited simultaneous attention to what is seen and to the fea-
tures of the medium” (2015, p. 156). In keeping with Arnheim’s desire to
bring the analytical precision of specific psychological effects to bear on ques-
tions of depiction on while retaining an emphasis on the pleasures of aesthetic
appreciation, Wollheim offers two arguments that emphasise each of these
methodological foci in turn. The psychological argument proceeds from the
principle of object constancy: if we change position while looking at a picture,
the picture does not undergo perspectival distortion. That is to say, if we were
standing in front of a painting consisting of parallel horizontal lines, and then
moved to view it from an oblique angle so that the lines converged in our field
of vision, we would still understand the lines to be horizontal and parallel in the
image itself. This is possible because “the spectator is, and remains, visually
aware not only of what is represented but also of the surface qualities of the
representation” (2015, p. 159). The aesthetic argument holds that we would
be unable to “marvel endlessly at the way in which line or brushstroke or
expanse of colour is exploited to render effects or establish analogies” (p. 159)
if we were unable to observe those features and their effects simultaneously. It
is difficult to see how Gombrich could square his enjoyment of the virtuosity
of the caricaturist’s pen with this challenge.
Kendall Walton’s theory of depiction (1990, pp. 293–352) is close enough
to Wollheim’s to have motivated him to publish clarifications of the distinctions
between the two (Walton 1991), but his theory of “mimesis as make-believe”
places greater emphasis on the role of the imagination, and in the case of depic-
tion on the inseparability of perceptual and cognitive activity. Walton regards
Wollheim’s theory as “not so much mistaken as incomplete” (1991, p. 423), in
that he does not offer an explanation of what the experience of seeing a figure
in a picture actually is, instead brushing away the need for such clarification by
claiming that seeing-in is such an everyday experience that he only needs to
gesture towards it for a reader to follow his meaning (p. 424). Without an
explanation of how a spectator sees a depicted subject in a marked surface, the
account of the phenomenology of looking at pictures is incomplete. Walton’s
solution is to argue that representational seeing is “participating in a visual
game of make-believe” (p. 425) in which we imagine, not that Velázquez’s
canvas is Pope Innocent X, but that our seeing of the canvas is the seeing of the
Pope. In other words, we do not imagine the painting to be anything other

than what it is—a painting—but we do imagine our own perceptual activity to
be something other than what it is. All of the work discussed thus far has to
some degree argued that perception and cognition are intertwined, but
Walton’s argument rests on a particularly strong version of this position: “I do
not mean just that thoughts have causal effects on one’s experiences, but that
the experiences contain thoughts” (1990, p. 295).
The Comics Research Project: I Preferred It When This

Stuff Was Just Theoretical
The project I outline here is an ongoing series of autobiographical comic strips,
but that artistic production is so closely intertwined with the theoretical work
undertaken in my doctoral research project that some exploration of that will
be required as an introduction.
My thesis, Visual Metaphor and Drawn Narratives (Miers 2017), took as its
starting point an exploration of visual metaphor in narrative drawing, with a
focus on cognitively oriented theories of metaphor, amongst which the
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) developed by linguist George Lakoff
and philosopher Mark Johnson (Lakoff and Johnson 2003) is the most influ-
ential. I argued that, despite the still-growing body of work that applies CMT
to comics and cartoons, the field lacked a substantial account of depiction and
was thus unable to account for the perceptual nature of visual as opposed to
verbal metaphor. Following this intuition, I sought to integrate the method-
ological field outlined above with contemporary metaphor theory. Walton’s
work was key to achieving this synthesis: his arguments about the inseparability
of perception and cognition are echoed in the “embodied cognition” frame-
work that underpins CMT, which holds that having a physical or sensory expe-
rience and simultaneously forming an evaluative judgement of that experience,
as we do when engaging in visual games of make-believe, forms a phenomeno-
logical whole: “It can be misleading […] to speak of direct physical experience
as though there was some core of immediate experience which we then ‘inter-
pret’ in terms of our conceptual system” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003, p. 56).
There are genealogical as well as thematic links between these frameworks.
Johnson (1987, pp. 74–100) begins his discussion of metaphorical extensions
of the concept of balance by discussing Arnheim’s (1974, pp. 10–41) use of
Gestalt psychology in a discussion of the notion of visual balance. Arnheim asks
how it is that, when looking at a circle placed in a square frame, we can instantly
and without the use of measuring instruments tell that it is slightly off-centre.
He proposes that this intuition can be explained by the existence of “perceptual
forces”, which are “assumed to be real in both realms of existence – that is, as
both psychological and physical forces” (1974, p. 16). Johnson extends this
proposal into an account of how the polysemic extensions of the word “bal-
ance” develop from embodied knowledge we begin accumulating in infancy.
84 J. MIERS
As children we experience physical balance, in the straightforward sense of

weights being distributed evenly around a fulcrum, when learning to walk, and
we experience the ability to maintain this balance as a positive one. The more
abstract uses of the concept of balance, such as legal or moral balance, or the
balance of rational argument, are extensions of the schematic structure of
embodied experience mapped from concrete domains of experience to more
abstract ones. This, in abrupt summary, is the core of Lakoff and Johnson’s
claim that “metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and only derivatively a
matter of language” (2003, p. 153). Any metaphorical expression that uses the
concept of balance, be it a linguistic one such as my earlier reference to
Gombrich’s analytical balancing act, or a visual one such as the image of the
scales of justice, works by fleshing out the schematic cognitive structure
described above.5
A significant recent contribution to the examination of comics as drawn
texts, Simon Grennan’s A Theory of Narrative Drawing (2017), makes exten-
sive use of some of the work discussed here. Wollheim’s seeing-in is key to a
number of its arguments, and the notion of “image schema”, the name Johnson
gives to the kind of minimally elaborated cognitive structure described in the
previous paragraph, is a fundamental part of Grennan’s elaboration of his aetio-
logical account of drawing. Grennan’s theory is primarily concerned with the
ways in which drawings mediate embodied social behaviour rather than the
perceptual effects of aspects of graphic arrays, but an entailment of his argu-
ments is that different forms of representation produce different narrative
meanings. For example, in one of the “drawing demonstrations” that conclude
the book, Grennan adopts Mike Mignola’s form of representation in drawing
pages based on a script extrapolated from two pages of Jim Medway’s Teen
Witch (Medway 2007). Although the plots of the two sets of pages remain the
same, moving the events from Medway’s gentle north of England populated by
anthropomorphic cats to the world of Mignola’s Hellboy (specifically Mignola
1998) produced new readings of specific events within the plot, to say nothing
of the different inferences of mood and intention produced by the new draw-
ing. A spell cast by Medway’s protagonist to humorous effect now carries the
possibility of lasting harm, and the word “princess” becomes a literal title rather
than a term of familial endearment (Grennan 2017, pp. 192–193). My own
work presented in this section draws on the core idea of creating a new narra-
tive by adopting the representational forms of another, but does not fully
attempt to make new drawings that could pass as the work of another cartoonist.
So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now (Miers 2019) emerged from
an unusual coincidence of research interests and personal circumstances, as
summarised on its opening page (Fig. 3). Soon after settling on visual meta-
phor as the main topic of my thesis, I decided that David B.’s graphic memoir
Epileptic (2006) would make an excellent case study for my final chapter. The
visual metaphors B. develops throughout the book as he depicts the trauma
that his brother Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy visits upon his family would allow
me ample opportunity to apply the theoretical framework developed in the
Fig. 3 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, p. 1
preceding chapters, and my admiration for the book would make writing the
chapter an enjoyable end to the project. I could not have known that when I
began writing the chapter, in January 2017, I would be reeling from a diagno-
sis of multiple sclerosis I had received the previous month.
86 J. MIERS
Questions of how a cartoonist could use their practice to work through trauma
caused by chronic neurological disease took on a new and acute salience. I was
fortunate to have the opportunity to begin exploring how they could be answered
through drawing during a “Researcher in the Archives” residency in University
of the Arts London’s Archives and Special Collections Centre at London College
of Communication. Working primarily with the Les Coleman Collection, a vast
and rich bequest of mostly European and American underground and alternative
comic books given by the late British artist, poet and curator, my intention was
to adapt for my own purposes the visual metaphors for illness and disability I
found in the comics it contained.6 This ran aground when a survey of the collec-
tion uncovered few depictions of physical illnesses, certainly not enough to begin
identifying any common themes or patterns. There were, however, frequent
occurrences of visual metaphors in which physical injuries or disabilities were
used as metaphors for psychological or emotional distress. Perhaps I should not
have been surprised. This observation was entirely consistent with CMT, which
holds that concrete physical and sensory experiences are typically used as meta-
phors for more abstract experiences, and not the other way around.
I was struck by a sequence in Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo #1 (1994) depicting a
dream in which Brunetti imagines himself returned to high school. He con-
fesses to the reader, “I get so nervous around people that I inevitably lose
control of my excretory f-f-functions!” (1994, p. 3). Immediately after that, a
group of jocks and bullies mock his loss of bodily control (Fig. 4). This seemed
an exact inversion of my own experience. In general, I am fortunate not to
experience the kind of social anxiety depicted in this sequence. On the other
hand, the incontinence Brunetti’s dream-image suffers from is a common
symptom of multiple sclerosis. An aspect of the experiences I was hoping to
confront through metaphor was itself being used as a metaphor for another
type of affliction.
Fig. 4 Ivan Brunetti (1994) Schizo #1, p. 4, panels 1–3. Fantagraphics

Metaphor analysis in CMT usually begins by identifying the two concepts that
are brought together by a metaphorical expression. In this case, a depiction of
loss of control of bodily functions supports an account of loss of control of social
function. In this methodology, understanding Brunetti’s visual metaphor involves
first recognising what is depicted, and then ascribing metaphorical meaning to
that subject. But scholars interested in psychologies of perception also argue that
metaphorical thinking is present in the process of seeing-in itself. Gombrich lik-
ens the artist’s ability to apply new denotations to visual stimuli to the creation of
metaphor (2002, p. 264). Walton perceives a “kinship” between metaphor and
the games of make-believe we play with representational art (1973, p. 292). Flint
Schier (1986), Virgil Aldrich (1971) and Jon Green (1985) have given accounts
of representational seeing that align the twofold phenomenology described by
Wollheim to the way in which metaphor makes two concepts active in the mind
at once. Wollheim explores this connection in more detail and proposes a distinc-
tion between “pictures that are metaphors” and “pictures that have metaphors as
their textual content” (1987). Observing that Brunetti’s loss of continence meta-
phorises his social anxiety is to identify a metaphor of the second type. The first
type refers to the way in which the properties of the marked surface imbue the
depicted subject with metaphorical meaning. Philip Rawson took a similar posi-
tion two decades earlier when he observed that in any drawing “the main bulk of
the marks will not just refer directly to everyday objects but will “qualify” them
by investing them with analogous forms …endowed with a kind of metaphorical
radiance” (1969, p. 26). If drawing style operates as a metaphor for the qualities
of represented objects, then “implicit in every drawing style is a visual ontology,
i.e. a definition of the real in visual terms” (1969, p. 20). Grennan invokes this
comment as part of his account of how his drawing demonstrations change not
only the appearance but the story of the comics pages he takes as source material
(2017, p. 177). In more general terms, Douglas Wolk has suggested that “car-
tooning is inescapably a metaphor for the subjectivity of perception” (2007, p. 21).
Brunetti’s drawing style in Fig. 4 conforms to conventions of underground
cartooning. It mimics the rounded and elastic forms popularised by the work of
Walt Disney and an array of graphic storytelling aimed at children, but renders
these forms with a dense and enervated facture that suggests transgressive intent.
In Brunetti’s metaphor, incontinence serves a cognitive role that contradicts the
relationship I had to it: for him, it was a means of addressing another trauma. For
me, it was part of the trauma I wanted to address. CMT did not seem to offer a
way out of this conundrum, but drawing on my engagement with psychologies
of perception, I decided to confront Brunetti on the comics page and to adopt
his visual ontology in doing so (Fig. 5). Following Grennan’s arguments about
the inseparability of visual and narrative expressions of subjectivity, in order to
realise this confrontation as a coherent story my autobiographical self needed to
not only look like one of Brunetti’s characters but behave like one, and this
meant being misanthropic, foulmouthed and scatological. Grennan reports feel-
ing dishabituated when looking at the results of his drawing demonstration
(2017, pp. 212–214), and that was my experience here too. The page did not
look like drawings I had previously completed, and despite being its creator, I
88 J. MIERS
Fig. 5 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, p. 15
was shocked by the result. Nevertheless, it felt like a breakthrough. Emboldened

by what I saw as the success of this drawing, on subsequent pages I continued
with a similar style to retell an incident in which, as I put it in Fig. 5, I “shat
myself in public”, reframing an episode of intense disgust and humiliation as a
slapstick tale of gross-out humour. The process was empowering and contrib-
uted to my ability to retain a sense of agency and resilience in the face of illness.
Proceeding along the same methodological lines, the second story in So I
Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now (Fig. 6) adopted the graphic
Fig. 6 John Miers (2019) So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now p. 3
90 J. MIERS
expression of Mark Beyer.7 The bulk of Beyer’s output depicts the misadven-
tures of his characters Amy and Jordan, who suffer a procession of physical
injury and psychological torment. His graphic style is characterised by dis-
torted figures, obsessive hand-drawn patterns and exaggerated incoherent per-
spectives. As Chris Mautner puts it, “There’s no plot, per se, […] just a series
of hazardous events that eventually stop” (2016, n.p.). The impression of a
nonsensically cruel universe created by Beyer’s work felt appropriate for a story
that begins with the moment of my diagnosis and the response that life-
changing news provoked: why me?
Producing these drawings required engagement with both poles of the
methodological range mapped by the work of Kris and Gombrich, and Rhodes:
mimicking the material properties of the graphic languages of other cartoonists
required minute observation of their habits of composition, mark-making and
spatial construction, while the psychoanalyst’s focus on internal and affective
states provided the motivation for completing these confessional works.
Benefits and Challenges for Comics Studies

Some of the applications of this methodological field to Comics Studies have
been discussed already, most prominently in the analysis of caricature. Not all
drawing in comics is caricature, of course, but its characteristic features of exag-
geration, distortion and simplification are present to some degree in the work
of most cartoonists. The work of Kris and Gombrich, and Rhodes, analysed
how recognition of characters is achieved and sustained through caricature,
and of how this approach to drawing can create character. But the value of this
methodology is not limited to one set of graphic languages already covered in
canonical texts. A key concern for psychologies of perception is the examina-
tion of the material features characteristic of any given style, and the psycho-
logical processes by which those features support seeing-in. For example, the
work of John Kennedy (1993) has analysed the psychological processes by
which outline drawings provide information about the scenes they depict.
Lefèvre and Meesters (2018) recently provided a productive example of how
empirical studies of this type of drawing might be applied to comics scholar-
ship. They showed viewers a video of a line drawing being produced, as well as
stills from that video, and recorded their interpretations of what was depicted
at each stage. Although their experiment was not intended to specifically exam-
ine “the clear line style and other minimalistic styles […] often used in […]
comics”, they draw on previous research demonstrating that “a line drawing
does part of the pre-processing that our brain has to do to make sense of visual
stimuli” in suggesting that “our experiment may help to understand why sim-
plicity is very important in these styles” (2018, p. 214). Kennedy’s work places
greater emphasis on the way in which outline drawings support the construc-
tion of mental representations of the three-dimensional form of objects, which
has value for analysts seeking to understand how sequential drawings support
imaginings of continuous physical spaces.
It is difficult to think of any material feature of graphic style that has not
been examined in this field. Walton has paid attention to the effects of specific
types of facture in the development of his notion of the “apparent artist”
(1987), a figure that bears a family resemblance to Philippe Marion’s “graph-
iateur” (Baetens 2001) in its concern with the narrative effects of how drawn
marks appear to have been made. All of the key figures discussed in this chapter
have given attention to the effects of different approaches to perspective and
the construction of pictorial space, a necessary part of understanding the visual
creation of fictional worlds in an art form which, as Hillary Chute has put it,
has “an intense concern with locating bodies in space” (2011, p. 107). If, as
Lefèvre (2016) has argued, graphic style serves as the “primary entrance to a
story”, it behoves the researcher interested in cartooning as a visual art to
attend to the ways in which graphic style mediates access to the fictional worlds
it constructs.
Comics scholarship that draws on CMT would also benefit from closer
attention to graphic style. Applications of this theory to comics tend to focus
on what Wollheim called “pictures that have metaphors as their textual con-
tent”; the analyses often take representational seeing for granted and give little
attention to the processes by which seeing-in is achieved, meaning that the
effect of stylistic variation on the use of visual metaphor is frequently elided.
Elisabeth El Refaie (2019) makes a valuable intervention by developing a tri-
partite classification system for visual metaphors that includes pictorial meta-
phors, spatial metaphors and, most pertinently to this discussion, stylistic
metaphors, which “use features such as brightness, colour, form, level of detail,
and quality of line, as well as actual or implied material qualities of the page or
the whole book, to indicate an abstract concept or a non-visual sense percep-
tion” (2019, pp. 85–86). Charles Forceville, whose Pictorial Metaphor in
Advertising (1996) was the first substantial application of CMT to visual meta-
phor, notes in a review of El Refaie’s work that this framework proposes prom-
ising refinements to both metaphor and Comics Studies (Forceville 2020).
Finally, Walton’s account of depiction as a self-conscious fusion of imagina-
tive and perceptual activity, and its subsequent development by Grennan, raise
the possibility of a closer integration of visual and narratological approaches to
comics by describing the ways in which narrative drawings do not just illustrate
but create fictional worlds. Gombrich hints at this idea when he introduces the
duck-rabbit as “the simple trick drawing which has reached the philosophical
seminar” (2002, p. 4). He does not take up the riddle of why Wittgenstein felt
it necessary to reduce Jastrow’s drawing to a diagrammatic form before invit-
ing it to the seminar, but alludes to an answer when he observes that Jean de
Brunhoff’s rendering of the face of Babar8 with “a few hooks and dots” (2009,
p. 283) succeeds “partly because its lack of elaboration guarantees the absence
of contradictory clues” (p. 284). Grennan argues that “every story has a story,
in the sense that everything that is told also affords the story of its telling/
showing” (2017, p. 174), and if we take the story of Wittgenstein’s showing of
the duck-rabbit to be the presentation of a precise argument about linguistic
92 J. MIERS
categorisation of sensory stimuli, it makes narrative as well as theoretical sense

that he would not want his audience distracted by contradictory clues. Equally,
Gombrich’s concern with the material aspects of pictures meant that he needed
richer stimuli to work with, so he reinstated the more heavily textured version
from Die Fliegende Blätter. The art historians discussed in this chapter fre-
quently treat the visual and narrative properties of depictions separately. Such
questions are more likely to be intertwined in comics scholarship; thus, the
field offers novel ways of apprehending the stories that produce and are pre-
sented in depictions, even when they are employed purely in the service of
elaborating theoretical arguments. Figure 7 asks what use characters in Mark
Beyer’s world might make of the duck-rabbit. Their stories do not permit them
the intellectual repose of philosophical argumentation, and so the drawing’s
competing interpretations are instead recruited into the unending struggle to
comprehend the torment of existence.
Fig. 7 John Miers (2020) Mark Beyer’s Duck-Rabbit

Notes
1. Narratological analyses of style in comics include Pascal Lefèvre’s (2011a, 2011b,
2016) emphasis on graphic style’s ability to create fictive worlds; Simon Grennan’s
(Grennan 2012, 2017) conceptualisation of graphic style as the realisation of
intersubjective relationships; Eszter Szép’s (2020, pp. 109–134) analysis of the
ethics of style as an element of interpersonal engagement; and Elisabeth El
Refaie’s theorisation of “stylistic metaphors” (2019, pp. 109–117)
2. Gombrich returns to the analysis of caricature later in Art and Illusion (2002,
pp. 279–303); also of interest to comics scholars is his argument that visual meta-
phor is the primary weapon in “the cartoonist’s armoury” (1963).
3. For further discussion of caricature Cf. Mutard chapter “From Giotto to Drnaso:
The Common Well of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’ Comics”.
4. Gombrich himself provides evidence of this shift in his discussion of Rodolphe
Töpffer’s Essai de Physiognomonie (1845), which he frames as a systematic inves-
tigation of the psychological principles of “minimum clues” and “release mecha-
nisms” (Gombrich 2002, pp. 283–289)
5. For further discussion of Arnheim and visual balance Cf. Sommerland chapter
“Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga”.
6. The collection can be browsed at http://bit.ly/lescolemanlcc
7. Beyer began self-publishing in 1975 and is best known for comic strips starring
his luckless characters Amy and Jordan. During the 1980s and 90s his work
appeared in a variety of underground and alternative periodicals including the
influential anthology RAW, and has been reprinted in Amy and Jordan (Beyer
2004) and Agony (Beyer 2016).
8. An anthropomorphic elephant who starred in seven children’s books authored by
Brunhoff between 1931 and 1937.
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Aesthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes
of Interaction in Comics
Nina Eckhoff-Heindl
Abstract First developed in the literary studies of the late 1960s, the aesthetics
of reception was gradually applied within the discipline of Art History. This
methodology considers the artwork itself as the result of the interaction
between the work and its viewers. Consequently, this approach encourages a
focus on the possibilities of perception, experience and the mechanisms in the
artwork which unveil these potentials. The approach to aesthetics of reception
here are based on a discussion of three early art-historical approaches, namely,
those of Wolfgang Kemp, Gottfried Boehm and Max Imdahl. Using two comic
examples by Chris Ware, I will demonstrate the potential of reception aesthet-
ics for Comics Studies, and, in a final step, evince the challenges associated with
it. A first attempt at an explanation of the method’s restrictions was undertaken
by Janneke Wesseling, who critically reflected and expanded on the perspec-
tives of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing from her insights, this chapter con-
cludes with an outlook on aspects essentially connected to comics and which
should be followed in developing a reception aesthetics of comics. As I argue
from a perceptual-theoretical orientation, comics can be characterised as a
visual-tactile medium, which has to be understood in its dialogical relation with
its reading viewers.
N. Eckhoff-Heindl (*)
University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland
e-mail: Nina.Heindl@uni-koeln.de

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_6
98 N. ECKHOFF-HEINDL
Keywords Chris Ware • Gottfried Boehm • Iconic difference • Janneke

Wesseling • Max Imdahl • Reception aesthetics • Wolfgang Kemp
Introduction
First developed in literary studies in the late 1960s by Hans Robert Jauß and
Wolfgang Iser, an aesthetics of reception approach was gradually applied in Art
History, mostly in German-speaking regions, whereas it remained quite unno-
ticed in Anglophone countries (Wesseling 2017, p. 14). The method considers
the artwork as such as the result of its interaction with its viewers. Thus, not
only does the artefact carry an embedded meaning, but at the same time the
viewers put their subjective interpretation into it—both are seen as active coun-
terparts within a process, turning them into integral constituents. Consequently,
this methodological approach encourages a focus on the possibilities of percep-
tion, experience and the artwork’s mechanisms which unveil these potentials.
This means that reception aesthetics concentrates on the interaction between
artefact and viewers from a theoretical point of view and asks particularly about
the extent of modes of action within artefacts (Kemp 2011, p. 388; Grave
2014, p. 55). It must therefore be distinguished from empirical research on
forms of reception, which is interested in the perceptions of actual reading
viewers of comics. In terms of methodology, the two approaches differ in their
set starting point: reception aesthetics as a theoretical approach starts from the
artefact, empirical-experimental approaches work with interviews or eye-
tracking of the viewers.1 As this characterisation already implies, aesthetics of
reception is not linked to a predetermined framework as, for example, Erwin
Panofsky offers with his approach to iconology.2 Rather, it contains underlying
premises on which researchers can base different positions and perspectives.
In this chapter, I will discuss three early art-historical approaches using
reception aesthetics, namely, those of Wolfgang Kemp, Gottfried Boehm and
Max Imdahl.3 Using two comic examples by Chris Ware, I demonstrate the
potential of reception aesthetics, and, in a final step, evince the challenges asso-
ciated with it. A first attempt at an explanation of the method’s restrictions was
undertaken by Janneke Wesseling, who critically reflected and expanded on the
perspectives of the 1970s and 1980s by examining the active role of viewers
and the accompanying implications. Drawing from her insights, this chapter
concludes with an outlook on those aspects which are essentially connected
with comics and which should be followed in a reception aesthetics of comics.
From Literary Studies to Art History

It may come as a surprise that Art History—as a discipline in which the refer-
ence to the viewer is so closely connected to the investigated object—has not
played a leading role in the methodological development of reception aesthet-
ics. Wolfgang Kemp explains this with reference to historical changes in the
concept of art: the understanding of art up until the eighteenth century
AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION: UNCOVERING THE MODES OF INTERACTION… 99
considered the triad of artist, work and viewer in different constellations (1992,
p. 9). However, this understanding of art changed during the Enlightenment—
towards an aesthetics of autonomy: the artwork’s effect on the viewer is all the
greater the less it cares about the viewer (Kemp 1992, p. 14). This perspective,
in turn, laid the foundation for the focus on the artistic genius of the nine-
teenth century. Thus, it can be summarised that there were already earlier
approaches in Art History which focused on the relationship between artwork
and viewers (Kemp 1983, pp. 10–27), but the emergence of an independent
method, the so-called aesthetics of reception, only begins with the involvement
of literary studies. Two prominent stances within the literary approach are
those of Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser. While Jauß is interested in the
history of reception, that is, in exploring how a novel was perceived at different
times (Jauß 1972), Iser is concerned with the development of a theory of
reception aesthetics. For this purpose, Iser constructs the implied reader, a
concept describing the requisites of the reading position presupposed by the
text, and deals with the blanks of the text that must be filled imaginatively by
readers (Iser 1972, 1984).
Kemp is probably the most prominent expert on the art-historical aesthetics
of reception and has contributed significantly to its understanding.4
Nevertheless, his approach evinces limitations due to its thematic as well as
methodological focus. Thematically, he deals with representational and figura-
tive art, especially historical paintings from the nineteenth century and the
classical modern period.5 Furthermore, his perspective only covers a certain
methodological entry point for the investigation of the dialogical relation
between artwork and viewers. His conception can be characterised by its adap-
tation of literary concepts for Art History. Therefore, he notably addresses
issues of representation, that is, depicted objects and their relations in terms of
storyline in three-dimensional image space. These ‘internal reception require-
ments’, as he calls them, must—in its transposition from literature to the fine
arts—be supplemented by an understanding arising from the artwork’s spatial
disposition as well as the socio-cultural perspective of the viewers. Kemp con-
siders art-historical reception aesthetic’s most important task as pointing out
the relationship between the internal and external conditions of art reception
during different epochs (1983, pp. 33–34). The analyses of blank spaces in
paintings is probably Kemp’s most influential transfer of concepts from literary
studies. Wolfgang Iser defined these in literature as spaces in the text that can
be filled by the readers’ own imagination (1984, p. 284). A textual characteri-
sation of a person’s facial expression, for example, contains descriptions of form
and measurements of their nose, eyes and other facial features—the reader then
puts these together as one whole face. Therefore, these blank spaces are in need
of the reader’s combinatory willingness. Similarly, reading and viewing sequen-
tial panels in comics entails a filling of blanks: the reading viewers have to
imagine the connection between panels A and B (Postema 2013, pp. 65–66).
Blank spaces in paintings also require the viewers’ combinatory skills, though
slightly differently in its medial manifestation. As Janneke Wesseling points
out, the blank spaces that Kemp treats in his analyses are consistently charged
with a semiotic, symbolic or narrative function. She emphasises that the term
“blank space” generates what is, in essence, a traditional iconographic interpre-
tation or narrative construal of the painting, an interpretation based on the
literary strategy of the “omniscient storyteller”’ (Wesseling 2017, p. 59).
As Wesseling argues, Kemp’s focus on representational and figurative art is
insufficient for the whole range of the history of painting, including, for exam-
ple, abstract paintings—let alone the complete array of artworks in general
(2017, pp. 73–74). All artforms should be addressed by aesthetics of reception
since they are based on the dialogical exchange between artwork and viewers
to the same extent. Wesseling’s criticism will be dealt with in more detail in the
final section of this chapter, but first I want to discuss two more image-based
approaches to show what the focus on a reception aesthetics methodology with
an orientation to visual theory can add to the previously mentioned represen-
tational mode.
Therefore, I turn to Gottfried Boehm who pursues an art philosophical and
systematic approach with a focus on visual aspects in which he coined the term
‘iconic difference’.6 Boehm defines his highly discussed concept as a simultane-
ous effect of repulsion and collaboration in images (2010, p. 49). For a descrip-
tion of this concept, I refer to three basic contrasts involved in the experience
of images which are all intertwined with each other.
The first contrast contains two levels inside an image: the level of the
depicted and the level of depiction. The first level corresponds to the represen-
tational mode mentioned above in Kemp’s approach. Viewers focusing on the
level of the depicted perceive the figurative content, the depicted objects and
characters in the construed spatial depth. Perceiving the level of depiction, in
turn, emphasises the planimetric, that is, planar, two-dimensional relations of
forms and colours as well as the artefact’s facture by also thematising aspects of
its production.
The second contrast is intricately linked to the first and is characterised by
the constant interplay of both transparency and opacity (Majetschak 2005,
pp. 179–182). Transparency, in this regard, means that the images can open up
a perspective on something else that is visualised at the level of the depicted.
Opacity, on the other hand, means that the image shows itself and its medial
construction at the level of depiction (for this contrast in comics: Heindl 2018).
The third contrast of iconic difference is the interplay between simultaneity
and successiveness in the image perception. Thus, an image is perceivable in its
entirety as well as successively with its details—both aspects of which can never
be separated. This mechanism has also discussed in the field of Comics Studies
as a central aspect of single comics pages or double-page spreads (Bredehoft
2006, p. 873; Groensteen 2007, p. 18; Raeburn 2004, p. 25). However, by
addressing only one basic contrast, comics’ image-theoretical implications have
not yet been sufficiently considered in Comics Studies. The relationship of
transparency to opacity and—what is more—the repulsion and collaboration
between the level of the depicted and the level of depiction also have significant
implications for the understanding of comics and its perception mechanisms.
As mentioned earlier, these three facets of iconic difference are closely linked
as Boehm shows using examples across the history of paintings. In this respect,
Boehm and Max Imdahl have similar approaches. Both focus primarily on
paintings through all epochs from medieval codices to classical modernism and
contemporary art. Yet, while Boehm deals with the mechanisms in images
against the backdrop of an image-theoretical and systematic interest, Imdahl
ties his considerations closely to a specific artwork’s interpretation.
Imdahl’s main research question concerns how planimetric correlations at
the level of depiction generate meaning at the level of the depicted and for the
artwork as a whole (1996a, p. 21).7 According to him, the two levels inherent
in images are associated with different sight concepts. Regarding the level of
the depicted, he speaks of ‘identifying sight’ [‘wiedererkennendes Sehen’]: a
picture’s characters and objects can be named and thus distinguished from one
another (Imdahl 1996b, p. 316). The level of depiction, on the other hand, is
more strongly connected with ‘seeing sight’ [‘sehendes Sehen’]: for example,
when a brushstroke is discernible as such instead of as part of a body or an
object (Imdahl 1996b, p. 316). Imdahl states that the identifying sight has
become a habit and the ‘normalised’ way of seeing. Seeing sight, in contrast, is
subordinated to the conventionalised sight and requires the viewers to main-
tain an in-depth focus (Imdahl 1996b, p. 304). Yet it is only the interaction of
both forms of sight that makes it possible to perceive images in their full signifi-
cance—he calls this interaction ‘distinguished sight’ [‘erkennendes Sehen’]
(Imdahl 1996a, pp. 92–93).
In his analyses, Imdahl combines these perceptual-theoretical implications
of sight with the individual mechanisms of iconic difference. He developed his
approach in dealing with Concrete and Optical Art, but he has also applied it
to visual narratives with an emphasis on detailed image description as well as
their modes of interaction. The discussion of his perspective on the dialogical
relation between artwork and viewer is closely linked to his analyses of indi-
vidual works; therefore, one of his main examples serves to illustrate his
approach.
The miniature of the imprisonment of Jesus (Fig. 1; Imdahl 1996a, VIII)
from the medieval Codex Egberti (between 980 and 993 AD) is based on the
Gospels. It depicts Jesus Christ, caressed by Judas Iscariot as well as surrounded
by his disciples to his right and his opponents to his left. As Imdahl argues, this
miniature takes advantage of the characteristics of images, which can be sum-
marised as the simultaneity of successive and synchronous occurrences as well
as planimetric correlations (1996c). This means that the consecutive events of
the biblical text are transferred to a simultaneous perceptibility: Judas’s kiss,
Jesus’s capture as well as the events before and after are depicted side by side
and are merged in the figure of Jesus.
Through his hand postures, Jesus is represented simultaneously as actor and
receiver. With his right, he gestures towards, that is, talks to, his disciples whilst
Fig. 1 Miniature of the imprisonment of Jesus. Codex Egberti, Ms-Lat. 24, Fol
79v-80r (between 980 and 993 AD). (From Anderlik 2005)
they want to save him; his left hangs limply by his side whilst he is captured by
his opponents. Jesus is not just an actor nor solely a receiver, instead he is both
of these combined. This is also the case with him and Judas. Although Judas
envelops Jesus, he does not dominate Christ but rather operates as an acces-
sory, in terms of size and pose. At the same time, Jesus is exposed to all this by
his mere size—he is the only figure who crosses several thresholds inside the
picture and is the centre due to the other figures’ positions. With this descrip-
tion, Imdahl shows that the succession of the biblical text is transformed into
vivid simultaneity in the miniature. In addition, the planimetric relations in the
figures’ size and posture, the directions of their gazes and actions as well as the
spatial disposition contribute significantly to the constitution of meaning.
These three approaches to reception aesthetics all examine the dialogical
relation in experiencing fine art with regard to the artworks’ mechanisms.
Whereas Kemp is mostly interested in the impact of the correlations on the
level of the depicted, Boehm and Imdahl investigate the basic contrasts of the
so-called iconic difference. With their focus on the interplay between the level
of the depicted and level of depiction, effects of transparency and opacity as
well as the dynamics of simultaneity and succession, Boehm and Imdahl high-
light how visual mechanisms create additional meaning and subliminally affect
the understanding of images. What all three perspectives bring together is that
they are developed primarily for paintings and other ‘stand-alone’ artistic
images like engravings, etchings or drawings. Against this background, it is
important to critically conceptualise the differences between the chosen inves-
tigated objects in Art History to date and comics as my subject of study. These
differences include aspects of production, handling, interaction and systemic
dimensions, some of which will be addressed in this chapter’s conclusion. Yet,

one aspect correlates directly with the explanations so far: the definition of
images in comics.
In my view, a comics page or double-page spread should not be understood
as a conglomeration of images but should be seen as one entity and—in con-
clusion—as one image. Basically, I here incorporate Thierry Groensteen’s con-
cept of ‘iconic solidarity’:
I define this as interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the

double characteristic of being separated – this specification dismisses unique
enclosed images within a profusion of patterns or anecdotes – and which are plas-
tically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in prae-
sentia. (Groensteen 2007, p. 18; original emphasis)
Groensteen’s understanding of ‘iconic solidarity’ as an interaction of all pan-

els on a page implies that each individual panel is part of a larger arrangement.
It can neither be extracted nor can it be representative of the whole comics
page. In this regard, it is important not to use ‘panel’ and ‘image’ interchange-
ably. Not every individual panel functions as one image in its own right, but the
collaboration of all panels on one comics page or double-page spread does so
by its perceptual implications.8
Closely related to my understanding of the term ‘image’ with respect to
comics is the term ‘reading viewers’ which I use for the characterisation of the
comics audience. This designation also stems from the former methodological
considerations: when a printed comic is opened or a digital one is accessed, the
addressees are first viewers, as they perceive the entire single comics page or
double-page spread in its visual structure. Only then do they turn successively
to the single panels forming sequences, an action that is interrupted and
expanded by the simultaneous observation of the single comics page or double-
page spread.
In the following, I illustrate the potential of art-historical reception aesthet-
ics for Comics Studies through two case studies, namely, the comics episode
Rusty Brown. Autumn., published in the collection The ACME Novelty Library
Report for Shareholders (2005), and a double spread from ACME Novelty
Library #18 (2007), both by comics artist Chris Ware. Ware’s comics are par-
ticularly suitable for illustrating this methodical approach, as his composition
style focuses decisively on visual means. Yet even with differently constructed
comics, it is important to consider the visual implications for the comic’s mean-
ing. By implementing crucial aspects of the method of reception aesthetics, I
will show in the first case study that a supposedly trivial visual element, poten-
tially dismissed as a mere accessory, lays bare the subliminal emotional tensions
within the visual narration. For the second case study, I will argue that by the
way it is composed and situated within the book, the page layout of the spread
makes the intricacy of thought processes perceptible. Both examples illustrate
how planimetric correlations in comics can generate meaning.
Rusty Brown. Autumn.

The one-page episode from the life of young Rusty Brown (Fig. 2; Ware 2005,
p. 60) deals with the relationship between father and son. The comic strip con-
sists of a header containing the protagonist’s name and an overall structure of
nine equally sized panels. The first two depict a situation during which Rusty
watches TV, while speech bubbles indicate a dispute between his parents in the
next room. The father then drags his son to join him on his walk to the park,
Fig. 2 Chris Ware. Rusty Brown. Autumn. © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2005, 60)
even though the boy would rather continue watching his programme. The fol-
lowing seven panels then take place outside: the father walks ahead, smokes a
cigarette and raves about the surrounding beauty of autumnal nature. After
they have arrived at the park, the father sits down on a park bench, coughing
and sobbing. The boy senses his chance to escape unnoticed. In the last panel,
he can only be identified by the shoe heel walking away in the panel’s upper left
edge, while his father has collapsed on the bench and now crouches totally lost
at the picnic table.
As a unique framing device, there is a branch structure that covers the entire
comics page, except for the first two panels, due to the fact that they take place
inside. The branches complicate the Western conventional reading direction
from top left to bottom right by ‘growing’ from the margins into the panel
arrangement. Furthermore, they protrude above and below the different panel
boundaries and literally weave the panels together. This interweaving of panels
and branches has temporal and spatial implications. In order to highlight the
different dimensions of these simultaneous mechanisms, this can be compared
to formally similar panel arrangements, in particular Sunday strips from Frank
King’s comics series Gasoline Alley. In addition to the fact that Chris Ware
adopts the classic structure of early newspaper strips, the comparison with
Gasoline Alley is particularly suitable due to King’s experiments with the entan-
glement of time and space in comics. Besides, Ware himself repeatedly empha-
sises that Frank King’s work is an important inspiration to him (Hignite 2006,
pp. 236–253; Ware 2017, p. 171). Thus, it is very likely that the thematic
alignment with Gasoline Alley is not coincidental and is also echoed in Rusty
Brown’s character world.
Through comparisons with some of King’s panel arrangements, the visual
implications of the branch structure in Ware’s episode can be underlined. One
of Frank King’s signature panel layouts in his Sunday strips is the layout that
divides a scene in several panels.9 The atmosphere of a continuous space is
retained by the background, single occurrences of each figure, and the gutter
that takes on a structuring function. The simultaneous scene is split into smaller
units that can be scanned by the eye step-by-step. The conventional reading
direction does not have to be followed—yet it is probably still the preferred
one. All these aspects make it a simultaneous scene that is spatially and tempo-
rally consistent. Even though Rusty Brown. Autumn. suggests a similar arrange-
ment at first sight due to the continuous branch structure, this is undermined
by the fact that the protagonists are depicted in every panel. Hence, the out-
door scene cannot be perceived in a spatially and temporally consistent way.
In the Sunday page of April 22, 1934 (Fig. 3; Maresca 2007, n. p.), Frank
King also experimented with modes of depiction in terms of spatial consistency
with the possibility of temporal variance. Walt’s adopted son Skeezix climbs
with one of his friends on top of a house on a construction site. Another young-
ster then chases them across, through and around the house. The mechanisms
of perception in this strip are especially intriguing due to the relation of a single
panel to the whole and this correlation’s spatio-temporal implications. Each
Fig. 3 Frank King. Gasoline Alley (Construction site). Chicago Tribune, April 22nd,
1934. (From Maresca 2007, n. p)
individual panel represents only a small part of the house, and it is only in con-
junction with the overall background that the characters can be spatially
located. The children’s activities are shown in all panels simultaneously—as
well as the fragments of the house. The logic of this visual narration demands
that the reading viewers envision the characters only in the particular panel
they focus on at that moment, while the house as a whole must be kept in mind
to ensure the characters’ respective spatial position in this episode. In Rusty
Brown. Autumn., the branch structure connotes just such a spatial consistency
with temporal variance as seen in King’s house-episode. The branches pervade
all the panels of the exterior space and take over the function of the house in
Gasoline Alley: it holds the scene together. The crucial difference is that in
Rusty Brown. Autumn., the branches and the characters are not causally inter-
linked with each other.
The comparison with Gasoline Alley clarifies that in Rusty Brown. Autumn.
the reading viewers are repeatedly made aware of the complexity of spatial and
temporal entanglements. Even more so, when the transition of branches is
considered from one panel to the next above the gutter. It invokes self-reflexive
conventions of the comics medium by overstepping panel boundaries, yet also
stresses the idea of a coherent space constructed by the whole panel arrange-
ment—an idea, as the analysis of the spatio-temporal variability has already
shown, that is consistently undermined and questioned. This formal analysis of
how the branches enter and exit the panels helps to understand the role of the
foliage for the spatio-temporal dynamics of the comic strip.
Beyond that, the branch structure also plays an important role in character-
ising the relationship between the two protagonists. From the third panel
onwards, when both leave the house, Rusty keeps the exact same distance while
he follows his father. Only in the penultimate panel the boy’s attachment to his
father seems to loosen. He turns away from him and, in the last panel,
disappears.
The thereby denoted relationship of father and son is visually reinforced by
the branches. As the bond between father and son weakens, the planimetric
dominance of the branch structure increases from each panel to the next. From
the sixth panel onwards, when the father sits down at the picnic table and thus
no longer gives the boy any direction of movement, the branch structure also
moves between the two characters. Rusty and his father are spatially separated
from each other for the rest of the episode. The branch structure becomes
increasingly more expansive, while the characters have increasingly less space
for themselves. This planimetric relation culminates in the last panel, which is
entirely dominated by the strongest branch. The dynamic relationship between
father and son is thus perceivable on a visual, planimetrically oriented level of
depiction. The reading viewers can literally see the ever-widening emotional
gap between the two characters through the depiction of the branches.
One last comparison between Rusty Brown. Autumn. and an episode of
Gasoline Alley underlines this observation. In the Sunday episode of December
5th, 1927 (Fig. 4; Maresca 2007, n. p.), Walt takes his son for a walk. King
thereby invokes the topos of the instructive walk of the knowledgeable father
and his inquisitive son. In its course, Walt admires the autumnal variety of
shapes and colours painted by Mister Frost. Therewith, the basic motif in
King’s as well as Ware’s episode is comparable, as Jeet Heer has pointed out
(2010, p. 8). The differences are intriguing when we compare the depicted
Fig. 4 Frank King. Gasoline Alley (Autumn walk). Chicago Tribune, December 5th,
1927. (From Maresca 2007, n. p)
relationship between father and son. Walt and Skeezix are very familiar with
each other: in every single panel they hold hands, sit next to each other or Walt
carries Skeezix in his arms. Only once, are they partly separated in planimetrical
terms. In the fourth panel, in which the protagonists admire a wild cherry,
Walt’s head is separated from his torso by a branch that protrudes across
the panel.
In Frank King’s case—if at all—this produces a funny effect on a formal

level, while Chris Ware uses it to enhance the narration as well as the emotional
inclusion of the reading viewers. The reference to Frank King’s Gasoline Alley
evokes a special form of father-son relationship that corresponds to the nostal-
gic ideal of a traditional nuclear family with its promise of happiness and con-
tentment in early twentieth-century America (Lovett 2007, pp. 2–4; McCarthy
1997, pp. 1–6). Against this backdrop, the emotional distance between Rusty
and his father seems even larger—the latter needs an excuse to spend time with
his son. Following the example of Walt and Skeezix, the father wants to inten-
sify the relationship through an instructive walk. Yet, as it turns out, the emo-
tional gap between the two family members only widens. The branch structure
and its planimetrical relatedness to father and son uncovers this abstract and
subliminal correlation. At the level of the depicted, the branch structure serves
to frame the content of the autumn walk. From the perspective of the reading
viewers, this can be described as addressing the identifying sight. At the level of
depiction, the seeing sight is targeted and the branches take on a structuring
function that ties the layout together. In addition, the branch structure also
visualises the emotional gap between father and son. This third aspect corre-
lates with Imdahl’s third form of sight, the distinguished sight. This form of
vision emerges from an in-depth examination of the comic strip and is based on
the interplay of the identifying and the seeing sight.
I Just Want to Fall Asleep

While the first example represented a rather self-contained episode, the second
is part of a book-length comic story.10 When they open ACME Novelty Library
#18 (2007), the reading viewers are confronted with a complex, diagram-like
panel structure that covers both endpapers (Fig. 5; Ware 2007, n. p.). This
double page does not meet the expectations or, rather, conventions related to
opening a comic book: common components of comics such as speech bub-
bles, thought balloons, panel grid or a comprehensible plot within panels are
reduced to a minimum, image and text are interwoven differently than with
conventional panel arrangements. The layout consists of three panels, each
situated at the side margins. Although text is used sparingly in speech bubbles
or in commentary boxes, it is predominantly arranged on arcs (partially
inverted) and thus connects different areas of the structure. After an initial
orientation, the panel on the right-hand side of the page can be identified as
the starting point of the diagrammatic construct. The (consistently unnamed)
female protagonist lies in bed, arms crossed, covering her face. From this panel,
thought bubbles lead to the centre of the double page, proclaiming ‘I JUST
WANT TO FALL ASLEEP AND NEVER WAKE UP AGAIN’. The whole
panel arrangement turns out to be protagonist’s thought construct. Starting
from the centre, circular movements repeatedly lead back to the middle of the
double page. The woman’s thoughts literally ‘circle’ around loneliness, uncer-
tainty, anxiety about the future and considerations of suicide. The connections
Fig. 5 Chris Ware. I Just Want to Fall Asleep © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2007,
endpapers)
between one uncertainty and the next in the protagonist’s train of thought are
taken over by various arrow shapes and directional reading instructions.11
Page layouts like this one from ACME Novelty Library #18 are consistently
referred to as diagrams in the research literature on Chris Ware’s work (Bartual
2012; Cates 2010). Indeed, Ware uses mechanisms and modes of depiction that
are familiar to reading viewers from their own experiences with diagrams: struc-
tures of references, oppositions as well as the combination of both graphic and
textual components. Felix Thürlemann defines the diagram as a synthesising
graphic of geometric or topological references (such as left/right, top/bottom,
central/peripheral, near/far) and as a resource for mental processing of com-
plex facts or as an instrument for guiding actions (2011, p. 91). Thürlemann
and Steffen Bogen point out, that on the level of production, the features of
diagram can be summarised as concentration and, on the level of reception, in
the unfolding or expansion which demands an intensive examination by the
viewers (2003, p. 8). These characteristics also apply to this double page in
which Ware interweaves diagram-like elements with conventional panel struc-
tures. Therewith, he incorporates diagrammatic qualities into the presentation
of the protagonist’s mental world. The characteristics of diagrams support visu-
alising the intricacy and entanglement of the woman’s negative thoughts.
However, this page layout seems too complicated to understand it at first
glance. A longer and more intensive examination is necessary to be able to col-
late her thoughts and grasp their emotional extent. This is further reinforced
by the succeeding double page, packed with a total of 79 panels, in which the
protagonist wakes up, showers and shops. Various actions, such as the descent
down the stairs, are laid out over several panels. Compared to the diagram-
matic structure, this double page can be received conventionally, even though
the plethora of panels is just as atypical for most comics. Ware depicts the pro-
tagonist’s everyday rituals in just the same way as the reading viewers can look
at this double-page spread: in a comparatively simple and fast manner—in stark
contrast to the previous double page.
It is important to see both double pages in correlation with each other.
Without the protagonist’s world of thought, this double page seems almost triv-
ial—nothing of her inner struggle and suffering is conceivable in the multico-
loured, cheerful-looking panels. The diagrammatical structure of the preceding
pages puts the second double page in a completely different light: as the day
progresses slowly, the dejection and emptiness inside the woman is only intensi-
fied by the colourful world outside. The perception of these everyday activities
depends to a large extent on how much the reading viewers have previously
familiarised themselves with her ‘circling thoughts’ about suicide and loneliness.
A final comparison with an earlier draft of this composition (Fig. 6; Ware
2017, p. 241) illustrates the relevance of the initial disorientation and circular
motion in the published version. Here, the diagrammatic structure is based on
a panel row, which in ACME Novelty Library #18 is integrated into the suc-
ceeding double page. This ‘footing’ embeds the thought world directly into
the next comic story. As the panels progress, her circling thoughts are
Fig. 6 Chris Ware. I Just Want to Fall Asleep, 2002. Ink, coloured pencil and white
gouache on Bristol, 20 x 28 in © Chris Ware 2022. (From Ware 2017, 241)
interrupted by the comment ‘BUT’, succeeded by ‘Maybe it’s not so bad …’

in this page’s last panel. The depressive content of the diagrammatic structure
is thus directly played down and retracted.12
At the same time, the panel row makes the orientation of this double page
quite clear as it adds a bottom to the circling world of thoughts. This is sup-
ported by the emblem in the upper left corner of the page. The emblem is the
only part of the graphic that is pencilled, not inked. It shows the protagonist in
a bust portraiture overwritten with ‘YOUR NARRATOR’. Not only does the
emblem open up a direct correlation between the rather ambiguously depicted
figure in the panels and the portrait, but it also identifies her as the protagonist
who will be the subject of the following story. Moreover, the emblem’s orienta-
tion supports the longitudinal alignment of the whole layout. Due to this
directionality, every turning of the book leads back to the vertical orientation
and thus underlines the fixation by the panel row at the lower edge of the pro-
tagonist’s thought world.
The published double page of ACME Novelty Library #18, in contrast, is
much more ambivalent. The layout’s vertical orientation is considerably
reduced and only held in the lower area by the panel from which the thought
bubbles emanate. Furthermore, the protagonist is neither characterised by
external attributions nor in her appearance. This ambiguity is also continued in
the book design. Due to its location on the endpapers, instead of the main mat-
ter of the book, the question arises whether this double page belongs directly
to the comic’s story or whether it needs to be understood as a paratextual addi-
tion. The reading viewers do not receive guidelines that apparently have to be
followed to understand this double page. Neither can they build upon previous
experiences with other comics to get more information. The diagrammatic
structure, which must be perceived from all sides and angles, demands an
intensive examination of the intricate layout and equally intricate thoughts of
the protagonist. Her thoughts and fears are not merely described but shown
and become palpable in a never-ending circular process. Experiencing this dou-
ble page does not only take place mentally and intellectually by turning letters
around or understanding relations but also in the physical act of turning and
rotating the book during the reading process. Chris Ware transfers the elusive
arrangement and logic of the (seemingly endless) trains of thought, which are
also constantly renewed in new associations, into a page layout enriched by
diagrammatic structures. Similar to the function of the branch structure in
Rusty Brown. Autumn., the circling thoughts become visible and, furthermore,
accessible intellectually (through mirror-inversions and the complexity of refer-
ence structures), emotionally (through the subjects of her thoughts) and physi-
cally (by turning the book in one’s hands).13
With regard to the three basic contrasts of the iconic difference, it is a matter
of emphasising one pole in each case. In relation to the two interconnected
levels of the visual, the level of depiction is emphasised, while the level of the
depicted is strongly reduced: objects and figures can be identified, but the
rather pictogram-like content is only rounded off to possible actions through
the relations on the level of depiction. This is underlined by the fact that the
panels provide less insight into constructed spaces (transparency), instead they
rather remain flat (opaque). Referring to the third basic contrast, it is also
apparent that the simultaneous mode of action dominates. While in a usual

panel arrangement an already socio-culturally conventionalised way of perceiv-
ing can be applied, in the layout of I Just Want to Fall Asleep, the simultaneous
effect of the double page must first be ‘overcome’. Therefore, the circular lay-
out without a particular starting or end point confronts the reading viewers
with their own reception habits.
Reception Aesthetics of Comics

The two examples Rusty Brown. Autumn. and I Just Want Fall to Sleep have
been analysed on the basis of the method of reception aesthetics, which presup-
poses a dialogical relationship between comics and reading viewers. Based on
three art-historical approaches to aesthetics of reception, I have emphasised the
interweaving of the level of the depicted and the level of depiction with refer-
ence to image-theoretical implications.
The foliage in Rusty Brown. Autumn. cannot be dismissed as a mere decora-
tive accessory. Rather, it is an elementary and important component of the
story, which visualises the relationship between father and son, and helps read-
ing viewers perceive the emotional gap. Therefore, the analysis of Rusty Brown.
Autumn. helps to illustrate integral visual aspects and, more specifically, plani-
metric relations for the interpretation of comics. In I Just Want to Fall Asleep,
the emphasis was on the analysis of the spread’s circular layout and diagram-
matic structure. Through its ambivalences, the accessibility from several entry
points and the implications of understanding diagrammatic relations, the expe-
rience of ruminating is translated into a page structure. This brings an intel-
lectually and emotionally demanding examination to the beginning of the
comic story and makes the rolling of negative thoughts perceptible.
As the analyses show, a reception-aesthetic perspective enables reading view-
ers to uncover the modes of interaction that lie in the visuality of comics, which
have been as yet insufficiently considered in the field of Comics Studies.
However, the implementation of this methodology to comics is also affiliated
with challenges that affect art-historical research on the one hand and comic
studies on the other.
In her book The Perfect Spectator. The Experience of the Art Work and
Reception Aesthetics (2017), Janneke Wesseling points out the problems of
older approaches to art-historical reception aesthetics. She argues that the
method has remained underdeveloped, since the focus has solely been on
paintings and the viewer’s position in the dialogical relationship has only been
treated implicitly (Wesseling 2017, pp. 10, 50). Against this background,
Wesseling updates the approach by expanding the subject area and strengthen-
ing the viewers’ role in their embodied and situated perception (2017, pp. 9,
76, 121).
This update to art-historical reception aesthetics must also be taken into
account for the adaptation of this method to comics. A second important
aspect is the expansion of the levels of analysis, which have so far only focused
on implications regarding the so-called iconic difference. For I Just Want to

Fall Asleep, for example, it is essential to also take the need to turn and rotate
the book into account. Moreover, the double page cannot stand alone but is
embedded in the book as a whole (including its paratextual features) as well as
in the succeeding pages.
I build on these findings by introducing the level of topological relations
into the analytical model in addition to the level of the depicted and level of
depiction. Similar to the planimetric relations on the level of depiction, the
topological level is also characterised by a structural, relational understanding
of elements, here, however, explicitly related to spatiality. For the analysis of
the topological level of comics, art-historical research which deals with multi-
part pictorial forms can be adapted. Helga Lutz and Berhard Siegert, for exam-
ple, point out that the operations that primarily perform or enact the spatial
relations should be considered accordingly (2016, p. 110). Regarding
printed comics, this ‘performance’ is about handling: turning pages, opening
and closing double spreads, turning and rotating the book.
However, the handling cannot be addressed on its own; instead, it must be
analysed in relation to the materiality of comics, that is, including their physi-
cal, technological and sensual aspects. Thus, the analysis of the topological level
of comics comprises the object-oriented materiality and the processual han-
dling. Since both are mutually dependent, I summarise them under ‘tactility’.
From the Latin tactilis, meaning ‘touchable’, this term marks an intersection,
on the one hand, of materiality and handling, on the other hand, of comics and
reading viewers.
In order to pursue this perspective further, a reception-aesthetics approach
of comics can expand on Ian Hague’s multi-sensory understanding of comics
(see Hague 2014). Unlike Hague, who puts all senses on an equal footing in
the reception of comics, I suggest an emphasis on visual and tactile connections
for the characterisation of comics. Thus, in order to take a look at comics as a
visual-tactile medium, the perceptual dimensions must be considered in their
interrelatedness.
The method of reception aesthetics offers a suitable basis for looking at
comics from a perceptual perspective. By implementing and refining art-
historical reception aesthetics, I propose an understanding of comics as a visual-
tactile medium that focuses on the interplay of visuality, materiality and
handling. This procedure facilitates the understanding of comics in the interac-
tion of the level of depicted, depiction and topological relations. Besides this
benefit for comics research, the development of reception aesthetics for comics
offers the opportunity to enhance the method and sharpen the focus on the
dialogical structure between work and reading viewers.14
Acknowledgements This chapter was written in the context of my doctoral thesis on

comics as aesthetic experience and as a visual-tactile medium, which has received fund-
ing from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 713600.
Notes
1. Within Comics Studies, a rich body of research has developed focused on recep-
tion theory, with approaches informed by Cultural Studies forming one early
strand; see, for example, Martin Barker’s Comics, Ideology, Power & the critics
(1989). Mel Gibson is another comics scholar using reception theory, where—
in my opinion—reception-aesthetic components can be found in her method-
ological foundation although she often works using interviews with readers
(Gibson 2012, 273). One of the most recent approaches focusing on reception
can be found in the work of the German Early-Career Research Group Hybrid
Narrativity, who use cognitive experiments such as eye tracking (Dunst
et al., 2018).
2. Iconology is a method of interpretation for which Erwin Panofsky developed a
three-stage model consisting of pre-iconographic as well as iconographic analy-
sis and in the final stage iconological interpretations (Panofsky 1939).
3. Wolfgang Kemp is a representative of a reception-aesthetic approach. Max
Imdahl and Gottfried Boehm, in contrast, make use of reception-aesthetic pro-
cedures. Yet they refer to them by other terms—Imdahl with ‘Ikonik’ [Iconic],
while Gottfried Boehm does not specify his approach in this regard.
4. Kemp‘s most important study in regard to reception aesthetics is Der Anteil des
Betrachters. Rezeptionsästhetische Studien zur Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts [The
Viewer’s Share. Reception-Aesthetic Studies on 19th-Century Painting] from
1983. Furthermore, he is editor of the publication Der Betrachter ist im Bild.
Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik [The viewer is in the image. Studies on
Art and Reception Aesthetics] from 1992.
5. Following the 1970s and 1980s, Kemp also focused on contemporary art; see,
for example, Der explizite Betrachter. Zur Rezeption zeitgenössischer Kunst [The
explicit viewer. On the reception of contemporary art] (Kemp 2015).
6. Boehm’s engagement with the method of reception aesthetics occurs within his
body of research especially in essays such as Bild und Zeit [Image and Time]
(Boehm 1987).
7. In his comprehensive study Giotto Arenafresken. Ikonpgraphie, Ikonologie, Ikonik
[Giotto’s arena frescoes. Iconography, Iconology, Iconic] from 1980 Imdahl
developed key aspects of his approach. However and much like Gottfried
Boehm, he mostly conducts his art-historical research in research papers. In
1996 these papers were collected in three volumes, edited by Gottfried Boehm,
Angeli Janhsen-Vukicevic and Gundolf Winter, and published with the German
publishing house Suhrkamp.
8. For futher detail on Groensteen’s idea Cf. Hardy-Vallée chapter “From Tableau
to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within Art History to Study the
Photobook”.
9. Due to the manifold examples from King’s Gasoline Alley, which are character-
ised by this layout, I only describe the main design decision without concentrat-
ing on one specific example. It is used, for example, in the Sunday page of the
Chicago Tribune from 24th of May 1931 (Maresca 2007, n. p.).
10. Space does not allow for a more detailed discussion of the fact that Rusty Brown.
Autumn. is not entirely self-contained, since The ACME Novelty Library Report
for Shareholders also includes the three other seasons as episodes of Rusty
Brown’s life. In addition, these pages are juxtaposed with comic strips about
Quimby the Mouse, which also take place during the respective seasons.
11. For a more extensive analysis, see Heindl 2014.

12. In the published version, this restricting remark has been removed.
13. In Heindl 2017, I describe this tedious reconstruction or rather cognitive explo-
ration of meaning as an ‘experienced’ metaphor.
14. I pursued this dual objective (implementing an approach of reception aesthetics
for Comics Studies as well as enhance the theoretical framework of the method
by discussing comics) in my doctoral thesis Comics als ästhetische Erfahrung am
Beispiel von Chris Wares ‘Building Stories’ [Comics as aesthetic experience using
the example of Chris Ware’s Building Stories] from 2021, in which I developed
a model of comics as a possibility of aesthetic experience, conceptualised the
medium as visually tactile and offered a systematic approach to visual-tactile nar-
ration in comics.
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Reading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow
Kid” Through Perception of the Image
Christine Mugnolo
Abstract Richard Felton Outcault’s smelting of visual structures, his plucking

of social archetypes, and his manipulation of consumer practices all illuminate
how his serial comics from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
helped invent modern comics. This chapter explores what the new visual struc-
tures and unorthodox narratives of the Yellow Kid, Outcault’s first serial comic
and one of his most commercially successful characters, relayed to their infatu-
ated readers. This analysis turns to the art historical methodologies formulated
by Svetlana Alpers and Hans Belting, particularly their concept that “images”
can be unlinked from their material embodiment in pictures and their physio-
logical embodiment in human perception. Outcault’s Yellow Kid pulled from a
variety of conventions governing how images operated in humour magazines,
urban periodicals, and reports on New York’s poor. By bringing together
incompatible spheres of picturing, Outcault’s mixture deconstructed and
inverted their ideologies. Eschewing satire, Outcault used ecstatic violence,
jolting non sequiturs, and convivial repartee between characters and readers to
generate a comedy that was simultaneously bodily, empathetic, and intellec-
tual. By violating pictorial protocols, he heightened the characters’ perfor-
mance as images, and thus as avatars a diverse readership could invest with their
own dispossessed, exasperated experience of the “American Dream”.
C. Mugnolo (*)
Antelope Valley College, Lancaster, CA, USA
e-mail: cmugnolo@avc.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_7
122 C. MUGNOLO
Keywords Outcault • Nineteenth-century comics • Visual Studies • Sunday

supplement • Yellow Kid
When American cartoonist Richard Felton Outcault died in 1928, newspaper

obituaries crowned him “father of the Modern Comic Newspaper Supplement”.
This accolade still endures, positioning R. F. Outcault as a key figure not only
in the history of comic strips but also in the labyrinthine origins of comic books
and comic strips as a visual medium developed in the modern era.1 Although
Buster Brown was Outcault’s most enduring commercial success, comic studies
tends to devote attention to the artist’s initial commercial hit, the “Yellow
Kid”, for its forage into word balloons and sequential imaging. While Outcault
did not originate these structures, he continues to stand as a pivotal figure who
launched comic strips as an experimental, interactive medium capable of bend-
ing and stretching social boundaries.
The Yellow Kid performed as the lead character in Outcault’s slapstick-
driven comedy and became a favourite feature of the late nineteenth-century
Sunday newspaper supplement (see Blackbeard 1995; Gordon 1998; Meyers
2019). “Yellow Kid” is the colloquial name fans coined for Mickey Duggan, a
character who appeared in Outcault’s production of both “Hogan’s Alley” and
“McFadden’s Flats” between 1894 and 1898 in large single-panelled cartoons
as well as multi-panelled strips. Performing with an entourage of juvenile mis-
chief makers in New York City’s Irish tenements, the Yellow Kid stood apart as
a character with his clean-shaven scalp and iconic yellow nightshirt who fre-
quently addressed the reader with a direct gaze. To simplify my discussion, I
generally refer to Outcault’s complex line of production as “Yellow Kid” or
“Yellow Kid comics”. Outcault’s smelting of visual structures, his plucking of
social archetypes, and his manipulation of consumer practices all illuminate how
Outcault helped initiate many of the structural and conceptual approaches that
define comics as a unique medium. Yet precisely what he invented for the
American public is less clear. What did the new communicative structures of
Yellow Kid actually communicate to their infatuated readers?
A recent wave of scholarship has applied ground-breaking methodologies to
Outcault’s serials to explain his enduring primacy in Comics Studies. Approaches
from seriality studies (Meyer 2019), materialist studies (Gordon 1998), and
formal analyses of Outcault’s visual strategies (see especially Blackbeard 1995
and Smolderen 2014) have all revealed new insights into how Outcault set
light to cultural flashpoints and helped engender the medium of comics. My
exploration of Outcault relies on understanding how Outcault’s Yellow Kid
comics operated specifically as images. Separated from their concurrent identi-
ties as serial events or commercial products, images provoke a different set of
questions that engage the unique corporal processes by which images are phys-
ically processed and culturally understood.
READING RICHARD FELTON OUTCAULT’S “YELLOW KID” THROUGH PERCEPTION… 123
Outcault’s comic strips are particularly well suited to be discussed as images.

Outcault’s Yellow Kid famously accumulated a bewildering omnipresence in
popular culture that quickly transcended his authorship. In October of 1896,
William Randolph Hearst’s New York World notoriously hired away Outcault
from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Journal and syndicated his “Yellow Kid”
comic strips under the new title “McFadden Flats” (see Meyers 2019, pp. 6–9).
With no copyright protecting the reproductions of Yellow Kid’s signature cos-
tume and features, the original comic “Hogan’s Alley” continued to run in the
New York Journal illustrated by Ashcan School artist George Luks. While
simultaneously headlining two Sunday supplement papers, Yellow Kid’s visage
freely circulated through New York City’s visual markets as a public icon, reap-
pearing in unlicenced reproductions in advertisements, as toys, and on various
leisure products (see Gordon 1998; Meyers 2019).
Art-historical methodologies formulated by Svetlana Alpers and Hans
Belting describe how images should be handled differently from other histori-
cal materials. Alpers’ and Belting’s revolutionary approaches serve as corner-
stones in the field of Visual Studies, a discipline that branches from the
temperamental category of “high art” to include all visual production. The
distinction between “images” and their material embodiment in pictures is
crucial to this expansion. The Yellow Kid successfully roamed between various
physical containers with a versatility that, in Belting’s sense, forefronts this
character’s identity as an image as opposed to a picture. In traditional art-
historical analysis, the artist’s mastery over a medium is often prioritised, a key
to unlocking how the artist fashions meaning through his or her pictures. A
history of images explores the lapse of this authorial control. In Belting’s
words, “the less we take notice of a mediums’ presence, the more we are cap-
tured by the image, until it seems to us that the latter exists by itself” (2001,
p. 16).2
Both Belting and Alpers prioritise how images are physiologically processed
through human perception. By cleaving images from pictures, Belting high-
lights how images perform as mental constructs. Absorbed through imagina-
tion, images inhabit the mind and intermingle with the brain’s own image
production (Belting 2001, p. 16). Using the perspective of anthropology,
Belting emphasises the control of images as “they colonize our bodies (our
brains), so that even if it seems that we are in charge of generating them, and
even though society attempts unceasingly to control them, it is in fact the
images that are in control” (2001, p. 10). Belting’s description of the internali-
sation of images provides a conceptual structure for considering how readers
not only consumed comic strips for entertainment, or read them for political
satire, but physically absorbed them. The repetition of the Yellow Kid implies
not only a desire to consume the character as a product but also a compulsive
desire to actively picture the Yellow Kid by multiple agents. I would contend
this is a symptom rather than the source of Outcault’s masterful understanding
of the power of images. The visual structures that Outcault applied to his
Yellow Kid comic strips not only innovated new meanings but were necessary
124 C. MUGNOLO
for challenging the status quo of how images operated as sources of knowledge
and authority in popular culture.
Images are also deeply ingrained in our understanding of what it means to
look and see. Alpers reveals how practices of looking are not detached anatomi-
cal operations but highly structured cultural practices. Practices of looking are
constantly in flux as scientific understandings about the operation of the human
eye and changing practices in image production redefine and expand our
understanding of the visual spectrum. At the heart of Alpers’ discussions is the
relationship of images to truth which constructs how people decide to direct
and shape their gaze. Outcault’s various forays into the comic medium derailed
entrenched practices of looking to question the relationship between image,
looking, and truth.
The Cartoon Image in the American Newspaper

To begin, it is essential to understand how comic strips and their characters
functioned as images within the structures of the newspaper. The question is so
simple that it seems self-evident. This is where Alpers’ seminal text The Art of
Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century offers methodological guid-
ance. Alpers’ examination of seventeenth-century Dutch painting understands
that it must unlock her subject from an art-historical discourse formulated
within and overwhelmed by the tenets of Italian Renaissance painting (1983,
p. xix). According to Alpers, the “active confidence in human powers” derived
from Italian Renaissance thinking had become naturalised as the definition of
representational art rather than a “particular modality” which excludes non-
conforming paintings from critical analysis (1983, p. 43). To understand how
the Dutch approached vision as an index to truth, Alpers scrutinised Dutch
treatises and pictorial resources. She detected a mode of seeing that recognised
the distance between the distortions of the eye (the world seen) and scientific
instruments that could produce alternative pictures of the world (1983, p. 35).
The aggregate of views so often found in Dutch painting thus did not reflect a
deficient understanding of linear perspective but an awareness of its limitations
in the empirical pursuit of knowledge.
Entrenched modes of seeing also governed 1890s cartooning. Visual ingre-
dients like line and colour and narrative mechanisms like text and action fol-
lowed customs honed over decades of political cartooning. Outcault’s cartoons
are particularly difficult to analyse because they challenge and overturn many
of these reigning traditions. By experimenting with word balloons, sequential
panels, and onomatopoeic visuals several years before they became an institu-
tionalised practice, Outcault’s comic strips seem to have more in common with
the ancestral tree of modern comic books than the nineteenth-century industry
of political cartooning (see Harvey 1998, pp. 13–17). However, Alpers dem-
onstrates the importance of questioning whether the constructs of an academic
discourse actually resonate with the historic dialogues generating those pic-
tures under analysis.
When the Sunday comics first boasted full-colour production in 1894, they
triggered a comparison to the polychrome cartoons dominating the market in
pricier humour magazines such as Puck, Judge, and Life (Kahn and West 2014,
p. 11). The comic weekly Puck established the tradition of using complex chro-
molithography to produce full-colour political cartoons for its front cover and
double-page centrefold followed by a social lampoon for its back cover. This
standardised format was soon adopted by competitors Judge and Life, distin-
guishing American humour magazines from Punch and other European coun-
terparts while highlighting the status of chromolithography as a technical
innovation and prized commodity (Gordon 1998, p. 15; Kahn and West
2014, p. 14).
In addition to sophisticated colour production, high priced “glossies” cali-
brated their political humour and social commentaries to the interests of their
elite readership (Couch 2001, p. 63). These class markers were embedded in
the complex and sophisticated construction of their polychrome political car-
toons. Their cartoons presumed a common visual literacy, dependent on a clas-
sical education and thorough knowledge of political events. Upholding its
Shakespearian motto “What fools these mortals be”, Puck’s visual parodies
worked “to expose folly and puncture pretension” by combining contradictory
visual ideologies (Kahn and West 2014, p. 13). Readers unlocked the wit of
their cartoons by decoding visual symbols, a process assisted by labels and
explanatory texts. Although full of foul analogies, these political cartoons were
processed essentially like allegorical paintings by navigating a network of sym-
bols that were “read” and knitted together.
Cheap colour printing, previously too expensive and laborious for daily
newspapers, developed from a series of technical innovations. In 1892 Walter
Scott & Company installed the first four-colour rotary press for the Chicago
Inter-Ocean, the first American newspaper to offer a colour illustrated supple-
ment (West 2013, p. 11). As necessitated by the newspaper format, these
presses were configured to print both sides of the newspaper sheet in poly-
chrome. In 1894 the New York World installed a five-colour rotary press and
published its first full-colour Sunday supplement in November of that year,
complete with comic cartoons alongside features dedicated to fashionable
urban entertainments. Two weeks after its launch, the Sunday World regularly
featured a multi-page section dedicated to full-colour comics and would expand
over the next year in size and complexity (Kartalopoulos 2013, p. 16). Due to
their escalating popularity, these Sunday supplements became central players in
the ruthless competition for subscribers between so-called yellow journalism’s
two juggernaut newspapers, Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York
Journal (Kartalopoulos 2013). As an embodiment of the supplement, comics
were positioned at the forefront of this battle, called upon for ever more rau-
cous and unpredictable imagery.
Colour was a crucial signifier of the Sunday supplement’s aspiration as an
upper-class commodity at a fraction of the price. However, increasingly sensa-
tionalised approaches to layouts, colour, linework and text quickly declared its
126 C. MUGNOLO
images were no longer playing by polite society’s rules. In the Sunday supple-
ment, artists imbued images with a new tactile, physical force. Their innovative
formats challenged the regulatory grid-structure of the newspaper itself, creat-
ing not simply a collection of jokes but an immersive funhouse environment
where regulations were relaxed.
This force was embodied in the Sunday supplements’ approaches to layout
design. When one opened an issue of a humour magazine like Puck or Judge,
there was a stark visual contrast between the brilliantly coloured illustrations
and the interleafing monochrome pages. These inside pages, printed in black
and white, were crammed with humorous stories, pun-laden comic panels, and
derogatory ethnic humour, all sandwiched together. Orderly columns kept
these features organised, perfect for quick consumption during a businessman’s
short respites throughout the day (Couch 2001, p. 73). Like humour maga-
zines, the Sunday comics formatted their cartoons between blocks of humor-
ous text. Yet both the New York World’s “Comic Weekly” and New York
Journal’s “American Humorist” section liberally experimented with ways to
upset their predictable, vertical rhythms. Comic panels might step diagonally
rather than horizontally through the page, shaping surrounding text into a
staircase pattern. Text would ebb and part for egg-shaped comic panels. Vertical
columns of text, reminiscent of New York’s soaring skyscrapers, would even
crumble and fracture as cartoon buffoons created the illusion of dissolving
their structures. This transformed reading into a physically mobile experience,
where stories and images needed to be scaled and chased throughout the
broadsheet.
Far from just a container for comics, the newspaper layouts performed as
playful, pictorial forms in their own right. Layouts could momentarily trans-
form the newspaper into an alternate leisure object. On Valentine’s Day of
1897, the New York Journal’s “American Humorist” fashioned its comic pan-
els to mimic the shape of posted love notes and a string of paper hearts. On
February 21, another layout transformed the page into a giant deck of cards,
shaping its comic panels as hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs. This composi-
tional play merged comics with other parlour room entertainments while
simultaneously making these polite diversions untenable and illogical over the
giant broadsheet dimensions.
Outcault published his first “Hogan’s Alley” instalment for the New York
World on 5 May 1895. Frequently published at full or half broadsheet dimen-
sions, his comics crucially helped generate the new image phenomenon in the
Sunday supplement, foremost through his choice of subject matter. In the
comic weekly, expensive colour printing designated a humour hierarchy, posi-
tioning polished, painstaking political satires at the top. Slapstick comedies,
tenement humour, and garish ethnic caricature were positioned as lowly,
monochrome fodder between the chromolithograph satires. The ubiquity of
colour in the Sunday supplements meant colour no longer assigned a superior
position to comics on the cover or in the centrefold. The New York World’s and
New York Journal’s decision to frontline the Yellow Kid’s low-brow entertain-
ment seems to contradict, even self-ridicule, its upper-class aspirations.
More crucially, Outcault’s commitment to sprawling, uncontained slapstick
meant he was using different visual vehicles to orchestrate narrative and mean-
ing. The political allegories of Life, Puck, and Judge required a “stop and go”
reading experience. Each spasm or physiognomic exaggeration needed to be
distilled for its symbolic meaning, and then reassembled like a tapestry of
threads. By contrast, Outcault’s composition entailed a “swarming” effect that
comics historian Thierry Smolderen traces to the eighteenth-century pictorial
storyteller William Hogarth (Smolderen 2014, pp. 4–5). Smolderen elaborates
how this compositional approach permitted circuitous paths for constructing
meaning, allowing us to “lose ourselves” in a “relaxed and whimsical fashion”,
ultimately embodying liberation (2014, p. 4). In line with the supplement’s
focus on images as corporeal forces, circuitous readings can also engender diz-
zying and disorienting experiences affecting not only the physical stability of
the newspaper but also that of the reader.
Outcault’s approach to colour and text further restructured the image as a
physical force rather than a passive graphic. In the humour magazines, chro-
molithographs typically reserved saturated colour for symbolic functions. The
very fact that comic strip character Mickey Dugan was colloquially termed
“Yellow Kid” by his fans reveals how deeply periodical consumers read colour
as an identifier. In the Sunday supplements, however, colour was frequently
free of symbolic weight. Instead, newspapers deployed free-flowing colour to
generate sensual experiences of space, temperature, and motion. In Outcault’s
large-scale comics, colour flowed unhindered by black boundary lines to punc-
tuate explosions, lend impact to collisions, and create atmospheric effects.
Editors permitted Outcault’s colour to bleed freely into adjacent passages of
text. Rendered as pure colour silhouettes, the Yellow Kid’s miscreants could
even climb up and invade columns of text without severely impairing their
readability, as in “The Residents of Hogan’s Alley Visit Coney Island” (Fig. 1).3
Why would the Sunday supplements wish to hone images that seemingly
willed themselves free of the periodical’s bounded structures? Outcault’s pref-
erence for images capable of overtaking body and brain, images that Belting
asserts “are in control”, speaks not only to the prerogatives of Sunday supple-
ments but also to the visual culture of the rising American city and its sensory
onslaught (2001, p. 10).
Picturing as a Mode of Urban Living

Despite its chronological and geographic distance, Alpers’ work on seventeenth-
century Dutch society provides a convenient model for approaching late
nineteenth-century New York City. Both cultures prioritised vision and pictur-
ing as modes for forging identity. Alpers describes visual experience as “a cen-
tral mode of self-consciousness” by which seventeenth-century Dutch citizens
situated their role in the broader society (1983, p. xxv). The Dutch impulse to
128 C. MUGNOLO
Fig. 1 R. F. Outcault, “The Residents of Hogan’s Alley Visit Coney Island”, 24 May
1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio
State University Cartoon Research Library
obsessively “picture” their surroundings was moulded by broader cultural phi-

losophies that constructed looking as a crucial means to actively construct new
knowledge. Alpers’ preference for the term “picturing”, an active verb, rather
than the passive noun “pictures”, emphasises this “inseparability of maker, pic-
ture, and what is pictured” (1983, p. 26).
Art historian Rebecca Zurier likewise draws on urban sociology and prac-
tices of looking as methodologies for analysing the viewing cultures of late
nineteenth-century New York City in Picturing the City. Zurier describes
New York as an image capital where its citizens operated in a compact environ-
ment of “perpetual visibility” (2006, p. 47). Living as an image was both a
condition of living in New York and a frame of mind conditioned by the city’s
visual industries, particularly those of “fashion, publishing, advertising, and
entertainment” (Zurier 2006, p. 49). Zurier positions the illustrated metro-
politan press as the beating heart of this visual capital as it both “created and
chronicled these developments, making individual events resonate in represen-
tations of representation” (2006, p. 53). As in Dutch visual culture, fragmented
looking dominated New York’s urban representation. However, in New York
City, fragmented looking resulted less from a deliberate meditation on the lim-
its of vision. It instead manifested as unavoidable symptom of a distracted
frame of mind shaken by the city’s fast-paced modalities for living and leisure.
Take, for example, Yellow Kid’s approach to word panels, aimed at trigger-
ing an overwhelming sensory, rather than deductive, experience. Any relatively
blank surface in a Yellow Kid comic became a receptive surface for inscription,
including shirts, hats, and even clouds. The discombobulating use of text
echoed New York City’s long-maligned visual pollution by advertisements and
sandwich boards (Zurier 2006, pp. 55–59). Unlike the political cartoons of
humour magazines, these texts did not easily coalesce into expository mean-
ings. Rather these images forced the reader to fight against the visual din of text
to access any meaning, duplicating the frustrations of city-life.
Zurier catalogues how New York’s “urban representation” manifested
through various drawing and compositional styles designed to transport read-
ers to the edge of scandal and catastrophe. Outcault’s Yellow Kid comics chan-
nelled many of the stylistic attributes developed within newfound brands of
pictorial journalism. In the mid 1890’s, artist reporters, many of which became
associated with New York’s Ashcan School of painters, moved from a diagram-
matic technique to a sketch-artist approach that depended on long, sweeping
lines with a focus on movement and incomplete contours. Rather than deriving
their authenticity from an empirical or authoritarian approach, such images
emphasised individual testimony, a physically embodied experience that was
progressively blending with late nineteenth-century conceptions of realism
(Zurier 2006, p. 145). Zurier follows these same methods through the car-
toonists of the Sunday supplements whose “autographic drawing became a way
of re-presenting things the artists had seen in a distinctive, opinionated voice”
(2006, p. 183).
Outcault generated this autographic form of drawing through multiple
means. The outlines rendering the features of his juvenile cast are relatively
open and abbreviated. Quick, loose lines helped propel his bodies and objects
into perpetual motion. Outcault tended to vigorously mark explosions, fling-
ing objects, dust clouds, and splashing water with multiple lines, emphasising
their transitory and deleterious effects. As David Kunzle has shown, such
methods for generating the experiential sensations of motion, impact, and pain
had long occupied cartoonists throughout the nineteenth century, responding
to the pressures applied by society’s new mechanised means of living and
130 C. MUGNOLO
production (1990, pp. 348–375). However, in the context of the 1890s urban
periodical, these techniques accrued new associations with authenticity that
legitimised Outcault’s representations as “true” portrayals of the urban
environment.
Crucially, Outcault’s cartoons were not only participating in the newspa-
per’s picturing of the city but also its commitment to reporting. Close analyses
performed by comics historians such as Christina Meyers and Bill Blackbeard
reveal how Outcault’s seemingly farcical slapsticks were intricately threaded
with pointed political critiques. In these final sections, I explore how Outcault
recombined and fractured various imaging systems in his Yellow Kid comics,
thus challenging the veritable claims made by pictorial journalism. This brings
Outcault’s work unexpectedly close to Alpers’ assertions about the fractured
spatial organisation of Dutch painting. Both present incoherence as a highly
conceptual position which points to the fallibility of human perception.
Outcault’s images in the Yellow Kid comics did not behave as images ought to
behave, particularly regarding the protocols governing images of the poor.
Violating the Rules for Imaging

Outcault had a penchant for combining incommensurate image universes. His
images of poor and ethnic minorities pulled from a variety of pictorial conven-
tions, each loaded with different, even diametrically opposed, aims. As with
fellow pictorial reporters, Outcault’s emphasis on tactile, immediate drawing
techniques helped to virtually transport the viewer to the tenements, emphasis-
ing the shock and immediacy of squalid conditions. The layouts Outcault used
for “Hogan’s Alley” echoed an aestheticisation of the poor developed within
the socially conscious illustrations of highline magazines. According to Zurier,
the preference for open foregrounds and panoramic vistas with plunging per-
spectives formulated by artists like Ashcan school painter and magazine illustra-
tor Everett Shinn heightened the realism and presence of the slums “while
simultaneously pushing the viewer away with an aestheticizing distance” (2006,
p. 160). To bring Belting’s picture/image theory into play, these formal devices
directed attention to the containing medium. By emphasising the picture’s
design and structured composition, even raw depictions of the poverty-stricken
packaged a socially conscious subject for polite consumption.
While recalling activist practices of imaging, Yellow Kid comics also followed
cartooning conventions that served up poverty and racism as sources of com-
edy. Far removed from any empathetic intent, ethnic caricatures of immigrants
and other designated “savages” reinforced derogatory stereotypes. Humour
often rode on these groups’ attempts to unsuccessfully parrot Western or
upper-class leisure activities (see Soper 2005b). In the comic weeklies, ethnic
cartoons contrasted sharply with images of elites exchanging witticisms in a
fashionable parlour setting, providing a clear signal to their affluent readers.
Ethnic cartoons were objects of distant contempt, while elite cartoons pointed
to the reader’s own experience of clever repartee.
The Yellow Kid comics thus operated as an odd Venn diagram of different,
diametrically opposed modes of urban representation. The ultimate effect of
this mishmash is complicated considering the Sunday supplement was read by
a diverse audience which included those very working-class and immigrant
members caricatured within their comics (Soper 2005a, p. 184). Many scholars
debate how the Yellow Kid comics reinforced pejorative stereotyping and pre-
cluded access to social spaces (see especially Meyer 2019, pp. 143–148 and
Saguisag 2019). Outcault’s own self-presentation as a glib entertainer rather
than a social architect further obscures the potential readings and intentions of
his work (Blackbeard 1995, pp. 18, 134–135).
These discussions compound the universe of images with the realities and
experiences of their represented subjects. However, if the grounds of discus-
sion are shifted from living subjects to pictorial genres, Outcault’s use of pejo-
rative caricatures reveals a complex deconstruction at play. Alpers’ analysis of
the “studio phenomenon” and the artist’s workplace is useful here. In The
Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others, Alpers meditates on the studio as a
modality for constructing images, where “the relation of the artist to reality is
seen or represented in the frame of the workplace” (2005, p. 9). By exploring
how the concept of “the studio as the world” took hold in the seventeenth
century, Alpers accounts for this era’s more indecipherable and anachronistic
modes of painting which reflected the investigations prompted by the setting
of the “studio-laboratory” (2005, p. 14). I propose that Outcault operated
similarly, creating investigations prompted not by the studio but a workplace
bounded by the irrational rules of print culture and imaging. By confusing dif-
ferent modalities for picturing the poor, Outcault’s images begin to strip back
the veneer of truth proclaimed by these modes of urban representation, point-
ing to their fictional constructions.
Whether Outcault’s comics produced any egalitarian by-product is difficult
to confirm. What does seem indisputable is Outcault’s interest in critiquing
New York City’s upsurge of social crusaders. This happens directly via political
allegories interlaced through his Yellow Kid comics. It also happens visually,
notably in the methods Outcault used to deconstruct the reformist overtones
of two of his most direct antecedents, cartoonist Michael Angelo Woolf and
photographer Jacob Riis.
When Outcault debuted his first instalment of “Hogan’s Alley” in the New
York Journal, its title and ethnic shorthand established its tenement as an Irish
ghetto. This choice is important as one of the reigning motifs in Irish jokes was
child death and disease. Blackbeard links Outcault’s early Irish tenement car-
toons to the techniques of Michael Angelo Woolf, whose cartoons of street
children appeared in Life and Puck throughout the 1880s (1995, pp. 17–19).
Woolf’s dark humour derived from his characters’ wretchedness as the children
attempted social graces, normalised alcoholic fathers, and threatened to infect
each other with measles. His images often adopted a sympathetic and reformist
tone, and sometimes forewent humour all together as pleading editorials
lamenting the plight of the poor. While Outcault’s early cartoons almost
132 C. MUGNOLO
directly aped Woolf’s style, they resisted his paternalist stance (Blackbeard
1995). Outcault rendered “Hogan’s Alley”’s street urchins as resourceful and
resilient individuals rather than meek starving waifs. Their irascible and destruc-
tive penchant for mischief further troubled their position as charitable subjects.
Outcault’s cartoons similarly channelled and mollified the reformist aesthet-
ics of one of the nineteenth century’s most famous documentary photogra-
phers, Jacob Riis. Pulling from the popular visual device of the slum tour, Riis’
photographs of tenement life introduced a stark, new aesthetic for immigrant
poverty while subscribing to Victorian conceptions of the urban destitute
(Yochelson 2015, pp. 12–13). To create images of juvenile truancy, Riis asked
boys to enact the “typical” poses of shooting craps and selling newspapers
(Yochelson 2015, pp. 14). Outcault’s renditions of New York’s signature
stacked tenement dwellings, narrowly packed streets, and vacant lots often
appear almost directly pulled from Riis’ signature compositions. Yet Outcault’s
miscreant misbehaviours are far more elaborate and innovative, pushing tru-
ancy into an ecstatic creative form. Rather than succumbing to their condi-
tions, Outcault’s children transformed and dominated their surroundings.
One cartoon in particular, “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley” (Fig. 2), sug-
gests a direct and intentional revision of Riis’ 1894 photograph “Drilling the
Gang”. Riis’ image was reproduced as wood engraving by A. D. Fisk for
Century magazine approximately a year before Outcault’s cartoon was
Fig. 2 R. F. Outcault, “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley”, 15 March 1896, New York
World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University
Cartoon Research Library
published on 15 March 1896. The similarities with Outcault’s comic are over-
whelming. Both Outcault’s and Riis’ composition included 13 boys aligned in
single file with heels together. For “Drilling the Gang”, Riis arranged the
group of boys to pose as an organised drill team, illustrating the reformative
potential of military-style summer camps. The wood engraving is as much a
study in discipline as an analysis of the uneven growth spurts and ethnic fea-
tures of the Mulberry Street boys. Their straight-backed military stance high-
lighted their physiognomic irregularities, a worrying sign of truancy, while
reassuring its healthy rectification through urban programming. An invisible
camp drill sergeant supposedly controls their motions off camera.
“The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley” reconstructed Riis’ visual program, desta-
bilising its reassurances and annulling its crusader overtones. Outcault replaced
the implied adult sergeant with a juvenile soldier in flamboyant pose, erasing
state regulation. The cartoon line-up also exaggerated the ethnic diversity of
the crowd. Racist caricatures frequently served as stand-alone jokes in
nineteenth-century cartooning practice, placing Outcault’s image in line with
other derogatory comics. Yet the atypical range of ethnicities on display here
and the nod to Riis suggests that the comic’s satirical target was taking to task
the social phobias propagated by photojournalism rather than the ethnic popu-
lations themselves. A small fisticuffs scene of two bald toddlers in nightshirts
pointed to this meta-critical stance. The duking toddlers were nearly identical
in physiognomy and visually interchangeable, excepting the braided pigtail and
slippers that signified one as Chinese. Here Outcault violated the protocols for
displaying two ethnic cartoons in combat, which nearly always pivoted on their
exaggerated physiognomic difference.
A deeper dive into the symbolism of “The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley”
reveals how Outcault’s comic presented a complex critique of contemporary
events, collapsing the roles of the slapstick farce with calculated editorial car-
tooning. Bill Blackbeard and Steve Carper have identified that the boys of
Hogan’s Alley are organising in response to Britain’s release on March 5 of the
“Venezuela Blue Book” (Blackbeard 1995, pp. 37–38; Carper 2015). This
document advocated Britain’s position in the Venezuelan border dispute and
was largely decried for inaccuracies by the American press. An allegorical litho-
graph published in Judge a month previously on 5 February 1896 forthrightly
defended the United States’ position in this debate with clear-cut symbolism.
In Judge’s cartoon, a defiant Uncle Sam defended the frightened, diminutive
characters labelled “Venezuela” and “Nicaragua” against highly decorated
European powers. Uncle Sam stood before a sign proclaiming “No Trespass.
America for Americans. Uncle Sam”. By contrast, in Outcault’s image, the
boys held placards pronouncing “Down wit Ingland” and “Down wit Spane”.
Although essentially voicing the same message as the Judge cartoon, in
Outcault’s image, the text was confused, misinformed, and reactionary. One
placard read “We don’t know Venezuela but we are wit him troo tick & troo
tin all right”. Their response was also violent. An apartment window displaying
the sign “Hurrah for old England” had been destroyed by projectiles. The
134 C. MUGNOLO
incoherent pronouncements paired with military zeal suggested an unedu-

cated, knee-jerk patriotism.
Newspaper editorial cartoons frequently positioned lower-class commenta-
tors as both common-sense mouthpieces and pejorative comic relief. A decades-
old cartooning tradition employed by British caricaturist George Cruikshank,
impoverished individuals were often positioned to the side of current events to
comment on political injustice, functioning like an all-seeing yet agency-
deprived Greek chorus. These characters often delivered pun-driven comments
in heavy dialect, emphasising both their stupidity and their position as a mouth-
piece for the author’s argument. Outcault’s tenement crew recalled these car-
tooning techniques. However, their juvenile age range and histrionic play
indicated that theirs are not heartfelt opinions but a raw parroting of the inco-
herent debates the children would have overheard from adults. Victorian con-
cepts of childhood innocence combined with the innate “savage” stage of
juvenile development (see Hall 1904, especially pp. 44–45) scrambled correc-
tive or disciplinary responses to their antics, confusing whether the kids were
conscious of their own social critiques. The cartoon thus did not so much cri-
tique the political event itself as surreptitiously mock the emotional overreac-
tion it generated in an invisible adult newspaper-reading public.
The “Hogan’s Alley” Independence Day episode titled “The Day After the
Glorious Fourth Down in Hogan’s Alley” (Fig. 3) further demonstrates how
Outcault fused different genres of illustration together, disrupting the pre-
scribed ways such pictorial methods were intended to frame the city’s social
Fig. 3 R. F. Outcault, “The Day After the Glorious Fourth Down in Hogan’s Alley”,
7 July 1895, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The
Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library
problems. On and around 4 July 1895, issues of Pulitzer’s Evening World ran
multiple articles addressing New York City’s new firecracker ban. Ironic
acknowledgements that “it is not likely that the children’s fun will be checked”
were reinforced by editorial cartoons displaying children of both lower and
upper-class origins setting off explosives underfoot helpless cops, tying fire-
works to their pet’s tails, and nursing firework-induced injuries (see “The Small
Boy” 1895). The cartooning styles were boisterous and light-hearted, humor-
ously illustrating the main content of the articles while matter-of-factly deliver-
ing naughty children their comeuppance. In contrast, Outcault’s “The Day
After the Glorious Fourth Down in Hogan’s Alley” flaunted a morbid range of
explosive-induced injuries in an unusually sombre Hogan’s Alley. In the fore-
ground, one child displayed his missing fingers to companions, who were in
turn missing an arm and sporting bandaged heads. The range of injuries and
property damage infused Outcault’s cartoon violence with real events by closely
repeating previously published news reports on “The Fourth’s Casualties”. For
example, a burned out second floor window in Outcault’s illustration recalled
an article published three days prior about a fire in Mulberry Street started by
children who chucked a firework through an apartment window.
Historian Roy Rosenzweig records how July 4th was a sore point in the
struggles over the Americanisation, culminating in a “divided fourth” where
middle-class families frequently left the city to escape the noise and violence of
urban celebrations (Rosenzweig 1983, pp. 65–90). Outcault’s cartoon
appeared at a time when the blame for “loud celebrating” started to shift away
from young boys who “embodied nostalgic recollections of the writer’s own
youth or indulgent feelings about his or her children” and onto immigrant
populations (Rosenzweig 1983, p. 156). Moving into the twentieth century,
papers increasingly highlighted the deaths and injuries resulting from these
immigrant gatherings, which in turn became targets of reform and legislation.
To conclude, boyish misbehaviour and immigrant misbehaviour were two very
different problems when it came to Independence Day, both of which appear
uncomfortably suspended together in Outcault’s cartoon.
Collaging pictorial conventions from different genres of pictorial journal-
ism, Outcault’s images confused their aims and exposed their artifice. By rewir-
ing political satire into the circuitry of the juvenile slapstick cartoon, he was
reinventing the rules of political cartooning. Cartoons and pictorial journalism
are not always codified as “art”, but these genres do resonate with Belting’s
definition of art as an “aesthetic mediation” where authors “seize power over
the image and seek through art to apply their metaphoric concept of the
world”, a place “about which artist and beholder can agree between them-
selves” (1994, p. 16). By disabling the methods through which cartooning and
art controlled its arguments, Outcault emphasised the autonomy of the image
and image-reading as a personalised, interactive process. This process invested
his images with a range of “reading options”, an aspect Christina Meyers ties
to the Yellow Kid comics’ serial dynamics and medial liminality (see especially
2019, pp. 82–86).
136 C. MUGNOLO
Outcault’s images succeeded best as political critiques when the reader iden-
tified directly with his miscreants, recognising that the discombobulation of
the rebelling children echoed their own urban experience. For instance, in
“The Residents of Hogan’s Alley Visit Coney Island”, children tumbled out of
the baskets of hot air balloons. With strings snapping and flailing, all these bal-
loons were branded with urgent, boastful ad campaigns. If one identified with
the hurdling children, the comic moved beyond a slice of farce toward a meta-
phor for dishonest branding and the fallout that ensues. This final section
examines the critical work the Yellow Kid himself performed to open these
reads and function as an avatar for perceiving the city.
The Yellow Kid as a Mask

The Yellow Kid helped propel the connection between the reader and his serial
comic through his direct reciprocal gaze. The first instance of this phenome-
non launched in January of 1895 in “Golf – The Great Society Sport as Played
in Hogan’s Alley”. Frequently laughing, sometimes expressing terror or
despair, Yellow Kid’s text rarely added narrative content that was not already
implied by the visuals. Rather, the interactive potential of this character seemed
to hinge to his brazen repartee with the reader, something neither the impov-
erished waif nor the caricatured immigrant was supposed to attempt. The
Yellow Kid’s dialogue, scrawled in mishappen font on his nightshirt, imbued
printed text with bodily vitality. This text contributed to Outcault’s formation
of the comic as what Smolderen termed an “audio visual” stage, collapsing
boundaries between image and text as well as speech and action (see Smolderen
2014, p. 147). Rather than advancing the narrative, these texts typically
expressed intentions and reactions. As ensuing slapstick thwarted his expecta-
tions, the Yellow Kid narrated the emotional experience of being caught up in
the maelstrom of shocks and jolts of urban chaos, a condition that Tom
Gunning shows had become popularised as symptomatic of modern urban liv-
ing (Gunning 2000). The Yellow Kid thus coordinated gestures and text to
prompt the reader to identify with him and become vicariously disoriented.
Yet how could a reader from the newspaper’s diverse populace be expected
to associate themselves with such a specifically Irish and impoverished carica-
ture? Belting’s Face and Mask: A Double History suggests strategies for contem-
plating this possibility. Belting understands face and mask comprising a single
theme with fluid boundaries. Masks encompass both man-made objects and
the living face shaped by its bearer. While the operation of the mask fluctuates
according to time and culture, in its Western incarnations Belting defines the
mobile face as an “open form” and the mask as a “closed”, conceptually dis-
tilled form (2013, p. 93). Belting explains that the boundary between face and
mask become ambiguous “wherever the vivid interaction between gaze and
facial expression is disturbed or interrupted” (2013, pp. 6–7). To illustrate his
point, Belting describes a wearer of a man-made mask who looks on with living
eyes, fixing us with an unreadable gaze which “acquires an uncanny force that
renders us powerless” (2013, p. 7).
I contend that the Yellow Kid fixes the viewer with a similar face/mask amal-
gam. His impossibly forward-facing ears and tendency to confront the viewer
straight-on emphasise his head as a flat shape, rather than a full volume, an
attribute that Christina Meyers connects to his iconic reproducibility (2019,
p. 13). His open, unflappable smile, repeated week after week, echoes the fro-
zen, expressive countenances of Greek theatre masks. Meanwhile the empty
circle eyes and clean-shaven scalp channel the eerie, smooth shells of Venetian
masks. The combination of illiterate script with clever double entendre on his
nightshirt recalls that it is not the kid at all but the artist who speaks in code to
the reader through his caricatures. The Yellow Kid’s mask-like performance
draws attention to the role of the living face (a supposed locus for authenticity)
as mask (a disingenuous matrix), a concept that Belting asserts became the fate
of the face in modern mass media.
Kerry Soper’s study of ethnic humour in the comic strips resonates with
Belting’s meditation on face and mask. As Soper describes, the ethnic carica-
ture can disarm its function as “a marker of foundational identity” and instead
“become a mask to be worn lightly ambivalently, or ironically” to damage
entrenched hierarchies (Soper 2005b, p. 262). Like an absurdist collage, ethnic
masks, when relocated to an experimental creative space, can take their repres-
sive presumptions to task. Soper discusses how the ethnic “mask” can also
operate as a point of “sympathetic identification” and as a receptacle for the
reader to inhabit. Soper invokes Scott McCloud’s work in Understanding
Comics to explain how abbreviated marks used to render a recognisable carica-
ture like Yellow Kid potentially invites the reader to “project themselves into
the comic world through an open-ended, unfinished dialectical image”
(pp. 262–263).
Outcault’s “A Wild Political Fight in Hogan’s Alley – Silver Against Gold”
(Fig. 4) published on 2 August 1896 demonstrates how the Yellow Kid’s recip-
rocal gaze and mask-like visage helped transform the comedic image into a
complex site for projection and self-mirroring. The cartoon targeted the presi-
dential race between Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan and
Republican William McKinley which hinged on the debate whether to main-
tain the gold standard or switch to a bimetallic standard that backed US cur-
rency with silver. The Hogan’s Alley rally featured exclusively juvenile
campaigners. Flying bricks, children cowering from a barking dog, and a boy
tossing a cat from a roof accentuated the physical chaos without forwarding
any ordering narrative or agenda. However, a building clock arranged and
labelled as the time “16 to 1” (the rate of silver to gold) echoed the Democratic
slogan and underscored the central currency issue. Rally signs for both candi-
dates choked the scene and paired political alignments with ridiculous justifica-
tions. Outcault’s image embodied the hysteria, confusion, and suspicions of
incompetence that characterised contemporary headlines and New York’s
political climate.
138 C. MUGNOLO
Fig. 4 R. F. Outcault, “A Wild Political Fight in Hogan’s Alley-Silver Against Gold”,

2 August 1896, New York World. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The
Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library
The Yellow Kid characteristically took a central foreground position on a

raised platform as a campaign speaker. With gleeful fervour, the Yellow Kid
lunged forward, looking directly at the reader, with his nightshirt proclaiming
“Fer O’Bryan” and, in smaller text, “At last I am in ter politics”. His dopey
smile and misspelled dialogue implied a hapless innocent swept up in politics
merely as an urban rite of passage and mistaken alignment with his Irish heri-
tage. Yet the Yellow Kid also extended forward an uncharacteristic diamond
ring, signalling political influence and corruption. Roughly two weeks prior to
Outcault’s cartoon on 20 July 1896, The New York Times announced,
“Tammany to Endorse Bryan”. The Tammany Society was an influential politi-
cal organisation in New York City that typically controlled Democratic nomi-
nations. It also notably assisted incoming Irish immigrants, particularly with
scaling the political ladder. In this light, the Yellow Kid may instead be a shrewd
colluder who has been paid for his Tammany endorsement and only performs
as the innocent to maintain his profitable popularity. Here the Yellow Kid flip-
flops between joyful participant, instigator, and a gullible victim simply aping
American customs. As a haunting mask, he embodies forces of chaos at work
over American urban life. As a site for projection, the Yellow Kid invites the
readers into the maelstrom and takes to task the reader’s complicit role in
that chaos.
Eschewing symbolism and satire, Outcault used ecstatic violence, jolting

non sequiturs, and convivial repartee between characters and readers to gener-
ate a comedy that was simultaneously bodily, empathetic, and intellectual. He
heightened his characters’ performance as images, and thus as avatars a diverse
readership could invest with their own dispossessed, exasperated experience of
the “American Dream”. As a methodological model, this study suggests how
Belting’s and Alpers’ approaches to the image can shift the definition of comics
from what they look like to what they are doing. This opens avenues for
research into the early formative stages of comics that is less dependent on its
defining visual structures, like word balloons and sequential panels. By target-
ing comics’ unique performance as images, this theoretical approach also posi-
tions comics as an art form that was formulated to satisfy urgent needs and
collective longings generated by modern culture.
Notes
1. The accolades given by R. F. Outcault’s obituaries are overly simplistic and have
been nuanced by scholarship in Comics Studies. David Kunzle’s book Rudolphe
Töpffer: Father of the Comic Strip rightly challenges Outcault’s position as a prime
originator of modern comics. However Outcault did have crucial formative influ-
ence on the development of the “Comic Newspaper Supplement”.
2. For further analysis of Visual Studies as an approach Cf. Roan chapter “What Is
an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies”.
3. For further detail on the role of colour and comics Cf. Uhlig chapter “Colour in
Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens of Art History”.
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University Press.
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www.flyingcarsandfoodpills.com/x-rays-and-the-yellow-kid. Accessed 20
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Colour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti
Through the Lens of Art History
Barbara Uhlig
Abstract The question of the thematic dimension of colour has been a

neglected one in many fields, including Comics Studies and Art History. In the
twentieth century the latter, however, started to shift towards a new interpreta-
tion of the significance of colour. The first scholar who dedicated himself to
this important topic was the German art historian Ernst Strauss. He laid the
basics for our present understanding of the subject. His student Lorenz
Dittmann expanded his theories and published them in an accessible way under
the title Colouring and Colour Theory in Western Painting. A handbook.
Unfortunately, neither Strauss’s nor Dittmann’s work has been translated, so
they remain rather unknown outside of German-speaking Art History. Another
seminal researcher in the field of colour, and more well known in the English-
speaking world, is John Gage and his book Colour and Culture has become
canonical. Drawing on these scholars and a hermeneutical approach, their the-
ories will be applied to Lorenzo Mattotti’s and Jerry Kramsky’s adaptation of
Doctor Jekyll & Mr Hyde. Mattotti often evokes specific historic artworks and
painting styles in his comics and here transferred the story from Victorian
London to Weimar Berlin, often referencing artworks from this period. The
methods of Dittmann and Gage allow for a better understanding of the dia-
logue of colour, contrast and form that Mattotti simulates. The hermeneutical
analysis places the comic in a larger context, allowing many differing sources to
enrich and enlighten the interpretation.
B. Uhlig (*)
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_8
142 B. UHLIG
Keywords Colour • Hermeneutics • Dittmann • Doctor Jekyll & Mr Hyde

• Expressionism • Otto Dix
Introduction
As art historian Christoph Wagner (1997) has expounded, research into colour
has undergone numerous changes over the last two centuries. Various scientific
methods have attempted to address the subject of colour, with differing degrees
of success. Art-historical approaches employing iconographic methods regarded
colour purely phenomenologically and came to the conclusion that for inter-
pretation no importance need be attached to it (e.g. Panofsky 1985). Colour
iconography attempted to remedy this analytic defect. Although this led to
significant single results, the extremely narrow concept of the symbol meant
that colour could not be comprehended in all its complexity in colour iconog-
raphy. Colour was reduced to canonised symbolism (green for hope, red for
love, etc. (Haeberlein 1939)), which could not however be applied universally.
This approach was not flexible enough to take into account the whole spec-
trum of variable possibilities of cultural, historical and artistic meaning that
come into play (Wagner 1997, p. 184).
Attempts to expand and extend the iconography of colour by means of a
semiotic analysis also failed due to a too rigid classification scheme and a con-
ceptual structure which could not properly adapt to differing medial circum-
stances.1 Anthropological, ontological and colour psychology approaches were
likewise doomed to failure because they all wanted to create binding norms for
the interpretation of colours which were not tenable. Only hermeneutics has so
far proved promising and in addition provides sufficient space in research,
historico-culturally, systematically and also methodologically. As Wagner argues,
Hermeneutics …offers not merely a sophisticated and methodologically sound

model for understanding an individual work of art, seen from the point of view of
art history. …Furthermore, this approach opens up perspectives for a synoptic
exploration of the potential for artistic perception together with the historico-
cultural background, the history of reception, and even considerations of the
experiences of modern observers. (1997, p. 185)
Accordingly, this chapter will first deal with the methodology of hermeneu-
tics and in particular of art-historical hermeneutics according to Oskar
Bätschmann. Following that, it will present two central theoreticians of colour
in Art History, Lorenz Dittmann and John Gage, who represent different
approaches. Dittmann stands for a very practical interpretation of colour, ori-
ented close to the artist and the work of art, whereas Gage focuses on the
embedding of the artist in their historical context as well as on the interplay
between the artist and contemporary academic discourse. In the final section,
these theoretical approaches will be applied practically to the comic Docteur
Jekyll & Mr Hyde by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky, published in 2002.
COLOUR IN COMICS: READING LORENZO MATTOTTI THROUGH THE LENS… 143
Hermeneutics in the History of Art

The term “hermeneutics” was used as early as Antiquity in the writings of Plato
and Aristotle to interpret various terms. It is derived from the Greek verb her-
meneúein, which means to state or to interpret. At first it was mainly applied to
the interpretation of text or speech. Gottfried Boehm created the foundations
of the “hermeneutics of a picture” in his article of the same name (Boehm
1978).2 In his book Einführung in die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik
[Introduction to Hermeneutics in Art History] (1984), Oskar Bätschmann was
first to apply it specifically to the field of Art History, namely, to the sub-genre
of painting. This differentiation is important since according to him there exists
not just one single form of interpretation but a different one for at least each
genre of art (1984, p. 9): For the hermeneutical strategy, the object of inter-
pretation is at the core, meaning a three-dimensional sculpture calls for a dif-
ferent approach to interpretation than a two-dimensional painting, for example.
Bätschmann’s aim is to question the established methods of analysing a paint-
ing and to focus on the viewer-related interpretational approach. Therefore, he
does not so much concentrate on the question of what the artist tried to
express, but on how we as the recipients perceive the painting. The hermeneu-
tical method is therefore by no means limited to Art History, but in it reaches
“a special manifestation” (Dittmann 1975, p. 154). What is essential with this
method is on the one hand to understand it as a process that admits of changes
when new sources or discoveries appear. It is therefore important to accept the
plurality of opinions. On the other hand there is similarly not simply one cor-
rect interpretation. Rather it is a question of realising when an interpretation is
correct. For Bätschmann, interpretations are correct when they are methodi-
cally transparent, when they capture the elements of a work and their relation-
ships and when they substantiate their procedure and their results with
arguments (Bätschmann 1984, p. 161). This opens up the possibility of several
correct interpretations for one work.
Seminal Theoreticians in Contemporary

Colour Research
As can be seen from the remarks above, many theoreticians have made valuable
contributions to the field of colour, with constantly changing focal points and
standpoints. In the twentieth century, a shift in art departed from colour being
tied to a mimetic function and thus forced a new orientation in research. In
Germany, this was developed by Ernst Strauss. In his groundbreaking book
Koloritgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Malerei seit Giotto und andere Studien
[Colour Historical Analysis of the Art of Painting since Giotto and Other
Studies]3 (1972), he laid down “that the physically specified, empirical colour
differs from the aesthetically effective painted colour of a picture not only
materially but also in essence” (1972, p. 12). The importance of this sentence
cannot be overstated. Strauss was referring to the difference between the colour
144 B. UHLIG
on the painting’s surface and the colour in nature. Shaped by the artistic expe-
rience of Modernism, especially by abstract art, he separated colour from the
concept of mimesis and distinguished between the colour of the “visible world”
and the colour in the work of art as being “completely different” (Wagner
2001, p. 306). For Strauss the colour on the surface to be painted first of all
passed through the artist’s will, was changed by it and finally became a means
of structure and significance of equal rank with all the other elements of the
picture. It could therefore no longer be ignored.
In 1955, Strauss’s student Lorenz Dittmann wrote his doctoral thesis on
Die Farbe bei Grünewald [Colour in Grünewald’s Art].4 Using Strauss’s meth-
odology and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a starting point, Dittmann
developed his own academic approach and forged a link between art in the
Middle Ages and abstraction in the twentieth century. The focal points of his
research were the history of colouring in Western painting and the develop-
ment of chiaroscuro. Here, too, Dittmann continued Strauss’s research. His
publications on the subject of colour in painting can be regarded as pioneering
achievements in this field, as his 1986 article on colouring in German and
French paintings in the eighteenth century, or his article Lichtung und
Verbergung in Werken der Malerei [Clearance and Obscuring in Selected
Paintings]5 (1989).
Dittmann’s main work, which remains a canonical text for research into
colour in the history of art, was published in 1989 under the title Farbgestaltung
und Farbtheorie in der abendländischen Malerei [Colouring and Colour Theory
in Western Painting].6 What is typical of his approach is a rejection of an ana-
lytic interpretation based purely on form and colour, a l’art pour l’art point of
view. Instead he stresses that he wants to comprehend the “content of an art-
ist’s work that represents existence and the world” (Dittmann 2002, p. 151).
Dittmann’s work is characterised by an extremely comprehensive knowledge of
source history as well as by an analytic, almost dissecting perspicacity. His great
strength lies in a precise, very well-structured analysis, both of writings and of
works of art, which in detailed investigations always forms the basis of all his
statements. In contrast to iconography or iconology, he tries to bring in all pos-
sible sources to give the full picture, from the artist’s own words to that of their
contemporaries, from preliminary studies to recent insights into the circum-
stances of the painting’s creation, while keeping an open mind for the signifi-
cance of colour in the specific artwork.
Someone who is often mentioned in the same breath as Dittmann is the art
historian John Gage. He came to colour research via J. M. W. Turner, about
whom he also wrote his doctoral thesis. Gage’s publications, in particular his
book Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (1969), led to a change in perspective
when considering Turner’s work. Up until then Turner’s attainments had been
reduced to the purely optical dimension of his oeuvre; his written legacy was
ignored. Gage’s great achievement was proving that Turner was intimately
involved in the academic and literary circles of his age and was influenced by
them. From this it can be seen that Gage was early on concerned with an inter-
disciplinary view of painting.
Gage’s and Dittmann’s aims in analysis are similar, but where Dittmann
focuses on the painting itself and describes it in great detail, Gage focuses on
the artist’s milieu and hardly mentions the painting’s pictorial content. While
Dittmann explores the progressive changes in perception of colour between
different artists, Gage delves into the application of colour theory in painting
which derive from science.7 In the chapter “Colour without Theory”, which
encompasses more than 100 pages and which spans from George Seurat’s idea
of pictorial colour to Frank Stella’s view on materiality, he only describes one
work of art in some detail: Piet Mondrian’s triptych Evolution, to which he
dedicates five sentences. To better understand his approach, it is helpful to look
at his analysis of Mondrian’s work, to take just one example. He starts with
chemist and philosopher Wilhelm Ostwald and traces his reception by the
group De Stijl, to which Mondrian belonged. Mondrian was friends with
painter Jan Toorop who in turn introduced him to theosophy and their views
on colour. The Theosophists had implemented nineteenth-century research
into colour which led Mondrian to science and his first Cubist paintings. Then
he met the mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers and adapted his ideas on
colour in his own paintings. An encounter with artist Bart van der Leck lead
him to explore coloured line paintings, soon turning to a grid taken from psy-
chological studies.
As this shows, Gage meanders between art and science, seeking the connec-
tion between them. Comparing John Gage and Lorenz Dittmann, we can see
that Gage is more interested in the greater context than the interpretation of
the specific artwork, whereas for Dittmann, the artwork is central and the
greater context enriches his own interpretation. Together they complement
each other and form academic guiding principles—a space for one’s own
research in the field of colour in the history of art.
Colour in Comics
Both Dittmann and Gage worked almost exclusively on paintings, a genre that
is related to the field of comics but not identical with it. Some aspects can easily
be transferred, others adapted, but as Bätschmann rightly asserted, each art-
historical genre needs to take its specific objects into account. The following is
therefore not a fixed theory but a proposition on how to approach colour in
comics. In the following section, I will briefly summarise the rather meagre
literature on colour in comics before applying the hermeneutical approach out-
lined above to the comic adaptation of Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky.
146 B. UHLIG
The Current State of Research

In 2011, Jan Baetens published the article “From Black and White to Color
and Back”, an important exploration of the back and forth movement in com-
ics outlining preferences for either colour or a black and white style. He also
argued that colour is greatly under-theorised. This has not changed signifi-
cantly in the past decade. The body of source material concerning the topic of
colour in comics research is still problematic. Two systematic studies of comics
devote only one section to colour (Baetens and Frey 2014; Hague 2014).
However, as these works want to cover comics in their entirety, the comments
on the theory of colour naturally tend to remain underdeveloped. The few
articles that focus on colour in comics deal either with technical aspects, such
as the development of four-colour printing (Blackbeard 2003), or with cultural
associations, in particular the depiction of race in comics (Chiu 2015; Aldama
2018; Smith 2019). The most important sources that deal with the question of
colouring are Couleur directe. Masterpieces of the new French Comics (Gaumer
et al. 1993), as well as I linguaggi del fumetto [The Languages of Comics]8
(Barbieri 1991), which however adopts a semiotic approach and therefore dis-
plays limitations with regard to the analysis of colouring. Although there are
individual areas within comics research which accord the topic of the colour
scheme greater significance, for example, in couleur directe (direct colour) or
the ligne claire (clear line) established by Hergé, most analyses mention this
field without providing a deeper theoretical background (Groensteen 2007;
Postema 2013; Cohn 2013).
The Application of Art-Historical Theory to Comics

To apply the principles of art-historical hermeneutics as adopted by Lorenz
Dittmann to comics, we must examine closely how he in general approaches
the issue of colour in works of art in his writings. In his basic principles he fol-
lows Strauss, who identifies three categories: firstly, the colouristic principle;
secondly, the luminaristic principle; and thirdly, the chromatic principle. The
colouristic principle refers to large, solid areas of colours that are clearly defined,
for example, but not necessarily by a contour line, and in contrast to each
other. Think of Simone Martini’s depiction of Madonna and Child (1326):
Her black cloak is in sharp contrast to both the surrounding golden back-
ground and the red dress of the child she is holding. The luminaristic principle
is characterised by a tension between light and dark and a transitory merging
of colours, not by a contrast between individual, differentiated colours. This is
closely related to the painting style of chiaroscuro, for example, in the works of
Rembrandt or Caravaggio. The chromatic principle is a combination of the
colouristic and the luminaristic. In a chromatic painting, the contrasting
colours present themselves in a micro-structure and are not characterised by
their own value but by their interaction. Often they mix in the eye of the
viewer. Good examples are Impressionism and Pointillism, for example, in the
works of Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, respectively.
Dittmann usually starts by mentioning the framework of creation of the
work of art he proposes to analyse. His first step is therefore to analyse which
of the three principles is dominant in the design. This includes material, colour
and direction of light. A single painting can usually be assigned to one cate-
gory. (With a comic, which can vary greatly in length and can undergo major
stylistic changes in the course of the narrative, it is conceivable that different
design principles can occur in different sections.) Dittmann then supports his
judgement as far as possible with quotations from the artist about the design of
the painting. Building on this, he describes the painting’s structure, construc-
tion and subject, which is then interpreted in a subsequent step. In doing so he
repeatedly draws on quotations by the artist and statements by contemporaries
as well as on sources, either literary or artistic, which the artist used or may
have used in the process of creating the work of art. In this way Dittmann
embeds his statements in the historical world of the artist and of his work.
Of great importance to Gage are the artist’s own words, the literature they
read and adapted and the interaction of science and art. He looks for the bigger
picture, compares the artist’s stylistic development with similar realisations by
other artists, academics and related disciplines and reveals connections between
them. It is therefore difficult to use his writings as guidelines on how to inter-
pret images. They are, however, excellent works of reference, which can guide
and amplify one’s own interpretation. To adapt his approach in my research, I
created a document listing Lorenzo Mattotti’s work by date of creation, which
sometimes differs greatly from its date of publication, adding the names of art-
ists he met, influential publishers he worked with, books he read, important
political events of the time. In the resulting grid I marked stylistic changes and
long-lasting developments, cross-referencing and connecting the dots between
these instances. This proved messy and tedious at first, but did help to identify
connections. I applied this approach in my article on Mattotti’s comic Murmure
(Uhlig 2015) as well as in my previous article on Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde
(Uhlig 2016).
Based on these approaches, I will now examine in more detail the comic
Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky from 2002.
I examined this work in 2016 from the point of view of the literary and artistic
adaptation, but did not focus on the aspect of colour (Uhlig 2016). I now
propose to build upon and expand the 2016 article. In accordance with both
Gage’s and Dittmann’s method, detailed statements by the artist will also be
adduced.
The comic was initially created to fulfil a request: An Italian magazine kept
asking Lorenzo Mattotti for a graphic adaptation of a classic text which was
then to appear in its pages. Since Mattotti was interested in playing with the
Gothic genre and had already illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Pavilion
on the Links in 1992, they settled on a reinterpretation of Jekyll and Hyde.
Mattotti’s childhood friend and long-term collaborator Jerry Kramsky would
148 B. UHLIG
write the text. Unfortunately, a dispute arose between Mattotti and the editors
and he decided to stop the project. The French publisher Casterman expressed
interest, so they returned to the ten pages that already existed, tore them apart
and restructured the project as a classic bande dessinée album: The book was
published in a hard-cover edition measuring 24 cm by 32 cm. It is thread
stitched, so the 64 full-colour pages remain open. The high printing quality as
well as the black border around each frame make the vivid colours of the draw-
ings pop against the smooth, bright white background of the pages. The paper
is not translucent so that the reverse sides do not shine through.
On a structural level, Mattotti and Kramsky made a number of crucial
changes in their adaptation of Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde. Although the text of the comic follows the Italian translation of
the novella by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini very closely, the scene of
the action has been transferred from Victorian London to Berlin in the final
years of the Weimar Republic. Many of the works of art referred to in the comic
were created after the year 1930—the year “when the Weimar Republic ceases
to be a democracy” (Schröder 2018). The date of its creation also coincides
eerily with the September 11 attacks. George W. Bush had just proclaimed the
War on Terror, the French weekly news magazine L’Express had announced
gloomily: “The 3rd World War has begun” (Jeambar et al. 2001). It is against
this background that Mattotti and Kramsky create their “hysterical” (Mattotti
and Gravett 2017) story of madness and senseless violence. Mattotti says that
when the idea of adapting Stevenson’s work came up he immediately thought
not of London but of Berlin during the Weimar Republic:
Every time I tackle a book I like to think what forms it will have, what references
I will have. I automatically think, I don’t know, of a romantic story, so I go and
see what paintings fascinate me, what films have been there before. This whole
library, in my imagination, in my mind. And so in Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde the
first thing that came to my mind is not to put it in the Victorian period, I didn’t
want to do it in foggy London, I found it limiting. Immediately, I automatically
saw Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll drawn with German Expressionism, with extremely
dry, hysterical forms, a mean side of the situation. And immediately I went to see
some paintings, drawings by painters from the Weimar period, Expressionists,
and I bumped into Beckmann’s self-portraits. I made a whole series of his self-
portraits and, looking at him, I said to myself: “But this is Mr. Hyde!” With a sort
of cynical look, the way of placing his hands, a sort of hysteria, of inner wicked-
ness, and I said to myself: “But this is really Mr. Hyde!” Then I also went to see
Grosz, Otto Dix of course and slowly I saw before me this very possibility of
developing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with all what is the culture of Expressionism.
Expressionism reaching as far as Bacon, because Bacon too is one of the most, of
the last greats of contemporary Expressionists.9
It must be pointed out that although Mattotti repeatedly speaks of

Expressionism, from the point of view of Art History, he interprets the term in
much wider artistic terms. It includes Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) as
well as Kritischer Realismus (Critical Realism) and extends as far as the post-
war works of Francis Bacon. In general, it can be said that by Expressionism
Mattotti understands something similar to what Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (using
his pseudonym Louis de Marsalle) said in 1921: “Since these images have been
created with blood and nerves and not with a coolly calculating intellect, they
speak directly and suggestively. …Despite the calmness a heated struggle for
the things can be felt” (Kircher, quoted from Dittmann 2010, p. 278). From
this Dittmann rightly concludes that “[t]he self-expression, the experience of
the artist” are in the foreground (2010, p. 278). However, the comic, and
Mattotti’s art, is subservient to the narrative, and it is therefore not Mattotti’s
struggle that is the central point, but that of the characters experiencing it—
Jekyll and Hyde. Similar to the Expressionist paintings Kirchner refers to,
Mattotti’s polychrome drawings are carried by colour itself, which becomes
“an emotional state”. As Mattotti described, “colours …are life, the energy you
can pass to others” (2003). At the same time, it gives the artist great freedom,
as colour is emotionally rich without being specific in content. In Mattotti’s
work, colour is used narratively but uniquely to each story. The significance
given to specific colours can change throughout the story, or can link scenes
chromatically, the way Mattotti links Hyde’s blazing joy of being transformed
into a body of his own with the blood bath of his first murder using the
colour red.
Mattotti executes the drawings with opaque coloured crayons. He always
colours and draws by hand, even though it can become tedious for longer sto-
ries, because he likes the physical aspect of the work. He worked extensively in
monochrome before, for example, in his preceding comics The Man at the
Window (1992) and Stigmata (1998), but decided to return to colour in this
work. According to him, it is often an intuitive decision whether to work in
monochrome or polychrome: “There are stories …that cannot do without
color; otherwise it would be as if they were losing the breath they need. …The
choice of technique is also a function of the type of emotion you want it to
pass. It’s a choice, not always rational” (2009). Thus it is the story itself which
demands a certain mode as colour is an integral part of the narrative:
“You …need to find the right story, where the color and the story have equal
importance” (Bi and Mattotti 1997). Often, he leads his panels to the brink of
abstraction, as in the last pages of Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde. The text will fade
into silence, the forms will dissolve and the narration is carried by symbolic
colours, a code the reader deciphers on a very basic level: “In Fires, there’s a
scene in the forest where the combat takes place and you see the soldier falling
and the blood. It’s a scene you see and just accept without other explication.
There was no other way to tell this” (Bi and Mattotti 1997).
Many artists Mattotti mentions as inspiration for Docteur Jekyll & Mr
Hyde—Hanns Kralik, Carl Barth, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen10—tend
towards abstraction. Similarly for Mattotti the formal composition and the
colour scheme take on the visualisation of the great emotions in the story:
madness, pain and hysteria. Other artworks, like Otto Dix’s Großstadt
150 B. UHLIG
(Metropolis, 1927–1928) or Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins,

1933), are obvious reference points as they are open commentaries on both the
original novella and the situation in Weimar Germany, linking the two.11 The
influence of Weimar cinema is also unmistakable. In films like Friedrich Wilhelm
Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or Fritz Lang’s M (1931), the evil is reduced to a
shadow roaming the streets, much like Hyde in the opening scene of the comic.
They all consciously avoid showing the faces of their antagonists, shrouding
them in darkness or playing with their silhouette. The lightning in the Weimar
films is dominated by stark contrasts, the scenery is distorted and angular, thus
rendering it grotesque and showing a world about to come apart—elements
that can also be found in the comic. A final inspiration can be found in the
world of comics itself: Mattotti and Kramsky’s comic is dedicated to Alberto
Breccia who made an adaptation of the same story in watercolours. Though
the execution of the drawings is very different, both Breccia and Mattotti pri-
oritise the colours red and blue in contrast to black in the first pages of their
adaptations.
Mattotti’s drawings are filled with a murkiness that in the first half of the
album is set as darkness in opposition to garish shades of yellow and red. The
colours are planar and are deployed in contrast to each other: Red can be found
next to purple, orange borders on blue, yellow beams of light throw turquoise
shadows. In this way the colour of the picture is freed from any relation to real-
ity. Applying the approach of Strauss and Dittmann, the colouristic principle is
paramount in the comic as Mattotti puts an emphasis on colour contrasts to
create strong tension and highlight the clash between Jeykll’s and Hyde’s emo-
tional states. He does, however, subtly play with the chromatic principle char-
acterised by chiaroscuro as seen in its use of shadow and silhouettes but skilfully
transposes this into colour.
Subsequently it is less dominated by light and dark while maintaining a har-
monious colour palette—as in Caravaggio’s work—but instead by colour con-
trasts that are fractured by Hyde’s dark figure.
The colours are not consistent from panel to panel as they are not intended
to represent reality but to evoke emotion. In the panel top left of page 2, the
girl may wear a green skirt; in the adjacent panel top right, her entire figure is
swathed in shades of violet, the complementary colour harmony to the first
panel (Fig. 1). Also the colours are determined as blue sky, yellow houses and
red pavement in the first panel, reserving the primary colours for the largest
areas of each panel. In the fifth panel (bottom left), however, this order is
reversed: What used to be up (the blue sky) is now down and vice versa. The
traditional rules no longer apply which foreshadows the narrative. When Hyde
attacks the girl, the architectural space is dissolved—much as the world stops
following the same rules as before Hyde’s creation. Instead, geometrical shapes
are set against each other in primary colours, aiming for the highest tension
possible, both artistically and narratively. This reinforces the violence of the act
and expresses the girl’s shock and pain. What is important is therefore not the
colour in detail but the overall impression of colour and their contrasts. Mattotti
identifies this a typical characteristic of German Expressionism:
Fig. 1 Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. Pay attention
to the reduced drawing style and the use of primary colours
In Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, by using this style of German Expressionism I

found myself using colours I [normally] didn’t use much. They are very contrast-
ing colours, very (pause) I call them hysterical, acid, I mean, I put acid green
colours next to orange colours, next to pink colours, violet colours with much
152 B. UHLIG
contrast, nearly wild, to give the idea of hysteria and in the end they belong to the
rawness of the painting of these painters.12
His choice of colour as representing light carried by homogeneous areas of

colour is therefore by no means random. It can be seen in the early works of
the group of artists known as Die Brücke [The Bridge] and achieves vital
importance in colouration in twentieth-century art, because it manages to take
over and replace the functions of other pictorial elements. Mattotti follows this
design closely; composed of geometrical figures, the characters have a coloured
shading that gives them an extraordinarily plastic consistency, which is strongly
reminiscent of Oskar Schlemmer’s human figures, “not for the sake of refer-
ence, but just to find strength in things that have gone before” (Bi and Mattotti
1997). The forms are created purely by colour without monochromatic delim-
iting contour lines. Pure and strong areas of colour complement each other
“according to laws of contrast or harmony” (Jantzen 1914, quoted in Dittmann
1987, p. 92). Colour here represents light and shade, plasticity and contours.
Mattotti’s use of space is also remarkable. It is characterised by straight or
triangular areas, very occasionally also by round ones, which are strictly marked
off from each other. The backgrounds are in perspective but seldom shaped
three-dimensionally. Instead of a landscape there are geometrical forms whose
aim is to guide the tension and in this way support the narrative. The girl, for
example, appears in front of a light-coloured background. Hyde on the other
hand stands out against the darkness. He emerges from a black shadow and
stands in front of the midnight-blue sky, while the red background of the fifth
panel illuminates his rage and the physical assault on the girl. Everywhere the
perspective appears to collapse; it often lacks the spatial continuum of Euclidean
geometry. Instead we see a metaphysical space that is reminiscent of Giorgio de
Chirico’s pittura metafisica.
Each scene in the narrative has its own colour scheme, with most scenes
comprising three pages. The pages devoted to Jekyll are remarkable for their
lighter colour scheme, which is dominated by a contrast between orange and
light blue, referencing Hyde’s primaries but toned down. Similar to Hyde’s
colours, they become darker as the narration progresses and Jekyll’s despera-
tion grows. In addition to the colouristic changes between scenes, there are
three major artistic breaks. The first appears on page 21 (Fig. 2), shortly after
Jekyll’s impressive transformation, which is derived from Bacon’s crucifixion
cycle. The use of space is clearly more detailed: the colours are less solid and
more chromatically graduated; the colour palette has shifted from predomi-
nantly primary to secondary colours in orange and green; the background is
intensified by the superimposition of contoured dancers in crimson red; wavy
lines, which are supposed to make the music of the saxophonist audible, are
used for the first and (conspicuously) for the only time. Narratively, the colours
express Hyde’s “awakening”, as he rages in the bottom right panel: “we cele-
brate my liberation”. The panels are shot through with irregular horizontal
lines, reminiscent of claw marks, as if Mattotti wanted to cross out the pictorial
Fig. 2 Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. The drawings
are more fleshed out, the colours have shifted to green and orange. Criss-crossing
lines appear
content of the panels. He himself pointed out that Expressionism makes use of
signs that destroy themselves: “also in reference to Expressionist painting, that
is, with hard signs, almost contradicting this colour that flakes off, that destroys
itself, underneath.”13 In the comic he uses this stylistic device to symbolise
Jekyll’s decline and Hyde’s descent into excess. The visual style of muted
154 B. UHLIG
colours and the criss-crossing lines is therefore intensified in the course of the
second half of the narrative.
The section from page 41 to page 44, immediately preceding Hyde’s first
sexually motivated murder,14 has a key function. As with earlier in the story in
these pages, the range of colours shifts into the tertiary area. Yellowy green and
orangey red are the dominant shades of this sequence, with accents in yellowy
orange and bluish green shadows. This highlights Hyde’s decline. Originally a
creature of pure, albeit violent, emotions, he follows his pleasures without
restrictions. Hyde is well aware of his devious actions but submits to lust none-
theless. The experience, however, changes him, which is foremost captured in
the comic in a chromatic shift. After this scene—after the murder—the pictorial
object disintegrates rapidly. The geometrical areas in pure colours from the
early pages of the comic give way to detailed chromatic areas in violet and dark-
ened yellow, the bold geometric triangles splinter into small shapes, which are
superimposed by a grid of dark lines (Fig. 3). Also the pictorial style changes
significantly. The passers-by in panels two and three are reminiscent of the
famous triptych Grande Ville (1927–1928) by Otto Dix. Mattotti had made
allusions to this famous painting before (Uhlig 2016, p. 16). The first time,
however, the colours were applied solidly, single pen strokes could not be iden-
tified. The second time the colour application appears almost hatched in places.
The dark shadows in the third panel are broad strokes, colours bleed into each
other, contours are less clearly defined, details are roughly executed. Therefore
the colour application itself appears hectic, even driven. This fragmentation of
the pictorial object is reflected in the narrative. The border between Jekyll and
Hyde becomes increasingly blurred. The serum that ensures the transforma-
tion from Jekyll to Hyde and back ceases to work. Hyde himself is out of con-
trol, living in the streets, eating food out of trash cans. Jekyll is tortured by
self-reproach. Increasingly, he finds himself trapped inside the body of Hyde.
The final sequence, which is devoted to Jekyll’s despair and his decision to
commit suicide, is remarkably dark in colour. This is the third break mentioned
above. Black is the dominant colour, offset by various shades of grey with yel-
low highlights. Jekyll’s effort to keep Hyde away by keeping his purest and
most joyful memories in his mind fails—he appears buried by his memories.
His body undergoes one last transformation, but this time it is not the meta-
morphosis—characterised by pain—into Hyde. It rather resembles a transfor-
mation into a cloud, which in the end dissolves, leaving behind a void, which
is accompanied by a sense of peace.
We have been able to see that colour in Mattotti’s works is never random. It
is always determined by the narrative and carried by it. The decision to shift the
action to the Weimar Republic is echoed in the accents that Mattotti and
Kramsky place in Stevenson’s work, not least in their choice of colour. They
focus on change and transformation: from Jekyll to Hyde, from democracy to
dictatorship, from Jekyll’s striving for the pure human being to the National
Socialist idea of an Aryan human being. The aim of this adaptation is not to
simply retell the story but to empathise with the hysteria, the inner evil, the
Fig. 3 Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Mattotti/Kramsky, © Casterman S.A. The drawings
are overly detailed, almost grotesque. The colours are mixed with black
pain of transformation, despair as well as Jekyll’s longing, and the unbridled

lust that breaks through in Hyde’s behaviour. It finds its narrative counterpart
in the garish, untamed colours, in their explosive force. His colours capture the
menacing atmosphere of the era, which is often compared to the “dance on the
volcano”. Mattotti intensifies his narrative by adding in new scenes which do
not occur in the original novella: Shortly before Jekyll’s death, he lets him
156 B. UHLIG
think back to a moment in his childhood, in which young Jekyll holds a gold-
fish bowl in his hand and watches the movements of the goldfish in it. The
colours are even and placed calmly next to each other; the background is not
divided up into triangles but uniformly dark. A moment of tranquillity and joy.
To fathom the emotional depths of his characters and make them comprehen-
sible to the reader in an equally emotional and intuitive manner by the con-
struction of the image and the use of colours—that is Mattotti’s declared aim.
Conclusion
A hermeneutical approach to colour is highly beneficial as colour in art follows
its own logic. It is not to be confused with the colours in the real world but
should be recognised as a highly stylistic sign. Colour semiotics was largely
unsuccessful because its terms for defining colour were too limited. Colours
defies a universal system of codes, though it may well play with it. In this comic,
Lorenzo Mattotti does, for example, make use of the colour red as symbol of
intense emotion which also pays tribute to art of the early twentieth century.
As Gage shows though, the meaning instilled in these colours was far from
stable: Albeit Piet Mondrian consistently used the primaries, red in his theoso-
phist phase symbolised—rather traditionally—pride, avarice, anger or sensual-
ity. Later, under the influence of M. H. J. Schoenmakers, red for Mondrian
signified “the radial movement of life, visual art and volume” (Gage 1999,
p. 257). More important is Mattotti’s use of primaries, their colour contrast,
their interaction as well as their increasing alteration into secondary and ter-
tiary colours symbolise the descent of both Jekyll and Hyde. Colour, therefore,
needs to be analysed in the context of the specific artwork. It is crucial to exam-
ine which function colour fulfils in a specific comic, how it is related to other
colours or forms, if it changes in the course of the comic.
In a second stage it is useful to see if the artist has a unique meaning for
colours that can be traced in other works as well. Mattotti, for example, uses a
very typical shade of green he reserves to express calm and tranquillity, that
plays only a subordinate role in Docteur Jekyll & Mr Hyde—probably because
tranquillity is missing in the story. This hermeneutical approach to colour is
consequently best suited as it does not force a pre-set concept on the comic but
explores how colour is manifested in the work itself.
Bätschmann’s approach, which finds its echo in Dittmann’s and Gage’s
method of interweaving artist comments, contemporary and modern views as
well as a viewer-related analysis, is helpful in the scope of the interpretation. As
mentioned, he opens up the interpretation to include several correct conclu-
sions. Here, I highlighted Mattotti’s and Kramsky’s focus on transformation,
on the destabilising nature of Jekyll’s experiment. Other interpretations that
are just as valid have emphasised the horror of the war in Hyde’s behaviour and
Mattotti’s references to Grosz and Dix (Gangnes 2017). This proves particu-
larly helpful in analysing Mattotti’s comics as he often keeps his stories deliber-
ately ambiguous (Uhlig 2015).
Lorenz Dittmann’s approach to the analysis of the use and significance of

colour in a painting (and this in the widest sense includes comics) is strongly
oriented to practice. This makes it easier to observe comics and to analyse
them. This approach is eminently suitable above all for key scenes and for short
or relatively homogeneous comics. On the other hand, Dittmann’s clear focus
on the construction of the image, the structure and the use of colour makes it
more difficult to encapsulate the entire comic in its mutability and its develop-
ment. This becomes laborious in particular with very long comics or ones that
extend over several volumes. Also the emphasis on attributing a painted art-
work to either the coloristic, chromatic or luminaristic principle is of less
importance. It used to imply a historic association that is less relevant to a
young medium as the comic. It can, however, be useful in that it helps recog-
nise main artistic trends in the comic: Does the artist try to create tension by
using colour contrasts? Or do they create atmosphere by focusing on light and
dark? Does it change in the course of the comic?
John Gage’s approach is considerably more theoretical and often less acces-
sible for one’s own analysis. In some contexts, however, his approach can prove
extremely helpful. Such a context may, for example, be the change of colour
with a switch of medium, for example, from a material medium like the
coloured crayons that Mattotti uses to a purely digital colouring. The advan-
tage of Gage’s approach is that it is easier to apply it to a series of pictures such
as a comic because it focuses less on concrete descriptions of the images and
more on basic stylistic characteristics and the wider socio-historical picture.
Combined, these theories provide a helpful frame for analysing comics from
an artistic point of view. Applying methods used for interpreting paintings can
bring great results but may need to be adjusted to mixed-media comics, for
example. So as Bätschmann saw the necessity for different interpretation for at
least each genre, it might be necessary to establish more granular variations in
the very diverse field of comics.
Notes
1. See for this Felix Thürlemann‘s analysis of Albrecht Dürer‘s Allerheiligenbild as
well as the note „Über Farben. Rekonstruktion einer historischen Farbsyntax
[On Colour. Reconstruction of a historic colour syntax] (Thürlemann 1990).
For further reading, the texts of Michael Baxandall (1972) and Margret Lisner
(1990) are recommended.
2. For further detail on Boehm and the aesthetics of reception Cf. Eckhoff-Heindl
chapter “Aesthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes of Interaction in
Comics”.
3. This is my translation of the title. The book itself has, unfortunately, never been
translated to English.
4. Again, this is my translation of the title.
5. The translation of the title is my own.
6. This, too, is my own translation.
158 B. UHLIG
7. This may be both Gage’s greatest strength, as this approach produces excellent
results, and at times his greatest downfall, as he makes the artist the servant of
technology and denies him his own creative thoughts.
8. This is a great book that to my knowledge has only been tranlsated into Spanish.
Therefore, the translation is my own.
9. In 2011 the comic was published as an iPad App in the Apple Store together
with extensive extra material, in particular short thematically structured inter-
views with Lorenzo Mattotti. The longer statements by Mattotti have all been
taken directly from these videos, though the translation is my own. Unfortunately
the app is no longer available in the Apple Store.
10. Hanns Kralik (1900–1971) was a German painter and belonged to the associa-
tion of avantgarde artists called Young Rhineland, founded in Düsseldorf in
1919. Carl Barth (1896–1976) is most famous for this tempera paintings dating
from the 1930s, which stylistically belong to New Objectivity and Magical
Realism. Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (1894–1970) also belonged to the
association Young Rhineland as well as the to November Group of expressionist
artists. He was close friends with George Grosz and a pioneer of New Objectivity.
11. For a detailed interpretation, see Uhlig 2016 as well as the article “Hysterical
Reality” by Madeline Ganges (2017).
12. Interview on iPad App 2011.
13. Interview on iPad App 2011.
14. The motif of sexually motivated murder, referred to as “Lustmord”, was a very
common one in German art in the first half of the twentieth century. In
Stevenson’s work it is not referred to as openly as in Mattotti’s, but it is discern-
ible in the story of Jack the Ripper, which resonates in the background. A draw-
ing by Otto Dix from the year 1922 served as a concrete example for Mattotti’s
interpretation.
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PART III
The New and Newer Art Histories

Feminist Art History as an Approach
to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections
on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics
Margareta Wallin Wictorin and Anna Nordenstam
Abstract The aim of this chapter is to illuminate how the theories of the femi-
nist art historians Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker can be
utilized when analysing Swedish comics. What are the potentials and the defi-
ciencies, and what other theories and methods are needed when investigating
comics from feminist perspectives? The analysis will be based on four case stud-
ies of Swedish feminist comics: “The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics,
2006–2014” (2017), “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi. Politisk satir i
svenska feministiska serier” [Right wing ideology as popular dance music.
Political satire in Swedish feminist comics] (2017),“Women’s Liberation.
Swedish Feminist Comics and Cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s” (2019)
and “Comics Craftivism: Embroidery in Contemporary Swedish Feminist
Comics” (2021). The chapter is structured according to Pollock’s three posi-
tions for feminism’s encounter with the canon, which began with the Women’s
Liberation Movement in the early 1970s (Pollock, Griselda, Differencing the
Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. Routledge, London
1999). This chapter ends with a reflection on the relevance—the potential and
M. Wallin Wictorin (*)

Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden
e-mail: margareta.wallin-wictorin@kau.se
A. Nordenstam
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
e-mail: anna.nordenstam@lir.gu.se

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_9
164 M. WALLIN WICTORIN AND A. NORDENSTAM
the deficiencies—of feminist art-historical approaches to the field of Comics

Studies, and their methodological possibilities.
Keywords Feminist comics • Swedish comics • Linda Nochlin • Griselda

Pollock • Rozsika Parker
Introduction
The Swedish Women’s Liberation Movement has for a long time constituted a
vital force. Since the middle of the nineteenth century it has produced a wide
variety of journals which have functioned as arenas for feminist issues and
debates, formation of opinions, mediation of art, literature and humour and so
on (Nordenstam 2014). From the 1970s onwards some of the journals also
included feminist comics and cartoons. Nicola Streeten (2020) has demon-
strated that British feminist cartoons and comics played an important part in
the Women’s Movement in Britain from the 1970s, with humour as a key
component, and the same conclusion is applicable for Sweden (Nordenstam
and Wallin Wictorin 2019). The authors of this chapter had vague memories of
comics in Swedish feminist journals and anthologies from the 1970s, but
before 2019 they had been neither researched nor documented by art histori-
ans or any other researchers (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2019). There
are a few art historians, such as Isabella Nilsson, who have claimed knowledge
of Swedish feminist comics from the 1970s, but a close look at her research
reveals that the comics mentioned date from the 1980s, 1990s or even later
(Nilsson 2005). Olle Dahllöf, member of the Swedish Academy of Comics,
himself a collector of comics and an author writing about comics for a general
audience, in 2019 published a book about women comics artists in Sweden
active between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1970s. He asserts
that the historiography of Swedish comics has been continuously dominated by
men from the start, despite the considerable presence of women artists. To
challenge this exclusion Dahllöf showcased 28 women who published comics
in Sweden between 1887 and 1970 (Dahllöf 2019).
Dahllöf discovered the first of them in 1989 when he was working at the
Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, and in connection to the newspaper’s
125 years jubilee searched the company archive for older comics. He found
many comics by women artists, especially from the 1920s and 1930s, which
according to Mira Falardeau corresponds in time with a rise in comics by
women in the daily press in North America (Falardeau 2020, p. 30). In 2017
Dahllöf was asked by some members of the Swedish Academy of Comics to
write a book about women comics artists. By then the academy had 7 women
members out of a total of 18, after having been exclusively male between its
foundation in 1965 and 1990 (Svenska Serieakademin n.d.). Dahllöf contin-
ued to search for women comics artists, found several and noticed that they
had often been published in daily newspapers and in magazines for children
(Strolz 2020). As a matter of fact, the literary scholar Helena Magnusson, who
FEMINIST ART HISTORY AS AN APPROACH TO RESEARCH ON COMICS: META… 165
was the first to write an academic dissertation about Swedish comics, had also
discovered some of these, and other women comics artists, while working on
her dissertation about children’s comics in the early 2000s (Magnusson 2005).
Magnusson, who studied children’s and family magazines as well as daily papers
and albums, did not focus on the artists in her study, but mentions that the
male dominance of the comics field was broken with the publication of chil-
dren’s comics in the 1920s and 1930s (Magnusson 2005, p. 367). This shows
the importance of investigating different kinds of media and digging deeper
into the archives. C(h)ris Reyns-Chicuma, who has written about bande dessi-
née and gender (2021), notes that what we nowadays see as typical comics, that
is, strips, at an earlier stage were mostly published in mainstream family-
oriented newspapers and children’s magazines. The early structural exclusion
of women in the historiography of comics appears to be similar to the histori-
ography of art in general, but regarding art in general the differencing of the
canon began earlier, already in the 1970s, in Sweden as well as in other parts of
the Western world.
The omission of comics for children is not the only reason for why there are
so few women artists in the histories of comics. Falardeau, who in 1981
obtained her Ph.D. from the Institute of Aesthetics and Art Sciences at the
University of Paris, writing on comics by women in France and in Quebec, in
her 2020 book, A History of Women Cartoonists, asks why there still are so few
women in the areas of comics and cartoons (Falardeau 2020, p. 22). She sug-
gests that part of the problem is the stereotypical expectations placed on
women, especially the idea that women are not supposed to laugh in the public
sphere and that men often have had problems with recognizing or appreciating
women’s humour. Falardeau points to the low number of women comics art-
ists, but Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode, by contrast, emphasize their
amplitude. They write in their early attempt to differentiate the comics canon,
Women and the Comics (1985), another of the first books ever published on
this subject, that there have been hundreds of women comics artists but that
they have been overlooked and ignored. Their book documents the careers of
a large number of women who have created and worked in the field of comics
strips, comic books and cartooning, in America during the twentieth century
(Robbins and Yronwode 1985). Robbins, who started out as a comics artist
herself, continued to publish volumes on women in the comics field, including
A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993), The Great Women Superheroes (1997),
From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (1999),
The Great Women Cartoonists (2001) and Pretty in Ink (2013). Among Swedish
comics researchers, such as Nina Ernst, Inger Jalakas, Helena Magnusson,
Kristina Arnerud Mejhammar and Isabella Nilsson, Robbins is mostly men-
tioned as a comics artist. But her work in uniting women comics artists in the
Wimmen’s Comix collective, later titled Wimmin’s Comix, for c. 20 years from
1972 onwards, might have been an inspiration for the Swedish feminist comics
artists network Dotterbolaget [The affiliation, or literally The daughter’s com-
pany], founded in 2005 (Ernst 2017, p. 74).1
Around the turn of the millennium, there was an increase in the production
of feminist comics in Sweden, related to a new generation of feminists and of
women comics artists (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2021b). Some years
into the new millennium, there was a rapid expansion of feminist artists in the
field. The vital ideas and innovative aesthetics in the comics and cartoons of
artists such as Liv Strömquist, Åsa Grennvall (Schagerström), Nina
Hemmingsson, Sara Granér, Nanna Johansson, Lotta Sjöberg and later Moa
Romanova have mostly attracted attention from national readers and research-
ers.2 Now that Swedish comics are increasingly being translated to other lan-
guages (Strömberg 2020), more international research has appeared (e.g.
Rauchenbacher and Serles 2021).
In Swedish Art History, theories of the feminist art historians Linda Nochlin,
Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker have been used from the 1970s onwards.
Pioneers in this regard have been Anna Lena Lindberg and Barbro Werkmäster,
and many scholars, such as Yvonne Eriksson, Linda Fagerström, Anette
Göthlund, Bia Mankell, Johanna Rosenqvist, Margareta Wallin Wictorin and
Eva Zetterman, have followed their example. However, these feminist art-
historical theories have not been explicitly used in comics research in Sweden,
even if the question of “Why have there been so few women comics artists” has
been discussed, at least since the 1980s.3 The aim of this chapter is to illumi-
nate how the theories of these feminist historians—Nochlin, Pollock and
Parker—can be utilized when analysing Swedish comics. What are the poten-
tials and the deficiencies, and what other theories and methods are needed
when investigating comics from feminist perspectives? The analysis will be
based on four case studies we have recently published regarding Swedish femi-
nist comics: “The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics, 2006–2014”
(2017), “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi. Politisk satir i svenska feminis-
tiska serier” [Right wing ideology as popular dance music. Political satire in
Swedish feminist comics] (2017), “Women’s Liberation. Swedish Feminist
Comics and Cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s” (2019) and “Comics
Craftivism: Embroidery in Contemporary Swedish Feminist Comics” (2021).
Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock’s Feminist Theories

of Art History
In the 1970s many women art historians and artists questioned conventional
Art History that often focused on male artists and so-called canonical works
(Lindberg 1995, 10).4 Linda Nochlin published the groundbreaking essay
“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” in 1971. It has been
reprinted several times, in the UK and the USA, and is included in Nochlin’s
Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (Nochlin 1994). In 1995 it was pub-
lished in a Swedish translation. Nochlin challenged the established view of art
history as a single sex world, populated by men and structured as a canon that
permeated the art world and thwarted women artists. In her essay, Nochlin
argued: “In the field of Art History, the white Western male viewpoint, uncon-
sciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, may – and does – prove
to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is
elitist, but on purely intellectual ones” (Nochlin 1994 [1971], p. 146). Nochlin
claimed that art isn’t made by natural geniuses, but by trained human beings.
Throughout the greater part of history, artistic training, and in particular draw-
ing and painting from life, has been exclusively available to men. Historically,
the few women with the opportunity to study art and achieve pre-eminence
came from exceptional situations, such as growing up with artist fathers or with
the support of strong male artistic personalities (Nochlin 1994 [1971],
pp. 168–169).
Nochlin’s ideas received significant attention, and her theories have been
both appreciated and criticized from various perspectives. In the 1980s the
British feminist art historians Parker and Pollock claimed that Nochlin did not
challenge traditional definitions of art and creativity, and that she studied the
actors in the field of art, rather than the structures that made possible the
oppression and exclusion of women (Parker and Pollock 1981, p. 49). In their
opinion, the modern definition of “artist” was based on the romantic
nineteenth-century myth and ideal of the artist as a male, divinely inspired
creator, an outsider, an anti-social and anti-domestic bohemian. It was not
applicable to women, since they were obliged to fulfil a socially ordained
domestic and reproductive role at home, rather than appearing and exhibiting
art in public life (Parker and Pollock 1981, pp. 82–113). Pollock and Parker’s
critique is relevant, and Pollock developed it further in several books about
structural conditions around artists such as Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas and
Vincent van Gogh. She generated a set of theories, three strategic positions
regarding feminist challenges to the canon, stating that it’s necessary but not
enough to add women artists; that it’s necessary to consider the systematic
devaluation of aesthetic practices, material and procedures associated with
women; and, finally, that the feminist movement must interrupt the naturalized
(hetero)sexual divisions that identify the structures of difference on which the
canon is based—woman as Other, sex, lack, metaphor and so on. Nochlin was
the one who pointed to the canon, and her notion that women had been
excluded from artistic careers by being denied academic education is signifi-
cant. In this chapter we regard Nochlin’s text as the important point of depar-
ture for an extensive research area in Art History, and also as a background for
our studies regarding women’s and feminist comics. Mira Falardeau’s question,
“Why are there so few Women cartoonists?” (2020, p. 22), is very similar to
Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”. The title of
Robbins book from 2001, The Great Women Cartoonists, also echoes the out-
cry from Nochlin in 1971. However, we have chosen to structure this chapter
on Pollock’s three positions further outlined below, since Pollock takes the
question further into a broader field of intersecting power structures. Her three
step-model is also pedagogically elucidating.
In 1999 Pollock published the book Differencing the Canon. Feminist Desire
and the Writing of Art Histories. Here she presented the three positions for
feminism’s encounter with the canon after the Women’s Movement of the early
1970s. These positions can be understood as feminist strategies for dealing
with problems caused by the existence of a patriarchal canon. The first position
concerns the situation when “[f]eminism encounters the canon as a structure
for exclusion” (Pollock 1999, p. 23). The strategy here was to fill the gaps in
historiography by including women artists. Evidence of women’s uninter-
rupted activities in the arts was regarded as crucial in exposing the canon’s
selectivity and gender bias. However, Pollock claimed that it was not enough
to, like Nochlin suggested, add the women, without deconstructing the dis-
course of Art History and its gender-based hierarchy. This leads to a second
position, presented as: “Feminism encounters the canon as a structure of sub-
ordination and domination which marginalises and relativises all women
according to their place in the contradictory structuration of power – race,
gender, class and sexuality” (Pollock 1999, p. 24). The strategy here could be
to valorize low status practices and procedures, especially practised by or associ-
ated with women, such as art made with textiles and ceramics. Acting from a
marginalized position, interrupting Art History with a political voice challeng-
ing hierarchies of value was regarded as having a subversive force. However,
there is still the risk of entrapment in a binary value system in which women are
regarded as the Other to the universal sign Man (Pollock 1999, p. 25). The
third position was presented as when “[f]eminism encounters the canon as a
discursive strategy in the production and reproduction of sexual difference and
its complex figurations with gender and related modes of power” (Pollock
1999, p. 26). The strategy proposed to overcome this inequality is to decon-
struct discursive formations of Art History and to produce radically new sources
of knowledge regarding the seemingly “ungendered” domain of art and Art
History.
Pollock’s First Position on Comics

When we, the authors of this chapter, were engaged in the research for
“Women’s Liberation. Swedish Feminist Comics and Cartoons from the 1970s
and 1980s”, published in European Comic Art in 2019, we discovered a gap in
knowledge regarding feminist comics from the 1970s. Therefore, we decided
to conduct a systematic search through feminist journals from the 1970s and
1980s, knowing that their editors had been radical in many ways, and possibly
in their attitudes towards comics. We started with Kvinnobulletinen [Women’s
bulletin], published by the left-wing feminist organization Grupp 8 [Group 8],
between 1971 and 1996 and Vi Mänskor [We humans], the journal of the
Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund [Swedish Women’s Left Federation] which
was published under different names from 1947 to 2011. We searched these
journals systematically in the Women Studies Collection at Gothenburg
University Library. In the very first number of Kvinnobulletinen, we found a
comic by Anne Lidén, “Lena i livet” [Lena’s life], a full-page, four-strip, black-
and-white comic in 12 panels (Fig. 1). The comic narrates the story of a young
woman looking for a job, who discovers that all women’s jobs have worse pay
than men’s jobs.
Fig. 1 © Anne Lidén, “Lena i livet” [Lena’s life], Kvinnobulletinen 1 (1971), p. 10

There were comics in many of the other issues, too, with 14 comics and 3
single-panel cartoons discovered in the issues published between 1971 and
1979. Among others, we discovered Helga Henschen’s cartoon in which she
expressed her wish for “the new human” instead of “the new woman”
(Kvinnobulletinen 3–4 1973), and Ann Marie Langemar’s comic about “the
women’s house” (Kvinnobulletinen 1 1979). “Katja” published comics about
lesbian issues (“Lisa är rådvill”, [Lisa is perplexed], Kvinnobulletinen 2 and 3
1977). We are unable to identify this artist since she published anonymously,
this being an era when it could be problematic to be regarded as promoting
homosexual relations and when lesbianism was still considered a mental disor-
der in Sweden (until 1979).5
In the journal Vi Mänskor, there was a comic by Anne Lidén about the 8th
of March and the history of International Women’s Day in number 1, 1973,
but otherwise there were hardly any comics at all in this journal during the
1970s. In the 1980s a few more comic strips were published in this magazine,
but the big flood came with the Fnitter anthologies (see below). In total this
led to an increase in the media we studied, even if in the 1980s, the number of
feminist comics in Kvinnobulletinen slightly decreased to 12 comics and some
cartoons in the decade 1980–1989. However, they displayed a great variety of
themes and styles. Among the themes explored were heterosexual and lesbian
love (signed by Marie Falksten and Margareta Stål), elderly women’s love,
body issues, and problems and joys in the workplace. We found 45 feminist
comics and 90 cartoons in the Fnitter [Giggle] anthologies from the 1980s
(Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2019). They were the results of a campaign
started at the daily social democratic newspaper Aftonbladet in 1980, encour-
aging women from all over Sweden to contribute feminist and humorous
material to the editorial board of the women’s supplement. The underlying
ambition was to use humour and satire, including irony, to contest the prevail-
ing attitude that women had no sense of humour, while challenging the patri-
archy. Essays, comics and cartoons were first published in the newspaper, and
later collected in three anthologies. These anthologies contained comics and
cartoons by, among others, Christina Alvner, Susanne Fredelius, Marie Falksten
and Margareta Stål, Kersti Frid, Gunna Grähs, Helga Henschen, Arja Kajermo,
Lilian Lindblad-Domec, Maria Lindhgren, Eva Lindström, Katarina Ribrant,
Aja Thorén, Ingrid af Sandeberg and Cecilia Torudd. There were also quite a
few anonymous comics and cartoons (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2019).
Alvner, Grähs and Torudd continued after the 1980s to publish comics rather
frequently and have been included in more recent comics research (Nilsson
2005, Arnerud Mejhammar 2020).
We expected to find feminist comics in Puss [Kiss], a politically radical,
underground journal. Puss, published from 1968 to 1974, was part of the stu-
dent protest movement of 1968. The editor Lars Hillersberg was a student at
the Academy of Art in Stockholm, as were several of the co-editors.6 There
were comics in most of the issues, and in some of them several, but many of
these were anonymous. Therefore, we were initially unaware that the artist
Karin Frostenson was responsible for approximately 50 images, cartoons and

comic strips. None of her contributions were signed, and several of her images
have mistakenly been attributed to her husband at the time, Lars Hillersberg
(Gerdin 2020, p. 22). Both Frostenson and Hillersberg studied at the Academy
of Art in Stockholm and worked as artists for many years. Hillersberg has
received far more attention than Frostenson and has gained the reputation of
being a politically and stylistically controversial artist. He seems to fulfil the
prerequisites for an ideal bohemian modernist artist according to Parker and
Pollock and is included in the latest comprehensive Swedish Art History book
(Johannesson 2007, p. 249), while Frostenson is not. It wasn’t until we read
the catalogue published to accompany Frostenson’s solo exhibition at Thielska
galleriet in Stockholm in 2020, a retrospective organized around her art prac-
tice, that we learned of her extensive but anonymous engagement with the Puss
journal (Gerdin 2020, p. 22). Nochlin’s theory about women artists’ exclusion
from the canon of art history is applicable here, since we find it possible and
necessary to add Karin Frostenson to the canon of comics and feminist comics,
but Pollock’s first position is also applicable, since Frostenson’s exclusion does
not depend on any lack of education, but rather patriarchal structures that
made possible her oppression and exclusion (Parker and Pollock 1981, p. 49).
The fact that she didn’t sign her comics, and didn’t get the same public atten-
tion as her husband, the rebel, anti-social and bohemian editor, seems to have
been at least one of the reasons for her exclusion.
As researchers in a related study, we clearly placed ourselves in Pollock’s first
position, in which “[f]eminism encounters the canon as a structure for exclu-
sion” (Pollock 1999, p. 23). We applied a strategy that aimed at filling gaps in
history by including women artists previously ignored. By turning to politically
radical and feminist journals such as Kvinnobulletinen and Vi Mänskor and to
the feminist Fnitter anthologies, we directed our work to sources not previ-
ously consulted for the study of comics. We found women artists and their
feminist comics which had not been discussed previously in the context of
comics research.
Pollock’s Second Position on Comics

Pollock’s second position of feminism’s encounters with the canon considers it
to be “a structure of subordination and domination which marginalises and
relativises all women according to their place in the contradictory structuration
of power – race, gender, class and sexuality” (Pollock 1999, p. 24). One reason
for marginalization of women art and artists that she points to is connection to
materials and techniques that have been used in domestic contexts, such as
weaving, embroidering and ceramics, media that in Western society have been
regarded as crafts rather than art since medieval times. Lately such media have
been elaborated by different kinds of artists in order to question exclusion and
devaluation. The idea is that acting from a marginalized position, the interrup-
tion of Art History by a political voice challenging hierarchies of value can be
a subversive force. Our strategy has been to focus on a low status practice asso-
ciated with women, embroidery, which has been taken up by feminist comics
artists in Sweden.
In 1984 Rozsika Parker published the book The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery
and the Making of the Feminine. It has been reprinted many times, which points
to its relevance, and in 2010 it was revised and republished, with an emphasis
in the introduction on how embroidery can be used to challenge norms.
According to Parker, the art of embroidery has functioned as a means of edu-
cating women into the feminine ideal, with coercion in connection with mar-
riage and the labelling of household textiles, while conversely providing a
weapon of resistance against the constraints of femininity (Parker 2019, p. xix).
It also functions as a source of pride and socialization through sewing circles
(Parker 2019, pp. xv–xvi). In the 1970s Swedish feminist movement, embroi-
dery was seen by some as a form of oppression to be opposed, while others
began using it in free and creative ways to express feminist political messages
(Waldén 1988, pp. 24–34; Eriksson 2003, p. 63). The situation was the same
in the UK and other Western countries, where the craft was brought out from
female domesticity into the public domain, carrying freedom, joy and feminist
ideas, strengthened by cooperative work for the betterment of sociopolitical
conditions (Parker 2019, xi–xxi).
A development of this phenomenon is described by the concept “craftiv-
ism”. This term was launched in 2003 by the crafter and writer Betsy Greer in
order to join the spheres of craft and activism (Greer 2014, p. 8). Craft can be
described as “an occupation or trade requiring manual dexterity or artistic
skill” (Merriam Webster n.d.-a).7 Examples of crafts are pottery, carpentry and
sewing. “Activism” may be defined as “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes
direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a
controversial issue” (Merriam Webster n.d.-b). When these are merged, accord-
ing to Greer, “the very essence of craftivism lies in creating something that gets
people to ask questions […] to join a conversation about the social and political
intent of the creations” (Greer 2014, p. 8). When used with a feminist perspec-
tive, craftivism can be defined, according to Sandra Markus as “the use of craft
to challenge patriarchal hegemony, advocate for political and social rights, and
promote the recognition of women’s traditional art forms” (2019, p. 2).
Together with twelve British women, Greer formulated a craftivism manifesto,
accessible on the web. It states that you can use craft, such as sewing, as a voice,
to raise consciousness and create a better world, stitch by stitch, and share ideas
with others, celebrating traditional skills in new ways. The manifesto also states
that craftivism is about creating wider conversations about uncomfortable
issues, and that one can make a difference by crafting individually or collec-
tively, while benefiting from the fellowship of other crafters (Greer n.d.).
In Sweden during recent years increasing numbers of comics artists have
made use of embroidery. In 2020 we wrote the article “Comics craftivism:
embroidery in contemporary Swedish feminist comics” about the work of
these artists for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics which we labelled
comics craftivism. We saw their comics as conscious ways to challenge stereo-

typical preconceptions about art and feminism as well as enjoy the opportunity
to indulge in developing at the same time embroidery technique and comics
making. The examples we wrote about in the article can be seen as what Pollock
called “subversive opposition to a structure of subordination and domination,
which had marginalised and relativised women according to their place in the
contradictory structuration of power” (Pollock 1999, p. 24). The subversive
force that emanated from the historically marginalized position of embroidery
was apparently still robust, judging from the frequent use of traditional embroi-
dering techniques. The cross-stitch, the stem-stitch and the chain-stitch, as
well as conventional patterns associated with family relationships, are now used
in freer ways resulting in ironic and other critical effects.
The first comics artist using embroidery that we encountered was Åsa
Grennvall, who has changed her name to Åsa Schagerström in connection to
publishing her last book where she denounced her genealogical background.
The change of name can be seen as a symbol of her denying the family origin
and her connection especially to her mother. She has been thematizing the
issue of violence in close relations from a feminist perspective since her comics
album debut Det känns som hundra år [It feels like a hundred years] in 1999.
She started to include embroidery in 2003 with reproductions of embroidered
images on covers, such as the cross-stitched portrayal of a couple for her fourth
album, Det är inte värst sådär i början [The beginning is not the worst]. In 2007
she crafted the front cover for her book Svinet [The swine] in stem-stitch and
chain-stitch. In 2019, after three more comics books, two of which have repro-
ductions of embroidered images on the covers, Schagerström published
Urmodern [The original mother], a book consisting of 78 pages with reproduc-
tions of embroideries. Here the entire story is told in embroidered images,
some of them combined with applications. Even the verbal text is embroidered.
Lotta Sjöberg is another artist who makes embroidered comics and cartoons
on the theme of heterosexual family life in private homes, with ironic humour
and feminist critiques. She has published the albums Family Living (2011) and
Det kan alltid bli värre [It can always get worse] (2014). The latter includes
embroidered comics. Sjöberg has produced a large number of embroidered
comics which are posted on Instagram, not leastwise with images of the
Coronavirus during the pandemic period. In her second album she has drawn
a sequential comics story about a group of crafters. The narrator expresses the
joy and power experienced by the women as they craft and chat together, but
the overall rhetorical strategy is ironic, political and humorous, as signalled by
the title: “It can always get worse.” (Det kan alltid bli värre 2014, pp. 37–39).
Lisa Ewald, Sara Granér and Marie Tillman have also published embroi-
dered comics and cartoons in comics albums and on Instagram, often expressed
with irony and humour. Increasingly in recent years, Sara Granér has also used
ceramics as a form of expression. The anthropomorphic teddy bears that popu-
late her comics and cartoons appear now as ceramic figures. Both Granér and
Schagerström have recently held exhibitions at art galleries in Sweden where
they show and sell their comic works (images, embroideries and ceramics),
placing them in the field of art as well as comics (Nordenstam and Wallin
Wictorin 2021a).
As noted by Pollock herself, one risks getting trapped in a binary value sys-
tem with women as the Other to the universal Man when applying her second
position in the arts (Pollock 1999, p. 25). The risk is present when studying the
emerging and expanding category of comics as well. However today, more
than 50 years after the beginning of the second wave of the feminist move-
ment, both men and women make embroideries (Parker 2019). Artists schooled
in the fine arts, such as Louise Bourgeois, Tracy Emin and the Swedish artist
Brita Marakatt Labba, have contributed to raising the status of the technique.
Marakatt Labba’s embroidered works that focus the oppressed Sami people in
the north of Sweden, Finland and Norway received abundant attention at
Documenta 2017. Embroidery has become trendy among a growing number
of young crafters with various backgrounds and agendas (Arnqvist Engström
2014). The problematic relationship between women and the craft, described
and analysed by Parker, has changed to a freer one, based on voluntary activi-
ties and with other topics and styles than previously displayed. Traditional tech-
niques are used freely, now combining manual crafting also with digital
technology. Embroidery traditions provide a bank of techniques, patterns and
styles, but are now used creatively via methods similar to sampling. Through
the use of scanning, photographing and uploading on the internet and social
media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, embroidered comics and
cartoons have become important art expressions in the public sphere. Thus,
embroideries now appear in a contemporary context, created by a generation
that has grown up with punk and a do-it-yourself attitude (Greer n.d.).
Pollock’s Third Position on Comics

Pollock’s third position refers to the situation in which “feminism encounters
the canon as a discursive strategy in the production and reproduction of sexual
difference and its complex figurations with gender and related modes of power”
(Pollock 1999, pp. 26–27). The third position is no longer an internal matter
within the discipline. It implies a shift from Art History into the broader
Women’s Movement, which covers several fields of discourse and institutional
bases. To create new knowledge, researchers need to turn their attention to
new and wider perspectives (Pollock 1999, pp. 26–27). In our research on
feminist comics, we work closely together, an art historian and a literary scholar.
We jointly formulate research questions and discuss theoretical perspectives
and methods from our separate disciplines, and, rather than alternating, we
interweave the writing of our articles. We experience this as a productive way
of collaborating, and quite suitable since comics are characterized by an inter-
medial structure, based on words and images, verbal and visual narration.
Gender studies and cultural sociological perspectives are examples of further
areas of knowledge that we find important to include in our work. Some
researchers argue that the establishment of an independent Comics Studies

discipline would facilitate research in the field (Strömberg 2016, p. 134). We,
however, would rather emphasize the positive aspects of interdisciplinary stud-
ies utilizing methods gathered from several disciplines. Cooperation can also
be seen as a feminist strategy and a way of challenging the boundaries between
the disciplines.
In relation to Pollock’s third position, we will discuss two more of our arti-
cles. The first is “The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics, 2006–2014”,
published in the anthology Visions of the Future in Comics. International
Perspectives, edited by Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Adnan Mahmutovic and Frank
Bramlett (2017). In this text we analysed the future as a theme in Swedish
contemporary comics by arguing that “the Swedish comics artists elaborating
on future conditions express existential confusion or/and strong critique
against the neoliberal ideology” (Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017,
p. 213). The material for this analysis involved comics by three men and two
women artists: Henri Gylander, Fabian Göransson, Joakim Pirinen, Lotta
Sjöberg and Liv Strömquist, all well-known and important comics artists in
Sweden. As theoretical perspectives we included ideas and concepts formulated
by Zygmunt Bauman and Chantal Mouffe. Bauman’s thoughts on how politi-
cally governed institutions have given away previously common tasks to politi-
cally uncontrollable global markets and withdrawn from functions they
previously performed (Bauman 2004) were central to our study, as was his
discussion concerning the uncertain feeling of seeking or choosing individual
identity in the postmodern condition he called liquid modernity (2007). This
is also in line with Pollock’s way of working. In 2007 she emphasized the
importance of a transdisciplinary encounter between a sociology of liquid
modernity, a sociology of the information society and artistic practice with a
consistent and profound social engagement and analysis. This was to be done
in order to take up the challenge of thinking with concepts offered by such a
cultural sociology to those of us in fields divided from mutual understanding
by the current maps of knowledge: sociology, informatics, aesthetics, cultural
analysis (Pollock 2007, p. 112). We also found Chantal Mouffe’s theories in
On the Political (2005) salient, where she defines the political as “the dimen-
sion of antagonism I take to be ‘constitutive of human societies’” (Mouffe
2005, p. 8). Mouffe advocates the potential of critical art, the different ways in
which artistic practices can contribute to questioning the dominant hegemony
(Mouffe 2007). In several of the feminist comics, we found the idea of discern-
ing and pointing to conflicting interests as distinct, for example, in Liv
Strömqvist’s comic about the climate crisis and Lotta Sjöberg’s comic about
“individual choice” (Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017).
A common trait among the comics we analysed and interpreted was sharp
critique of the dismantling of the welfare system performed by the bourgeois
Swedish government between 2006 and 2014. Many of the reforms were seen
as threatening to women, men, children and the elderly as well. We analysed
how this critique was visualized and narrated by studying formal elements such
as line, form, colour, composition, the viewer’s perspective, setting, characters

and events, verbal narration, dialogue and image conventions in relation to
their context. One object of study was a story by Lotta Sjöberg, published in
the comics journal Galago (1 2013, p. 61) about shifting possibilities when
“choosing” one’s future life (Fig. 2).
On top of the page there is an introduction (translated from Swedish):
“Since the solidarity was replaced by individual choices you must make a suc-
cessful choice already from the start” (our transl. in Wallin Wictorin and
Nordenstam 2017, p. 223). Then the story is broken down into two female
torsos constituting the “panels”. The setting is two wombs with a baby in each.
The babies “speak” about the future in one balloon each, having already cho-
sen their life paths. Their choices are connected to their mothers’ situations and
Fig. 2 © Lotta Sjöberg, “Valfrihet” [Individual choice], Galago 1 2013, p. 61

to their own respective genders, class and ethnic origins. The first baby, a male,
says “Hey! I thought like this! I choose a dong to get the best possible future
salary. 100% Swedish of course, and well-off parents on the sunny side, with
documented experience of tax evasion” (our transl. in Wallin Wictorin and
Nordenstam 2017, p. 222). Since he is male, white and upper-class (evidenced
by the trademark of his mother’s underwear), he will become rich, have a nice
job and so on. The second baby says: “How funny! I choose exactly the oppo-
site: a vagina and low salary. Third generation immigrant, Single mother with-
out social security, in a marginalized suburb, well, macaroni!” (our transl. in
Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017, p. 223). Since she is female and of
immigrant descent, she will not gain a rich future, like the baby boy. The two
babies are intended to be viewed sequentially, and in opposition. The horizon-
tal perspective on eye level gives the reader an impression of being on the same
level as the babies and of taking part in the discussion. Sjöberg illustrates here
how an intersection of structural factors forecasts the future for individuals. She
uses irony as a rhetorical device, but the verbal remark is serious: “the solidarity
has been replaced by individual choices” (our transl. in Wallin Wictorin and
Nordenstam 2017, p. 223). With Mouffe’s theory on the political in mind, we
concluded that Sjöberg displays conflicting alternatives as problems that need
to be handled politically (Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017).
Another case is the four-page piece by Henri Gylander published in 2012,
“Jag drömmer om en ålderdom…” [“I dream of an old age…”]. The theme of
the story is the selling out of elderly homes, public welfare institutions, and the
setting is contemporary Sweden. This is an important issue from a feminist
perspective, since taking care of elderly people traditionally has been an
unequally distributed workload. The comic is designed like an old black-and-
white photograph album with oval images. This is a framing device that relates
to an image convention in which past events in someone’s life are nostalgically
recalled. This album, however, tells a story about the future. The protagonist
is a man who dreams about his coming old age. The setting is a home for the
elderly. The events in the images here have not taken place but are rather visu-
alizations of the man’s fears regarding his future. Verbally, in captions, the story
points forward to a person’s declining years with hopes and dreams of good
health care and companionship, but the images express anticipated setbacks
owing to political conditions, thus creating a strong ironic effect. Gylander is
issuing a warning for that which Bauman has described as the selling out of the
welfare state with all services contracted out, left for private initiatives, a play-
ground for capricious and unpredictable market forces (Bauman 2004).
Another article we published that can be related to Pollock’s third position
is “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi – politisk satir i svenska feministiska
serier”, [“Right wing ideology as popular dance music. Political satire in
Swedish feminist comics.”] published in a Swedish anthology about comics, De
tecknade seriernas språk [The language of Comics], edited by David Gedin
(2017). In this study we analysed how political satire was visually and verbally
narrated in Swedish feminist comics from 2006 to 2014. Swedish feminist
comics artists used a wide variety of drawing styles, using satire and humour in
their reactions to the political implications of the period. The use of humour as
a weapon is a common strategy in Swedish feminist journal texts (Nordenstam
2014) and in feminist activism (Rosenberg 2012). As mentioned above, this
conforms with results from Streeten’s and Falardeau’s research on feminist
comics in English and French speaking parts of the world.
When working with the aforementioned article, we became aware of Lotta
Sjöberg’s use of embroidery. But at the time we concentrated on other tech-
niques such as the collage used by, among others, Sara Granér and Nanna
Johansson, in a way reminiscent of Hannah Höch and Martha Rosler. During
this period, satire was extensively employed by these comics artists, especially
against bourgeois politicians, including the male prime minister, Fredrik
Reinfeldt, of the conservative party (Moderaterna). One example of Granér’s
work is a collage with Reinfeldt in a hospital bed, his head realistically photo-
graphed in colour, looking up at the nurses around him. Typically for Granér,
the nurses are drawn as anthropomorphic yellow teddy bears, here wearing
little white nurses’ hats with red crosses. Ironically, Reinfeldt, who frequently
argued for the privatization of hospitals, appears rather frightened, bedded
down as he is in linens displaying the logo of the county council, responsible
for national health care in Sweden.
Another trend in the feminist comics of the era was the use of references to
popular culture such as TV series and popular music. One frequent referent
was the TV-series Sex and the City (1998–2004), with the four characters
Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha and their luxury lives on Manhattan.
In one image they appear Photoshopped as the four leaders of Sweden’s bour-
geois political parties. From left to right, wearing the red and black dresses of
the Sex and the City women, they are Annie Lööf, Jan Björklund, Fredrik
Reinfeldt and Göran Hägglund. The image signals shallowness, false gaiety and
forced celebration. Nanna Johansson used the same four politicians in another
of her collages, but as members of a fatuous and fictional popular dance music
band with the typically wacky name “Jan-Göranz”, here referring to the politi-
cians as populists. The ironic title “Jan-Göranz”, with the equally ironic sub-
title “Högerideologi som dansbandsmelodi” [“Right wing ideology as popular
dance music”], appears in the comic album Hur man botar en feminist [How
to cure a feminist] (2013), which of course is yet another highly ironic title.
Why cure a feminist?
Conclusion
As we have shown in this chapter, women artists have been excluded from the
canon in the comics field, as well as in the field of fine art, and we have been
motivated to search in other printed media than mainstream comics albums
and magazines in order to fill in the gaps, and also question the art-historical
discourse. Clearly, Nochlin’s question and Pollock’s first position are still rele-
vant, and it was necessary for us to deconstruct, for example, the history of the
Swedish underground magazine Puss and its leaders, to discover the extensive
work by Karin Frostenson. However, Pollock’s conclusions might not be suf-
ficient regarding comics, since it also seems to be a matter of laughter and
humour. As Falardeau suggests, women have not been supposed to laugh or
engage in humorous speech or cartooning. Streeten also emphasizes the aspect
of humour. And Swedish feminist cartoonists and comics artists and authors in
the 1980s found it necessary to make a statement against the patriarchal notion
that “women do not have any sense of humour” and met it by assembling texts
including comics and cartoons in the Fnitter anthologies. Comics and cartoons
are part of popular culture, which does not necessarily include the same expec-
tations on women as the fine art sector, where humour is not a required com-
ponent, but where there are other obstacles impeding women’s recognition.
We have also found it productive to look for comics artists using techniques
other than drawing, and materials, other than paper and ink, in order to achieve
a richer and more complete understanding of the production of comics, bear-
ing in mind that this phenomenon is apparently increasingly common and
trendy among Swedish feminist artists. Hence Pollock’s second position is also
relevant.
Today contemporary feminist comics artists in Sweden attract attention in
the media; their works are exhibited in art galleries and included in comics
research. Their inclusion in the contemporary written history of comics indi-
cates their possible entry into the canon. Researchers now have the opportu-
nity to investigate how feminist issues are treated in comics, as we have done
in, for example, the article “The Future in Swedish Avant-Garde Comics,
2006–2014” (Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam 2017). They can also study the
use and visualization of satire in feminist comics, as in “Högerideologi som
dansbandsmelodi” (2017), or examine other interesting issues in relation to
feminist comics. When doing this, Pollock’s third position becomes relevant,
since, as she suggests, we need to traverse several fields of discourse and insti-
tutional bases. To generate new knowledge, we need to include theory from
several disciplines and apply new and wider perspectives.8 We have found it
productive to use a multidisciplinary perspective on comics, combining theo-
ries and methods used in the social sciences with those applied in art history
and literary studies in order to find a deeper and broader understanding of
feminist comics in specific periods and the Swedish contexts. The feminist
method of working together has been helpful here, where multidisciplinary
perspectives have been needed.
We still need to utilize basic art-historical methods when describing and
analysing various types of comics. Considerations of the formal elements such
as line, form, colour, composition and style are important, as well as of such
aspects as image conventions and the viewer’s perspective. But in addition, we
might well need special terms for describing comics in other techniques such as
embroidery, ceramics and digital comics. Furthermore, we also need some kind
of contextual method for interpreting the meanings of the images and the sto-
ries, perhaps related to iconologically or semiotically inspired methods, while
including practices from Literary Studies to handle verbal narration and nar-
ratological element, rhetorical style figures, themes and motifs, also in relation
to feminism and intersectional perspectives.
A feminist movement in Comics Studies would go on searching for excluded
feminist comics artists in the history and in the contemporary practice of com-
ics, because there is still much to do all over the world. It is also important to
put focus on other artists than white, middle-class comic artists who seems to
get most attention, at least in the West. In Sweden, there is a rising number of
feminist comics artists with migrant backgrounds, and their voices need to be
discerned, analysed and paid attention to. It is also necessary to ask questions
about politics and power in the comics market. A dislocation of power is needed
in the field of Comics Studies too, and a wider variety of issues that do exist in
comics needs to be raised, such as the conditions of the precariat, children and
the elderly. A feminist movement in Comics Studies needs to be based on a
multidisciplinary approach, where Art History and Visual Studies is one impor-
tant field among others.
Acknowledgement This chapter is funded by the research project “A Multidisciplinary

Study of Feminist Comic Art” (2018–2021), Foundation for Baltic and East European
Studies.
Notes
1. For further discussion of the role of Trina Robbins in the field of women’s comics
and comix, as artist, editor, and scholar, Cf. Olsza Chapter “Towards Feminist
Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study of Women’s Comix in the
1970s in the U.S.”
2. In English: Classon Frangos 2020, Lindberg 2016, Nordenstam and Wallin
Wictorin 2017, 2019, 2021a and 2021b.
3. One early example is Ingrid Jalakas who in 1986 published the chapter “Tecknade
tjejer – och tecknande” [Drawn girls and drawing] in Boken om serier [The book
about comics], eds. Elisabet Haglund and Johan Andreasson. Johanneshov:
Hammarström & Åberg.
4. For further discussion of the questioning of the canon by feminist art historians
Cf. Olsza chapter “Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and
the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the U.S.”, and Yu-Kiener chapter
“The Lives of the Artists”.
5. In 1979 the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare decided to stop
regarding homosexuality as a mental disease (https://www.rfsl.se/om-oss/
historia/).
6. Other editors were Åke Holmqvist, Carl-Johan De Geer, Karl-Erik Liljeros, Ulf
Rahmberg, and Lena Svedberg.
7. It is also interesting to compare with Glenn Adamson’s view on craft, which
claims that craft can refer to a process or an activity rather than a discipline. He
regards craft as positioned within modern production – and increasingly within
today’s post-disciplinary practice. For Adamson, the conventional narrative of
craft emerged during the Industrial Revolution and the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Adamson, Glenn. 2013. The Invention of Craft, Berg, Oxford.
8. For further discussion of interdisciplinarity and its importance for Comics Studies
Cf. Sommerland Chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined
Gravity in Sport Manga”, and Roan Chapter “What Is an Image? Art History,
Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies”.
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Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art
History and the Study of Women’s Comix
in the 1970s in the United States
Małgorzata Olsza
Abstract This chapter examines the applicability of feminist art criticism for
Comics Studies. This question is discussed in the historical timeframe of the
1970s with a focus on women’s underground comix in the United States,
which developed in response to second-wave feminism (e.g. It Ain’t Me Babe
(1970), Wimmen’s Comix #1 (1972) and Tits & Clits #1 (1972)). The meth-
odological framework comprises both historical and contemporary art criticism
written from and in dialogue with the theoretical perspective of second-wave
feminism. Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker and Lucy Lippard
first addressed such issues as the objectification of women in art, the existence
of the essentially male canon, systematic discrimination against women in art
institutions and even the implication that there exist distinct male/female tech-
niques, genres and styles. Feminist art criticism in the context of women’s
comix in the United States in the 1970s is discussed in two perspectives: the
comics canon and the canon of feminist “high” art. Both perspectives allow
comics and art historians and scholars to discuss systematic discrimination in
the comics and comix world and locate women’s comix in the history of femi-
nist art.
M. Olsza (*)
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
e-mail: malgorzata.olsza@amu.edu.pl

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_10
186 M. OLSZA
Keywords Comics Studies • Feminist criticism • Women’s comix •

Women’s comics • Feminist art • Canon
In the present chapter, I examine the applicability of feminist art criticism for
Comics Studies. Specifically, I discuss this question in the historical timeframe
of the 1970s, focusing on women’s comix in the United States, which devel-
oped in response to second-wave feminism, including titles such as It Ain’t Me
Babe (Robbins et al. 1970), Wimmen’s Comix #1 (Moodian et al. 1972) and
Tits & Clits #1 (Chevli and Sutton 1972). The methodological framework
comprises art-historical writing and criticism (Nochlin 1973 [1971]; Lippard
1976; Pollock and Parker 1981; Nochlin 1988; Pollock 1988; Pollock 1999)
written from and in dialogue with the perspective of second-wave feminism.
Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker and Lucy Lippard first
addressed such issues as the objectification of women in art, the existence of
male canons, systematic discrimination against women in art institutions and
even the implication that there exist male/female techniques, genres and styles.
The responses of feminist art historians to the “canon question” varied—
understandably so, considering that feminism/s is/are not a methodology but
a strategic perspective (see Horne and Tobine 2017, pp. 32–4)—ranging across
the need for the canon to be critically re-examined, extended, reformulated
and “re-desired.”1 I will read feminist art histories in the context of women’s
comix in the United States in the 1970s, focusing on two main issues: the ques-
tion of the comics canon and the canon of feminist “high” art. Both approaches
allow comics scholars and art historians to discuss systematic discrimination in
the comics and comix world and further locate women’s comix in the history
of feminist art, especially as regards shared artistic practices and the “politics of
representation” employed in feminist comix and feminist “high” art, since
“[a]t its most provocative and constructive, feminism questions all the precepts
of art” (Lippard 1980, p. 362).
The organization of the chapter follows the line of argument presented
above. Feminist art criticism is discussed first. It provides a critical and method-
ological framework for the discussion of the canon in the two contexts out-
lined. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate that feminist art criticism can inform
the study of comics and, in a critical move “from practical strategies to strategic
practices” (Pollock and Parker 1981, p. 3), help re-examine the history of com-
ics, comix and feminist art in the United States.
Challenging the Canon: Feminist Art History

in the 1970s
While the very question of the canon may seem outdated in twenty-first-
century Art History, it has nevertheless defined, framed and conditioned the
functioning of the art world for centuries, beginning in the sixteenth century,
TOWARDS FEMINIST COMICS STUDIES: FEMINIST ART HISTORY… 187
when the “father” of the modern Art History Giorgio Vasari “distinguish[ed]
the better from the good, and the best from the better” (2007, p. 58) in Lives
of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.2 “Old masters” and
“great artists,” as concepts, were legitimized and promoted by the canon, as
were the notions of beauty, taste and aesthetic quality. It was in the 1970s, to
somewhat abruptly move forward in time and space, that the supposedly ahis-
torical, aesthetic and thus objective concept of the canon was questioned by
New Art History (Harris 2001, pp. 39–62), and feminist Art History in par-
ticular. In addition to new periodicals, including The Feminist Art Journal
(1972–1977) and HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics
(1977–1983), Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why have there been no great
women artists?” and Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s 1981 book Old
Mistresses: Women, art and ideology chronologically and symbolically mark the
beginning and the end of the 1970s as the decade of revisionist feminist art
histories.
The question asked by Nochlin in the title of her now classic essay chal-
lenged the view and the construction of the canon as “natural” and “profes-
sional.” Nochlin openly stated that “the white Western male viewpoint,
unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, is proving to be
inadequate. (…) [T]he current uncritical acceptance of ‘what is’ as ‘natural’
may be intellectually fatal” (1973 [1971], p. 1). Apart from the very concept
of the canon, Nochlin also challenges the constructs associated with (and sup-
ported by) this notion, including “greatness” and “genius.” Eventually,
Nochlin points to the greatest misconception associated with art and its cre-
ation, namely, that
[t]he making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less

dependent upon, or free from, given temporally-defined conventions, schemata,
or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through
study, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation. (…) The
fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty inter-
nal spaces, but in our institutions and our education (…). (1973 [1971], pp. 5–6)
Women had been systematically excluded from the art education system
and, at best, could only be active in “the ‘minor’ and less highly regarded fields
of portraiture, genre, landscape, or still life” (Nochlin 1973 [1971], p. 25).
The question of the canon was in fact the question of institutions. One of the
goals of feminist art criticism in the 1970s was to expose and dismantle the
systematic processes of exclusion to which female artists had been subjected
(see Schapiro 1972). While she does not state it directly, and in fact does not
use the category of the canon in her text, Nochlin nevertheless concludes that
the solution is not to ignore the canon and the categories of “greatness” and
“genius,” but to reform the existing institutions (and by extension the lan-
guage of these institutions) (1973 [1971], p. 37). Nochlin expressed a similar
view in Women, Art and Power (1988). She argued that the systematic
188 M. OLSZA
discrimination against women in the art world was reflected in the canon of
Western art, but she did not “conceive of a feminist art history as a positive
approach to the field, a way of simply adding a token list of women painters and
sculptors to the canon” (Nochlin 1988, p. xii). The canon should not be sim-
ply expanded. The “institution” of the canon (including art education system,
the language of criticism and the language of art histories) should be reformed.
In 1976, in a collection of essays entitled From the Center, the art critic,
activist and curator Lucy Lippard also focused on the institutional problems,
which oftentimes prevent women from not only achieving “greatness” but also
pursuing a career in the arts in general. “The worst sources, not only of dis-
crimination, but of the tragic feelings of inferiority so common among women
artists,” Lippard writes, “are the art schools and college art departments (espe-
cially at women’s colleges), most of which have few or no female faculty”
(1976, p. 33).
As if summarizing and concluding the debate that had taken place in femi-
nist art histories of the 1970s, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker subjected
Art History as a discipline to critique in Old Mistresses: Women, art, and ideology
(1981). Like Nochlin, they distanced themselves from the essentialist under-
standing of women’s art and instead investigate the institutional problem:
We are not concerned to prove that women have been great artists or to provide
yet another indictment of art history’s neglect of women artists. Instead, we want
to know how, and more significantly, why women’s art has been misrepresented
and what this treatment of women in art reveals about the ideological basis of the
writing and teaching of art history. (Pollock and Parker 1981, p. xvii)
Pollock and Parker demonstrate how dominant ideologies had consistently

undermined the role played by women in the art world and the reception of
their works, including the concepts of “femininity,” “stylistic or formal innova-
tion [as] the exclusive standard of evaluation in art” and the distinction between
“arts” and “crafts” (Pollock and Parker 1981, pp. 6–23). As a result of institu-
tional and patriarchal obstacles and misreadings, the notion of “great (innova-
tive) art” is associated with masculinity, while women’s art is relegated to the
sphere of domestic crafts or imitative (i.e. unoriginal) art. Pollock and Parker
conclude that while “[w]omen’s practice in art has never been absolutely for-
bidden, discouraged or refused,” it was nevertheless reduced to “the means by
which masculinity gains and sustains its supremacy in the important sphere of
cultural production” (1981, p. 170). Constructed and safeguarded by domi-
nant patriarchal ideologies, the canon was exclusive by definition. Acting in
dialogue with mainstream Art History and its revisions, feminist art histories in
the 1970s sought to not only secure a place for women but, more importantly,
expose the mechanisms of discrimination.
Although this discussion was especially prominent in the 1970s, Pollock
further commented on the issues at hand in her later writings. In “Women, Art,
and Ideology: Questions for Feminist Art Historians” (1983), Pollock
discusses the role of institutions in Art History, emphasizing that the discipline
“omits and marginalizes” women, promoting the “exclusively male” concept
of the genius artist (1983, p. 40). She repeatedly warns against “unthreatening
and additive feminism” which incorporates some women into the canon, thus
allowing it to function without major transformations in its very structure. “A
central task for feminist art historians is, therefore,” Pollock argues, “to cri-
tique art history itself (…) as an institutionalized ideological practice which
contributes to the reproduction of the social system by its offered images and
interpretations of the world” (1983, p. 40). In Vision and Difference, Pollock
continues to question the “masculine paradigm” inherent to the concept of the
canon and the “patriarchal discourses of art history” (1988, p. 137) and sum-
marizes her position in Differencing the Canon, where she writes about the
canon as a structure of “exclusion,” “subordination,” “domination” and
“Western masculinity,” which demands “deconstructive” and productive “re-
reading” (1999, pp. 23–38).
The discussion of the feminist Art History in the 1970s and its both critical
and productive approach to the notion of the canon is meant to act as a starting
point for a discussion of women’s comix in the 1970s. Naturally, the goal of
such a pairing is not only to apply second-wave feminist art criticism to a body
of primary sources. While I will first discuss the relations between second-wave
feminism in the United States and comics, paying particular attention to the
place of women comix artists in the canon of comics and comix in the 1970s,
ultimately, I want to re-read the history of art and, in keeping with what
Nochlin, Lippard, Pollock and Parker encouraged feminist art historians to do,
ask whether it is possible to locate women’s comix in feminist Art History of
the 1970s. While comics and comix held low cultural value in the 1970s and
their position not just in Art History but also in feminist art histories was mar-
ginal, or non-existent, they were nevertheless women’s art—just like embroi-
dery, sewing or other “low” and “minor” art forms which feminist Art History
reclaimed (see Lippard 1980; Pollock and Parker 1981; Parker 1984; Nochlin
1988; Pollock 1999). As such, I read women’s comix in the 1970s in terms of
two complementary processes of “breaking out” and “breaking in(to)” differ-
ent canons.
“Breaking out”: The Comics and Comix Canon

and Women’s Comix in the 1970s
The 1970s were the time of the unprecedented development of women’s

comix in the United States and It Ain’t Me Babe (1970), All Girl Thrills
(1971), Wimmen’s Comix (1972–92), Tits & Clits Comix (1972–87), Come
Out Comix (1973), Abortion Eve (1973), Dynamite Damsels (1976), Wet Satin
#1 (1976), Twisted Sisters (1976–94), Dyke Shorts (1978) and Mama! Dramas!
(1978), to name just a few, are all complex products of the era. In this section,
I discuss women’s comix in a (new) art-historical perspective. The notion of
190 M. OLSZA
the canon, and its critique in feminist art histories, is the starting point for my
reflection on systematic discrimination against women in the comics and comix
world. To further problematize these questions, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s
field theory (1996), since the sociological approach, and the sociological study
of institutions and academic Art History, further informs feminist Art History
as a “revisionist” practice.3 Indeed, I propose to see women’s comix as a player,
or an actor, in the power field of comics production in the 1970s in the United
States. The other two key actors are the mainstream comics scene and men’s
underground comix scene. I discuss them briefly to contextualize the develop-
ment of women’s comix in the 1970s and then analyse selected comix.
The first actor in the power field of comics and comix in the 1970s was the
mainstream comics scene. While the focus of this chapter is on women’s comix,
any avant-garde or alternative scene is by definition a “reaction” to and an
“escape” from dominant trends (Poggioli 1981, p. 64), which have not only
sanctioned but also monopolized the relations in the field. While, to paraphrase
Nochlin, the question “Why have there been no great women comics artists?”
would be inaccurate (see Robbins 1993, 2001, 2013), the institutional barriers
described by feminist art historians also applied to comics production. The
male-oriented, at best, and openly sexist, at worst, nature of mainstream com-
ics has been criticized by many comics historians and critics (see Robbins 1999;
Wolk 2007; Chute 2010; Sabin 1996). To paraphrase Pollock, “like woman in
a phallocentric culture, feminism is already posited as the difference, that is, as
something other, and outside” the world of comics (1999, p. 8), and women
artists have often functioned on the margins of the mainstream comics market
as inkers and colourists (Robbins 2013, p. 110). As Wolk observes, even as late
as in 1996, the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit featured only men
(2007, p. 71), and the cult of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, to
name just a few mainstream artists, may be read as the comics equivalent of the
celebration of “male genius” in Art History. Respectively, in terms of content,
mainstream comics perpetuated gender stereotypes (Robbins 1999, pp. 47–78)
and sexualized superheroines (see Grunzke 2019, pp. 23–44). It was only in
the 1970s, concurrently with the rise of second-wave feminism, that main-
stream superheroines became more independent and popular (see Robbins
1996; Robinson 2004; Grunzke 2019, pp. 45–64; Hanley 2018, pp. 221–50).4
The second actor in the power field of comics and comix in the 1970s was
the underground comix scene, which developed concurrently with the coun-
terculture and the civil rights movement in the United States (Hatfield 2009,
p. 18), corresponding to Bourdieu’s model of challenging “the internal hierar-
chy” in the “field of power” (1996, p. 252). Initially, this scene was animated
mostly by men. Gilbert Shelton, Jack Jackson and Frank Stack published first
underground comics in 1963 (Robbins 1999, p. 83). In 1968, Robert Crumb
published the first comix in his successful Zap series (Gabilliet 2010, p. 65) and
other male artists, including Denis Kitchen, Art Spiegelman and Justin Green,
followed. Men’s comix are suspended between liberating experimentation and
misogyny, as if echoing the debate surrounding the interpretation of Philip
Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). And even if “the underground was no

more or less ‘sexist’ than the counter-culture as a whole” (Sabin 2013, p. 224),
comics like Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat (1965–72), Snatch (1968–9) and
Big Ass Comics (1969–71) raise the question of pornography, objectification
and sexual violence against women.5 This aspect of the underground comix
movement has been discussed from different perspectives (see Shannon 2012;
Calonne 2021; Worden 2021b). Worden (2021b, p. 68), for one, explains that
“Zap’s indulgence of male sexual violence (…) projects the vision of the comics
reader as a sexually dissatisfied, emotionally immature, and socially awkward
white heterosexual male, and comics are akin, if not equal, to pornography,”
but then again the context for the comix is “white heterosexual male desire and
sociality” and “that context itself has some explanatory power.” Crumb further
argues that the medium tamed the imagery, insofar as drawing, even realistic,
provides distance (Groth 2014). This notwithstanding, as Pollock observes in
her discussion of sexuality and art, “[m]asculine heterosexuality has become a
constitutive trope in the modernist myth of masculine, phallic mastery” (1999,
p. 41), and the same holds true for men’s comix. Respectively, from the point
of view of representation per se, such images are exploitive, and, understand-
ably, sparked a process of reclaiming the image of the female body, and female
desire, in women’s comix (as explained below), which echoed the feminist sex
wars,6 allowing Art History, and Visual Studies in general, to move “away from
the model of critique towards other modes of analytic practice” (Cartwright
2017, p. 319).
The historiography of American comix further strengthens the power rela-
tions in the comics and comix field in the 1970s and the position of the male
canon. It is predominantly the history of men (and, consequently, “male
genius” and the history of comix as a male medium) (see Estren 1993;
Rosenkranz 2002; Skinn 2004; Kitchen and Danky 2009). While women are
included in the canon, it is often on the “unthreatening and additive” basis,
criticized by Pollock (1983, p. 207). Similarly to the canon constructed in Art
History, the comix canon is governed by “the Western masculine subject, its
mythic supports and psychic needs. The Story of Art is an illustrated Story of
Man,” as Pollock observes, and “it needs constantly to invoke a femininity as
the negated other that alone allows the unexplained synonymity of man and
artist” (Pollock 1999, p. 24).
The process of not so much “adding to” but critiquing the discipline itself
postulated by Nochlin, Lippard, Pollock and Parker plays an important role in
understanding the situation of women comix artists. This process was initiated
by the artist who was not erased from the histories of the underground comix
scene written by men—Trina Robbins. In her publications on the history of
women’s comics and comix, A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993), The
Great Women Cartoonists (2001) and Pretty in Ink: North American Women
Cartoonists 1896–2013 (2013), to name just a few, Robbins continuously ques-
tioned “exclusion,” “subordination,” “domination” and “Western masculin-
ity” (Pollock 1999, pp. 23–38) inscribed in the comics and comix canon. While
192 M. OLSZA
it may seem obvious today, it was Robbins who established a close connection
between women’s comix in the 1970s and the rise of second-wave feminism in
herstories of comics, which constituted a foundation for comics scholars in
later years (see Sabin 1996, pp. 104–5; Hatfield 2009, p. 20; Chute 2010,
pp. 20–4). Alongside Joyce Sutton, Lyn Chevli, Aline Kominsky-Crumb and
Diane Noomin, she is one of the most important actors in the field of women’s
comics and comix. As a modern Vasari and Pollock in one person, she writes
histories of comics and comix, re-reading and reformulating the male canon.
Apart from the institutional barriers in the mainstream comics world (i.e. lim-
ited opportunities for women), Robbins (1999, p. 85) also openly objected to
the sexism and misogyny of the male-dominated underground scene, both in
terms of systemic exclusion (even though this term seems incongruous in the
greater context of the comix scene which was a reaction the exclusion from the
mainstream comics scene) and the portrayal of women. The notion of exclu-
sion (which I shall read in terms of the canon and male genius) was the main
theme of the first comix created solely by women, It Ain’t Me Babe, in 1970.
It Ain’t Me Babe was created by “a women’s collective,” including Trina
Robbins, Lisa Lyons, Carole (last name unknown), Michele Brand, Barbara
“Willy” Mendes, Meredith Kurtzman and Nancy Kalish, and “conceived by
the Women’s Liberation Basement Press” (Robbins et al. 1970). While under-
ground comix and presses run by men also functioned as cooperatives (e.g. Rip
Off Press), the collective editorship of It Ain’t Me Babe, and other women’s
comix, may be interpreted in the feminist context, insofar as “probably the
most important contribution of the women’s movement of the 1960s and
1970s was that it gave women a sense of their collective power” (Epstein 2002,
p. 118). Lee Marrs observes (as quoted in Robbins 2013, p. 125) that “[t]here
was no way a beginning artist could break in, no place for it. All the Underground
comics consisted of friends printing friends. They were all buddies; they didn’t
even let us in,” emphasizing that collective authorship was not gender-inclusive
(still, women artists received support from Rob Turner’s Last Gasp). Lippard
observes that instead of formal innovations, feminist art’s greatest contribution
are “inclusive structures and social collages,” and specifically, “cooperative/
collaborative/ collective or anonymous art making,” in keeping with “the
favourite feminist metaphor: the web, or network, or quilt as an image of con-
nectiveness, inclusiveness and integration” (1980, pp. 364–5). Respectively,
Twisted Sisters (1976–94) was created by Kominsky-Crumb and Noomin, with
numerous contributing women artists (even though Noomin asserted “We’re
not ‘a feminist art collective’” (1995, p. 6, see also Noomin 2004), distancing
herself from what she and Kominsky-Crumb perceived as a limiting ideologi-
cal, and not artistic, position). Lesbian artists Mary Wings and Roberta Gregory
created, respectively, Come Out Comix (1973) and Dyke Shorts (1978), and
Dynamite Damsels (1976), as individual projects.7 It is important to acknowl-
edge the complexity of the scene, considering the subsequent critique of the
1970s feminist Art History, which failed to address the questions of sexuality
and race (see Pollock 1988, pp. 155–99, and Wallace 2004).
The feminist collective complicates and challenges the art-historical notions

of author, authorship and the myth of the (male) lone genius (see Duncan
1975), as constructs “produced” in “an elaborate work of framing” (Bal and
Bryson 2009, p. 252). Collective authorship exposes the fact that “whole
genres” are “excluded from ‘authorship’ (…), and the decisions regarding such
genres are historically variable to a degree. In our own time, graphic art occu-
pies a mysteriously fluctuating zone between authorship (many graphics in
magazines bear signatures) and anonymity (many others do not)” (Bal and
Bryson 2009, p. 253). This holds true for many women’s comix (see Galvan
2017). The importance of the “collective” is emphasized on the now iconic
cover of It Ain’t Me Babe, which shows the rebellion of numerous female com-
ics characters. The cover functions as both the quintessence of second-wave
feminism (with its emphasis on feminist rebellion) and its shortcomings (with
its portrayal of only white characters drawn by white artists).
The question of women’s collective power, announced on the cover, is
developed in the story “Breaking Out” (Fig. 1): female comics characters (from
commercially successful franchises) rebel against misogyny, sexism and discrim-
ination. Their “feminist interventions (…) disrupt canonicity and tradition by
representing the past not as a flow or development, but as conflict, politics,
struggles (…)” (Pollock 1996, p. 12). In the final panel, they create their own
“club” where “no boys are allowed” (Robbins et al. 1970). The characters
(whose number corresponds to the number of comix creators who contributed
to the first issue of It Ain’t Me Babe) literally break out of the male canon.
The form of the drawing is further worthy of critical attention. Though the
black and white drawings appear austere, upon closer examination it is revealed
Fig. 1 Carole (artwork) and the It Ain’t Me Babe Collective, the two first pages of
“Breaking Out” in It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970, Last Gasp Ecofunnies
194 M. OLSZA
that the entire comix is, paradoxically, overwhelmed by and devoid of idiosyn-
cratic style. All characters are drawn in their original “mainstream” styles. The
simplicity of drawing characteristic for the syndicated edition of Little Lulu
(drawn by Irving Tripp and John Stanley, whose style differed greatly from the
original cartoon style of Marjorie Henderson Buell) is discernible in panels
one, two and three (counting from top to bottom and from left to right), while
Juliet Jones (panels four and five) is drawn in a more elaborate style of the
1950s. The same applies to Betty and Veronica. Respectively, Supergirl in
“Breaking Out” is the exact copy of the Supergirl who was first introduced to
readers in 1959 in Action Comics #252. While so many commercial styles of
drawing are employed in a single story, a unique style characteristic of a given
artist (clearly visible in other stories anthologized in It Ain’t Me Babe) is indis-
cernible. Unity, and thus a sense of “collective” voice, is nevertheless achieved
thanks to the use of tone and inking (officially, the story is credited to the “It
Ain’t Me Babe Basement Collective” and the artwork is credited to “Carole
[last name unknown]).” Such an approach to drawing style raises a number of
interpretive questions.
While drawings in comics and comix are often characterized by “typification
(…) the abbreviation of a character to several pertinent lines” (Groensteen
2007, p. 162), the drawing style is also seen as an idiosyncratic marker or
“index” of the artist, especially in the case of alternative creators (Crumb, for
example, “self-consciously invokes and describes his linework” (Worden 2021a,
p. 13)). “The aesthetics of drawing style produce stirring effects,” Hannah
Miodrag observes (2013, p. 211), “flavoring the experience of reading.” The
question of individual style is even more important in Art History, where it is
almost inextricably associated with creativity, ingenuity and reputation. David
Summers (2009, p. 145) observes that “the matter of style, however, is not so
simple, and the very fact that deep values of selfhood and authenticity have
been attached to it should suggest that it may also be valued differently (…).”
The decision to refrain from using an idiosyncratic drawing style in “Breaking
Out” may be read as refraining from speaking in one’s own original voice,
which could be considered a tribute to women artists who had been for so long
deprived of it (and thus of creative control), working only in colouring and
inking. As a feminist critique of authorship, it enhances the collective ethos of
publication. Respectively, the decision to copy the commercial drawing styles
so carefully may also be read in terms of “critical encoding,” which “is to force
a dislocation with old forms in order to make explicit both old and new mean-
ings” (Jefferies 1995, p. 166). The dominant and oppressive mainstream style
is “critically encoded” in the comix, for example, when Little Lulu’s visual
simplicity and innocence clash with the character’s uncompromising language.
The use of screentone also raises questions of art/mechanical reproduction, to
draw on Walter Benjamin, and thus the question of comix as a work of art, on
which I will comment in the next section.
The question of the (male) canon was also discussed directly in one-page
comix, “So, ya wanna be an artist” by Lee Marrs published in Wimmen’s Comix
Fig. 2 Lee Marrs, “So, ya wanna be an artist” in Wimmen’s Comix #2, 1973, Last
Gasp Ecofunnies
#2 (1973a) (Fig. 2) and “The woman who couldn’t” by Trina Robbins pub-
lished in Trina’s Women (1976), much in keeping with the principles presented
by Nochlin in “Why have there been no great women artists?” in 1971. Marrs
196 M. OLSZA
presents the obstacles that the contemporary female artist faces, urging aspiring
cartoonists to “be prepared for usual situations,” such as attacks of sexual pred-
ators, who lure them into meetings but are not interested in their art, and “be
open to unusual situations,” such as meeting men who truly admire their art.
Realistically assessing the comics and comix market, she observes that women
artists tend to be employed in non-creative positions, such as “typist” or
“receptionist.” Marrs also breaks the historic taboo, on which Nochlin com-
ments in her essay, on women drawing the male nude and ends the strip in the
bottom right corner with her self-portrait as an artist, sitting at a desk, with
writing utensils on the side, and her hands covered in ink, asserting her creative
role. Respectively, Robbins presents in her comic the history of the great “mis-
tress” Suzanne Valadon, observing that as a woman, mother and breadwinner
she could not have focused on her art and thus failed to achieve the status of
men artists (Degas, Renoir, Utrillo). Robbins ends the story with a personal
comment: “Suzanne Valadon died in 1938, the year I was born. I sometimes
feel that in my body she has been given another chance, and this time we won’t
blow it!” (1976).
Ultimately, in the power field of comics and comix, women’s comix chal-
lenge and “break out” of the male canon, both mainstream and alternative, and
question the notions of “male genius.” This has been confirmed by a simulta-
neous reading of texts by Nochlin, Pollock, Parker and Lippard and selected
women’s comix. Respectively, since
feminism signifies a set of positions, not an essence; a critical practice not a doxa;
a dynamic self-critical response and intervention not a platform. It is the precari-
ous product of a paradox. Seeming to speak in the name of women, feminist
analysis perpetually deconstructs the very terms around which it is politically
organized. (Pollock 1996, p. 5)
In the next section I shall focus on the question of (challenging) the canon
in a different feminist perspective, namely, in the context of feminist “high” art,
asking questions about the status of women’s comix.
“Breaking in?” The Canon of Feminist Art and Women’s

Comix in the 1970s
While we may speak of feminist art as a distinctive form and practice, it is nev-
ertheless as dynamic and complex as feminisms. Neither “an essence” nor a
“doxa” (Pollock 1996, p. 5), feminist art is created and studied in dialogue
with other disciplines. The focus on the 1970s, however, allows us to identify
themes, concerns and critical positions that were shared by feminist artists.
Even within a single decade, these varied, from the utopian (and essentialist)
visions of womanhood to a more critical investigation of popular images of the
woman’s body, the female nude, the male gaze and representation in general
(see Berger 1972; Mulvey 1975; Barry and Flitterman-Lewis 1980). And while
women comics and comix artists may be found neither in Edelson’s Some
Living American Women Artists (1972) nor in Judy Chicago’s Dinner party
(1974–9), in this section I would like to discuss women’s comix in the 1970s
in the power field of feminist “high” art, demonstrating that the shift from the
idealistic representation of the female body to its critique and reformulation is
also observable in women’s comix.
Reading women’s comix in dialogue with the 1970s feminist art raises the
question of “breaking in(to)” the canon of feminist art and art histories, which,
we might speculate, was a concern for some women comix artists. Robbins
acknowledged the connection she shared with Valadon, Kominsky-Crumb
praised Art Spiegelman for elevating comix “to another level of (…) high art
(…) and [taking] it out of the comics ghetto” (after Chute 2014, p. 7), and, as
I explain below, feminist comix and art engaged in similar critical practices (and
at times fell victim to the same essentialist presumptions). It appears, however,
that the revisionist feminist art criticism in the 1970s did not go as far as to
acknowledge women’s comix or, at best, to paraphrase Pollock (1999, p. 6),
comix functioned as a “supplement” to the feminist canon of “high” art.” And
while I wish to emphasize the importance of the critical revaluation of the
canon of feminist art in general, I nevertheless do not want to reproduce binary
divisions, of which “low”/“high” art is a part, and which have already been
dismissed in feminist Art History by Pollock and other critics. Instead, follow-
ing in the footsteps of Pollock, I propose to discuss feminist comix and art
through “feminist desire” for “knowledge of the other” (1999, p. 306), focus-
ing on three main approaches to the representation of the female body observ-
able in feminist art in the 1970s.
The first approach was, as Helen McDonald (2001, p. 2) observes, a “femi-
nist ideal” linked to “images of the archaic goddess whose maternal body was
tied spiritually and essentially to Nature and the Earth” and “the goddess
archetype” in general (see the special issue of HERESIES 1978 and Orenstein
1990). Such an understanding and representation of femininity may be found
in women’s comix especially in the early 1970s, for example, in Mendes’s
“Oma” and Robbins’s “Lavender” and “Remember Telluria” published in It
Ain’t Me Babe (Robbins et al. 1970) or Nina Salina and Kay Rudin’s “Star
Cake” published in Wimmen’s Comix #2 (1973a). Women are drawn as power-
ful and connected with nature. It Ain’t Me Babe literally ends with the image
of a goddess (Fig. 3). The back cover shows a woman holding a baby, half
Mary, mother of Jesus, and half Gaea, the goddess of fertility and the earth, as
indicated by the representations of nature which surround her. As far as form is
concerned (the shapes, the colours and the elaborate framing), the drawing
also celebrates “marginal forms” of women’s art, such as decorative arts.
This iconographic motif died out in the second half of the 1970s. The back
cover of Roberta Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels (1976) is an intriguing counter-
point for the back cover of It Ain’t Me Babe: instead of a blonde, white
198 M. OLSZA
Fig. 3 Barbara “Willie” Mendes, the back cover of It Ain’t Me Babe, 1970, Last Gasp
Ecofunnies
goddess, women of different body types and races are represented. The caption
simply reads “We’re women and we’re beautiful.”
Respectively, the second approach was concerned with more radical body
and vaginal art. Feminist artists “aimed to ‘demystify’ patriarchal conceptions
of the female body by experimenting with body art and vaginal iconology.
They set out to create alternative ‘positive’ images of the female body by mak-
ing ‘visible’ those parts that had been censored in traditional art” (McDonald
2001, p. 81), as exemplified by the early works of Judy Chicago and Carolee
Schneemann. In comix, we may see such an approach to the female body in
numerous stories published in Tits & Clits Comix, Twisted Sisters and Wimmen’s
Comix, to name just a few.
Five issues of Tits & Clits were published between 1972 and 1979 (and
additionally two more, one in 1981 and one in 1987). The entire series was
built around and focused on female sexuality, and its “positive” representation
(including the need to produce feminist porn movies, as discussed in Roberta
Gregory’s “Free enterprise” published in Tits & Clits Comix #4 in 1977) and
as such corresponded to the ideals of second-wave feminism and the rediscov-
ery of female sexual pleasure and female desire. Barbara Rose observes in
“Vaginal iconology” (2001 [1974], p. 377) that while such images are inti-
mate, they are not meant to be misconstrued as “erotic”: “feminist art that has
been labelled ‘erotic’ because it depicts or alludes to genital images is nothing
of the sort. (…) Hannah Wilke’s soft latex hanging pieces, Deborah Remington’s
precise abstractions, Miriam Schapiro’s ring-centred Ox, Rosemary Mayer’s
cloth constructions, Judy Chicago’s yoni-lifesavers are all vaginal or womb
images.” While “vaginal art” was later criticized in connection with its essen-
tialist view of womanhood, such art may also be discussed in the context of the
ontology of the image and the fact that representation cannot be controlled,
which means that images that are not meant to be erotic may be misread or
misconstrued (which of course does not mean that feminist art cannot be
erotic, see Webster 1981). Bal observes that “by reusing forms taken from
earlier works, an artist both carries with [them] the text from which the bor-
rowed has broken away and constructs a new text with the debris” (2001,
p. 69). The “new” image is “contaminated by the discourse of its predecessor,
and thereby fractured, ready to fall apart at any time” (Bal 2001, p. 69).
Feminist “vaginal art” is thus “fractured” and “ready to fall apart” simply
because of the history of certain iconological motifs (i.e. the (ab)use of the
female body by male artists).
In this case, comix seem to have the advantage of text. The visual does not
stand on its own but is incorporated into a subversive and “anti-mythological”
message, in keeping with Pollock’s (1988) notion of “scripto-visual” strategies
(see also Schor 1997, pp. 82–6). It is thanks to language (word balloons, cap-
tions and the narrative in general) which contextualizes and tames the image
that the image of the woman, and especially the female body, no longer falls
victim to institutional sexism. In Chevli’s “Fonda Peters vaginal drip” pub-
lished in Tits & Clits Comix #1 (1972), the focus is on the vagina, albeit in a
context that disrupts the expectations of the male gaze. Fonda Peters is strug-
gling with a yeast infection. She is drawn naked or semi-clothed with her vagina
exposed, but the images are not “sexual”: they normalize the representation of
the female body and medical procedures. It is at the end of the story that
Fonda Peters explores her sexuality by participating in an orgy once she is
cured. As such, Chevli and Sutton participate in the greater feminist project of
identifying icons of femininity and transforming them into iconoclastic repre-
sentations. As McDonald observes:
By the 1970s and 1980s, early second-wave feminist research had unearthed a
great number of stereotypes in the history of art that were based on a binary
200 M. OLSZA
system of desirable and undesirable forms of femininity. These stereotypes, which

ranged from the ‘civilised’ virgin, mother and muse to the ‘uncivilised’ whore,
monster and witch, were shown to serve as role models for women. Although the
investigations of these earlier feminists were conducted in traditional, i conographic
terms, they demonstrated that such stereotypes of femininity reinforced a ‘patri-
archal’ ideal, an ideal that in art was embodied in the female nude. (2001, p. 15)
In Sutton’s “The menses is the massage, starring Mary Multipary,” also

published in Tits & Clits #1 (1972), the artist further plays with the notions of
“civilised” and “uncivilised” images of womanhood. Mary Multipary, the nar-
rator and the protagonist, tells the reader/viewer about her week, with a par-
ticular focus on the symptoms of PMS (mood swings, depression) and later her
struggles to afford period products. Like Peters, the character may be seen
semi-naked, albeit not in a sexual context. For example, on page 8 (Fig. 4),
Multipary is devising her own period product from a sponge, observing that
“Virginia Johnson would be proud of her.” In the panel to the right, she is seen
inserting the home-made tampon.
The image is detailed, yet not “erotic” (if anything, the image itself could be
read as a masturbation scene but the focus would still be on the experience of
the woman and not the “visual pleasure” of the viewer). In a minor but telling
visual gesture, Multipary transgresses the limitations of the frame (her left foot
presses on the bottom edge of the panel and oversteps it, while her right foot
dents the edge of the panel to the left), thus transgressing the limitations and
taboos around the representation of the female body. In the two panels that
follow, Multipary asserts that “this [the tampon] even feels good standing up.”
This strip also represents a deeper change that had taken place in feminist art in
the 1970s, namely, “a shift from representation – how the female body should
be represented – to the question of subjectivity – what it means to inhabit that
body: from the problem of looking (distance) to the problem of embodiment
(touch)” (Betterton 1996, p. 7). This question also further relates to the ten-
sions in the women’s comix scene, which surfaced earlier in connection to the
Fig. 4 Joyce Sutton, the top row from “The menses is the massage” in Tits & Clits
#1, 1972, Nanny Goats Productions
notion of the “feminist collective,” insofar as not only Chevli and Sutton but
also Kominsky-Crumb and Noomin questioned the idealized representation of
the female body promoted by, among others, Trina Robbins (Noomin 2004).
The Twisted Sisters authors “preferred to have [their] flaws and show them”
(Noomin 2004), creating fictional (Noomin’s Didi Glitz) and autobiographi-
cal characters (Kominsky-Crumb’s Goldie) who “inhabited their bodies” and
thus questioned all the “shoulds” of representation. Both authors were origi-
nally contributors to Wimmen’s Comix (Goldie first addressed the questions of
body shame and female sexual pleasure in Wimmen’s Comix #1). Respectively,
Wimmen’s Comix engaged with different approaches to feminist iconology,
including vaginal art, most prominently in Cathy Millet’s “Where have you
been you little pig?” in issue #5 (1975). Millet draws a vagina in a series of 11
panels arranged in two rows, zooming in on its inside. The images are so
detailed that they are almost abstract, playing with the very notion of
representation.
The third approach to the representation of the female body in feminist art
was concerned with the wider category of “hybrid forms” of feminist art which
“eclectically appropriate or replace, quote and parody, contaminate and are
contaminated by ‘other’ traditions, languages and gender inscriptions”
(Jefferies 1995, p. 166). Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974–9) exemplifies a
playful approach to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, and so does Edelson’s
Some Living American Women Artists (1972). Similarly, Barbara Kruger’s col-
lages playfully imitate advertisements and slogans created by men. Indeed, in a
quasi-framing fashion, the notion of “eclectic appropriation” and “collage
technique” in women’s comix takes us back to the discussion of “Breaking
Out” in It Ain’t Me Babe (Robbins et al. 1970), which challenged the canon
through the use of screentone and different drawing styles. Analogous strate-
gies of “critical encoding” (Jefferies 1995, p. 166) were adopted in the 1970s
(e.g. Tits & Clits as a response to Playboy and/or Robert Crumb’s Big Ass
Comics). The prime example of such a strategy were “ReActionary Comics by
Petchesky [Margery Peters]” published in Wimmen’s Comix #3 (Marrs et al.
1973b) and Wimmen’s Comix #6 (Brown et al. 1975). The stylized font made
it clear that the strips were both appropriating and rereading Action Comics.
Respectively, such an active approach to iconological traditions, both in “high
art” and comix, was based on the same feminist foundation, namely, activist
art. As Mary Jo Aagerstoun and Elissa Auther observe, “[s]ince its emergence
in the 1970s, feminist activist art has consistently exhibited a diversity of sub-
ject matter and form that defies the attempts to pigeonhole the practice”
(2007, p. vii) and artistic strategies shared by “high art” and women’s comix
demonstrate that the latter are part of the greater landscape of feminist art in
the 1970s and should be recognized as such.
202 M. OLSZA
“There to Make Trouble”: Towards Feminist

Comics Studies
Nochlin writes that “feminist art history is there to make trouble” (1988,
p. xiii) and perhaps reading women’s comix in the double framework of “break-
ing out” of the male canon and “breaking in(to)” the feminist art canon is the
best kind of trouble. It demonstrates that the relation between feminist art
histories and Comics Studies is reciprocal. For one, the benefits and challenges
of feminist Art History for Comics Studies revolve around the benefits and
challenges of feminisms as a critical practice per se. Feminist art histories reveal
systematic oppression and discrimination inscribed in both mainstream and
underground comics, demonstrating that the histories of comics need to be
critically re-written and reformulated. While at a time when the most successful
comics artists are women, including Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, Phoebe
Gloeckner and Marjane Satrapi, to name just a few, it may be difficult to believe
that some women artists, both mainstream and underground, still need to be
rediscovered and reclaimed, it is nevertheless true. As I have tried to show, the
answer to the question “Why have there been no great women comix/comics
artists?” is “That is not true!” in the American context—there were many bril-
liant women artists who questioned the male canon in the 1970s and before (as
shown by Robbins’s herstories of comics)—but it may be different in other
parts of the world. Feminist art histories help comics scholars discover why—
“they locate a network of minor roads that simply covers more territory than
the so-called freeways” (Lippard 1980, p. 365). Respectively, Comics Studies
exposes and challenges the elitism of feminist art histories, allowing the disci-
pline to stay the course and “make trouble,” since it is “a dynamic self-critical
response and intervention not a platform” (Pollock 1996, p. 5).
Acknowledgement The research for this chapter was funded by the Polish National
Science Centre [Narodowe Centrum Nauki] (Miniatura 2: 2018/02/X/HS2/00693,
Drawing feminism: Female artists on the underground American comix scene in the 1970s
and 1980s). The research was conducted at Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum,
Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Notes
1. For further discussion of feminist art-historical approaches to the canon Cf.
Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach
to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist
Comics”.
2. For further discussion of the canon and Vasari’s Lives Cf. Yu-Kiener chapter “The
Lives of the Artists”.
3. For further discussion of drawing sociology (and political theory) into a multidis-
ciplinary feminist approach Cf. Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter
“Feminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections
on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”.
4. As Robinson observes (2004, pp. 14, 81–2), Wonder Woman was born a fierce
Amazon in the 1940s, branded a lesbian (and thus a “dangerous role model for
children”) by Frederic Wertham in the 1950s, and “conformed to the sexy 60’s
ideal.” She was “reclaimed” as a feminist in the 1970s (Robinson 2004, p. 82).
The development of other superheroines followed a similar path, while some
were forgotten (see Robbins 1996).
5. The objectification of women and the representation of sexual violence have a
long history in comics, dating back to the 1920s and Tijuana Bibles. They also
influenced men’s underground comix and Crumb (see Adelman 1997).
6. “Feminist sex wars” of the 1970s concern debates among feminists about por-
nography and sexuality, which culminated in anti-pornography positions of the
early 1980s since some feminists drew connections between pornography and
sexual violence (see Hunter 2006). The responses of women’s comix ranged from
idealizing the representation of women, reclaiming women’s sexual pleasure (e.g.
Wet Satin, All Girl Thrills), to, incidentally, depicting sexual violence against men
(e.g. Dot Bucher’s “A sordid affair” in Wimmen’s Comix #3 (1973b)).
7. To be specific, in Dynamite Damsels (1976), Gregory gives thanks for the “sup-
port and encouragement” and “valuable technical info” provided by Chevli and
Sutton but ultimately she thanks herself “for doing all the writing + drawing +
everything else.” In Dyke Shorts (1978), Wings thanks a number of women as
well. She refers to them by their first names (which makes it difficult to identify
some of them), but one name is obvious: she thanks Trina [Robbins].
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Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined
Gravity in Sport Manga
Ylva Sommerland
Abstract The method introduced in this chapter combines queer theory and
Rudolf Arnheim’s theory of visual composition introduced in his book Power
of the Center – A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982), and more
specifically his concept “visual weight”. The main purpose of using a queer
method in Art History or Visual Studies is to add visual records of queer bodies
and queer life into the catalogue of a queer Art History or used in an interdis-
ciplinary context—the queer archive (Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place:
Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press,
2005). I will study visual weight as imagined gravity in the sport manga Real
by Takehiko Inoue with the purpose to discuss the queer body. Real is a story
that evolves around three young men who experience different tragic life-
changing events. They all have a common passion for basketball, and sport
performances are at the centre of this story. Damage to their bodies caused by
illness and accident has led two of them to be dependent on a wheelchair to be
able to practise basketball. The third character suffers from bad conscience hav-
ing caused a traffic accident resulting in a girl damaging her legs.
Keywords Rudolph Arnheim • Visual weight • Imagined gravity • Queer

bodies • Sport manga • Takehiko Inoue
Y. Sommerland (*)
National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: Ylva.Sommerland@kb.se

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_11
208 Y. SOMMERLAND
The method introduced in this chapter combines queer theory and Rudolf
Arnheim’s theory of visual composition introduced in his book Power of the
Center – A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982); more specifically his
concept “visual weight” is used in the analyses. I will study visual weight as
imagined gravity in the sport manga Real by Takehiko Inoue with the purpose
to discuss the queer body. Real is a story that evolves around three young men
who experience different tragic life-changing events. They all have a common
passion for basketball, and sport performances are at the centre of this story.
Damage to their bodies caused by illness and accident has led two of them to
be dependent on a wheelchair to be able to practice basketball. The third char-
acter suffer from a bad conscience having caused a traffic accident resulting in
a girl damaging her legs.
All bodies have a weight, in this text a question is asked of how weight is
depicted visually. Gravity is present in sport as resistance, threatening to end
the play by forcing bodies to the ground and immobility. To approach visual
representations of the queer body from this angle, the surrounding motifs
defining the boundaries of human bodies are examined, and the role of an
imagined gravity is studied, in a selection of panels from Real. The argument
put forward is that human bodies are defined around resistance of gravity, as in
sports classes, where, for example, human bodies are separated by gender and
age in an evaluation of the ability of muscles, mobility, and weight to resist
gravity, to create fair games. Additionally, gravity as an agent in the sport per-
formance can be considered a teammate or co-player, as well as an opponent.
It is part of the game to contest gravity.
Comics in general are full of icons and symbols that represent the experience
of gravity. Nevertheless, how are these qualities of visual weight performed
with lines, dots, light, and shadows and in some cases colours? The “play” con-
cept is useful for queer analysis, and from a sports perspective, and these con-
cepts have in common the performative aspect and the act of performance. It
is also important to have in mind that the images studied here are fiction. They
depict fictive characters that do not exist. This is a play with bodies performing
in sport zones. The manga Real depicts human bodies in wheelchairs perform-
ing basketball, or wheelchair basketball. In these images, I will look closer at
weight and the representation of the queer, cyborg bodies in transition.
Queer, Cyborg, and Bodies in Transition

The queer analysis demonstrated here as a method for reaching towards silent
motifs is developed from performative methodological approaches used in Art
History as applied by art historian, queer feminist theorist, and curator Amelia
Jones. In In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance, Jones
aims to outline the genealogy of “discourses surrounding concepts of queer or
gender fluidity and performativity or performance” and to investigate in what
ways they are connected and why (2021, p. 4).
REAL QUEER BODIES: VISUAL WEIGHT AND IMAGINED GRAVITY… 209
Clearly there are no singular origins of queer as we know it today. Rather, it is a

complex field of concepts and words eventually pointing to crystallized activist
and theoretical definitions by 1990, shifting into mainstream applications by the
2000s in television and other mass media. (Jones 2021, p. 188)
The use of queer in academia and the introduction of queer theory was initi-
ated by Teresa De Lauretis in 1990, in a special issue of differences where she
argued that queer theory could offer rethinking of sexualities. Jones further-
more highlights Sue Ellen Case’s claim in the same special issue on the align-
ment of queer theory to the “counter-normative force of queer performing
bodies” (Jones 2021, p. 188; Lauretis 1991). Jones points out the common
misconception that Judith Butler frequently is credited to have introduced
queer theory and invented the idea of queer performativity. Jones furthermore
presents some critique of Butler’s theory of gender performance, where she
questions Butler’s claims surrounding the subversive acts of repeating or imi-
tating gender, such as drag, because they risk “missing the complexities of any
manifestation or experience or claim of sex/gender as embodied, contingent,
intersectional” (Jones 2021, p. 191). It is questionable if this subversive act of
gender ever could be voluntary and express “an ‘authentic’ interior self or
enacts freely chosen gender attributes” (Jones 2021, p. 208). Nevertheless, the
impact of Butler’s writing for the development of queer theory is indisputable.
Eve Sedgwick, also a significant influential queer theorist like Butler, according
to Jones, does not highlight queer performativity as such. Intersectionality is
one theory applied in critiques of queer theory focusing on the perspective that
lived experience includes additionally lived identifications that intersect with
the experience of gender and sexuality. In Tendencies Sedgwick writes:
At the same time, a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the
term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexual-
ity at all... Thereby the gravity (I mean the gravitas, the meaning, but also the
center of gravity) of the term ‘queer’ itself deepens and shifts. (1993, pp. 8–9)
The focus of study in this chapter are not bodies contesting heteronormativ-
ity, but bodies contesting human body normativity—what we define as a “nor-
mal/natural” human body. In comics, this means contesting the borders of
human/machine, human and woman/man/girl/boy, hero/antihero and
which can be related to Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg. To further
clarify the approach of using a queer method in the context of this chapter, it
is helpful to draw attention to the method’s proximity to what Donna Haraway
describes in her seminal essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) as “ironic faith”
or blasphemous fidelity. What is put into question when using a queer method
is the very existence of a natural and/or “normal” body. Donna Haraway
explains the cyborg as: “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organ-
ism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1991, p. 149).
This chapter focuses on queer perspectives of the imagined body that question
210 Y. SOMMERLAND
the “normal” body of an athlete and the potentials of bodies in motion depicted
in images. The images are chosen from a realistic sport manga, but still the
context qualifies them for study for the queer archive, and the cyborg motif is
present, even though it is neither a fantasy nor a science fiction manga. Since
the bodies playing basketball use machines in the form of manual wheelchairs,
they can be defined as cyborgs. A human body in a wheelchair is an example of
a body that could be described as a cyborg, a human and a machine interacting,
in this case to carry and move the human body.
Queer Comic Archives

The main purpose here of using a queer method in Art History studies or
Visual Studies is to add visual records of the queer body and queer life into the
catalogue of queer Art History, or, used in an interdisciplinary context, what
Jack (also Judith, or J. Jack or Judith Jack) Halberstam describes as the queer
archive (Halberstam 2005). Halberstam, professor in Gender Studies and
English at Columbia University, specifically focuses on transgender bodies and
queer subcultures. Halberstam is active in archival practices in creating a queer
archive, where examples from visual culture constitute a significant part of the
material studied, especially visual identities expressed in popular culture and
film. Since both comics and especially the images of manga have a close relation
to film and have been considered a part of popular culture rather than Art
History, I have found Halberstam’s method useful for this chapter. This fur-
thermore contributes to including comic images and specifically manga in the
records of the archive of Art History, a context where comics so far has not
received much scholarly attention (Sommerland and Wallin Wictorin 2017).
A few remarks need to be emphasized on how the category manga is used in
this chapter. By manga, I mean comics produced and published in Japan,
Japanese comics, and not a specific style, genre, or media type within comics.
It is worth noting though that sport manga is a popular genre in Japan and the
number of comics in Japan with sport as the main subject is extensive com-
pared to Euro-American comics. It is the images from the English translation
of Real that are studied in this chapter and not the original in Japanese. In
translation, especially of manga into English, there might be a need to deal
with significant intercultural aspects both when it comes to the visual and the
language. The intercultural aspects of manga and Japanese popular culture in a
broader sense regarding research on this material is discussed in, for example,
Reading Manga: Local and Global Perceptions of Japanese comics (Berndt and
Richter 2006), Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on
a Global Scale (Berndt 2010) and Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan
(Allen and Sakamoto 2008). When using the method of both queering the
archive of Art History and queering the archive of comics with manga, this
needs to be considered. At the same time, sport as motif, or the sport zone, is
a space with intercultural standards; for example, the rules for basketball stud-
ied here are the same in Sweden as in Japan.
Thus, this chapter argues for the usefulness of queer methods for analysing
comics, regarding the concept “queer” as a tool for studying objects in the
margins, and motifs and materials excluded from the norm of art-historical
studies. Consideration of the archival turn in Cultural History will help clarify
the purpose of a queer archive of Art History as a method.
One important function of what is called the archival turn is making noise
where there exist archival silences. It could be argued that both comics, and
especially manga, as art, and queer bodies have been left in a space of archival
silence in an art-historical context. One reason for this could of course be an
assumption that comics as well as queer cultures are rooted in subcultures and
are by definition found far off centre where they emerge and take shape in
transitional spaces. A polyphony of methodologies is necessary for analysing
comics, as pointed out by manga scholar Jacqueline Berndt, professor in
Japanese language and culture and specifically manga/anime/comics theory
(Berndt 2010), as well as for queer analyses of performance art and queering
the archive, as pointed out by art historian Mathias Danbolt. Motifs in the
margins or transitional spaces need to be lifted into the centre as part of an
interdisciplinary approach since cultural expressions in the margins are difficult
to frame from only one perspective (Danbolt 2013; Jones 2021).1 It is further-
more important to be aware that using queer theory in Art History and Visual
Studies gives opportunities to ask different questions than is the case for real
bodies in “social reality”. It could even be argued that all bodies drawn in com-
ics are always queer or, at the very least, inhabit queer possibilities. This is
important to mention to clarify that the boundaries of human bodies in drawn
images shows the limits of imagined bodies and are not studies of real bodies.
In this chapter Real queer bodies are studied, that is, bodies present in the
fictional world of the sport manga Real. However, imagined bodies and visual
identities affect how we perceive the concept of what makes a human body. In
Touching History: Art, Performance and Politics in Queer Times (2013),
Danbolt reviews the use of queer methods in Art History. Danbolt illuminates
the performative aspect of archival practice in the physical act of actually touch-
ing history when reaching out and handling the archival material, which had
not received attention in previous research. Drawing on philosopher, dancer,
and visual artist Erin Manning’s Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty
(2007), Danbolt notes the importance of the performative act of archival
research when using queer methodologies: “These touches should, in other
words, be seen as an inventive ‘act of reaching toward’ rather than as secure
arrival” (Danbolt 2013, p. 308).
Performative Comic Archives

In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(2009), Ann Stoler points out that a shift from “archive as source” to “archive
as subject” became visible in the fields of critical history and cultural theory in
the 1990s across a wide range of disciplines. This was the case in studies
212 Y. SOMMERLAND
spanning from “rereading histories of colonialism to those of gay rights”

(Stoler 2009, pp. 44–45). Stoler further explains that this archival turn has cre-
ated two completely different spaces when it comes to research for historians
and research for cultural theorists. For historians it is the physical (or digital)
documents, and the archival institution that is responsible for them, that is
being studied. For cultural theorists, according to Stoler, the archive has
become “a metaphoric invocation for any corpus of selective collections and
the longings that the acquisitive quests for the primary, originary, and
untouched entail” (Stoler 2009, p. 45). The archival turn means a performa-
tive perspective on the archive and a critical approach to it. This critique poses
questions regarding the factors that shape the archive and the effects of its
form, what the archive does. When using the performative method, the
researcher approaches the archive as a place with ambiguous answers. This may
seem contradictory, since the archive represents stability and duration, while
the performative perspective is used to describe movement, variability and
questioning of origin.
In studying diffractions from the “normal”, the concept of performativity
enables a critical way of studying the archival history and memory of comics
with a queer perspective. The performative perspective enables us to create
queer memories and make queer bodies and identities visible. The performa-
tive archive thus refers to both the creation and shaping of archives and to how
the form of the archive itself affects memory creation and collective memory.
New types of questions could be asked of the archive. What happened before
the archive was created? What influenced the selections made? Alternatively, we
can ask, as do the editors of Comics Memory: Archives and Styles, what comics
do with and to memory, and what memory does to comics (Ahmed and
Crucifix 2018, p. 3). Studying the silence means to study what has been
excluded and not been shown or spoken about and therefore has been out of
reach for future research to build new knowledge upon—what Danbolt and
Halberstam refer to as archival silences.
In the philosopher David Davies’ theory of performance, appreciation and
shared understandings are important factors of a performance (Davies 2004).
This is also the case when communicating visually, as Arnheim points out with
his theory on visual perception. In the anthology Performative Realism –
Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media, the visual aspect of recognition is
stressed as important part of performances (Gade and Jerslev, 2005).
Acknowledgement of comics as a significant part of the archive of Art History
and Visual Studies, or visual cultures, should be obvious since it is part of a
globally spread visual expression—a visual culture that exceeds the pages of
volumes of manga and influences other visual media, as for example film, paint-
ing, and fashion.
Visual Weight, Imagined Gravity, and Play

To investigate the potential of visual representation of gravity, I have been
influenced by a method developed by art historian Rudolf Arnheim.2 He argues
that there is a visual aspect in human experience of gravity and that composi-
tion in art is gravity perceptually experienced through visual weight. By visual
weight, he means how different forms create dynamic centres in a composition,
because they attract a different amount of attention, and he shows which ele-
ments lead a form to have increased or decreased visual weight compositionally.
In the Power of the Center – A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts,
Arnheim writes:
In the field of forces pervading our living space, any upward movement requires
the investment of special energy, whereas downward movement can be accom-
plished by mere dropping, or by merely removing the support that had kept the
object from being pulled downward. (1982, p. 10)
This investment of energy is certainly at play when performing sports.

Arnheim further claims that; “overcoming the resistance of weight is a funda-
mental experience of human freedom” (1982, p. 11). When investigating com-
position, he starts by comparing two spatial systems, cosmic space and parochial
space. In cosmic space mass is organised around a manifold of centres. Parochial
spaces are the narrow spaces where “the curvature of the earth straightens into
a plane surface” to create order (Arnheim 1982, p. vii). This is space is ordered
in parallel lines and right angles. Visually he translates these to the Cartesian
grid and the concentric system of circles, “the cosmic onion”, with a clear cen-
tre, and he argues for a combination of these two systems when analysing art:
Together they serve our needs perfectly. The centric system supplies the mid-
point, the reference point for every distance and the crossing for the grid’s central
vertical and horizontal. And the grid system supplies the dimensions of up and
down and of left and right, indispensable for any description of human experience
under the dominion of gravity. (Arnheim 1982, pp. ix–x)
When analysing the images of comics, these could function as starting points
when looking at the composition of spreads and composition within each
panel. Gravity is a basic property of life and the living and strongly connected
to time. This is also something Arnheim points out. And this is also true when
describing the characteristics of sport. Sport is a game or play where gravity and
time define the limit of different types of sport. A ball “lives” when it is mov-
ing, and the play is only ongoing within a limited time and space. All kinds of
movement require forcing the power of gravity. Sport discourse, or what I
choose to call the visual sport zone in the context of image analysis, is here
defined as a time and space where images of bodies are performed. In the regu-
lations of different sports in real life, the physical body is significant (Woodward
and Woodward 2009). The sport zone is a space where questions can be
214 Y. SOMMERLAND
investigated of how bodies are performed. In sports, it is important that all

participants compete under the same conditions; there exists a claim for equal-
ity and fair play (Morgan 2007; Steenbergen et al. 2001; Tännsjö and
Tamburrini 2000). Questions of criteria for inclusion or exclusion are present
when delineating the communities created as sport zones. How this is per-
formed in depictions of contesting gravity is a crucial part in the staging of a
sport act. In sport events, a play with gravity is present in obvious ways. The
characteristics that define different sports or sport events are dependent on the
way bodies relate to weight, and how human and/or non-human bodies move
in certain patterns. The range of ability to contest gravity is connected to the
categories of gender, age, and ability. Here the body matters when it comes to
constraining the conditions for how different bodies must contest gravity and
these are the grounds for dividing sport performing bodies into different
classes, as part of the rules of the game. I have found the performative aspects
of sport performances as a motif in art to be usefully framed by the concept of
“play” according to sociologist Roger Caillois’ definition. Caillois presents six
criteria for defining play (1961, pp. 9–10):
1. Free. Play is a voluntary activity.

2. Separate. Play is circumscribed in a time and space that is set beforehand.
3. Uncertain. The player’s initiative and performance play a part in the
course of the result of the game.
4. Unproductive. Play is materially unproductive.
5. Governed by rules. Every play has a set of rules that define it.
6. Make-Believe. Play takes place in a second reality or “free unreality, as
against real life”.
These criteria are particularly useful to distinguish the sport performances in

fictional images from a real-life sport performance. The sixth and last criterion
is evermore true when the sport performance is conducted and experienced in
two-dimensional still images. Since the performances of sport experienced in
the manga studied here are the kinds of play that function as if a sport perfor-
mance is done, the viewer or reader must agree to play—to pretend as if a sport
event is occurring in the pictures (Caillois 1961). This view of “free unreality,
as against real life” could be related to contesting gravity as a criterion for sport
and Arnheim. He claims that there has to be freedom of space for matter to
organize around a dominant mass in patterns (Arnheim 1982). When studying
sport performances in comics Caillois’ second criterion of play is also impor-
tant. A basketball game has a set period that decides when the game is at play.
It is the case that when this clock stops, the game stops or pauses. However, it
is also the case that the game can stop the clock, for example, when rules are
broken. Gravity is also involved in framing the time of a game. It could be a
basketball falling through the net or a ball in volleyball or tennis hitting the net
and landing on the wrong side, then the clock stops, and the game is paused.
Queer Spaces: Lost and Found in Transition

The sport manga studied as an example here consists of material from the bas-
ketball manga Real by the contemporary manga artist, Takehiko Inoue. It was
originally published as a serial in 1999 in Shūkan Yangu Janpu [Weekly Young
Jump]. In 2001, the first collected volume of the previously serialised chapters
was published, and to date 15 volumes have been published in Japanese. This
procedure in publishing is common for manga in Japan. Real was first trans-
lated and published in English in 2008 by Viz Media, and the English transla-
tion of volume 15 is scheduled to be released in December 2021. At the time
of writing this chapter, the story is ongoing. The genre of sport manga is cho-
sen because of the rich flow of material published in sports comics from Japan.
The sport discourse in fiction is also useful for discussions on the performative
aspects of bodies. I studied this material in my PhD thesis (Sommerland 2012)
in which I started to develop the method demonstrated in this chapter but have
also applied the method to completely different material outside of comics
discourse. In the article “Giving Indra’s daughter a female body: trans-time
gender captivity” (Sommerland 2016), I studied visual traces from an actress,
Ellen Widmann (1894–1985), who played the part of Indra’s daughter in one
of the first performances of August Strindberg’s play A Dream Play, set in
Düsseldorf in 1918. The materials studied in that article were scenography
sketches from the play, photographs of Widmann from her succeeding theatre
performances, and film screenshots from her film career. In this article, I also
discussed the queer body and how gravity affect the boundaries of the female
and human body.
Real is a story where wheelchair basketball is the main theme, and the story
is constructed around visual depictions of movement, direction, and other ele-
ments that Arnheim discusses in the context of visual weight. Arnheim studies
visual weight in the context of composition of one image, for example, a paint-
ing or a sculpture. In the case of comics, there also exists visual weight in the
composition of panels on the page overall. In the following section I will pres-
ent a method for demonstrating how visual weight is depicted, to show how
imagined gravity as a motif represents a force that could be used to discuss
queer bodies in transition. With queer bodies, I mean non-normative bodies
acting outside set limits for identity markers like gender, race, sexuality, and
body normativity in general, bodies in transition. The analyses do not cover all
images in the story and are not centred around the story, even if it affects part
of the interpretation. Two spreads are chosen from Real volume 1. To find
examples of depictions of gravity in this material has not been difficult, and I
undertake a close analysis of the two chosen examples, but they could be
regarded as visual quotes to strengthen the point put forward to demonstrate
the method. Of course, almost all realistic depictions of life include some rep-
resentation of gravity, and in depiction of sport bodies demonstrating forces
attempting to break free from gravity is part of the story. As Arnheim writes:
216 Y. SOMMERLAND
Overcoming the resistance of weight is a fundamental experience of human free-

dom… To spontaneous perception, motion is the characteristic undertaking of
living things, whereas dead things are ineluctably possessed by their heaviness.
(1982, p. 11)
Thus, depictions of realistic life in images are very likely to include gravity as
a motif. Arnheim also points out that gravity is a force that we perceive as pull-
ing mass down, while we rather perceive weight as a property within bodies
that weighs them down (1982).
Figure 1 shows a one-on-one basketball game inside a sports hall from the
first volume of Real. Here the images demonstrate neither a regular wheelchair
basketball game nor a regular basketball game. Figure 2 shows a previous scene
preceding what is happening in Fig. 1. New spaces of basketball games are
performed in these images, where the rules are played with and negotiated dur-
ing the game in transition. The panels read from right to left, as in the Japanese
original.
When applying Arnheim’s concept of visual weight, the examples include a
moment in time when the game stops because several of the rules are broken
affected by imagined gravity and depicted as visual weight. The players fall out
of their wheelchairs to the ground and the ball moves outside of the field that
defines the basketball court into the lap of a spectator (Fig. 1) From reading
Fig. 1 Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1 San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, pp. 54–55
Fig. 2 Inoue, Takehiko. 2008. Real. Vol. 1 San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, pp. 42–43
the whole story, we can also learn in the previous pages that one of the players
is not used to playing in a wheelchair and he has borrowed the wheelchair from
the girl sitting on the floor. He then switches wheelchair with his opponent’s
more advanced wheelchair to “make things fair” in his mind, since he has never
used a wheelchair before (Fig. 2).
The players try to use their energy to catch the ball but lose their balance
and fall to the ground. Gravity is the strongest competitor in this play, even in
the sweat drops that flow on their faces and bodies. In addition to this, the time
of the game stops when the basketball lands on the lap of the girl who is placed
outside the play, as a spectator. The girl holding the ball uses her muscles to
stop gravity from moving it. This is not visible in the image other than the
formation of her hands and fingers round the shape of the ball. This is not part
of what frames the basketball game. Instead, this scene takes place in a space
and time where the sport performance has paused for a moment. But in oppo-
sition to the other images, this panel includes parallel horizontal lines crossed
by some vertical ones, creating right angles.
The centre is placed in the circle forming the ball in the girl’s lap. In the
other panels the circular centres are found in the speech balloons that rather
could be described as speech suns, since they are shaped like a circle with beams
that recall sun beams. The text in these circles are interjections, in fact all texts
included in Fig. 1 are interjections or onomatopoeic words.
Before this scene described here in Fig. 1, one of the players is playing bas-
ketball standing up against the person in wheelchair. To start a fair game, he
218 Y. SOMMERLAND
suggests they both play sitting. The person sitting on the floor is the owner of
one of the wheelchairs but must give it up for the play and just sit and watch
(Fig. 2). There are thus three bodies in the scene.
Some of the depicted bodies are not able to use the muscles in their legs to
move. Instead, they use their arms and a wheelchair to perform the game and
contest gravity. They perform basketball sitting down, but the goal that defines
this sport is to invest energy in the ball that pushes it in an intended direction.
In the wheelchair game they let the ball rest in their lap before bouncing it to
the ground and then use all their energy in their arms for pushing their bodies
in the direction of the basket where they will throw the ball and it is intended
to land, fall to the ground, and stop the game, to reach the goal—the centre of
the game. Speed lines depict the vertical force being exerted to move the bod-
ies while competing against both the opposing player and competing against
gravity. The act of resisting the fall of body mass to the pull of gravity involves
the impact of muscles at work and sweat pressing out of pores keeping their
body temperatures intact. This works as a sign of contesting gravity but also
indicates the human part of their cyborg bodies. There are no sweat drops
pouring from the wheelchairs.
The visual weight and imagined gravity are shown with several different key
features. Thicker and more densely hatched lines mark the floor as one centre
of gravity, or perhaps the main centre in which direction the drawn falling mass
is pulled. We see the two bodies falling out of their wheelchairs and the power
of gravitational pull is also shaped by the placement of circles or round forms
depicting different motifs. The two circles we interpret as heads are facing too
close to the floor, and the fall is strengthened by the depictions of wheels spin-
ning over their bodies. There are a number of other details that amplify the
drama of bodies giving in to the force of gravity, the sweat drops, tensed mus-
cles, radiating lines and onomatopoeic words connoting hard sounds, and
speech balloons in the form of circles surrounded by beams, expressing inter-
jections (Fig. 1). Gravity is also shown in the girl sitting on the floor (Fig. 2)
and the ball landing in her lap (Fig. 1). Her legs and the ball are drawn without
any counterforce towards gravity and seem still and immobile. (Figs. 1 and 2).
In contrast to this she spins the ball on her finger, and in the scene her smile
plays a significant role as a symbol of life force and will to live, as a victorious
gyroscopic protest against the force of gravity to end the game and even life
(Fig. 2). Gravity is also very present in their clothes and how the cloth falls on
their bodies.
These images show bodies fighting and falling that are cyborgs pulled down
by an imagined gravity and queer bodies because they depict marginalized
images of human bodies that are not represented in Art History. They move
their bodies in queer ways that disqualify them from a regular basketball game
standing up. Gravity keeps them from standing or running, because they do
not have muscles in their legs to resist. However, in this manga it is the “nor-
mal” body and the way to play the game. If we return to Caillois’ criteria for
play, the rules are unique and set up for this particular time and space. This is
one of the main purposes of using a queer method, to shift focus on what is
“normal” and seeking to include more visual representations of human bodies
in a queer archive of Art History. The characters have all found themselves in a
space where they are lost and found in transition outside the “natural” body
and the “normal” way of living their lives, when the rules they are used to
don’t apply to their bodies anymore.
What then is the counterforce to gravity and weight in the images? A reoc-
curring motif in Real is a panel depicting the sky and some clouds in the fore-
ground. A calm space compared to the more dramatic depictions of the
struggles of sport games. It is also common that these cloud images include
text that reflects the inner thoughts of a character. Skies, clouds, stars, and
thoughts seem like obvious examples of forces free from gravity and weight,
with floating and flying capacities. This could be compared to thought bubbles
common in Euro-American comics that are cloud shaped. In one of the panels
in Real, that showing a cloudy sky, there exists only one black cloud. In English
the term gravity also means seriousness, as in the quote from Sedgwick above.
The word has its etymology in Latin “gravis” meaning “heavy” and “gravitas”,
meaning “weight”. Other words, similar in many languages, sprung from the
same Latin root include, for example, “gravid” and “grave”. Play is an antonym
to gravity, but still sport is very serious. A cloud can be gravid with rain, a black
cloud that eventually will have to give in to gravity and let the rain fall. There
are several centres in these pictures. In Fig. 1 one obvious centre is the girl
smiling and spinning the ball and after that then throwing it out of reach, out-
side the space of the play. This scene is ended with a panel showing a sky full of
light clouds. The smile is also a strong counterforce to gravity both in the
meaning of contesting the gravitational pull and in the meaning of seriousness
and lighting up a heavy mind.
Greetings to Rudolf Arnheim from the (Queer?) Future

Rudolph Arnheim’s theory of ‘visual weight’ has been a support when analys-
ing queer bodies in images. With visual weight, it has been possible to demon-
strate how bodies are categorised and framed in a visual composition. This has
functioned as a method for discussing depiction of the limits of human bodies
in comics framed by visual representations of human/machine, the cyborg, as
well as how the rules in sport define the limitations and the possibilities of
human bodies. The challenging of gravity was studied here in sport manga,
where flying material, like balls in the air and human bodies lifting from the
ground are in focus, and falling objects mark a disruption in time and the flow
of the story, where moving objects are the sign of action. In fantasy manga, or
superhero comics, the flying body is a significant and well-known reoccurring
figure (Bukatman 2003). As well as being almost a trope for the superhero in
comics, it is a common motif in Art History in a larger context, for example, in
religious motifs, where, as a sign for God not being constrained by the rules of
220 Y. SOMMERLAND
gravity and a visual representation of the transcendent, bodies are depicted,

floating, flying, or falling (Edwards and Bailey 2012).
Comics are a queer zone because it is a zone where almost anything can be
imagined and as Caillois states “it is a free unreality” (1961, pp. 9–10). But as
Arnheim argues, this unreality must be perceptually imagined into an image
that makes sense or a “make-believe”. His argument that thinking is not just
words, but thinking in images is as important, is interesting for analysing com-
ics. The queer perspective is made explicable when using the imagined gravity
to study body normativity. It is these visual perceptions that help us form a
motif in a composition and words guide us in a certain direction and function
as an amplifier, especially onomatopoeic expressions common in comic images.
Our visual perception of human bodies form patterns or compositions from
previous experiences. The queer body is not queer anymore the more often it
is exposed to our sight. To sum up, how did it work to combine an art historian
from the twentieth century and his theories on visual perception with a queer
method? When I read the introduction to Arnheim’s The Power of the Centre,
his text echoed to me in the future in a queer way. He writes:
A technical matter of diction requires mention here, namely my unwillingness to

supplement masculine pronouns with feminine ones… Now that the masculine
pronouns, which have always been “unmarked”, as the linguists say, are in the
process of becoming marked, we can expect our language to supply us soon with
terms that embrace both genders equally. (Arnheim 1982, pp. xi–xii)
As a final point, here are my greetings from the future to you, Rudolf
Arnheim, queer theory and queer activism, has supplied us with these terms
and the option to use them when found necessary.
Notes
1. For further discussion of the importance of an interdisciplinary approach Cf.
Wallin Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach
to Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist
Comics”, and Roan chapter “What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture
Studies, and Comics Studies”.
2. For further discussion of Arnheim’s work and its relevance to, and influence on,
Comics Studies Cf. Miers chapter “Psychologies of Perception: Stories of
Depiction”.
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PART IV
Comics for/Beyond Art History

Afrofuturism and Animism as Method: Art
History and Decolonisation in Black Panther
Danielle Becker
Abstract Art Historians have, since the late twentieth century, grappled with
the discipline’s origins as a nineteenth-century Western European discourse
enmeshed in the epistemological context of European colonisation. As a result,
there have been a variety of tactics employed to shift art-historical discourse
away from its parochial origins, expand its objects deemed worthy of study and
diversify its methodologies. The strands of this attempted shift have tended to
focus on a decolonisation of the discipline through the expansion of cultural or
geographical location or expansion through a focus on material from the realm
of popular culture. However, attempts to make these changes to Art History
have, primarily, focused on including previously neglected content as opposed
to looking at potential methodologies for the creation of new discursive frame-
works, such as a specifically African Art History. With this in mind, this chapter
presents a case study analysis of Black Panther in both its film and comic book
manifestation with the aim of understanding how the frameworks of animism
and Afrofuturism can be used as potentially decolonial methodologies. The
film and comic are analysed as works of visual culture whose use of African
cultural material through the lens of animism and Afrofuturism provides an
epistemological framework for the decolonisation of Art History.
Keywords African Art History • Decolonisation • Afrofuturism • Animism

• Art historiography
D. Becker (*)
Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_12
226 D. BECKER
Introduction
This chapter discusses Art History from a historiographic perspective so as to
gain an understanding of the challenges the discipline poses to epistemic decol-
onisation and how the methodological approach of Afrofuturism used in the
Black Panther film and recent comic book iterations may present a tool for such
decoloniality. In what follows I will outline the perception of Western Art
History as an ideological apparatus that has led to the unequal distribution of
the label ‘art’ among cultures, classes and racial groups on a global scale. This
moves on to a brief discussion of how the classification of material culture
through the discipline of Art History has impacted the way in which both
African artworks and global contemporary forms, such as comics, may be per-
ceived. Having established the perception of cultural value conferred through
Western Art History, I begin a discussion of Afrofuturism and animism as
methodologies before moving on to a case study analysis of the character of
Black Panther as he appears in comic and film form. The chapter concludes
with a look at what these methods may offer the discipline of Art History and
what they might contribute to its decolonisation.
The Discipline of Art History and Its Decolonisation

Art History is a discipline whose origins and development have been inter-
twined with the history of European modernity and in turn Western European
colonialism. It is also a discipline whose power to determine the value of mate-
rial culture has spread across the globe from its geographical origins in Western
Europe. This epistemological spread has had an immense effect on the way in
which objects and visual material are, and have been, perceived. As a dominant
discourse, Western European Art History has historically had the power to
decide which objects among the world’s material culture can be given the label
of ‘art’ (imbued with its correlative perceived value) and which cannot. In
short this has manifested, historically, in objects of Western cultural origin
being described as art and objects from other cultures for example, African
cultures, being described as craft, artefact or material culture.
I want to focus on two, intertwined effects of using the term ‘art’ and its
distribution: the effect on perceptions of culture and race, and the effects on
perceptions of class. It is on both these counts that Art History as a discipline
has been asked to change. Art History has been asked to include a greater
range of visual material and objects so as to disrupt the perception that it is
elitist and based on class prejudice. This is where the use of art-historical dis-
course to study comics becomes relevant. Art History has also been asked to
include a wider range of cultural production so as to decolonise its discourse
and its ideological apparatus. This in turn points us in the direction of Art
History being used to study African art and African cultural production or,
rather, the creation of an African art-historical discourse. The unequal distribu-
tion of the label ‘art’ has, as mentioned, had an impact on the way in which
AFROFUTURISM AND ANIMISM AS METHOD: ART HISTORY AND DECOLONISATION… 227
particular cultures (which in the Western colonial system became linked to

conceptions of race) have been valued historically, as well as how cultural pro-
duction is linked to perceptions of class. One of the primary ways in which
civilisations were distinguished, in Western thought, from cultural groups sup-
posedly lacking civilisation was in the perceived lack of objects that could fit
within the definition of ‘art’. Objects that were not ‘art’ were defined as ‘craft’
or ‘artefact’ and were expected to occupy different spaces and positions in the
value hierarchy. Western Art History or Art History that draws on historical
European art is, in other words, a pervasive epistemology that has, through
centuries of colonisation and globalisation, become discursively dominant.
In this sense Art History belongs to a Western epistemological system that
has become globalised. This becomes clear when one looks at the material
taught at universities across the globe. In South Africa, for example, Western
Art History was transplanted into the settler colonial state during the apartheid
period, so that students up to the present day receive a large amount of Western
content and very little African Art History, particularly when it comes to his-
torical African material. Even in the later decades of the twentieth century,
many departments at South African universities included no historical or con-
temporary African content in art-historical curricula (Nettleton 2006,
pp. 54–55). This slowly began to shift in the post-apartheid period, and a
greater focus was placed on contemporary African and South African art in the
curriculum at many universities, though still with a heavy focus on Western
material (Nettleton 2006). The relative lack of African content and method-
ologies in the curriculum at South African universities is in part what catalysed
the student protests that began in 2015 under the banner of Rhodes Must Fall
and later Fees Must Fall. These student movements drew a number of strands
of discontent together and asked for both physical access to universities
(through a waiver of fees) and epistemological access through an increase in
African content in the curriculum. As such the term decolonisation was pushed
to the forefront of discourse and has become the primary theme in the years
since the protests. In contemporary South Africa the term decolonisation has
been used to refer to the transformation of space, epistemology and ideology
from one dominated and created by the Anglo-American/Western European
system to one resonating with the non-West, the Global South or, most specifi-
cally, a localised Afrocentric vision.1 There is an effort to decolonise the curri-
cula at South African universities, particularly in the humanities and social
sciences. For Art History this means shifting towards more African art (histori-
cal and contemporary), but there is also the sense that the art-historical meth-
odologies employed to study material need to find an African or at least
non-Western counterpart so that the shift is not merely an inclusion of African
content within an existing Western discipline.
Apart from the drive to decolonise art-historical curricula and epistemolo-
gies, decolonisation also seeks to decolonise the museum. The Western museum
is being asked, for example, to decolonise by returning African art works to
their countries of geographical and cultural origin.2 The movement of the
228 D. BECKER
works constitutes an act of decolonisation in a physical sense but also in an

ideological sense as it changes the object’s status from anthropological ‘arte-
fact’ to ‘art’ and in so doing increases its perceived cultural value.
There has also been a movement towards decolonising the art-historical cur-
riculum internationally. Following on from the student movements in South
Africa, students at other universities, such as those at Oxford University and at
University College London, began to demand that the content of their studies
be rethought in relation to colonial epistemological bias (Grant and Price
2020). This in turn made the need to radically change the discipline of Art
History a more urgent quest. The impetus to decolonise follows on from an
earlier acknowledgement by scholars that Art History needs to move away
from its parochial beginnings to an international outlook. There has been an
acknowledgement, since the late-twentieth century, that Art History is formed
by its own epistemological bias and as such the application of its disciplinary
framework to contexts outside of its point of origin in Western Europe are at
best fraught and at worst a continuation of colonial hegemony.3
Such an acknowledgement, that the global distribution of Art History is tied
to colonialism, has begun to change the historiographical understanding of the
discipline itself and has led to what is now known as the ‘global turn’ (D’Souza
and Casid 2014). In James Elkin’s edited collection Is Art History Global?,
Chika Okeke-Angulu proposes that the globalisation of Art History either
means the adoption of Western models or the rise of “several, parallel or con-
tradictory, art historical models and methodologies” that allow for a diversity
of views rather than different yet subordinate perspectives (Okeke-Agulu in
Elkins 2007, pp. 206–207). The ‘global turn’ in Art History had, until the
student movements of 2015, focused on the method of inclusion into the
existing Western model. Writing more recently in response to questions posed
by Grant and Price in Art History, James Elkins asks if what is required is some-
thing more radical: a “deconstruction of colonial heritage and reconceptualiza-
tion of art history” that results in something new that does not ‘look like’ the
colonial version at all (Elkins in Grant and Price 2020, pp. 22–23). In other
words, there is now an acknowledgement that the decolonisation of the art-
historical curriculum needs to be wary of the process of assimilation that
appears to have been operating since the latter part of the twentieth century.
Debates have moved to a question of creating different methodologies and
multiple Art Histories rather than broadening the existing discourse through
inclusion. Writing in 2009, Freeborn Odiboh maintains that Art History in
Africa can be decolonised and Africanised if a discipline is created with a new
nomenclature and methodology rather than a replication of an existing Western
system (Odiboh 2009).
To differentiate, in the case of an African Art History, has the danger of
being nullified by ideological power if the differentiated phenomena is absorbed
in an effort to tame its difference. For Homi Bhabha, importance lies in dif-
ferentiation without dominance so that ‘cultural difference’ is the “attempt to
dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in
the moment of differentiation” (Bhabha 2012, p 51). This moment of differ-

entiation in turn creates the risk of ‘assimilation’, in the sense described by
Michel Foucault, where a differentiated and subordinated epistemology is
absorbed within the canon (Foucault 1977). In relation to these difficulties,
universities have, on an international scale, been attempting to broaden their
curricula beyond the engrained Western model. Abiodun Akande writes that
Nigeria and Ghana, like most African countries, had art-historical curricula that
were based on the Western model during the colonial period and that despite
attempts to shift this focus there has not been an adequate shift in the
“Eurocentric learning experiences” (Akande 2017, p. 2). Looking at the cur-
riculum at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and Kwame Nkurumah
University in Ghana, Akande notes that there is still a pervasive domination of
European or Western content and methodologies (2017). Akande goes on to
propose a new curriculum that will significantly increase the African or ‘indig-
enous’ focus while still providing for some focus on European material and
allowing students to learn “from the ‘known’ to the ‘unknown,’ thus making
indigenous art-history experiences count as prerequisites to art histories of
Europe and other foreign regions” (2017, p. 11). Akande’s analysis provides
an example of the contemporary state of art-historical decolonisation, which is
replicated in South Africa, where attempts to decolonise have largely resulted
in a process of including African material into the existing Western model. This
is in line with the increasing disciplinary linkage between Art History and
Visual Studies which is also modelled on the notion that ‘traditional’ Art
History can be changed through the inclusion of a broader range of material,
rather than creating a new discipline of African Art History using African
methodologies.
Art History, Visual Studies and Comics

Decolonising Art History proposes a change in the discipline that draws on
earlier and on-going calls to shift the focus of the academic frame. Prior to the
global turn mentioned above, there was an attempt from the 1970s to broaden
the range of visual material studied within Art History so as to include images
from popular culture, film and indeed any set of images which were seen to
allow for an understanding of the culture from which they came. A range of
new disciplines emerged to address the exclusions in Art History’s object of
study. These included Cultural Studies, studies in Material Culture, Film
Studies, Image Studies, Bildwissenschaft and, later, Visual Studies or Visual
Culture Studies.4 What has since become known as Visual Studies or Visual
Culture Studies has at its base the notion that our ideological frameworks are
structured in part through visual images. As Nicholas Mirzoeff notes, “visuality
and its visualizing of history are part of how the ‘West’ historicizes and distin-
guishes itself from its others” (2011, p. xiv). Mirzoeff goes on to acknowledge
that the dismissal of the discipline of ‘art history’ in favour of “visual culture
studies” is therefore not only an attempt to enlarge the field of analysis but a
230 D. BECKER
movement very much aligned with a questioning of Western and patriarchal

cultural authority (2011).5 In this sense moving away from Art History towards
Visual Studies has been perceived as an appropriate strategy to acknowledge
the Western nature of the discourse. The move away from Art History towards
Visual Studies is also based on the perception that Art History has historically
been elitist and that it needs to acknowledge its bias not only in terms of cul-
ture and race but also in terms of class. The ‘elitism’ of Art History is inter-
twined in its value system, which I would like to outline below. It is this value
system that did not allow for the study of material such as comics prior to the
1960s and 1970s.
Western Art History has made a distinction between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ by
privileging objects believed to have no utilitarian function over those that are
seen to be purely functional. In his lauded text The Invention of Art, Larry
Shiner traces the evolution of the term ‘art’ and describes the social and eco-
nomic circumstances which led to its current meaning. Shiner reminds the
reader that there was a time in European history when ‘art’ was a term used to
denote any kind of human skill and that it was during the eighteenth century
that a kind of splitting occurred, resulting in the term ‘fine art’ on the one side
armed with its associations of genius and ‘popular art’ or ‘craft’ on the other
with the devalued characteristic of skill (Shiner 2001, p. 5). The term ‘art’ was
elevated almost to the point of spiritual worship, while ‘craft’ or ‘popular art’
was increasingly relegated to the inconsequential. The distinction between ‘art’
and ‘craft’ came into existence as a polarity between objects that carried mean-
ing and objects that were created for utility (Shiner 2001, p. 6). It was not only
everyday objects that were deemed to be ‘functional’ within Art History’s lexi-
con but also objects and images from popular culture which were seen as ‘func-
tional’ in their explicit intention to sell. Despite the evolution within the
Western art system towards a distinction between art as an aesthetic or ‘mean-
ingful’ creation and craft as functional, and its supposed rejection by modern
and contemporary artists, the global contemporary art market still relies rather
heavily on this divide.
Western Art History has denied the study of objects and images from popu-
lar culture because it has held that art should be separated from social life. The
distinction of ‘contemporary art’ as the category of objects and practices with
the highest value in visual culture relies on Western notions of ‘high art’ as
being distinct from commercial ‘popular culture’ and ‘craft’. This distinction
has its roots in the nineteenth-century German origins of Art History as a for-
malised academic discipline. Frederic Schwartz notes that Heinrich Wölfflin
“sought to isolate form in order to establish the discipline of art history as
scientific and autonomous” (Schwartz 1999, p. 9). He goes on to argue that
this need to transform Art History into a pseudo-science came largely as a reac-
tion to the beginnings of capitalist mass culture and that “style was understood
quite explicitly as the nature of visual form under pre-capitalist conditions of
culture” so that ‘high art’ and ‘style’ could be seen as the opposition to ‘popu-
lar culture’ and ‘fashion’ (Schwartz 1999, p. 14). It is this separation of ‘high
art’ from the categories of craft and popular culture that became entrenched by
the time that the academic discipline of Art History came into being.
Connected to the notion that art must be separate from social life is the
ideological view that objects and images need to deny their status as commodi-
ties in order to gain the appellation ‘art’. Again, this has not always been the
case within Western Art History, as Renaissance artists produced paintings for
patrons to order in a system where the production of art was what art historian
Michael Baxandall called, “the deposit of a social relationship”, which can be
defined as primarily commercial even when it pertained to religious altar-pieces
(Baxandall 1988). By the eighteenth century, however, a shift had occurred.
According to Gotthold Lessing, ‘art’ was said to be created for some kind of
internal aesthetic content (beauty made for itself), while craft was created with
an external purpose (Lessing 1958). Artisans were seen to be those who
engaged in trade, while artists were characterised by genius and a desire to cre-
ate that went beyond trade in commodities, despite the fact that artist’s works
were also for sale. Shiner describes this as a shift from ‘concrete labour’ to
‘abstract labour’ where “the work of fine art is literally ‘priceless,’ its actual
price set by the artist’s reputation and the buyer’s desire and willingness to
pay” (Shiner 2001, p. 127). What emerged in the Western art system from the
late eighteenth century onwards was a market system based on commodities
and emerging capitalism. Although art exists within the market economy and
can have a very high monetary value, its perceived value relies on the notion
that it is not created for sale and as such exists in a separate, haloed realm.
The Western art system also focuses on individual authorship as conferring
value upon objects and images. A Western conception of ‘artworks’ as neces-
sarily being associated with individual creators, as opposed to a collective
(which often defines both popular culture, design and craft), has its roots in the
Renaissance period in Europe and more specifically in writing such as Giorgio
Vasari’s Lives of the most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in which he
details the individual achievements of artists like Leonardo, Raphael and
Michelangelo as most successfully approximating a ‘universal’ aesthetic ideal of
naturalism (Vasari in Holt 1958).6 While artist collectives functioning in an
apprenticeship-style system continued throughout Europe, and define the
workings of many artists within the Western canon, it was the individual name
of the artist that began to determine value. In the sense of copyright,7 a
‘Western’ understanding of authorship as a singular relationship “ …in which a
text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it” means that
creations by singular authors are privileged and structurally entrenched by
powerful sanctioning bodies as more valuable (Foucault in Preziosi 2009).
In summary, Western art is perceived to be valuable if it is perceived to have
some distance from functionality and utility; it functions in a sphere distinct
from everyday life and as such can be found in the gallery or museum; it appears
to exist outside of the capitalist market system and is recorded as the work of
an individual author. All of these attributes do not apply easily to comics, and
it is for these reasons that the study of comics has existed outside of traditional
232 D. BECKER
Art History and required the disciplinary shift towards Visual Studies and
related disciplines such a Film Studies or Image Studies in order to be included
in a mainstream sense. Comics, despite being aesthetic texts, are perceived to
have a function in the sense that they are read in the same manner as books. In
drawing on popular culture and fantasy, comics are perceived to operate within
everyday life rather than outside of it. As such, comics do not pretend to exist
outside of a capitalist market system as they are for sale as commodities and are
in turn often openly authored by multiple people rather than a singular ‘genius’
artist. It is through the lens of Visual Studies and the more specialised disci-
pline of Comic Studies that comics have been studied academically.
It is here that I want to begin a discussion of my case study. As an academic
discipline, Art History has been pushed to acknowledge its epistemological
bias: its ideological link to a parochial European beginning and a disciplinary
height that coincides with colonialism. In attempting to include material such
as non-Western art and the material we now call visual culture (such as films)
previously excluded from its historical frameworks, Art History has tended
towards the tactic of inclusion rather than the creation of alternative method-
ological systems. As a film based on a comic that champions African content
and Afrocentric discourse, Black Panther (2018), and the comic book creation
of the Black Panther character, provide an opportunity to reflect on how a
decolonial Art History might study comics, and, correlatively, how studying
comics/comic-based films that employ methods such as Afrofuturism can shed
light on methodologies for the decolonisation of Art History.
Afrofuturism and Animism

In 2018 the film Black Panther was released to great popular acclaim with
much of the positive critique focusing on the film’s empowering depiction of
black characters; the African-American identity of its writers and director (Ryan
Coogler); its reference to concerns relevant to those in the African diaspora and
its reference to African art and culture. Much of this positive critique is also
based on the notion that Black Panther employs Afrofuturism as a method.
Afrofuturism refers to a more specific form of speculative fiction that deals with
concerns relating to African and African-American people (Dery 1994, p. 180).
As such it was used historically to refer to fantasy elements employed by artists
and musicians such as the African-American Sun Ra who rose to fame in the
1950s through his development of a mythical persona that drew on ancient
Egyptian culture and references to futuristic outer space. In this sense, and
importantly for this chapter, Afrofuturism seeks to provide a discourse that
bends linear time by using African references to the past so as to imagine the
future. Others have pointed out that this dislocation can take on a political ele-
ment because it counters the colonial idea that African culture represents some
kind of living past, while European or Western culture and ‘civilisation’ repre-
sent the present and future. The idea that Afrofuturism could provide an alter-
native epistemology that works against colonial thought was written about by
Kodwo Eshun who emphasises Afrofuturism’s intentional and necessary dislo-

cation of time as an attempt to create both counter-memories and counter-
futures to contest the colonial archive (2003).
In writing on epistemologies and the colonial characterisation of Africa,
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe emphasises the dichotomising system that emerged
though the colonial world view and was subsequently projected onto existing
African (and other) knowledge systems (Mudimbe 1988). This dichotomising
system perceived constructed dichotomies such as ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’
as having a temporal logic: as there being a need to evolve from the one to the
other. In other words, modernity has been positioned against that which is
deemed ‘traditional’, and the traditional has been relegated to the static past.
As Harry Garuba points out, Africa became, from the perspective of this colo-
nial value system, the ultimate opposition to the modern, the civilised and the
rational:
it was in this process of disciplinisation and the creation of disciplinary structures

of knowledge that Africa fell out of the boxes and landed in the domain of anthro-
pology … [and that] many of the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences,
being disciplines of modernity, were invariably defined in opposition to Africa –
African animism, African irrationality, African orality, etc. In short, Africa was the
ultimate sign of the non-modern that was not available to disciplinary attention,
except within the domain of anthropological knowledge. (Garuba 2012, p. 45)
For Garuba the system of thought perceived to be in opposition to the mod-

ern, colonial world view can be placed under the notion of animism or an ani-
mist unconscious. Drawing an African system of thought together under the
term ‘animism’ is both a way to describe a colonial view of the ‘African other’
(as a Western construction) and a reclamation of the term in order to provide
a common thread for a range of subaltern knowledge systems. In an earlier
article Garuba describes animism as a spiritual philosophy where “animist gods
and spirits are located and embodied in objects: the objects are the physical and
material manifestations of the gods and spirits” (Garuba 2003, p. 267). Even
without the reference to spirituality, animism can be said to describe an order
of knowledge that focuses on the symbolic meaning afforded to the material
world (natural and man-made). Animism, through a disruption of the Cartesian
boundary between subject and object, works against the modernist conception
of isolated subjects through a focus on material symbolism and embodied
meaning (Garuba 2013, p. 43). As the metaphorical sign of the non-modern
for the colonial order, animism is perceived by Garuba to offer a useful frame
for “a different regime of knowledge, freed of the dualisms of the modern”
that may, in a process of reclamation, offer a relevant epistemological ground-
ing for African knowledge systems (2013, p. 45).
If we place the animist regime of knowledge alongside the modern Western
system, there are particular elements that stand out and are useful for this dis-
cussion that attempts to theoretically link Art History, decoloniality,
234 D. BECKER
Afrofuturism and animism. The first element in this animist world view is that
of accommodation or a flexible philosophy that readily allows for assimilation
and appropriation. Wole Soyinka describes this “attitude of accommodation”
in relation to African deities which, he says, “deny the existence of impurities
or ‘foreign’ matter, in the god’s digestive system” (1976, pp. 53–54). This
ability and desire to assimilate new material or apparently contradictory views
into existing epistemologies is what Garuba describes as a continual re-
enchantment of the world through a process in which the “rational and scien-
tific are appropriated and transformed into the mystical and magical” (2003,
p. 267). While this process of spiritualising objects may be described as appro-
priation or accommodation, it is also a subversion of the modernist logic of
binary opposition which wants to pit the scientific against the spiritual, the
traditional against the modern and the past against the present (2003, p. 270).
Animism instead allows these elements to exist together. This perspective also
works against the notion of the original so emphasised in art-historical dis-
course during the process of Western modernisation as it denies the linear logic
of a singular, hermetically sealed work of art whose conception exists within the
logic of copyright. The notion of the original loses its power when material
objects and artworks are allowed to continually and self-consciously absorb
additional elements.
The second element of animism that I want to emphasise here is the creation
of a conception of time that is not linear, positivist or progressive and accepts
the apparent discordance and the “complex embeddedness of different tempo-
ralities” (Garuba 2013, p. 49). In this sense animism perceives the world as
having multiple temporalities rather than one linear progression. This puts it in
opposition to the perception of time emphasised in Enlightenment thought
and utilised by canonical Western Art History which places all of material real-
ity into linear movements and is framed by the logic of cultural progression.
Garuba emphasises that this conception of temporality exists within many ani-
mist cultures and as such refers to it as “subaltern time” so as to nod towards
the manner in which it provides an other to the colonial modern that “simul-
taneously constitutes and haunts the modern” (2003, p. 281, p. 45).
These elements allow for a fruitful overlap between Afrofuturism as genre,
philosophy and cultural aesthetic and the animist epistemology described by
Garuba and others. Afrofuturism seeks to dissolve the modernist temporal
logic and instead perceives it as “plastic, stretchable and prophetic … a tech-
nologized time, in which past and future are subject to ceaseless de-and recom-
position” (Fisher 2013, p. 47). This fits well within an animist world view that
allows, as Garuba has emphasised, the malleable view of philosophy. Here both
animism and Afrofuturism oppose colonial discourse and a Western binary
logic by maintaining and enjoying the tension between oppositional temporali-
ties, philosophies and material manifestations. Afrofuturism can be perceived as
a cultural method that sits within a broader animist world view and, as is most
relevant for this chapter, emphasises the undoing of linear temporality.
Black Panther
Manipulating temporality through an Afrofuturist perspective is described by
Nomusa Makhubu as a radical return to the past in order to engage in a process
of change for the future (2016, p. 300). Makhubu looks at Nollywood video-
film and its use of the fantastic in relation to historical African cultural tradi-
tions, and proposes the use of the term ‘labyrinthine time’ to describe the
performance of “fantastic concepts of past, current and future time simultane-
ously” (2016, p. 301). Here, the use of historical forms or references to cul-
tural traditions through the fantastic becomes an act of political reclamation of
a history denied or abused by colonial logic. The film version of Black Panther
(2018) and its acclaimed references to African cultural traditions manipulates
temporality in an Afrofuturist manner.8 Much of this is based on references to
its comic book predecessors as discussed below.
The comic book character Black Panther premiered as Marvel’s first black
superhero to appear in mainstream American comics in Fantastic Four #52–53
in July 1966. The fictional character was created as writer Stan Lee and artist
Jack Kirby’s response to the civil rights movement that was gaining traction in
the United States of America in the 1960s, yet the Black Panther name pre-
dates the founding of the Black Panther Party in October 1966. Following his
debut, the Black Panther character made appearances in a number of Marvel
comics including Captain America #100 (January–April 1968) and The
Avengers #52. The character received his first starring feature in Jungle Action
#5 (July 1973) and went on to star in the Jungle Action series which ran
between 1973 and 1976 (#6–24). The series was written by Don McGregor
from 1973 who explicitly wanted to pull the Jungle Action title away from a
host of racist and sexist stereotypes that he believed were hopelessly outdated.
McGregor reinvigorated the series so that it not only nodded to the fictional
African nation of Wakanda but included predominantly African characters and
provided far more detail on the context of Wakanda itself. From issue #10
onwards (1974–1976), the Jungle Action (Black Panther) comic had its art-
work created by Billy Graham who had previously worked on Marvel’s Luke
Cage series: the first black character to appear as a title character within the
Western comics industry. Graham was himself African-American and was the
first black artist to work on a Black Panther comic for Marvel. Black Panther
ran as a series centred on the superhero for 15 issues (January 1977–May
1979). There was also a Black Panther mini-series (July–October 1988); an
instalment within the anthology series Marvel Comics Presents which ran in
issues #13–37 (February–December 1989); the miniseries Black Panther:
Panther’s Prey (September 1990–March 1991); The Black Panther vol. 3
(1998); Black Panther vol. 4 which ran 41 issues between April 2005 and
November 2008; Black Panther vol. 5 (February 2009); and a spin off from
Daredevil with issue #513 titled Black Panther: The Man Without Fear
(February 2011).
236 D. BECKER
As a character, Black Panther embodies a classic superhero who has incred-

ible physical and intellectual powers that, arguably, outperform many others
within the Marvel universe. Black Panther is often depicted as having extreme
physical strength and agility far beyond his enemies. Visually the character’s
black, skin-tight suit reveals a body whose muscular form has been pushed
towards the limit of fantasy.
The Black Panther character is also depicted over a variety of his comic
appearances as having enviable intelligence as he is often shown to have
invented new technological breakthroughs. This is in line with the conception
of the nation of Wakanda over which he rules as being a community posing as
the stereotype of a primitive African tribe while in fact harbouring technologi-
cal advancements far beyond the rest of the world’s capacity. In Fig. 1 from
2011 we see T’Challa, the Black Panther and King of Wakanda as the inventor
of a flying suit for The Falcon, the first African-American superhero who
appeared in Marvel’s Captain America in 1969. T’Challa is shown wearing a
white coat in the midst of machinery so that he appears as a scientist. Both the
chief character of Black Panther and the fictional nation of Wakanda take on,
Fig. 1 Jonathan Maberry (writer), Phil Winslade (penciller). Captain America: Hail
Hydra, Issue #3 (March 2011)
across many of his appearances over the decades, a certain futuristic, other-
worldly and even godly perfection. The aspirational nature of Black Panther
reaches beyond a simple attempt to reverse existing stereotypes of Africa and
Africans as primitive and provides an Afrofuturistic view of a black god-like
character: physically strong yet moral, intelligent yet spiritual, focused on the
future yet rooted in cultural traditions. Perhaps it is the character’s ability to
embody what Western philosophy, with its dichotomous methodology, would
struggle to contain that makes it so appealing to African and African-American
audiences. This “everything at once” superhero may be seen to embody the
animist philosophy that Garuba sees as “a different regime of knowledge, freed
of the dualisms of the modern” ready to accommodate apparent contradictions
(2013, p. 45).
Throughout the development of the Black Panther series as it runs through
the hands of a variety of creators, there is a constant, albeit at different levels,
reference to African traditions. Wakanda has two main elements at its disposal
that confer great power upon it: the use of the powerful and versatile metallic
ore known as vibranium and the concurrent adherence to spiritual traditions
and rituals that activate vibranium’s magical properties. This fact allows Black
Panther comics to artfully engage in a primary characteristic of Afrofuturism
and animism through the combination of scientific and ritualistic elements. In
Fig. 2 we see Black Panther explaining to the Thing in Fantastic Four #53
(1966) that he gains his panther powers through the ingestion of certain herbs
Fig. 2 Stan Lee (writer). Jack Kirby (penciller). Fantastic Four, Issue #53 (August 1966)
238 D. BECKER
and the performance of sacred rituals. In issue #1 of Black Panther: The

Deadliest of the Species (see Fig. 3), the priest or shaman character of Zawavari
speaks to T’Challa/Black Panther about the panther god in a spiritual manner
that emphasises the importance of the people over the individual—a philoso-
phy common among many African cultures.
In 2016 Marvel Comics published a new Black Panther series written by
Ta-Nehisi Coates and drawn by Brian Stelfreeze. This was followed with a sub-
sequent series titled Black Panther: Long Live the King (2017) written by the
Afrofuturist writer Nnedi Okorafor. The key significance of the Black Panther
series written by Coates and then Okorafor is that the authors focus on African
and African-diasporic themes and concerns and were already known for their
innovative and politically incisive writing. Coates is an African-American author
and journalist whose published work deals with the socio-political concerns
relating to being black in America. His first monograph (The Beautiful Struggle,
2008) was a memoir that looked at his relationship with his father who was a
member of the Black Panther political organisation, and his second (Between
the World and Me, 2015) dealt with the history of physical and psychological
violence affecting African-American bodies. As such, when Coates became the
writer for Marvel’s new Black Panther series along with the black artist
Stelfreeze, it began a new era for the Black Panther character and the portrayal
of the superhero. As Arturo Garcia wrote for The Guardian in September
Fig. 3 Reginald Hudlin (writer), Ken Lashley (penciller). Black Panther: The Deadliest
of the Species, Issue #6 (December 2009)
2015, the choice to employ Coates and Stelfreeze came at a time when Marvel
had been criticised for employing too few black writers and artists (Garcia
2015). With the added promise of the new Black Panther film (released in
January 2018) starring Chadwick Boseman, there was a high level of anticipa-
tion for Coates’ work and the potential disruption to the homogeneity of the
comics industry. To follow this with the employment of the Nigerian-American
(or as she prefers, Naijamerican), Okorafor heralded a potentially significant
shift in both the specific arc of the Black Panther narrative and visual represen-
tation within the comics industry in general. Okorafor has been labelled by
others as an Afrofuturist writer for some time, and her work can generally be
described as fantasy or science fiction that draws on African culture, spirituality,
history and mythology. Her novel Lagoon (2014), for example, begins from
the premise that aliens have landed in Lagos and uses Nigerian mythology to
weave together multiple points of view. In her Binti novella trilogy, Okorafor
traces the life of Binti, a Himba woman who is accepted into an intergalactic
university called Oomza Uni where she interacts with various alien species.
Despite having been defined as an Afrofuturist writer, recently Okorafor has
rejected the label and has instead advocated for her own term, Africanfuturism.
She defines Africanfuturism as a “sub-category of science fiction” that is “spe-
cifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and
point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privi-
lege or center the West” (Okorafor 2020, p. iv). This rejection of a given label
not only asserts her autonomy on a personal level but operates as a rejection of
an existing methodology that she perceives as originating in the West in favour
of one that is based in African epistemology. Okorafor’s rejection then is in
some sense analogous to the rejection of other Western epistemological sys-
tems, such as Art History, in favour of a new methodology that not only
‘includes’ new case studies but rather presents knowledge centred in Africa.
This difference, between including new discourse within an existing epistemo-
logical system and acknowledging an existing different system, is in turn what
Garuba and others point to when writing about animism as a frame for a
knowledge system that provides a “spectral other that simultaneously consti-
tutes and haunts the modern” or in other words haunts the parochial frame-
work of enlightenment philosophy and the academic disciplines it has begetted
(Garuba 2013, p. 45). The employment of Okorafor and Coates to write for
Marvel on Black Panther marks an important shift in the comic book charac-
terisation of Black Panther and the manner in which the fantastical universe of
the superhero fits within the decolonisation of cultural material.
Much of the critique of historical Black Panther comics, and indeed criti-
cisms that extended to the more recent film, have pivoted on its use of stereo-
typical images of Africa and African people that corroborate the Western,
colonial perception of Africa as primitive and its people as animalistic and phys-
ically powerful while intellectually weak. In Garuba’s terms the African became,
within colonial ideology, “the ultimate sign of the non-modern”: irrational,
primitive, animist, traditional and so on (Garuba 2012, p. 45). Commentators
240 D. BECKER
on Black Panther (2018) noted that the film continued many of the racist
tropes about Africa and African people that begun with earlier comic versions
of the narrative. As Anna Peppard notes in relation to earlier comics, “depic-
tions of Black Panther’s conflicts with racialized supervillains and animals as
well as his routine depiction within gratuitous spectacles of suffering and bond-
age demonstrate a simultaneous – and occasionally overwhelming – tendency
to appropriate the black body in the service of white desires and anxieties”
(Peppard, 2018, p. 60). The film was perceived to perpetuate the stereotype of
Africa as bound to the realm of the animalistic, as requiring white or white-
sanctioned saviours and of being a space more akin to a homogenous nation
than a large, heterogeneous continent. Similar criticisms have existed about the
older comic book versions of Black Panther which readily show images of a
tribal Africa where animal and human relations merge. In Fig. 4, for example,
we see the introduction of the character known as Madam Slay in the Jungle
Action comic (Issue #18, November 1975) drawn by Billy Graham—the image
falls easily within many existing stereotypes. Madam Slay is surrounded by
leopards, dressed herself in leopard skin and lying in a reclining position that
potentially objectifies her body. The conflation of the animal and the human
potentially reads as both racist and sexist. The Jungle Action series has histori-
cally been the subject of much criticism because of the manner in which it
seems to provide exactly the stereotypical version of Africa that critical theorists
Fig. 4 Don McGregor (writer), Billy Graham (penciller). Jungle Action, issue #18
(November 1975). Showing the introduction of Madame Slay as a character
Fig. 5 Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer), Daniel Acuña (penciller). Black Panther, issue #5
(October 2018)
speak about. Indeed the character of Black Panther himself as a human imbued
with power through an animal potentially speaks to these problematic stereo-
types. Peppard points to the historical depiction of Black Panther as being
“bound up with animals in a kind of intercorporeal exchange across species
lines” and the difference between the white characters who “prove and display
their humanity – and their whiteness – by wearing as little clothing as possible”,
while Black Panther “covers his blackness with an even-blacker animal skin” so
that he become racially overdetermined (2018, p. 69).
More recent versions of Black Panther in comic form continue to use similar
depictions of the character, particularly in the sense of the black costume that
turns T’Challa into the panther. While more recent writers and pencillers have
been lauded for their postcolonial approach to the character, writers such as
Coates and pencillers such as Daniel Acuña continued to push the animal-
human hybridity seen in past iterations of Black Panther. In Fig. 5 we see an
image of Black Panther from issue #5 (2018) where the character’s costume
shows none of his skin and his feline characteristics, such as his claws and facial
features, have been emphasised. Yet despite this, Black Panther under Coates
has received great critical acclaim and a firm following from a black audience.
The nod to the notion of a revolution that brings about a racial and cultural
renaissance for African people in a futuristic sense is felt in both Coates and
Okorafor’s Black Panthers.
For issue #2 of Black Panther under the partnership of Coates and Stelfeeze,
the cover shows a large statue of the panther being pulled down by a group of
citizens who are revolting against T’Challa’s leadership in Wakanda (Fig. 6).
The image appears to reference, somewhat ironically, the South African student
movements of 2015 that had the statue of Cecil John Rhodes removed from
242 D. BECKER
Fig. 6 Ta-Nehisi Coates (writer), Brian Stelfreeze (penciller). Black Panther, issue #2
(May 2016)
the University of Cape Town under the banner of Rhodes Must Fall. This revo-
lutionary movement spread to other parts of the world including the United
States of America where an increasing number of confederate statues were
pulled down in a manner akin to the panther image. While the anti-racist senti-
ments of Rhodes Must Fall and those leading to confederate statue removal
appear to be at odds with the removal of a fictional statue of the Black Panther,
the sentiment of revolution and the critique of institutionalised power is apt.
Black Panther, Afrofuturism, Art History

and Decoloniality
What allows the Black Panther film (2018) and the recent comic book itera-
tions by Coates and Okorafor to read as celebratory nods to Afrofuturism (or
Africanfuturism) rather than examples of a perpetuation of colonial stereotypes
through a neocolonial, capitalist regime? It seems it is the reference to African
traditions, fashions, spirituality, art and other forms of culture in a manner that
does not attempt to protect the past in some kind of museum of authenticity
but rather transports these cultural forms into a fantastical future. The opening
up of a different concept of time and the seamless merging of the scientific with
the spiritual in the recent iterations of the Black Panther narrative allow these
phenomena to sit within the animist philosophy as Garuba describes it, as a
knowledge system embodying the anti-modern or an epistemology that is both
the fetishised Other of Western modernity and its antidote (2013). Herein lies
the core of my argument: that the very exaggeration of African cultural ele-
ments in the Black Panther film as well as Coates and Okorafor’s comic books
pushes these forms beyond the racist trope into the realm of the Afrofuturist
through the animist methodology of accommodation. In other words, when
Coates chooses to focus on Black Panther as a human-animal hybrid, he risks
turning the character into a racial stereotype because of the historical Western
perception and misunderstanding of African spirituality that exists as a result of
colonialism. Yet, to avoid references to African traditions within contemporary
fantasy allows the stereotypes to flourish and remain fetishised. What
Afrofuturism has the potential to do is to reclaim references to African cultural
traditions and push them beyond the racial fetish through the animist method
of circular time or, as Makhubu calls it “labyrinthine time” (2016, p. 301).
It is this methodology employed by Afrofuturist (or perhaps even better,
Africanfuturist) texts that may be useful for the discourse of Art History. If we
see Art History as an ideological apparatus with its origins in Western colonial-
ism and an indelible connection to race, culture and class, then its decolonisa-
tion may not come from the addition of case studies from non-Western material
culture. The decolonisation of Art History requires the acknowledgement of
alternative epistemologies that operate with a different set of art-historical
methods. If the methodology of Afrofuturism and animism is employed within
art-historical discourse, they may offer a means for decolonisation through an
emphasis on the study of historical African forms and the way in which they are
linked to the present. The very analysis of material culture such as comic books
244 D. BECKER
and films rejects Western Art History’s focus on the individually authored work
of art that is positioned outside of popular culture. To study comics that refer-
ence African cultural forms within the discipline of Art History while employ-
ing methodology rooted in African philosophy may in fact be a decolonial act.
Acknowledgement This work was completed during a postdoctoral fellowship at

Stellenbosch University with funding from the Mellon Foundation under the project
The Decolonial Turn: Unsettling Paradigms.
Notes
1. The terminology used to define these geographical and epistemological spaces is
fraught. In their recent book Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Walter
Mignolo and Catherine Walsh refer to concepts originating in ‘Western Europe
and the Anglo United States’ as a way of locating colonial thought in specific
locales (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018: 2).
2. See Oltermann 2021. Germany has agreed to return some of the bronze works
looted from Benin City in 1897 during the British punitive expedition that
became part of the collection of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Thousands
of works from Benin City made their way into European museum collections as a
result of the 1897 looting with the most notable collection being housed in the
British Museum. What is striking about this recent agreement to return work to
present-day Nigeria is that the objects will move from the Ethnological museum
where they have the status of artefacts to the proposed Edo Museum of West
African Art.
3. See, for example, key works on postcolonial Art History such as that of Olu
Oguibe, Partha Mitter, R. Siva Kumar, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, David Craven,
and Okwui Enzewor.
4. Each of these disciplines emerged as a response to what had previously been
excluded in disciplines like Art History and each proposed a specific way of over-
coming art-historical biases and omissions. Each discipline emerged within a spe-
cific cultural and geographical context. Cultural Studies and specifically its British
iteration, for example, maintains a focus on the political dynamics of culture and
was formulated through the work of particular writers such as Stuart Hall.
5. For further discussion of Visual Culture Studies Cf. Roan chapter “What Is an
Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies and Comics Studies” (this volume).
6. For further discussion of Vasari’s Lives, Cf. Yu-Kiener chapter “The Lives of the
Artists”.
7. Martha Woodmansee investigates the effect of this understanding of authorship
and Western notions of intellectual property on law and literature in The
Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (1994).
8. See Afrofuturism and Black Panther (Strong and Chaplin 2019) and issue num-
ber 33 of Image and Text (Karam and Kirby-Hirst 2019) with its articles on Black
Panther.
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What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture
Studies, and Comics Studies
Jeanette Roan
Abstract This chapter considers what Visual Culture Studies can offer to the
study of comics. It begins with a brief overview of the emergence of Visual
Culture Studies and its relationship to Art History, before focusing on how a
broad framing of the object of study and the interdisciplinary methodologies
used by Visual Culture Studies makes it a useful critical framework for the study
of comics. The second half of the chapter engages with Lynda Barry’s explora-
tions of the nature of the image in her works What It Is and Syllabus. Barry’s
work is seen as a theory of the image in its own right, rather than an object to
be analysed by theories of visual culture or an illustration of an existing theory.
Instead, her contemplation of the image is situated within an interest in the
presence of the image within Visual Culture Studies, and it is juxtaposed with
Hans Belting’s An Anthropology of Images as one example of what a Visual
Culture Studies approach to the study of comics might yield.
Keywords Visual Culture Studies and comics • Art History and Visual
Culture Studies • Interdisciplinarity • Image • Lynda Barry • Hans Belting
J. Roan (*)
California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, USA
e-mail: jroan@cca.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_13
248 J. ROAN
Introduction: Visual Culture Studies and Art History

In a volume dedicated to the question of what Art History can offer to the
study of comics, what is the place of a chapter on Visual Culture Studies? In
order to answer this question, and furthermore to determine what Visual
Culture Studies might offer comics scholarship, it is necessary to revisit the his-
tory of Art History and Visual Culture Studies. After an overview of the emer-
gence of Visual Culture Studies, this chapter will highlight two aspects of this
practice that are particularly relevant to comics scholarship: How Visual Culture
Studies defines its object of study, and its interdisciplinary methodologies. The
second half of the chapter will present an exploration of Lynda Barry’s theory
of the image from a Visual Culture Studies perspective, followed by a conclud-
ing reflection on methodology.
First, what exactly is Visual Culture Studies? Douglas Crimp wrote,
“Cultural studies, visual culture, and visual studies are often used interchange-
ably in the current debates, although sometimes distinctions are made” (1999,
p. 51). Among those who insisted upon distinctions, James Elkins began his
“skeptical introduction” to Visual Studies with a chapter titled “What Is Visual
Studies” in which he distinguishes between Cultural Studies, Visual Culture,
and Visual Studies. He used “visual culture” to reference the current state of
the field as well as the field of study, but “visual studies” to denote what he
hoped visual culture would become, “the study of visual practices across all
boundaries” (2003, pp. 1–7). Like Elkins, Marquard Smith devoted one sec-
tion of his introduction to the book Visual Culture Studies to the question
“What’s in a Name: Visual Culture or Visual Studies or Visual Culture Studies?”
Smith favoured “Visual Culture Studies” (2008, p. 8). A decade after his Visual
Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, in an introduction to an edited anthology of
graduate student writings on Visual Studies, Elkins suggested, “In general,
those who favor visual culture want to emphasize that the subject in question
is culture and not vision, and those who favor visual studies want to stress the
generality of the field and its commitment to visuality.” He continued, “Because
the contributors to this book take various positions in that regard, we are not
consistent in naming our subject” (2013, p. 8). For scholars who are engaged
in these pursuits, “Visual Culture,” “Visual Studies,” and “Visual Culture
Studies” may be terms with distinct meanings. However, for the purposes of
this chapter, which considers the question of what Visual Culture Studies can
offer to the study of comics, the differences among them may be less signifi-
cant. Therefore, I will be using “Visual Studies” and “Visual Culture Studies”
here somewhat interchangeably, though typically according to the preferences
of the scholars I am referencing, and with the understanding that the terms
point to roughly the same set of intellectual frameworks and practices, even
though their meanings may shift depending on the context.
For many scholars, the journal October’s “Visual Culture Questionnaire”
which appeared in its summer 1996 issue, was a significant event in defining
the distinctions between Art History and Visual Culture Studies.1 The
WHAT IS AN IMAGE? ART HISTORY, VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES, AND COMICS… 249
questionnaire comprised a series of four statements which each began, “It has
been suggested that.” The first suggested that Visual Culture is organised on
the model of Anthropology rather than History, and therefore is “in an eccen-
tric (even, at times, antagonistic) position with regard to the ‘new art history’.”
The second traced Visual Culture’s embrace of a “breadth of practice” back to
the thinking of “an early generation of art historians—such as Riegl and
Warburg,” implying that Visual Culture was merely the rediscovery of certain
(foundational) strands of Art History. The third suggested that Visual Culture
is helping to “produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” via its
conception of the visual as disembodied image, and the last situated the inter-
disciplinarity of Visual Culture within the context of pressures within the acad-
emy as well as “shifts of a similar nature within art, architectural, and film
practices” (Krauss et al. 1996, p. 25). Responses from 19 well-established
scholars from disciplines as varied as Art History, Comparative Literature, Film
and Media Studies, and English followed the four statements.2 The issue also
included lengthier essays by Kurt W. Forster, W.J.T. Mitchell, Rosalind Krauss,
and Hal Foster, some of which expanded upon the criticisms implied by the
questions. Margaret Dikovitskaya’s history of Visual Culture and Visual Studies
in the United States describes the statements as “openly unsympathetic to
visual studies,” and suggests that the questionnaire as a whole was “conceived
as an attack on the new research area” that nevertheless had the positive effect
of “help[ing] proponents of visual culture to articulate their positions and thus
contributed to the theoretical growth of the new field” (2005, pp. 17–18).
According to Anne Friedberg, the questionnaire was directly linked to the
choice of the name “Visual Studies” rather than “Visual Culture” for a new
doctoral program at the University of California, Irvine: “We chose to call our
program Visual Studies, rather than Visual Culture, in full knowledge of the
October magazine ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture,’ because we wanted to be
certain that our definition of the study of vision and visuality and its cultural
effects would not be ‘tarred by,’ i.e., too directly associated with, cultural stud-
ies” (2005, p. 156).
Dikovitskaya categorises the perspectives of scholars referenced in her book
into three groups based upon their views of the relationship between Visual
Studies and Art History: those who believe Visual Studies is an expansion of
Art History, those who see Visual Studies as independent of Art History, and
those who believe Visual Studies to be a threat to Art History (2005, p. 3). The
years that followed the questionnaire saw a number of scholars offering defini-
tions of Visual Culture Studies in relation to Art History. Some of these writ-
ings, such as Irit Rogoff’s contribution to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s influential The
Visual Culture Reader explicitly acknowledged the October questionnaire and
went on to counterpose Visual Culture Studies to Art History. Rogoff describes
Visual Culture as “transdisciplinary and cross-methodological,” offering an
opportunity to “unframe” discussions from established disciplinary fields,
including Art History. In a parenthetical aside she suggests that within an art-
historical context, the formation of “the good eye” was seen as sufficient for
250 J. ROAN
students who otherwise lacked intellectual curiosity or had a narrow under-

standing of culture (1998, pp. 16–17). Although this representation of Art
History was an exaggerated caricature even then, her essay clearly situates
Visual Culture Studies in opposition to Art History. Douglas Crimp’s “Getting
the Warhol We Deserve,” which responds to not only the October Visual
Culture questionnaire but also some of the articles published in that same
issue, explicitly challenges established art-historical scholarship on Andy Warhol
and the ways in which it has obscured Warhol’s sexuality. Crimp advocates for
Visual Culture Studies, understood as a “narrower area of cultural studies,” as
an alternative (1999, p. 52). W.J.T. Mitchell’s article “Showing Seeing: A
Critique of Visual Culture” begins, “What is visual culture or visual studies?”
(2002, p. 165). Mitchell characterises aesthetics as “the theoretical branch of
the study of art” and Art History as “the historical study of artists, artistic prac-
tices, styles, movements, and institutions.” In relation to these two disciplines
and drawing upon Jacques Derrida, he names Visual Studies the “dangerous
supplement,” which functions to fill in the “gaps” in aesthetics and Art History
while also threatening their boundaries (2002, p. 167). “From a visual culture
standpoint,” James Elkins writes, “art history can appear disconnected from
contemporary life, essentially or even prototypically elitist, politically naïve,
bound by older methodologies, wedded to the art market, or hypnotized by
the allure of a limited set of artists and artworks” (2003, p. 23).
In the two and a half decades since the publication of the October question-
naire, the occasionally antagonistic relationship between Art History and Visual
Culture Studies has softened as the status of Visual Culture Studies has become
both more institutionalised and less defined. The critiques of Visual Culture
Studies implied in the four opening statements have faded, with the exception
of the valorisation of early art historians, whose usefulness for the study of a
range of practices, including comics, is demonstrated in previous chapters of
the present volume.3 The title of the Stone Summer Theory Institute’s 2011
symposium, “Farewell to Visual Studies,” even suggested that the era of Visual
Studies was coming to an end. However, the readings, lectures, and conversa-
tions that took place at the week-long event actually testified to the diverse
range of practices and heterogeneity of scholarship that could be understood as
Visual Studies in what turned out to be more of a reflection upon the past and
future of Visual Studies than a wake for a bygone practice (Elkins et al. 2015).4
At one seminar, when W.J.T. Mitchell proposed, “All in favor of saying farewell
to visual studies and getting on to something else, raise your hands,” the book
version of the symposium records the collective response of the participants as
“[No one raises their hands; everyone laughs]” (Elkins et al. 2015, p. 76).
Meanwhile, the International Association for Visual Culture held their inaugu-
ral meeting in 2010, and their first conference, titled “NOW! Visual Culture,”
was convened by Nicholas Mirzoeff in 2012. There are now many textbooks,
anthologies, monographs, journal articles, and other writings that can be col-
lected under the umbrella of Visual Culture Studies, yet the practice of Visual
Culture Studies—I am deliberately avoiding the use of the terms “discipline”
or “field”—is even more complicated to summarise today than it was in the late
1990s, and its relationship to Art History, which has also of course undergone
considerable change in the past few decades, is no easier to determine. For
example, several of the scholars I will be relying upon in the remainder of this
chapter about Visual Culture Studies identify as art historians. Over time, the
identity of Visual Culture Studies has multiplied, reaching backwards in time
towards various origins and genealogies, and forward into future possibilities
yet to be fully realised.
Interdisciplinarity and the Object of Analysis

Despite the difficulty in pinning down one single definition of Visual Culture
Studies in the contemporary moment, it is still possible to identify significant
differences between Art History and Visual Culture Studies that impact what
Visual Culture Studies can offer to the study of comics.5 I will focus on two
related issues here. The first is the object of Visual Culture Studies, and the
second is its interdisciplinary methodologies. While the history of art is, at its
very foundation, an historical approach to the always changing, yet generally
relatively narrow, definition of what constitutes “art,” the expansiveness of
“visual culture” as the object of Visual Culture Studies allows for the study of
a broad range of subjects, including comics. Donald Preziosi has thoughtfully
delineated the shifting definitions of the object of Art History, writing, “Critical
historiographic accounts of the discipline of art history are continually beset by
unresolved questions about the field’s proper purview or object-domain of
study” (2009, p. 8). However, even an expanded sense of what it is that Art
History studies remains qualitatively distinct from how Visual Culture Studies
approaches its object. Consider, for example, Michael Ann Holly’s response to
undergraduates who asked her the question “What is visual studies?”: “It isn’t
a discipline; it isn’t a field. It just names a problematic. It shakes up compla-
cency. No objects are excluded. Visual studies names an attitude in relation to
visual things, rather than a department” (Elkins et al. 2015, p. 45). However,
Visual Culture Studies has also been criticised for its seeming lack of discrimi-
nation, and charged with flattening important distinctions between various
media. As Mitchell notes, one of the “myths” surrounding Visual Culture is
that it entails “the liquidation of art as we have known it,” when in fact Visual
Culture “encourages reflection on the differences between art and non-art”
(2002, pp. 169–170). What this means for Comics Studies is that the question
of whether or not comics are “art” and therefore worthy of study becomes,
instead, one of how “art” has been defined, and an interrogation of the specific
operations that have marginalised practices such as comics and cartooning as
merely popular or “low” culture, of little enduring value and undeserving of
analysis. In other words, whether a particular creative practice is considered art
or not is a topic of inquiry, rather than a requirement for entry.
It is surely not an accident that Bart Beaty titled his book Comics versus Art,
rather than, for example, Comics and Art. The first chapter of the book,
252 J. ROAN
following the introduction, asks “What if Comics Were Art?” implying, of

course, that comics are not art. Beaty traces the institutionalisation of Comics
Studies, initially in departments of American Studies, Popular Culture Studies,
Communication Studies, and Cultural Studies, then in departments of English
Literature. He notes, “As art departments, and in particular art history depart-
ments, lagged in the adoption of courses and research on comics, the literary
turn in the study of comics prevailed” (2012, p. 18). Thus, “One of the signifi-
cant consequences of the literary turn in the study of comics has been a ten-
dency to drive attention away from comics as a form of visual culture. Comics
have rarely been considered an art form akin to painting, sculpture, or photog-
raphy, and they are not commonly taught in courses in art history” (Beaty
2012, pp. 17–18).6 Although Beaty describes his book as a sociology of art
rather than as a practice of Visual Culture Studies or Visual Studies, neverthe-
less his reference to “comics as a form of visual culture” is congruent with
understandings of “visual culture” within Visual Culture Studies. The point
here is that within the framework of Visual Culture Studies, comics do not have
to be considered akin to painting or other forms of traditional fine arts to be
taught in courses or studied and written about by scholars.
For a concrete example of how comics can figure within Visual Culture
Studies, we can compare two textbooks, one in Visual Studies and another in
Art History. Introductory textbooks serve as ways of defining a field, giving
students an initial glimpse into a specific subject and how to study and under-
stand it. In Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Studies, now in its
third edition, authors Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright include comics
alongside other examples of visual culture including social media, fine arts,
advertising, mass media, scientific images, and more. Scott McCloud’s play
upon René Magritte’s famous painting Treachery of Images (1929) in
Understanding Comics is used to make a point about representation and icons,
while a few panels from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis serve as an example of
iconic signs as defined by Charles Sanders Peirce (Sturken and Cartwright
2017, pp. 21–22, 35–36). A discussion of the distinction between high and
low culture, undergirded by the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, notes the struggle
for cultural legitimacy on the part of comic books and graphic novels, while an
analysis of Simone Martini’s and Lippo Memmi’s painting The Annunciation
(1333) compares the presence of a line of Latin text in the work to the repre-
sentation of speech in a graphic novel, without ever suggesting that a fourteenth-
century painting and a twenty-first-century comic are equivalent. What they
share, however, is a similar response to the common challenge of how to rep-
resent speech in a visual medium (Sturken and Cartwright 2017, pp. 64, 151).
Crucially, in a section of the chapter on postmodernism about Roy
Lichtenstein’s Pop Art appropriations of comics, Practices of Looking acknowl-
edges the source for Lichtenstein’s painting Drowning Girl (1963) as Tony
Abruzzo’s “Run For Love” story in the DC Comics title Secret Hearts issue
#83 (1962) (Sturken and Cartwright 2017, p. 312).7 Sturken and Cartwright
are not as critical of this appropriation as Beaty in Comics versus Art, who writes
of “pop art’s Jerome-like theft of comics-derived imagery” and how “pop art,
with its seemingly tight relationship with comics and other aspects of consumer
culture, is the seemingly perfect ‘evil’ in the mind’s eye of resentful cartoon-
ists” (2012, p. 54). Nevertheless, the crediting of the cartoonist and comic
book from which Lichtenstein derived his work is a marked departure from
much art-historical writing about Lichtenstein and Pop Art, which typically
briefly establishes Pop Art’s engagement with popular culture (such as comics)
in general before moving on to analyses of the works of art themselves. As an
example, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History, a popular intro-
ductory Art History textbook, devotes a brief Artists on Art section to “Roy
Lichtenstein on Pop Art and Comic Books” in which Lichtenstein is quoted as
saying “[Pop artists portray] what I think to be the most brazen and threaten-
ing characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also so power-
ful in their impingement upon us” (Kleiner 2020, p. 976). The author of the
textbook adds, “The influence of comic books is evident in Lichtenstein’s
mature works.” In discussing Lichtenstein’s painting Hopeless (1963), he
writes, “Here, Lichtenstein excerpted an image from a comic book, a form of
entertainment meant to be read and discarded, and immortalized the image on
a large canvas. Aside from that modification, Lichtenstein remained remarkably
faithful to the original comic-strip image” (Kleiner 2020, p. 976). There is no
information about the original comic strip. Comic books are merely disposable
forms of entertainment in this telling, though with the potential for being
elevated to immortality as raw material for Pop Art commentary on popular
culture. The people who create comics remain uncredited and inconsequential.
According to the index of the more than 1000-page tome, comics are not
mentioned again in this compendium of art from around the world from the
Stone Age up to the 1980s.
It seems clear that Visual Culture Studies more easily accommodates comics
as a possible object of study than Art History does. The relationship of Visual
Culture Studies to traditional academic disciplines also offers a methodological
model for comics scholarship. In the introduction to her Narrative Structure
in Comics, Barbara Postema identifies two approaches within comics criticism:
“One says it is useful to use literary studies or film studies as touchstones for
studying comics,” while “Another argues that it is important for comics studies
to establish itself on its own terms, without relying on more traditional disci-
plines, not in the least because such reliance might hamper the discussion of
comics in its own right” (2013, p. xviii). Postema recapitulates here a familiar
challenge to studying comics and to the institutionalisation of Comics Studies.
In the context of the present volume, we might consider whether it is useful to
use Art History (rather than Literary Studies or Film Studies) as a “touch-
stone” for studying comics, or whether the reliance on art-historical method-
ologies might “hamper” the study of comics “in its own right.” Furthermore,
such questions should also be related to ongoing discussions of interdisciplin-
arity and Comics Studies. In “Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics
Studies,” Charles Hatfield calls for Comics Studies to “think concretely about
254 J. ROAN
the relationships among disciplines as they interact within the field” (2010,
p. 2). Gregory Steirer reinforces Hatfield’s call for a more intentional interdis-
ciplinarity. Steirer’s review of scholarship in Comics Studies finds that it “pos-
sesses a primarily atomistic organization in which different works of scholarship
do not explicitly engage with one another” (2011, p. 268). He proposes,
instead, “an active or dynamic model of disciplinarity, produced through an
interrogative and even competitive approach to self-identification among its
representatives” (2011, p. 264). Dale Jacobs’s recent “Comics Studies as
Interdiscipline” asks “How, in other words, can we move from being a collec-
tion of scholars from disparate backgrounds and attendant methodologies who
all happen to study comics to being an interdiscipline that productively draws
on our varied methodologies” (2020, p. 656)? Steirer explicitly looks to Visual
Studies and Cultural Studies for models of how Comics Studies might engage
with the question of disciplinary methodologies, as they are “‘disciplines’
marked by numerous internal debates over their own institutionalization and
purpose, [and they] offer examples of such an unsettled disciplinarity in action
and indeed inform this paper’s vision of how comics studies should approach
its own scholarly identity” (2011, p. 264). It is true that nearly every effort to
define Visual Culture Studies insists upon its interdisciplinarity. Mitchell’s
description of Visual Studies, for example, bears more than a passing resem-
blance to the above citations: “Visual studies is not merely an indiscipline or
dangerous supplement to the traditional vision-oriented disciplines, but an
interdiscipline that draws on their resources and those of other disciplines to
construct a new and distinctive object of research” (2002, p. 179). What might
Comics Studies take from the efforts of Visual Studies to “construct a new and
distinctive object of research” through interdisciplinary methods? Lynda
Barry’s intriguing explorations of the image invite a creative methodological
engagement that can serve as a case study for picturing how Visual Culture
Studies might see comics.
Lynda Barry on “What Is an Image?”

James Elkins’s introduction to Paul Karasik’s and Mark Newgarden’s How to
Read Nancy suggests that there are already intersections and connections
between Visual Studies and Comics Studies, not least in the very fact of the
introduction itself. Even though Elkins asserts at the outset that he knows little
about comics, he has clearly surveyed recent comics scholarship, and is gratified
to find references to recognisable problematics and citations of scholars he has
studied, what he characterises as “thin rope bridges leading from familiar terri-
tory to the world of comics” (2017, p. 13).8 He even offers bibliographic cita-
tions to those who “are interested in walking across these rope bridges that
connect visual theory to comics” (Elkins 2017, p. 13). It is my hope that the
present chapter could be considered another “thin rope bridge” between
Visual Culture Studies and comics. What follows below is hardly the only way
to imagine the intersection of Visual Culture Studies and Comics Studies,
particularly in light of the diversity of Visual Culture Studies as outlined above,

but it gives one example of what a Visual Culture Studies approach to comics
might yield.
In a Guardian interview Lynda Barry credits Marilyn Frasca, her college
painting teacher, with first asking her the question “What is an image?” Barry
then adds, “And that has directed my entire career” (Randle 2015). Barry’s
interest in the nature of the image has become more explicit in the works What
It Is (2008), Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book (2010), and Syllabus:
Notes from an Accidental Professor (2014).9 Her latest, Making Comics (2019),
implicitly continues her exploration of the image through an emphasis on the
practice of drawing. The question “What is an image?” is of course a vast one
within both Art History and Visual Culture Studies, and there are many differ-
ent answers. However, the purpose of this case study is not to answer the ques-
tion and define the image but, rather, to consider the ways in which we might
engage with Barry’s explorations of the question within a Visual Culture
Studies framework. This topic differs from much of the established scholarship
on Barry, which has tended to address the themes of girlhood, multiracial iden-
tity, childhood trauma, and other related topics. Her more pedagogically ori-
ented works have been less obvious subjects of study, perhaps because they fit
less easily into frameworks of literary study; they are even less like a “novel”
than the typical “graphic novel.”10 But Barry’s longstanding interest in the
image is quite relevant to Visual Culture Studies. To be clear, the point is not
to use Visual Culture Studies to analyse Barry’s work, nor to use Barry’s work
to illustrate theories of visual culture. Viewing Barry’s work as itself a theoreti-
cal exploration of the nature of the image will help us to gain some insights into
the image in general, which is to say that Barry can help us to “see” the image
in a particular fashion. Furthermore, as comics, Barry’s reflections upon the
image have the advantage of taking shape through images themselves, images
that Barry or her students (or both, as in Barry’s tracings of student drawings)
have created, alongside text that, as in all comics, sometimes reinforces the
message of the images, or perhaps adds to them, or challenges or contra-
dicts them.
For the purposes of this brief foray into Barry’s work, my focus will be on
one example each from Syllabus and What It Is, beginning with one of the most
memorable assignments reproduced in Syllabus. The prompt for Barry’s assign-
ment is based upon Ivan Brunetti’s spontaneous drawing exercises from his
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. Brunetti’s instructions for the first exer-
cise are to draw a car in three to four minutes, then to redraw it in decreasing
amounts of time: two minutes, one minute, thirty seconds, fifteen seconds, and
finally, five seconds. The second exercise involves drawing quick, five-to-ten
second doodles of famous cartoon characters from memory (Brunetti 2011,
pp. 25–26). Although there’s no record of exactly what Barry tells her students
to do, on a page from Syllabus we see the handwritten suggestion, in Barry’s
distinctive cursive lettering, “Let’s draw a car and then let’s draw Batman”
(Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and Quarterly,
2014), p. 25
She shows us her students’ drawings, reproducing them over ten pages,
sharing space with handwritten, meandering reflections about the process of
drawing. The first six pages feature a mix of cars and batmen, while the latter
four are entirely full of batmen (Fig. 2).
All the images are utterly compelling. Brunetti says of the results of his sec-
ond exercise, “often these drawings are, technically speaking, ‘wrong’—but
Fig. 2 Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (Drawn and Quarterly,
2014), page 30
also kind of right at the same time. One can tell who the character is supposed
to be, even though it need not be strictly ‘accurate’” (2011, p. 26). The draw-
ings from Barry’s students are stiff, awkward, largely uncertain, but, most of
all, highly idiosyncratic. For the most part the batmen bear little visual resem-
blance to the famous caped crusader, aside from sharing what could be
described as the minimum required to signify “Batman”—a cowl with pointy
258 J. ROAN
ears, a cape that resembles the wings of a bat. If we look at these batmen as
representations of the Batman, whether from the comic books, television
shows, films, or some amalgamation of the above, then they are rather poor
representations, as none of them really “look like” the familiar figure. But
achieving perfect mimesis, as Brunetti points out, isn’t really the point of the
exercise. The cursive text that surrounds the batmen in Syllabus, filling in the
spaces of the pages between one batman and another, asks us to reconsider our
largely unstated and ambiguous understandings of what constitutes a “good
drawing,” and why people are so embarrassed when their drawings turn out
seemingly childlike, naïve, and unpractised. Barry counters, “But what if the
way kids draw—that kind of line that we call ‘childish’—what if that is what a
line looks like when someone is having an experience by hand? A live wire!
There is an aliveness in these drawings that can’t be faked, and when I look at
them, that aliveness seems to come into me. I’m glad to see and feel them. Real
aliveness of line is hard to come by.” On the next page she adds, “When some-
one learns to draw – to render – it’s the first thing that goes—the aliveness”
(Barry 2014, pp. 31–32).
The life of a line, the “aliveness” of a drawing—Barry’s language suggests a
view of drawing as an animating practice. Eszter Szép argues, “Barry uses the
word ‘image’ to describe the experience of aliveness felt in drawing lines”
(2020). On page 14 of What It Is (2008), Barry tries to explain how an image
is alive through a series of analogies: “alive in the way our memory is alive…
alive in the way the ocean is alive… alive in the way thinking is not, but expe-
riencing is.” These efforts at explaining the “aliveness” of an image—like mem-
ory, like the ocean, like experiences—offer a view of the image very much at
odds with an approach to it as an inert object of analysis and interpretation. But
this line of thinking has much in common with developments outlined in an
article published in the Journal of Visual Culture by art historian Keith Moxey
in which he traces the emergence of a renewed interest in what he calls the
presence of an object or image. (Moxey uses the words “image” and “object”
interchangeably in the article.) He opens with the assertion, “Affirmations that
objects are endowed with a life of their own – that they possess an existential
status endowed with agency – have become commonplace” (2008, p. 131).
Attention to the presence of an image or object approaches it as something to
be “more appropriately encountered than interpreted,” in Moxey’s words, and
involves “the demand that we take note of what objects ‘say’ before we try to
force them into patterns of meaning” (2008, p. 132). Some of the names asso-
ciated with such perspectives are the French art historian Georges Didi-
Huberman, who himself looks back to Aby Warburg, and in the German
context, Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, and Horst Bredekamp, who are
linked to the work of Bildwissenschaft, usually translated as “image science.”
W.J.T. Mitchell, familiar to many in Comics Studies for his work on text-image
relations, and James Elkins have also been associated with this perspective.11
Although each of these theorists has their own emphasis, what links them in
Moxey’s overview is a common conception of “the visual object as invested
with an animating power of its own” (2008, p. 139). So, if all of these theorists
have an interest in the animated image, are any of their theories similar to
Barry’s articulation of the aliveness of the image? One intriguing juxtaposition
is with art historian and theorist Hans Belting’s book An Anthropology of
Images, in which he emphasises the relationship between the image and the
body as a medium.12 As he points out, in Art History, the term “medium” is
typically used to reference the material used by the artist, as, for example, a
painter who works in the medium of oil on canvas. But Belting defines
“medium” slightly differently, as “that which conveys or hosts an image, mak-
ing it visible, turning it into a picture” (2011, p. 18). He’s interested in par-
ticular in the human body as a medium: “our bodies themselves constitute a
place, a locus, where the images we receive leave behind an invisible trace”
(Belting 2011, p. 38). Belting gives us another way to see the batmen from
Syllabus, as the results of a process or an “experience” in Barry’s words. They
are the external, visible, and highly individual expressions of a collective, social
image of Batman. Each drawing shows what becomes of the image in the hands
of each individual. Each batman is so specific, so particular to the person who
drew him! As Belting suggests, “An ‘image’ is more than a product of percep-
tion. It is created as a result of personal or collective knowledge and intention.
We live with images, we comprehend the world in images. And this living rep-
ertory of our internal images connects with the physical production of external
pictures we stage in the social realm” (2011, p. 9). Seeing this series of batmen
gives us a hint of how individual style comes about, in some mysterious alchemy
of memory and movement.
In the introduction to the English translation of his book, Belting identifies
his fourth chapter, titled “Image and Death: Embodiment in Early Cultures,”
as the most important section of the book. In its emphasis upon death, it
touches on what Belting feels is essential to understanding the image: the play
of absence and presence. He writes, “an image finds its true meaning in the fact
that what it represents is absent and therefore can be present only as image. It
manifests something that is not in the image but can only appear in the image.
An image of the departed was therefore not an eccentricity, but rather an early
and rather literal statement of what an image essentially is” (Belting 2011,
p. 85). Belting discusses mostly ancient examples, including a diorite statue of
Gudea, king of Lagash, from c. 2120 BCE; a “reserve head” of an official from
Old Kingdom Egypt (2630–2524 BCE); and a head of a Neolithic statue from
Jericho from c. 7000 BCE. He contrasts these animated images to images from
“modern times,” when “‘image magic’ has been relegated [to] the dark realm
of demonology.” He laments, “Today, when we have nothing like a cult of the
dead, we are apt to mistake the meaning of the human production of images”
(Belting 2011, p. 89). Here, Belting makes a remarkable, transhistorical, trans-
cultural claim for the origin of images that extends far beyond Barry’s explora-
tions of the “aliveness” of the image. But our potential discomfort with Barry’s
belief in the animism of the image, which broaches the typical boundaries
between what is alive and what cannot be, could well be an example of what
Belting describes as a modern antipathy to “image magic.”
260 J. ROAN
The discussion of page 14 from What It Is thus far has cited Barry’s written
response to the question “What is an image?” but did not remark upon the
drawings on the page. But the drawings are undeniably there, as examples of
images on a page that asks the question “What is an image?” Moxey writes of
encountering rather than interpreting the image, and the demand that “we
take note of what objects ‘say’.” What is an image? Well, what do the images
themselves show or say (Fig. 3)?
Fig. 3 Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 14

The first panel of the page introduces a multi-eyed monster acting as a

stand-in for Barry asking into a microphone “What Is An Image?” in a large
word balloon. The second panel is almost entirely text, with a small celestial
body in the upper right-hand corner—a sun or moon?—and three diminutive,
rather indistinct figures at the bottom. The capitalised block lettering reads
“AT THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING WE CALL ‘THE ARTS,’ AND
CHILDREN CALL ‘PLAY,’ IS SOMETHING WHICH SEEMS SOMEHOW
ALIVE.” The third panel of the page continues, this time in a mix of capitalised
block lettering and cursive, “It’s NOT ALIVE IN the WAY YOU AND I are
alive, BUT IT’S certainly not dead.” Below the text, there is a drawing of a bird
on the left, and another similar drawing of a bird on the right, but upside down
and with a tell-tale “x” over its eye. We immediately understand the bird on the
left is alive, and on the right, dead, in part because of familiar conventions of
drawing. However, as drawings, although they may or may not be representa-
tions of an actual living or dead bird, they are definitely neither alive nor dead
in themselves in the same way that real birds are alive or dead. So what do they
tell us about the life of images? How is it that an upside-down image looks
dead to us? How effective is that small “x”? It’s incredible how the slope of the
back versus the straight line makes all the difference in the world. Perhaps there
is something in the juxtaposition of the two drawings, and the way in which the
movement between the two, reading from left to right, is from life to death,
and how we feel a twinge of melancholy as we arrive at the upside-down bird.
And yet the upside-down bird is not really dead, as it was never truly alive, but
it can still make us sad because it reminds us of death, of the absence of an
animating spirit that enlivens its immediate predecessor to the left.
What of the octopus in the next panel, Barry’s “Magic Cephalopod,” either
just arriving in the panel or perhaps edging away from it into the yellow right-
hand margin? Some viewers may think of Hank, the octopus, in the Pixar film
Finding Dory (2016) or perhaps the beautiful but deadly creatures in the James
Bond film Octopussy (1983). The Monterey Bay Aquarium, upon which the
aquarium in Finding Dory was modelled, has a Pacific octopus that is almost
always motionless in the corner of its tank, at least during public visiting hours.
In contrast, Inky, a New Zealand octopus, apparently made a daring escape
from its aquarium enclosure into the ocean (Bilefsky 2016). If, according to
Belting, “our bodies themselves constitute a place, a locus, where the images
we receive leave behind an invisible trace,” drawing may be one way of express-
ing these “invisible traces” as visible images. Seeing existing images acts to
trigger previous images received as well as adding to one’s personal repertoire
of images. Barry says that images are alive like memories, like the ocean, like
experiences. This page from What It Is suggests that the question to ask of an
image is not “What is it?” but rather “What does it do?” What happens when
we draw an image? What happens when we look at images that others have
drawn? Although “What is an image?” might be the first text the reader sees on
the page because of its size, reading from top to bottom the page actually
begins with “The story of transportation,” typed text centred at the top of the
262 J. ROAN
page that serves as a title. Transportation is about movement, both literal and
metaphorical. It’s about the way images move between us and a book, for
example, as well as how they can move us, make us feel, think, remember,
reflect.
What is an image? Hans Belting’s original German version of his book
includes more than 100 illustrations that are not a part of the English transla-
tion. According to one reviewer, given the relatively minimal role the repro-
ductions play in his argument, very little is lost. The reviewer describes the
illustrations as “a visual counterpoint to the text,” rather than as “evidence” or
“information” for the argument, rendering the images apparently non-essential
and secondary to the text, unlike a more conventional art-historical treatise in
which images of the objects analysed are essential to the argument (Visonà
2014). But what if we viewed the images and text in Belting’s book in terms of
the kinds of text-image relationships more typically found in comics? Lynda
Barry’s books are full of images and also words, and as comics, the images are
not so easily ignored. She both shows and tells us what she thinks images are,
and even if the tendency is to look to her words for her theory of the image,
her images actually show us what they do, what they are, and how they work,
in part by working on us. “Pictures can help us find words to help us find
images” Barry writes (2008, p. 149) (Fig. 4).
What if the best way to answer the question “What is an image?” is to draw
a picture? Elkins has suggested, “Images need to start arguing. If Visual Studies
is to fulfill its promise of thinking of images differently than Art History, then
the most fundamental challenge is to stop taking images as illustrations of the-
ories, exemplifications of historical arguments, or mnemonics for encounters
with the original, and begin employing images to argue” (2015, p. 6). What is
an image? In offering images in response, images that are drawn, seen, sent,
and received, Barry shows us how images can begin to argue and how scholars
can see, and study, the images in comics with new eyes.
Visual Culture Studies and Comics

Lynda Barry’s work, and in particular her inquiries into the nature of the
image, are unique within the broader landscape of comics. What does this one
example suggest about the ways in which Visual Culture Studies might engage
with Comics Studies and vice versa? As noted earlier, the interdisciplinarity of
Comics Studies has been a subject of discussion.13 In some ways, these conver-
sations mirror those that took place in Visual Culture Studies as well, and some
Comics Studies scholars, like Steirer, have looked to Visual Culture Studies’
engagements with the question of disciplinarity as a model. One compelling
investigation of interdisciplinarity and the object of Visual Culture Studies is
Mieke Bal’s “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture.” Bal draws
upon Roland Barthes to declare, “Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a
new object that belongs to no one” (2003, p. 7).14 This “new object” is not
simply visual objects, which have always existed, but rather “visuality as the
Fig. 4 Lynda Barry, What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008), p. 149
object of study,” which she describes as “what happens when people look, and
what emerges from that act? The verb ‘happens’ entails the visual event as an
object, and ‘emerges’ the visual image, but as a fleeting, fugitive, subjective
image accrued to the subject” (2003, pp. 7–9). This expansive outline of the
object of Visual Culture Studies feels remarkably apt for an engagement with
264 J. ROAN
Lynda Barry’s theory of the image, except that Barry would most certainly add
the question of what happens when people draw to that of what happens when
people look. Bal’s emphasis on practices of looking and acts of seeing distin-
guishes Visual Culture Studies from object-based disciplines such as Art History
or Film Studies, and highlights the relationship between the one who sees, and
that which is seen. A similar method applied to comics could allow for a broad
range of approaches to the text, all while foregrounding it as something that is
seen by someone. Furthermore, as Elkins reminds us, images can be more than
illustrations or examples, but rather arguments in themselves. Perhaps the most
intriguing aspect of Bal’s representation of the object of Visual Studies is that,
“objects are active participants in the performance of analysis in that they
enable reflection and speculation, and they can contradict projections and
wrong-headed interpretations (if the analyst lets them!) and thus constitute a
theoretical object with philosophical relevance” (2003, p. 24). One response
to the question of how best to study comics “in its own right” then might be
to allow comics as a “new object of knowledge” to lead the way, as we consider
what happens when people draw, and what happens when people look, in our
encounters with rather than interpretations of comics.
Notes
1. October is an American journal of contemporary art theory and criticism. It was
founded in 1976 and was named after the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well as
the Sergei Eisenstein film October (1927) which depicted the revolution. The
journal was among the first publications in the United States to introduce struc-
turalist and post-structuralist theory to critical discourses of Art History and
contemporary art.
2. The journal published responses to the questionnaire from the following indi-
viduals: Svetlana Alpers (History of Art, UC Berkeley), Emily Apter (French and
Comparative Literature, UCLA), Carol Armstrong (Art History, Graduate
Center, CUNY), Susan Buck-Morss (Government, Cornell University), Ton
Conley (Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University), Jonathan
Crary (Art History, Columbia University), Thomas Crow (Art History, Yale
University), Tom Gunning (Radio, Television, and Film, Northwestern
University), Michael Ann Holly (Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural
Studies, Art and Art History, University of Rochester), Martin Jay (History, UC
Berkeley), Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann (Art and Archaeology, Princeton
University), Silvia Kolbowski, Sylvia Lavin (Architecture, UCLA), Stephen
Melville (History of Art, Ohio State University), Helen Molesworth (Editor of
Documents), Keith Moxey (Art History, Barnard College/Columbia University),
D.N. Rodowick (English/Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester),
Geoff Waite (German Studies, Cornell University), and Christopher Wood
(History of Art, Yale University).
3. For example, Ahmed chapter “Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging
Memories” exploring the work of Aby Warburg, and Miers chapter “Psychologies
of Perception: Stories of Depiction” drawing on the work of Ernst Gombrich
and Ernst Kris.
4. I attended the symposium as one of 15 Fellows, so my reflections upon the

event are based upon both my memory of them as well as what was published in
the book version (Elkins et al. 2015).
5. For further discussion of Visual Culture Studies/Visual Studies, Art History and
comics Cf. Becker chapter “Afrofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History
and Decolonisation in Black Panther”, and Mugnolo chapter “Reading Richard
Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through Perception of the Image”.
6. Currently, in the United States, courses on the history and theory of comics are
more likely to be found in Literature than Art History departments. Although
some art schools today offer courses on and degrees in comics, Daniel Clowes’s
savage parody of art schools in his comic “Art School Confidential” seems rel-
evant here. It ends with a warning from the disaffected narrator to “never men-
tion cartooning in art school because it is mindless and contemptible and
completely unsuitable as a career goal” (Clowes 1991). In Jamie Coe’s more
recent Art Schooled (2014), the main character’s comic is not particularly well
received by his instructors or his classmates, but not explicitly because it is a
comic. I thank Maggie Gray for this reference.
7. It is worth noting that the examples discussed here were not included in the first
edition of Practices of Looking (2001). Some of them were part of the second
edition (2009). Thus, each progressive edition of this text has incorporated
more comics examples than the previous version, suggesting that although com-
ics may not have been a significant part of earlier Visual Culture Studies, there
is increasing interest in this topic.
8. Elkins mentions work by Charles Hatfield, Pascal Lefèvre, and David Carrier,
and the edited anthologies A Comics Studies Reader (Heer and Worcester 2008)
and The Language of Comics: Word and Image (Varnum and Gibbons 2001). He
notes that work by W.J.T. Mitchell has been referenced by Anglophone Comics
Studies scholars and included in the above edited anthologies, and Francophone
art theory by Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch has also been cited by French-
speaking as well as Scandinavian and German scholars. Although Elkins does not
mention it, Mitchell also participated in the May 2012 “Comics: Philosophy
and Practice” conference at the University of Chicago which inspired the
“Comics & Media” special issue of Critical Inquiry, the journal Mitchell edits
(Chute and Jagoda 2014). This issue reproduces a conversation between
Mitchell and Art Spiegelman that served as the keynote address of the confer-
ence, along with an afterword by Mitchell (2014).
9. What It Is and Picture This come out of Lynda Barry’s workshop “Writing the
Unthinkable,” which is designed to help people who do not consider themselves
writers or artists to explore and develop their capacity for creative expression.
Syllabus is based on Barry’s teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
where she is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity in the Art
Department.
10. Susan E. Kirtley’s excellent monograph on Barry does open with a discussion of
Barry’s definition of the image in relation to W.J.T. Mitchell’s work (2012). It
concludes with a discussion of What It Is and Picture This in the final chapter,
with a focus upon how the books showcase Barry’s development as an artist and
her creative process, in the context of her career-long attention to representa-
tions of girlhood. Hillary Chute devotes a chapter of Graphic Women: Life
Narrative & Contemporary Comics to Barry, specifically the book One Hundred
266 J. ROAN
Demons (2010), which has also been the subject of critical essays by Melinda de
Jesús (2004a, 2004b) and Theresa M. Tensuan (2006). Miriam Harris’s
“Cartoonists as Matchmakers” (2009) explores Barry’s use of text and image
primarily through examples from Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Eszter Szép’s recent
book Comics and the Body differs in its attention to Barry from the previous
works cited, as the first chapter is dedicated to the same works I examine here,
What It Is and Syllabus, with an emphasis on the image, drawing, and the
line (2020).
11. See, for example, Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of
Images (2005) and Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (1998).
12. For further application of Belting’s work on the image and its relationship to the
body to comics Cf. Mugnolo chapter “Reading Richard Felton Outcault’s
“Yellow Kid” Through Perception of the Image”.
13. For further discussion of interdisciplinarity and Comics Studies Cf. Wallin
Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to
Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”,
and Sommerland chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined
Gravity in Sport Manga”.
14. Rogoff cites the same passage from Barthes as Bal does, about interdisciplinarity
having to do with “the constitution of a new object of knowledge,” while add-
ing Gayatri Spivak’s argument “it is the questions that we ask that produce the
field of inquiry and not some body of materials which determines what ques-
tions need to be posed to it” (1998, pp. 15–16).
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Bal, Mieke. 2003. Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture. Journal of
Visual Culture 2, pp. 5–32.
Barry, Lynda. 2008. What It Is. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly.
Barry, Lynda. 2010. Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book. Montreal: Drawn and
Quarterly.
Barry, Lynda. 2014. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor. Montreal: Drawn and
Quarterly.
Barry, Lynda. 2019. Making Comics. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly.
Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics versus Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Belting, Hans. 2011. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Trans. Thomas
Dunlap. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bilefsky, Dan. 2016. Inky the Octopus Escapes From a New Zealand Aquarium. The
New York Times, April 13.
Brunetti, Ivan. 2011. Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Chute, Hillary L. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Chute, Hillary L. and Jagoda, Patrick. eds. 2014. “Comics & Media” special issue.
Critical Inquiry 40.
Clowes, Daniel. 1991. Art School Confidential. Eightball 7: unpaginated.
Coe, Jamie. 2014. Art Schooled. London: Nobrow Press.
Crimp, Douglas. 1999. Getting the Warhol We Deserve. Social Text 59, pp. 49–66.
De Jesús, Melinda. 2004a. Liminality and Mestiza Consciousness in Lynda Barry’s One
Hundred Demons. MELUS 29, pp. 219–52.
De Jesús, Melinda. 2004b. Of Monsters and Mothers: Filipina American Identity and
Maternal Legacies in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons. Meridians: Feminism,
Race, Transnationalism 5, pp. 1–26.
Dikovitskaya, Margaret. 2005. Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural
Turn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Elkins, James. 1998. On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them. Reissued edition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Elkins, James. 2003. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Elkins, James. 2013. An Introduction to the Visual Studies That is Not in This Book.
In Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline, ed. James Elkins et al.,
pp. 3–15. New York: Routledge.
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in Three Easy Panels by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, pp. 12–19. Seattle:
Fantagraphics Books.
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Schoell-Glass, pp. 129–43. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press.
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reviews.2014.104.
From Giotto to Drnaso: The Common Well
of Pictorial Schema in ‘High’ Art and ‘Low’
Comics
Bruce Mutard
Abstract In The Aesthetics of Comics, David Carrier argued that at the time of
Giotto, all of the visual technology required for making comics was present
(2000). This term is analogous to Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowl-
edge (1966) which refers to knowledge that is not explicable, such as how to
hold a brush loaded with ink to make a certain mark, allied with knowledge of
composition, perspective, colour, shape, line, texture, etc. to depict, say, a
building. Ernst Gombrich describes all this as a schema, specifically that of
Western Art (1959). This chapter, presented in the comics register, will show
how Western comics schemas, originated from the break that Giotto made
with the Byzantine iconic, hierarchical tradition, to a humanist form Susan
Vogel described as the ‘Western Eye’ (1997). I show how comics schemas
arose through the Western art training and interests of eighteenth century cari-
caturists and Rodolphe Töppfer, leading to the work of Nick Drnaso (2016,
2018), who I argue is as much an adherent of the Western Eye as Giotto and
all who came in between. I explain why pictures in Western comics appear as
they do and that it is not unreasonable to posit Giotto as the father of Western
comics, and not just because his astounding fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel
(ca. 1300) is a visual narrative.
Keywords Western eye • Tacit knowledge • Schema • Giotto • Caricature
B. Mutard (*)
Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, USA

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_14
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FROM GIOTTO TO DRNASO: THE COMMON WELL OF PICTORIAL SCHEM… 271
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Picture Sources
All pictures redrawn and/or transformed from the original by Bruce Mutard.
Page 1, panel 2: Giotto, The Last Judgement. Capella degli Scrovegni,

ca. 1300–05
Page 2, panel 2: Giotto, The Last Supper. Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05
Page 2, panel 5: Giotto, Charity. Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05
Page 3, panel 2: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, detail. ca. 1300–05
Page 3, panel 4: ©Jack Hayes, Michelangelo Painting the Sistine Ceiling,
detail. 1964
Page 3, panel 5: Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus, detail. Capella degli Scrovegni,
ca. 1300–05
Page 3, panel 6: ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018
Page 4, panel 1: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05
Page 4, panel 3: Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, ca. 1300–05
Page 4, panel 4: Cimabue, Virgin Enthroned with Angels, detail. ca. 1290–95
Page 4, panel 5: Raphael, The Sistine Madonna, detail. ca. 1512–13
Page 4, panel 6: ©Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Pads Box, 1964
Page 5, panel 3: Puff the Magic Dragon.
Page 5, panel 4: Baule people, Rabbit Mask; Female Figure; Pendant Mask.
Dates unknown.
Page 5, panel 7: Masaccio, Brancacci Chapel, detail. ca. 1425–27
Page 6, panel 1: ©Alain, 1955
Page 6, panel 2: Giotto, Joachim and Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, detail.
ca. 1300–05
Page 6, panel 6: Cimabue, Madonna Enthroned with the Child, St Francis and
Four Angels, detail. ca. 1278–80
Page 7, panel 2: Masaccio, Masolino, Filippino Lippi, Brancacci Chapel, detail.
ca. 1425–27
Page 7, panel 3: Masaccio and Filippino Lippi, Raising of the Son of Theophilus
and St Peter Enthroned, detail. ca. 1425–27
Page 7, panel 4: Masaccio, Tribute, detail. ca. 1425–27
Page 9, panel 2: Giotto, The Last Judgement, detail. ca. 1300–05; ©Nick
Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018
Page 9, panel 3: James Gillray, Monstrous Craws at a New Coalition Feast. 1787
Page 9, panel 4: Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Convex and Lady Concave. 1802
Page 9, panel 5: Rodolphe Töpffer, Histoire de M. Jabot, excerpt. 1831
Page 10: Adapted from the characters Krazy Kat, Ignatz and Officer Pup by
George Herriman.
Page 11, panels 5–9, 14–15: ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018
Page 11, panels 10–13: ©Nick Drnaso, Beverly. 2016
Page 12, panels 1–15: ©Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. 2018

Page 13, panel 1: Giotto, Joachim and Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, detail.
ca. 1300–05
Page 13, panel 3: Amedeo Modigliani, Nude. 1917
Page 13, panel 5: Piet Mondrian, Composition C, No. 3 with Red, Yellow and
Blue. 1938
Page 13, panel 6: Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (version). 1930
Notes
1. Lubbock, Jules. 2006. Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to

Donatello. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 7.
2. Refers to a tradition in the Catholic Church that the evangelist St. Luke
painted the first picture of the Virgin and Child, known as the Salus
Populi Romani, in the Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome. St. Luke is also
known as the patron saint of artists (among others). https://udayton.
edu/imri/mary/s/salus-populi-romani.php Retrieved 17 Oct 2021.
3. See Ayrton, Michael. 1969. Giovanni Pisano Sculptor. London: Thames
and Hudson. p. 186.
4. Carrier, David. 2000. The Aesthetics of Comics. Penn State: Pennsylvania
State University Press. p. 5.
5. Ibid.
6. Vogel, Susan. 1997. Baule: African Art, Western Eyes in African Arts,
30:4. Special Issue: The Benin Centenary, Part 2. Los Angeles: UCLA,
James Coleman African Studies Center. p. 64.
7. By ‘us’ I refer to those beholders who have grown up with or are famil-
iar with the modes of visual arts communication in the Global north, or
‘Western’ world.
8. Lavin, Marilyn. 1990. The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in
Italian Churches 431-1600. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 4.
9. Ibid. p. 7.
10. Carrier, David. 2000. p. 14.
11. Ibid. It is worth noting the irony here that Gombrich was antipathetic
towards Hegel.
12. Danto, Arthur. 1964. The Artworld. The Journal of Philosophy, 61:19.
American philosophical Association. p. 580.
13. This is commonly understood as ‘realistic’ art, usually determined as
something that visibly exists in the world.
14. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. Northampton: Kitchen
Sink Press. p. 51.
15. Vogel, Susan. 1997. p. 64.
16. Ibid.
286 B. MUTARD
17. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century

Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 29–103.
18. Ibid. 118–128.
19. Gombrich, Ernst. 2000. Art and Illusion. London: Folio Society. p. 3.
20. Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University
Press of Chicago. p. 4.
21. Gombrich, Ernst. 2000. p. 53.
22. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Giotto’s Joy in Desire and Language. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell. p. 18.
23. By Giotto’s schema, I mean those that he introduced as mentioned, as
a package of possibilities in representation.
24. Note that Massacio designed but did not complete all the panels. He
had an elder partner, Masolino who completed some panels, and some
others were completed a number of decades later by Filippino Lippi,
the son of Masaccio’s pupil, Fra Filippo Lippi.
25. Specifically, Italian painting of the fifteenth century. This means it was
built upon schemas present and developing in the northern Italian pen-
insula of this era, which was not influenced by developments North of
the Alps in say, Flanders.
26. Lee, Alexander. 2013. The Ugly Renaissance. New York: Doubleday.
pp. 41–42.
27. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. pp. 15–16.
28. Academic training always meant rigorous instruction in drawing before
proceeding to painting. The methods of academies across the European
continent varied according to tradition and beliefs of masters, but an
example is given in Wickham, Annette, The Schools and Practice of Art
in Simon, Robin (ed). 2018. The Royal Academy of Art: History and
Collections. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and
the Royal Academy of Arts. pp. 433–442.
29. The academic hierarchy of painting was formally established by the
Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture in Paris in the middle of the
seventeenth century. First was History, then portraiture, genre, land-
scape and down through to animals and still-life. The list was not
immutable. See Poë, Simon. From History to Genre in Simon, Robin
(ed). 2018. p. 256.
30. Wickham, Annette. The Schools and Practice of Art in Simon, Robin
(ed), 2018. 432.
31. Poë, Simon. 2018. p. 256.
32. Carrier, David. 2000. p. 108.
33. Medley, Stuart. 2012. The Picture in Design. Champaign: Common
Ground. p. 48.
34. Ibid. p. 47.
35. Ibid.
36. Gombrich, Ernst. 2000. p. 342.
37. Kunzle, David. 1973. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and
Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2–3 & 7. Note that the
descriptive definition of comic strips I used here is not precisely that of
Kunzle, whose own was an attempt to circumscribe a boundary defini-
tion to delimit his monumental survey of pictorial narrative precursors
to comic strips and thus, comics.
38. Carrier, David. 2000. p. 3.
39. Witek, Joseph. 2011. Comics Modes: Caricature and Illustration in the
Crumb Family’s ‘Dirty Laundry’. In Critical Approaches to Comics:
Theories and Methods eds. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. Taylor
& Francis Group. ProQuest Ebook accessed 2021-07-12.
40. Ibid. p. 31.
41. There is nothing exceptional about this. Plenty of makers eschew the
use of these common visual features of comics for their own reasons. I
did not use them in my books The Sacrifice (2008) and The Silence
(2009), but liberally so in Bully Me (2021).
42. Witek, Joseph. 2011. p. 34.
43. Danto, Arthur. 1964. p. 582.
44. I use the word ‘primitive’ as reflective of its use and thinking in the art
world by and through the colonial, imperial mindset of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries when such arts were blithely appropriated for
Western ethnographic museums.
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VAST/O Exhibition (De)Construction:
Exploring the Potentials of Augmented Abstract
Comics and Animation Installations as a Method
to Communicate Health Experiences
Alexandra P. Alberda, João Carola, Carolina Martins,

and Natalie Woolf
Abstract This chapter critically reflects on the methodological potentials of

augmented abstract comics and animation installations to positively impact
public awareness of the lived experience of mental health through emotive
responses to the installation VAST/O. In developing our approach, we
employed Astrid von Rosen’s (Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History
86:1, pp. 6–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2016.1237540, 2017)
Warburgian methodology which was proposed as an “activist art history” giv-
ing space to the marginalised, voiceless, and the undefinable experiences that
A. P. Alberda (*)
Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
e-mail: alexandra.alberda@manchester.ac.uk
J. Carola
Ar.Co, Lisbon, Portugal
C. Martins
University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
N. Woolf
Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa, Portugal
e-mail: natalie.woolf@network.rca.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_15
290 A. P. ALBERDA ET AL.
are denied in a canonised telling of Art History and evade it static conclusions.
We explore von Rosen’s (Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 86:1,
pp. 6–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2016.1237540, 2017) meth-
odology in the space of the gallery through abstract comics where readers take
on the performance of a museum visitor. Our proposed methodology breaks
from the bound nature of comics to explore the architectural element of instal-
lations, namely, the visitor’s experience of the (de)constructed gutter. Rosalind
Krauss’ (Grids. October 9, pp. 51–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/778321,
1979) seminal work, “Grids,” and the power of structured abstraction on the
psychological experience of viewing and creating art within this well-known
framework, is used to make sense of our own reliance on and rejection of the
gutter, or grid, in augmented visitor experience. We advance the perspectives
of researchers and artists in this chapter in merging theory with practice, and
explore the advantages and challenges of our method.
Keywords Augmented reading • Abstract comics • Comics activism •

Animation installations • Graphic medicine • Visitor experience
In this chapter, we critically reflect on the methodological potentials of aug-

mented abstract comics and animation installations to positively impact publics
regarding the lived experience of mental health. We explore this method for its
potential to start conversations of health, facilitate empathic reading, and raise
awareness of lived realities through emotive visitor responses to VAST/O. We
conceptualise VAST/O, the installation and project, as forms of graphic medi-
cine, which is a genre that encompasses works in which the comics medium and
health(care) intersect (Czerwiec et al. 2015) and seeks to empower individuals
whether patients, medical professionals, or general publics to build understand-
ing. In this vein, graphic medicine can be analysed as health activism that uses
the affordances of comics to stimulate social change. In our project, we assert
that the installation can be considered as a work of graphic medicine that plays
at the boundaries of different media to deliver a more affective and multisen-
sory experience to visitors. Gallery comics have the “potential to disrupt stan-
dard museum modes of consumption” (Peltz 2013), which we seek to explore
further through spatial-reading that shows what comics can do and make us
feel when abstracted through installation (La Cour 2019). While this interdis-
ciplinary project encompasses practices and theories from multiple fields, we
reflect on the art-historical methods and theories that make sense of our
methodology.
Astrid von Rosen’s (2017) Warburgian methodology, proposed as a comics
“activist art history,” gives space to the marginalised, voiceless, and the unde-
finable experiences that are denied in a canonised telling of Art History and
evades its static conclusions that feminists and others have critiqued since the
1960s.1 The fluidity of this methodology, and our own, is hinged on the per-
formative nature of both artists and readers. Going beyond this, we explore
VAST/O EXHIBITION (DE)CONSTRUCTION: EXPLORING… 291
von Rosen’s (2017) methodology in the space of the gallery through abstract
comics where readers perform as visitors. Through approaching this as a per-
formance, our proposed methodology breaks from the bound nature of comics
to explore the architectural elements, namely, the visitor’s experience of the
(de)constructed gutter. Art historian Rosalind Krauss’ (1979a) seminal work,
“Grids,” and the power of structured abstraction on the psychological experi-
ence of viewing and creating art within this well-known framework, is used to
make sense of our own reliance on and rejection of the gutter, or grid, in aug-
mented visitor experience.
Comics scholarship also examines the role of the grid in gallery comics.
Priego and Wilkins (2018, p. 16) present us with a vision of the grid that
relates to gallery comics’ performative nature when they state that it “is like the
stage technology in theatre or musical performance: sometimes we ignore it;
sometimes it intervenes in the action in a particular way and is made meaning-
ful.” Whether a book or an installation, (meaningful) reading is always what
becomes of the feedback loop between author, medium, and reader. In gallery
comics, considered in Daniel Goodbrey’s (2017) practice and research, the
concern with the integration of the architectural and visual cues of the space
and reader placement are of the utmost importance. The latter is intimately
related with the grid, which, in a gallery, will work much more like in a staged
performance where the barrier of the fourth wall is mostly non-existent, turn-
ing everyone in an active participant, even if apparently just a voyeur
(D’Arcy 2020).
VAST/O
Our VAST/O installation explores lived experience of anxiety through immer-
sive technologies, audio, and spatial-reading. It contains a distributed narrative
and inner dialogues that attempt to share the complex physical and emotional
experience of claustrophobic and acrophobic symptoms. It is based on two
research threads: the tangibility of drawing and animation to facilitate physical
understanding (communicating phobias), and spatially distributed reading in
graphic novel and comic book contexts (reading through architectural place-
ment). The installation composed of animation, abstract comics, and poetry
spatially integrated in order to convey Martins’ lived experience of spatial anxi-
eties, such as with animations projected onto other works. The overall installa-
tion plays with being an augmented abstract comic in its entirety through
exploring how the architecture and comics’ affective qualities (what comics
do—not what they are) come together (La Cour 2019). Through developing
the installation, we employ different media, such as animation (visual and audio
elements) projected into the space, abstract comics blended with poetry and
gestural markings, and abstract landscape murals, as well as the staging of a
domestic setting with a live webcam feedback loop. The installation was
arranged across two levels that created a domestic space (ground floor) which
portrayed physical experiences and an interior space (basement) which con-

veyed emotional and intangible experiences (Fig. 1).
The research project stemmed from Carolina Martins’ doctoral research and
lived experience. It was developed (over two years) through detailed conversa-
tions and visual elaborations with Natalie Woolf, an artist and moving image
researcher. They collaborated to identify the significant elements of Martins’
condition and find visual solutions to represent and embody them in an instal-
lation. Later, João Carola, a comics artist Martins had previously worked with
on the piece “like glass” in 2018–19,2 joined. Carola designed the application
of Martins’ poetry for the exhibition as an abstract comic that begins at
Entrance’s (Fig. 4) gestural poem mural and ends at the entry point of Arrival
(Fig. 2) with the “like glass” sculptural comic. All three curated the Entrance
space that also contained a number of Martins’ publications (zines document-
ing her lived experience) and Woolf created a “mise-en-abyme altered lens”
piece. Woolf grounded the installation’s design with the titling Entrance,
Descent and Arrival to help its processional thinking and introduce its structur-
ing dualities (discussed later), additionally producing two animations: “Anxious
Hands” (Fig. 3) and “Breathe” (Fig. 2) and the painting “Landscape-1-2-3-
loop” (Fig. 2). Arrival was also curated collaboratively. These works and our
intentions are analysed later in this chapter.
Martins also brought in Alexandra Alberda, a graphic medicine researcher,
to explore earlier iterations of the work through visitor responses in order to
develop the VAST/O installation we reflect on in this chapter. Visitor responses
revealed how we could elicit what comics scholar Erin La Cour (2019) describes
as the affective qualities of the social abstraction of comics through exhibition,
which incorporates Krauss’ (1979b) theory of the post-medium that is elastic
and self-reflexive. All the team contributed towards the dual challenge of
expressing the concepts while engaging with the theoretical approaches within
Martins’ doctoral research. We wanted to explore what blended comics and
animation can do in installations less concerned with medium boundaries and
more with self-reflexive methods.
After several starts, Martins, a Portuguese researcher, became aware of the
differences between the sound of the English word vast (open) and the
Portuguese word vasto (closed) whilst reading Gaston Bachelard’s analysis, in
The Poetics of Space (1958), of Baudelaire’s use of the French word vaste. Woolf
and Martins found this analysis allowed them to bridge differences in their
lived experiences:
Indeed, whenever we read this word [vast] in the measure of one of Baudelaire’s
verses, or in the periods of his prose poems, we have the impression that he forces
us to pronounce it. The word vast, then, is a vocable of breath. (Bachelard
2014, p. 113)
At first, these phonetic cues led to an exploration of breathing, breathless-

ness, and the respiratory system, particularly through Woolf reflecting on the
movements made by the mouth while uttering those words. Following this
Fig. 1 VAST/O installation layout, 2021. (Illustration by Alexandra P. Alberda and

Photography by Alexandre Ramos). Note on illustration: grey lines indicate features
that were behind walls that visitors could not see without moving in the space (made
transparent here), the large arrow indicates the entry into the space, and the music notes
represent the audio installation in the basement that played the sound of breathing. The
fading music notes indicates the loudness of the sound and how it could faintly be heard
at the top of the stairs as visitors descend. (Collaged images at the bottom show where
the later examined works existed in the space)
Fig. 2 The Arrival montage, 2019. In collaboration with Carolina Martins: Wall
installation art “Landscape-1-2-3-loop” by Natalie Woolf, pillar installation art “like
glass” by João Carola. Landscape mural: brown paper glued on wall, white acrylic paint,
and pencil markings; like glass pillar: alcohol-based pigmented paint on Crystal Acrylic
Plates; Video/Audio animation: projected hand painted animation on wall.
(Photography by Alexandre Ramos)
awareness of the oral mechanics involved in enunciation of these words, Martins

began to visualise the letter “O,” the last letter of the Portuguese word, enclos-
ing the English word in its entirety. Martins felt this was a visual symbol of her
own agoraphobia as the “O” swallows and disorients the other letters within its
circularity. This is resonant with the vertiginous nature of von Rosen’s (2016)
methodology and is a theme that gave shape to the installation. VAST/O has
since been developed over three iterations.3 And, while we focus on the instal-
lation at Atelier Concorde, Lisbon, Portugal (November–December 2019),
the others exist as important extensions of our own vertiginous methodology.
Vertiginous here relates to a methodology that is not seeking closure, like com-
ics, or a finite answer as to how augmented abstract comics and animation
Fig. 3 “Anxious Hands” by Natalie Woolf, 2019. Hand-drawn animation projected

on floating translucent screens and walls behind Entrance. Photography by Alexandre
Ramos. Note: this photograph is taken from behind the first screen. Visitors stood in
the background of the image having the animation projected around and onto them
installations can achieve a definitive way to convey health experiences, but a

method that helps us to work through emerging contradictions and complexi-
ties in communicating these in an open-ended manner.
Activist Art History and Knowledge Montage

An activist Art History methodology gives us the analytical framework to make
sense of and develop abstract comics and animation installations to contribute
to health activism. In her article “Warburgian Vertigo: Devising an Activist Art
Historical Methodology by Way of Analysing the ‘Zine’ Family Fun,” von

Rosen presents an activist Art History in which Aby Warburg’s vertiginous
knowledge montage methodology “makes possible an engaged art history
interested in societal, political and individual change with and through visual,
embodied, hybrid and moving expressions” (2017, p. 27). Warburg was an art
historian and cultural theorist who is credited with founding the iconographic-
iconographical approach.4 Warburg’s knowledge montages combined frag-
ments from different media (photos, reproductions of art, text excerpts, etc.)
that reflect our memories or realities to explore their relationship to each other
and thus construct new meanings based on this interpretative process (Galofaro
2017). Von Rosen (2017) argues that since his death in 1929, Warburg’s work
was subject to misinterpretation by scholars following Erwin Panofsky’s ideas,
before being liberated by E.H. Gombrich in the 1970s. Recently, art historians
have returned to Warburg’s theories, but von Rosen contends that they often
overlook his own experience of mental illness,5 which she believes is integral for
understanding the intricacies of his Mnemosyne panels, or knowledge mon-
tages. Von Rosen asserts that Warburg’s methodology can be used to reveal
“how our culture is shaped by entangled subjective and objective forces”
(2017, p. 9). This enables us to confront these tensions and contradictions and
the “psychologically and affectively charged histor[ies]” (von Rosen 2017,
pp. 26–7) that inform our understandings of mental illness. Informed by
Warburg’s own experience, von Rosen argues that her reimagining of his meth-
odology is apt for going beyond an understanding of how devastating trauma
is, or limited historical narratives about mental illness treatment. Instead, it
embraces the complexity of lived experiences alongside these histories.
Warburg used his Mnemosyne panels as tools to think through art and
Cultural History of the Renaissance in a spatial and physical method that
allowed relationships to emerge from putting different knowledges together
(Murphy 2021). However, Warburg’s Mnemosyne panels and the fragments on
them were moveable as new information could establish new relationships and
rewrite Art History. Von Rosen’s methodology borrows Warburg’s concepts of
the Denkraum (thinking-space), the Pathosformel (pathos formula), and the
Nachleben der Antike (the afterlife of antiquity),6 in order to adapt his knowl-
edge montage work into her own activist Art History. She creates a knowledge
montage of Una’s Family Fun: On Sanity, Madness, & Family Tunnel
Construction (2012), which collages excerpts from the zine with pictures, post-
cards, and text taped on a wall, sometimes overlapping and sometimes separate.
She views her own knowledge montage as a performative supplement, or
meaningful other, and “multifaceted mind-map in motion” (von Rosen 2017,
p. 28), to explore Una’s work with women’s experiences of health and enable
creative testing of the iteration and transformation – Nachleben – of cultural

images and memory. The most powerful device is perhaps the Pathosformel, as it
can effectively help researchers uncover and understand often contradictory psy-
chological and affective charges in visual, embodied, spatial and hybrid features.
Importantly the Denkruam allows both personal and scholarly engagement to

feed into the analysis, making sometimes vertiginous process as conscious and
clear as possible. (von Rosen 2017, p. 28)
Importantly, this methodology also neither silences Una’s art and voice
“nor [uses] it solely as an illustration of what [von Rosen] wants to do with
Warburg’s methodology” (von Rosen 2017, p. 7). Disrupting these silencing
practices in art-historical analysis is seminal in von Rosen’s (2017) methodol-
ogy which seeks to actively contribute to change in understanding marginalised
voices in health. She does this through examining women’s voices in the men-
tal health contexts present in Una’s work. This methodology is also in constant
motion and she states it is only temporarily frozen in her article but exists to
transform and develop beyond it (von Rosen 2017). This is similar to how we
view each VAST/O installation as well as our methodological discussion in this
chapter. Visitors’ responses to the earlier iterations became new fragments
added to the installation montage and prompted the artists to shift the differ-
ent works in the installation to stimulate new meanings. In never claiming a
restitutive ending common in public health and clinical narratives (Frank
1995), this vertiginous constant motion moves collaborators between a place
of disruption and stability. This allows us to methodologically engage in the
realities of mental illnesses and lived experiences. We engage with von Rosen’s
(2017) methodology to make sense of our own contradictions and perfor-
mances as researchers, artists, and individuals, which also includes engaging
with our (de)constructing of the gutter within the installation.
Against the Grid

Krauss’ (1979a) article, “Grids,” explores the emergence and modernist histo-
ries of grids and how these operate within psychological readings of such works.
At the time of writing her article, grids had been being produced for decades
by modernists such as Piet Mondrian, Sol LeWitt, and Donald Judd, but she
also describes the presence of grids in Symbolist Art through windows (Krauss
1979a). Krauss reflects on how the grid is repeated, but resists change, and
describes it as a modernist form that has the “capacity to serve as a paradigm or
model for the antidevelopment, the antinarrative, the antihistorical” (1979a,
p. 64). Strongly aligned with modernist art, the grid functions spatially and
temporally. For Krauss, spatially, the grid “is what art looks like when it turns
its back on nature” as it seeks to establish an organisation that is aesthetic and
not an imitation of the natural (Krauss 1979a, p. 50), though there are differ-
ent perspectives on the grid that challenge her interpretative framework of
modernism;7 Krauss (1979a) did not position the grid as determined by a spe-
cific historical chain of events, but grids have a temporal and causal relationship
with modernity. Thus, grids as an aesthetic tradition and individual works are
an emblem and a myth of modernity:
For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction not by dissolving the
paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by covering them over so that they
seem (but only seem) to go away. The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able
to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at
the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).
(Krauss 1979a, p. 54)
Using Mondrian as an example, Krauss believes these grids have seemingly

contradictory centrifugal and centripetal readings. For Krauss a centrifugal
reading sees the work of art as a fragment of a grid that extends infinitely, which
comics scholars may align with readers’ world-building that is interpreted
actively in the gutter but supported by the frozen panels that provide frag-
ments of this world. A centripetal reading views the grid as an autonomous
“re-presentation of everything that separates the work of art from the world,
from ambient space and from other objects” (Krauss 1979a, pp. 60–1, empha-
sis in original). We view our own work as being able to have similar contradic-
tory readings, because it tries to communicate the intangible and
incommunicable lived experiences of health that can only be told in fragments.
The environment acknowledges the separation from the visitor’s reality before
they enter the space by creating an immersive experience, and, in fact, we cel-
ebrate that subtle shift with our dissolved and dissolving reality should visitors
choose to fall into our grid-less and, therefore, blurred boundaries. Krauss, in
her article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” examines artistic interventions
into architectural spaces, through the medium employed, as “mapping the axi-
omatic features of the architectural experience – the abstract conditions of
openness and closure – onto the reality of a given space” (1979b, pp. 41).
VAST/O explores the play between the blurred meeting of comics, animation,
and architecture to reveal the affective lived experience of spatial anxiety.
VAST/O dissolves the grid’s temporality and autonomy from development,
narrative, and history through using abstract comics and animations designed
to facilitate spatially augmented readings. As the visitor slips between the gutter
and the panel, they also become the movement that happens between animated
frames, if we extend Norman McLaren’s definition of animation to that of
animated space (McLaren 1995). Martins’ fragmented poetry ties the emotive
experience of the artists’ works together playing with being classed either as an
anti-narrative or narrative, emblematic of chaos illness narratives (Shwetz 2019;
Frank 1995). We hope to stimulate activist engagement through sociocultural
(anti)narratives and histories of health and individual voice. We explore this
through closing the space physically and emotionally between visitors’ bodies
and the multilayered emotive presences asserted by the installation.
Dualities and Contradictions as Creative Stimulus

In this section, we confront three dualities, or contradictions, in the installation
and reveal how these can be thought of as creative stimulus for health activism.
These dualities have both conceptual and physical levels and are meant to stim-
ulate similar responses in visitors. We examine here in detail the three contra-
dictions that arose in developing VAST/O, which reveal the interplay of comics,
Art History, and health activism, before exploring how the artists in our team
(de)constructed the gutter when bringing abstract comics and animation
together. In her own analysis, von Rosen (2017) reveals how exploring contra-
dictions can promote more complex understandings of health realities when we
embrace them rather than try to resolve them. In the following section, we do
not attempt to resolve these contradictions but rather to demonstrate how we
embraced them in an attempt to communicate the lived experience of spatial
anxieties more meaningfully to visitors.
The first duality we face is creating a sense of both vastness and enclosure
that individuals with spatial anxieties feel. In attempting to theorise the instal-
lation’s contradictory aims, Bachelard provides answers by telling us “The
word vast reconciles contraries” (2014, p. 209, emphasis in original), offering
a stepping off point for Martins to confront dualities in her own lived experi-
ences of spatial anxiety. His words also provided an angle for her collaborators
to begin to understand the duality of her experience. Emerging out of
Bachelard’s text Woolf was confronted with the complexity of trying to repre-
sent vastness. She determined that this was better achieved by allowing visitors
to share a sense of vastness as she experienced it, communicated through repet-
itive, consecutive, and inconsecutive numbers associated with a calming tech-
nique for anxiety sufferers drawn on the walls of the landscape piece
“Landscape-1-2-3-loop” (Fig. 2). The empty landscape, with or without hori-
zon, is explored in detail by Dylan Trigg:
As we see, homogenous space – space perceived as having no horizon – becomes

especially problematic as it leaves the agoraphobic subject ‘stranded’ in a void,
without any means of escape. (2018, p. xxiii)
Trigg here discusses the loss of a horizon as a significant factor in triggering

his own agoraphobia; however, Martins felt the horizon line would confer the
sensation of extension, which, in extending without end, produces its own type
of vastness that is both a void and enclosed space, discreetly and eerily felt. This
reflects how those experiencing agoraphobia can generate fear from vast and
open spaces that become smothering and claustrophobic.
Woolf’s landscape represents these dualities as both internal and external
spaces in Arrival (Fig. 2). Her exploration of these contradictory lived experi-
ences can be considered as her working in the Denkraum. Von Rosen (2017,
p. 10) states that those working in this space have “to both lose her/himself in
an endless associative abyss and navigate in precise ways to capture the more
relevant (but still open and moving) aspects of the investigation.” The
Denkraum is a well-equipped conceptual space for understanding the realities
and histories of mental illness, since it requires an acceptance that no one defin-
itive answer can be found. Instead, Woolf’s various, congruent sketches and
experiments aim to find an experience that speaks to intangible mental health
realities.
Technical limitations did not allow for multiple projections, so Woolf cre-
ated a homogeneous space of vastness through the representation of a static
interior landscape. The landscape became a fixed drawing that wrapped around
the basement gallery, aesthetically connecting with Carola’s work. In VAST/O,
both the landscape and the enclosed cave-like space of the basement are a play
with the Nachleben carrying new meanings through the context of the installa-
tion while also maintaining cultural memories of these visuals that call to exter-
nal contexts. With its tactile presence, this seemed more suited to the duality of
the task: to express the challenge of vastness but also not instill too much fear
so that the visitor could not engage with the works. For Martins, the drawing
and the horizon line concept also represented the diaphragm itself, the muscle
of breathing. To Alberda, this work references early Abstract Expressionist
paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, and suggests an expansive landscape from
the mere gesture of a horizontal line stretched out, consuming the visitor’s
entire vision.
Similarly, the VAST/O landscape is an abstraction of the physical realities
that trigger those with spatial anxieties, and it is a visual illness metaphor to
communicate these intangible experiences. In the tradition of narrative and the
Pathosformel, inner dialogues are presented throughout via the poetry to
anchor the emotions of the affectively charged visual works. These diverging
interpretations of the same work reveal the contexts and histories carried by the
individual contributors and the presence of the Nachleben. Von Rosen (2017)
states that these operate by attempting transformation and making readers con-
front contradictions through affective performance, using the Pathosformel.
The second duality we explore is the push/pull between the static imagery
and the moving animations that were based on Martins’ bodily reactions when
experiencing spatial anxiety. The fixed imagery includes the visual poem, ges-
tural marking, abstract comics, and landscape elements, while the moving
imagery is on-screen or projected animated drawing. Though contradictory, it
is the still images (discussed in relation to the grid in the next section) that pull
the visitors’ bodies through the installation by establishing the narrative. The
differences between still and moving imagery are essential in conveying the
vertiginous nature of health and stimulating critical engagement that aligns
with activism on an individual level. The movement and content of the anima-
tions is constantly conveying the physical symptoms of spatial anxiety: nervous
gestures, difficulty breathing, and discomfort in seemingly neutral places. The
abstract comic and still images tell the experience grounded through a narra-
tive with a high emotional equality. But, these different parts do not exist sepa-
rately. The animations are projected on top of and around the still images that
make up the abstract comic and its extensive parts; vice versa, the still images
exist wherever there is room making the narrative immersive and inescapable
and without closure. Von Rosen (2017) states that the lack of closure in a ver-
tiginous methodology enables it to contribute to activist Art History. This is
because it actively creates space for unheard and marginalised voices to reinter-
pret the work. So ultimately, Woolf suggests a kind of inversion to the tradition
of the panel in comics. The still images cause movement, while the moving
images frame the viewer and fix them in space for the purpose of viewing. The
exception being “Anxious Hands” (Fig. 3), which through the expansion of
the screen—the transparent curtains—catch the projected image and spread it
through the space, mixing visitor and image together, and allow both a still and
moving viewing, becoming more energised as people passed through it. These
curtains capture and obscure the animation, but they also allow for it to be
projected onto the bodies of the visitors as they watch it. In the installation, we
hope that the constant shifting between immersing the visitors in someone
else’s story and reminding them of the physicality of their own bodies will aid
in drawing connections between their own personal experiences and others’ for
deeper understanding.
This closes the conceptual distance between the visitor’s and Martin’s
(drawn) body. This animation exists as the bridging piece after visitors enter the
constructed domestic space and before the visitors descend into the interior
landscape. Lurking behind the Entrance (and therefore also the exit), this pro-
jection is positioned at a point when action/departure is required.
Often tied to the second duality, the third duality we explore is the overlap-
ping exterior and interior realities present in the installation (Figs. 2 and 4).
This duality is important for trying to communicate mostly invisible health
experiences to affect social change, because clinical attempts at communicating
these experiences often rely on text-based communication and/or lists of
symptoms. These are often linked to master (clinical) narratives concerned with
communicating treatment and behavioural change. This is not the point of
VAST/O, which is an attempt to communicate what is missing here: the emo-
tional lived experience of mental health that is not felt linearly or is not com-
municated in symptom-focused medical texts. To achieve this, we construct
these two realities across the two levels, starting with something that looks like
a calm physical reality (domestic space) at first, but later dissolves into a charged
emotive landscape (interior space) at a point of turmoil. Visitors can only expe-
rience the installation in this order and must return to the physical reality
before leaving the installation with the knowledge that what is under the sur-
face is contradictory to what can be seen. But, even within this domestic space,
there is vertiginous movement that disrupts a complete sense of calm.
The “domestic set” (Fig. 4), or constructed reality, was meant to shift the
visitor from a sense of physical place to the later interior emotional landscape.
We had an entrance that naturally offered a sense of domesticity, since it con-
veyed a kitchen and had space for us to simulate a living room, with seating,
tables, and screen. The changing light of the entrance space caused by the glass
Fig. 4 Entrance—The “Domestic Set” and Transition montage, 2019. Water-based

acrylic painted on walls. (Installation art by João Carola, Carolina Martins, and Natalie
Woolf. Photography by Alexandre Ramos)
door kept the notion of time passing in the “domestic set” situated at Entrance.
Here, Woolf devised the “surveillance loop” that created a mise-en-abyme
whereby what appeared on screen was footage of the viewer captured on a web-
cam. This works on a similar level to that suggested by Chavanne’s analysis of
Inside Moebius by Jean Giraud (Grove et al. 2020), where, within the “diegetic
world” of the gallery, we replace the panel with the monitor, that cannot deny
its configuration, capturing (imprisoning) its live subjects. This acts in part as
an inset panel, and since we are following the action of the viewer, we replace
“artist activity” with the viewed and viewer. If the viewer then reads from one
of Martins’ publications, placed on the table, the internal spiral continues.
The domestic space sits as transition between the visitor’s own reality of the
world outside and the beginning of the constructed reality that will unfurl
within the installation. The mise-en-abyme of the domestic setting begins to
suggest a vertiginous recurring, out of linear time, of illness experiences, as well
as prompting the viewer to think about narratives within narratives (Cohn and
Gleich 2012). Importantly the footage was not a straight feedback/reflection
of people within the range of the camera. Because the webcam lens was altered,
you only became aware that you were the subject when you realise your move-
ments were being echoed on screen. A partial, unnerving self-awareness is
awakened, but the image is not clear enough to be used as a mirror. During
students’ visits, when asked about the purpose of the surveillance loop, one
person replied “it’s because we are the last frame” and another stated “you can-
not escape from yourself.” The live webcam view of the entrance door pro-
poses not only a sense of in/security and disturbing the borders between in and
out but also reinforces the idea of circularity present in Carola’s marks and the
sense of vertigo we wanted to convey through the overall reading.
Augmentation and abstraction are by definition the transforming and
deconstructing of realities into something else, as in La Cour’s (2019) theory
of the social abstraction of exhibited comics. The installation sought to do that
by playing with the multimedia affordances that help create worlds through
reader engagement, such as the gutter in comics or movement in animation. By
deconstructing them, we were able to explore methodological potentials for
these types of installations for communicating health experiences beyond clini-
cal or homogenous concepts of illness. Our method’s ontological position is
that every visitor has their own version of reality (Levers 2013). Therefore, it is
crucial to consider audiences’ abilities to suspend disbelief and enter into shift-
ing realities the installation facilitates. This type of project requires collabora-
tors to engage with multiplicity and inform visitors of the nature of the health
experiences in the installation prior to their visit, as it is difficult to self-monitor
in immersive installations.8 This last point resonates with von Rosen’s
Warburgian activist approach that is in constant motion and never seeks closure
but is open to individuals’ unpredictable personal experiences that give emotive
meaning to sociocultural and political associations.
(De)constructing the Gutter Through Abstraction

and Augmentation
VAST/O attempts to blur the boundaries between each of its elements and
spaces, proposing an expanded environment, where a certain reality is shaped
for the audience to feel incorporated in the narrative, corrupting one of the key
elements of comics: the gutter. The gutter is a kind of “venue where the minds
of readers interact with the comics text” (Kukkonen 2011, p. 217) and delin-
eates what belongs in the realm of the fictional or of the real world. In the
context of an installation, where boundaries are not clear, the reader is con-
stantly in and out of the gutter, traversing the real and the fictional. In these
examples, the gutter is diluted in a hybrid space, becoming a venue to be tra-
versed and used as a connection. In installations, this space becomes a literal
venue bordered object by object where the readers are juxtaposed in praesentia
(Groensteen 2007). Ultimately, we found the abstraction of experiences and
the works in the installation created an emotive site through which a
just-within-grasp narrative, further augmented through spatial-reading, could

be asserted overall.
Krauss’ (1979a, b) work is used here to understand how VAST/O’s (anti)
narrative required the abstraction of the gutter into the architecture in order to
achieve an immersive and prolonged reading experience that explicitly reveals
its contradictions. Shwertz (2019) states that traditional chaos narratives “can
often be identified by sentences that are themselves disordered and chaotic
instead of clearly written and grammatically succinct.” In VAST/O, Carola does
not make distinct caption boxes and communication bubbles around Martins’
poem, symbolically fixing phrases to narrative time. Instead, Martins’ distrib-
uted poetry directs movement and leads visitors through the architecture more
vertiginously. Alongside the poetry, Carola paints abstracted gestures that
accentuate this movement, leading the visitor down into the interior landscape
(Fig. 2). These gestures resonate with those present in Woolf’s animations, as
well as the sculptural comic in the interior landscape below.
We assert that this immersive experience can more effectively stimulate
health activism by purposefully hiding gutters (boundaries) between panels
(works), so that when, in “like glass” (Fig. 5), a work is made more distinct
within the installation, the visitor feels this separation, as works push and pull
them between competing centrifugal and centripetal readings. We need to
work backwards to understand how the abstract comics part of the installation
was formulated, because Carola’s artistic process is the opposite of the visitors’
Fig. 5 The “like glass” art by João Carola and poetry by Carolina Martins, 2018–19.
Alcohol-based pigment hand painted on Crystal Acrylic Plates. (Photography by
Alexandre Ramos)
experience of the works. In the installation, visitors start from a resistance of

gutters and grids in the domestic space and abstract comics mural, but the grid
emerges in “like glass,” the last piece visitors encounter in the basement.
Martins has a fascination with glass’ materiality, origins, fragility, and contradic-
tions, similar to Krauss’ (1979a) analysis of the appearance of the grid in the
windows of Symbolist Art. Martins already had a fixed grid in mind for Carola
to adapt: four square pages divided in four equal squared panels. The poem
itself explores the body’s connection to emotional fragilities and its character-
istics became an epigraph of the comic and installation. Firstly, its circular
nature, where the first four verses are structurally similar to the last four verses,
gave Carola his first narrative idea: ending up in a situation that is very similar
to where we started from. In the installation, these four pages are placed against
the sides of the same plinth making the reader walk circularly around the comic
to read it in an order of their own making. This circular physical movement
needed to read the comic embodies the cyclic features that Carola illustrates on
the acrylic and appeals to the reader’s immersion in the (anti)narrative, while
the structure (grid) conveys its prison-like stiffness.
From the very start, Carola had a feeling that the poem and the narrative
growing in his head were asking for a different type of format away from paper.
The various materialities and textures, at times in a metaphysical way, not only
dictate the material in which the comic should be produced but also the course
of its own narrative. In fact, the first couple verses speak of notions of transpar-
ency and opacity, which gave Carola the initial idea for a different type of mate-
rial: an acrylic book as an installation piece where each page would be divided
in four transparent layers. The layers were painted with opaque black ink so,
when together, they would complete the graphical information of the page as
well as accentuate a notion of tridimensionality within the object: a space inside
the book. The narrative of the comic is a journey of observation, approxima-
tion, and transformation. In its space there exist markings that keep showing
themselves to us in order to reveal their fractal nature. The poem dictates their
interactions, sometimes in accordance with its text but other times not, creat-
ing a disparaging dissonance. Carola’s brushstrokes in the comic connect to the
graphic communication of the entire installation, increasing their urgency and
velocity.
Carola felt a desire to explode these brushstrokes onto the walls of the gal-
lery in order to connect the two floors separated by a staircase. He approached
this as creating a graphic narrative work that uses the space of the gallery as a
narrative tool (Duffy 2009). Using Martins’ poetry again, Carola continues an
exploration of an empty space inhabited by smudges that shows themselves in
a process of transformation to the visitors. This work establishes a continuous
stream of walls that text and image share, without other graphic boundaries
like panels, speech bubbles, or text boxes. We read through the narrative with-
out the need of windows, symbolic and literal grids (Krauss 1979a), since we
are already in its diegetic world: the gallery itself. Text and image punctuate
each other creating a reading rhythm based on the movement of the reader
inside the gallery. Quick and sparse brushstrokes accelerate its reading but
bold, heavy strokes and big dense dark blobs of paint grab the reader, trying to
stop them from walking further, demanding to observe them harder. One
powerful instance of this occurs when the visitor is coming to the bottom of
the stairs where the ceiling requires most people to crouch. Here, Carola places
a bold and dark brushstroke, so that the emotional and physical tightness of the
space stays with the visitor. Walking down to a more open area is not done in
relief, as the visitor brings the closed-in sensation of the tight staircase with
them. Almost because of that last brushstroke, the visitor does not actually
transition to a more open room. They bring that feeling with them as they read
the last verses of the poem while still immersed in it: “my body stops / it
becomes a place.” When visiting the exhibition, we start with the urgent
moment of the exhibition poster, then we read the erratic and violent moments
of the mural and poem, and we end up in the “like glass” grid. In a way, any of
these three pieces of work are all branches from the same narrative tree. They
can be seen as short narratives, with the same characters, exploring the same
themes in different diegetic times. However, the return of the grid in “like
glass” creates a moment of calm transformation as the visitor arrives at a point
of emotive self-discovery and a centripetal reading is facilitated to allow separa-
tion from the immersive and augmented work.
In his book Comics and Communication, Paul Fisher Davies explores
Abstract Comics in their capabilities to communicate. In Chapter 3,
“Abstraction in Comics,” Davies (2019) refers to Andrei Molotiu’s two types
of abstract comics. The first one being “recognisable mimetic images (…) com-
bined in ways McCloud’s system would classify as ‘non-sequitur’”; and the
second one being the comics that do not mimetically represent recognisable
real-world images (2019, p. 38). Carola’s work falls into the latter. Its organic
forms, contrasting with the obtuse angles of the architecture, are animated by
passing readers. At the same time, its rhythm expresses a physical discomfort
and disorientation, recalling Davies’ reading of Benoît Joly’s “Parcours”
(1987), where he calls upon C.S. Peirce’s “indexical” mode of representation,
which “represents the traces left by physical action which are then implicit in
the reading” (Davies 2019, p. 53). It is Carola’s interpretation of rhythms in
the textual poem, mimicked in the visualised gestural marks of the mural, that
lead the reader’s passing throughout the space and creates its own narra-
tive world.
However, the audio of the breathing from Woolf’s animations does not
allow visitors to separate their reading of Carola and Martins’ “like glass” for
long before pulling them back into the enveloping presence of overall chaos
and discomfort of the installation.9 A centripetal reading is both encouraged by
the grid in “like glass” and denied by the audio that reminds the visitor of the
experiences beyond it. This could be understood as a vertiginous voicing of
silence, trying to make something intangible tangible, made accessible to read-
ers through the repeated visual and textual expressions and disrupted by the
audio (von Rosen 2017), like the constant noise of thoughts in the back of
your head. Visitors stated that it ultimately led them to need to return to the
domestic space above where the audio was only faintly heard and, thus, less
emotionally pressing and able to be dealt with. It became apparent that audio
was important in conveying a fragment of the lived chaos of spatial anxieties
and the need to find an escape. By creating this, we hope to facilitate a meta-
reading of the installation as the visitor without spatial anxieties re-emerges
from the interior landscape, and realises that it is only they themselves who are
able to escape as the installation is a representation of Martins herself and her
lifelong condition of spatial anxieties. We hope that this emotive experience
stimulates individual change through a non-medical understanding of health,
which feeds into larger social changes and health activism that advocates for
more empathetic understandings of patient’s dual and seemingly contradictory
experiences.
Reflection: Installing Health Activism

In this chapter, we explored how to merge theory with practice, and the advan-
tages and challenges of our method. Researchers wanting to explore abstract
comics’ emotive potential in communicating health experiences need to engage
collaboratively with artists familiar with this genre, as well as individuals who
have experienced the health condition and seek to liberate it from limiting and
toxic social stigmas. With each reiteration of the installation, our action research
approach reacts to visitor feedback to build our own method and continue to
disrupt existing canonised inequalities opened up by an activist Art History.
A comics activist Art History allows researchers to go beyond academic dis-
ciplinary conversations and actively contribute to social, political, and individ-
ual change (von Rosen 2017). The greatest strength of this exhibition lies in its
ability to immerse the reader, physically and emotionally, in the diegetic world
of its pieces. The world that the reader discovers is not welcoming, as the feel-
ings present are of aversion and repulsion, but the installation gives a voice to
lived experiences to confront prevailing harmful sociocultural and charged his-
torical contexts. Abstract comics and animation installations provide us an
opportunity to communicate lived health experiences and empower artists and
individuals through supporting their work and voices. An activist approach
makes us as researchers confront our own current practices that may margin-
alise creators’ voices or agency. Von Rosen’s idea of the vertiginous montage
and our own on-going vertiginous installation methodology “keeps critical
motion alive” (2017, p. 28). This means that we as collaborators are continu-
ously and actively engaged in adapting the work to new spaces, voices, and visi-
tors in ways that do not adhere to master narratives and promote visitor agency.
Visitor reactions, as well as other observations collected from informal feed-
back, have helped us to consider how far to take the augmentation of the gal-
lery spaces to present a powerful immersive experience. Abstract comics and
animations afford the artists the ability to combine actual and animated spaces
in the gallery, static and moving, to work towards our goals but not cause
harm, which is a challenge when working with immersive health experiences.
For us, working on an installation that is always in motion and only freezes
temporarily as it is installed is exciting; however, it calls for site-specific consid-
eration in order to effectively convey its activist intentions. Von Rosen’s work
affords us analytical devices for deepening our own engagement with creating
these works as well as creating meaningful experiences for visitors. For Comics
Studies scholars, this methodology also requires us to be human within the
work, and make transparent how we ourselves relate to the topics, work, and
histories we engage with. This not only allows for our work to affect sociocul-
tural or political change through facilitating emotive visitor responses, but the
method has the potential to stimulate our own individual transformation
through methodological activism that uses self-reflexivity. These personal and
societal changes are meaningful whether the impact would be perceived as
slight or major by the researcher, visitor, artist, or institutions.
VAST/O is not supposed to be a clinical report providing a clinical or medi-
cal understanding of spatial anxieties. It was our intention from the beginning
to convert Martins’ emotions into a format visitors could feel. We believe that
our methodology reveals that an abstract comics and animation installation
that seeks to augment space in order to communicate health experiences is
impactful and meaningful for some visitors. Augmented abstract comics and
animation installations allow for a balance between personal illness narrative
that tells a singular story and also ambiguity and emotion that can lead to vis-
ceral and emotive embodied experiences. Researchers might consider the
power of abstract comics in conveying intangible and untouchable health expe-
riences to publics. They may also benefit from blending the boundaries between
different media to add narrative depth and create an immersive environment
that mimics sensory experiences associated with comics or the health experi-
ence (Hague 2014). By engaging with local artists and patients, researchers can
employ a comics Art History activist approach that empowers these groups and
works to destigmatise health realities through emotive installations.
Notes
1. For further discussion of feminist Art History’s critique of the canon Cf. Wallin
Wictorin and Nordenstam chapter “Feminist Art History as an Approach to
Research on Comics: Meta Reflections on Studies of Swedish Feminist Comics”,
and Olsza Chapter “Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and
the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States”.
2. The poem like glass came together when Martins first tried to explore the strange-
ness of her own bodily relation with spaces. It was made previously into an
unbound, multiple page, limited print comic that was multicursal and readers had
to twist and move to read; Carola worked again with Martins to adapt the work
into a sculptural comic. It is a metaphor that links the toughness and vulnerability
of the human body with glass properties, ending up signaling overcoming the
terror of one’s own uncanny relation with space, from which you cannot escape.
By choosing a composition that conveys the turning of the sheet and of the head
to read it, it purposely induces a vertigo feeling. Besides this, due to its multi-
cursality, one can enjoy different readings, similar to what happens when reading
the plexiglass object it came to be as a sculptural comic.
3. A partial pilot exhibited in Bournemouth, UK (open to the public), and two
immersive installations at Atelier Concorde, Lisbon, Portugal (November–
December 2019), and the Banco das Artes Galeria, Leiria, Portugal (November
2020–January 2021).
4. For further application of Warburg’s methodology to comics Cf. Ahmed chapter
“Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories.”
5. Following World War I, Warburg suffered from severe psychosis, which was ini-
tially diagnosed as schizophrenia, but was later challenged by Emil Kraepelin as
mixed manic-depressive state. Warburg recovered over six years, across three dif-
ferent institutions, and was discharged from Binswanger’s Belle Vue clinic,
Switzerland, in August 1924. Here artistic ventures were encouraged in patients’
treatment and Warburg spent time with psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn discussing
topics related to his later Mnemosyne work. For more on Warburg’s treatment
and mental health, see Barale, Emanuele, and Politi (2011), Punzi (2019), and
Theiss-Abendroth (2010) (in German).
6. Warburg intended to make a book from his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne; however, he
died before this could happen, and thus the work we discuss here is based on his
many reflections and talks he gave while alive. The three concepts of his method
that we employ here are the Denkraum (thinking-space), the Pathosformel (pathos
formula), and the Nachleben der Antike (the afterlife of antiquity). The Denkraum
for Warburg was not the work, but the tools that enabled the thought experi-
ment, such as the individual parts that he moved around his panels in searching
for their relationship, and the environment its physicality created for thinking.
The Pathosformel was what the panels portrayed, and what his book would con-
vey, which was the emotional quality and actions of what is contained in the art,
through gesture and content, that reaches through time. The Nachleben der
Antike refers to the relationship between the different elements emerging from
the methodology that creates new constructed meanings. For more on Warburg’s
montages and reactions to it, see Kathryn Murphy (2021).
7. Krauss’ theory of the grid has been contested by some and differs from others,
such as Amy Goldin (1975), Andrew McNamara (1992, 2009), and Francesco
Proto (2020).
8. Alberda conducted curator and visitor interviews of graphic medicine exhibitions
for her PhD research. Self-monitoring was described as the ability for an indi-
vidual visitor to monitor their own emotional responses to the works, and if those
became too powerful, and potentially harmful, the visitor would have the space
to not engage with the work. Immersive health exhibitions must consider how
visitors are enabled to act on self-monitoring to maintain their wellbeing in an
exhibit. The concept of self-monitoring is an important ethical consideration and
reality supported by semi-structured interviews conducted for that forthcom-
ing work.
9. These reflections were shared informally with Alberda, Martins, and Woolf dur-
ing the opening and tours they ran at the gallery in November and December
2019. However, the audio was tested in the Bournemouth exhibition earlier that
year to see if it would do this and Alberda conducted semi-structured interviews
which capture these reactions.
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From Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics
Theory Within Art History to Study
the Photobook
Michel Hardy-Vallée
Abstract Since the late 1970s, the skyrocketing prominence of photography

in the art world has been accompanied by the production of large, tableau-like
prints and their study within Art History. The institutionalization of photogra-
phy within the museum has been met by a rising interest in the photographic
book—or photobook—among collectors, critics, and scholars. This has created
a need for methods to perform the fine analysis and interpretation of pictorial
sequences, a task that comics theory can help fulfil. Thierry Groensteen’s
System of Comics defines at a fundamental level the material and conceptual
framework of the medium. For art-historical research on the photobook Open
Passport (1973), by Canadian photographer John Max, Groensteen’s system
has been repurposed to analyse the photographic sequence. This framework
has been useful in building a detailed interpretation of the book, and its appli-
cation was extended to the exhibition variant of Open Passport. Groensteen’s
semiotic analysis fills a gap in the analysis of narrative pictures, which often
neglects the space in which images are situated, as well as image-to-image syn-
tax. This usefulness does not point to a homogeneous scholarly field for picto-
rial sequence but rather to the connected nature of cultural forms and the need
for interdisciplinary dialogue.
M. Hardy-Vallée (*)
Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada
e-mail: michel.hardy-vallee@mail.concordia.ca

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_16
314 M. HARDY-VALLÉE
Keywords Photobook • John Max • Thierry Groensteen • Canadian

photography • Visual semiotics
To read a pictorial sequence, art historians often heuristically rely on cultural

conventions like sinistrodextral reading, character consistency, gestures and
facial expressions, or patterns of pictorial composition, especially when their
focus is on narrative, historical, or political aspects of the work. Such pre-
theoretical concepts adequately serve the purpose of many studies, just as liter-
ary scholars need not recapitulate the principles of linguistics every time they
write about a novel. However, there are occasions when syntactical, lexical, or
even phonological analysis is relevant, and so it is with pictures. The photo-
graphic book (photobook) has created in Art History a need for methods to
perform the detailed analysis and interpretation of pictorial sequences that
comics theory can help fulfil.
Since the late 1970s, the skyrocketing prominence of photography in the art
world has been accompanied by the production of large, tableau-like prints and
their study within Art History—the work of Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff, or Gregory
Crewdson is paradigmatic in this regard. At the heart of this institutional shift
is not so much an opposition between the documentary and artistic values of
photography but rather a debate on the rapport between images and audi-
ences. Modernist critics such as Michael Fried have championed a kind of pho-
tographic art that could not be examined up close in the hands like small prints,
magazines, or books can, entertaining “the ontological fiction that the beholder
does not exist” (Fried 2008, p. 40). Fried thus directly precludes the artistic
value of both expressive and performative photographic practices—from the
humanistic documentary of W. Eugene Smith to the pictorial appropriations of
Sherrie Levine—and relegates to the suburbs of fine art as mere objecthood the
photographic sequence, which takes for granted the viewer’s participation in
connecting the images.
The book has rallied scholars and critics reacting to the increasing place of
photography within the museum (Dugan 1979; Crimp 1989; Armstrong
1998; Parr and Badger 2004), identifying the birth of the medium with the
publication of the first book combining printed text and photographs, the
1844 Pencil of Nature (Fox Talbot 2011). An account of the author’s develop-
ment and application of his pioneering photographic process, the Pencil of
Nature ushered in a new era of mechanical reproduction: unlike the daguerre-
otype, which produced unique images on silvered copper plates, Talbot’s calo-
type process employed paper negatives allowing the production of multiple
positive copies. Redefining thus the origin of photography acknowledges the
resounding fecundity of the negative-positive process, while flipping the con-
versation once more from the single to the multiple image, as well as from the
FROM TABLEAU TO SEQUENCE: INTRODUCING COMICS THEORY WITHIN ART… 315
ignored to the acknowledged audience, since books are made to be touched,

thumbed, earmarked, chewed, or cherished.
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s epoch-making survey The Photobook: A
History therefore excludes books notable for their emphasis on the stand-alone
photograph. Artistic intent lies instead close to editorial control. Parr and
Badger define the photobook as “a book—with or without text—where the
work’s primary message is carried by photographs. It is a book authored by a
photographer or by someone editing and sequencing the work of a photogra-
pher, or even a number of photographers” (Parr and Badger 2004, p. 7). They
take the comparatively smaller scholarly interest in the photobook to reflect
academics’ sense of a “contradiction in the very idea of the photographer as
auteur” and a refusal to consider “the photographer’s view of the medium”
(Parr and Badger 2004, pp. 10–11). The study of photography in books is
today a growing field, but it has inherited a quarrel pitting the book and the
tableau, a quarrel that recapitulates eighteenth-century philosopher
G.E. Lessing’s essay on the Laocoön, the canonical expression of the opposition
between narrative and pictorial art (Lessing 1984).1 A case like Open Passport
shows instead how the photographic “museum” and “library” are interrelated
rather than mutually exclusive, to borrow the famous opposition (Crimp 1989).
My own research has therefore aimed to overcome this fault line by relating
the photobook to multiple sites of photographic dissemination—the book, the
gallery, and the screen. The photobook visibly sits among a constellation of
practices that employ photographs in groups such as chronophotography, the-
matic exhibitions, the photo-novel, or the magazine photo-essay (Smith
2008a). This new perspective awakens old questions: what defines a photo-
graphic work and its variants; how to elucidate its genesis, interpret its mean-
ing, or preserve it in a collection (Greenough 2009; Koudelka and Chéroux
2017)? More than ever, the answer requires paying greater attention to the
semiotic rapports between photographs than between the image and its
referent.
While theories of cinematic montage can provide starting points to articu-
late the temporal, fictional, or perceptual aspects of photobooks (Méaux 1995),
their usefulness is offset by the comparative rarity of spatialized pictorial
sequencing in films. Comics, in contrast, are most typically characterized by
sequencing based on juxtaposition and page layout. Both photobooks and
comics have a temporality comparable to that of reading. Academically, comics
and photographic studies have experienced heated debates over the status of
their object of study, navigated a complex positioning within departments, and
suffered from unfavourable comparison to established media. Nevertheless,
few links have been made; nothing yet compares at the theoretical level to what
has been accomplished in practice by the trilogy Le Photographe (Guibert,
Lefèvre, and Lemercier 2010), seamlessly fusing the contact sheet to the strip.
Narratology informs the art-historical analysis of images (see Kemp 2003),
but the attention given to the narrative dimension leaves the sequential aspect
relatively unexamined. In the case of photographs, both narration and sequence
alter our received idea that they are a slice of time-space (Baetens 2007, p. 60),
but only the sequence requires us to consider the space of audiences: how pic-
tures are arranged, and in what order. This problem drew me to the work of
Thierry Groensteen on the semiotics of comics in my research focused on
Canadian photographer John Max [Porchawka]. His Open Passport (Max
1973) was an innovative work with a storied genesis that cast a long shadow in
its native context. A narrative about the transformation and failure of a couple
around the birth of their child, it was a complex sequence built on the repur-
posing of images picked across the photographer’s entire archive. It posed for-
midable challenges of description and interpretation from its audacious
sequencing, but also because it was produced as exhibition, slide show, and
book. The work done by Groensteen to define at a fundamental level the mate-
rial and conceptual framework of comics allowed me to build an interpretation
of Open Passport that withstood scrutiny and could be extended beyond the
printed page while distinguishing this photobook from comics.
In the following pages, I situate Groensteen’s System of Comics in relation-
ship to the scholarly background that justified its use and critically consider its
usefulness. After an overview of my research on John Max and the photo-
graphic book, I will illustrate my application of Groensteen’s system to the case
of Open Passport according to its principal components. I conclude on the
benefits and challenges of this method by considering the horizon of a general
theory of pictorial sequences.
Problems in Sequence
The meaning of the term “sequence” when applied to photography varies
remarkably between authors, especially when contrasted to the cognate
“series.” Most authors will use one term to refer to a group of pictures that is
more organised (thematically, narratively, or plastically) than the one they iden-
tify by the other term: someone’s sequence is someone else’s series. This makes
discussing conceptual frameworks a somewhat daunting exercise in synoptic
reading, but all authors grapple with the same fundamental issue: how to speak
of related images. My usage follows that of Groensteen: a series is constituted
by pictures following one another, continuously or not, that are related accord-
ing to iconic, plastic, or semantic features; a sequence is a narrative series
(Groensteen 1988, p. 65).
Studies of photographic sequences have favoured close reading of visual
content above syntax. American Studies scholar Alan Trachtenberg’s ground-
breaking analysis of Walker Evans’s Message from the Interior (1966), inspired
by literary criticism, draws attention to the cumulative impact on the viewer of
the photographs (Trachtenberg 1979). Art historian Peter C. Bunnell adopts a
similar approach to Minor White’s non-narrative works. Inspired by Zen
Buddhism, White made in the 1950s a number of abstract photographs that he
presented according to a linear order, which function by appealing to intuition
and emotional response rather than to character and plot (Minor White,
Klochko, and Hershberger 2015). Bunnell examines the sustained effort of

concentration that is required of the audience attempting to connect the
images (Bunnell 1991). Art historian Lew Andrews, considering Evans’s
American Photographs (1938), draws attention both to thematic and symbolic
aspects of the sequence, noting oppositions and leitmotifs, but neglects page
layout (Andrews 1994). Cultural Studies and comics scholar Jan Baetens analy-
ses Lawrence Levy’s Going to Heaven (1976) using A.J. Greimas’s semiotics
and Gérard Genette’s narratology, but he does so to illuminate the thematic
structure of the work, not to qualify the nature of relationships between images
(Baetens 2001). His interest in hybrid forms has also led him to do extensive
work on the photo-novel and the film photonovel, as well as the photographic
narrative (Baetens 1995, 2008, 2010, 2019), but his focus is on their cultural
significance and their hermeneutical aspects, not the specifics of image syntax.
Recent studies of photobooks bring in a much-needed expertise in the
materiality of the book and its cultural significance, but still face the challenge
of operating in a scholarly context for photography that has until now favoured
the study of iconography and its relation to ideology across multiple disciplines
(Nickel 2001). As Visual Studies scholar Shamoon Zamir notes on the subject
of Edward S. Curtis’s major work:
The failure to attend with exactness to the work of form in The North American
Indian [1907–1930] has narrowed our understanding of the book’s ethical and
epistemological dimensions and obscured what remains most creative and engag-
ing in the work. Despite the substantial body of existing commentary on Curtis’s
project, we still have no sustained close reading of an image, or of an image
group, or sequence, or of the interaction of image and text—no account, in fact,
of the work as precisely what it is, a photobook. (Zamir 2012, p. 39)
The limits of his essay do not allow Zamir to perform systematically the kind
of analysis he wants for his subject, but for curator Joel Smith, this is perhaps a
pipe dream:
the image-to-image syntax of a series is an unreliable index to the series’ sense, or

intended reading. After all a single mode of organization, such as minute varia-
tions on a theme, can serve purposes as different as valorization by analogy
([Lewis W.] Hine), motion analysis ([Eadweard] Muybridge), formalist self-
expression ([Alfred] Stieglitz), salesmanship (the stove inventory), and disinter-
ested typology ([Bernd and Hilla] Becher). Since, therefore, compiling a
taxonomy of sequential structures does not promise to be of much help as a basis
for understanding the varieties of photo-series, it might be better instead to begin
from the opposite direction: that of origin and context. (Smith 2008b, 14)
Smith despairs from lacking a unified framework to do the kind of analysis

Zamir is looking for, but he might be asking too much of conceptual tools.
Image-to-image relationships between photographs can be studied empirically
(Tardy 1964) or theoretically (Méaux 1997), while the concept of closure has
focused a comparable discussion in the context of comics (McCloud 1994;

Gavaler and Beavers 2020). However, a theoretical framework cannot be
mechanically applied. It supports the interpretive effort of the scholar engaging
with the meaning of a pictorial sequence but does not supplant it. The image-
to-image syntax of Open Passport constitutes a necessary, not a sufficient deter-
mination of its meaning.
Literary scholar Mireille Ribière draws a distinction between photographic
sequences, series, and sets that comes close to providing such a framework. Her
notion of sequence corresponds to “the order in which the pictures have been
taken” (as can be seen on a contact sheet, for example), while the series “results
from a process of selection and combination of shots in order to tell a story”
(Ribière 1995, p. 288). Sets concern “linear and translinear networks within a
visual narrative,” such as leitmotifs (Ribière 1995, p. 288). They account for
the fact that a work employing multiple photographs can be understood non-
linearly. Ribière also acknowledges the specificity of photographic work: sensi-
tive materials are typically exposed only once to image-forming light. After a
fraction of a second or longer, a new image can be exposed, allowing chrono-
logical order. However, multiple exposures or the simultaneous use of cameras
wreak havoc on the coherence of Ribière’s notion of photographic sequence.
Still, within a limited photographic practice, it may be applicable. Taking her
framework as a whole, we have concepts to analyse both the linear order of
photographs and their translinear order, but we are lacking a concept for pho-
tographs presented according to a purposeful linear order neither chronologi-
cal nor narrative—for instance, in the abstract works of Minor White.
Thierry Groensteen’s semiotic analysis of comics developed in Système de la
bande dessinée (Groensteen 1999, 2009)2 is indebted to the interdisciplinary
work in pictorial semiotics of Groupe μ (mu) from the Université de Liège
(Belgium). In the Traité du signe visuel: Pour une rhétorique de l’image (1992),
the Groupe argues that codes, or conventions, should be studied at the level of
the whole picture rather than at the level of point and line (Edeline et al. 1992).
This is fundamental for analysing the sequence of panels typically found in
comics, which are individually fragmentary and depend on the co-presence of
other panels to be meaningful. Comics exploit narratively both the succession
and simultaneity of multiple images, relying on the active participation of
reader in filling gaps between pictures to do so, something which can be done
in the absence of text. The linking of panels is a core topic for the study of the
medium, framing the discussion at the level of reader’s imaginative involve-
ment (Stein 2019). Pictures in comics thus exhibit what Groensteen calls iconic
solidarity:
I define this as interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the

double characteristic of being separated … and which are plastically and semanti-
cally over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia. (Groensteen
2009, p. 18)
Iconic solidarity is minimally possible in suites of pictures, the broadest cat-

egory of works constituted of multiple pictures, which Groensteen defines as
“a collection of disparate uncorrelated images” (Groensteen 2009, p. 146).
Taking at random pictures from newspapers constitutes a suite because of the
pictures’ lack of prior correlation. Series and sequences are more specific cases
of suites, and by definition afford iconic solidarity as well. Making a collage out
of the newspaper pictures can constitute a series; turning it into a story makes
it also a sequence. Iconic solidarity is the minimal condition lacking in Ribière’s
framework that could help characterize Minor White’s non-narrative works as
series (in Groensteen’s terms).
Pictures in relation of iconic solidarity must inhabit a shared space to be
interpreted together: a single page, a spread, or even a codex. The meaningful
organization of space corresponds to Groensteen’s notion of spatio-topical sys-
tem: how it is subdivided; how these subdivisions are located relative to each
other; what shapes they assume; and how blank space is used. The spatio-
topical system describes the spatial arrangement of pictures in a work exhibit-
ing iconic solidarity, and the space itself in which they are located.
We finally come to the issue of image-to-image syntax with Groensteen’s
concept of arthrology: a feature of iconic solidarity that describes how these
pictures are semantically and plastically linked together. It is itself subdivided
between restrained arthrology—the linear relationships between pictures
immediately following one another in a sequence—and general arthrology—
the translinear relationships between two or more pictures located anywhere in
the entire work. Both Ribière and Groensteen pay close attention to these two
kinds of relationships between pictures. In this respect, their concepts overlap,
and Ribière was there first. While the System of Comics lacks Ribière’s consider-
ation of photographic temporality, it compensates in usefulness with its con-
cepts of iconic solidarity and spatio-topical system, which proved necessary to
analyse the spatialization of pictures in Open Passport and unpack its lin-
ear order.
Language is the medium in which we commonly express meaning.
Groensteen reminds us that a picture can be transformed into statements by
the interpretive work of the reader (Groensteen 2009, p. 107). But pictures are
not equivalent to statements: they can be translated. Being able to translate a
sequence of photographs into statements is a way of validating its narrativity or
making sense of a non-narrative work. As philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-
Georg Gadamer reminds us, language is the milieu in which our being and the
world meet: what can be understood is language (Gadamer 2013, p. 490). To
bring the meaning of Open Passport into language—or as art historians would
put it, “a representation of thinking about having seen the picture” (Baxandall
1985, p. 11)—requires a broad and flexible framework of analysis, one taking
into consideration both simultaneity and succession, the relationships between
immediately successive images, those between images separated by any other
arbitrary number of images, and between image and text.
A Canadian Transient
John Max worked and lived most of his life in Montréal. Born to a family of
immigrants from Galicia (now Ukraine), he began his photographic career in
the mid-1950s. Mostly self-taught, his brief frequentation of art schools gave
him access to an artistic scene then in full expansion, thirsty for international
exposure (Whitelaw, Foss, and Paikowsky 2010). Max built an extensive corpus
of spontaneous and formal portraits of painters, dancers, sculptors, musicians,
filmmakers, and writers that he used both for magazine work and exhibitions.
Pursuing an artistic rather than a journalistic career, he eventually won the sup-
port of major institutions that sponsored the production and circulation of his
work at home and abroad, especially the Still Photography Division of the
National Film Board of Canada (NFB), the National Gallery of Canada, and
the Canada Council. His photographs were characterized at the plastic level by
extreme contrasts, elliptical compositions, and a theatrical atmosphere evoking
both Expressionism and Surrealism; however, his primary mode of expression
was the sequence rather than the individual print, and he never abandoned
figuration for abstraction. He proved to be an important reference for younger
photographers (S.P. Cousineau 1977; Clément 2005; Ewing 2009), but his
career went through often complicated routes, and his legacy is still under
construction.
Open Passport is a long narrative sequence, recognized among the country’s
landmark works, the only one Max published as a book. First exhibited at the
NFB Photo Gallery in Ottawa (5 October 1972–1 January 1973), it subse-
quently travelled to Montréal, Vancouver, and a number of smaller venues in
Ontario and Québec. The slide show variant was shown at the Ottawa and
Montréal openings, while the book variant was published by Toronto maga-
zine IMPRESSIONS in late 1973 as a special double issue, in close collabora-
tion with Max. Weaving together images taken over 15 years in a multiplicity
of contexts, Open Passport tells a fictional story: how the arrival of a child
impacts a couple and the attendant dilemma between the pursuit of art and
domestic responsibilities. Freedom is a central theme, the crux of the conflict,
and its achievement elicits ambivalent rather than celebratory feelings; the real-
life counterpart to this story in Max’s divorce gives Open Passport elegiac notes.
From an art-historical point of view, I have sought to understand what artis-
tic strategies John Max used to challenge the denotative meaning of photogra-
phy during an era of intense theorizing on the medium. Understanding
denotation as what a photograph refers to and connotation as its associated
meanings in a given culture, Roland Barthes laid out the apparent paradox of
the photograph: an image that connotes the fact of its denotation (Barthes
1961, p. 129). In doing so, he was stressing the almost mythical proportions
to which the photograph was understood as emanating directly from the real,
unmediated. All major theoretical accounts of the medium from the 1970s
onwards have dealt with the relationship between the photographic image and
its referent (Krauss 1977; Sontag 1977; Barthes 1980; Schaeffer 1987; Tagg
1988; Dubois 1990; Elkins 2007). John Max evidenced the awareness of the
photographic community itself that the medium could not be reduced to its
denotative function alone. How did he employ the photographic sequence,
and what did he require of his audience to understand it? Taking into consid-
eration Open Passport’s multiple variants, related works, and Max’s archive, my
research followed an interpretative approach, circling hermeneutically between
the part and the whole. Being monographic in scope, its findings led to a
renewed understanding of the work and significance of John Max—to whom
many tall tales, misunderstandings, and enigmas were attached—as well as a
reconsideration of the methodological isolation of the photobook from other
forms of photographic production (Hardy-Vallée 2015, 2019a, 2019b, 2022).3
Theory in Practice
The book variant of Open Passport is made of 168 photographs presented
according to a complex layout. Rich relationships between them must be
understood, and text has a necessary, but supporting role in this task. The role
of text-image relationships has been taken to be central by previous studies:
Carole Armstrong, for instance, argues that photographs in books depend
upon a verbal frame to anchor their meaning, being highly ambiguous and of
limited symbolic content (Armstrong 1998, p. 2). I argue instead that the col-
lation of multiple photographs in an artwork can construct and clarify mean-
ing, not simply pile up ambiguity. The frame of a photograph, when there is
one, needs not be verbal: it can also be pictorial. Iconic solidarity is a concept
particularly germane to my purpose, as it suggests that photographs in a
sequence hold together in a systemic way.
To illustrate the usefulness of iconic solidarity, I will begin with a counterex-
ample. The following review of Open Passport, as it opened in Montréal in
1973, assumed that it was a typical retrospective exhibition of a documentary
photographer:
Walls, sidewalks, roads, unnamed men with telling faces are John Max’s favourite
subjects. He, going hither and thither, does not have a perceptible line of con-
duct, an organizing theme … directing sometimes his research on plastic effects,
as in this depiction of horses where heads constitute the principal armature of the
photograph. Fugitive men and women, and especially a great number of extremely
expressive faces are shown to us often under different aspects… . The photos
exhibited have been chosen over a fifteen-year period of activity. This explains,
undoubtedly, the unequal presentation. (Toupin 1973 [my translation])
The critic analyses each photograph in isolation, glossing over the sequential
aspect and narrative content. This illustrates the difficulty for an artist who
relies on conventions that may not be shared by all: we default to an interpreta-
tion of photographs as slices of time-space unless we are familiar enough with
sequences. Despite a narrative understanding being suggested in the artist’s
statement and noticed by other contemporary reviews (Confino 1972;

P. Cousineau 1973; White 1973), this particular critic was unable to relate
Open Passport to existing models of sequence.
Open Passport employs multiple strategies to induce in the audience an
awareness of iconic solidarity. Repetition of the same photograph, for instance,
draws attention in a striking manner to both the separateness and relatedness
of the two identical pictures (Fig. 1). After an initial dedication, epigraph, and
liminary poem, the second spread with photographs shows twice the image of
a boy (Max’s son) rowing a boat: alone on the left-hand page and as part of a
square grid of four pictures on the right-hand page. On both pages, the pho-
tograph is at the same position and has the same size. Working from Groensteen’s
definition, iconic solidarity applies when pictures, two or more, can be clearly
distinguished, while being related both plastically and semantically. The two
identical photographs of Max’s son exhibit iconic solidarity because their co-
presence allows us to witness their identity. But by presenting this photograph
first on its own, then surrounded by other photographs, these two pages cue in
an interpretative strategy central to the entire work: when looking at a given
photograph, one must especially pay attention to the ones framing it. Each
photograph exhibits iconic solidarity with the others on the same spread.
Near-identical pictures also instruct the reader to link, rather than to isolate
pictures. For instance, in a group of four (Fig. 2), two portraits of photogra-
pher Sam Tata highlight their iconic solidarity by the fact of their similarity,
which allows one to notice their minute plastic differences. All of this points
Fig. 1 Spread 04 of John Max, Open Passport, Toronto: IMPRESSIONS special issue
No. 6 and No. 7 1973. Offset lithography on paper, 28.5 × 22 cm. (Author’s collection)
Fig. 2 Spread 37 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973
towards a unified, rather than a fragmented, understanding of Open Passport,

in which the juxtaposition of photographs, especially identical or very similar
ones, announces iconic solidarity. Juxtaposition also makes possible semantic
features such as the identity of subjects across pictures, temporality of action,
and identity of setting. These indications of iconic solidarity could also suggest
what Ribière calls the photographic sequence, that is, the order in which actual
photographs are shot: based on archival evidence, the two portraits of Sam
Tata are the result of the same session.4 However, Ribière’s concept is of lim-
ited utility here: although it suggests that our understanding of the photo-
graphic act can bear upon our interpretation of images, iconic solidarity rests
on linking pictures. On the contact sheet, two photographs can be interpreted
as two attempts at making the same image; on the page, they function instead
as two moments in narrative time.
Pictures must inhabit a shared space to show iconic solidarity. The spatio-
topical system and both kinds of arthrology are aspects of iconic solidarity, not
distinct entities, which means that they are always conjoined. Their separate
consideration here only helps the demonstration. Iconic solidarity does not
depend on juxtaposition but on the ability of audiences to recognize connex-
ions between pictures both in intent and in effect. A photobook using only one
photograph per spread, such as Evans’s Message from the Interior, still allows
for iconic solidarity: memory rather than juxtaposition establishes links.
Spatio-topical System
Open Passport is organized as a rectangular book, subdivided into a variable
grid of rectangular pictures using changing amounts of blank space between
them. In comics, the single printed page is also often divided into a grid of
panels. This grid pattern may vary from page to page, and so Groensteen terms
the sum total of these subdivisions in a book the “multiframe” (Groensteen
2009, p. 28). It is, so to speak, the Cartesian space in which is located each
individual panel. The multiframe of a typical comic book is divided into pages,
but the multiframe of Open Passport is a collection of spreads, as is suggested
by the iconic solidarity between pictures on facing pages. Each spread is then
subdivided into a grid of photographs and blank space. Within the grid, indi-
vidual pictures can be described according to their site, their (x,y) spatial coor-
dinates. The shape of the grid determines the kind of visual rhythm accomplished.
When contemplated in its entirety, Max’s book can be broken down into four
main grid subsystems. First, the most common type of spread is the 2 x 2 grid
of photographs in landscape orientation. It provides the more regular motif—
or, to use a musical metaphor, its basic time signature. Two smaller subsystems
provide variety and accent, or pauses: 1 x 2 grids, and longer strips. Groups of
photographs in portrait orientation can be lumped together as a single subsys-
tem for the sake of expediency, but a certain number of sub-sub-systems of few
exemplars each can readily be seen. Finally, no photograph spans both pages of
a spread. Most of the time, independently of the kind of grid, the sites are
equally spaced, but there are some instances of irregular positioning that break
the regularity of layout.
The site of pictures inside the multiframe helps define the order of reading
(Groensteen 2009, p. 34). In fact, it also defines the manner of interpretation
as reading in Open Passport. Its first illustrated spread juxtaposes a poem on the
left-hand page to photographs on the right-hand one. It cues in readers to the
left-to-right order, but it also establishes some correspondence, a continuity
between text and image. The similar positioning of text and image on each
page of the spread suggests that there is, for the artist, a similarity between
reading words and looking at pictures. Following Groensteen, I use “reading”
to qualify the process of interpreting Open Passport and do not reserve it only
for the interpretation of textual components. Text in Open Passport facilitates
and guides reading, but the work is narrative independently of it. The repeated
picture of the rowing boy on facing pages (Fig. 1) creates a visual tension that
engages the reader to look left-to-right, top-to-bottom across both pages to
read each spread as a whole. As Groensteen argues, narration is fully possible in
the absence of text for pictures both organized spatio-topically and related
through a process of arthrology.
The margins around the photographs are part of the multiframe. In Open
Passport they are variable: most often very narrow, sometimes absent, but occa-
sionally very large. As Groensteen notes, whatever frames a picture participates
in its message, and conditions its visual reception, so that many comics authors
Fig. 3 Spreads 13 and 14 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973
are known to colour or draw in their margins. The size of margins in Open
Passport establishes a level of distance to the reader: the feeling of proximity is
proportional to the amount of white space surrounding a picture. Margins also
function as negative space in relation to site: for instance, a spread can begin at
top left with a small image, then continue across a vast expanse of blank paper
at the bottom right, emulating a fall to the ground (Fig. 3). The spatio-topical
system thus functions as the underlying architecture of iconic solidarity and
structures meaning beyond the content of individual pictures. Open Passport
evidences a rich, expressive spatio-topical system, which is apparent when
compared to other photobooks that rely on uniformity of layout like Robert

Frank’s The Americans (1959) or Duane Michals’s Sequences (1970). The
spatio-topical system not only modulates our response to individual pictures
like layout can, but it allows us to establish relationships between pictures by
locating them relative to each other. When these relations are narrative, they
can be detailed by Groensteen’s concept of arthrology.
Restrained Arthrology
Whereas a spatio-topical system can exist for any suite or series of pictures,
arthrology only concerns pictures that constitute a narrative series—a sequence
according to Groensteen. He defines narrativity by refining semiotician Tzvetan
Todorov’s definition: any statement relating actions, gestures, or events
together according to a logic of succession and transformation is narrative
(Groensteen 2009, p. 104). As applied to pictures, Todorov’s definition would
be overreaching and also apply to series. Groensteen responds that for pictures
to constitute a narrative, they must also follow one another according to logical
inferences and relationships of causality or deduction. The mere juxtaposition
of pictures is not sufficient to create narration. Narration is only possible when
the reader can infer that one event caused another, not simply witness change
over time.
The sequence in Fig. 3 happens in the first third of Open Passport. The pho-
tographs can be dated between 1962 and 1970 and are not shown in chrono-
logical order. Three different women can be distinguished: a circus performer,
Max’s wife Janet Peace, and Gail Zappa (with her musician husband). Going
from picture to picture, the narrative progression suggests that something is
about to turn the situation upside down like the circus performer. The growing
Zappa family stands in for the arrival of a child, something that slows down the
course of time before the resulting whirlwind, the consequent exhaustion or
desire for inner peace. From disparate sources, Max put together a very clear
narrative line, one that most parents would recognize. Consistency of character
is maintained despite the use of different women for the role of the mother.
Finally, and most importantly, the narrative meaning derived from the sequence
interacts with the spatio-topical system: birth is literally and symbolically ren-
dered as a fall.
Reading Open Passport as a continuous narrative requires the ability to
unpack the use of multiple tools at the artist’s disposal—not relate it to a spe-
cific taxonomy of sequences. Methodologically speaking, a taxonomy is a flat
tool of analysis: elements may or may not fit within specific categories. In con-
trast, a poetics (like versification or musical theory) presupposes a range of
possible devices known to artist and audience that can be adapted to the needs
of a particular work. The poetics of John Max’s photobook draws on features
common to that of comics or narrative poetry. Groensteen’s notion of restrained
arthrology directs our analysis towards the image-to-image syntax of Open
Passport, in which a number of familiar tropes can be discerned: metaphor,
rhythm, repetitions, or symbolism combined in an organic manner to consti-

tute more abstract entities like character, theme, plot, and narrative arc. Once
these are recognized in the context of images in space, rather than language,
then a reading of Open Passport is possible. However, if one fails to recognize
the photographs as having iconic solidarity and space as meaningful, the door
to narrative meaning will remain shut.
General Arthrology
As I was working through the main narrative line, I took note of photographs
that could be grouped together on the basis of iconic, plastic, or semantic cor-
respondences, and which are not presented in a contiguous, successive manner
in Open Passport. For instance, I constructed series involving food, people clos-
ing their eyes, and boys because they corresponded to themes or to elements
of the plot. Although these photographs are part of a sequence, grouping them
does not constitute a sequence. General arthrology exemplifies a deeper level
of formal and thematic organisation in a work and provides additional layers of
meaning. Patterns and repetitions across non-contiguous pictures tap into the
memory of the reader, and the full meaning of pictures at the beginning of the
sequence can be deferred until the end. Groensteen names braiding this net-
work of meanings that functions both synchronically and diachronically within
the story (Groensteen 2009, p. 147). Similarities between images encourage
audiences to compare them, mentally or visually, while their distinct position
within the narrative also prompts us to consider them as different moments
in time.
The first and last groups of images of Open Passport constitute a series
marked by plastic resemblances and thematic changes—a case of braiding
(Fig. 4). On the last spread, a photograph of a seawall shot in perspective geo-
metrically resembles the road of the first one. The tonal composition of both
photographs is also similar: dark on the sides, light in the centre. The young
boy accompanied by a dog is in thematic opposition to the solitary old man.
While the aspect ratio and relative positioning of photographs on the page is
identical in both spreads, their reproduction size varies, those on the first being
smaller than those on the last. The change in picture size suggests growth, but
the relationships between beginning and end implies a return, taking stock of
the path travelled along the road. Finally, since these four pictures are the
beginning and the end of the photographic sequence, one can read them as a
kind of thematic chiasmus: boy, road, road, man. Comparable constructs can
be found in Open Passport around motifs of food or eyes.
General arthrology builds on the hermeneutical principle that any element
of a work is potentially meaningful in relation to all the others: a detail on page
three may help understand a plot point 60 pages later. It is not only narratively
constructed but also spatially constructed, as it depends on the physical dis-
tance between pictures, as shown by the first and last spreads of Open Passport.
The spatio-topical system of the book involves a constant unit of space—the
Fig. 4 Spreads 03 and 46 of John Max, Open Passport, 1973
spread—in which photographs constitute a grid. This space is experienced

sequentially during reading, with each spread being equally separated from the
other—only one can be seen at a time. In contrast, the spatio-topical system of
the exhibition variants of Open Passport resulted in a much less linear experi-
ence. They were designed according to a circular floor layout, and in Ottawa
the very first and very last photographs were actually hung back-to-back on a
single wall. Photographs distant from each other in sequential terms were spa-
tially close to each other. In comparison to the book, the exhibitions thus
presented the narrative of spiritual liberation of Open Passport inside a circular

form, which in turn alluded to Max’s Buddhist beliefs.
In the gallery, one could posit the individual walls as units equivalent to
spreads—both being flat and bounded. However, this would be a mistake for
Open Passport, insofar as the relative position of photographs to each other in
adjacent or facing walls matters as much for the structure of the exhibition as
the individual grouping of photographs. The spatial layout of exhibitions is the
site of relationships between pictures that are not possible in the space of the
printed codex.5 The units of space were therefore the zones within which the
visitor’s field of view is bound, as verified by the manner in which the subse-
quent hanging of the exhibition in Montréal maintained these zones rather
than the linear sequence of groups (see the analysis in Hardy-Vallée 2019a).
Finally, the relationship between text and image in Open Passport sets it
apart from the medium of comics. Open Passport, devoid of captions but not of
text, allows for polysemy. Text in comics first accomplishes Barthes’s functions
of anchoring and relaying. Anchoring is to limit the polysemy of pictures; relay-
ing is to provide complementary information. But text in comics also has a
“stitching” function: because the narration consists of multiple pictures, text
may help linking two pictures together (Groensteen 2009, p. 131). Text can
speed up or slow down narrative time. From the start of Open Passport, text
and image are related, but their relationship does not occupy centre stage. In
the absence of stitching text, it cannot be easily ascertained whether the span
of narrative time between two pictures is nine months or nine years. Max dedi-
cated Open Passport to his son, something which relays the book externally as
an object; a quotation on the same page from Persian poet Rūmı̄ anchors the
book internally. The text “This world is as the dream of a sleeper” suggests that
the world which we are about to enter, the book itself, is not a world that is real
as a naïve reading of photography would suggest, but instead that it is a world
thick with signification and multiple senses, or illusions, as a dream is. It links
photography and poetry by using the premise of the dream to support free
associations and symbolic meaning—the use of poetry alongside photography
being in its own right another practice popular in France after 1950 to signal a
detachment from denotation (Frizot 2009, p. 192). However, in the 1961
translation by Arthur John Arberry of Rūmı̄ ’s Fihi Ma Fihi [‫]فیه مافیه‬, most likely
the source used by Max, the same passage suggests that the world of the unini-
tiated is but a dream (Rūmı̄ 1961, p. 194), which can also lead to a spiritual
reading of Open Passport. This quotation, like the dedication, bears a relation-
ship to the entire work more than to specific pictures. As such, these texts
establish a formal and thematic context of interpretation for readers.
Beyond the artist’s statements and title cards, very little text accompanied
the photographs of the Open Passport variants. John Max believed in the divi-
sion of labour between text and image:
Interviewer: What do you think about people who put words with their
photographs?
Max: It depends how the words are used. I would use words with
images, but as a counterpoint, it would be like a fugue. But the
images must stand, must be able to work and do everything
that is inherent in the language of the image, by itself, it must
not depend on the word. That the word would be added as just
another piece of beauty, doing what the language of words can
do. But the picture must not depend on the word, giving you
any sort of information in order for the photograph to work
for you. That’s the way I look at it.6
Only the book had text in close proximity to the photographs: the poem
written by Max and translated in French by his friend, playwright Jean-Claude
Germain (Fig. 4). For the exhibition, it was instead included in the promo-
tional leaflet. Text in Open Passport neither anchors nor relays the meaning of
images, but provides cues for interpretation, priming audiences for a particular
kind of reading. The “open passport” of the title is a metaphor, meant by Max
to suggest a passport to go anywhere, the cost of total freedom (Lamothe
2010). It puns on the idea of an “open ticket,” suggesting that a precise
moment to return is not intended.
Fusion on the Horizon

To reuse the terminology long established by German philology, my research
put together internal and external evidence concerning Open Passport using
judgement—Kritik—and explained the work both in itself and according to its
relevant context—Hermeneutik (Schleiermacher 1998; Boeckh 2013). The
semiotic tools developed by Groensteen gave me the initial traction for engag-
ing with the meaning of Open Passport: a story told in the first person about the
conflict between freedom and existence.
Despite the importance of pictorial narratives for Art History, its spatial and
sequential mechanics remain a secondary concern to the analysis of images
themselves. The study of painting’s integration to architecture is perhaps one
of the discipline’s closest equivalent to a spatio-topical system, itself a reflection
of painting’s uses over time. Photography’s own intertwined history with the
printed page has often drawn it into the orbit of literature, but I believe theo-
ries such as Thierry Groensteen’s system of comics offers two previously
unreaped benefits. First, it provides a steppingstone for the combined analysis
of sequence and space; second, a focus on relationships between pictures rather
than between image and referent, as is so overwhelmingly the case in photo-
graphic studies.
Max mustered a variety of existing tropes and techniques, in addition to
producing many variants, casting doubt on the autonomy of the photobook as
a medium and suggesting its porousness to other artistic and cultural practices.
Comics, in comparison, has often been claimed to be a unique, autonomous
medium with well-defined characteristics—this is after all the premise of any
system like Groensteen’s. Applying comics theory to the photobook leaves us

on the horizon of a larger problem, namely, whether there is a unified medium
for all picture stories. Some comics scholars and theorists have enthusiastically
developed histories reaching far into the European Middle Ages, even phara-
onic Egypt, providing grammars and systems (Kunzle 1973; McCloud 1994;
Cohn 2013). However, such approaches tend to suffer from a teleological
bias—positioning the contemporary comic strip as the culmination of a deep
evolution—and from a technocratic bias—every concept has sharply defined
boundaries, functions within a grammar, has a limited number of possible
cases, and so on. In doing so, they recapitulate the same problems that have
plagued philosophical systems.
Being interpretative, my research employed culture-bound reading heuris-
tics comparable to those Alan Trachtenberg used, but in my case, these heuris-
tics interacted with the possibilities opened by semiotic analysis, not literary
criticism. This might be the true usefulness of any theoretical framework: not
to create a mould that pre-emptively circumscribes all possible cases, but rather
offer an intellectual construct which multiplies a scholar’s ability to achieve the
task at hand. Against the various species of photographic sequence, it is tempt-
ing to lift one’s hand in despair like Joel Smith. Repurposing intellectual tools
developed for the study of comics to the context of the photobook suggests
that no dedicated tool was available. However, there is no such thing as a tailor-
made conceptual framework: the “linguistic turn” in the humanities was a
large-scale repurposing of ideas developed for other disciplines than philoso-
phy, literary criticism, or history. Collectors and antiquarians did much to help
raise the visibility of photobooks, and the product of their work reflects their
intellectual baggage: categorization, surveys, corpora, and reprints.
My goal in working on Open Passport was to draw connections between the
photobook and other cultural forms. Comics, of course, but also exhibitions.
There has been a good deal of work on photographic books and photographic
exhibitions, but few studies draw them together (Wells 2012). In addition to
the detailed analysis of the book, Groensteen’s tools have also allowed me to
unpack the formal characteristics of the Open Passport exhibition. This opens
up a completely different track for further research than the application of the
System of Comics to other pictorial sequences: it poses the problem of under-
standing such sequences in space rather than on a page. Are the museum and
the library the unfolded and the folded modalities of a yet unconceived multi-
frame? Even if they do not inhabit a homogeneous field, they remain sites more
in need of bridges than borders.
Notes
1. Incidentally, Lessing’s analysis precluded the kind of art Rodolphe Töpffer would
produce several decades later.
2. Page references are given for the English translation by Bart Beaty and
Nick Nguyen.
3. I am focusing here on the work I did during my PhD research, but further
research has been done in preparation for an adaptation in book form of my
dissertation.
4. Contact sheet for negative HG 33, Fonds John Max en dépôt P18, Musée des
beaux-arts de Montréal.
5. For further discussion of comics in relation to the space of the gallery Cf. Alberda,
Carola, Martins and Woolf Chapter “VAST/O Exhibition (De)Construction:
Exploring the Potentials of Augmented Abstract Comics and Animation
Installations as a Method to Communicate Health Experiences”.
6. John Max, Interview with Katherine Tweedie, 1978–1982, Katherine Tweedie
Fonds P126, Archives and Special Collections, Concordia University, Montréal.
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Index1
A All Girl Thrills (1971), 189, 203n6

Abortion Eve (1973), 189 Alpers, Svetlana, 5, 7, 123, 124, 127,
Abstract art, 144 128, 130, 131, 139, 264n2
Abstract comics, 3, 4, 6, 290–308 American Photographs (1938), 317
Abstract Expressionism, 300 The Americans (1959), 326
Abstraction, 282 Amy and Jordan, 90, 93n7
Academic Art, 190, 277 Anchoring function, 329
Academy, 30n1, 35, 164, 249 Andrews, Lew, 317
ACME Novelty Library, 103, 109, 111, Anecdote, 4, 14–24, 26–28, 30,
113, 116n10, 118, 119 82, 103
Activist Art History, 290, 295–297, Animated image, the, 259
301, 307 Animation, 62, 64, 68, 291, 292, 294,
Acuña, Daniel, 241 295, 298–301, 303, 304, 306–308
Adventure, 4, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 67 Animation installations, 4, 6, 290–308
Aesthetics, 2, 4, 5, 7, 14, 15, 34, 37, 49, Animism, 6, 226–244, 259
56, 66, 76–78, 80, 82, 98–115, Annales School, 54
117n14, 132, 135, 157n2, 166, Anthropology, 2, 5, 123, 233, 249
167, 175, 187, 194, 230–232, 234, An Anthropology of Images: Picture,
250, 297 Medium, Body, 259
Aesthetics of comics, 98, 114–115 Apelles, 21
Affect, 5, 6, 47, 66, 67, 76, 102, 114, Apollodorus, 21
211, 212, 215, 301, 308 Archival silences, 211, 212
African art, 6, 226, 227, 232, 274 Archival turn, 211, 212
African Art History, 227–229 Archive, 3, 4, 6, 7, 38–41, 48–50, 55,
Afrofuturism, 6, 226–244 56, 69n3, 164, 165, 210–212, 219,
Akande, Abiodun, 229 233, 316, 321
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8
338 INDEX
Arena Chapel (Capella degli Scrovegni), Baudoin, Edmond, 23–25

269, 271–273, 282, 283 Bauman, Zygmunt, 175, 177
Ariel, 41 Baxandall, Michael, 6, 157n1, 231, 274,
Armstrong, Carol M., 264n2, 314, 321 277, 319
Arnheim, Rudolf, 5–7, 77, 80, 82, 83, Beaty, Bart, 2, 35, 251, 252, 331n2
93n5, 208, 212–216, Belting, Hans, 5, 7, 123, 127, 130,
219–220, 220n2 135–137, 139, 258, 259, 261,
Art academy, 277 262, 266n12
Art and Illusion (2002), 76, 77, 80, Ben Day pattern, 47
81, 93n2 Benjamin, Walter, 54, 56, 194
Art-historical methodologies, 2, 3, 6, 7, Berenson, Bernard, 15, 37, 38, 40
40, 123, 227, 253 Berndt, Jaqueline, 210, 211
Art historiography, 50 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 81
Art History and Visual Culture Studies, Beverly, 280, 284
248, 250, 251, 255 Beyer, Mark, 90, 92, 93n7
Arthrology, 319, 323, 324, 326–330 Bhabha, Homi, 228, 229
Artist’s biography, 4, 14, 17–19, 21, 23, Bildwissenschaft, 2, 229, 258
24, 26, 27, 29, 30 Black Panther (comic book series),
Artist’s monograph, 14, 17, 18, 23, 24 235–239, 241
Art market, 18, 35, 230, 250, 277 Black Panther (film), 226, 232,
Art museums, 29, 277 235, 239–244
Art training, 277, 278 Black Panther: Long Live the King
Art world, 8n2, 29, 35, 38, 166, 186, (2017), 238
188, 282, 287, 314 Black Panther: Panther’s Prey
Assmann, Aleida, 55, 56 (1990–1991), 235
Attribution, 3, 17, 34–51, 113 Black Panther: The Deadliest of the Species
Audubon, John James, 20 (2009), 238
Augmented reading, 298 Black Panther: The Man Without Fear
Authorship, 3, 6, 35–37, 41, 47, 123, (2011), 235
192–194, 231, 244n7 Blanchard, Gérard, 3
Avant-garde, 3, 190 Blanks, blank spaces, 99
Blue Ribbon Comics (1942), 18–20
Bodleian Library, 40
B Body as medium, 259
B., David, 84 Boehm, Gottfried, 5, 7, 98, 100–102,
Babar, 91 116n3, 116n6, 116n7, 143,
Bachelard, Gaston, 292, 299 157n2, 258
Badger, Gerry, 314, 315 Bootlegging, 35, 47, 48
Baetens, Jan, 57, 61, 91, 146, 316, 317 Bourdieu, Pierre, 190, 252
Bal, Mieke, 193, 199, 262, 264, Braiding, 327
266n14 Brancacci Chapel, 276, 284
Baldinucci, Filippo, 35 Brand, Michele, 192
Barry, Lynda, 6, 202, 248, 254–262, Brennan, Susan, 79
264, 265n9, 265–266n10 British Library, 40
Barthes, Roland, 262, 266n14, Browne, Tom, 48
320, 329 Brunelleschi, 276
Batman, 255, 257–259 Brunetti, Ivan, 86, 87, 255, 256, 258
Bätschmann, Oskar, 142, 143, 145, Brunhoff, Jean de, 91, 93n8
156, 157 Bunnell, Peter C., 316, 317
INDEX 339
Burckhardt, Carl Jacob Christoph, 15 Coleman, Les, 86

Buster Brown, 122 Collage, 5, 6, 54, 56–58, 61, 63, 64,
Butler, Judith, 209 66–68, 137, 178, 192, 201,
296, 319
Colonialism, 212, 226, 228, 232, 243
C Colour, 2, 5, 19, 46, 47, 58, 65, 82, 91,
Caillois, Roger, 214, 218, 220 100, 107, 124–127, 139n3,
Calotype, 314 142–157, 176, 178, 179, 197,
Canada Council, 320 208, 325
Canadian photography, 314 Colouristic, 146, 150, 152
Canon, 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 27, Colour processes, 46–47
29, 30, 39, 77, 165–168, 171, 174, Combat ordinaire, 64
178, 179, 180n4, 186–202, 202n1, Come Out Comix (1973), 189, 192
202n2, 229, 231, 308n1 Comic Cuts, 38, 42, 45, 48
Canonical feedback loop, 4, 15, 18, Comics activism, 290, 295, 299
23, 27, 29 Comics, affective qualities, 291, 292
Captain America (1969), 236 Comics craftivism, 172
Captain America: Hail Hydra, 236 Comics Studies and Art History, 3
Caracci, Agostino, 78 Comics Studies, history of, 2, 3, 8n2,
Caracci, Annibale, 79 180, 186–202, 248–264
Caricature, 3–5, 7, 34, 55, 63, 64, Comics versus Art, 251, 252
78–81, 90, 93n2, 93n3, 126, 130, Commodity, 35, 125, 231, 232
131, 133, 136, 137, 250, 277, 288 Composition, 15, 45, 50, 56, 90, 103,
Carole (last name unknown), 192, 194 111, 127, 130, 132, 133, 149, 176,
Carrier, David, 265n8, 272, 273, 179, 208, 213, 215, 219, 220,
275, 277–279 309n2, 314, 320, 327
Cartooning, 3, 4, 44, 46, 87, 91, 124, Composition in art, 213, 278, 279, 282
130, 133–135, 165, 179, 251, Conception of art, 274, 277
265n6, 277 Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT),
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, 255 83, 86, 87, 91
Cartoon mode, 279–281 Connoisseurship, 5, 17, 30n5,
Cavazzola, Paolo Moranda, 36 34–51, 79
Centre Pompidou, Paris, 23 Connotation, 34, 68, 320
Centrifugal readings, 298 Corto Maltese, 5, 58, 59, 61, 63, 66, 67
Centripetal readings, 298, 304, 306 Couperie, Pierre, 3
Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), 50 Cousineau, Sylvain P. “Henri,” 320
Chevli, Lyn, 186, 192, 199, 201, 203n7 Craft, 171, 172, 188
Chiaroscuro, 61, 144, 146, 150, 276 Cremins, Brian, 67
Chicago, Judy, 197–199, 201, 265n8 Crewdson, Gregory, 314
Children’s comics, 165 Crimp, Douglas, 248, 250, 314, 315
Chromatic, 146, 150, 154, 157 Critical Race Art History, 7
Chronophotography, 315 Cruickshank, George, 277
Cimabue, 273, 275 Crumb, Robert, 190, 191, 194,
Clark, Kenneth, 81, 82 201, 203n5
Class, 7, 34, 47, 79, 125, 131, 168, 171, Cultural History, 3, 55, 211, 296
177, 208, 214, 226, 227, 230, 243 Cultural memory, 55–58, 68, 300
Clément, Serge, 320 Cultural Studies, 2, 116n1, 229, 244n4,
Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 238, 239, 241–243 248–250, 252, 254, 264n2, 317
Cognitive psychology, 79, 80 Cumberland, George, 17
340 INDEX
Curator, 2, 6, 34, 86, 188, 274, Duck-rabbit, 76, 77, 82, 91, 92
309n8, 317 Dürer, Albrecht, 17, 157n1
Curricula, 227, 229 Duris of Samos, 15
Cutting, James, 77 Dutch Art, 124, 129, 130
Cyborg, 6, 208–210, 218, 219 Dyke Shorts (1978), 189, 192, 203n7
Dynamite Damsel (1976), 189, 192,
197, 203n7
D
Daguerre, Louis, 20
Daguerreotype, 314 E
Dalí (2012) (graphic novel), Eco, Umberto, 59, 63
23–25, 27, 29 Edelson, Mary Beth, 197, 201
Dalí, Salvador, 14, 23–25, 27 Education, 4, 15, 50, 125, 167, 171,
Danbolt, Mathias, 211, 212 187, 188
Danto, Arthur, 273, 282, 285, 287 Eiffel, Alexander Gustave, 20
Dating of art works, 34, 37 El Refaie, Elisabeth, 91, 93n1
De Lauretis, Teresa, 209 Elkins, James, 228, 248, 250, 251, 254,
Decolonisation, 6, 226–244 258, 262, 264, 265n4, 265n8,
Denkraum (thinking-space), 296, 299, 266n11, 321
300, 309n6 Emanata, 45, 280
Denotation, 87, 320, 329 Embroidery, 6, 172–174, 178,
Depiction, 4, 76–93, 100–102, 105, 179, 189
107, 109, 111, 113–115, 130, 146, Engraving, 132, 133
214–216, 218, 219, 232, 240, 241, Epileptic (2006), 84
272, 274, 277, 278, 283, 321 Epistemology, 227, 229, 232–234,
Diamond, Clare, 35 239, 243
Didi-Huberman, Georges, 54, 55, 258 Eshun, Kodwo, 233
Dikovitskaya, Margaret, 249 Evans, Walker, 316, 317, 323
Disability, 7, 63, 86 Experience of art, 80, 274
Distinguished sight, 101, 109 Expressionism, 148, 153, 320
Dittmann, Lorenz, 142–147, 149, 150,
152, 156, 157
Dix, Otto, 148, 149, 154, 156, 158n14 F
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 37, 38 Facial characteristics, 44
Drawing, 6, 7, 15, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, Falardeau, Mira, 164, 165, 167,
41–44, 46, 48, 49, 55, 60, 65, 67, 178, 179
68, 69n7, 76, 78, 79, 83, 84, 86, Family Fun: On Sanity, Madness, &
87, 89–92, 98, 102, 129, 130, Family Tunnel Construction
148–150, 153, 155, 158n14, 167, (2012), 296
179, 180n3, 191, 193, 194, 196, Fantastic Four, 235, 237
197, 202n3, 203n7, 211, 232, 233, Félibien, André, 35
250, 255–261, 266n10, 277, 286, Felton, Samuel, 17
291, 300, 301 Feminist art, 6, 15, 164–180, 186–202
Drawing style, 2, 5, 8n2, 56, 57, 64, 66, Feminist comics, 4, 6,
87, 151, 178, 194, 201 164–180, 186–202
Drnaso, Nick, 6, 272, 274, Feminist criticism, 185–187, 189, 197
278, 280–283 Feminist sex wars, 191, 203n6
Dubois, Philippe, 320 Film photonovel, 317
Duchamp, Marcel, 68, 282 Fisher, Mark, 234
INDEX 341
500 Years Too Soon! (comic book story) Goddess archetype, 197
(1947), 19, 20 Going to Heaven (1976)
Fnitter, 170, 171, 179 (photobook), 317
Forceville, Charles, 91 Gombrich, Ernst, 3, 5–7, 76–82, 84, 87,
Fortuitous pictures, 77 90–92, 93n2, 93n4, 264n3, 275,
Foucault, Michel, 229, 231 278, 282, 285, 296
Fox Talbot, Henry, 314 Graham, Billy, 235, 240
Framing, 45, 78, 105, 177, 193, 197, Granér Sara, 166, 173, 178
214, 318, 322 Graphiateur, 61, 91
Frank, Robert, 326 Graphiateur, 91
Frankenthaler, Helen, 300 Graphic medicine, 6, 290, 292, 309n8
Freud, Sigmund, 37, 54, 78, 79 Greimas, A.J., 317
Fried, Michael, 314 Grennan, Simon, 84, 87, 91, 93n1
Friedberg, Anne, 249 Grid, 3, 6, 47, 109, 145, 147, 154, 213,
Frostenson, Karin, 171, 179 291, 297–298, 305, 306, 309n7,
Funny Wonder, The, 38 322, 324, 328
Groening, Matt, 49
Groensteen, Thierry, 2, 7, 41, 100, 103,
G 146, 194, 303, 316, 318, 319, 322,
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 319 324, 326, 327, 329–331
Gage, John, 5, 142, 144, 145, 147, 156, Groupe μ (mu), 318
157, 158n7 Gylander, Henri, 175, 177
Galleries, comics exhibited in, 49,
290–291, 305–308
Gallery comics, 6, 290, 291 H
Gardner, Jared, 8n2, 48, 56 Halberstam, Jack (also Judith, J. Jack),
Garuba, Harry, 233, 234, 237, 239, 243 210, 212
Gasoline Alley, 105–109, 116n9 Handling, 102, 115, 211
Gaze, reciprocal, 136, 137 Haraway, Donna, 209
Gender, 7, 39, 165, 168, 171, 174, 177, Harmsworth, Alfred, 46, 47
190, 201, 208, 209, 214, 215, 220 Hatfield, Charles, 190, 192, 253,
General arthrology, 319, 327–330 254, 265n8
Genette, Gérard, 317 Health activism, 290, 295, 299,
Genius, 16–19, 99, 187, 189–193, 304, 307–308
196, 230–232 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 273,
Genre, 4, 14, 18, 19, 23, 27, 29, 30, 46, 279, 285
50, 57, 59, 61, 67, 131, 134, 135, Hellboy, 84
143, 145, 147, 157, 186, 187, 193, Hermeneutics, 142, 143, 146, 319
210, 215, 234, 286, 290, 307 Herriman, George, 279, 284
Genre fiction, 57–64 Het Schilder-Boeck, 17
Germain, Jean-Claude, 330 Historia Naturalis, 14, 15
Ghiberti, Gianlorenzo, 30n3 Hoffman, Malvina, 20
Gifford, Dennis, 40 Hogarth, William, 35, 127
Gillray, James, 277, 278, 284 Holland, Frank, 48
Ginzburg, Carlo, 37, 38 Holly, Michael Ann, 251
Giotto (di Bondone), 4, 6, 17, 21, 23, Holmes, Sherlock, 37–38
30n3, 116n7, 270–275, Homer, Winslow, 20
277–279, 282–287 Humour, 282
Global turn, 228, 229 ethnic humour, 126, 137
342 INDEX
I Jones, Amelia, 208, 209, 211

Iconic difference, 100–102, 113, 115 Jones, Sue Ellen, 209
Iconic solidarity, 103, 318, 319, Judas (Iscariot), 101, 102
321–325, 327 Judd, Donald, 297
Iconographic, 3, 44, 100, 116n2, 142, Jungle Action, 235, 240
197, 200 Juxtaposition, 54, 56, 259, 261, 278,
Iconography, 54, 116n7, 142, 144, 283, 315, 323, 326
274, 317
Iconology, 3, 54, 98, 116n2, 116n7,
144, 198, 201 K
Identifying sight, 101, 109 Kalish, Nancy, 192
Ideology, 125, 166, 175, 177, 178, 188, Kemp, Wolfgang, 5, 98–100, 102,
227, 239, 317 116n3, 116n4, 116n5, 315
Illusion, 76, 81, 126, 298, 329 Kennedy, John, 90
Illustrated Chips, 38, 48 King, Frank, 105–109
Image, the, 45, 47, 48, 55, 56, 62, 67, Kirby, Jack, 190, 235, 237
78, 82, 84, 100, 116n4, 122–139, Knowledge montage (Mnemosyne
156, 157, 177–179, 191, 197, panels), 296
199–201, 208, 210, 213, 216, 217, Kominsky-Crumb, Aline, 192, 197, 201
219, 241, 248, 253–256, 258–262, Kramsky, Jerry, 5, 142, 145, 147, 148,
264, 265–266n10, 266n12, 295, 150, 151, 153–156
303, 314, 315, 317, 322, 330 Krauss, Rosalind, 6, 249, 291, 292, 297,
Image schema, 84 298, 304, 305, 309n7, 320
Imagined gravity, 208–220 Krazy Kat, 279, 284
Imdahl, Max, 5, 98, 101, 102, 109, Kristeva, Julia, 275, 286
116n3, 116n7 Kruger, Barbara, 201
Imitative drawing, 42 Kunzle, David, 3, 48, 129, 139n1, 278,
Index, 7, 124, 194, 253, 317 287, 331
Inside Moebius, 302 Kurtzman, Meredith, 192
Instagram, 6, 173, 174 Kvinnobulletinen, 168–171
Interdisciplinarity, 2, 3, 7, 249, 251–254,
262, 266n14
Intermedial, 174 L
Intersubjective relationships, 93 La Cour, Erin, 290–292, 303
Irony, 55, 59, 170, 173, 177, 285 Labour, 65, 231, 329
Iser, Wolfgang, 98, 99 Lakoff, George, 83, 84
It Ain’t Me Babe (1970), 6, 186, 189, Larcenet, Manu, 5, 57, 64–67, 69n7
192–194, 197, 198, 201 Lavin, Marilyn, 264n2, 273
Italian Quattrocento, 274, 276 Le Photographe (graphic novel), 315
Italo-Byzantine, 273, 275 Le Vite De Piu Eccellenti Pittori, Sculptori
E Architettori [Lives of the Most
Excellent Painters, Sculptors and
J Architects, 16
Jacobs, Dale, 254 Lee, Stan, 190, 235, 237
Jauß, Hans Robert, 98, 99 Leech, John, 39
Jesus Christ, 101 Lefèvre, Pascal, 90, 91, 93n1,
Johansson, Nanna, 166, 178 265n8, 315
Johnson, Mark, 83, 84 Leonardo (da Vinci), 14, 17–20, 22–24,
Joly, Benoît, 306 30, 201, 231, 274
INDEX 343
Leonardo da Vinci: Painter and Scientist. Material culture, 226, 229, 243
Pioneer in Engineering (comic book Materiality, 2, 3, 56, 115, 145, 305, 317
story), 19 Mattotti, Lorenzo, 5, 142–157,
Leonardo da Vinci (comic book 158n9, 158n14
story), 18, 20 Max (Porchawaka), John, 7, 316,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 231, 320–326, 328–330, 332n4, 332n6
315, 331n1 Maynard, Patrick, 81
Level of the depiction, 100–102, 107, McCloud, Scott, 137, 252, 274, 306,
109, 113–115 318, 331
Levine, Sherrie, 314 McFadden’s Flats, 122
Levy, Lawrence, 317 McGregor, Don, 235, 240
LeWitt, Sol, 297 McLaren, Norman, 298
Lichtenstein, Roy, 252, 253 Medium, 3, 18, 21, 29, 34, 35, 39, 41,
Lidén, Anne, 169, 170 56, 61, 62, 66, 68, 82, 107, 115,
Life-and-work model, 5, 14, 17, 18, 117n14, 122–124, 130, 157, 191,
23–24, 26–28 252, 259, 290–292, 298, 314, 315,
Line, the, 8n2, 20, 43, 55, 61, 63, 65, 318–321, 329–331
66, 68, 81, 82, 89–91, 122, 124, Medley, Stuart, 277, 286
127, 129, 133, 145, 146, 152–154, Medway, Jim, 84
175, 176, 179, 186, 194, 208, 213, Meesters, Gert, 90
217, 218, 229, 236, 241, 252, 258, Memory, 4, 53–68, 154, 164, 212, 255,
261, 266n10, 293, 299, 300, 315, 258, 259, 261, 265n4, 296, 300,
318, 321, 326, 327 323, 327
Linguistics, 2, 8n2, 81, 84, 91, 314, 331 Mendes, Barbara “Willy,” 192, 197, 198
Lippard, Lucy, 6, 186, 188, 189, 191, Mental representations, 79, 90, 277, 278
192, 196, 202 Message from the Interior (1966),
Literary Studies, 2, 98–103, 179, 180, 316, 323
253, 255 Metaphor, 55, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91,
Looking, as a practice, 124, 128, 264 93n1, 93n2, 117n13, 136, 167,
Looking at art, 274–276 192, 300, 308n2, 324, 326, 330
Luke Cage, 235 Methodology, 2–7, 34, 37, 40, 44, 49,
Luks, George, 123 54, 77, 78, 87, 90, 98, 100, 114,
Luminaristic, 146, 157 122, 123, 128, 142, 144, 186, 211,
Lyons, Lisa, 192 226–229, 232, 237, 239, 243, 244,
248, 250, 251, 253, 254, 290, 291,
294–297, 301, 307, 308,
M 309n4, 309n6
Majno, Luigi, 17 Michals, Duane, 326
Maker, 56, 122, 128, 275, 287 Michelangelo (Buonarotti), 17, 22–24,
Makhubu, Nomusa, 235, 243 231, 273
Mama! Dramas! (1978), 189 Mignola, Mike, 84
Manetti, Antonio, 30n3 Millet, Cathy, 201
Mannerism, 79 Mimesis, 77, 79, 144, 258
Marion, Phillipe, 61, 91 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 229, 249, 250
Marrs, Lee, 192, 194–196, 201 Mise-en-abyme, 302
Marvel Comics Presents, 235 Mitchell, W. J. T., 68, 81, 249–251, 254,
Mask, 136–139 258, 265n8, 265n10
Massacio, 274, 276, 286 Mnemosyne Atlas (Bilderatlas
Massironi, Manfredo, 77 Mnemosyne), 54–57, 61, 69n1
344 INDEX
Modernism, 3, 101, 144, 282, 297 Nineteenth century comics, 4, 34, 122,
Modernist, 68, 171, 191, 233, 234, 124, 164
297, 314 Nochlin, Linda, 5–7, 15, 166–168, 171,
Modernity, 56, 175, 226, 233, 178, 186–191, 195, 196, 202
243, 297 Noomin, Diane, 192, 201
Modigliani, Amedeo, 282, 285 Norm theory, 79
Molotiu, Andre, 8n3, 49, 306 The North American Indian, 317
Mondrian, Piet, 145, 156, 282, Nostalgia, 61, 66
297, 298
Monochrome, 126, 149
Montage, 54, 56, 68, 294–297, 302, O
307, 309n6, 315 Object, 2, 6, 64, 79, 87, 90, 98–102,
Morelli, Giovanni, 5, 34–38, 40, 113, 126, 129, 130, 136, 143,
42, 44, 46 145, 154, 176, 211, 213, 219,
Mouffe, Chantal, 175, 177 226–231, 233, 234, 244n2, 248,
Moxey, Keith, 258, 260, 264n2 251–254, 258, 260, 262–264,
Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves, 233 266n14, 298, 303, 305, 309n2,
Multidisciplinary, 6, 179, 180, 202n3 315, 329
Multiframe, 324, 331 Object constancy, 82
Muse, 54, 56, 200 October (1927), 248–250, 264n1
Myth, 58, 61, 63, 167, 191, 193, 251, Oeuvre, 17, 24, 29, 45, 144
297, 298 Okeke-Agulu, Chika, 228
Okorafor, Nnedi, 238, 239, 241, 243
Omniscient storyteller, 100
N Opacity, 100, 102, 305
Nachleben der Antike (the afterlife of Open Passport (1973) (photobook), 7,
antiquity), 296, 309n6 315, 316, 318–331
Narrative, 4, 6, 7, 8n2, 14–16, 18–30, Opper, Frederick, 46
48, 49, 56–58, 64, 65, 76–78, 83, Optical Art, 101
84, 87, 91, 92, 100, 101, 124, 127, Ordinary Victories (Combat ordinaire), 5,
136, 137, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 57, 64–68
155, 180n7, 199, 239, 240, 243, Outcault, Richard Felton, 5,
273, 275, 279, 283, 287, 291, 122–139, 139n1
296–298, 300–308, 314–318,
320, 321, 323, 324, 326, 327,
329, 330 P
Narrative fresco cycle, 4, 273, 276 Panel border, 278, 280
Narratology, 2, 315, 317 Panofsky, Erwin, 54, 98, 116n2,
National Film Board of Canada, Still 142, 296
Photography Division, 320 Parcours (abstract comic), 306
National Gallery of Canada, 320 Parker, Rozsika, 5, 6, 166, 167, 171,
Naturalistic mode, 46, 280, 281 172, 174, 186–189, 191, 196
Negative-positive process, 314 Parr, Martin, 314, 315
Negative space, 45, 325 Parrhasios of Ephesos, 16, 21, 24, 26
New Art History, 5, 187, 249 Patch, Thomas, 17
New Objectivity, 148, 158n10 Pathosformel, 55, 58, 59, 65, 68, 296,
Newspaper supplement, 122 300, 309n6
New York City, 122, 123, 127–129, 131, Pearson C. Arthur, 46
135, 138 Peirce, C.S., 252, 306
INDEX 345
Perception, 2, 5, 15, 23, 30, 76–93, 98, Polychrome, 125, 149

100, 101, 105, 111, 114, 122–139, Polykleitos of Sikyon, 14
142, 145, 212, 216, 220, 226, 227, Pop Art, 252, 253
230, 234, 239, 243, 259 Pornography, 191, 203n6
Perceptual forces, 83 Postcolonial Art History, 5, 7, 244n3
Performance, 6, 7, 57, 62, 115, 137, Postema, Barbara, 99, 146, 253
139, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, Postmodernism, 3, 252
217, 235, 238, 264, 291, 297, 300 Post-structuralism, 5
Performative archives, 212 Poussin, Nicholas, 79
Personal stories, 64 Poverty, 130, 132
Period Eye, 6, 274 the poor, images of, 130, 131
Persepolis, 252 Practice as research, 1
Personal stories, 53 Pratt, Hugo, 5, 57–59, 61–63, 67
Perspective, 7, 35, 39–41, 47, 67, 79, Presence, of an image or object, 258
90, 91, 98–102, 109, 114, 115, Preziosi, Donald, 231, 251
123, 124, 130, 142, 144, 152, 166, Protogenes, 16, 19
167, 172–177, 179, 180, 186, 189, Psychoanalysis, 37, 54, 78, 80
191, 196, 208, 209, 211, 212, 220, Psychology, 2, 5, 54, 77–80, 83, 142
226, 228, 233–235, 248, 249, 258, Punch, 39, 41, 48, 125
276, 278, 280, 297, 315, 327 Pyle, Hilary, 40
Peters, Margery “Petchesky,” 201
Photobook, 7, 314–331
Photo-essay, 315 Q
Photography, 4, 20, 65, 252, 314–317, Queer bodies, 208–220
320, 329, 330 Queer performativity, 209
Photo-novel, 317 Queer theory, 208, 209, 211, 220
Picture(s), 2, 5, 6, 21, 37, 39, 56, 66,
76–82, 87, 91, 92, 101, 102, 123,
124, 128, 130, 143, 144, 147, 150, R
157, 214, 219, 259, 262, 274, Race, 7, 81, 137, 146, 168, 171, 192,
283–285, 296, 314, 316, 318, 319, 198, 215, 226, 227, 230, 243
322–327, 329–331 Rampley, Matthew, 54–56
Picture plane, 282 Raphael (Sanzio da Urbino), 231,
Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey 273, 274
Book, 255 Reading viewers, 5, 98, 99, 103, 106,
Pif Gadget (1969–1993), 58 107, 109, 111, 113–115
Planimetric relations, 102, 107, 114, 115 Realism, 62, 65, 129, 130, 280
Plato, 79, 143 Realism continuum, 274
Play, 6, 48, 62, 63, 65, 66, 78–80, 87, Real Life Comics (1942), 19
107, 126, 130, 131, 134, 142, 150, Ream, Vinnie, 20
156, 191, 200, 208, 213–215, Reception aesthetics, aesthetics of
217–219, 252, 259, 262, 290, 291, reception, 5, 98–115, 116n1,
298, 300 116n3, 116n4, 116n6,
Pliny the Elder, 4, 14, 15 117n14, 157n2
Polanyi, Michael, 269 Relaying function, 329
Political cartooning, 124, 135 Rembrandt (graphic novel), 23,
Politics, 138, 180, 186, 193 26–28, 30
Pollock, Griselda, 5–7, 15, 166–179, Rembrandt (Harmenszoon Van Rijn),
186–193, 196, 197, 199, 202 14, 26–28, 30, 146
346 INDEX
Representation, 47, 56, 63, 65, 78, Sequence, 4, 6, 56, 57, 65, 67, 86, 103,
79, 81, 82, 84, 90, 99, 129–131, 154, 314–331
186, 191, 196, 197, 199–201, Sequences (1970) (photobook), 326
203n5, 203n6, 208, 213, 215, Sequential images, 122
219, 220, 239, 250, 252, 258, Series, 2, 4, 18, 21, 30n6, 41, 42, 45,
261, 264, 265n10, 286, 300, 306, 58, 83, 90, 103, 105, 125, 148,
307, 319 157, 178, 190, 199, 201, 235, 237,
Representational art, 87, 99, 100, 124, 238, 240, 249, 258, 259, 316–319,
273, 276, 277, 282 326, 327
Restrained arthrology, 319, 326–327 Set, 5, 20, 44, 48, 61, 64, 66, 68, 79,
Rhodes, Gillian, 78–80, 90, 277, 278 80, 84, 90, 98, 122, 150, 167, 196,
Rhodes Must Fall, 227, 243 198, 214, 215, 218, 229, 231, 243,
Ribière, Mireille, 318, 319, 323 248, 250, 318, 329
Riegl, Alois, 249 Sexuality, 7, 168, 171, 191, 192, 199,
Riis, Jacob, 66, 131–133 203n6, 209, 215, 250
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 25 Shiner, Larry, 230, 231
Robbins, Trina, 165, 167, 180n1, 186, Shinn, Everett, 130
190–193, 195–197, 201, Signatures, 37, 41, 48, 105, 123, 132,
202, 203n7 193, 324
Rogoff, Irit, 249, 266n14 Signifiers of comics, 278
Romance, 50, 58, 59 Simultaneity, 100–102, 318, 319
Rowlandson, Thomas, 277, 278, 284 Site, 35, 49, 105, 106, 137, 138,
Rudin, Kay, 197 303, 308, 315, 324, 325,
Ruff, Thomas, 314 329, 331
Rūmī, Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad, 329 Sjöberg, Lotta, 166, 173, 175–178
Rusty Brown Autumn, 5, 103–109, 113, Slapstick, 57, 65, 89, 126, 127, 130,
114, 116n10 133, 135, 136
Smith, Joel, 315, 317, 331
Smith, Marquard, 248
S Smith, W. Eugene, 314
Sabrina (2018), 6, 272, 280–282, Smolderen, Thierry, 31n9, 57, 122,
284, 285 127, 136
Salina, Nina, 197 Sociology, 2, 5, 128, 175, 202n3, 252
Satire, 63, 123, 126, 135, 139, 166, Sontag, Susan, 320
170, 177–179 Soyinka, Wole, 234
Satrapi, Marjane, 202, 252 Spatio-topical system, 319, 323–327, 330
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 320 Speech balloons, 46, 217, 218
Schema(s), 6, 84, 275–280, 282–287 Spiegelman, Art, 190, 197, 265n8
Schizo, 86 Steirer, Gregory, 254, 262
Schneemann, Carolee, 198 Stelfreeze, Brian, 238, 239, 242
Schorn, Ludwig, 17 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 145, 147, 148,
Schultz, Charles, 49 154, 158n14
Schwartz, Frederic, 230 Stitching function, 329
Scientific analysis, 34, 37, 38, 48 Stoler, Ann Laura, 211, 212
Scrovegni, Enrico, 270, 271 The Story of Painting (comic book
Seeing-in, 82, 84, 87, 90, 91 story), 14, 21–23
Seeing sight, 101, 109 Strauss, Ernst, 5, 143, 144, 146, 150
Semiotics, 2, 8n2, 100, 142, 146, 156, Streeten, Nicola, 164, 178, 179
315–318, 330, 331 Structuralism, 5
INDEX 347
Style, 2, 5, 8n2, 37–39, 41–49, 55–58, V

61, 63–66, 68, 77, 81, 87, 89–91, Vaginal art, 198, 199, 201
93n1, 103, 129, 132, 135, 146, Valadon, Suzanne, 196, 197
151, 153, 154, 170, 174, 179, 180, Van Eyck, Johannes, 22
186, 194, 210, 230, 231, 250, 259, Van Mander, Carel, 4, 14, 17, 21–23
273, 275, 280, 281 Vasari, Giorgio, 4, 14, 16, 17, 19–24,
Successiveness, 100 26, 35, 187, 192, 231, 274
Suite, 319, 326 Vasarian biographical model, 17
Summers, David, 194 Velázquez, Diego, 81, 82
Sunday supplement, 123, 125–127, Viewing, cultures of, 128
129, 131 Villani, Filippo, 30n3
Superhero, 4, 6, 58, 59, 63, 65, 67, Vi Mänskor, 168, 170, 171
219, 235–239 Visitor experience, 291
Sutton, Joyce, 69n4, 186, 192, Visual Culture, 7, 54, 127, 129, 210,
199–201, 203n7 212, 230, 232, 248–252, 255
Swedish comics, 164–166, 175 Visual Culture Studies and comics,
Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental 254, 262–264
Professor (2014), 255–257 Visuality, 3, 114, 115, 229, 248,
Symbolist art, 297, 305 249, 262
Visual metaphor, 83, 84, 86, 87,
91, 93n2
T Visual methodologies, 100, 248, 251,
Tacit knowledge, 272, 274, 275, 277 254, 275
Tagg, John, 320 Visual semiotics, 142, 147, 179, 313,
Tata, Sam, 322, 323 315, 318, 330, 331
Teen Witch (2007), 84 Visual Studies, 2, 6, 123, 180, 191,
Tenniel, John, 39 210–212, 229–232, 248–252, 254,
Tits & Clits Comix (1972–87), 189, 262, 264, 317
198, 199 Visual-tactile, 115, 117n14
Todorov, Tzvetan, 326 Visual technology, 272, 275
Töpffer, Rodolphe, 48, 93n4, Visual weight, 6, 208–220
278, 331n1 Vogel, Susan, 6, 272, 274, 282
Topological relations, 115 Von Bode, Wilhelm, 37
Trachtenberg, Alan, 316, 331 Von Rosen, Astrid, 6, 290, 294, 296,
Transparency, 50, 100, 102, 113, 305 297, 299–301, 303, 306–308
Trigg, Dylan, 299
Tropes, 14, 21, 23, 24, 26–28, 30,
54, 56, 191, 219, 240, 243, W
326, 330 Wagner, Christoph, 142, 144
True Comics (1947), 19 Wall, Jeff, 314
Twisted Sisters (1976–94), 189, 192, 198 Walton, Kendall, 5, 77, 81–83,
Typex, 23, 25–28, 30 87, 91
Warburg, Aby, 5, 7, 53–68, 249, 258,
296, 297, 309n5, 309n6
U Ware, Chris, 5, 66, 98, 103–105, 107,
Una, 296, 297 109–113, 117n14
Underground comix, 4, 6, 190–192, Warhol, Andy, 250, 273
203n5, 281 Weimar, 148, 150
Understanding Comics, 137, 252 Wesseling, Janneke, 98–100, 114
348 INDEX
Western Eye, 6, 272, 275, 276, 279, Women’s comix, 186–202, 203n6
282, 283 Women’s Liberation, 166, 168
Wet Satin (1976), 189, 203n6 World War One, 58, 62, 63, 309n5
What It Is (2008), 6, 255, 258, 260, Wren, Christopher, 20
261, 263, 265n9, 265–266n10 Wrightson, Bernie, 49
White, Minor, 316, 318, 319
Wimmen’s Comix, 6, 165, 189,
198, 201 Y
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 15 Yeats, Jack B., 5, 34, 40, 42
Witek, Joseph, 280
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 76, 77, 82, 91
Wölfflin, Heinrich, 230 Z
Wollheim, Richard, 5, 77, 81, 82, Zamir, Shamoon, 317
84, 87, 91 Zappa (Sloatman), Gail, 326
Women’s comics, 180n1, 191, 192 Zeuxis of Herakleia, 16

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

More information about this series at

Seeing Comics through

ISSN 2634-6370 ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Mark Beyer’s Duck-Rabbit / John Miers

Ways of Seeing Comics: Art-Historical Approaches to the Form 1

Part I Old Skool Art History 11

Part II Perception, Reception and Meaning 73

Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction 75

Part III The New and Newer Art Histories 161

Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport

Part IV Comics for/Beyond Art History 223

VAST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials of

Maaheen Ahmed is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent

Małgorzata Olsza is an assistant professor at the Department of American

The Lives of the Artists

 onnoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case

Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories

Fig. 2 Excerpts from the shadow theatre performance with an incredulous

Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction

 esthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes

 eading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through

 olour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens

 eminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta

 owards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History

 eal Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined

 frofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History

 hat Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies,

 AST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials

 rom Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within

Maggie Gray and Ian Horton

Keywords Art-historical methodologies • Comics Studies and Art History •

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

life-and-work model. Michael Connerty focuses on methodologies of art con-

canon, holds for a multidisciplinary, feminist Comics Studies. This is grounded

Old Skool Art History

Abstract Art-historical writing traditions and narrative tools have influenced

Keywords Artist’s biography • Anecdote • Life-and-work model • Pliny the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

This chapter analyses art-historical writing traditions’ influences on the artist’s

biography verged on the novelistic and reached a much broader audience”

Corpus One: Biographical Comics of the 1940s

a genius endowed by God …a very fine geometrician …not only work[ing] in

Furthermore, the comic strips feature anecdotes about Leonardo da Vinci’s

After a discussion of Medieval painting, the section on the Renaissance fea-

Briefly mentioning Leonardo da Vinci, the narrative also features an anec-

In its summarising verdict, “The Story of Painting” (1949) closely follows

Corpus II: Biographical Graphic Novels of the 2010s

Fig. 4 Typex, Rembrandt (2013), SelfMadeHero, p. 127, Hendrickje doing house-

Secondly, leaving the traditional art-historical anecdote behind would allow

7. Frequently mentioned, the legendary death of Zeuxis, is unfortunately never sup-

Keywords Connoisseurship • comic strips • Jack B. Yeats • Victorian

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 33

equally important to the scholar seeking to construct histories of artistic activ-

Holmes. Ginzburg situates Morelli within a “conjectural paradigm” that

The Identification of the Yeats Corpus

confirmation. Much of the work of attribution is concerned with comparison

Fig. 3 A selection of sketches based on Jack B. Yeats characters. (The author’s

specifically, there is a distinctive way of rendering eyes that, in my experience,

Ways of Seeing Comics: Art-Historical Approaches to the Form 1

Part I Old Skool Art History 11

Part II Perception, Reception and Meaning 73

Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction 75

Part III The New and Newer Art Histories 161

Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport

Part IV Comics for/Beyond Art History 223

VAST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials of

The Lives of the Artists

onnoisseurship, Attribution, and Comic Strip Art: The Case

Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories

Psychologies of Perception: Stories of Depiction

esthetics of Reception: Uncovering the Modes

eading Richard Felton Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” Through

olour in Comics: Reading Lorenzo Mattotti Through the Lens

eminist Art History as an Approach to Research on Comics: Meta

owards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History

eal Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined

frofuturism and Animism as Method: Art History

hat Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies,

AST/O Exhibition (De)Construction: Exploring the Potentials

rom Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics Theory Within

Abstract “Psychologies of perception” refers in this chapter to a strand of art-

If “psychologies of perception” had a single visual motif, it would be the duck-

Fig. 2 The Duck-Rabbit,