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Terms and Conditions [PDF, 130mb] Author: Robert Sikoryak Title: Terms and Conditions Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly Language: English City: New York Year: 2017 Pages: 108 Format: 17 cm x 24.3 cm Fabrication: offset ISBN: 978-1-77046-274-8 Description: "For his newest project, Sikoryak tackles the monstrously and infamously dense legal document, iTunes Terms and Conditions, the contract everyone agrees to but no one reads. In a word for word 94-page adaptation, Sikoryak hilariously turns the agreement on its head – each page features an avatar of Apple cofounder and legendary visionary Steve Jobs juxtaposed with a different classic strip such as Mort Walker’s Beatle Bailey, or a contemporary graphic novel such as Craig Thompson’s Blankets or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Adapting the legalese of the iTunes Terms and Conditions into another medium seems like an unfathomable undertaking, yet Sikoryak creates a surprisingly readable document, far different from its original, purely textual incarnation and thus proving the accessibility and flexibility of comics. When Sikoryak parodies Kate Beaton’s Hark A Vagrant peasant comics with Steve Jobs discussing objectionable material or Homer Simpson as Steve Jobs warning of the penalties of copyright infringement, Terms and Conditions serves as a surreal record of our modern digital age where technology competes with enduringly ironclad mediums." (from the publisher's website) Rude [PDF, 712k] Author: Zou Luoyang Title: Rude Publisher: Self-published Price: FREE Language: English City: Hong Kong Year: 1999 Pages: 0 Format: 21 cm x 14.85 cm Fabrication: risograph Description: In 1998, Zou Luoyang, chief-editor of the risographed art zine Rude, controversially declared: “The future of comics is in the trash can.” Fifteen years later, he addressed a consortium of publishing representatives at the San Diego Comic-Con, with the following words: “It is a measure of your progress in regards to the ethics of the comic book industry the last ten years, that my 1998 remark no longer raises any eyebrows. You are filling the shipping containers, trash cans, landfill dumps and incinerators with literally tons of paper pulp: newsstand magazines, graphic novels, comic pamphlets, satirical magazines, promotional giveaways and funny papers, superhero novelettes, shonen manga anthologies, comic weeklies sealed in protective polyurethane bags, anniversary collectors slipcase editions–and now, slender box sets of colour volumes of serialized fiction. The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers comics too good to throw away. The social shift had been successful, and disposability is now naturalised, partly thanks to you, the comics industry.” Luoyang was familiar with discard studies that analyse in detail what disposable components say about our relationship with the world and the manifold ways social and economic values are reflected in what is thrown away. He even went on to propose an extensive, now quasi-forgotten comics-manifesto on the energising potential of trash, bringing in observations of a nascent branch of social sciences, rudology (from the Latin rudus: waste). Understanding the very nature of rubbish, Luoyang found in comics the embodiment of trash, a trash that you can not just dispose of (both in the sense of throw away and settle a matter), but a trash that you have to read through and confront as it is. Luoyang allegedly found in a dumpster Michael Thompson’s book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, a reading that specified his practice and reoriented his approach to distribution. In the book, Thompson proposes that for a human-made object to go from something everyday and transient to something of great, durable value, it must first become rubbish. He looks not specifically at comics, but antiques, real estate, and dated kitsch to make the argument that something can not move from the worthless to the valued without first transitioning to waste with a cultural or social value of zero. It was clear that Luoyang's interest in disposability was not about personally reaching into new processes and spaces in search of profit. Bitter about the industry's indifference to his ideas, Luoyang was committed to retaliate against the opposite end of the professionals, defending this time the unabashed self-indulgence of the contemporary reader. In a personal exchange, ruminating over the Readers' (his own capitalization and pluralization) existential aporias, he adds, appropriately quoting Bataille at length: “Authors are 'slaves working like cowards to prepare the beautiful blustering eruptions that alone are capable of answering the needs that torment the bowels of most men.' Readers, on the other hand, obey a much simpler economy: they absorb and excrete and there is no doubt on which end I will bet for empowerment.” Luoyang, after years of careful examination and methods of industrial espionage, embraced a design for Rude, based entirely on planned obsolescence, the industry's way to artificially limit the use life of an object, favouring the shortening of replacement cycles. risographed on cheap non-archival, non-acid-free newsprint, Rude with its modest print run of 200 (signed) copies, contributed its minor share to the landfills. Originally disseminated in landfills with its delicate copies covered under tonnes of debris, Luoyang invited readers to search for it by practising targeted digging, and other methods at the margins of grassroots archaeology. Zou Luoyang’s project can be understood as an exercise in accelerating a book’s life cycle, displacing the reader from his comfort zone to a participatory psychogeographic exploration of suburban dumping grounds. Rude, more than a pungent comment on how human labour, (and here Luoyang will have unequivocally referred to the comics industry) always turns to waste, stratified in multiple temporal scales, waiting to be managed towards efficient disintegration, has the merit to acknowledge the energising potential of trash. Rather than defining the benign side of disintegrating matter, for example, biological waste containing macronutrients for land fertilisation, Luoyang claims for an unapologetic cultural production of toxicity. Snake Agent [PDF, 40mb] Author: Stefano Tamburini Title: Snake Agent Publisher: Coniglio Editore Language: Italian City: Rome Year: 2005 Pages: 48 Format: 26.5 cm x 21.5 cm Fabrication: offset ISBN: 978-8-8888337-8-1 Description: Snake Agent is a re-edition from Coniglio Press of Stefano Tamburini's series. Originally published in the magazine Frigidaire from 1980 to 1984, Snake Agent is a détournement from Mel Graff's Secret Agent X-9 comics strip from the 1940s. It explores the uses of Xerox technologies, and more precisely the newly introduced portable model Xerox 3107 in regards to comics making. Beyond mere duplication, Tamburini is little concerned by Xerox's claims of quality and excellence of reproduction. He is more interested in the machine's portability and ease of manipulation; he uses the photocopier as an expressive tool, and by moving the pages on the machine's flatbed, he stretches, distorts and disfigures Graff's characters. His use of the 3107 prefigures a generation of comics artists exploring the materiality of reproduction technologies and foregrounds the contextual opacity of one of comics craft's most inglorious processes; Tamburini's work, despite its obstructive materiality, makes xeroxing the object of the systematic and sustained attention that it deserves. Wasim 1995 [PDF, 35mb] Author: Francesc Ruiz Title: Wasim 1995 Publisher: Self-published Language: Arabic City: Barcelona Year: 2014 Pages: 32 Format: 29.7 cm x 21 cm Fabrication: offset Description: In collaboration with Salah Malouli, Wasim 1995 was presented as an installation in MACBA's exhibition Justo delante de nosotros, Otras cartografías del Rif. Its printed version is a collection of thirty-two covers and has all the likes of a children's magazine in Arabic. The covers represent different moments from Morocco's recent history, commemorations and events from the official and religious calendars, such as the Ramadan, the Green March and celebrations of Pan-Arabism, as well as announcements of international contemporary events such as the Mexico Mundial. Although comics and children's literature press coming from France or Belgium were widely read and distributed circa 2005 in Morocco, there was no official or national equivalent to them. By pointing to this little known historical fact and drawing its inspiration from its Franco-Belgian counterparts, Wasim 1995 is a speculative exercise in what Moroccan children’s literature would look like. Ruiz walks a contentious line in mimicking the very violence of capital's market segmentation for the young public and with a sensitive eye, both estranges and provincializes what is taken for granted in western children’s literature. Tintin Akei Kongo [PDF, 21mb] Author: Ilan Manouach Title: Tintin Akei Kongo Publisher: CCC & La Cinquième Couche Language: Lingala City: Lisbon, Brussels Year: 2015 Pages: 64 Format: 22 cm x 16.5 cm Fabrication: offset Description: Tintin Akei Kongo is the translated version of Tintin au Congo in Lingala, the official Congolese dialect. The book is an exact facsimile of the commercial edition and follows the industrial standards and layout of classical comics. The goal of this endeavor was not simply to construe the artist’s tasks through a redefinition of the possible interventions by commissioning a translation himself; neither to emphasize the importance of discursivity and self-referentiality as a way to address comics both as a language and a form of logic. The goal is neither to fill a historical error by making this work accessible in the language of those who are primarily interested, the oppressed, the insulted. One should never forget the implicit consensus that stands behind the choice of languages for translated works. The fact that the original edition hasn’t found its way to the Congolese market with a Congolese edition, reminds the reader of Tintin Akei Kongo that distribution of cultural products is not solely governed by profit and market values. Adding Lingala to the 112 different translations of the Tintin Empire, Tintin Akei Kongo reveals blind spots in the expansion of the publishing conglomerates. (from the book's press-release) Chronographie [PDF, 550mb] Author: Nikita Fossoul & Dominique Goblet Title: Chronographie Publisher: L'Association Language: French/English (Introduction & Afterword) City: Paris Year: 2010 Pages: 560 Format: 25.6 cm x 19.6 cm Fabrication: offset ISBN: 978-2-84414-387-7 Description: Chronographie began with a simple idea: comics artist Dominique Goblet spontaneously proposes to her daughter Nikita Fossoul, then 7, to sit, face to face with her and make portraits of each other. They agree to regularly repeat the experience. This ritual is reproduced almost weekly, and for ten subsequent years. The book, released in the catalogue of L'Association presents a huge body work that chronologically registers the physical and artistic transformations of the two women. Chronographie is a durational performance unfolding entirely in the privacy of the domestic space; its encompassing time span stretching far from what is customary in autobiographical or other works of graphic literature, delivers a narrative of solidarity and care but also a rare glimpse into the process and development of artistic craftsmanship. Muji Life & Yangire/Yandere [PDF, 21mb] Author: Hetamoé Title: Muji Life & Yangire/Yandere Publisher: Clube do Inferno Language: English City: Lisbon Year: 2015 Pages: 24, 24 Format: 19 cm x 19 cm, 19 cm x 14.5 cm Fabrication: risograph, B/W laser printing Description: "Muji Life + Yangire/Yandere is a theoretical-practical zine comprising a comic and an essay (respectively), both engaging with the Japanese concepts of yandere (love-struck and psycho) and yangire (cute and psycho). Parodying the look and dimensions of Muji’s catalogue – the Japanese seller of household supplies whose Bauhaus-style minimalism is iconic of an ideal domestic order – Muji Life addresses the underlying connection between madness and method, violence and mundanity, through the eyes of a bloodthirsty “psychotic girl”. Its counterpart, Yangire/Yandere, explores the meaning and (ideological, political) ambivalence of yandere and yangire characters in anime, games and popular culture, including Mirai Nikki, Elfen Lied, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Lucky Star, Yandere Simulator and the Sada Abe Incident." (from the book's press release) 978 [PDF, 54mb] Author: Pascal Matthey Title: 978 Publisher: La Cinquième Couche Language: French City: Brussels Year: 2013 Pages: 48 Format: 20 cm x 29 cm Fabrication: offset ISBN: 978-2-9303569-4-5 Description: Matthey works a day job in a Brussels bookstore and judging from his surprising body of work as a comics artist, he is already at ease with more conventional forms of graphic narrative. This book, whose title comes from a prefix that designates, in the numeric ISBN system, the category of objects assigned as books, prefigures something different. 978 took ten years to ferment. It's a narrative work exclusively composed from promotional material circulating in Matthey's workplace that advertises new arrivals of mainstream and epic fantasy comics literature. For many years he collected these pamphlets and painstakingly created a new non-representational, grid-based collage, where each page embodies a different mood. Matthey's selective focus on the physical aspects of the comics industry (its underutilized resources) and the non-remunerative value of its paratextual economy, makes this book the ultimate redemption. 978 is a book "with the sound of its own making", a psychedelic trip that emerges through the interplay between work and leisure, text and context, and writer and reader/user/librarian sensibilities. La historieta en el (Faulduo) mundo moderno [PDF, 76mb] Author: Un Faulduo Title: La historieta en el (Faulduo) mundo moderno Publisher: Tren en Movimiento Language: Spanish City: Buenos Aires Year: 2015 Pages: 160 Format: 16 cm x 23 cm Fabrication: offset ISBN: 978-987-3789-10-6 Description: Hailing from Buenos Aires, Un Faulduo is an artists collective which has been investigating, through publications, scholar presentations and performative interventions the different articulations of comics and graphic literature. Here, they revisit Oscar Masotta's legendary research book La historieta en el mundo moderno, originally published in 1970. Masotta's published research on North-American, European and Argentinian comics, as well as the First World Comics Biennial he directed in 1968, were seminal in the medium's history for treating comics as an art form in its own right. Un Faulduo using scans of a rare copy of Masotta's book, recompose the texts with collages, redraw illustrations and materially intervene on Masotta's text. This is a rare example of artistic research in comics, a praxeology proposing to further blur the boundaries between theory and practice. La historieta en el (Faulduo) mundo moderno could be understood as an exercise in perlaboration: a process in psychoanalysis that consists of recognizing and overcoming the resistances (here of the increasingly globalised dimensions of artistic resonance in comics practice) through the repetition, the elaboration and the amplification of an interpretation, that would have certainly appealed to Masotta's inclination for psychoanalysis. Polyepoxy [PDF, 25mb] Author: Bernard Joubert Title: Polyepoxy Publisher: Fondation Paul Cuvelier Language: French City: Brussels Year: 2017 Pages: 92 Format: 17.2 cm x 11 cm Fabrication: offset, paperback Description: Discussed in the pages of the influential comics reader Eprouvette n° 1 (2006), Polyepoxy, published by the Foundation Paul Cuvelier in Brussels, explores "the most plagiarized comic panel": the manifold unsolicited iterations of a drawing from Cuvelier's Epoxy (1968) depicting a naked Olympia looking behind her shoulder. Bernard Joubert literally leafed through thousands of magazines to document the exact same pose in more than 40 different drawings, particularly in the productions of Italian erotic fumetti, but also elsewhere. Polyepoxy's aesthetics are forensic, with a feel that would have appealed to Lev Manovich's analysis of cultural data or to Franco Moretti's distant reading: the publishers of the book took care to title and date the different findings from the cheaply printed trade paperbacks and reproduce the fragments in the exact size they had been printed. Polyepoxy demonstrates the self-reflexivity of the comic medium and how pervasive swiping practices are in the just-in-time production standards of its economy. It also reflects on how graphic objects move across time and activate different semantic networks only to ultimately confirm the highly gendered nature of the industry's imagination. 360º [PDF, 38mb] Author: Martín Vitaliti Title: 360º Publisher: ArtsLibris & Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König Language: Spanish (Editor's Note also Catalan/English) City: Barcelona, Cologne Year: 2016 Pages: 40 Format: 21 cm x 27 cm Fabrication: offset, paperback ISBN: 978-3-86335-943-0 Description: "One could call the artist’s book 360º by Martín Vitaliti (Buenos Aires, 1978, lives in Barcelona) a concept-comic. It is based on a single page from La Banda del Missouri [The Missouri Gang] designed by the acknowledged Italian Hugo Pratt (published in: TOTEM EXTRA 20. Especial Western, Editorial Nueva Frontera, Madrid, 1978, p. 91). Its grid of thirteen panels has been reproduced forty-one times while the respective illustrations have been “expanded” by Vitaliti. This results in thirteen panoramic views of each scene throughout the book. The narrative as such — Indians and rangers discovering a riderless horse and a dead body floating in the Missouri river — hasn’t an important meaning. What becomes meaningful is the void of the vast landscape that is developed by Vitaliti’s intervention. He evokes a strange kind of “something in between”, on one hand a visual cinematic effect; on the other hand a frozen storyboard. Compared with other famous panoramic representations of landscapes — think for instance of the Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill (1877) by Eadweard Muybridge, or Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) by Ed Ruscha — Vitaliti’s approach appears highly complex. What might look as a popular comic book, turned into a Cadavre Exquis, an existing story narrated anew by someone else, that doesn’t develop to a climax but instead remains on hold." (from the editor's note) Photon [PDF, 17mb] Author: Alexis Beauclair Title: Photon Publisher: Papier Machine Language: French/English City: Saint-Férreol-Trente-Pas Year: 2014 Pages: 8 Format: 18 cm x 26 cm Fabrication: risograph Description: As described in Beauclair's website, Photon is a narrative experience where the reader enters the optical apparatus through a variety of filters and prisms. Once the end is reached, the reader flips the book only to do the reading in the other direction, and much like a photon she travels back in time. Photon is a beautifully printed visual poem that highlights time and the reading experience as relative quantities. Compte-rendu des conditions météorologiques [PDF, 32mb] Author: Jérôme Puigros-Puigener Title: Compte-rendu des conditions météorologiques Publisher: Habeas Corpus Language: French City: Brussels Year: 2013 Pages: 26 Format: 21 cm x 29.7 cm Fabrication: xerox, japanese-style binding Description: Following the practices of conceptual art, the title explicitly mentions the programmatic nature of this work. For two years, Puigros-Puijener observed and registered the weather on a daily basis in the city of Brussels where he lives and, drawing on a weather forecast website, compared it to two different cities for each month such as Alice Springs (Australia) or Biarritz (France). Using weather forecast graphics, a vernacular system of pictogrammatic representation, Puigros-Puijener's work brings to mind Cage's desire to have his music sound like the weather, only here in its digital, mediated, infographic variant. Negros Rojos [PDF, 24mb] Author: CCCCC Title: Negros Rojos Publisher: Fatbottom Books Language: Spanish City: Barcelona Year: 2017 Pages: 21 Format: 25 cm x 34 cm Fabrication: Silkscreen printing Description: CCCCC mocking Barcelona's CCCB's and the institutional acronymic nomenclature, stands for Center for Communication and Conservation of Contemporary Comics. "The work in question is a coloring book, a piece of contemporary history. It's a footnote of a saga of violence, betrayal and fight for the power that you usually laugh at when watching famous TV series. It's a history that started in the sixties...". This is from the introductory text from Negros Rojos; a collection of twenty-one silkscreened posters sealed in an envelope. The project has been presented as a show, and according to CCCCC's spokesperson, "in one of the smallest exhibition spaces in comics history, the bookstore Fat Bottom in Barcelona, further divided by a median wall that could only allow a couple of simultaneous visitors, at most". Negros Rojos presents the findings of a document that was supposedly produced by the Black Panthers for the indoctrination of the young. In reality, it was designed by FBI's Counter Intelligence Program in order to discredit the Black Panthers and mock their revolutionary agenda. Comics has been widely used for propaganda and Negros Rojos traces the bitter history of a comics coloring book that foregrounded the uses of cultural appropriation, over-identification and indoctrination, revealing them as the comics medium's most powerful modes of address. How to be Everywhere [PDF, 20mb] Author: Warren Craghead III Title: How to be Everywhere Publisher: Self-published Language: English City: Charlottesville, VA Year: 2007 Pages: 90 Format: 15.2 cm x 23 cm Fabrication: Digital printing Description: How to be Everywhere draws its inspiration from Apollinaire's Calligrames: a literary work that emphasized a playful use of typography and layout as meaningful signifiers in their own right (they would prefigure the more fully experimentations of concrete poetry and poema processo in the 1950s). How to be Everywhere is a highly abstract narrative work that formally explores the interstices between comics and poetry through its elliptical, fragmented and object-oriented storytelling. Evincing all the formal elements that conventionally account for comics making such as panels, speech balloons, characters, genre tropes and other medial modes of address, Craghead's compositions claim - both graphically and in their storytelling structure - a narrative space where text and images are just substructures of the same language. Rakennusohje [PDF, 89mb] Author: Matti Hagelberg & Riikka Ala-Harja Title: Rakennusohje Publisher: Kustannusliike Hans Nissen Language: Finnish City: Lahti Year: 2012 Pages: 112 Format: 15 cm x 20.5 cm Fabrication: offset, hardcover ISBN: 978-9-52664-600-8 Description: Matti Hagelberg, best known for his dexterity with the scratchboard technique and his ongoing saga Läskimooses, collaborates with writer Riikka Ala-Harja for the making of Rakennusohje. Ala-Harja’s narrative takes place in Normandy and unfolds through a series of disconnected events that can each be described with the conciseness of a title: "The daughter spends the week with her father. The woman visits an American cemetery. A cow gives birth. Eventually the daughter returns home, but she is distant. In the end the two women drive towards Finland. In the end there's a text about Rupert. A parachute mannequin made of cloth which was dropped from the plane during the invasion." Hagelberg's images are inspired by Lego user manuals with their diagrammatic displays that resemble narrative structures in comics grammar. The drawings have a piling effect and their interplay with the text brings in mind what Matthew Kirschenbaum calls rapid shuttling, a reading practice that oscillates between the quantitative display of information and the hermeunetic close reading of the prose. Scaffold [PDF, 66mb] Author: V. A. Graham & J. A. Eisenhower Title: Scaffold Publisher: Most Ancient Language: English City: Oakland Year: 2012-2015 Pages: 48 Format: 23.5 cm x 21.6 cm Fabrication: Digital printing, silkscreen covers, handbound Description: Graphically, Scaffold is a strange object. The pages of the series' books are entirely composed of different sets of quasi-architectural formations and various sets of unfolding landscapes mostly depicted frontally. The sequence follows an implicit, oulipian rule that the two artists agreed upon: no world location can ever be revisited or depicted again once it is left. They manifest the artists' desire to produce a system for conveying movement through sets of fixed structures where storytelling, consisting mostly in commonplace dialogues, is just a byproduct of these rigid superstructures. Scaffold reads like a post-human narrative; the reader is left to contemplate something similar to the sidescrolling of a platform video game. No main characters are present. No action takes place. Scaffold thematizes the narrative impact of the background layer. It is a demonstration of comics' intermedial referential capacities in regards to other media, here video games. RIP [PDF, 73mb] Author: François Henninger Title: RIP Publisher: PCCBA Language: French City: Paris Year: 2017 Pages: 48 Format: 19.5 cm x 29.7 cm Fabrication: Digital printing Description: Henninger takes Alex Raymond's comics strip Rip Kirby for the material of his quasi-sculptural collage experiment. The 48 pages of his self-published RIP exclusively consist of one single page composition of Raymond's comics. Each reproduction of the page comes with paratextual annotations and registers an operation of collage. The pages are xeroxed and the collage operations slowly accumulate, allowing only a few of the recycled materials to carry on. RIP stages the resistance of a morphogenetic narrative to unfold despite the general entropic tendency to degenerate into abstract drawings. Noirs [PDF, 14mb] Title: Noirs Publisher: La Cinquième Couche Language: French City: Brussels Year: 2014 Pages: 64 Format: 21 cm 29.7 cm Fabrication: offset Description: Noirs is a facsimile of the original edition of Les Schtroumpfs Noirs: same cover, same stories, same number of pages, same format, and as close to the original in the quality of paper, weight and so on. There is one, single difference: the four plates of magenta, yellow, cyan and black that form the basis of offset printing have been replaced by four plates of cyan. The goal of this endeavour, apart from reactivating an old consensus and problematizing the innocuously naturalization of the ideological potential of color, was also to shed light on the industrial fabrication of books. offset printing, a supposedly transparent and mechanic process, once it stops working correctly (here, regarding color separation), can be thoroughly political. Comics Meetings Artist's Books [PDF, 45mb] Author: Francesc Ruiz Title: Comics Meetings Artist's Books Publisher: Fundació Joan i Pilar Miró a Palma Language: Spanish City: Palma de Mallorca Year: 2013 Pages: 32 Format: 21 cm 29.7 cm Fabrication: offset Description: Comics Meetings Artist's Books is a visitor's account of a fictional book fair. Typical of Ruiz's strategy, the project was also presented as an installation at the Fundació Joan i Pilar Miró in Palma de Mallorca. By following the typical guide from illustrated educational literature, the reader gets to visit seven different stands of cutting edge producers of artist's books and independent comics, based in the Mediterranean area. Comics Meetings Artist's Books imagines a world situated at the periphery of the major comics industries (EU-US-JP), where geographical alliances can be activated towards the production of radical artistic scenes and communities. The proverbial figure of the guide is none other than Tiramolla, the famous Italian comics character created by Renzi and Rebuffi in the 1950s. Ruiz's choice for this comic character is not arbitrary. Tiramolla points to a time where the Non-Aligned Movement brought together 120 member-states to articulate an agenda that was independent from the two major political powers during the Cold War era. Comics Meetings Artist's Books, situated far from the medium's superpower geographies, traces an impossible history of comics alliances; the camp aesthetics and secret affinities of the cultural and geographical subaltern of experimental comics producers. Miscomocs Comics [PDF, 72mb] Author: Samplerman Title: Miscomocs Comics Publisher: Le dernier Cri Language: English City: Marseille Year: 2017 Pages: 40 Format: 16 cm x 24 cm Fabrication: offset trikro and quadri Description: Inside the restless underground sphere, far from conventional and edicted ways, fanzine is often chosen as a way to express oneself. For some independent and/or alternative comic writers, being and working in the margin is not a plan B but a real choice. This outsider status is sometimes a chance to investigate their own creative area and there, fanzine becomes not only a way but THE way to do it. This is where we find Yvan Guillo, questioning, for 25 years, the limits of his own field. Seeing his self-produced fanzines appeared in the 90’s and the many well-defined work he did since, we could be tempted to qualify his behavior as typical underground author. But, around 2010, his strong will and interest in comics as a full artistic (codified) language, made the difference. Creating a new project, the author was far from thinking the huge scope it would have. We can find the origins of his narrative explorations through the diversity of his inspirations. Not only comics of course but poetry, radio, abstraction and surrealism, which can explain his interest for inter-iconic gaps and non-linear narrative experiences. Using mainstream comics (mostly from the 50’s) as a material, Yvan Guillo/Samplerman generates a new hypnotic, fascinating, vibrant, experimental dimension. Patterns, cut-ups, iterations, blasting before your eyes, making you wonder about what «reality» means. The way he pushes the boundaries of narration is like an earthquake transcending, mutating comic art. More than a pictorial world you could and would easily get lost into, his avant-gardist work is a real sensorial experience. (from the https://www.pierrefeuilleciseaux.com/ blog) 384 [PDF, 30mb] Author: Jérôme Puigros-Puigener Title: 384 Publisher: Habeas Corpus Language: French City: Brussels Year: 2010 Pages: 16 Format: 10.5 cm x 14.8 cm Fabrication: xerox, japanese-style binding Cómics de la Revolución [PDF] Author: Francesc Ruiz Title: Cómics de la Revolución Publisher: Centre d'Art La Panera, Lleida Language: Spanish City: Barcelona Year: 2008 Pages: 130 ISBN: 978-8-4968552-8-1 Description: This installation is a modified version of Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics (translated into Spanish as La Revolución de los Cómics), a theoretical treatise in comic-book format that analyzes different aspects of this medium in order to enlarge and expand its spreading. It consists of 1,800 colour-toned copies piled up to resemble a city scale model in which the people’s faces have been replaced by the artist’s own face, thus reinforcing the idea of the copy and modification of the original. The modified text invites the reader/visitor to launch that will change our way of communicating and of perceiving art, supporting the idea of change. (description from the book’s press release) We All Die Alone [PDF, 184mb] Author: Mark Newgarden Title: We All Die Alone Publisher: Fantagraphics Language: English City: Seattle Year: 2005 Pages: 192 Format: 20 cm x 22.8 cm Fabrication: offset ISBN: 978-1-5609766-1-5 Designed by: Helene Silverman Edited by: Dan Nadel Description: Acclaimed cartoonist Mark Newgarden debuted in the first issue of RAW magazine in 1980 and his work subsequently found its way into a variety of high and low profile media. He co-created the '80s pop culture fad Garbage Pail Kids, wrote, drew, and syndicated a weekly humor feature in the '90s, and created a Web Premiere Toon for The Cartoon Network called B. Happy. Newgarden is currently developing an unconventional Christmas special for The Cartoon Network. Newgarden's comics are hilarious, alarming, and masterful uses of the medium, alternating between old-time gags and avant-garde storytelling, often on the same page without missing a comedic beat. His syndicated strip in such publications as L.A. Weekly and The New York Press encouraged a fervent following and exerted a fresh influence on the medium. Today they remain as vital and entertaining as when they first appeared. Those syndicated comics will make up the bulk of this book, the balance drawing on Newgarden's long form stories from various anthologies, including the much-lauded Love's Savage Fury. In addition to compiling his comics, this book will be a full picture of the artist, his influences, and his many other careers. An avid collector and historian of 20th century ephemera, Newgarden has achieved the rare distinction of both contributing to and furthering the mediums he collects: novelties, comics, and cartoons. Newgarden remains a great link to the past while moving ever further into the future. We All Die Alone is edited by Dan Nadel, founder and editor of The Ganzfeld, and a regular contributor to The New York Times, Print, Metropolis, and more. It is designed by Helene Silverman, who has designed books for Abrams, Random House, Penguin, Chronicle and many other publishing companies. She has been the Design Director for the Red Hot Organization since 1990 and is a former Design Director of Metropolis. We All Die Alone will be an uproariously funny and fascinating book that will appeal to comics readers, pop culture buffs, and any appreciator of the graphic arts. (description from the book’s press release) M-Maybe (Human Torch-Towering Inferno) [PDF, 39mb] Author: Sebastian Utzni Title: M-Maybe (Human Torch-Towering Inferno) Publisher: Edition Taube Language: English City: München Year: 2019 Pages: 36 Format: 17 cm x 26 cm Fabrication: offset ISBN: 978-3-9459004-4-4 Texts by: Daniel Baumann, Manuel Gerber, Gino Leoni, Thomas Milic, Katharina Ammann, Maxim Keller & Friedrich Melzer (futurzwei) and Siri. Edited by: J. Steinbach Description: No super hero was able to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Sebastian Utzni collected comics that were published between 1973 and 2001 and that show shockingly similarity to the images of the 9/11 attacks. (description from the book’s press release) Suggestions d'harmonies [PDF, 23mb] Author: Unknown Title: Suggestions d'harmonies - Federal Emergency Management Agency Present, how to make your own shelter in home Publisher: Superstructure Language: English Lost Works by Ed Ruscha (After Martin Lang) [PDF, 16mb] Author: Tate Foley Title: Lost Works by Ed Ruscha (After Martin Lang) Publisher: Work Press & Publication Language: English City: Saint Louis, Missouri Year: 2018 Pages: 24 Format: 14 cm x 22 cm Fabrication: risograph, saddle stitching Description: The authors concept of the appearance of a selection of "lost works" of artist Ed Ruscha. Ruscha's professional website contains a list of his works that are unaccounted for, including a plea for information. Foley has chosen 11 of those pieces, specifically ones with no photographic depiction, and created his impression of their appearance based on their titles and Ruscha's contemporary work. 7-color risograph prints in an edition of 60. Signed by the artist. (description from the book’s press release) Perturbations [PDF, 72mb] Author: Rosaire Appel Title: Perturbations Publisher: éditions Adverse Language: French City: Paris Year: 2019 Pages: 40 Format: 19 cm x 25 cm ISBN: 979-10-95922-30-8 Description: A versatile American artist coming from the field of poetry, Rosaire Appel has been engaged since the 1980s in pioneering work in computer-assisted image making. Appel has a steady presence in New York galleries where she developed a significant production of publications and artists' books, from graphic scores to visual poetry, including experimental comics. Perturbations is her second book published by Adverse (after Intersections in 2017). In the present publication, Rosaire Appel radicalizes her research in comics, flirting more than ever with the limits of abstraction. On the basis of ghostly and fragmented architectural and topographical plans, she articulates her “asemic writing” (concrete poetry) and its entanglements of convoluted spaces in a visual explosion destabilizing all the accepted reading habits, definitively endorsing the comic strip as the ideal art with rhizomatic developments. (description from the book’s press release) A Final Companion To Books From The Simpsons (Updated Version) [PDF, 870mb] Author: Olivier Lebrun Title: A Final Companion To Books From The Simpsons (Updated Version) Publisher: Yellow-pages / Rollo Language: English City: Zurich Year: 2018 Pages: 640 Format: 11.43 cm x 17.78 cm Fabrication: softcover, perfect bound ISBN: 978-3-9062132-4-8 Description: French graphic designer Olivier Lebrun follows on his previous publications documenting the books that appear in the popular cartoon television series with this anthology of more than 330 images and titles. All have been captured with a black-and-white animation screenshot and cataloged in alphabetical order. Ostensibly the final installment of this highly personal project by Lebrun, this new, updated edition reflects countless painstaking hours spent scanning episodes, plus the contributions of a large community of fans and readers who provided tips over the years. (description from the book’s press release) Cordel Urbano [PDF, 60mb] Author: Lapi (i.e. Pires da Silva, Luiz Antônio) Title: Cordel Urbano Publisher: Ouvidor Language: Portuguese City: Rio de Janeiro Year: 1974 Pages: 56-60 Format: 13 cm x 18 cm Description: Luiz Antônio Pires, better known by the pseudonym Lapi, had his first cartoons published in the extinct O Jornal, by the Diários Associados. He also worked for Jornal do Brasil, collaborated with the communist publications Pasquim and Adiante, in addition to creating, in 1973, Cordel Urbano, a booklet that was the size of those little cordel leaflets, only a little fatter, but the role was the same. Lapi was the project leader for urban depollution in Rio, collaborating with paintings in the Rocinha favela, Morro Dona Marta, entrance to the Tunnel Velho, in Copacabana, and at the Hospital Pinel. Lapi died at the age of 60 of a heart attack, in Rio de Janeiro. Il Fumetto Dei Giardini [PDF, 101mb] Author: Francesc Ruiz Title: Il Fumetto Dei Giardini Publisher: Self-published Language: English City: Barcelona Year: 2015 Pages: 80 Fabrication: 5 booklets, 16 pages each, softcover Description: Il Fumetto dei Giardini is a comic in installments temporarily distributed during the opening week of 56 Biennale di Venezia. The booklets were collected, remixed and customized by Francesc Ruiz for the exhibition "The Subjects", curated by Martí Manen in the Spanish Pavillon in 2015. (description from the book’s press release) Panorama du Feu [PDF, 410mb] Author: Jochen Gerner Title: Panorama du Feu Publisher: L'Association Language: French City: Paris Year: 2010 Pages: 400 Fabrication: boxset containing 51 booklets, total weight: 719 g ISBN: 978-2-84414-355-6 Description: Le Panorama du Feu is one of the main pieces of Gerner’s solo exhibition presented at the Anne Barrault gallery in September 2009. The artist, with his typical revisiting older works, worked on a selection of covers from 50 so-called war literature booklets from the 1960s and 1970s; he covered multiple areas in black, highlighted specific words or included pictograms in the old booklets. The author thus highlights the extreme violence of these popular periodicals from the Cold War era. The result is an Oubapian book-object par excellence, a totally atypical assemblage, made up of 50 booklets of 8 pages each gathered in a box. (description from the book’s press release) Remake [PDF, 38mb] Author: Luis Aranguri Title: Remake Publisher: Meli-Melo Press Language: Portuguese City: São Paulo Year: 2015 Pages: 20 Format: 14 cm × 21 cm Retour Vers le Centre [PDF, 14mb] Author: Sammy Stein Title: Retour Vers le Centre Publisher: Papier Machine Language: French City: Paris Year: 2015 Pages: 12 Format: 20 cm x 26 cm Fabrication: risograph, paperback, Staple bound 1000X [PDF, 76mb] Author: Raul Luna Title: 1000X Publisher: Livros Fantasma Language: Portuguese City: São Paulo Year: 2018 Pages: 84 Description: The book makes sense of the online world through a collection of logos and emblems, between the word and the image, the icon and the index. TNT en Amérique [PDF, 100mb] Author: Jochen Gerner Title: TNT en Amérique Publisher: L'Ampoule Language: French City: Paris Year: 2002 Pages: 66 Format: 22,3 cm x 29,5 cm Fabrication: 1 affiche insérée. Relié avec dos toilé ISBN: 9782848040004 Description: “The main interest for me of the comic strip is the infinite possible links between text and image: a system of representation continually confronting, in a kind of alchemy, text and picture. This is the field I endeavour to explore on my own or with OuBaPo (Ouvroir de Bande dessinée Potentielle). The idea TNT en Amérique sprang from these remarks with OuBaPo, from exercises, experiments. I try to find new reading perspectives. I dismantle a given material to make something else of it. Through analysing Hergé’s comic strip Tintin en Amérique I realized the recurring incident of fall (of bodies) in this book. I wanted to understand where this permanent giddiness came from. Early 2001, I began to understand this violence (violence always softened and made seem ordinary thanks to the clear line of the drawing : getting punched is much more violent than what is shown in this kind of book) and I decided it would be the opportunity to do an “oubapian” exercise with the whole book. Therefore all this was only a personal experience at the beginning. I first analyzed and dissected the text in Hergé’s balloons. Then I kept the words for their meanings (in relation with the violence and the symbolical themes of American society) and their musical qualities. I drew up lists. I tried to elaborate sets of themes according to the pages. At that time, I began to blacken Hergé’s drawings letting out only the words I thought important. Later on, I found the graphic solution by enlightening this black with “openings” on colour, while completing the text by images. Black has then become night since all these coloured spots (signs, pictograms, simple symbols) were becoming urban little lights, pop neon lights flickering in the violent darkness of the American city. A kind of tentacular city watched by night from the sky or a promontory ( a recurrent scene in American films). Black in reference to censorship, to night, to darkness ( evil ), the mystery of uncompletely revealed things. On a dense black background, light coloured vignettes tell a story of American violence through their sequene and insistence: I bring up this phenomenon as well as the notions of noises, movements, money, religion, Good and Evil connected to it (the first moving neon sign in the United States was used to announce a death sentence). This night is an “American night”: a filter on an image taken in daylight to give the illusion of night. The reader’s mind (who should have read Tintin en Amérique beforehand) must be able to go from Hergé’s underlying work to my graphic indications and back. This graphic intervention is as much about America through one of Hergé’s comic strip, as it is about Hergé’s work through the themes about America. For these two universes, Hergé’s light line and American society can be understood in the same way: both worlds apparently rich, beautiful, smooth, but radically dark and violent. So I was able, thanks to reframing, masking, covering up to use a given material in order to examine its unexploited contents as well as its obscure zones. From a technical point of view, I bought (in shops specialized in old editions) old copies of Tintin en Amérique. Therefore I worked directly on the printed editions by cutting the pages one by one and covering them thickly with black ink. The elements of the original work were not to be seen showing through. It is for the same reason the publisher suggested I should rewrite the selected words myself for the printed version because Hergé’s handwriting could not be copied without authorization. The book was logically made by following the covering up concept thoroughly. Every word in its original place, each page in its place in the book. The publisher’s address and the colophon were put in the same places. The flyleaves and the clothbound back refer to Hergé’s original editions. I did not see this book as a “technical feat” but as the discovery of a secret passage , of a dark track followed to the end. I do not try to respect a fixed form or to keep faithful readers through my style of drawing. I make my books according to the theme and the issue at stake. This book was published in 2002, Ampoule publishers After September 11th 2001, when I was working on this book, I did not change anything about my work. At that time I had chosen all the words I was to keep, I had written the quatrains placed at the end of the book. I had also drawn the first fifteen pages. Later on I realized I was working on topical questions. Some sequences in TNT en Amérique strangely echoed perfectly what was going on at the time: bomb attack / terror / revenge / pursuit / cave / dollars / crisis. Last, this book was not made against Tintin or for Tintin but about Tintin. A piece of work on and about the comic strip.” (from the author’s letter of intention) Suit(Es) [PDF, 143mb] Author: Robert Varlez Title: Suit(Es) Publisher: éditions Adverse Language: French City: Paris Year: 2016 Pages: 144 Format: 14,9 cm x 21 cm ISBN: 979-10-95922-06-3 Description: Robert Varlez is arguably best known for his work as an editor with L'Atelier de l´agneau in the fields of literature, poetry and the visual arts. As an illustrator, he collaborates with various poets and writers such as Izoard, Ben Jelloun or Butor, and it is thanks to the encouragement of Martin Vaughn-James that he embarked on a series of experiments in comics based on Muybridge’s Chronophotographs. These works, published in the 1970s in various journals such as Minuit or "To Be Continued ...", remain in confidentiality until their rehabilitation by The Hoochie Coochie publishing team. In 2015, encouraged by the interest of a new generation of readers, a feverish impulse engages him in the production of a copious series of plates operating the ideal synthesis between his work as a comic book author, collagist and plastic surgeon. He thus gave birth to Suit(es), a machinery of dismemberment and recomposition that is both enjoyable and complex, in turn playful and overwhelming, the culmination of an art skilfully developed throughout his rich career. (description from the book’s press release) Astro Boy Tome 6 [PDF, 340mb] Author: William Henne & Xavier Löwenthal Title: Astro Boy Tome 6 Publisher: La Cinquième Couche Price: 25€ Language: French City: Brussels Year: 2020 Pages: 240 Format: 15 cm x 21 cm ISBN: 978-2390080619 Description: Astro Boy, the Little Robot is a shonen manga by Osamu Tezuka, published between 1952 and 1968. This sci-fi series takes place in a futuristic world where robots and humans coexist. It is based on the adventures of Astro Boy (often referred to simply as Astro), a powerful robot created by the head of the Ministry of Science, Dr. Tenma, to replace his son Tobio, who died in an accident. Dr. Tenma builds Astro identically to Tobio and raises him as he would his own son. He soon realizes that the robot cannot fill the void left by his son, Astro unable to express character traits or grow old like any human does. Remaking, with one detail, an identical book, in compliance with the Essaim charter, to modify, correct or revive its reception and meaning, is reminiscent of Borges' short story, “Pierre Ménard, author of Quichotte”, which describes the life and work of the imaginary writer Pierre Ménard. He details his incredible project: to rewrite, to update it, the first book of Quixote. After a lifetime of effort, arriving at this new contemporary and perfect form, he reproduced Cervantes’ work identically, in archaic 15th-century Spanish. Borges justifies this work and demonstrates that Ménard's result is superior to the original: if Cervantes wrote banally in the Spanish of his time, Ménard engaged in a linguistic creation similar to that of these historical novels of the 19th century, which present two identical passages that the context of their writing nevertheless makes opposing. The Essaim collection brings together creations resulting from diversions, strictly respecting a charter requiring that one modification, only one, be made on the whole of a work which modifies, corrects or revives its reception and meaning. The subversion described by Karl Marx, by which Marchandise(Merchandise) > Argent (Money)> Marchandise (Merchandise) became A> M> A ', allowing the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of labor value, then simply A> A', finds its artistic expression here contemporary: M> A> A '> A' '..., ad libitum, or even A> A> A'> A '' ... where the first A is that of Astro Boy. In few words, the authors bought 300 copies from the original publisher, at a discount, and sell now each copy at the exuberant price of 25€. (description from the book’s press release) Methode Bernadette [PDF, 162mb] Author: Laurent Bruel & soeurs Bernadette Title: Methode Bernadette Publisher: éditions Matiere Language: French City: Paris Year: 2008 Pages: 167 Format: 15 cm x 21 cm ISBN: 9782916383040 Texts by: François Cheval, Sonia Floriant Description: At the beginning of the 1930s, in the small industrial town of Thaon-les-Vosges, a group of young virgins secretly consecrated to Christ. The “Bernadette sisters” developed a striking method of catechism based on the use of drawings in stencil: black silhouettes on a white background. Thus begins the “Bernadette epic”: the incredible adventure of a community of women who, for thirty years will think, express themselves, act and fight in pictures. The adventure is warlike. It is about making room for the intellectual, moral, political and artistic depravities of the modern world. In terms of images, it is a matter of fighting step by step "against materialist, cubist and communist art". In other words, it is about igniting, in the heart of the 20th century, a counter-fire to modernity. White against black. Images versus images. "Teaching by silhouette offers the maximum photographic impression on the retina": the Bernadette sisters stenciled images of singular efficiency. Images cut with knife and scissors. Cropped images. Almost seventy years after their invention, Éditions Matière found these hundreds of images and (re) edited most of them in the form of a comic strip. The extraordinary visual and narrative power of the Bernadette silhouettes is there, intact. Through the effect of this unprecedented montage, the Method tells itself, brings to light the story of its invention, reveals its stakes, its ambitions, its rise and its fall: the prohibition imposed on it by the Church, its futile attempts at self-censorship, and finally the long occultation of which it has been the object until today...(description from the book’s press release) Au Travail! [PDF, 135mb] Author: Manuel Title: Au Travail Publisher: La Crypte Tonique Language: French City: Brussels Year: 2019 Pages: 224 Format: 7.6 cm x 11.6 cm Description: Blow Books idea is a project initiated in 2017 by Philippe Capart (Head of La Crypte Tonique) with the idea to sell, through specialized vending machines, small format picture books (7.6 x 11.6 cm), at a very attractive price (5 euros). As stated in their press release, “bande dessinee, by abandoning the press cartoons in favor of the book format, and then by generalizing the use of large hardcover formats, whatever the quality of their content, cease to be popular: due to their high price, they are no longer accessible to the regular reader. For their part, graphic novels, in various formats, always address, because of their price the privileged few. Blow Books is therefore a humble proposal to get out of this situation”. Au Travail, is one of the collection’s books and comes from Liege-based comics artist Manuel, who is also known for his published work with French publisher l’Association. (amended description from the book’s press release) Fahrenheit 451's Comic [PDF, 20mb] Author: Francesc Ruiz Title: Fahrenheit 451's Comic Publisher: Captures éditions Language: Spanish City: Barcelona Year: 2016 Pages: 8 Format: 20 cm x 30.9 cm ISBN: 978-2-9533912-9-9 Edited by: Valérie Cudel Description: This is a reconstitution of a comic book appearing at the beginning of the film Fahrenheit 451 by François Truffaut. With this publication, Spanish artist Francesc Ruiz also questions the status of the comic book at the time the film was made and also within the dystopian universe originally created by Ray Bradbury. The publication is the reconstruction of a prop from the film directed by François Truffaut in 1966: a comic without text that the main character browses for a few seconds while lying in bed. The 8-page publication contains some original images of the comic from the movie itself and others taken from the still film images from the shooting and was completed after research on styles and authors of the period, mixing some material borrowed from James Bond comic strips (Truffaut's film was shot in Pinewood Studios in London with the same production team as the James Bond movies) with new content that helps to understand the meaning of both the film and the novel, adding a new narrative perspective. The limited edition of 400 copies was published on the occasion of the exhibition “No Words, 3 Walls, 3D Porn”, at the Florence Loewy Gallery in Paris, that was open from October 15 to December 18, 2016. (description from the book’s press release) Compendium of Francobelgian Comics [PDF, 54mb] Author: Ilan Manouach Title: Compendium of Francobelgian Comics Publishers: La Cinquième Couche / Forlaens / L’Endroit / Fortepressa / Hélice Hélas / Topovoros / Antilope / Gnat Language: French City: Brussels / Copenhagen / Rennes / Rome / Athens / Veuvey / Sao Paulo / Tel Aviv Year: 2018 Pages: 48 ISBN: 978-2-3900801-8-3 Description: Compendium of Francobelgian Comics (Abrégé) was published in 2018 under the book catalog of eight publishers in Europe and elsewhere. Abrégé was built following the precepts of ontography, a model of conceptual representation for objects theorized by video game designer and OOO philosopher Ian Bogost. Abrégé presents a visual a personal typology of graphemes drawn from a shared reservoir of the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée tradition, where one can find a variety of comics proto-memes, metanarrative devices, paratextual elements and building blocks of the European BD. The Cubicle Island [PDF, 857mb] Author: Ilan Manouach Title: The Cubicle Island: Pirates, Microworkers, Spambots and the venatic lore of clickfarm humor Publisher: La Cinquième Couche/ Forlaens Language: Mostly English City: Brussels / Copenhagen Year: 2020 Pages: 1500 Format: 18.3 cm 26.1 cm ISBN: 978-2-3900805-1-0 Texts by: Ilan Manouach Description: The Cubicle Island is a post-digital, conceptual comic book project. It is an experiment with the distributed ramifications of digital labor. The Cubicle Island labors silently through the products of an extremely deskilled textual workforce, both human and non-human, and embraces the epistemic and technological acceleration put forward by the interconnectedness of the global precarious. It consists of a 1500 detexted desert island cartoons, for which I have solicited some 17,000 textual contributions through the interface of a popular digital labor platform. With varied formulations for each subsequent call, I was explicitly asking contributors (both human and automation processes) to provide me with a funny text between 50-70 words for each of these cartoons. By welcoming contributions from the most generic algorithms that were haunting this project from its inception, The Cubicle Island occupies a semantic textual field, an uncanny valley of Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Without sacrificing the cartoon’s semantic complexity and reader engagement, The Cubicle Island puts the emphasis of comics in their (digitally) distributed, partly human labor. The percolation of the comic strip units through the reader swarm of the digital factories and their cheap algorithmic surrogates, calls into question the primacy of the punchline and the drawing as the defining factors of the cartoon format and the comic industry. In the age of surveillance, capitalism’s selective transparency, The Cubicle Island thematizes new formations of labor and leisure (the newly coined playbor). The Cubicle Island is a durational performance based on 50 years of desert island press cartoons that highlights the extreme isolation that comes with new regimes of work in the making of an international class of precarious cognitive workers. (from the book initial press-release) Didascalias [PDF, 19mb] Author: Martín Vitaliti Title: Didascalias Publisher: Save as...Publications Language: English/Spanish City: Barcelona Year: 2013 Pages: 38 Format: 15 cm x 21 cm Fabrication: poster | glued ISBN: 978-84-938430-2-1 Description: This publication contains a selection of rectangular cartridges with temporal information which are commonly used in comics to include the voice of the narrator: the stage directions. These text boxes have been isolated from other information in the vignette. Thus, these elements become independent objects, they no longer are clarifications to understand the timing of the main action and become the stars of a new narrative sequence. (description from the publisher’s website) The work of Inès Chuquet [PDF, 540mb] Author: Inès Chuquet Title: Untitled Description: Arjun Appadurai in The Social Life of Things, describes the socially relevant life of commodities. Commodities embody a value that can be exchanged and thus are defined as “things with a particular type of social potential, that are distinguishable from "products," "objects," "goods," "artefacts," and other sorts of things.” Quoting Georg Simmel, a commodity can be “any thing intended for exchange”, as value is never an inherent property of objects, but is a judgement made about them by subjects, driven by their desire to possess them. Politics is what creates the link between exchange and value, and these things have “no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with.” Exchange, therefore, is the source of value, a formative phase of the commodities’ becoming; the circulation of things enlivens them. According to Appadurai “all efforts at defining commodities are doomed to sterility unless they illuminate commodities in motion”. An integrated part of the commodity pathway is what Appadurai calls the diversion of commodities, “the placement of objects and things in unlikely contexts”. Diversion occurs in and out of commoditization, when a thing is removed from its commodity pathway for different reasons, or when a thing formerly retrieved from its customary circuits, is re-commoditized after a long lapse. Taking from Appadurai’s work, it is possible to examine material cultures and the ways in which movements and migrations of populations have altered the meanings, uses and exchanges of the things they carried, sold or propagated, and the things they left behind. But what happens to things when they are left behind and when no motion illuminates them anymore? When their customary circuits don’t overlap with trajectories of exchange, things, instead of a social life, reclaim a life. What happens when things, put it in Simmel’s terms, don’t “resist our desire to possess them” or when their economic value does not motivate any exchange of sacrifices? What happens, in a technological age of industrially proportioned consumption that produces an effluence of disposable consumer goods, when things deceive their programmed social potential? Beyond inscribed processes of mutability and mobility relevant to value exchange, the physical materiality of things is asserted. For most of her life, Inès Chuquet suffered from what she described as persistent difficulty discarding possessions. Recently separated from the general category of obsessive-compulsive behaviours, hoarding disorder is designated as the compulsive urge to acquire unusually large amounts of properties and the inability to voluntarily get rid of those possessions without experiencing corresponding feelings of anxiety and mental anguish. Chuquet describes herself as incredibly eccentric and exceedingly reclusive. As far as she could remember, she always had a taste for collecting objects that had no obvious use to others. She remembers that her specialised collecting spiralled out of control when she received her first auction listings newsletter. Her hoarding practice progressively escalated from local yard sales to industrial storage spaces and hangars. She expressed contempt for the petty collector and showed interest only for wholesale, bulk giveaways, or anything that came in the hundreds; hoarding was a way of celebrating the industrial ambit of scavenging, and there was no better predilection terrain than harvesting the bulk of unsold comics. Chuquet consistently visited cold, damp basements of defunct publishing houses, hangars, distributors’ storage places located in sprawls, and bought for pennies comic books by the hundreds, from the same print run. Chuquet asserted that these books might have failed from an industrial perspective; they didn’t make a profit, neither, given their declining use-value, have been discarded or recycled as a last redeeming attempt. During the years, she reportedly developed a very emotional relationship with the industry’s discards. In a personal exchange, Chuquet asserted that among many others, her collection contained 172 copies of Laff-a-Lympics 1980 Cartoon Annual, 220 Knockout Fun Book, 1958, 98 copies of the Old Yeller, 156 or so copies of Cufflinks (the number is imprecise as it is difficult to negotiate the thin line between a book and mildew cultivation). Indeed, poor storage conditions and the generally high humidity or dampness with occasional poor air circulation has favoured the growth of organic material and mould that lived off the book’s pulp. Most of the books she collected, at the opposite end of a museological or private capitalist ‘best practice’ collectability were in a dreadful condition, usually with broken joints, damaged sewing, distorted spines, and degenerative cover staining. Entire pallets of books literally developed their own microclimatic cultivation of mould and mildew, according to the books’ paper properties, the printed ink’s quality and the materials of binding. Perfect binding, for example a binding technique where both cover and pages are stuck together at the spine edge by a thick layer of hot melt glue, combined with the use of poor quality, acidic paper printed in CMYK, was responsible for a powdery flaking layer of brown mildew developed in patch of spots distributed unevenly in areas where yellow ink coverage was substantial. In another instance, where books were stockpiled in a space that had insufficient airflow and has suffered minor floodings in the past, books developed a thin haze of a fuzzy growth evolving progressively, bottom to top, from red fungi to stingy greenish filaments. Chuquet boasted that she could immediately figure the exact year of the book’s fabrication and sometimes even the location of the printers suppliers, without opening the book. Chuquet’s collection demonstrates that in temporalities of deep archiving, represented in castaway print commodities, things are before anything else matter, and that life, in the biological sense, continues to circulate, beyond the circuits of value negotiation. Given Chuquet’s claims against the advantages of building a subeconomy based on rarity and fetishization, what was unpredictable is how she became through the years a specialist in discard forensics; a branch of discard studies, that examines the recovery of enormous quantities of what Appadurai calls ex-commodities, defined as things retrieved, either temporarily or permanently from the commodity state, and treated as a physical evidence for establishing an industrial history of a medium. Conceptual Comics Conceptual comics is an archive of works that are unaffiliated with the commonly accepted history of the comics medium. It is a resonating chamber for conceptual works and unconventional practices that are little known outside of our community but also a springboard for establishing the conditions for an affective lineage between similarly minded practitioners. The variety of the collected material expresses the curator’s choice for a non uniform consistency and claim instead for a perpetual becoming of the medium. Nevertheless, these works share with each other many common issues and urgencies, alternating between material self-reflexivity and critical exhaustion. They operate on the margins of distribution and reception and their unlocatedness in the medium's spectrum is more than an abstraction: artists uncomfortable with the entrenched roles invite readers, in the absence of critical discourse, to engage with the works in non-specified, at times forensic, ways of examination. I argue that this condition, more than a minor drawback of a normative industry, induces new behaviours and forms of social relationships. Each of the works that are featured in this collection explores the very substrate of its medium not as a culturally neutral site, but as a way to build alternative historiographies, replete with its own material properties and signifying potentials. They propose to examine how social and economic forces and their related sets of activities and commercial, communicative and other routines compose the media’s meaning-signifying trajectory. The rainforest of pulp production, the printer’s studio, the readers’ column and the landfill are not simply the industry's geographies but are technologies of inscription in their own right. They are the integral elements of a material language that actively shapes the medium and challenges the reader to negotiate meaning through different distributions of transparency over opacity in its products. This collection proposes to equally embrace the real, the unclaimed, the anticipated and the fictional practices, in their constant materialisation, and reflect on their specific sites of production in their potential to register meaning and organise discourse based on the inscriptions of this material language. About Ilan Manouach Ilan David Manouach is a researcher and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital art. He currently holds a PhD position at the Aalto University in Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines the intersections of contemporary graphic literature and XXIst century’s technological disruptions. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling specifically designed for blind and partially sighted readers/makers of comics. He is also the founder and creative director of Applied Memetic an organization that researches the political repercussions of generative art and highlights the urgency for a new media-rich internet literacy. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, World Literature Today, Wired, Le Monde, The Comics Journal, du9, 50 Watts and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet. For a fuller documentation on the above projects, the Brussels-based non-profit Echo Chamber is responsible for producing, fundraising, documenting and archiving Manouach’s research on contemporary comics, that has been presented in solo exhibitions to important festivals, museums and galleries worldwide. He is an Onassis Digital Fellow and a Kone alumnus and he works as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation visibility through its newly founded publishing arm. UbuWeb