While scholarly analyzes of comics are multiplying, the publication of the proceedings of the Cerisy conference on war in comics illustrates the richness of this field of study, and places particular emphasis on Spanish comics, poorly known in France.
After Bubble lens in 2009 then Boxes on screen in 2010, Front lines is the third volume of the collection “ The Equinox » dedicated to comics. It brings together, under the direction of Viviane Alary (University of Clermont-Ferrand) and Benoît Mitaine (University of Burgundy), the proceedings of the conference held in Cerisy in June 2010, with a change of title: the conference was in fact entitled “ Wars and totalitarianism in comics », while the volume which brings together the contributions is subtitled “ Comics and totalitarianism “. This subtitle is misleading: totalitarianism does not constitute the point of convergence of the studies collected in this volume, which is therefore devoted to the representation of war in comics. Despite this slight hesitation on the exact subject of the work, Front lines brings together sometimes very rich material. It is particularly worth noting the strong presence in the collection of Spanish comics (five of the fifteen contributions are devoted to it, not counting Mariella Colin’s study on the treatment of the Spanish War in the fumetti of fascist Italy, and that of Lucía Miranda Morla on Salazar’s vision of Portugal in two works by Miguel Rocha). This presence, linked to the academic registration of the two authors of the volume in Hispanic studies, is remarkable, as Spanish comics are poorly represented in scholarly studies in the French language.
Spanish tradition
We will read with pleasure the study that Mariella Colin devotes to “ The Spanish Civil War seen in the comics of Fascist Italy » (pp. 27-45). Analyzing the graphic and narrative regimes prescribed by a totalitarian regime to deal with one of its military engagements in the mode of ideological propaganda, Mariella Colin explores in a very scholarly manner a little-known chapter in the history of comics, which completes the book she published on children’s publishing in fascist Italy.
Complementing and extending the work of Mariella Colin, Antonio Martín proposes with “ Franco’s designers. Graphic humor and comics for a post-war » (p. 127-163) an overall study on the trajectories of Spanish cartoonists after Franco’s victory in 1939. Editor and historian of comics, of which he is one of the best Spanish specialists, Antonio Martín works to show the paradoxes and difficulties of internal exile, highlighting the practices of recycling and double discourse that the practice of comics implies under a totalitarian regime, with a particular interest in two similar and yet very different paths, those of Desiderio Babiano and Lorenzo Goñi.
Dealing with the end of Francoism, Benoît Mitaine draws up in “ El Cubri goes to war… » (p. 223-244) the portrait of one of the first groups of Movida graphic designers. Born in Madrid in 1973 from the friendship between Felipe Cava, Saturio Alonso and Pedro Arjona, El Cubri develops a revolutionary and anti-imperialist discourse which, by taking the paths of collage, diversion, copy, offers unpublished images and powerful. Benoît Mitaine finely analyzes the ideological issues of El Cubri’s work, relating them both to the historical context and to a study of the technical procedures used, particularly highlighting the work of degradation of the graphic signal which characterizes the images produced by El Cubri throughout the 1970s.
War reporting
In a completely different field, Paul Gravett traces the evolution of war reporting in comic strips: “ Joe Sacco in Palestine: from witness to historian » (p. 245-254) highlights the evolution of Joe Sacco’s work since the first fascicles of Palestine in 1995 until Gaza 1956 in 2010. Very comprehensive despite its relative brevity, the article deals with both the material constraints of the original booklet format and the change in Sacco’s methods. To this approach of “ comics-reporting » policy is perhaps missing a question on the “ report on the past » (unlike what he does in PalestineSacco investigates in 2010 a massacre which is more than half a century old: the conditions of work first, and of the construction of the relationship with the truth then, are no longer at all the same).
Finally, we must point out the study that Philippe Marion signed with “ The war shot. Of Shooting War At Photographer » (pp. 287-312). By examining the visual and narrative restitution of war through intermedial hybridization (between photography and comics for Emmanuel Guibert, or between photography, comics, web and video for Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappé), Philippe Marion offers a reflection on equivocity of shootingbetween shooting and firing a gun. This article, one of the most stimulating in the collection, shows in itself that an exclusively thematic treatment is not enough to reason about comics: it is by combining a thematic approach, a technical approach and a media approach that Philippe Marion manages to draw from her corpus an intelligibility capable of being generalized.
A fleeing object
These analyses, if they confirm that a solid interdisciplinary approach can account for this decidedly very rich subject, underline by contrast the defects of an exclusively thematic approach, to which the work as a whole yields. Viviane Alary and Benoît Mitaine have chosen to organize the collection into two large sections, themselves organized into chapters, according to a distribution which does not reproduce that of the interventions in the conference sessions, and which sometimes gives the feeling of a single score. little artificial. This feeling is particularly strong when reading Michel Porret’s article: the scholarly fresco that he paints seems to want to bring together the corpus whose lack is felt in the rest of the collection. The Beast is dead (Calvo), Ottokar’s Scepter (Hergé), QRN on Pretzelbürg (Franquin), Hunting party (Bilal), or Maus (Spiegelman) are thus mentioned too quickly, in a synthesis whose place, in the middle of a section devoted to the making of national imaginations, is problematic – whereas the intervention of the same author was logically located at the opening of the conference of 2010. We will easily agree that this difficulty is the lot of all collections of conference proceedings, and that there inevitably enters a part of arbitrariness and a part of artifice in the way in which the contributors dispersed from one such collective work are brought together and put in order in what must become a unique book.
However, the thematic approach and its limitations pose a deeper problem here. Indeed, if the editors of the work rightly point out that the studies they have brought together are marked by a strong historical division between “ two major enunciative modalities, one indicated by the primacy given to the statement, the other by an obvious significance of the enunciation » (introduction, p. 12), however another partition is left aside: the articles in fact deal indifferently with comics which talk about wars, with comics published during these wars, or with comics which take as their subject the theme of war without referring to a real historical episode. This indistinction contributes to confusing the subject: we thus find pell-mell monographic studies devoted to authors who worked on “ image » a historical conflict (this is the case of the fairly comprehensive article by Vincent Marie on Tardi), synthetic studies drawing the contours of a particular industry in its link with the war (like the very detailed article by Philippe Videlier which, under a somewhat misleading title, studies the production of stories of warlike adventures published by Imperia between 1946 and 1986), and formal studies questioning the general conditions of a discourse iconotextual relating to war (thus the article by Jacques Samson devoted to the construction of the subject of enunciation in the war story). This mixture of genres, or more precisely of angles, weakens the coherence of the volume, and here we reach the limit of a work which, while affirming its heritage vocation, struggles to scientifically constitute its object.