Violence, Politics, and the Graphic Nove

In the 21st-century, we’re accustomed to seeing historical violence represented in all forms of popular culture, from animated films to TikTok videos. But when Art Spiegelman published Maus in the beginning of the 1980s, he worried about the dissonance between form and content: “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dream. And trying to do it as a comic strip!” Spiegelman is not the only, nor the first artist to rely on this medium to represent politics, history, and violence. In French, Callot denounced the Thirty Year’s War in a series of etchings, while French illustrators of the 19th-century took hold of the art of caricature as a political speech—incarnated by Charles Philipon’s infamous drawing of Louis-Philippe transforming into a pear. Today, we conceive of the comics medium according to a few distinctive characteristics—hand-drawn art, seriality, frames, word bubbles, gutters, among others—but throughout history, artists have experimented with the relationship between image and text. Recall Hokusai’s manga and impressionist japonisme, Swiss artist’s littérature en estampes, or Flemish artist Frans Masereel’s so-called “wordless” novels. In the first half of this course, we will develop together a retrospective history of the medium, considering hand-drawn art books, illustrated magazines, Épinal prints, comic strips, and children’s comic books; we will insist upon the polemic aspect of the bande dessinée since its inception, in series like Tintin or Zig et Puce, so often vehicles for colonial and Vichy propaganda. This retrospective will touch on the international circulation of adult magazines or counter-culture comix of the 1960s and ‘70s (Charlie Hebdo, Métal Hurlant, Raw), as well as the success of the graphic novel, or narrative album. In the second half of the class, we will focus on French and Francophone graphic novels that treat historical traumas as diverse as the First World War, the Iranian Revolution, the totalitarian state of North Korea, or the Vietnamese diaspora. Turning to some iconic graphic artists (Tardi, Satrapi, Sfar, ou Sattouf), as well as a few that are less well known (Baru, Baloup, Abirached), we will examine why the medium has become such an important site for the work of memory and autobiography. We will conclude with new genres, no