ABSTRACT

This book takes an interdisciplinary and diverse critical look at the work of comic artist Ilan Manouach, situating it within the avant-garde movement more broadly.

An international team of authors engages with the topic from diverse theoretical approaches, from traditional narratology and aesthetic close readings of some of Manouach's books, engaging with comics' own distinctive history, modes of production, circulation and reception, to perspectives from disability studies, post-colonial studies, technological criticism, media ecology, ontography, posthumanist philosophy, and issues of materiality and media specificity.

This innovative and timely volume will interest students and scholars of comic studies, media studies, media ecology, literature, cultural studies, and visual studies.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

A Critical Situatedness of Comics

part 1|83 pages

Textuality and Surfaces

chapter 1|11 pages

Katz, Noirs & Tintin akei Kongo

Ilan Manouach's Critical Manifesto

chapter 2|21 pages

Ilan Manouach's Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge

Ontography and the Past and Future of Stories

chapter 3|19 pages

Whitewashing the Smudge

The politics of erasure and unreadability in Ilan Manouach's Cascao

chapter 4|12 pages

The Void that Challenged Narrative

A Poetics of Emptiness in Riki Fermier

chapter 5|18 pages

Replacing and Reorganizing

A Discursive Arc about Cultural Production

part 2|59 pages

Reading Practices

chapter 6|15 pages

Reading Childly

Riki Fermier and Cascao 1

chapter 8|15 pages

Shapereader and the Limits of Touch

chapter 9|9 pages

Blanco

On Blank and Illegible Books

part 3|88 pages

Rethinking the Pasts and the Futures of Comics

chapter 10|16 pages

Manouach Contrabandier

Countering Practices to Industrial Publishing

chapter 11|16 pages

Haunted by Tradition

Ilan Manouach and the Ghosts of BD Past

chapter 12|15 pages

[CoCo]

Conceptual Comics and Online Archives

chapter 13|21 pages

Can Comics Think?

Automation on The Cubicle Island

chapter 14|15 pages

Ilan Manouach

The Comic Book Hacker

chapter |3 pages

Afterword

Like a Robot Bereft of Its function