[CoCo]

This chapter studies Ilan Manouach’s curatorial practice around “conceptual comics”, particularly in his contribution to existing shadow libraries. Manouach has indeed assembled, compiled, and uploaded dedicated collections of experimental comics to Monoskop and UbuWeb, two online repositories of critical knowledge, media studies, and avant-garde art. This anthologizing gesture contributes to situate and ground the self-proposed category of “conceptual comics” within an alternative history of comics, expanding its confines and integrating unexpected productions uplifted from other traditions while also situating comics within histories of avant-garde and experimental art. Beyond the assembled corpus, the technological choice to digitize limited-circulation printed works and disseminate them through shadow libraries brings out important questions of access, transformation, and cultural memory that are surveyed in this chapter.