ABSTRACT
Artists such as Asger Jorn and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio played key roles in founding the group, in 1962 the Situationist International (SI)purged artists from its ranks and shifted its focus to politics. This chapter argues that the SI’s reengagement with comics in the later sixties was an essential component of a multifaceted campaign to influence restive student audiences, and it entailed a shift in tactics from detournement to the direct realization of hand-drawn images in the sophisticated, pop-influenced bedephile style popular with students. It outlines the trajectory of the SI’s detournement of petits format comics, to the detournement of Pop art and finally to the appropriation of bande dessinee for the direct realization of situationist comics, demonstrating that the SI’s involvement with comics shifted as the popular medium was aestheticized by Pop art, figuration Narrative painting and bedephile culture.
