A collaboration between Belgian artist François Schuiten and French writer Benoßt Peeters, The Obscure Cities is one of the few comics series to achieve massive popularity while remaining highly experimental in form and content. Set in a parallel world, full of architecturally distinctive city-states, The Obscure Cities also represents one of the most impressive pieces of world-building in any form of literature. Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten's work as an architectural designer informs the series' concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta Plana website.Synthesizing cutting-edge approaches from both literary and visual studies, Rebuilding Story Worlds will give readers a new appreciation for both the aesthetic ingenuity of The Obscure Cities and its nuanced conception of politics.
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This statement on the home page of Altaplana already hints at some of the major features of the work of Schuiten and Peeters: the strange and the uncanny, the relationship between reality and fiction, the importance of spatial and urban settings, and the very singularity of a project that seems to be as much interested in world making as in storytelling come immediately to the fore, and most elements of this rough general presentation will be read in detail in the various chapters of this book.
The originality and unique position of the series depend not only on style and content. This originality, which this book will also frame in historical and political terms, is strongly related to the way in which Schuiten and Peeters profoundly redefine the usual comics publishing policy as well as the relationships between comics and other media. As pointed out by the leading French historian and theoretician of comics studies, Thierry Groensteen:
The Obscure Cities ⊠The volumes that have been gathered until today under this generic term can immediately be distinguished in many ways from the cycles and book series with which the comics world is so familiar. Here, the proliferation of titles has not been programmed in advance. The first volume of the series, The Great Walls of Samaris, was not meant as the pilot of a series to be developed in case of success. The coherence of the whole enterprise does not depend on the presence of a recurring character or a group of characters, not even by the repetition of certain material aspects of the volumes (size, book design). (Groensteen 1994, n.p.; my translation)
Launched with the publication of Samaris in 1983 (first U.S. translation in 1987), after a run in the monthly (Ă Suivre) from June to September 1982, the chronicles of The Obscure Cities constitute a landmark series in European and world comics. The revised and final version of the various works in four âintegralâ albums released (in French) between 2017 and 2019 presents us with a timely opportunity for a first critical overview of the series as a whole, including many of the âperipheriesâ that were not realized in the host medium of comics (illustrated books, anthologies, catalogues, collectorâs items, lectures, posters, performances, and so on). We may begin this endeavor by considering what makes the series such a stunning achievement in modern comics and more generally in modern literature and culture. Much more than other works or series, The Obscure Cities has indeed a powerful literary dimension, which immediately makes it a good candidate in bridging the gap between two worlds, that of comics and that of writing.3 As we will see later, the generic and media hybridization of The Obscure Cities goes, however, far beyond the sole fields of comics and literature.
Deeply rooted in Belgian and European comics culture, but with more than an eye wide open to global tendencies, The Obscure Cities has emerged at a watershed moment in modern comics culture and in modern or postmodern culture in general. This introductory chapter will give a historical presentation of the work and its context in order to build the necessary framework to better understand and critically examine not only the form and content, but also the real stakes of Schuiten and Peetersâs contribution to the ninth art.
A brief practical note before getting started: Readers less familiar with the plot of the various volumes will be happy to discover that comprehensive plot summaries are available at the highly user-friendly and perfectly up-to-date portal site Altaplana,4 where one will also find clear and circumstantial information on characters, places, events, and general chronology of the series.
In global comics history, 1983 may not be as pivotal a year as, for instance, 1978, the year that witnessed the launch of Will Eisnerâs A Contract with God and the first issue of the journal RAW, a publication strongly influenced by European comics avant-garde and rapidly influential in France as well as the UK, or 1986, which saw the simultaneous publication of Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and of course the first volume of Mausâall books that strongly impacted the European comics market, introducing a conceptual tension between âcomicsâ and âgraphic novelsâ that was practically unknown before, when all European comics, whatever their style or content, were seen as part of the same medium. It is nevertheless a year that is at the center of a crucial period where the great structural changes in European comics culture during the 1950s and 1960s, both in content and in institutional terms, resulted in a new Golden Age of adult storytelling.
After World War II, European comics witnessed two fundamental and strongly linked transformations: one in its publication formats, another in its commercial and industrial infrastructure. First of all, the classic publication venuesâcomics pages or sections in daily newspapers, weeklies, and monthly magazinesâwere challenged by a new format, that of the specialized comics magazine, that is, a weekly publication of sixteen to twenty-four pages offering a combination of gag strips and serialized adventure strips, generally complemented with smaller editorial contributions. Granted, comics magazines already existed before the war, but their number and importance strongly increased after the mid-forties and fifties, with Tintin (the journal) as the flagship publication in the field. Each of these magazines had its own look and feel, tone, and ideology, but this internal streamlining did not prevent artists from adding a personal touch. Magazine editors tried to seduce their readers with maximal diversity and thus a mix of genres as well as visual and narratives styles. This variety was a must in the competition between the countless journals on newsstands; the number of subscribers being generally very low, accounting for between 5 and 10 percent of the copies sold (Michallat 2018), necessitated an industry aversion to routine. This openness to individual creation within the comics cultural industry encouraged artists to create and develop their own characters and story worlds, which were normally not continued or rebooted when the series was abandoned (for a counterexample, see Baetens and Frey 2018). Obviously, this creative freedom proved an essential feature in the emergence of the adult comics of the sixties, when authorsâmore attuned to catering to juvenile audiencesâobtained greater freedom to move to other types of content and storytelling.
The widespread acceptance of comics in Europe, where the industry did not specialize in the horror genres that had exposed U.S. comic books to wide social and political repression, as well as the dynamic distribution policy of magazines and publishers in Belgium and Franceâthe core countries of the European production in that periodâcontributed to an enlargement of the field from general and juvenile publications to adult publications. The range and scope of these new comics were extremely diverse. Some were traditional comics that progressively targeted a more mature audience (the works published in a magazine such as Pilote, founded in 1959, are a good example of the rise and fall of the attempts to convert a youth journal in something else [Michallat 2018]); others were from the very start oriented toward a political agenda.5 Yet none of the worksâsome of them masterpieces, such as Moebiusâs The Airtight Garage (1976â1979)âwere labeled âgraphic novels,â mainly due to the presence of a wide range of styles and genres and thus the absence of a clear-cut opposition between mainstream and nonmainstream pu...
Table of contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
1. A New Series, a New Type of Author
2. A World of Its Own
3. More Than a Possible World
4. Between Chapter and Series
5. A New Fantastic
6. In and Out the Medium
7. Doing Politics in Comics
8. Close-Reading The Leaning Girl
9. A Conversation with BenoĂźt Peeters
10. Birth of an Album: The Theory of the Grain of Sand