“Memory is tabooed as unpredictable, unreliable, irrational,” deplored Adorno (2005, 121) more than half a century ago. Despite the growing interest in memory today and the establishment of memory studies as a field in its own right, the unreliability and irrationality of memory make it a simultaneously challenging and exciting topic. For Henri Bergson, memory is brought into sharper focus by the image, but its most concrete articulation unfolds through action, which is both dynamic and ephemeral. Bergson’s emphasis on such bodily memory finds a counterpoint in his student Maurice Halbwachs’ conceptualization of collective memory with its varying social frames (cf. Olick 2008, 154). For Astrid Erll (2011, 12), “it is the ongoing exchange of information between individuals and the motion between minds and media which first of all generates what Halbwachs termed collective memory.” This oscillation between individual and collective memories in early twentieth-century theories of memory is reflected in comics, where different kinds of memories are in constant interaction, for instance, through the confluence of an individual reader’s memory, historical context, and the collective memories of comics, including the intertwined memories of the genres, styles, and series populating them. Comics thus capture the tension and the ambiguity between individual and collective memories which, as Halbwachs (1992) suggests, is strongly rooted in the process of intersubjective remembering. An ambiguity already discernible, as Astrid Erll (2011, 11) points out, in Halbwachs’ frameworks, which close in on themselves, became “containered” or combine and transcend several frameworks as the perspective shifts from, for instance, the nation-state to the individual. This volume interrogates such ambiguities and their relationship to the particularities of the comics medium as well as its varying cultural contexts, ranging from Europe to North America and from the Victorian age to today.
Bringing Together Comics and Memory
There are many ways in which Bergsonian memories reverberate through the richly visual, multimodal world of comics. Images, usually presented in some kind of sequential flow and thus in constant transformation through panels but also in the reader’s head, are central to comics. Moreover, the essential building blocks of comics, including the under-theorized drawn line (Gardner 2011) and colors (cf. Baetens 2011), the cut-and-pasted material, are direct outcomes of bodily actions and are thus traces, mediated through various production processes, of bodily memory. The body and the mind are thus interwoven in comics with a distinctive vitality that could have met Bergson’s approval (coincidentally, the first edition of Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire appeared in 1896, a year after the first appearance of Richard Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, which is often taken as the pivotal point the history of comics).
Memory is a key word in contemporary comics studies as evinced by the attention accorded to representations of personal and collective memories in comics, beginning with the extensive body of work on autobiography (El Refaie 2012; Chaney 2011; Alary et al. 2015) to recent works on comics journalism and the representation of troubled collective memories (Chute 2016 ; Mickwitz 2016; Worden 2017). This central position of memory in comics studies can be traced back to the literary and trauma studies scholarship on Art Spiegelman’s Maus. While Maus has been key in establishing critical vocabulary in memory studies, such as Hirsch’s (1992) concept of postmemory, its canonical position in comics studies has led to a situation where memory’s presence in comics studies has been closely tied to the concept of trauma. This book suggests propelling the debate beyond a hierarchy of memory that has been connected to what counts as “plausible” texts in comics studies (Beaty and Woo 2016, 14).
Moving beyond traditional trauma theory as well as postmodern interpretations of autobiographies and the retelling of history through comics (Hutcheon 2002; Polak 2017), this volume follows in the footsteps of pioneering work on remembering comics (Berthou 2011; Gibson 2015; Cremins 2016). It also expands its scope in order to propose a more holistic understanding of comics memory, where the medium and its history, personal (albeit not always autobiographical or even autofictional) and collective memories are not easily disentangled from each other. By presenting “comics memory” together rather than comics and memory or memory in comics, this volume reflects on the multiple relationships between comics as a medium for memory and the memory of comics as a medium. The questions inspiring the contributions in this volume are therefore not so much about the innovative ways of representing personal or subjectivized memories but rather about the various roles played by styles and archives in using, forming, and transmitting comics memory. Our key concerns can be phrased, very simply, in a proverbially Austinian way, as follows: What do comics do with, and to, memory and what does memory do to comics?
To answer these questions, we propose styles and archives as two interlaced trajectories into this excavation of comics memory. This interlacing, which might seem counterintuitive, can be extremely useful, as demonstrated by Robin Kelsey (2007, 194) in his book on US survey photographs, tellingly titled Archive Style, which seeks “to open up consideration of the archive as a matrix of reflexive pictorial reasoning in its own right.” While not strictly focusing on the question of style within archival visual culture, this book similarly builds on the productive tension between both terms. Thinking about comics memory in terms of archives and styles enables us to examine different materialities—ranging from the drawn line to the covers of the book, to the potential of embodiment inscribed in personal stories—while accounting for the scaffolding of memories propping up the stories themselves, which constitute and reconstitute, like styles themselves, mobile and fluid but also alternative archives.
Styles: Drawing Memories, Memories of Drawing
It might seem counterintuitive to tackle the amorphous concept of memory with the notion of style, which is also a concept that resists definition. Often taken for granted, comics style remains understudied (Meesters 2010) . We consider style as covering the manner of drawing and coloring, the page layout and the panel arrangement as well as the ways in which comics narration unfolds. Since the drawn line remains the most material manifestation of style, we build our reflections on the roles played by style for comics memory by starting with the act of drawing.
Within the trajectory of style, one can distinguish two ways in which style engages with comics memory: graphiation, which works as a node where the author and reader meet, a meeting that is given shape and colored in by the drawn line and shades used; and polygraphy which taps into the history of drawing and representation through different media that are primarily, but not exclusively visual. These two concepts, which are further elaborated below, enable us to move away from the more traditional discussions of autobiography and autofiction, which often gauge the memories against the keeping, or breaking, of the Lejeunian autobiographical pact. While autobiographical traces are present in, and indeed tangibly mark, many of the comics examined in this volume, particularly in its first two sections, each contribution focuses on how memories of different kinds—personal, collective, medium-based—are simultaneously channeled and remembered by the act of drawing. Memories are thus figured and re-configured through certain recurrent images of an indeterminable personal significance (Pedro Moura), drawing styles that remember or produce nostalgia (Giorgio Busi Rizzi), or styles that code and pack memories in different forms of embodiment (Eleanor Ty, Bettina Egger) that extend to the form of the book itself (Rachel Miller). Style remains an underlying concern even in the later chapters on comics history and archival memory. Styles lead the way toward commentaries on, and even detournements of, the symbolism and connotations attached to them as well as their role in the processes of legitimization where serious styles are given precedence over comic and immature ones (Chris Reyns-Chikuma; Christopher Pizzino; Nicolas Martinez). Style also remains a marker for certain series and publishing houses. It can thus provide crucial clues to the demands of narrative continuity as well as fan expectations (Jean-Matthieu Méon) as well as the “low,” forgettable status accorded to the cartoon and the caricature (Michael Connerty).
Giorgio Busi Rizzi’s offers a system for the construction of nostalgia in comics, which he illustrates through Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. Bettina Egger shows how Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercer’s Le Photographe can be seen as oral history c...