Comics—A form once considered pure junk—Is sparking interest in literary studies. I'm as amazed as anybody else by the comics boom—despite the fact that I wrote an English department dissertation that makes the passionate case that we should not ignore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of comics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in literary studies may think the moves obvious: making claims in the name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out (the term doesn't settle comfortably into our grammar; nomenclature remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped its object or properly posed its project. To explore today's comics we need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on comics—and specifically on what I will call graphic narrative—is gaining traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal—or use one simply to illustrate the other—but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning. Throughout this essay, I treat comics as a medium—not as a lowbrow genre, which is how it is usually understood. However, I will end by focusing attention on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25501865.pdf

Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative

Before the first World War, graphic design was almost entirely conventionalized. Layouts were symmetrical, centered. Variety and interest were achieved by using different type faces, different sizes and weights of type (bold, italic etc.), and by employing a welter of decorative rules and borders. Illustrations and vignettes, either drawings or photographs, might accompany the printed text; but they were rarely integrated, essential parts of typographic compositions.

http://fq.ucpress.edu/content/ucpfq/16/2/35.full.pdf

Museum of Modern Art

A Century of Artists Books

Notons X la variable aleatoire egale au nombre de lancers necessaires pour obtenir toutes les faces du de. Soit Xi la variable aleatoire egale au nombre de lancers necessaires pour obtenir la i ieme nouvelle face. Tous les Xi suivent une loi geometrique. Precisons leur parametre : Des le 1 lancer, on obtient une nouvelle face, donc X1 a pour parametre 1. Pour obtenir une 2 face, on n’a plus que 5 choix sur les 6 faces du de, donc X2 a pour parametre 5 6 .

Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Poème bloc poème. Désir-hasard-dés

Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’ il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison ; car, à moins qu’ il n’ apporte dans sa lecture une logique rigoureuse et une tension d’ esprit égale au moins à sa défiance, les émanations mortelles de ce livre imbiberont son âme comme l’ eau le sucre. Il n’ est pas bon que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer sans danger. Par conséquent, âme timide, avant de pénétrer plus loin dans de pareilles landes inexplorées, dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. écoute bien ce que je te dis : dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant, comme les yeux d’ un fils qui se détourne respectueusement de la contemplation auguste de la face maternelle ; ou, plutôt, comme un angle à perte de vue de grues frileuses méditant beaucoup, qui, pendant l’ hiver, vole puissamment à travers le silence, toutes voiles tendues, vers un point déterminé de l’ horizon, d’ où tout à coup part un vent étrange et fort, précurseur de la tempête. La grue la plus vieille et qui forme à elle seule l’ avant-garde, voyant cela, branle la tête comme une personne raisonnable, conséquemment son bec aussi qu’ elle fait p 24

Riva Castleman

Papers

A Century of Artists Books

American impressions : prints since Pollock

Art of the Forties

Printed Art: A View of Two Decades

Jasper Johns : a print retrospective