Introduction
Mise en abyme
The Editors
This edition of European Comic Art was not planned as a themed issue,
but during the editing process, we noted that all four articles may be
regarded as offering variations on mise en abyme, the use of an image
within an image or text within a text, whereby the inner picture or
story illuminates the outer work. This is a term whose heraldic origins
link it to visual depictions, and a figure that the comics medium, with
its single and multiple frames, can deploy to particular effect. We will
show in our conclusion how the frame within a frame occurs in the
articles introduced below, either literally or metaphorically.
Renaud Chavanne’s article concerns a type of panel that he catego-
rises as the cube-panel. Unlike the window panel, which allows for a
larger world to be projected by artist and reader beyond the frame, the
cube-panel creates a hermetically sealed realm, entirely turned in upon
itself, prison or refuge. The analysis bears on the six volumes of Inside
Mœbius. The title, and the author’s self-representation at various ages,
imply that the reader will be offered access to the inner life of the epon-
ymous artist. However, this comic is by definition une bande de Mœbius,
a Mœbius strip that is a continuous surface with no outside or inside:
the artist’s avatar is a graphic character like any other, not a pretext for
the exhibition of his subjectivity.
What is revealed instead is the creative process that drives him, and
this is achieved through a number of figures. The first is the desert,
representing a creative void but also, through an untranslatable play
on words (Désert B. = désherber [give up smoking weed]), the desire
to replace the out-of-body vision of the self that is afforded by weed-
smoking with the externalisation enabled by drawing. The second is
the bunker, represented as a cube or parallelepiped within the square or
rectangle of the panel, the latter sometimes coextensive with the page
European Comic Art Volume 13 Number 2, Autumn 2020, 1–5 © European Comic Art
doi:10.3167/eca.2020.130201 ISSN 1754-3797 (Print), ISSN 1754-3800 (Online)
2 Introduction
as a whole, and which, in certain of its occurrences, contains within it
an additional set of rectangles: the comics page on which the artist is
shown to be working, and, by extension, the practice of comics. Further
motifs take the form of the fall and the flight: the fear of falling, of
losing the creative distancing offered by drug consumption, is counter-
acted by the impetus sustained by improvisation, untrammelled by a
prior script. Chavanne shows how colour is used to establish an equiva-
lence between the upper surface of the bunker and a comics panel and
how a panel is depicted as under artistic construction just as the bunker
that it contains is under artisanal construction, both places that may
be inhabited. Chavanne concludes by noting that comics becomes for
Mœbius not merely a mode of expression but a way of thinking about
the self as an artist.
Thierry Groensteen writes about the five years during the 1980s in
which he was the editor of Cahiers de la Bande Dessinée, the groundbreak-
ing journal that played a key role, in France and beyond, in legitimising
comics as an object if not yet of academic study then of theoretical
discourses. He begins by recounting the early days of S chtroumpf, a
fanzine founded by Jacques Glénat in 1969. It only later gained the sub-
title ‘les cahiers de la bande dessinée’, and later still, on Groensteen’s
assumption of the editorship in 1984, lost its original title and with it,
the assimilation of bande dessinée as a whole to the Franco-Belgian tra-
dition. The proposal for a new format arose out of Groensteen’s percep-
tion of the need for an outlet for theoretical work, for engagement with
artists whose work rarely received critical attention, and for evaluative
appraisal of the plethora of comics albums being produced in a rapidly
expanding field. By the early 1980s, the pioneering generation of comics
theorists, such as Pierre Couperie and Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, had
ceased to publish or moved into different areas of interest, and Groen-
steen was faced with the task of recruiting collaborators. His selection
process was rigorously eclectic, and one of the strengths of Les Cahiers
was, as he remarks, the coexistence of semiologists with philosophers
and art historians, elitists with devotees of popular culture, and the
involvement of contributors from many different countries and comics
cultures, including, notably, our colleague Paul Gravett.
Groensteen is not without a certain frustration that the period of his
editorship coincided with the dominance of a somewhat conservative
tendency in comics publishing, since it predated the emergence of the
small presses that revivified French—and European—comics produc-
tion in the following decade. The new-format journal, did, however,
Introduction 3
appear just a year after the announcement of an ambitious project for
a French national comics centre to be situated in Angoulême, and may
be seen as part of the same legitimising movement: indeed, Groen-
steen himself would go on to work there. In the meantime, the journal
was being edited out of Groensteen’s flat in Brussels, and he describes
the complex physical labour required by layout and printing. Moreover,
while grappling with a challenging workload, he had to contend with
ongoing hostility from those, including comics artists and publishers,
who considered the journal pretentiously intellectual. The legacy of Les
Cahiers encompasses major theoretical works produced by some of its
contributors over the following two decades and the awakening of a
younger generation to the potential of comics as a medium for artistic
expression.
Francisca Lladó discusses El Perdón y la furia [Forgiveness and Fury],
scripted by Antonio Altarriba and drawn by Keko, which was produced
in 2017 in collaboration with the Prado Museum on the occasion of an
exhibition dedicated to the seventeenth-century Baroque painter José
de Ribera. The interpretation by the modern-day protagonist, Osvaldo
González Sanmartín, of the artist’s works, focusing on his interest in
magic and his political radicalism, earns him disapprobation and ulti-
mately terrible punishment at the hands of his hierarchical superiors in
the university who refuse to see Ribera as other than a devout catholic.
Osvaldo seeks lost works by Ribera depicting mythological scenes (two
out of the four ‘Furies’), but the boundaries of time frames become
blurred as, embroiled in academic rivalries, he begins to take on the
qualities of the artist, a process denoted as ‘Riberisation’. Lladó details
the changes made by Altarriba to attested accounts of the commission-
ing of The Furies, with the aim, she suggests, of linking the painter
to the heretical tradition of Illuminism, strengthening the mythol-
ogy around the curse that strikes viewers of his works, and drawing
the paintings into the drama of Ribera’s grievance against a powerful
enemy. She goes on to examine Keko’s use of intertextual references,
both to previous works by the comics authors themselves, whose pro-
tagonists occupied similarly obsessive fictional worlds, and to multiple
works by Ribera, whose iconography resurfaces in the depiction of
Osvaldo in tortured perspective and arresting chiaroscuro. Lladó quotes
the notes given by Altarriba to Keko, showing his concern to capture
exact poses and décor from the source paintings, and stresses the care
taken by Keko to find models for the architecture of the Baroque spaces
inhabited by Osvaldo.
4 Introduction
Most strikingly, the comic shows the crazed Osvaldo enacting the
fantasy, invented by Romantic poets, that Ribera had painted with the
blood of saints, by substituting the blood of a beggar. Lladó identifies
the techniques used by Keko to work from Ribera’s originals and to
evoke the stages in Osvaldo’s gore-soaked recreation of them. In her
final section, she notes the importance of the references in the comic
to contemporary Spain, including the high visibility of beggars on the
streets, the art market, and the entrenched conservatism that imposes
orthodoxy within academe, the bitterness of disputes given extra reso-
nance by another reappearance of characters from a previous comic by
the authors. Lladó concludes by emphasising the multi-layeredness of
the comic, a quality fully brought out by her analysis.
Fredrik Strömberg puts to the test the oft-made but rarely substan-
tiated claim that Marjane Satrapi’s drawing style in Persepolis is influ-
enced by ancient Persian art forms, namely arabesques and calligraphy,
miniatures and friezes. His analysis draws on Ernst H. Gombrich’s
work on visual schemata, the patterns common to groups of artists that
result in stylistic similarities, but Strömberg introduces a key division:
he uses the term visual building blocks to refer to practical conventions,
the ‘how-to’ level of creating a drawing, and visual ideas for patterns of
perception. Internalised visual ideas may be turned directly into building
blocks or adapted through a process of accommodation. The result will
be the visual elements in the completed drawing. He makes a further
classification: schemata may be discerned at the levels of lines, details,
characters and objects, and compositions. The analysis of Persepolis
begins with a comparison of its curvilinear art with arabesques and
calligraphy, in particular with visual ideas from Persian carpets. Their
accommodation with comics conventions relating to thought balloons
and emanata has the effect, Strömberg suggests, of associating them
with the inner life of the autobiographical character. In the next cate-
gory, details, he compares the facial features of Satrapi’s characters to
Persian miniatures, finding them to be plausibly related, particularly in
the design of the eyes, although it is hard to establish, he acknowledges,
whether this is a matter of influence or coincidence. In the category of
characters and objects, a connection is demonstrated between the Per-
sian warriors on friezes and the soldiers represented in historic scenes
by Satrapi. On the compositional level, Strömberg points to instances of
rhythmical, symmetrical rows of bodies in Persepolis, with an absence
of perspective that again connects them to friezes. He moves on to con-
siderations about the degree of accommodation needed between each
Introduction 5
type of Persian art and the conventions of comics: slight in the case of
miniatures and, more surprisingly given the divergence of materials,
in that of friezes, but greater in the case of arabesques and calligraphy.
He contends that the integration of all these ideas from Persian visual
culture not only intensifies the thematic of Persepolis but has revitalised
comics in general, with a direct legacy that is visible in work by other
Middle Eastern comics artists.
In Chavanne’s article, mise en abyme operates at more than one level.
The recurring figure of the bunker that occurs within the diegetic
world may also be read as part of the comics apparatus, a square or
rectangular comics panel. As such it enters into a larger, organised
array, but it also contains within in it, on occasion, a sheet of paper on
which is drawn a multi-panel comics grid, a schematic representation
of that same comics apparatus, standing for the activity of the artist.
The struggles that Thierry Groensteen recounts may be read as a mise
en abyme of aspects of the wider legitimising process: the establishment
of critical frameworks within which comics could be assessed on the
basis of artistic merit rather than commercial success, the constitu-
tion of a group of specialists, often drawn from other disciplines, who
could make these judgements, and the scornful opposition of those for
whom comics could only ever be regarded as a mass cultural product.
The title of the comic discussed by Lladó, El Perdón y la furia, alludes
to the themes of pain and revenge to be found in Ribera’s paintings.
Quoted in the comic, they function as mise en abyme of the larger nar-
rative of the defiance of power that spans both time frames, that of the
modern-day art historian and that of his seventeenth-century subject.
Fredrik Strömberg’s meticulous tracking of the influence of Persian
art in Persepolis leads him not only to the obvious conclusion that the
visual elements derived from Persian sources resonate with the comic’s
subject matter but to the more complex proposition that the exercise of
combining different art forms, three- and two-dimensional, coloured
and black and white, non-narrative and narrative, has opened up new
creative potential for comics, a medium whose development has been
marked by remediation and hybridisation.
