Toward Another Graphic Novel

From: 
2012 to 2016

This research in the arts project, conducted by a practicing graphic novelist, isolated forms of graphic narration that could take the genre of the graphic novel in new directions. The project returned to the concurrent boom in the interwar period of lowbrow comics on the one hand and narrative experiments with word and image by the historical avant-gardes on the other. Shedding light on the history of comics and more recent experiments in the graphic novel, and presenting a state of the art of comics studies, the project zoomed in on experiments of the historical avant-gardes (Lissitzky, Van Doesburg, Steinitz, Schwitters, Ernst, etc.) to explore alternative narrative imagetexts. Concepts as symptom, event, montage and appearance were foregrounded, and applied in a series of graphic novels by the researcher himself, resulting in, among others, the books Grid and Lamer (2013), Lamaree (2016) and Degré Zéro (2016).

 

This project won the 2017 Roger Dillemans Fund Prize for research in the arts.

 

PhD thesis:

 

Conard, S., Bru, S. (sup.), Van Imschoot, T. (cosup.), Deprez, O. (cosup.) (2016). Naar een andere graphic novel: woord, beeld en verhaal in de striproman en de historische avant-gardes.