French help with serious lesson in art of looking at comics
Comics manga, bandes desinées, strokiesprente, call them what you will are probably the most egalitarian and democratic of all visual art forms. All you need to create one is paper and a pencil. They are cheap to consume (often free) and their conventions are easy to master; no literaryaesthetic code to crack, no discouraging arty elitism.
Of course, collector’s items such as rare vintage issues or expensive coffee table books can set you back a few thousand rand. And the popularity of more affordable publications means that there is a lot of money washing around the global comics industry, even without the billions attached to film, gaming and merchandise.
The biggest player, unsurprisingly, is Japan which also has the oldest sustained tradition in a recognisable comic-strip format, going back to the 12th century (although manga proper owes its development, not to mention its name, to the Chinese manhua of the 18th century). The US is the second-largest market, and the third-largest is France.
French comics are enjoying a “golden age”. The wider sector, including Belgium and various francophone African countries, produces more than 5,000 titles per year; 45-million copies were sold to French comics enthusiasts in 2018. So it is fitting that the French Institute and the Embassy of France in SA have teamed up with the Johannesburg Art Gallery to promote the art form.
In SA we have our favourites, from Supa Strikas (at one time the highest-circulating monthly comic in the world) to hit-andmiss strips such as Madam & Eve and the niche “graphic punk” of Bitterkomix. I’ve admired the rise and rise of Loyiso Mkhize’s Kwezi. Beyond this, I have much to learn.
Co-curators of the SA component of the exhibition, Tara Weber and Raymond Whitcher, share a passion for comics and graphic novels. The Art of Comics incorporates work from the JAG collection. The pop art of Roy Lichtenstein, borrowing from (or simply reproducing) comic strip imagery, raises questions about the relationship between popular culture and ostensibly more sophisticated “high” art.
Their main interest, however, is in showcasing the recent work of South Africans producing comics and graphic novels. It is an education in seeing. These are drawings of exquisite beauty. They shift in theme, setting and mood. Speculative fiction is prominent, but there are quiet moments, the domestic and mundane, depicted with understated realism. Sometimes the emphasis is on blow-by-blow narrative. Sometimes the plot is fragmented and episodic. Sometimes we are presented with a simple tableau.
The curators’ brief history includes a focus on satire; this leads to felicitous intersections, such as Hogarth revisited by SA artists in the 1980s. Caricature is acknowledged as problematic Bitterkomix is an ambiguous example and it is worth noting that the French section, curated by Thierry Groensteen, includes artists who had contributed to the controversial magazine Charlie Hebdo. Yet the material selected by Groensteen steers clear of crass cartooning; it dazzles with its sometimes simple, sometimes spectacular rendering of worlds both imagined and familiar.