Ilan Manouach’s 'Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge': ontography and the past and future of stories
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IMR 04 - Chapter 2, Simon Grennan ...
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2025-03-08
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Abstract
This chapter will consider Manouach’s own explanation of the genesis of Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge (2018) in theorisations of cross-media visual correspondence systems (Bogost 2012), utilising the concept of the ontograph, or “a graphical […] representation that provides concise and detailed information about the units and the ways they relate with each other in a particular situation” (Manouach 2019: np). Instumentalising this concept, as a method of production, Abrégé tests a general hypothesis derived from Jean-Christoph Menu's 2005 polemical analysis of mainstream commercial bande dessinée. The chapter will interrogate this idea – and Manouach’s methods for producing the book – in terms of a range of related concepts: first, the use of social conventions as productive constraints, according to Jan Baetens' proposal that "“the study of constrained writing should no longer be restricted to the study of internal constraints in high-cultural texts that are detached from their cultural and historical context" (2010:76). Second, what Crucifix calls “undrawing”, or the disruption of “the relationship between drawing and storytelling to refocus attention on the social and political economy of the drawn image” (Crucifix 2019:7). Third, collage, as a method of interrogation or resistance (Brockelman 2011) and, finally, Wilde’s theorisation of characters without storyworlds, or kyara (Wilde 2019). The chapter will conclude that Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge accumulates redacted and arranged fragments, of which readers have memories that appear stylistically and discursively similar. These memories establish an identity for Manouache’s sources by identifying storyworlds, rather than stories. Then the storyworld not only includes the causes and consequences of the object of depiction, that is, its past and future, but also the pasts and futures of the ideas that the reader employs to make sense of the image.Citation
Grennan, S. (2023). Ilan Manouach’s Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge: ontography and the past and future of stories. In P. Moura (Ed.) Ilan Manouach in review: Critical approaches to his conceptual comics. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003374961Publisher
RoutledgeType
Book chapterDescription
This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in [Ilan Manouach in Review Critical Approaches to his Conceptual Comics] on [08/09/2023], available online: https://www.routledge.com/Ilan-Manouach-in-Review-Critical-Approaches-to-his-Conceptual-Comics/Moura/p/book/9781032399713ISBN
9781032399713ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.4324/9781003374961
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