European Comic Art

This edition of European Comic Art brings together articles that offer a variety of theoretical frameworks. Ilan Manouach proposes new ways of understanding the nature of comics creation, including artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted creation, particularly in relation to the virtual comics that are never actualised, as divergent paths are followed by the artist and early drafts cast aside. Éric Dubois's presentation of the archives of the Belgian comics artist E.P. Jacobs at the Fondation Jacobs in Brussels gives us the opportunity to appreciate the value of just such preparatory material, as Jacobs’ carefully preserved outlines and sketches bear out Manouach's conceptualisation of the artistic process as far from linear. Radu Harald Dinu, Ylva Lindberg and Małgorzata Olsza discuss two comics that feature historical instances of disability, in Romania and Poland respectively, by attending to instances of the gaze, both as objectifying and as ultimately re-appropriated by the protagonists, whose stories contribute to a politicised form of remembering. Ann Miller's article makes a claim for an autobiographical album by Binet, best known for his humorous series Les Bidochon, as a highly wrought work of art that exploits the visual and verbal resources of the medium to reveal the gaps and continuities among the multiple selves that amount to the autobiographical persona.

This article examines the largely unseen documentary strata that structure the production of comics and argues that preliminary materials – sketches, layouts, colour roughs, scripts and character sheets – function as generative design prototypes that articulate comics’ liminal, iterative and collaborative labour. Drawing on theories of documents, design, liminality, boundary objects and hauntology, it shows how these artefacts mediate decision making and reveal the spectral traces of discarded possibilities embedded in the creative process. The article then extends this framework to computational practices, analysing how generative models and feature-space exploration reshape prototyping in synthetic comics, using Fastwalkers as an exceptional case study. It concludes that integrating analogue and computational methods reconfigures the relationship between potentiality and actuality in the creation of contemporary comics.

Could the E.P. Jacobs Foundation archives contain more information than meets the eye? Behind the plethora of carefully preserved documents of all kinds relating to each album are pieces that escape any logic of classification, making each adventure within the saga unique. Convinced that such a brilliant author, famous for his attention to the smallest detail in his scenarios, could not have missed such an opportunity to write his own legend, we wondered if it was possible that Jacobs had hidden a message at the heart of his archives, to bear witness to his fiercest fight as a comic book author: his opposition to the very constraints of the medium?

This article explores how graphic narratives from Central and Eastern Europe depict disability history, bridging the underexplored intersections of comics studies, disability history, memory activism and history education. Through an analysis of Becoming Eli (Dan Ungureanu) and Igor and the Time Machine: Holocaust (Tomasz Adam Świderski and Justyna Kieruzalska), it examines how these works challenge dominant historical narratives and reclaim marginalised histories. Drawing on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's concept of staring and Jaipreet Virdi's notion of the disabled gaze, it highlights how these comics reposition disabled individuals as active agents of memory. By integrating disability history with comics studies, the authors argue that graphic narratives serve as tools of memory activism, offering innovative ways to engage with the past, enrich history education and foster social change.

In L'Institution, his savage indictment of the Catholic boarding school that he attended in the 1950s from the age of six, Christian Binet includes a paratext containing photographs of himself as a child and of the building itself, in order, seemingly, to authenticate his account. However, this guarantee of reliability is undermined by exaggerated verbal protestations, by Binet's famous insouciance about background detail and by the inclusion of drawn sequences that are not merely implausible but avowedly false, in what may be viewed as a strategy of ‘ironic authentication’, in Charles Hatfield's term. This article will argue that the play between voiceover and images, and within the images between identification and distancing, creates a complex autobiographical self that allows for the subjectivity eluded by the photograph.

Marys Renné Hertiman and Camille de Singly, eds, Construire un matrimoine de la bande dessinée: Créations, mobilisations et transmissions des femmes dans le neuvième art, en Europe et en Amérique (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2024). 352 pp. ISBN: 978-2-37896-467-2 (€18)

Zane Elward, Comic Fascism: Ideology, Catholicism, and Americanism in Italian Children's Periodicals (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2025). 232 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5952-8 ($36.95)

Hugo Frey and Maaheen Ahmed, eds, The Visionary Art of Franco-Belgian Comics, 1930s to 1960s (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2025). 280 pp. ISBN: 9789462704800 (€40.00)