Comics World Wide? Comic Art and Globalisation

Comics as an art form have been considered an apt mode of mirroring changes in culture and reacting to the fragmentation of perception in our modern world. Owing to their fusing of disparate drawing-styles, images and text, they potentially echo any crisis of understanding and signification. One such crisis of understanding clearly has been brought about by the practices of what is commonly called 'globalisation'. Thus it seems rewarding for the theory of globalisation to analyse what comics have to 'say' about the changes induced by global capitalism. It is, however, also important to query into Comic Art as itself being produced by ideas or ideologies of globalisation and into what this will reveal about the functions of popular culture.

This paper tries to explore these issues on the example of the recent anthology COMIX 2000 that has been designed as a "universal comic tome". To make it a truly international, universally 'readable' work, the editors decided that it "shouldn't have any written dialogue". This exclusion of language in its written form certainly has manifold ramifications. This paper's investigation of Comic Art as a global language of images will thus probe into the kinds of power such an art of non-language can exert in today's dense network of global flows. What will comics disclose about the logic in this circulation of forms?

Comix 2000 has been edited by L'Association, a renowned Parisian group of Comic artists. Their idea was to create a "2000 page book of comics for the year 2000" (L'Association 1999: Foreword), which would "showcase the best of authors from all around the world". Using only two rules as a guideline for that huge task, they collected 324 authors from 29 countries, born between 1940 and 1982. Those two 'rules' were not to use any written dialogue and to use the general theme of the 20^th Century. The first rule not only saved them from the agonies and problems of translation, but also contributed to their positive and idealistic idea to hatch one book that "anyone in any country will be able to read", this same book, not a translation. In this spirit and belief in a truly international culture, they thus brought together comics that vary a lot in styles, techniques and plots. Hence and according to the second rule, to deal with the 20^th Century, we find themes ranging from the Banale, like a visit to a hairdresser, to global catastrophes like AIDS, the technologizing of the world and capitalism, the Holocaust, or, more locally, the Apartheid system in South Africa. Another extremely recurrent theme is sex and love and violence, which seem to form a kind of subtext to the 20th Century, or rather the space where global events materialise, become reality that can be grasped, sensually or epistemologically - or cannot be grasped, as the ever-present violence makes clear.

It has been repeatedly asserted that comics are a valuable, if not the, tool for registering what is going on in what could be called the operating system of culture and cultural production. Unsurprisingly, the editors of Comix 2000 operate in exactly this 'tradition':

Comic Art (just in case you haven't noticed), is a major and universal means of expression and maybe even the most apt communicative medium of our times. (L'Association 1999: Foreword)

However, they add a significantly new dimension, a global and universal one! This surely implies certain forms and politics that need to be examined, if not challenged. L'Association's "universal comic tome" is designed to fulfil the desire for global understanding and a global culture. But is this truly international culture, as they stated it in their Foreword, a reality? And can such an idea be seen as part of a positive project to democratise the world or are there other, less beneficial and more problematic, ramifications?

Presupposing such an ideal globalised world poses many questions and problems, doing so in the form of an "universal comic tome" does even more so. What does it mean to write a 'history' of the 20th century in the form of comics, 2000 pages for 2000 years, and catastrophic events in a comic form? What does it mean for this aim that the contributions for Comix 2000 have been chosen by a small group of French comics artists and that the publication has been sponsored enormously by the French government? And what does it mean to speak of Comic Art as "the most apt communicative medium of our times"? What kind of tool is it that Comic Art provides us with, what politics and ideology stand behind a, in this case, global (and universal?) language of images? Will it be a powerful tool or language of resistance and cultural criticism, or will it be yet another very powerful means for cultural imperialism?

Short Bibliography:

L'Association (1999) COMIX 2000, Paris. Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.