Comics and Narration

Translator’s Foreword

vii translator’s Foreword Bande dessinée et narration: Système de la bande dessinée 2,1 published in the original French in 2011, is the long-awaited follow-up to Thierry Groensteen’s seminal Système de la bande dessinée, written in 1999,2 in which he embarked on the project of defining the fundamental resources deployed by comics for the production of meaning and aesthetic effects. By making underlying systems visible , Groensteen was able to shed light on the spatial operations of layout and articulation that conditioned the activity of the reader. He now builds on and expands that analysis, refining the concepts set out in Système 1 by bringing them to bear on new material. He acknowledges the increasingly transnational nature of comics culture by moving beyond the mainly Franco-Belgian corpus on which he had drawn in the first volume and exploring innovative currents that blur and extend the boundaries of the medium, such as abstract comics, digital comics, and shōjo manga. In so doing, he shows how the comics apparatus is put to work by virtuoso practitioners across a spectrum from mainstream to experimental. In addition, major chapters are devoted to two areas that were not covered in Système 1, the question of the narrator and the nature of rhythm in comics : here Groensteen maps out the theoretical terrain rigorously and comprehensively . The value of his approach becomes self-evident through the insights that it affords into the expressive power of artists as disparate as André Franquin, Robert Crumb, and Chris Ware, and, more generally, into evolutionary tendencies such as the recent move away from uniformity of graphic style in the work of exponents like David Mazzucchelli and Fabrice Neaud. In his final chapter, Groensteen poses the question of the relationship of comics to contemporary art: historically the latter has disdained the former, while plundering its resources, formal and thematic, but more recently certain comics artists have chosen to exhibit their work in galleries. The argument returns to the question of narration as Groensteen considers the most exciting work currently being produced by comics artists. viii Translator's Foreword Groensteen also explores theoretical advances made over a decade during which more critical ink has flowed than ever before. He alludes to important work by many French-language researchers, most notably Thierry Smolderen and Harry Morgan, both of whom have offered re-readings of the history of the medium, critiquing approaches that discern only a straightforward evolution towards its present forms and functions, and Jean-Christophe Menu, whose concern, as both artist and theorist, is to investigate the potential of comics, including possibilities as yet unrealized. Groensteen is equally familiar with comics scholarship in English: he engages with the work of Scott McCloud and Douglas Wolk, among others. He also points to recently developing approaches such as the study of comics within media theory, adaptation theory, cultural studies, or cognitive science, all valid, he recognizes, even if it is the task of understanding how the medium works that is primary. Groensteen himself has hardly been slacking in between the publication of Système 1 and Système 2, having produced a series of books that examine comics from a variety of angles, encompassing analyses of formal features and mechanisms , historical studies of the medium as a whole and of particular genres, and reflections on cultural positioning, as well as a superb textbook. This prolific output (to which should be added a plethora of articles and exhibition catalogues) has been achieved in parallel to his other activities as lecturer, publisher, and curator , not to mention indefatigable traveler, promoter of dialogue and debate on every continent. However, it is with this volume of the Système that he completes his general theory of the medium. Readers of Système 1 will know that Groensteen’s approach, semiotic in the broadest sense, is not to be equated with a dry exercise in taxonomy: on the contrary, it is the pleasures of comics that provide the starting point for his analysis , and, equipped with the rich conceptual framework that he offers, we return to comics as better, subtler, and more demanding readers. Groensteen’s prose is elegant and highly readable, maintaining its lucidity however complex or detailed the point being made. The difference between French and English syntax patterns means that it is not easy for the translator to replicate the style of the original, and the text may seem a little clumsy in places...