Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice/Le travail distribué comme pratique organisationnelle by Ilan Manouach (review)

Like any other field of cultural production, comics is a medium that has been dramatically transformed by digital culture. Virtually all aspects of the making, publishing, marketing, distributing and (increasingly) reading of comics have now become digital, while more and more new forms of comics can be called digital-born (and not just “transferred to a digital format”), yet not always in the forms predicted in the 1990s, when e-comics started to emerge.

At the same time, however, there also exists a strong resistance to digitalization in comics, mainly due to two reasons. First, there is the very conservative approach of digitalization in the traditional comics industry that merely considers digitization a useful instrument of cost-efficiency and maximization of profit, hence missing all creative opportunities offered by the new digital environment and confusing its consumers with online copies of originals in paper that simply don’t work on screen (newer e-comics have discovered that the best solution was to avoid complex layouts and to go for a kind of slide show presentation one can scroll through). Second is the exceptional attachment of the graphic novel movement, which caters to a different (allegedly more sophisticated but definitely wealthier) audience, to the magic of ink and paper, that is, the touch and feel and smell of works in print. In the graphic novel, classic publishing formats are not only preserved and cared for, but they also remain commercially successful. In quite a few cases, the graphic novel even comes close to the coffee table book circuit and, just like comics, has now entered the gallery and museum circuit, where they may soon compete with all-time classics such as vintage Superman and Tintin material.

Whatever one thinks of these changes, none of them radically changes the old-fashioned pillars of comics as art, such as—among others—the creative genius of the individual artist, the commercial value of original and copyrighted material, or the autonomy of the artistic sphere in regard to the publishing industry. Yet these are exactly the elements that have been shattered by the digital revolution, with its emphasis on mechanical copying and distribution, anonymous subcontracted labor by new masses of cottage industry workers or the ubiquity of technical operations such as web-scraping, tagging, archiving, crowdsourcing or reviewing, which have proved vital to the business but are rarely seen as a substantial part of the creative dimension of the cultural or creative industries [1].

Peanuts minus Schulz is a book published in the Uncreative Writings series, a collection of conceptual creative works—that is, works relying on a strong programmatic claim within a global framework of remix and appropriation. Like the other volumes in the series, it explores the new directions of book art, not after but in light of and thanks to the digital turn. The author, comics artist and theoretician Ilan Manouach (1980), is one of the most innovative and politically committed authors in this sphere of postdigital comics. A practice-based researcher, Manouach questions the fundamental issues of originality, innovation, ownership, participatory culture, or skilling and deskilling, from an artistic as well as economic perspective (actually, these dimensions can never be distinguished in his work). In the new type of “conceptual comics” or “CoCos” that he has launched [2], he both creates and gathers comics that thematize these issues in the era of “playbor”—the portmanteau word conflates “play” and “labor” and refers to the new forms of economic organization blurring the boundaries between labor and play, thus abolishing all kinds of distances in time and space. “Playbor” represents postindustrial alienation: Everybody must work all the time and in every place, yet without ever seeing the result of their labor—and, of course, without receiving serious payment, as the work is seen as “fun,” even by some workers...