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Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories

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Seeing Comics through Art History

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ((PSCGN))

Abstract

This chapter takes the pioneering visual epistemology of the art historian Aby Warburg as the starting point for a guide to reading comics. It transposes Warburg’s montage of images in the incomplete Mnemosyne Atlas to comics along two axes: it treats comics pages as collages and examines the symbolic and emotional charge of comics images. The Mnemosyne Atlas acquires special relevance through reading comics as collages of words, images, panels and of different media or imitations thereof. Combining the ideas propelling the Mnemosyne Atlas with the concept of media memories, or the ways in which media remember and reference each other, this chapter reads two French-language comics (Hugo Pratt’s Les Celtiques and Manu Larcenet’s Le Combat ordinaire), to show how these insights can be applied to a spectrum of comics ranging from genre fiction to personal stories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Mnemosyne Atlas was recently reconstituted and exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. See the catalogue by Roberto Ohrt et al. Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – the Original (Hatje Cantz 2020).

  2. 2.

    The website to which Johnson 2012 is a companion volume provides an overview of the themes around which diverse plates were organized: https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about/mnemosyne-themes

  3. 3.

    For further discussion of the archive in relation to Art History and Comics Studies Cf. Sommerland Chapter “Real Queer Bodies: Visual Weight and Imagined Gravity in Sport Manga”.

  4. 4.

    I am alluding to philosopher John Sutton’s discussion of spongy brains (2007).

  5. 5.

    The comic, conflating all differences between militant and political movements, presents Sinn Féin as a militant party.

  6. 6.

    For further discussion of documentary photography Cf. Hardy-Vallée Chapter “From Tableau to Sequence: Introducing Comics theory within Art History to Study the Photobook”.

  7. 7.

    Children’s drawings are accorded a more central role in Larcenet’s Blast comics, where they are used to visualize the protagonist’s moments of euphoria.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Maaheen Ahmed

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  1. Maaheen Ahmed
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Correspondence to Maaheen Ahmed .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, UK

    Maggie Gray

  2. London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, London, UK

    Ian Horton

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Ahmed, M. (2022). Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories. In: Gray, M., Horton, I. (eds) Seeing Comics through Art History. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8_4

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