Reviewed by: Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel by Benoît Crucifix Matthew Levay (bio) Benoît Crucifix. Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 280 pp, 110. To the long list of welcome developments in comics studies that have emerged over the past decade, one must surely add the proliferation of monograph series dedicated to the field. A longtime stalwart like the University Press of Mississippi, whose comics titles have shaped critical conversations for several years, now faces considerable—and, one imagines, friendly—competition, with series from Rutgers University Press, the Ohio State University Press, the University of Texas Press, the University of Nebraska Press, Leuven University Press, and Wilfrid Laurier University Press all appearing in quick succession, alongside series from major academic trade publishers like Bloomsbury, Routledge, and Palgrave. Now that each of these series has released a few titles, their respective chronological and geographical parameters, areas of thematic emphasis, and methodological and theoretical commitments have started to come into focus. One can see that a particular series is heavily invested in superhero scholarship, while another focuses on national traditions within the medium; this series is largely formalist, that one historicist, and so on. The most interesting have a clear ethos that animates and links each of their titles, demonstrating the diversity of the field while also making plain how the series expects to contribute to it something it had previously lacked. As of 2023, one can add another series to the list: Cambridge Studies in Graphic Narratives, published by Cambridge University Press. With two titles to date, this series's ethos is still developing, but one of those two books—Benoît Crucifix's Drawing from the Archives—hints at a few possible clues. Dedicated to a comparative historical perspective that situates the contemporary graphic novel in relation to its comic strip forebears, Drawing from the Archives examines a rich slate of cartooning whose primary emphasis is in the dissemination of comics history via a set of practices that Crucifix taxonomizes into six categories: collecting, curating, reprinting, forging, swiping, and undrawing. These specific practices, Crucifix argues, offer contemporary cartoonists material opportunities for preserving and promoting comics' past, for instance, by drawing in recognizably antiquated styles, manipulating or otherwise reworking iconic images from comics' early history, or cataloging those images through End Page 88 collected archival editions of once-popular newspaper strips now virtually unknown outside of comics studies. In attending to this overlap between past and present, Crucifix provides an intriguing account of how—and a more uneven explanation of why—so many contemporary cartoonists have positioned their work in relation to earlier moments in comics history. His focus on material practice is especially welcome. As he argues, "As cartoonists draw from existing archives, they rely on and enact different gestures of transmission: embodied acts that recirculate specific historical objects and, in the process, transform and adapt them to their new contexts" (3, emphasis in original). Crucifix is thus interested in the material circumstances of comics' production, distribution, and reception, particularly as they self-consciously engage with the history of the medium. The artists he analyzes have, throughout their careers, "effectively acted as diplomats of comics memory for cultural and commercial institutions, for their peers, and for their readers" by bringing collected editions of past comics back into print, by curating exhibitions of comics history based on their own, idiosyncratic aesthetic interests, and by explicitly harkening back to past visual styles through their own artwork, sometimes with reverence and sometimes with their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks (2). In all of these registers, they "participate in the construction of historical knowledge about their own medium and in the transmission of this graphic heritage" (3). These cartoonists, in other words, serve as ambassadors for the medium, bringing the work of the past to new audiences through a variety of gestures and forms that keep comics memory alive within a changing media landscape. Crucifix notes at the outset that his survey of the contemporary comics scene is necessarily bounded by certain parameters, most notably his focus on the graphic novel as a separate formal. . .
Matthew Levay (Fri,) studied this question.