Redrawing as Reframing. Graphiation, Quotation and Comics History

Coining the concept of ‘graphiation’ to theorize the narrative functions of drawing in comics, Philippe Marion’s Traces en cases has become a seminal text in comics studies due to its further theorizations by, among, others, Jan Baetens, Jared Gardner, and Simon Grennan. This presentation hopes to make an original contribution to these discussions by focusing on the issue of quotation and redrawing in graphic narratives, practices that interrogate how the ‘graphic trace’ relates to the drawing subject. I will compare and contrast two culture-specific terms: ‘case mémorable’ in the context of Franco-Belgian comics and ‘swiping’ in the context of American comic books. Both terms point at how comics images circulate across the borders of their original formats trough different technicalities of reproduction (mechanical or hand-crafted) that split them from both their immediate and larger contexts. While these terms are frequently used by creators, fans and readers alike, they have gained no currency in comics theory. My attempt, however, is not to argue for their inclusion within that vocabulary but rather to understand how these terms articulate, within the comics world, debates about quotation and redrawing. I will briefly retrace the genealogy of these terms in fan discourses to finally show how two contemporary cartoonists–Charles Burns and Olivier Josso Hamel–revisit them in ways that foreground the cultural and narrative stakes of reusing ‘old’ comics. Comparing these two terms will shed light on distinct conceptions of copying, originality and quotation, hopefully providing fresh perspectives on the theory of graphiation