Rethinking the Memorable Panel from Pierre Sterckx to Olivier Josso Hamel

Going back to the origins of the ‘case mémorable’ in the pages of Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, this article revisits the debates between Pierre Sterckx and Benoît Peeters, articulated around a conceptual tension between linear and tabular, about the relationship between single panels and narrative. It proposes that the ‘remembered panel’ pinpoints important issues about the recirculation of single images, isolated from their contexts, and the discourse of memory that becomes associated with it. A close-reading of Olivier Josso Hamel’s Au travail, in which the cartoonist redraws his own set of remembered panels, further calls for a reconsideration of Sterckx’s concept in the light of a creative practice that intimately engages with the memory of such panels in a complex relationship to their original narratives.