What do Comics do to Graphic Novels? Remediating Old Comics

A widely debated object, the graphic novel has catalyzed anxieties about changes within the comics world, postulating something of a radical break with its past. Albeit with great nuance, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey put forward the bold argument that graphic novels constitute not only a “special type of comics” or a genre, but perhaps even a new medium. At the same time, they also repeatedly hint at how graphic novels are traversed by references to the past of comics, at times lapsing into a constraining retromania. This talk seeks out to dig into these questions by focusing on the remediation of the comic strip within two recent American graphic novels: Daniel Clowes’s "Ice Haven" and Cole Closser’s "Little Tommy Lost". Both works recuperate the medial body of the comic strip within their structure, demonstrating a self-reflexive historical awareness that redraws ‘old’ comics into its cultural make-up. Considering the remediation of the comic strip within the graphic novel, this talk analyzes how remediation might work ‘within’ a medium, reinvigorating the concept in a historical but medium-specific perspective that accounts for the dynamically changing identities of a medium.