Undrawing Comics

Comics theory has paid increasing attention to the medium specificities of narrative drawing, laying a particular emphasis on comics as an embodied visual trace. One step ahead of theory, cartoonists have been questioning the relationship between authorship, body and graphic trace by “undrawing” comics. Comics artists worldwide indeed make comics not by drawing original images but by means of collage, erasure, digital editing, reprinting, cutting-up, crowdsourcing, and other transformative acts of appropriation. Starting from close-readings of several 'uncreative' works by Samplerman, Pascal Matthey, Jochen Gerner and Ilan Manouach, this paper contextualizes these approaches within a digital media ecology of remix. It argues that it is important to specify what it means to ‘undraw’ other comics as an act of withdrawing or displacing drawing in comics culture in order to foreground a different set of questions pertaining to comics production.