Uneven Development: Timing the Neo-Avant-Garde in European Comics

While comics and historical avant-gardes share a twin birth in early-twentieth-century urban contexts, the notion of the avant-garde would only be vocally reclaimed by postwar comics artists, in pair with a struggle for cultural legitimation. As a typically ‘low’ media, comics front the issue of an “uneven development” of the (neo-)avant-garde: “The logic of ‘uneven development’ implies that just as the world’s regions are in some respects out of synch with each other, so too are different cultural domains even within the same region” (McHale 2015, 5). This chapter will flesh out the historiographic implications of this unevenness for understanding bande dessinée in the context of the neo-avant-garde: how do references to the historical avant-garde function in the context of low media? What does it mean to be "late" to the avant-garde? How does the connection between modernist avant-gardes and the birth of newspaper comics translate to a postwar context? This talks interrogates the hypothesis of "historical belatedness" often used to describe comics and argues for a closer attention to the complex temporalities of avant-gardism in comics.