Conceptual Comics. An Industrial Form of Expression

Conceptual comics explore the very substrate of their medium not as a culturally neutral site, but as a way to build alternative historiographies, replete with their own material properties and signifying potential. The conceptual project Noirs that is discussed in this paper is a detournement facsimile of Les Schtroumpfs Noirs: the same cover, the same number of pages and the same format. Noirs comes as closely as one can get to the original edition, except of one single difference; its colours: The four different colour plates have been uniformly replaced by four plates of cyan. By shedding light on the industrial fabrication of a book though offset printing technology, a supposedly transparent and mechanic process, it reveals it to be a powerfully meaningful signifying device. Noirs problematizes the innocuous naturalisation of the ideological potential of colour through a formal experiment into a language (offset technology) acting upon another language, the book’s content.