Tarwar

Tarwar is Manouach’s latest comic book that builds upon his previous work Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge while dramatically expanding scope to examine comics as a truly global medium. Using computer vision technology and his production studio to analyze over 12 million digitized comic book pages spanning continents, languages, and cultural contexts—from Korean webtoons and Indian superhero folktales to Brazilian quadrinhos and religious illustrated stories—the work identifies black panels as a remarkably omnipresent visual element that haunts comics across all traditions. These mysterious semantic spaces, whether signifying “a night without moon,” “loss of consciousness,” or rolling blackouts, function as spatiotemporal units where narrative pauses, creating moments of introspection, ambiguity, and the unspoken that challenge conventional narrative flow and invite readers to become co-authors. Composed entirely of black panels from this vast corpus, Tarwar transforms this ubiquitous motif into a playful and enigmatic visual meditation that transcends linguistic boundaries, market norms, and stylistic conventions, revealing how comics serve as a graphic universal language that weaves together the interconnectedness of globalized readership through shared threads of storytelling. 

Research: Echo Chamber
Editorialization: Paul Comoretto, Luca Reverdit, KangWei Peng and Antoine Graff
Book design: Antoine Graff
Cover design: Jeroen Wille
Concierge: Xavier Löwenthal
Published by: La Cinquième Couche (Belgium), NERO Editions (Italy), Lystring Förlag (Sweden), CCC (Portugal), Inkpress (Greece)

240 x 340 mm
120 pages
CMYK Paperback
978-2-39008-112-8
€35

Lu 0

The comic series Little Lulu, created in 1935 by Marjorie Henderson Buell, better known as Marge, is a foundational work in American comics history, as it features one of the medium’s first heroines. The series not only subverted gender norms but also achieved great commercial and critical success. Marge, as a pioneer of women-created comics, successfully penetrated the predominantly male sphere of mainstream comics, quickly expanding beyond newspapers into a wide range of merchandise, despite the pervasive sexism that she, and her contemporaries, faced.

In an unprecedented exploration at the intersection of BD (as both Bande Dessinée and Big Data), Ilan Manouach’s latest conceptual book collects all panels from the Lulu series in which human characters are absent. This assemblage presents a silent narrative, a world without human protagonists, inviting contemplation of spaces and objects that usually go relatively unnoticed.

The conceptual significance of Lu 0 is deeply connected to posthumanist discourse, which challenges anthropocentric conceptions of the world and reconsiders humanity’s role within a larger ecological system in light of the ravages of the Anthropocene. By stripping the narrative of its human elements, Lulu 0 echoes a call for a critical examination of human exceptionalism and recognition of the intrinsic value of all life forms. It serves as a silent yet powerful commentary on the potential future of our planet, a world from which human traces would be absent and where nature would have reclaimed its rights. This assemblage not only functions as a visual archive of the spaces we inhabit but also as a profound reminder of the volatility of human existence and the resilience of nature in the context of the ecological crisis and ongoing transformations on our planet.

The Lu book series represents an exploration of comics as machine-interpretable information systems. By focusing specifically on panels devoid of human presence in Little Lulu, Manouach’s work engages with how computational systems can extract, classify, and interpret visual information from comics. Using machine learning algorithms, the project demonstrates how comics can be deconstructed into data points that machines can process—empty backgrounds, architectural elements, natural landscapes, and inanimate objects become quantifiable elements that can be clustered according to various criteria such as visual similarity, spatial composition, atmospheric qualities, or narrative function. This computational approach reveals entirely new taxonomies invisible to traditional human reading—patterns of environmental representation and object relationships that emerge only when hundreds of human-absent panels are analyzed simultaneously by algorithmic systems. The work thus functions as a meditation on how our understanding of comics is transformed when the “reader” is an artificial intelligence rather than a human interpreter. By privileging panels traditionally considered as “setting” or “background,” Lu 0 inverts conventional narrative hierarchies and highlights the non-human world typically subordinated to character action. As comics increasingly exist as digital datasets rather than merely printed artifacts, Lu 0 anticipates a future where comics historiography might be fundamentally reshaped by machine-learning approaches that identify formal patterns, environmental representations, and non-anthropocentric visual genealogies invisible to traditional analytical methods focused primarily on character and plot.

Research: Echo Chamber
Editorialization: Paul Comoretto, Luca Reverdit, KangWei Peng
Book design: Andy Grandillon
Published by:
La Cinquieme Couche (Belgium)
240 x 340 mm
72 pages
CMYK Paperback
978-2-39008-112-8
€27

Lu X

The comic series Little Lulu, created in 1935 by Marjorie Henderson Buell, better known as Marge, is a foundational work in American comics history, as it features one of the medium’s first heroines. The series not only subverted gender norms but also achieved great commercial and critical success. Marge, as a pioneer of women-created comics, successfully penetrated the predominantly male sphere of mainstream comics, quickly expanding beyond newspapers into a wide range of merchandise, despite the pervasive sexism that she, and her contemporaries, faced.

In an unprecedented exploration at the intersection of BD (as both Bande Dessinée and Big Data), Ilan Manouach’s latest conceptual book compiles all crowd scenes from Little Lulu, offering a panoramic view of crowds through the lens of one of the most influential media of the 20th and 21st centuries. As both a sponge and mirror of its sociocultural environment, comics have long been recognized as one of the mass media most capable of shaping and reflecting the values and ideologies of their time. Lu X not only concentrates human realities such as love, hate, humor, fertility, or aggression, but also contains the cultural zeitgeist, the spirit of its time, as a “total social phenomenon.”

The conceptual relevance of Lu X is deeply rooted in the work of researchers on crowd movement, mass popular movements, and the rise of fascism in post-war Europe. Gabriel Tarde’s notion of imitation as a primary social process is strikingly illustrated by the uniformity of collective behaviors in Lulu’s world. Gustave Le Bon’s description of the crowd as a singular entity susceptible to certain ideas, particularly during the rise of fascism, finds an echo in the representation of mass movements and public assemblies in the comic. Elias Canetti’s ideas about the psychological foundations of crowds, particularly their tendency to grow and create a sense of equality among their members, are reflected in the masses that are both varied and unified depicted in the series.

The Lu book series represents an exploration of comics as machine-interpretable information systems. By focusing specifically on crowd scenes in Little Lulu, Manouach’s work engages with how computational systems can extract, classify, and interpret visual information from comics. Using machine learning algorithms, the project demonstrates how comics can be deconstructed into data points that machines can process—panel structures, character arrangements, crowd densities, and compositional patterns become quantifiable elements that can be clustered according to various criteria such as visual similarity, temporal sequence, or narrative function. This computational approach reveals entirely new taxonomies invisible to traditional human reading—patterns of collective behavior representation that emerge only when hundreds of crowd scenes are analyzed simultaneously by algorithmic systems. The work thus functions as a meditation on how our understanding of comics is transformed when the “reader” is an artificial intelligence rather than a human interpreter. As comics increasingly exist as digital datasets rather than merely printed artifacts, Lu anticipates a future where comics historiography might be fundamentally reshaped by machine-learning approaches that identify formal patterns, visual genealogies, and evolutionary developments invisible to traditional analytical methods.

Research: Echo Chamber
Editorialization: Paul Comoretto, Luca Reverdit, KangWei Peng
Book design: Andy Grandillon
Published by:
La Cinquieme Couche (Belgium)
240 x 340 mm
104 pages
CMYK Paperback
978-2-39008-102-9
€27

Brother, What is Program?
How to Use Your Machine

Brother is a User’s Guide, an instruction manual—the one for the Brother digital knitting machine, designed to be easy to use. The original text of the manual has been replaced with excerpts from Forces of Production by David F. Noble (1984), a critical reflection on technological innovations in automation and industrial mechanization. These innovations primarily aim to increase investment returns by reducing cost variables such as workers and their training.

Comics as a medium have evolved alongside the growth of media industries and advancements in domestic mechanical reproduction technologies. However, its creators often remain attached to or nostalgic for the artisanal techniques of its golden age, when it was still a living craft—incunabula, photocopying, linocut, or risography. The latter method was chosen for this reproduction.

Brother was produced as part of a research project on tactility, initiated by Begum Erciyas, Robert Ochshorn, Lea Søvsø, and Ilan Manouach and presented during the group’s residency at PACT Zollverein / Choreographisches Zentrum in Essen.

Research: Echo Chamber
Editorialization, Book design: Antoine Graff

Published by:
La Cinquieme Couche (Belgium)

Size: 186 x 263 mm
Pages: 20
Printing: Risograph, Duotone
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-239008-110-4
Price: €15.00

Out Side

A graphic novel inspired by artbooks, Out Side is a unique collaboration between two leading digital artists: K Allado-McDowell and Ilan Manouach. Together, the two construct an extraordinary pictorial story in the manner of a comic strip, combining the exacting clarity of Allado-McDowell’s post-internet vision with Manouach’s conceptual and formal depth. In the story, a young painter named Stone navigates the art world—meeting shady dealers and strange collectors—while pining for her long-lost parrot, Petey. Eventually, she finds her way into the upper echelons of technology, working as a VR designer. It is here that she discovers a conspiracy that will shake her understanding of reality itself. Blending layers of dreams, real life and simulation, Out Side explores the possibilities of storytelling with AI: creating a multiverse on the page that infiltrates our own mixed reality.  .

Research: Echo Chamber
Editorialization: Luca Reverdit
Production assistance: Paul Comoretto
Book design: Emma Zampieri
Published by:
France: JBE Books

196 pages | hardcover edition | CMYK | 2024 | 175mm x 248 mm

Reading

Why are there so many letters in Disney comics? What is the gravitas of extra-diegetic information that cannot be contained in the narrator’s text and needs to get there by postal services? Reading reveals the hidden power of correspondence as a narrative device within the realms of Disney storytelling. By placing a magnifying lens on these seemingly inconspicuous moments, Manouach invites readers to reconsider the significance of letters and their impact on the development of characters and plotlines. The compendium reveals the remarkable potential of letters as a catalyst for introspection, character development, and unexpected plot twists. By offering an unconventional lens through which to appreciate the nuanced details of Disney’s letter-focused panels, this conceptual comic invites readers on a visual journey that transcends the boundaries of traditional narrative frameworks.

Research & Production: Echo Chamber
Image search: Paul Comoretto, Luca Reverdit, KangWei Peng and Antoine Graff
Graphic design: Antoine Graff
Published by:
Belgium: La Cinquieme Couche
France: L’Endroit

400 pages | hardcover edition | CMYK | 2024 | 150mm x 150 mm

Fastwalkers

The first synthetic comic book written with emerging AI, Fastwalkers is a nonlinear meditation on deep learning that celebrates the unexpected poetics of generative computing and explores its potential to form new reader sensibilities.

Born out of Manouach’s ongoing experimentation with the informational abundance and affective economies of comics, this is a wildly vibrant hallucinogenic book in which all text and images have been produced by machine learning. Since its beginnings in the late 19th century the comics industry has expanded symbiotically alongside the development of printing, distribution, and communication technologies. As a highly digitized medium with active online communities, comics lend themselves to the programmatic processes that define machine learning and today synthetic processes are reshaping how we produce, consume, archive and understand all media, including comics. Co-created with the latest AI (GAN, GPT-3), and developed by an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and designers, Fastwalkers is an amalgamation of different community datasets, proprietary algorithms, indexing regimes, beta testing, and generative models, all trained on millions of data units and text bodies specifically to make this book. The result is a semantic landscape of ambient layers whose harmonies and dissonances reveal the aggregate nature of knowledge exchange in the semiocapitalist age and illuminate the inherent computational qualities of comics to play with the latent space lurking in the reader’s cognition.

Research & Production: Echo Chamber
AI Models: Yannis Siglidis
General Affairs: Dimitrios Vourakis
AI Consultancy: Vitalii Duk, Themos Stafylakis,Yannis Panagakis
Editorial & Graphic Design: Luca Reverdit
Copy Editing: Kasia Maciejowska
Content Typography: «Fastwalkers» by Luca Reverdit, «Antique Olive» by Roger Excoffon

Published by:
Belgium: La Cinquieme Couche
Portugal: CCC
Italy: D Editore

512 pages | softcover edition | CMYK | 2021 | 240mm x 300 mm