Lu 0

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONEPIECE

ONEPIECE

Digital comics are at the pulsating center of a global, entertainment industry. Comics are dual objects. They have a use value–for readers– and an exchange value for collectors. Although these two functions are not operating along a clear-cut divide, they sometimes run opposite to each other. Online participatory culture and the medium’s new networked possibilities have intensified the nature of comics beyond the scope of professional, established expertise with new and disruptive forms of entrepreneurial fan culture. Readers now actively scan, translate and distribute online their favorite manga series. ONEPIECE is a product of this expanded digital production belt. ONEPIECE consists of all the volumes of the worldwide bestseller One Piece, assembled into a single book of 21.540 pages. With a spine width of more than 80cm (31.5 inches), this sculptural object cannot be read or displayed in bookstores. ONEPIECE can only be contemplated as a materialisation of digital comics’ very own media-saturated digital ecosystem. ONEPIECE exists only as an object of pure speculation.

Numbered and signed by the artist
Published by JBE Books
Binding: Elise De Maio
With the support of Echo Chamber asbl
21540 pages
12 x 18,5 x 80 cm, 17kg

 

Edition of 50

1900€ + shipping (Shipping worldwide) Information about shipping is requested at info@jean-boite.fr. Buying a copy on jbe-books.com attributes a number and validate the sale with a standard art shipping fee, that will be adjusted accordingly to the destinatio54

CHIMERAS

Chimeras.Inventory of Synthetic Cognition

Chimeras (Onassis Publications, 2022) attempts to disassemble and reformulate what one might understand as AI by taking apart both notions of ‘artificiality’ and ‘intelligence’ and seeing what new meaning they produce when recombined. It is a collective glossary that I co-edited with Anna Engelhardt that gathers 150 contributors exploring a variety of epistemic perspectives on artificial intelligence : interspecies, crip, monstrous, feminist, distributed, and decolonial, among others. The glossary draws upon chimerism in order to broaden ‘artificial intelligence’ into ‘synthetic cognition’—an approach that highlights the duality of ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’, amplifies non-human methods of cognition and anticipates modes of symbiosis.  

Published by Onassis Publications (GR) 536 pages | paperback edition | 2022 | 120mm x 180mm

LE VTT COMME JE L’AIME

Le VTT comme je l’aime

The adult industry is the hidden engine that drives innovation in tech and Le VTT Comme Je l’Aime is a comic book whose entire entire narrative was composed by a GPT-2 language model trained on tens of thousands of erotic stories. The images are rendered in a 3d environment using the latest OpenGL assets of the dark porn marketplace. It is structured as a series of short confessions and fragments percolated through a machinic subjectivity where most of the genre’s conventions are disrupted: scene props are painstakingly
described, characters change gender and sex in a paragraph length in a totally anticlimactic narrative arc. Like The Neural Yorker, with its dry take on cartoons, this book reveals the alien side of arousal. The book received the generous support from Koneen Säätiö – Kone Foundation and the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles/Officiel. 

Published by BDCul, Le Monte en l’Air (FR). 160 pages | paperback edition | 2022 | 130mm x 180mm

SHAPEREADER

Shapereader

At the crossroads of disability studies, design, comics studies and art, Shapereader was initially designed for comics readers with visual impairment. It is built on a growing repertoire of tactile ideograms (tactigrams) that provide haptic equivalents for all the semantic features of a comics narrative. Shapereader transposes semantic cognition to the reader’s fingertips. Its research was funded by the Kone Foundation in 2015 and its ongoing outreach plan for raising awareness has been unfolding in a variety of formats, contexts and collaborations. It is a transdisciplinary, inclusive project that promotes an embodied, non-retinal, narrative experience with an international outreach unique in the history of comics. More information can be found on the Shapereader website.

In 2021, and in the middle of the global pandemic, Shapereader’s tactile resources are put to use in the field of sonic experimentation and musical notation during a residency at the Vooruit Kunstencentrum. Eighteen performers from a variety of backgrounds, were invited to question the normativity of conventional notation tools, discuss the de-emphasizing of vision in regards to reading music and explore the manifold ways sound can be translated and stimulated by touch. The installation and the two music performances commemorate a certain mutuality, subscribed within a larger sensorial frame of acknowledging the physicality of surfaces, consistencies and forms, a sense of touch which might never be the same again. This is an international coproduction between the Onassis Foundation  (GR), Vooruit and C-Takt (BE). The following documentary showcases Shapereader and its tactile resources as a speculative tool of musical notation.