Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics was built following a personal typology of graphemes drawn from a shared reservoir of the 48CC Bande dessinée tradition. The acronym 48CC is a denomination that stands for hardcover, full-color, 48-pages comics books and refers to the industrial standard in bande dessinée. The name was contemptuously christened by the alternative publisher l’Association in order to point to the product of a normative and just-in-time book industry that dominates the French speaking comics publishing landscape. In Compendium one can find a variety of comics proto-memes, metanarrative devices, paratextual elements and building blocks of the European BD that have been extracted from forty-eight different comic books, scanned from cover to cover. The book reads as an orchestral score whose elements, freed from the imperatives of their specific narratives, are newly layered according to the instrument families of a large ensemble. Their arrangement is directly inspired by different compositional techniques of orchestral music and can also be understood as a hybrid between graphic scores in mid-century contemporary music, concrete poetry and poema proceso, scrapbook traditions and comics. The book appeared under the following titles:
Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge (Belgium: La Cinquieme Couche, France: L’Endroit, Switzerland: Hélice Hélas), Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics (Greece: Topovoros, Israel: Gnat, Italy: Fortepressa, Brazil: Antilope) and Visuelt kompendium over konventionelle genretræk i den fransk-belgiske tegneserielitteratur (Denmark: Forlaens). 48 pages | hardcover edition CMYK | 2018 | 250mm x 350mm | SOLD OUT
