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
