Chapter 6 - Undrawing

Summary

This chapter considers “uncreative” appropriations of comics archives. Uncreative comics go a step further in presenting the result of collecting as the product itself, further unsettling the lines between archiving, curating, and drawing. In fact, these comics tend to shift toward undrawing and the “uncreative” cartoonist often avoids making their own mark visible. Instead, the tactics that come to define these avant-garde works are détournement, erasure, collage, digital editing, reprinting, cutting-up, and crowdsourcing. This chapter looks at proto-experiments with uncreative practices and considers their expanded continuities in the era of digital remixing, particularly as they are facilitated by the online archives of comic books. It considers more particularly the multifaceted works of Ilan Manouach, who has adopted radical approaches to appropriation by privileging mechanical, automatized, or distributed forms of comics production.