Exhibition review: Cosey, Basel, 12.11.2022–26.2.2023
Posted: January 29, 2023 Filed under: review | Tags: Basel, Cartoonmuseum, comics, Cosey, exhibition, French, museums, Swiss Leave a comment
After Tardi and Joann Sfar, Cartoonmuseum Basel celebrates another Franco-Belgian master, albeit from Switzerland this time: Cosey (Bernard Cosendai), born in Lausanne in 1950 and above all famous for his long-running adventure series, Jonathan (1975–2021). Recently he attracted some renewed attention with his two Mickey Mouse tribute albums, and over the years he has also produced a number of standalone albums, e.g. In Search of Peter Pan. Accordingly, the exhibition devotes the most space to Jonathan, displaying many original drawings, and also some sketches and even artifacts that he collected from Tibet and other places where his comics are set.
For someone who has read Cosey’s comics only in translation, it is fascinating to see his hand-lettered speech balloons and title pages, and to realise what a skilled calligrapher he is. One of the downsides of this presentation of the original drawings, however, is that once more – as in the Tardi exhibition – no translations of the French text are provided.
The other, perhaps more lamentable, downside is that all the drawings show the pages after inking but before colouring. That is a pity, because (as the accompanying texts in the exhibition mention too) Cosey colours his comics himself and does so with considerable success, using a reduced palette to great effect. Only a single page is displayed with an overlayed colour cel, and there are also some watercolour sketches.
As usual, the artist’s published oeuvre can be perused in the museum library, where one can also watch a documentary film about him – alas, again, in French only.
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
Exhibition review: Manga – Reading the Flow, Zürich, 10.9.2021-30.1.2022
Posted: January 28, 2022 Filed under: review | Tags: Christina Plaka, comics, exhibition, manga, medieval Japan, museums, Swiss Leave a commentA very special manga exhibition is about to close soon: curated by none other than Japanese Studies professor Jaqueline Berndt, it may well be the most scholarly sound manga exhibition yet.
The special exhibition space at Museum Rietberg is basically one large room, divided into five partitions for this show. The first of these contains a reading area with a selection of manga tankōbon in both German and Japanese for visitors to peruse. The second section, titled “Panels – Pictorial Storytelling”, takes a closer look at how manga are made, in terms of both craftsmanship and layout. To this end, a manga has been purpose-made and is displayed in various stages of completion, including a video of the manga being drawn. The short manga in question was made by German mangaka Christina Plaka and is a present-day reimagining of the Japanese fable of the Poetry Contest of the Twelve Animals, which is shown in the exhibition as a 17th century picture scroll (in reproduction – apparently, the original scroll from the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin had been shown in another Japan-themed exhibition at Museum Rietberg which has already ended in December).
The following section, “Genres”, contains more pages of Plaka’s manga, but this time each double page is drawn in a different style that corresponds to the major manga demographics – seinen, shōnen and shōjo (setting aside the question of whether “genre” is the adequate term here). The fourth section is called “Studio” and invites visitors to continue Plaka’s manga story by drawing their own little yonkoma manga. Finally, there’s the “Genji” section which presents three different Japanese manga on the same topic – the 11th-century Tale of Genji – by means of enlarged reproduced pages with accompanying texts in German and English. These manga are Asakiyumemishi by Waki Yamato (1980), Ōzukami Genji monogatari Maro, n? by Yoshihiro Koizumi (2002), and Ii ne! Hikaru Genji-kun by est em (2015).
For the most part, the exhibition works fine and dandy. There are just a few points at which it perhaps oversimplifies things, or which for other reasons are not as convincing as they could have been. For instance, large parts of the exhibition rely on Christina Plaka’s Tanuki vs. Zodiac 12, i.e. a German manga, to explain things about Japanese comics. Of course, Plaka is an accomplished mangaka, and it would have been much more complicated to collaborate with a Japanese mangaka, translate the resulting manga, etc. But no matter how closely Plaka’s manga imitates Japanese manga, it can never fully replace the ‘real thing’. And when people come to the museum to learn something about how the Japanese make comics, they probably want to do so by looking at comics created by Japanese people.
Another somewhat problematic thing – not only about this but also some other manga shows in the past, e.g. Hokusai × Manga in Hamburg, or the more recent Rimpa feat. Manga in Munich – is how contemporary manga are forcibly connected to historical Japanese arts and culture, as in this case the Twelve Animals fable and the Tale of Genji. This carries the danger of perpetuating the myth that modern-day manga are direct descendants from such older Japanese arts. It may also give a false impression when manga as a whole are represented only by manga set in or otherwise concerned with Japanese history, when in fact there are only relatively few of those compared to present-day, futuristic or fantasy settings.
Lastly, the identification of manga as a necessarily participatory fan culture, as claimed by the “Studio” section, is a bit exaggerated. There is nothing wrong with including such an activity section where visitors can draw their own manga in an exhibition, but the accompanying text goes too far when it suggests that manga fandom with its fan art and fan fiction is not only an integral part but even “at the heart of manga culture” in Japan. While that is a common view, it is actually perfectly fine to regard the published manga independently from their readers (and vice versa). Also, not every single one of the millions of manga readers can be considered a ‘fan’, let alone one who creates fan art or fan fiction.
Speaking of the exhibition texts, it is a pity that no proper exhibition catalogue has been published, but at least the texts from the wall placards are collected in a free leaflet (both in German and English). It is available for download here: https://rietberg.ch/files/ausstellungen/2021/Manga/MuseumRietberg_Manga_Handout_EN.pdf
Sequential art at the 58th Venice Art Biennale, 2019
Posted: October 13, 2019 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, exhibition, photography, Venice Biennale 1 CommentThere isn’t much on display resembling comics at this year’s Biennale (May 11 – November 24) and no participation of a famous comic artist as in 2017 or 2013. Here’s what caught my eye:
Darren Bader (not to be confused with fantasy illustrator Daren Bader) set up a comic book vending machine at the Arsenale. Somehow I failed to get a comic out of the machine, but there are pictures online that show that there are copies of an actual comic inside.
Also at the Arsenale, an episode of Ian Cheng‘s comic Life After BOB is displayed on large backlit panels. Not the ideal form of presentation, as the lower portions are hard to read. A printed pamphlet version is sold at the Biennale shop at an outrageous price. An interactive video installation based on the titular character is shown at the Giardini.
Many of Igor Grubić‘s photographic tableaux at the Croation pavilion can be considered sequential art. In this example, the accompanying text mentions first the floor tiles and then the step at the entrance, so the photos are best read from top left to bottom right (or clockwise). In others, the photos form a sequence from exterior to interior, or from wide shot to close up.
Anne Kuhn‘s photographic diptych in the pavilion of Mozambique, Seychelles and Kiribati is based on a scene in Marguerite Duras’s novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. In an earlier edition of the book, “ravissement” was translated as “rapture”, and Kuhn’s work is a convincing illustration of this state: in one moment, the young woman is standing in a room full of people, and in the next she experiences a rapture that makes her feels as if she is levitating and she becomes oblivious of everyone around her. This diptych is part of Kuhn’s Héroïnes series in which only some works follow this action-to-action transition pattern.
As always, there are those artists who use comics only as a quarry from which they incorporate bits and pieces into their works, but the results are not sequential themselves. One such artist is Christian Marclay whose Scream series is shown at the Arsenale. These prints are composed of wooden planks and manga character close ups. (Another artist working with images from comics is Goo Sung Kyun at the Mozambique/Seychelles/Kiribati pavilion.)
Exhibition review: Joann Sfar, Basel, 6.4.-11.8.2019
Posted: July 9, 2019 Filed under: review | Tags: Basel, Cartoonmuseum, comics, exhibition, French, Joann Sfar, museums 1 CommentShortly after Tardi, Cartoonmuseum Basel celebrates another living legend of French comics.
As with Tardi, the Joann Sfar exhibition does a good job of showcasing the artist’s vast body of work. There are many original inked pages on display, mostly of Le chat du rabbin but also of lesser known comics such as L’Ancien Temps or Aspirine, as well as his watercolours for La Fontaine’s Fables, oil paintings in connection with his Je l’appelle monsieur Bonnard project, excerpts from his live-action film Gainsbourg, lots of one-panel cartoons (with German translations provided this time) and much more.
It is perhaps easier to say what we don’t get to see here, and there are two surprising omissions: one is Professeur Bell, a series of no less than 5 albums (the last three of which have been drawn by Hervé Tanquerelle). There are only some reading copies provided in the museum library, but no original art. The other omission, which I find more severe because it was my introduction to Sfar, is Donjon. Of course, Sfar only drew very few Donjon albums himself and merely co-wrote others. But it would have been interesting if the show had shed some light on the process of the writing collaboration between Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. In Basel, only a few Donjon album copies are (mis)placed in some kind of children’s section for the visitor to read, next to Petit Vampire…
Another question one might ask is: are black-and-white ink drawings really representative of Sfar’s art? Can you talk about Sfar’s comics without mentioning Brigitte Findakly, who coloured most of them? When you think of e.g. Le chat du rabbin, you probably think of the grey cat with its large yellow-green eyes, the brown-skinned daughter of the rabbi and her colourful dresses, the light blue sky over Algiers… At least some side-by-side comparisons of inked and coloured pages would have been a sensible addition to this exhibition.
Exhibition review: Le Monde de Tardi, Basel
Posted: January 11, 2019 Filed under: review | Tags: Basel, Cartoonmuseum, comics, exhibition, French, Jacques Tardi, museums 2 Comments
At age 72, after 50 years of making comics, Jacques Tardi is more than worthy of his own exhibition at the Cartoonmuseum. I can’t say how this Tardi exhibition, which ends on March 24, relates to the one at the 2015 Fumetto festival in Lucerne. Anyway, it’s always worth reminding people through such a show that the author of the WWI comics for which he is perhaps best known, C’était la guerre des tranchées and Putain de guerre, is the same who created the Belle Époque mystery series Adèle Blanc-Sec in the seventies, and who also authored the Nestor Burma detective comics, as well as the historical comic Le Cri du peuple in the early 2000s, and, most recently, the WWII comic Stalag II B, to name but a few. A dazzling array of comics, and the Basel exhibition covers them all.
The primary medium of presentation are framed original drawings, of which there are apparently more than 200 on display. Here, however, it becomes obvious why the exhibition is titled “Le Monde de Tardi” (and not “Die Welt des Tardi”): while the commentary texts on the walls are in German, no translation is provided for the French speech balloon texts. Which is a pity, given that Tardi is not only a masterly draughtsman but also a witty wordsmith. At least this aspect of Tardi can be appreciated in the library room of the museum which is well stocked with German translated editions of many of his albums. In the library one can also watch a film about Tardi in – again – French only: Tardi en noir et blanc, also available on YouTube with German audio.
My impression was that the previous exhibition I had seen at the Cartoonmuseum, Joe Sacco – Comics Journalist, had done a slightly better job at telling something about the artist himself and his working process instead of just the finished works. But this is a common shortcoming in comic exhibitions.
Le Monde de Tardi must be a highly enjoyable exhibition if you’re fluent in both French and German, but I doubt you get much out of it if you speak neither.
Exhibition review: Craving for New Pictures, Berlin
Posted: February 3, 2018 Filed under: review | Tags: Berlin, comics, exhibition, German, history, media, museums, printmaking Leave a comment
Whenever there’s an exhibition with a (sub)title like “From Broadsheet to Comic Strip”, the question for the comic aficionado is: how much comics is there really? As a history museum, the aim of the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) is to show how printed pictures changed the way ideas are communicated (with a focus on sensational news, propaganda, and education, the three sections in which the exhibition is organised). Thus the exhibits span from late medieval woodcuts to present day political cartoons, and such a wide time frame leaves little room for comics, of course. (There’s also a marked but neither exclusive nor explicit emphasis on Germany.)
Still, some items on display are noteworthy in this context. The earliest are broadsheet picture stories from the mid-nineteenth century – maybe not quite comics yet, but see Andreas Platthaus’s analysis of one of them in his opening speech which was also published in English.
Next to them we have a small section of early American newspaper comic strips (shown as facsimiles), and within it there’s the highlight of the whole show: two Katzenjammer Kids episodes, translated into German and published in Lustige Blätter des Morgen-Journals in 1905 and 1908 (!), respectively. Not quite as early but still remarkable is a German collected book edition of Felix the Cat from 1927.
Famous but seldom exhibited is Pablo Picasso’s two-part etching, Sueño y mentira de Franco (1937), also mentioned by Platthaus.
At the end of the education section there are three examples of the best-selling comic magazines in postwar Germany: Micky Maus #1 (a copy of the valuable original magazine is on display), Fix und Foxi from 1956 (original drawings by Werner Hierl plus published pages) and part of a 1974 Digedags story from Mosaik (drawings + published pages). As interesting as these comics may be, though, I find it hard to see the connection between them and the overall exhibition topic.
That being said, it’s still an exhibition worth visiting if your interest is not limited to comics alone, because there are many fascinating non-comic prints to see. Furthermore, the DHM currently also hosts the excellent and much larger show, 1917. Revolution. Russia and Europe, so your overall museum visiting experience might be better than my rating below suggests.
Craving for New Pictures: From Broadsheet to Comic Strip at Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, is still open until the 8th April 2018.
Sequential art at the 57th Venice Art Biennale, 2017
Posted: November 1, 2017 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, exhibition, Joe Sacco, Venice Biennale 1 CommentThis year’s Biennale is once again a spectacular art show and, like the 2013 Biennale, counts a famous comic artist among its participants (see below). It is still open until November 26. These are all the sequential artworks I’ve seen there:
At the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj has made a wallpaper (ABETARE, 2015) out of his old Albanian alphabet book. On some pages it contained picture stories such as this one of the fable of the fox and the crow.
Abdullah Al Saadi keeps Diaries (2016) in the form of leporellos stored in metal boxes, ostensibly inspired by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some of his notes contain possibly sequential images.
In his All Images from… series (2015), Ciprian Mureşan copies pictures from books – monographs of painters such as Correggio or Giotto, or museum catalogues – on a single sheet of paper, thus juxtaposing (and overlaying) formerly separate images. It would be interesting to find out if the arrangement on the sheet of paper corresponds to the sequence of pictures in the book, or to the order in which Mureşan drew them.
Our Naufrage 1-10 (2014) by Hajra Waheed apparently tells the story of a shipwreck of migrants. Maybe this arrangement of the paintings on a shelf is already sufficient to speak of juxtaposed sequential images.
Some of the exhibited works were rather old, such as this sequence of photographs taken by János Vető of a performance by Tibor Hajas from 1978.
At the national pavilions in the Giardini, we find a work that isn’t sequential itself but includes an actual comic: in Takahiro Iwasaki‘s Tectonic Model (Flow) from 2017 at the Japanese pavilion, one of the books is a copy of the second volume of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira.
At the Hungarian pavilion, these two sequences by Gyula Várnai are meant to be part of the same work, E-Wars. One shows photographs of an ISIS missile attack overlaid with a mathematical formula supposed to represent an “algorithm also used by Google to collect user information” (pavilion leaflet). The other sequence adapts the animated opening of the Soviet children’s science television show Хочу всё знать (“I Want to Know Everything”).
At the Arsenale, we find works by the only famous cartoonist at the Biennale: excerpts from The Unwanted (2010) by Joe Sacco, mounted on large boards, arranged with some other artworks, and dispersed throughout the room that accommodates the national contribution of his native Malta. I’m not sure if reproductions of a rather old comic displayed in this way contribute to the acceptance of comics into the world of ‘high art’, but maybe it’s better than nothing. The whole story can be read at The Virginia Quarterly Review where it was first published. There you can see how entire panels were cut off from the page as displayed at the Biennale, pictured above.
Jean Boghossian‘s exhibition at the Armenian pavilion is distributed between Palazzo Ca’Zenobio and Santa Croce degli Armeni. At both sites, his Livres brûlés can be seen (and one even flipped through) – paper objects with marks made by fire.
It’s no coincidence that the drawings by Radenko Milak at the Bosnian pavilion look like film stills, as he also directed an animated film which can be seen as well at Palazzo Malipiero.
EDIT: I just remembered there’s one more comic. While The Aalto Natives by Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen at the Finnish pavilion is an animatronics installation, the pavilion leaflet contains this one-page wordless comic which sums up the plot of the installation.
Sequential art at documenta 14
Posted: October 15, 2017 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, documenta, exhibition, Kassel Leave a commentThe 2017 edition of the documenta art show ended on September 17 with a slight increase in visitors, but also a financial deficit. While the danger of a discontinuation of the exhibition series seems to have been averted, many visitors (including this one) felt disappointed or at least underwhelmed with regard to the majority of art that was on display.
Like five years ago, the documenta didn’t include any proper comics as far as I could see, but lots of sequential artworks that fit Scott McCloud’s definition of comics. Here are some of them (only from the Kassel portion of the show, not from Athens which co-hosted this documenta):
The Fridericianum venue was almost entirely taken over by works from the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens. This array of 192 inkjet prints is XYZ 1550 – Placebo 97 from 2015 by Lucas Samaras. Their arrangement implies a vague sequence, and each of them is composed of multiple panels.
Most works from the EMST were rather old, though, such as this painted Newspaper Book from around 1962 by Chryssa.
A clever piece of conceptual photography in which two photographers pass by each other on a staircase, also out of the EMST collection but by Belgian artist Danny Matthys: Brabantdam 59, Gent, Downstairs-Upstairs from 1975.
Another Greek work in the Fridericianum: Diary (Robinson Crusoe) from 2008, a book with sewn lines by Nina Papaconstantinou.
Prints of photographs from documenta 2 (1959) by none other than Hans Haacke.
Images in Matter from 1995 by Rena Papaspyrou. On closer inspection, these ‘books’ made of stone, metal and wood bear faint ink drawings.
Over at the documenta Halle, the long embroidered canvas Historja (2003-08) by Britta Marakatt-Labba supposedly tells the history of the Sami people.
At the Neue Galerie, a kind of storyboard (Atelierul: Scenariul, 1978) by Geta Brătescu is exhibited next to the corresponding video.
Grimmwelt Kassel is the successor of the old Brothers Grimm museum and was used as a documenta venue for the first time. The primary exhibit here was The Blind Merchant (1989-91) by Roee Rosen, a kind of revision or reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with illustrations, some of which consist of multiple panels.
Exhibition review: Comics! Mangas! Graphic Novels!, Bonn
Posted: June 2, 2017 Filed under: review | Tags: Bonn, comics, exhibition, manga, museums, US 1 Comment
Last month, “the most comprehensive exhibition about the genre to be held in Germany” opened at the venerable Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, where it can be visited until September 10. Curated by Alexander Braun and Andreas Knigge, it is a remarkable exhibition, not only because of its size (300 exhibits) but also because it tries to encompass the whole history of comics without any geographic, chronological or other limits. To this end, it is organised in six sections.
The first section is about early American newspaper strips. The amount of original newspaper pages and original drawings on display here would be impressive if there hadn’t been another major exhibition on the same topic not even a year ago. Still, it’s always interesting to see e.g. a Terry and the Pirates ink drawing alongside the corresponding printed coloured Sunday page (July 24, 1942). Another highlight in this section is an old Prince Valiant printing plate, or more precisely, a letterpress zinc cliché which would be transferred on a flexible printing plate for the cylinder of a rotary press, as the label in the display case explains.
Section 2 stays in the US but moves on to comic books. In its first of two rooms we find mainly superhero comics, again often represented through original drawings e.g. from Watchmen or Elektra: Assassin. The second room of this section is about non-superhero comic books; outstanding exhibits here are the complete ink drawings to two short stories: a 7-page The Spirit story by Will Eisner from July 15, 1951, and a 6-page war story from Two-Fisted Tales by Harvey Kurtzman from 1952.
The next section of the exhibition is dedicated to Francobelgian comics. There’s an interesting display case with a side-by-side comparison of the same page of Tintin in various original and translated editions, and there are also original drawings by Hergé, but perhaps even more impressive is an original inked page from Spirou et Fantasio by Tome and Janry, who revitalised the series in the 80s. In the same section, half a room contains examples of old German comics, both from East and West Germany.
And then we get to section 4, the manga section. The biggest treat here are several Osamu Tezuka original drawings from Janguru Taitei, Tetsuwan Atomu and Buddha. There’s original Sailor Moon art by Naoko Takeuchi as well. Most of the other exhibits, however, are from manga that are far less famous, at least outside of Japan. In this section there’s also the only factual error I found in the exhibition: a label on Keiji Nakazawa’s Hadashi no Gen says, “Barefoot Gen is one of the earliest autobiographical comics ever.” While Hadashi no Gen was certainly inspired by Nakazawa’s own experiences, it is a fictional story, not an autobiography – that would be Nakazawa’s earlier, shorter manga, Ore wa Mita.
Section 5 is about underground and alternative comics from both the US and Europe. The highlight here is the famous Cheap Thrills record by Big Brother and the Holding Company, which can be listened to via headphones. Most comics enthusiasts are familiar with the record cover by Robert Crumb, but perhaps not with the music on the album.
The sixth and last section is titled “Graphic Novels”. It is already unfortunate enough to make the dreaded ‘g-word’ part of the exhibition title, but this section makes things worse by not actually problematising the term or even analysing the discourse around it. Instead, “graphic novel” is meant here to comprise a vast range of contemporary comic production, including Jirō Taniguchi’s manga, pamphlet comic books such as Eightball and Love & Rockets, and Raw magazine.
The exhibition as a whole offers a lot of interesting things to see, but maybe its aim to represent the whole comics medium was too ambitious in the first place. Nowadays, no one would dare to make an exhibition about the whole history of film, or photography, but apparently comics are still considered peripheral enough that the whole medium can be squeezed into one wing of a museum. The general public, at whom this exhibition is presumably targeted, will probably discover many new things about comics, but for people who are already comic experts, the knowledge to be gained from this exhibition will be much smaller.
Exhibition review: Pioneers of the Comic Strip, Frankfurt
Posted: August 22, 2016 Filed under: review | Tags: Charles Forbell, Cliff Sterrett, comics, exhibition, Frank King, Frankfurt am Main, George Herriman, Lyonel Feininger, museums, newspaper strips, Schirn, US, Winsor McCay 1 Comment
Pioneers of the Comic Strip – A Different Avant-Garde (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, until September 18, 2016) is an exhibition of six American newspaper comic artists whose strips started between 1904 and 1921. So instead of creators such as Rudolph Dirks or Richard F. Outcault who actually pioneered the comic strip form, curator Alexander Braun (who had also curated the Going West! exhibition) has selected artists who in some way could be considered avant-garde. The problem with the concept of the avant-garde in comics is that comics developed largely independently of modernist printmaking, draughtsmanship and other ‘high arts’. Nevertheless, this exhibition – hosted by a major fine art museum, after all – tries to find links between comics and avant-garde movements such as Expressionism and Surrealism, with varying success.
The first exhibit isn’t a comic but a film: Winsor McCay the Famous Cartoonist of the N. Y. Herald and His Moving Comics from 1911. Apart from that (and McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur film), there are almost exclusively original newspaper pages and some original drawings on display. In other words, there are a lot of comics to read, which can be tiresome, but it’s better than the reproductions or book covers that one gets to see at other comic exhibitions. In some cases, they even managed to obtain the original drawings to corresponding newspaper pages and show them alongside each other.
Apparently McCay was included in the exhibition because he “can be considered the first Surrealist of the 20th century” (my translation). Salvador Dalí and René Magritte are also name-dropped in the text that accompanies McCays section of the exhibition. This is the central theme of the exhibition: all of the comic artists are judged by their relation to fine art and its avant-garde movements. The same is true for Lyonel Feininger, whose comic work is evaluated here as the job that had given him the financial freedom to pursue painting, and for Cliff Sterrett, whose stylistic changes in Polly and Her Pals are traced back to developments in high art (“echoes of the Bauhaus era” etc.).
The other three featured artists are George Herriman, Frank King, and, as the only really surprising choice, Charles Forbell. Forbell doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article, and apparently he only did a handful of episodes of his comic strip, Naughty Pete, in 1913. Each page is elaborately composed and lavishly coloured, but unfortunately he never used word balloons around his dialogue text. In some episodes he used different lettering styles for different characters, but in others it’s bothersome to figure out who says what. In a way, Naughty Pete is symptomatic of large parts of the exhibition: from a ‘high art’ perspective, one can see the avant-garde sensibility to it and why it was included in the exhibition, but from a comics perspective, it has neither been particularly influential nor is it actually that great a comic.
The 650-Cent Plague 