D.Duck; FAFC (FSC)
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If It Looks Like a Duck
Via Yohann Koshy at The Baffler:
Dorfman and Mattelart do not impute conspiratorial motives onto Walt Disney. How to Read Donald Duck is a work of ideological criticism: it tells you what his comics do not realize they are saying. The absence of fathers and mothers in the Disney universe—there are only uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces—serves to naturalize forms of authority, because the nephew cannot challenge his uncle as the child can their parent. The pursuit of money determines many of Donald’s misadventures, but Dorfman and Mattelart observe that there are no working-class occupations in Duckburg, where Donald lives, so “wealth is made to appear as if society creates it by means of the spirit” rather than by the exploitation of labor. Channelling Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry, they argue that the problem with Disney’s fantasy world is that it falsely reconciles antagonisms between child and parent, capital and labor: “All the conflicts of the real word, the nerve centers of bourgeois society, are purified in the imagination in order to be absorbed and co-opted into the world of entertainment.”
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French Abstract Formalist Comics (French Structural Comics): An Artistic Movement
At TCJ, Kim Jooha updates an essay from 2016:
I call this new budding movement French Abstract Formalist Comics. They are “Abstract” Formalist comics not because they do not show representational images — they do, and this is a critical difference between them and Abstract Comics — but because they show abstract narrative and study abstract and formalist themes, concepts, and motives. They could also be called French Structural Comics, because they are similar to works of Structural Cinema such as Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1968).
They share a physical environment, geography, and period; artistic forms (style, aesthetics of comics); themes and motives; and formal as well as the structural features of comics, printed media, and visual art. They also share a community and platform. The prime example is the anthology Lagon, edited by Alexis Beauclair, Jean-Philippe Bretin, Bettina Henni, and Sammy Stein, all of whom are French Structural Comics artists, though not every work in Lagon is Structural Comics. (For example, Simon Hanselman was in it.) Editions Matiere, which has had the seminal influence on the development of the movement, publishes many FSC.
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