Oubapo Exhibit at the CNBDI

The Centre National de la Bande Dessin�e et de l’Image’s page on their OuBaPo exhibit (up for the Angouleme comics festival) includes a good write up of some of the constraints involved and a few samples of the work.

The included Oubapo members are: Anne Baraou, Lewis Trondheim, Francois Ayroles, Gilles Ciment, Jean-Christophe Menu, Killofer, Etienne Lecoart, and Jochen Gerner. (Trondheim is the only one I’ve read.)

The examples they list include:

Iterations: wherein an element is repeated identically in each panel on the page (i.e. the whole drawing, the text, or a person in the same position).

Multireadability: which allows the reader to choose different readings of the panels, choosing the pathway across different panels. Apparently some of the works also have an element of chance (”when chance also plays a role, one doesn’t hesitate to talk of aleatoric consecution (a touch screen, a throw of the dice, drawing panels like cards, …)” [my trans.]) though it is a limited chance.

The drawing below by Lewis Trondheim is an example of Multireadability.

Restriction: a limiting of image (a certain element must appear in a panel, or only a limited number of certain elements may be used), tools, composition, point of view.

Reduction and Expansion: the former taking a given comic and removing panels until one is left with a predecided number of them, or the latter, taking a given comic and adding panels inbetween the ones that already exist.

Substitution: replacing certain elements in a comic (the words, the images).

Hybridation: mixing two comics together.

Graphical Reinterpretation: changing the style of drawing or the transforming the iconic contents. (I imagine this as for instance taking a Peanuts strip and redrawing it in the realist style, or taking a superhero comic and redrawing it as a Chester Brown/Joe Matt style autobiographical comic.)

Also a few group projects including a kind of comic exquisite corpse and a comic scrabble game (ScrOUBAbble) in which participants have 7 panels instead of letters to play on a board, creating crossing stories. That one sounds really fun.

Anne Baraou has a computerized comic with a touch screen, where touching on the screen brings up a new panel. As far as I can tell the images are selected randomly from a set creating a kind of anagrammatic comic (as in the panels are rearranged like the letters in an anagram).

Most of these don’t seem to be extremely new methods, but it is great to know that the group is getting some recognition.

Tags: Bande Dessinee, Comics, Constraint, oubapo, trondheim

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