From 4 April to 20 Sept. 2017, the Museum of Printing and graphic communication in Lyon is presenting the exhibition ‹ Comics: the invisible art ›, a co-production between the Museum and the Lyon Festival of comics.
Every year, the Festival of comics brings some 200 authors to Lyon. In the same spirit, the exhibition will look at comics as they are now, lining up today’s cartoonists with their major predecessors
to show how comics have developed since they first appeared in the 19th century… or even earlier.
The scenario, created jointly by the Museum and the Festival, also aims to decipher what the French call the ninth art, to reveal how it works, its codes. This lesson in comics will provide the context, right from the start of the exhibition, in which to define the limits of the genre and to show its diversity of styles and applications, from the paper album to Phallaina, a digital comic created by Marietta Ren which uses a tablet to scroll different episodes in any order and without a break.
Scott mcCloud’s involvement
The American theorist of comics Scott McCloud, himself also a cartoonist, has agreed to help us by letting us use his theoretical works Understanding comics and Reinventing comics and by making available many extracts from them to be used as the storyline for the exhibition.
For Scott McCloud the comic is a sequential art-form which has its own precise language, just as have literature, film, painting
or photography. Making reference to past and present cartoonists, the exhibition ‹ Comics: the invisible art › sets the boundaries of comics, then explores their specific languages and techniques.
