Visitors entering the Comics 1964-2024 exhibition, which closed this past November after a six-month run at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, were greeted by a perhaps-unexpected sight: the curators of the exhibition made the striking decision to open on a panoramic view of alternative scenes around the globe, with original issues of the Japanese Garo (as well as original pages by Abe Shin’ichi, Katsumata Susumu, and Tsurita Kuniko), the French Hara-Kiri, and of course the requisite R. Crumb. It’s a clever choice—by opening on the alternative, the very existence of a cohesive mainstream is called into question—an albeit safer one than the curators may have intended: though some artists may be bigger ‘brands’ than others (I don’t think there’s any competition between Tsurita Kuniko and Robert Crumb in terms of name recognition, even if I adore the former and would’ve liked to forget the latter’s existence), what publications like Garo, Zap, and Hara-Kiri, and publishers like Éric Losfeld, have in common is the gradual shift in stature from ‘disruptor’ to ‘establishment.’ From a curatorial standpoint, it’s an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too: a transgressivism past its expiration date, flattened into aesthetic.

From there, the gallery was divided into broad thematic clusters: one section, titled Literature, focused on comics adaptations of prose works (as should come as no surprise, it was Alberto Breccia who outshone every other inclusion, in pages from his paper-collage Brothers Grimm pastiche Chi ha paura delle fiabe? and his §painted Dracula); another, Laughter, focused on humor (it was here more than anywhere else that the Francosphere got its due, with pages by Franquin, Morris, Bretecher, and Goscinny and Uderzo among others, as well as non-Francophones such as Watterson, Schulz, and Fujiko Fujio).

In these organizational choices, the curators strongly and mostly-successfully asserted their thesis statement: comics as a decentralized, rhizomatic form of discourse. By starting in 1964–more or less a mid-point for modern comics history, or perhaps even later, depending on whether you choose Töpffer or Outcault as your convenient starting point—they gave up in advance on the impossible task of charting the origins (and, consequently, the linear chronology) of the art-form, instead presenting viewers with an already-matured presence; the same was achieved by the relative unimportance of countries of origin, as no pretenses of a singular national tradition are upheld. Individuals, too, were deprioritized; it would’ve been easy enough to dedicate a room to any one of the generally-acknowledged Masters already on display, but outside of one sole instance—a cubicle dedicated to Spiegelman’s Maus, in the middle of the larger History and Memory section—there was an overwhelming focus on pattern rather than instance.

On occasion this categorization served as a petard for the curators to be hoisted by, certain sections falling short of their grand statement. The floor of the Cities section, for instance, was dominated by Seth’s diorama of the fictitious town of Dominion, which told a viewer just about anything they might need to know: this was an urban vision encased in fantasy, whether this fantasy was intrinsic, which is to say, psychological (in the case of Seth’s nostalgic naivete) or extrinsic and literal, in the case of Schuiten and Peeters’ Imaginary Cities. That the more realistic end of the spectrum was the later-era Will Eisner—a fine artist, to be sure, but a writer of self-important, less-than-unremarkable melodramatic pap—only underscores the political ill-equippedness of the overall vision. By and large, these were not spaces equipped to deal with the real world; there would be no discussion of gentrification here, nor homelessness, except, maybe, through a prism, dimly.

Confusing, too, was the internal logic of inclusion and omission on display. Here I must make the distinction between critiques of individual exclusion and of patterns of exclusion: though it remains striking to me that there was not a single Ito Junji page in the horror section, or that Los Bros Hernandez were not deemed fit for inclusion in the Everyday Life section, but of course the easy counterpoint is that there are thousands on thousands of creators to be considered for every category, famous or less so. More striking, then, is the fact that, with the exception of a single page from Watchmen and a handful of Posy Simmonds, there was little indication of any manner of British comics tradition (personally I would have included Mick McMahon, a genre artist who transcends genre, and Chris Reynolds, a master of the eerie, just to name a couple). Superhero comics, too, relegated to a single brief corridor (here it was nice to see Marie Severin get her due, but the rest of the inclusions were largely predictable: Miller, Adams, Kirby — the latter with a Fantastic Four cover, which feels like a less-than-optimal showing). 

Finally, in what might well be little more than a personal gripe of mine, one observes that, for all its 1964-2024 grandeur, there were more cartoonists on display that were dead than ones under the age of fifty. This makes sense, of course, from a ‘branding’ perspective: ideally, a curator would like to hit the perfect overlap between ‘artistically worthwhile’ and ‘well-established,’ and most cartoonists don’t hit a stride of fame until some twenty years into their career. Nonetheless, one is forced to wonder: would it be inappropriate to expect more of an ‘eye toward the future,’ or even toward the present? Prolific, to be sure, is the generation of Raw, but where is the Kramers Ergot and Frontier generation? Where are—just to name a few—Kevin Huizenga, Eleanor Davis, Dash Shaw, Sammy Harkham, Jillian Tamaki? (Michael DeForge, I know, works almost exclusively digitally, otherwise he would have been at the top of this list.)

And yet, what quibbles I have with the curation are ultimately minimized by the exhibits themselves. I will readily confess, at this time, an insecurity of mine: I always feel out of place in museums, mostly because I have trouble lingering on physical detail. There’s a productivity-mindset element at play here, no doubt, an urge to have seen more than to see. Whatever the reasoning, the result is that I will, on occasion, fail to give an exhibited work the time, or the exact mode of attention, that it probably warrants. Comics are, in this case, in an even more complicated position, where the original art is viewed as a means to an end, the end being reproduction and adaptation for accessible reading. 

What purpose, then, does the original art serve, from the point of publication onwards? In some cases, they pose as a challenge, a confrontation: it is one thing to admire Phillippe Druillet’s operatics in a format that you can hold in your hand, control, rotate; it is quite another to stand before his physically towering originals (I do not know the measurements, but I am 1.73 meters tall and they felt almost as tall as I am, certainly over the one-meter mark), which occupy the brunt of your field of vision.

In other cases, the original is a beautiful humanizing moment. Chris Ware, for instance, is the perfect example: having never seen a Ware original in person, I have come, as most do, to view him as a meticulous draftsman whose lines are largely predetermined, perfectly placed. Imagine my surprise, then, when, approaching his originals for Building Stories and Jimmy Corrigan, I could finally see the things that Ware doesn’t want his reader to see — for all his perfect placement of lines, more striking still is the detailing (largely environmental) that he doesn’t even bother ink, here on display as a vestigial blueline; three forms of the same page from The Adventures of Tintin: The Castafiore Emerald—rough pencils, final inks, and original coloring—demistified a comic similarly inscrutable in its craft. In this regard, most enlightening was the room exhibiting notebooks by artists such as Fabrice Neaud and Lorenzo Mattotti alongside finished pieces, a tangible reminder of not only the destination but the journey as well.

Although the corridor structure of Comics 1964–2024 had no set linearity—viewers could enter Futurism, History and Memory, and Fright (focusing on horror, where Hino Hideshi’s Hell Baby loomed tall and delightfully large) in whatever sequence they pleased—the end-point was as clearly-delineated as the beginning. In spite of the somewhat-forced title, Geometry did not focus on geometry per se so much as on broader formal experimentation, of wildly varying modes. Pages from two parts of Jochen Gerner’s RG offered a close dissection of Tintin, one part chopping up environmental objects (carpentry, shrubs) while removing them from their actual environments and the other offering blown-up panel fragments that actively defy meaning, compounded with Last Year in Marienbad-esque circular narration. There is a Roy-Lichtensteinian impulse at play in these works: the inquiry of what qualifies capital-A Art, and whether the straightforward, commercially-minded mode-of-work epitomized by Tintin (a comic I think is very good, obvious caveats notwithstanding) fits into this category. Alongside these, pages from Yokoyama Yūichi’s Public Works presented visitors with a view of a world of sheer, inhuman mechanical efficiency, playing at Yokoyama’s usual decentering of the human (and thus of the pesky particulars of human historiography). Between these two works was a succession of three pieces by Chris Ware remarking on the very act of creation, idea-as-three-dimensional-image becoming two-dimensional-image-as-idea. 

What we have here, then, is a work that is fundamentally exegetical, contingent on the existence of what came before it, on the one hand; then, on the other, a work that appears to emerge from purely within itself. Between them, the act of abstraction and cogitation. After a panoramic display of comics that nonetheless adhered to a certain conservatism, Geometry was the perfect send-off, eschewing narrativism and figurativism in favor of form-first experimentation: the microcosm of an entire world, the boundary between comics-as-lineage and comics-in-isolation blurring. Yet this location is, in itself, a form of concession: We know we’ve kept you well-fed with one definition of comics, so your dessert will be the reminder that there are other ways — now off you go!

It is hard, almost impossible, to summarize Comics 1964–2024. Its breadth was aesthetically stunning and formally all-too-constrained; its material and creative energy was palpable, but divorced from the real-life circumstances of time and place. But it’s hard to be too harsh on this particular exhibition — its failings, to a great degree, stem from those same heady questions that we all lose breath just thinking about: how comics are defined, what comics are important, is there a meaning to canon. When it succeeded, its heights were astonishing; when it failed, it gave us plenty to talk about, at least until the next poor sucker who tries to answer these questions for all the world to see.