Haunted by Tradition: Ilan Manouach and the Ghosts of BD Past

This chapter will provide readings of a number of Manouach’s works to demonstrate how his graphic and printerly interventions strip away nostalgia from these works to expose how the publishing traditions of these BD have sustained racist and sexist ideologies. Manouach addresses the issues creatively but head on in his détournements. He zeroes in on issues by isolating specific albums and drawing attention to their problems through publication practices. By intervening in the colour print process of Noirs (turning everything Smurf-blue), or in the text of Tintin Akei Kongo (providing a previously unavailable Lingala translation), these works now draw attention to how the uses of colour or language construct ideological audiences. These concerns are also present in Compendium of Franco-Belgian Comics, which includes fragments of those same two comics. Through an accumulation of graphic and typographic patterns, this work creates an impressionistic barrage capturing the effect that reading stacks of such albums might have had, encountering pages of noise and violence, angry White faces and silly Black bodies. The interventions reveal that the original comics were haunted by patriarchal white supremacy, and Manouach’s work tries to exorcize those attitudes.