Reading Comics with Aby Warburg: Collaging Memories

Abstract

This chapter takes the pioneering visual epistemology of the art historian Aby Warburg as the starting point for a guide to reading comics. It transposes Warburg's montage of images in the incomplete Mnemosyne Atlas to comics along two axes: it treats comics pages as collages and examines the symbolic and emotional charge of comics images. The Mnemosyne Atlas acquires special relevance through reading comics as collages of words, images, panels and of different media or imitations thereof. Combining the ideas propelling the Mnemosyne Atlas with the concept of media memories, or the ways in which media remember and reference each other, this chapter reads two French-language comics (Hugo Pratt's Les Celtiques and Manu Larcenet's Le Combat ordinaire), to show how these ideas can be applied to a spectrum of comics ranging from genre fiction to personal stories.