ComiXconnection

The Museum for European Culture extended the run of ComiXconnection a stunningly curated exhibit of east euro comics. The museum is out of the way in Dahlem on the grounds of Free University, unfortunately.

(But while you’re there you could sneak into the graphic novel collection at the JFK institute. I don’t think they mind visitors, but I have a card, so cannot be sure. Anyway, the books are all in the original languages, and represent likely the biggest collection of North American comics outside Germany.)

The curators of the east European collection have a wonderful eye for space. Throughout the middle of the room, comics and infographics are arranged at eye level on metal displays that look welded together from raw steel. A long and simply gorgeous graphic work about the development of the collection itself ripples along one wall, while blown up images hang on the opposite wall.  

One can also enter a small lounge area through a curtain marked No Entry with yet more displays, this time artifacts behind vitrine. A second room repeats the welded-metal display format, which altogether feature several dozen artists, alongside a second display of comic journalism.

This is how I discovered La Revue Dessinée. This is a quarterly news magazine done entirely as comics or sequential art. This is the most gorgeous thing I have seen since Astrapi.

Part of me wonders what additional value comics bring to news journalism. After all, they add another layer of interpretation. 

When I read the news, I ask myself what the writer might have missed, misinterpreted or even misrepresented. Photographs are accurate but present the same challenge. With comics, unless they are totally copied from photographs (in which case, the question is, what is the point? Is it informative or even creative to reproduce another art form exactly?), they add even more questions. Where did the artist get the content of the photo? Were they there? What made them compose the images in that way? 

I believe fiction can bring us closer to universal or broader truths, but not necessarily to the facts of a live, current news issue. 

On the other hand I have long loved war art, which is not totally dissimilar to comics journalism. War art does not pretend to do current affairs journalism, though. Yet the idea of comics journalism really excites me. It’s so beautiful!

But it is too early to form an opinion.  La Revue can be borrowed from the Mediathek of the Institut Français. I will pick one up sometime soon, and feast my adoring if doubting eyes upon it.

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Go and see the ComiXconnection exhibit is my gentle advice, and if you do, check out the Slow Fashion exhibit that I did not have time for, and let me know how it was. You could also have a coffee at the café, a tribute to European coffee culture: