Front cover of The International Times underground newspaper (Issue No. 26, Feb 16–29, 1968).
Metagraphics: Situationist Comics and Sixty Years of French Student Revolt
In autumn 1966, a group of students sympathetic to the Situationist International (IS) were elected to the University of Strasbourg student union (AFGES). They used its entire budget to publish two pamphlets: the text “On the Poverty of Student Life” by Situationist Mustapha Khayati, and a four-page comic by student André Bertrand called The Return of the Durutti Column. This unique comic, assembled in collage and laden with visual and textual references, was reprinted in full or in part around the world. The furor around its appearance was the first in a chain of protests eventually leading to France’s May 1968 uprisings.
As students protest the austerity that structures their lives today, we look back to understand why a comics zine played a role in igniting France’s last great protest movement. We must engage the concept of metagraphics – later called hypergraphics – first articulated by Lettrist movement founder Isidore Isou, and carried forward separately by Situationist International founder Guy Debord. These two, related movements produced a body of fascinating comics which reveal that hypergraphic writing and détourned comics are not just part of our radical and avant-garde histories, but are a living legacy that finds reflection in contemporary work pointing to comics’ future.
About the Speaker
Bill Kartalopoulos is a multidisciplinary comics specialist working between New York and Paris. He teaches graduate courses about comics and graphic novels at Washington University in St. Louis, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France.
His primary research practice focuses on links between comics and various art and avant-garde movements, and is expressed through a variety of independent curatorial and editorial projects. As a curator, he has exhibited work by artists including Roberto Altmann, Lynda Barry, Joe Brainard, Kim Deitch, Mirtha Dermisache, Austin English, Keith Haring, Aidan Koch, Raymond Pettibon, Olivier Schrauwen, Deb Sokolow, Lale Westvind, and many others. He is the programming director for the MoCCA Arts Festival in New York and is a member of the organizing committee for the New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium. He has spoken about comics across the US and in countries including Colombia, Belgium, France, Finland, Greece and Russia. Kartalopoulos is currently finishing a general history of North American comics, to be published by Princeton University Press, and is editing a second volume of Joe Brainard’s comics to be published by the New York Review of Books.
He has worked previously as the series editor for the #1 New York Times best-selling Best American Comics series and as an assistant to Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman. He has been the programming coordinator for the Small Press Expo (SPX), he co-organized the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival for four years, and he has served as a member of the executive committee for the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF). He previously published the comics newsblog EGON and edited Indy Magazine, which was the first online publication to be nominated for Eisner and Harvey Awards. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Dartmouth College and a master’s degree in media studies from The New School.
Lecturer