Becoming Musicomic: Music and Comics in Resonance

Armelle Blin-Rolland
2019 Modern Languages Open  
What happens when music and comics are created and experienced together? Taking music-comics interactions as its impetus, this article investigates intermediality and audiovisuality through the concept of 'resonance', drawing in particular on its use in Deleuzian philosophy. It examines resonance as the process through which (audial, visual, medial) elements interrelate, thereby triggering, through medial dissemination ('dissemediation') and the explosive potential of sound and image, a
more » ... mation into a new heterogeneous, shifting and transient whole ('musicomic'). This is explored across three different formats: digital comics, comics performances, and comics-music albums (which combine a comic book and a music album). The article analyses resonance in a range of case studies from the Francophone field: in the inextricable audiovisuality of Marietta Ren's 2016 digital bande défilée Phallaina; the dialogue between music and comics as performing arts in the concert de dessins series at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Angoulême; and, in relation to music-comics albums, through politico-aesthetic resonance as an act of remembrance in Jacques Tardi and Dominique Grange 's 1968-2008 ... N'effacez pas nos traces! (2008), and the (dis)orienting experience of the sound-landscape of Baladi and Ghostape's Charge (2014). These audiovisual practices explore and bridge the gap(s) between music and comics, and orchestrate their resonance in differing ways, involving the experiencer in this process as she oscillates between reader, listener, viewer, and/or synchroniser.
doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.235 fatcat:22muww5xt5gx5cikiazbvfyvjq