Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn
May 2017
May 7–September 10, 2017
With more than 300 exhibits from the United States, Europe, and Japan, Comics! Mangas! Graphic Novels! is the most comprehensive exhibition about the genre to be held in Germany. Although the history of European comics is often traced back to illustrated stories by artists such as Rodolphe Toepffer, Gustave Doré, and Wilhelm Busch—none of whom used speech bubbles—it was in New York that comics emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the richly diverse immigrant cultures of the metropolitan melting pot, they were the first visual mass medium. Separate sections of the exhibition are devoted to Europe and Japan, where modern comics belatedly took off after the end of the Second World War, developing an intriguing range of highly distinctive national traditions. While cartoonists in Europe tightened and concentrated the visual language of comics, manga artists expanded it, introducing cinematic, multi-perspectival modes of representation and narrative that embedded themselves deeply in the current global youth culture.
In the 1960s, thanks to artists like Robert Crumb or Will Eisner and figures like Asterix or Barbarella, comics once again began to attract an older readership. In the wake of the cultural upheaval of 1968, comics came to be seen as the “ninth art,” and with the phenomenon of the graphic novel, we now witness the discovery of its hitherto ignored literary potential. At the same time, manga has established itself as a global phenomenon.