Chapter 2 - Curating

Summary

This chapter focuses on exhibitions of comics history curated by contemporary cartoonists. It maps out the stakes of this curatorial gesture in a context of comics museification and the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural challenges that it raises. Drafting in cartoonists as curators has been a way for some museums to navigate these issues, by commissioning a “cartoonist’s eye” to select and present material from archives. Two specific cartoonist-curated exhibitions are central case studies for this chapter: Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman in 2012 and Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History in 2014. The exhibitions frame “their” histories in quite specific ways, relative to their material and institutional contexts. Both cases present visitors with completely different versions of comics history, based not only on the material that is exhibited but on how it is presented, framed, and organized. Based on interviews and archival research, the chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the layout strategies and museological discourses around the two exhibitions, describing how curating shapes a particular visual transmission of comics history.