Chapter 4 - Forging

Summary

The contemporary fascination with comics archives also revolves around imaginary collections of invented “forgotten” comics. This chapter is not about forgeries of actual cartoonists but about imaginary constructions, fictive comics objects, and pseudo recoveries – whose transmissive function can be as important as the recirculation of actual archives. It details the stakes of this retro reflexivity by looking more closely at paratextual elements in Seth’s graphic novels and then in a more detailed close-reading of Cole Closser’s Little Tommy Lost, which presents itself as a playfully anachronistic work, mobilizing all the conventions of the 1920s comic strip within the publishing framework of a contemporary graphic novel. Productively fed by the many reprints of newspaper comics of the mid-2000s, Little Tommy Lost also offers an indirect critique “in practice,” reminding us of the complexities in reviving these serial objects, but also perhaps failing to take up the digital publication opportunities where such forms might find a new context.