Chapter 5 - Swiping

Summary

A synonym of “stealing,” swiping is a vernacular term in the comics industry and fandom used to identify and designate redrawn or traced copies of particular images and panels. As such, swiping constitutes a surprising mode of graphic transmission that implicates the gathering of particular images and their hand-drawn reproductions. The chapter recovers a history of the practice at the hand of a few smaller cases that highlight the variability of swiping as an appreciation and evaluation of copying, only to move to the central case study focusing on Charles Burns’s appropriations of “old” comics panels, mostly from pre-Code romance and horror comic books to Tintin. It is interested not only in how Burns redraws comic book images but also in how he constructs and publicly shares archives of reusable images that are constantly redistributed in his work, especially in his small-press publications. The chapter argues that Burns’s citational tactics function less as postmodern rewriting than as an adaptation of swiping practices from comic book culture, a transmission of a way of redrawing images.