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.

Reissuing old comics as books has become a chief process of transmission in the graphic novel. In the mid-2000s, alternative comics publishers Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly released a series of extensive reprint projects, drafting “their” cartoonists to visually repackage past comics. This chapter provides an in-depth inquiry into the idea of the “archival reprint” that has become a mainstay of twenty-first-century graphic novel publishing through its various interconnected issues: preservation technologies, collecting culture, copyright, publishing economy, graphic style, book design, and reception all constitute a dense set of constraints that variously shape reprinting today. In this context, cartoonists have become a vital asset in reprinting strategies and their book designs confer new ways of reframing comics history, as clearly evidenced in the graphic contributions by Seth for Charles Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts and Chris Ware for Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. These two case studies offer key insights into the challenges of reprinting long-length serials and the role played by book design in framing contemporary understandings of comics history.

Chapter 5 uses those terms to describe, through Assmann, a case study of polytheistic political theology in Egypt. This will help illustrate how polytheism (or better, “cosmotheism”) may be understood as rooted in the “victim mechanism,” in Girard’s terms. This puts to rest naïve notions of polytheism’s putative “tolerance,” seeing it more subtly as a socio-political force that “contains” violence, and an invitation to examine biblical monotheism.

The city of Hibis, located at the junction of the caravan roads passing through the northern part of the oasis, is often depicted as the capital city of the Great Oasis. In fact, little is known about the administrative organization of the district, and especially about the history of Hibis. Because areas now under cultivation have not been excavated, the chronology and the topography of the city, apart from the temple, are far from certain: Was there even a city before and independent of the temple? When did it become the capital city of the Great Oasis and what was the status of the oasis of Kharga within the Great Oasis ? The formation of the city of Hibis is studied in relation to the growing importance of the northern part of Kharga Oasis, from the Middle Kingdom onwards, and through the lens of the shifting relationships with the central powers and the political and religious institutions in the Nile Valley. The role played by other oasis metropoleis such as Mothis and Trimithis during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods is also questioned in order to provide a better understanding of the overall administrative structure of the Great Oasis.