ÉDITIONS MATIÈRE

[…] “People call it comic books. We call it popular art.” [+]

INTERNATIONAL COMICS: FIVE GROUNDBREAKING PUBLISHERS. Just east of the 20th arrondissement lies the Parisian suburb of Montreuil, accessible via the Paris Metro and increasingly spoken of as “the 21st arrondissement” or “the Brooklyn of Paris.” Here, out of their home offices, Laurent Bruel and Nicolas Frühauf have run the French comics publisher Éditions Matière since 2004, publishing twenty-four smartly designed, uniformly formatted books spotlighting both French and international artists. Just as Montreuil is apart from —but connected to— Paris, the productions of Éditions Matière seem to stand both apart from, but remain connected to, even the aesthetically expansive world of francophone comics. This has something to do with Matière’s other-media, avant-garde roots. “It all began by making and showing short films in a basement in Montreuil,” Bruel explained. “This continued with a strong commitment to a form of antiphilosophical theory called ‘theorism.’ And became, after some adventures, a publishing house dedicated to publishing books based on the assemblage of images and texts. People call it comic books. We call it popular art.” Matière may be best known in France as the francophone publisher of books by Japanese comics artist Yūichi Yokoyama, whose own work (present elsewhere in this issue) radically disrupts the codes and conventions of manga. Similarly, many of Matière’s books assemble figurative images and text within an overall sequence in novel ways. La Méthode Bernadette is Matière’s most surprising book: a collection of striking narrative images produced by a group of French Catholic nuns from the 1930s through the 1960s. In sequences of cut paper silhouettes, originally reproduced on sheets of paper for live narrative performance, the picture stories of the Sisters Bernadette aimed to combat sin, communism, and modernist art in an accessible way until their production was suspended by the Catholic Church in 1969. Matière’s other historical work is the eye-popping Prokon, by Norwegian artist Peter Haars: a 1971 graphic novel that reappropriates clichéd comic book imagery from then-recent Pop Art to tell satirical anticapitalist superhero stories for adult readers. Which is not to suggest that Matière is dedicated to historical excavation; the bulk of their catalog is contemporary, and the majority is French. Bruel remained sly about upcoming projects, except to note an upcoming book by a contemporary French artist: “It will be graphic, it will be abstract, it will be minimalist. It better be good!”       [-]