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2024

“Making Noise” with Comics: An Interview with Argentine Author, Artist, Singer, and Song Writer, Isol

Jennifer Nagtegaal

Résumés

Cet entretien avec Marisol Misenta, connue professionnellement sous le nom d’Isol, s’intéresse aux multiples façons dont l’écrivaine, musicienne et dessinatrice de bande dessinée argentine reconnue réunit la musique, le chant et la narration graphique dans ce qu’elle appelle « una poción para soñar » (une potion pour rêver). L’entretien se concentre sur le « discomic » Novela gráfica (Roman graphique), publié en 2014 par le groupe SIMA de Buenos Aires, dont Isol était la chanteuse principale. Il aborde également certains des projets et des performances artistiques, collaboratifs et interdisciplinaires, plus récents, de l’artiste argentine. Les sujets abordés comprennent les relations entre la bande dessinée et le son, le rôle du lecteur-auditeur dans l’expérience, ainsi que l’expérimentation de l’hybridation de la musique et de la bande dessinée dans l’objet « discomic », et enfin, la manière dont la bande dessinée et la musique (et, par extension, le son) enrichissent l’expérience du public.

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Notes de la rédaction

Cette interview s’inscrit dans la partie documentaire du dossier thématique « La bande dessinée à voix haute » de la revue Comicalités et, à ce titre, elle n’a pas fait l’objet d’une relecture par les pairs. Elle a été relue et approuvée par le comité de rédaction.
This interview is part of the documentary section of Comicalités’ “Comics Aloud” dossier, and as such has not been peer-reviewed. It has been read/edited and approved by the editorial board.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Other contributing artists for the accompanying comics include Lucas Nine, Johanna Wilhelm, Mariana (...)

1Marisol Misenta, known professionally as Isol, is an award-winning author and illustrator, singer-songwriter, and occasional comics artist from Argentina. Born in Buenos Aires (1972), where she continues to live and work, Isol has garnered recognition internationally for the many contributions she has made to children’s literature starting from the late 1990s (she was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2013), and parallel to this she has attracted the attention of cultural critics for her role as composer and vocalist in local bands whose genres range from electropop to baroque chamber music. But these aspects of Isol’s mutli-faceted career do not always remain separate. In our conversation together, Isol talks about her enduring interest in combining music, singing, and narration through images in what she calls “una poción para soñar” (a concoction to dream about). This experience-enhancing mixture of artistic disciplines was the driving force behind Novela gráfica (Graphic Novel), a so-called “discomic” (a portmanteau of “disc” and “comic”) that contains eleven songs and the same number of comics in fold-out format, each one created by a different world-renowned artist, the list of which includes Isol herself.1

  • 2 SIMA is made up of Isol and her brother and co-composer, Federico Zypce (Zypce”), whose self-fabri (...)

2The idea for Novela gráfica was born out of a quest to make the concert for the debut of the second album by Buenos Aires-based musical project SIMA, classified by various media sources as “fantasy-pop” or “art pop,” different and interdisciplinary.2 The endeavor expanded from adding a visual component during the performance of each song to the commissioning of corresponding comics that would be included in the packaging of the music album upon its release, and also projected during the concert. The style of each of Novela gráfica’s six-page fold-out comics is unique to the contributing artist, while the overall aesthetic of each one corresponds with the lyrics and sonority of SIMA’s related song. Johanna Wilhelm’s comic for track six, “Cruzada” (Crusade), for example, is done in her signature papercutting style whose intricacy matches the intimacy of Isol’s lovelorn lyrics, whereas Anne Herbauts’s muted colour palette and minimalist picture book drawing style matches the melancholy of track four, “Llueve” (It’s Raining).

3The result is something profoundly pop, permeated with fairy-tale motifs and symbols: track seven, “Bébeme” (Drink Me) and its accompanying comic by Mar Hernández, offers a clear evocation of Alice in Wonderland’s moment where the protagonist partakes of her ‘drink me’ potion. Christian Montenegro’s comic for the disc’s opening track “Nada” (Nothing) reveals a reworked and wise-to-the-world figure of Little Red Riding Hood, while Goldilocks’ tale takes on adult themes with an amorous tryst in the third track, “Alguien ha dormido en mi cama” (Somebody’s Been Sleeping in my Bed) and its accompanying comic of the same title by Paloma Valdivia. The collection of comics, ideated as illustrated music videos, is wordless save for the occasional incorporation of selected lyrics. Lucas Nine’s “Charro eléctrico” (Electric Charro [Cowboy]) does this to a maximum extent, whereas Isol’s “Claro y fresco ríos” (Clear and Crystalline Streams) and Montenegro’s “Nada” do this with a single line or phrase. In all cases, we are compelled to make meaningful connections between musical sound and visual style, between beat and background setting, to link lyric with visual motif and relate pitch with protagonist. Novela gráfica’s media-multitasking listener-viewer finds the collection of accompanying comics inside the slots of an accordion box specially designed by Buenos Aires illustrator Laura Varsky (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Novela gráfica, a discomic by SIMA.

4A long overdue conversation about Novela gráfica, which has flown under the radar of scholarly attention for ten years too long, allows for a better understanding of this aesthetic experiment that fuses music with comics art, but also photography, installation art, and graphic design. However, it also attunes us to Isol’s intentions behind a decade-long trajectory of hybrid and interdisciplinary, collaborative and self-managed projects that have emerged in the wake of SIMA’s discomic, some of which are touched upon towards the end of the conversation.

5Jennifer Nagtegaal: You are a multiple award-winning children’s book illustrator and author, and beyond Argentina your stories have been published in Mexico and Spain, and translated for audiences in Portugal, Norway, Estonia, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Canada, the USA, and Turkey. More local, and perhaps lesser known, is your simultaneous career as a musician where equally exciting things are occurring. These singing and songwriting endeavors have, for the better part of a decade now, offered a means of occasionally bridging your multiple artistic talents, and of pairing comics art with music. Looking back to 2014, you created the album Novela gráfica together with your bandmates from SIMA, and in collaboration with a dozen other national and international artists. Not only did you contribute to the production of a new artistic genre together, but in the process your band also coined the term “discómic” (discomic). Meanwhile, the album’s title evokes something totally different and altogether more familiar: the graphic novel. How did you arrive at this title?

  • 3 This interview has been translated from Spanish. All translations are my own.

Isol: [My brother] Zypce and I have always believed in self-managed conceptual projects, seeking to maintain an interesting aesthetic and the creation of original objects, starting with their design. This was how we made the covers of Zypce’s first solo album, Nuevo muerto (New Dead, 1994), silkscreened in our own house, and my first edition silkscreened comic, printed in a giant poster format. The title of the first album, Sima [a self-titled album], came out of a word Zypce found in a dictionary, which sounds almost like its antonym: “cima” (summit) is the highest point of a mountain, and “sima” (chasm) is a deep well.3

For the second album, we took much longer to get the material together (we were busy with children, travel, and work). Songs that were quite different were brought together, and the collection had something half fantasy about it, and with lots of little stories. When I was thinking about naming the collection, the name that occurred to me refers to an artistic genre, but the phrase itself has other resonances: they say that something is “de novela” when it is really incredible, and they say that something is “muy gráfico” when a literary image is very concrete and you can almost see it in your mind when you hear the description. So I thought “novela gráfica” was a very good title for the album we were making, thinking about the lyrics and the songs in addition to the concept that brought everything together: as I’m in the environment of illustration and comics, it occurred to me to call up colleagues that I admire to ask them do a small comics narration for each song, and thus to add a visual and artistic bonus to the album. I’ve always loved CDs with a good booklet, or carátulas with lyrics and artistic covers like in the 60 and 70s, and I was excited at the thought of adding that quality to the musical and poetic work we were doing, with top-notch artists.

JN: Beyond this initial inspiration, how did the concept for the discomic come about?

Isol: Ever since we were young, Zypce and I shared an interest in comics and in music. We both studied Fine Arts in high school and we both made music in our adolescence (me singing and him playing the saxophone and recording with invented instruments). But when we left school, my brother dedicated himself to music more than anything, and for me it was narration, chiefly through pictures. I also continued making music, and Zypce kept in contact with visual art in the construction of his instruments and in the aesthetics of his performances. When we got together to make SIMA, we thought about the staging quite carefully. Zypce would use objects that were really eye catching such as metronomes and turntable trays which were repurposed as percussion—his own instruments are like sculptures—, and I would contact VJs who projected some visual background textures for the stage.

  • 4 Man with Axe and Other Stories, which is a recurring large-scale installation, offers a bird’s eye (...)

When the proposal arose from the independent label Noseso Records to make the second album, and to present it in a large theater [the ND Ateneo Theatre in Buenos Aires], it was necessary to think of something attractive and powerful to “make noise” and fill the theatre. We had already composed almost all of the songs but had not yet come up with a unifying concept or a graphic idea for the album. But after having played our music with images from Liliana Porter’s exhibition, an experience which I describe in more detail below, the idea of combining the songs with graphics came strongly to me, and Zypce really liked it too.4 I called up different artists, thinking what aesthetic would mix well with each song. The idea was that you could listen to the songs while looking at the images, and that the disc object would be beautiful too. This is why I invited one of the best designers in Argentina, Laura Varsky, who had done a lot of work with music albums and who, besides being my friend, was excited about finding a format that worked without being too expensive (it was an independent production, paid for by the experimental label Noseso Records, as welle as really small independent comics publishing house—Espacio Moebius—and us as a band). Moebius also organized a preshow in the foyer of the theatre with a bunch of cartoonists improvising on the titles of the songs of the album. A real party.

JN: First of all, I like this idea of using comics as visual clatter, so to speak, to fill the atmosphere with something more than music. But in regards to the pre-concert jam, we cannot overlook the fact that the participating artists were local illustrators who were not previously invovled in the discomicAriel Olivetti, Gustavo Aimar and Maintena, among otherswhich expanded the already impressive collaborative scope of the project! Not to mention the additional musical element from saxophonist Sergio Merce who soundtracked the drawing jam with his live improvisations. Is it not true that you yourself have a long history of improvising comics in response to songs?

Isol: Yes, in fact I’ve done quite a few because I love to draw texts for songs and for poetry…they leave open space for creation. My first comic was “El circo” (Circus), with the text from one of [Australian musician] Nick Cave’s songs. I did a few more with texts from Nick Cave, [British singer-songwriter] PJ Harvey and one of [Argentine singer] Edmundo Rivero’s tangos (a tango singer who used the urban colloquial slang [“el slang de los bajos fondos”] from Buenos Aires in the 40s and 50s) which has a lot of irony to it. I was always interested in the poetry of songs.

  • 5 A sixteenth-century priest and a skilled musician in the lute-like vihuela and the guitar, Mudarra (...)
  • 6 Isol’s comic, which is also featured in a video version of “Claros y frescos ríos” that the band ha (...)

JN: And for Novela gráfica, you yourself created the comic for the bonus track, “Claros y frescos ríos, which is your own version of the Renaissance song by Alonso Mudarra (c. 1510-1580).5 Can you explain to us a little bit about the process of how drawing a song—this song—was for you?6

Isol: Oof, it was a little difficult because the song is so simple and so powerful at the same time… I dont know if I was able to come up with something as interesting as what the song evokes in me, really. I felt like I didnt need to do much. Rather, let it breathe some of the immensity and feeling of that ancient song that speaks of something transcendent in contemplation. I thought that the landscape was both external and internal, the lines are mountains but at the same time a body, there are some presences that you feel in the landscape and at the same time you feel loneliness. That’s what I tried to do.

JN: And with the discomic Novela gráfica, we are seeing this class of creativity eleven times over. Eleven drawn songs. You drew together ten illustrators from Latin America and Europe, each with their own personal and defined aesthetic, to accompany you in visually interpreting the themes of Novela gráfica’s songs. Meanwhile, we find themes that cross the borders of multiple song-and-comics pairings: childhood, rain and tears, death, fairy tales. But is there one overarching theme that conceptually connects the collection of songs to each other?

Isol: I think underneath everything is the concept of play, experimentation, and fantasy in the music, the arrangements, the songs. That’s why we were defined as “Fantasy Pop.” Then there’s my personal sensibility that finds some things especially attractive. And they can be seen in the lyrics. It’s true, there are references to fairy tales, such as “Alguien ha dormido en mi cama”—Goldilocks and the Three Bearsand “Bébeme”—Alice in Wonderland. There are musical elements from different traditions as well, such as Arab-inspired melodies in “Bébeme,” and Mexican-style melodies in “Charro eléctrico” and “No era el día” (It Wasn’t the Day). The influence of the medieval imaginary is in “Cruzada” and also in the electronic version of Mudarra’s Claros y frescos ríos, (a song that we listened to a lot at home in our childhood, which is absolutely beautiful). As well, “Una carta” (A Letter) is structured around a harp melody. Mixing textures is an important tool in our collaboration. The nice thing is that because we’re siblings, we share a broad and varied common musical background, since our parents were very much music lovers and listened to progressive music, rock, tango, jazz, baroque music, medieval… everything! So, all of that information was siphoned in a way, inspiring us to use some of its elements in the creation of new music. It’s also part of the idea that there are comics artists with different styles, different perspectives.

JN: In a way, it seems, we also see a siphoning of information from song to comic in each of the eleven pairings. What drove the drawing of the comics for the songs? Was it the lyrics or sound or both? Or was it something else? And, in relation to this, what was the process like of selecting the artists to illustrate their songs?

Isol: When the idea of putting together the project arose, I met with Martín Ramón, the editor from Moebius that in the end invented the word “discómic,” to define the object, to relay the idea to him and to invite him to participate. He knows many of the best comics artists. I was very clear on Liliana Porter, who had already told me yes. He suggested Johanna Wilhelm to me, and together with Laura Varsky, we discussed what other illustrators to invite; ones we liked and seemed suitable for the project. As I knew the songs well, I was doing the job of editor, thinking about which illustrator to call for each song according to their style. That work was nice; I was excited that for the first time another person would be illustrating my own text. We were reaching out to those we were interested in. Almost all of them said yes; some were really busy with work, but we had a good number of options. I sent them the demos of the songs and they sent us back sketches before defining the final comic. They had all the freedom they wanted, although sometimes I told them my thoughts regarding the song or their work I was already familiar with.

JN: Talking a little more about the many authorial voices, could we also say that the listener-reader intervenes in the narrative, for example creating their own connections between sound and style, instrument and image, linking beat with background, relating pitch with protagonist, and ultimately rendering these connections meaningful? That is, that they experience (experimentan) the hybridization of music and drawings while they experiment (experimentan) with the hybridization of music and drawings I really like that in Spanish, the verb “experimentar” has a double meaning, which is lost in English: to experiment and to experience.

Isol: Yes, this is what we wanted to happen, according to what we had perceived in the concert featuring Liliana’s images. In fact, in the concerts [which followed Novela gráfica’s release] we projected the images of the comics while we sang too and that really began to piece together an interesting prism in the combination of these arts. The music suddenly impresses a climate upon the point of view of the drawings, beyond the lyrics.

JN: Do you think the addition of the visual language of comics has an immersive effect on the listener-reader?

Isol: In my experience, it’s a gift for the listener who can view [the comic] or not while listening to the song, because I think it adds images and poetic stimulus to that listening. It’s like a music video but at your own pace and on different media (printed paper, musical album). That is, they [the music and the comic] have their independence, but together they are enhanced.

JN: And turning to the idea of publishing the comics in fold-out format,. what was the intention behind this decision? The format you selected seems ideal to me as the listener-viewer does not have to turn any pages. This allows the reader’s eyes to move over the drawings—forward and backward—for the duration of the song.

Isol: It was something that we worked on with Laura Varsky, looking at the foldouts that had been published by Nobrow Press and thinking of formats that differed from usual ones. This design gave more freedom to the artists and at the same time the songs remained separate from each other, independent. You can look at the images one by one, or the whole strip like a frieze. And [Laura] proposed the box with sections like in the old LP records, which I found very elegant and perfect for giving each foldout a special place—not all squeezed together—and to allow [the user] to realize if any are missing.

  • 7 SIMA’s Novela grafica is indeed a trailblazer in the Spanish-speaking world, as it would be a handf (...)

JN: The novelty of Novela gráfica is that we see the inverse of a well-established relationship between music and comics. That is, music (or sound) is typically created for comics: a soundtrack as accompaniment for a traditional comic, or a combination of music, sound effects, and pre-recorded voices in the case of the digital comic. But in this case, it is comics that accompany music.7 And while Novela gráfica’s songs can be enjoyed independently (something I know well because I have the CD in my minivan, and recently it has been the soundtrack for my drive to work), were the comics created to be enjoyed independently of the music too? Is this even possible?

Isol: I’m glad you enjoy it, thank you! I think that if the comics contained the lyrics it would be easier to enjoy them separately, but we asked [the visual artists] not to include them in order to give the listener freedom to let their eyes wander through the sequence. I do not know if it was the best idea in terms of viewing them without listening to the music, because the text and the image enhance each other. If I published them without the music album, I would add at least the text of the songs so that the relationship is maintained. We did an exhibition showing all the drawings and sketches and some are very beautiful in themselves. But, well, [each comic] is designed to illustrate a work and it is there [with the comic] that you truly end up understanding what happens.

JN: Delving deeper into this idea of a reversal of tradition: I understand the opening track “Nada” with its lively and energizing rhythm and its promise that “no será nada” (it must be nothing) as an anthem for the listeners; that they be bold, and not be afraid to experience (and experiment with) this inverted world in which they find themselves listening to a song while reading a comic. I think the Argentine artist Christian Montenegro captures this idea perfectly with the carnivalesque world he has drawn in his comic for this song: the dusk setting, the not-so-innocent young girl, mice as predators, so to speak. I don’t know if this was the intention behind this first song, or…?

Isol: My idea is somewhat open, so how you understand it, and like it, is just fine. I thought of it rather as the conscious denial of drama, someone who does not want to turn bad because of what happens to them (the volcano roars) or because of what they do (pressing the button to release the bomb) and then they deny the seriousness of it all and to achieve that denial she repeats to herself that mantra: “no será nada, ya pasará” (it must be nothing, ah, it will pass). Thats why she says she uses reason to heal her heart, that her weapon is her invented words…but I feel like it’s a front so that she doesn’t crumble in a dangerous or tragic situation. It [the song] has mystery and at the same time something half playful to make fun of the situation.

JN: For me, the cover image with the shattered ceramic objects (which comes from a photo from Liliana Porter’s installation Man with Axe and Other Stories) also serves to signal the innovative character of the project. Why Liliana Porter, and why these images?

Isol: This is part of the origins of the project: one day in 2013 we were called up by a concert cycle called Toy Music, which takes place in the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (Museum of Latin American Art, MALBA), asking us to do a concert in dialogue with the specific images from Argentine artist Liliana Porter. In that moment, we saw how Porter’s images, which were fascinating, played with the music in a way that was very powerful, adding more layers of possible meanings, generating interesting and open, poetic relationships. The brain combines what it hears in the music, in the text of the song and in the images in a way that’s very stimulating. This also happened because Porter’s exhibition (Man with Axe) had a concept similar to our music: delicacy, childishness, or anecdotal moments (dolls, dishes, cups, home furnishings, a piano) and the ominous, the everyday, and the mystery of a cataclysmic event despite that what happened is unknown, as well as tenderness and violence. It was a revelation. The audience thought we had chosen the images for each song, and they were images taken at random from the exhibition. That’s why we used images from Porter’s Man with Axe exhibition for the design of the case for Novela gráfica, because she was the first artist we felt could dialogue with our compositions, full of contrasts between my way of singing, my melodies and my lyrics (which have a tonal harmonic register and an intimate poetics), and Zypce’s arrangements and music, which is quite experimental and noisy, and which breaks down [traditional] structures.

JN: I mentioned at the beginning of this interview that we have almost arrived at the tenth anniversary of Novela gráfica’s release. In the ten years to come, can we expect to see more creative projects in which song and comic are mixed, either from SIMA or from yourself independently?

Isol: Yes, in fact right now I am performing as a soloist, mainly with musician Nicolas Cecinini and also guitarist Julián Horita, and we invite visual artists to somehow ilustrar” (illustrate) the songs in the show. Our main artist-collaborator is Lupe Marín. Her images, which she projects with an overhead projector behind and over us, enters us into a very beautiful space that makes the climate of the concert very magical, as can be seen in one concert that we streamed during the pandemic, and which has been adapted to concerts in different spaces.8

A month ago, I did a concert in Bogotá, Colombia, singing songs from different artists that I really like, as part of a festival organized by Casatinta, called Ilustropía (Illustropolis), and where those attending my illustration workshop created the images that would be projected at the concert. It’s really interesting to work with different artists and perspectives. We’ve also worked with Paloma Valdivia (from Chile) and Virginia Abrigo (from Argentina’s Santa Fe province).9

As albums are no longer being released in physical format, or rather, they are becoming somewhat of a collectors’ item really, we have not thought about making any [physical] object from these experiences. The [performances] are for the people who witness them and also the recordings of these… What I enjoy a lot is generating something with other artists, something that’s not completely controlled and that has that adrenaline of doing something live with people you admire and which adds a lot to the experience of the viewer. You know that you’re offering something special, on an artistic level, and that it has all the elements that I find exciting: music, the singing of a song, and narration through images. It’s a potion for dreaming (“a concotion to dream about”), is it not?

JN: It certainly is! And I for one hope that you keep on producing more of this experience enhancing concoction! With that, I wish to thank you very much for having discussed the innovative and important project that was Novela gráfica, which remains a benchmark for how to successfully combine music and comics in a printed, pressed, and published object, as well as sharing new expressions of this phenomenon through your recent collaborative concerts.

Isol: Thank you, Jennifer!

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Notes

1 Other contributing artists for the accompanying comics include Lucas Nine, Johanna Wilhelm, Mariana Chiesa, Decur, and Christian Montenegro from Argentina, Power Paola from Ecuador, Paloma Valdiva from Chile, Anne Herbauts from Belgium, Mar Hernández from Spain, and Gabriel Pacheco from Mexico.

2 SIMA is made up of Isol and her brother and co-composer, Federico Zypce (Zypce”), whose self-fabricated instruments made from everyday recycled items (electrical machines, coil springs, radios, old turn tables, metronomes, glasses, etc.) allow for an experimentation with new musical structures and new sonorities. Musicians Nicolás Cecinini (keyboards and audio processing) and Pablo Chimenti (guitarist and electroacoustic musician) round out the group.

3 This interview has been translated from Spanish. All translations are my own.

4 Man with Axe and Other Stories, which is a recurring large-scale installation, offers a bird’s eye view of a trail of destruction left by a small plastic figure of a man wielding an axe who has apparently reduced to rubble similarly minute items such as doll house furniture, as well as life-size furniture and even a piano. Porter is an Argentine contemporary artist based out of New York who works in an array of media aside from installation, including public art, photography, printmaking, painting, drawing, video, and theater.

5 A sixteenth-century priest and a skilled musician in the lute-like vihuela and the guitar, Mudarra today is held in high esteem as an innovative composer of the Renaissance.

6 Isol’s comic, which is also featured in a video version of “Claros y frescos ríos” that the band has published on YouTube can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeWN8DbGMnE.

7 SIMA’s Novela grafica is indeed a trailblazer in the Spanish-speaking world, as it would be a handful of years before we would see other so-called “discomics and these are still scant. Notable examples include a project by national-award winning comics artist Paco Roca who collaborated with Spanish rock band Seguirdad Social to produce eleven original songs and corresponding comics in La encrucijada (Crossroads, Astiberri, 2017). Shortly following this, and further south down Spain’s coast, pop-rock band Lori Meyers from Granada released the album Espacios infinitos (Infinite Spaces, 2021) with the support of English music producer James Bagshaw and the intervention of comics artist Sergio García Sánchez, who created the narrative cover art and also illustrated the music video for the track “No hay excusa” (There’s No Excuse). Even more recently, Juan Díaz Canales (author) and Jesús Alonso Iglesias (illustrator) created an account of the life of American folk singer Judith Lynn Sill, known as Judee Sill, in Judee Sill: éxtasis y redención (Judee Sill: Ecstasy and Redemption, Norma, 2023), inviting their readers to access an accompanying playlist through a QR code printed on the inside the cover of the comic. In this same year, across the Atlantic, appeared the Extended Play Resonant Voyage: SPM 001, self-produced by four-time Eisner Award-winning comic book artist J.H. Williams III (known for his work on Batwoman, Promethea, Sandman: The Overture, and his creator-owned series, Echolands) and Hip Hop DJ, producer and activitst Jason “Jay” Zotos. The duo goes by the moniker The Sound and Paint Men. Resonant Voyage: SPM 001, digitally released on Bandcamp, is Williams III and Zotos’s first music and art project together, and although not a comic per se, the art work in Resonant Voyage borrows themes and tendencies from comics art (sequentiality, narration through images). Prior to this, in 2018, American Jazz musician Wayne Shorter released Emanon (“No name” backwards), which consists of a three-disc album and a graphic novel created by Shorter together with Monica Sly (author) and Randy DuBurke (artist), that tells a story inspired by the music. There are also a handful of notable examples originating from the French-speaking world, which either precede or coincide with the release of SIMA’s Novela gráfica. First is comics artist Jacques Tardi and musician Dominique Grange’s 1968–2008… N’effacez pas nos traces! (1968–2008… Don’t Erase our Traces!, 2008), which contains fifteen chapters and an equal number of tracks with corresponding titles contained on the accompanying CD. A later but still early example can be seen in Baladi and Ghostape’s Charge (2014), which contains 48 pages of illustration in irregular panels and a continuous thirty-seven-minute instrumental electronic soundtrack. Also noteworthy is the long-lasting BD Jazz series (2003-) which publishes short biographical comics of some of the greatest American jazz musicians which are often accompanied by one or more CD. Beginning around this same time, the experimental comics group known as OuBaPo (OUvroir de BAnde dessinée POtentielleWorkshop for Potential Comic Book Art) collaborated with OuMuPo (OUvroir de MUsique POtentielleWorkshop for Potential Music) on a series containing sixteen-page comics strips accompanied by mixed CDs by international artists such as Kid Loco, DJ Hide and The Third Eye Foundation (2004-6). This list, although not exhaustive, would not be complete without mentioning the work of Geneviève Castrée, with records and corresponding graphic album projects like Pamplemoussi (Grapefruit, L’Oie de Cravan, 2004), which is the object of critical attention in another contributing article for the special issue of this journal.

8 A recording of the concert can be found in a link shared by Isol at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkGxs4p7MKc

9 A recording of the concert can be found in a link shared by Isol at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqH67Sy5fmY

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Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1: Novela gráfica, a discomic by SIMA.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9438/img-1.png
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Jennifer Nagtegaal, « “Making Noise” with Comics: An Interview with Argentine Author, Artist, Singer, and Song Writer, Isol »Comicalités [En ligne], La bande dessinée à voix haute, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2024, consulté le 16 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/9438 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12w6w

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Jennifer Nagtegaal

Jennifer Nagtegaal is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Jennifer’s research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), develops in the areas of comics studies and animation studies, and sometimes at the intersection of both. This is the case of her first monograph, Politically Animated: Non-Fiction Animation from the Hispanic World (University of Toronto Press, 2023). Jennifer has published a number of essays on Spanish-language comics and animation in high-ranking journals such as the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, and in the edited volume The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies. Jennifer’s current doctoral research explores comics in their expanded forms, from the multi-media music-comics album to operatized comics and exhibition comics, comparing cases from Spain and Latin America to those originating from North America.

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