Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilDossiers thématiquesLa bande dessinée à voix haute2024Chanson Cachée: The Music-comic a...

2024

Chanson Cachée: The Music-comic albums of Geneviève Castrée

Damon Herd

Résumés

Cet article s’intéresse à deux œuvres de l’artiste québécoise Geneviève Castrée, qui associent chacune un album de bande dessinée avec un disque 33 tours de chansons : Pamplemoussi (2004) et Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? (2007). Il commence par définir le genre de ces œuvres bifides, entre « recordworks » d’artiste et albums « musicomic », en rappelant des exemples précédents de combinaisons entre disques et bandes dessinées. Il analyse ensuite les deux livres-disques de Castrée, en comparant pour chacun la bande-son au récit dessiné : leur autonomie respective en tant qu’œuvres artistiques, leur temporalité en termes de réception, et le statut diégétique de la musique dans chacun des récits graphiques.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

Introduction

1This article examines two comic and vinyl record releases by Geneviève Castrée—Pamplemoussi published by L’Oie de Cravan (2004) and Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? (2007), which was released under the name Woelv by K Records. Each release consists of a 12” square comic book with an accompanying vinyl record. On each record there are songs corresponding to the stories in the books.

2This article will look at the shift in cultural position of each work taking into consideration the production, materiality, and distribution of each. It will also consider the cultural context of the two releases, including whether they can be considered what Ursula Block would term Artists’ Recordworks or what Armelle Blin-Rolland has termed a music-comic album. It will then position and compare Castrée’s work within the cultural history of comic/music combinations, including works such as Flash Fearless Vs. the Zorg Women, Pts. 5 & 6 (1975)a compilation album and comic featuring various musicians including Alice Cooper—and current comics and sound creators such as Miranda Smart.

3These discussions will then be used alongside a close analysis of Pamplemoussi and Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? to consider how music is used in the work. Whether it works as an accompaniment or paratext, and to what degree each musical accompaniment has autonomy. The relationship between the fixed temporal experience of the sound recording (homochrony) and that of the open temporal experience of the graphic narrative (heterochrony) will also be considered, as well as the diegetic status of the music. This will also be informed by a discussion on the autobiographical and metaphorical elements in Castrée’s work, including her memoir Susceptible (2012) and strip “We’re Wolf!” (2005).

  • 1 Susan E. Thomas, “Artists’ Recordworks in the Early Twenty-First Century.” Art Documentation: Journ (...)
  • 2 Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier. Broken Music: Artists’ Recordworks. 2nd ed. (New York: Primary (...)
  • 3 Christian Marclay crosses this divide as his work often involves the destruction of vinyl LPs which (...)
  • 4 Susan E. Thomas, “Artists’ Recordworks in the Early Twenty-First Century.” Art Documentation: Journ (...)
  • 5 Armelle Blin-Rolland “Becoming Musicomic: Music and Comics in Resonance.” Modern Languages Open 1, (...)
  • 6 Ibid., 7.

4In a 2013 article Susan E. Thomas1 categorized Geneviève Castrée’s Pamplemoussi as an Artists’ Recordwork, using the term popularised by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier. Writing in the book Broken Music, Block described Artists’ Recordworks as “works of visual artists created with and for the medium of the record: records, record-covers, record-objects, record-installations.”2 Some recordworks have records that are playable, but many use the vinyl as material objects in making art, therefore the sound or playability becomes irrelevant.3 Thomas noted that not all recordworks are vinyl, and that “[c]ontemporary artists’ recordworks often include a combination of vinyl records, flexi discs, cassettes, and CDs with jackets or sleeves of various sizes.”4 As a visual artist working in comics as well as illustration, printmaking, and poster design, Castrée’s record and comic releases qualify as recordworks, however, another term may be more appropriate. Armelle Blin-Rolland classifies work such as Castrée’s as “music-comic albums,” made up of “two separated medial elements” that “are sychronised by the experiencer, who orchestrates the combination of the recorded music and comic book.”5 This is an important point, as it is the reader/listener who decides when to put the needle on the record or start the Compact Disc player, and how that corresponds to reading the comic. Drawing from Deleuze, Blin-Rolland also expands on resonance, which she describes as “the process through which […] elements interrelate, triggering a transformation into a new heterogeneous whole.”6 In effect, synchronising and experiencing music-comic albums creates a new whole that she terms “musicomics.” For purposes of this article, I shall refer to such works as Pamplemoussi as music-comic albums, particularly in their pre-synchronised form.

  • 7 Phil Elverum, “Introduction,” in Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016, ed. Phil Elverum, (Mo (...)

5Geneviève Castrée (1981-2016) grew up in a single parent household (depicted in Susceptible) where she used her own creativity to help give herself stability. She left home aged 18 and embraced the supportive and creative communities that punk music, underground self-publishing, and a Do-It-Yourself spirit made possible. Around this time, she began publishing mini-comics under the name Fidèle Castrée. This was “a play on Fidel Castro, as well as with the meanings, “loyal” and “castrated”” according to her husband Phil Elverum.7 Castrée’s family name was Gosselin, and she occasionally used her married name Elverum (such as on the strip ‘We’re Wolf!’ (2005) in Drawn & Quarterly showcase 3), however she most often used her chosen alternative name for her creative works. As a non-French speaker, it is possible to miss the confrontational nature of her name but in English translation, Geneviève Castrated has a distinctly punk and anti-establishment ring to it.

  • 8 Guy Lawley, “I Like Hate and I Hate Everything Else—The Influence of Punk on Comics,” in Punk Rock: (...)
  • 9 Ibid.

6Writing on the influence and crossover between punk music and comics, Guy Lawley has noted how the DIY attitude of small press comics creators was similar to that of musicians in the punk music scene of the 1970s. There was “a greater acceptance of the basic, even primitive, level of ability so long as it had something worthwhile to say.”8 Lawley also emphasised how important access to a photocopier was to the British small press comics scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Even during the first few years of punk, many creators of self-published music fanzines did not have easy access to this recently available printing technology. Echoing the ‘start your own band’ rallying call of punk, he suggests the motto of the small press should be: ‘This is a felt pen. This is a piece of paper. This is a photocopier. Now start a comic’ [emphasis as original].9 Even though her teenage years took place almost 20 years after the original 1970s punk scene, this is the precisely the type of attitude and creative community that Castrée embraced.

  • 10 “Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016—review,” Hillary Brown, https://www.tcj.com/reviews/ge (...)
  • 11 Julie Doucet, Dirty Plotte 12 (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 1998), 27.

7By the mid-1990s Castrée found herself within the contemporary equivalents of this creative DIY punk spirit. Writing in The Comics Journal Hillary Brown noted how Castrée’s early work “bursts with angry boundary pushing, like the punk rock scene that welcomed her.”10 Her early work included self-published and photocopied black and white zine and mini-comics such as Sundays Suck (1997) but she quickly incorporated more artistic methods for creating her work. El Señor Pene (1997) has a four-colour screen-printed cover (despite the very underground comics-style title Mr Penis). This combination of alternative material presented in a more considered artistic way continued with Mucus de Puce (1998), with its interiors printed in red on white paper and multicolour screen-printed covers. This comic would bring wider attention to Castrée’s work, helped by a mention in the final issue of Dirty Plotte by fellow Quebec artist Julie Doucet.11 By 2002 Castrée had published several books with small press publishers such as L’Oie de Cravan in Montreal and Reprodukt in Germany. According to their website, L’Oie de Cravan have published poetry but also “poetry triggers of all sorts” since 1992. This includes books of lyrics, recipe books and “wordless books of insane visual poetry.” In 2002 they published Lait Frappé, a wordless comic by Castrée, followed by Pamplemoussi in 2004, and then another with French text, Roulathèque Roulathèque Nicolore in 2007. The books are carefully designed and printed using high quality paper stocks. With their high production values and pages often containing only one image and a few words, or a short sentence of text, these books sit in a place where comics, poetry, artists’ books, and children’s picture books overlap.

  • 12 Candida Rifkind, “Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives”, The Comi (...)
  • 13 Julie Doucet “Volcano,” in Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016, ed. Phil Elverum (Montreal: (...)

8By 2004 Castrée had developed a distinctive visual style with recurring character types and artistic motifs, including beds, children, animals, and detailed drawings of plant life. Her art style is realistic but also has a cartoon aspect, “that hovers between cartooning and illustration, naiveté and complexity, dreaminess and ugliness” according to Candida Rifkind.12 Castrée uses a delicate line and includes fantasy elements in her art. Trees, grass, and rocks are stylised so that each blade and leaf is individually drawn. The main character often resembles Castrée, with a shock of black hair and a striped t-shirt or sweater. In many of her stories there are several smaller child-like characters that the main character is caring for (whether through choice or necessity is not always clear). As Julie Doucet noted in her preface to Complete Works, the characters were “roundish and cute” but gloomy and perplexed, as well as being “borderline suicidal or dead.”13 This dichotomy runs throughout Castrée’s work – the apparent innocence of the drawings and endearing character designs contrasting with the morbid themes and sometimes violent content. While elements of this style appear in even her earliest zine and mini-comic work, the higher quality printing and paper in these books helps showcase Castrée’s mature delicate drawing style.

9The intertwining of comics with music has run throughout Castrée’s life beyond the releases discussed in this article. Although she first began making music to record the LP to accompany her book Pamplemoussi in 2004 (which is discussed below), she continued recording and touring throughout her life. Castrée initially recorded under the name Geneviève Castrée, then Weolv, and then later Ô Paon, in a similar fashion to the way she used multiple names on her comics. She also ran What the Heck Fest in Anacortes, Washington, with Phil Elverum, which ran from 2001 to 2019. Castrée created posters, flyers, and artwork for the festival, as well as for other concerts and her own music releases. In 2012 Drawn & Quarterly published Castrée’s memoir of her early life, the autobiographical comic Susceptible. As part of the promotion for the book, she was interviewed on pop-culture blog largeheartedboy.com where she was also asked to compile a playlist for her memoir of songs that influenced her. She described how personal this task felt, and how, because of the importance of music to her, that it felt impossible to prevent it becoming a soundtrack to her life.14 Susceptible detailed Castrée’s life up to the age of 18, when she left the home she shared with her mother and her mother’s partner, and the playlist consists of songs she listened to in her youth. In her teens she started experimenting with drugs and connecting with other young people interested in the punk subculture. She discovered alternative and punk bands like Dead Kennedys, CRASS, and Iggy and the Stooges as well as Sonic Youth, The Raincoats and Stereolab, who all feature in the playlist. The influence of these bands can be seen in the type of music Castrée made, and the DIY way in which she created both comics and music. While these songs do not necessarily correspond to specific moments in Susceptible, they do help to fill in some mood and background to the events she depicts.

  • 15 “Beyond A Crow: Looking at the Life and Works of Geneviève Castrée,” Jasmine Albertson, https://kex (...)
  • 16 “Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? By Woelv—album review,” Brian Howe, https: (...)
  • 17 “NPR: Viking’s Choice: Ô Paon, ‘Fille Tannée/Fille Tendue’—interview with Lars Gotrich,” Geneviève (...)

10The music Castrée made was especially influenced by the Raincoats and Stereolab, as well French singing Quebec punk bands such as WD-40 and Les Secrétaires Volantes (Castrée 2015). Writing on the KEXP website, Jasmine Albertson described Pamplemoussi as a “lo-fi record [that] features Castrée singing in French over a treasure trove of childlike instruments” and the song ‘Chanson Pour Le Tigre’ as featuring “a slinky keyboard line, jazzy high-hat focused drums, and a killer recorder solo.”15 Brian Howe of music review site Pitchfork described Castrée’s music as “cobwebbed drone-folk” and Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? as “a murky lo-fi space that treads a thin line between childlike wonder and childlike fear.”16 Adjectives such as lo-fi, drony, folky, and childlike feature prominently in reviews of Castrée’s music and highlight the contrast between the sense of innocence and the unsettling nature of much of her work. In an interview with Lars Gotrich, Castrée also noted that her final music release, Ô Paon’s Fleuve (2015), was a companion piece to Susceptible, “But with Fleuve, I was mostly writing about a potential version of myself—a more bad-ass, f----- up one, a kid who truly wears her anger on her sleeves and gets in trouble for it in serious ways. I am/was too polite to be her” [redaction as original].17 Fleuve and Susceptible were released three years apart, and were not conceived as one work, so do not qualify as a music-comic album and are not discussed together in this article.

Comics and music

  • 18 Eric P. Nash, Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater (New York: Abrams, 2009), 57.
  • 19 George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics: A Slight History. Reprint with introduc (...)
  • 20 For a more detailed history of comics and performance see: Damon Herd, Comics and Performance: From (...)

11Castrée’s music-comic albums can be positioned in a larger history of interactions between comics and music (and other types of performance). As long as comics and visual storytelling have existed there have been performances created around them. As far back as the eighth century in Japan Buddhist and Shinto monks produced ‘emaki’—pictorial scrolls used to illustrate the oral histories of their monasteries.18 At the end of the nineteenth century, the music halls of Britain featured shows based around the character of Ally Sloper, originally created in print by Charles Ross and Marie Duval, and in the USA, cartoonist Winsor McCay, worked as a performer in vaudeville as well as writing and drawing newspaper cartoon strips such as Little Nemo in Slumberland. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, was adapted into a ballet in 1922 by Adolph Bolm and more recently Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical comic Fun Home was adapted into a musical in 2013.19 Over the last 25 years there has been a wealth of comics performance events around the world, including Robert Sikoryak’s Carousel in New York. Each event involves comics creators presenting their work to an audience in a theatrical setting. Most commonly, the artist reads the comics out loud while the panels of the comic are projected onto a screen for the audience to view, often with musical accompaniment or sound effects.20

  • 21 Ian Hague, Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (Abingdon: R (...)

12When comics are performed, it is mostly in group settings—an artist reading, or otherwise presenting, comics to an audience. The following section focuses on the interaction of comics and music but specifically with recorded music. What Ian Hague described as “sounds with comics”, that is, comics that rely on an external device such as a CD player to play the music.21 These comics usually come with vinyl records, CDs, or downloadable digital music files, which can be listened to while reading the comic. This usually means that these music-comic albums are experienced in the same way that comics most commonly are—as an individual activity, rather than as a communal theatrical experience.

  • 22 Various artists, Flash Fearless versus the Zorg Women parts 5 & 6 (London: Chrysalis records, 1975) (...)

13An early music-comic album was the rock opera Flash Fearless versus the Zorg Women parts 5 & 6 (1975). It was a vinyl LP record with accompanying comic, which was subtitled “A Nostalgic Musical of the 24th Century.”22 Perhaps inspired by the success of shows such as Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Show, it was a spoof of 1930s/40s science fiction comics and serials such as Flash Gordon. The musicians were brought together by producer John Alcock and include many big names in the blues rock scene of the 1970s, including Alice Cooper and members of The Who. The LP comes with a 12-page 11” square comic. The comic claims to be part of the continuing tales of Flash Fearless (Flash Gordon in all but surname) but in reality, this was a one-off production made to feel like you had just dropped into the middle of a run of Saturday morning serial episodes. The artwork was created by Paul Sample, more famous for “Ogri”, a comic featured in Bike motorcycling magazine from 1972 to 2009. Flash Fearless was drawn in the style and lewd humour of contemporary 1970s underground comics and is typical of fantasy/science fiction comic art of the time, such as in Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal.

14In the narrative, Flash and his crew are kidnapped by the Zorg women and subjected to sexual torture before escaping. As the story reaches its conclusion, Flash’s spaceship is hijacked by space pirates, thus ending on a cliff-hanger. In true serial style the final caption of the comic reads “Is this the end of Flash Fearless and his loyal crew? Don’t miss next week’s episode of Flash Fearless, at your newstands NOW!” There never was a next episode, as indeed there were no prior episodes before these parts—despite the comic beginning with a caption that stated, “You remember from last week’s exciting episode…” Taken together, the songs on the LP have a loose story arc but they can be also taken individually as generic 1970s blues-rock songs. The comic fleshes out the story and the lyrics to the songs are included in the characters’ speech balloons alongside the dialogue. Despite a press release featuring in the British rock music press in May 1975, the LP made little impact and any plans to turn into a live rock-opera were shelved. It is now only a minor footnote in the careers of the musicians involved. However, the LP is notable for being a combination package of LP and comic with each adding elements to the overall story and visual narrative. Despite this, the LP and comic could be read and listened to as separate media with no discernible loss in understanding. The LP functions in a similar fashion to a cast recording or soundtrack LP from a Broadway show. The inclusion of full song lyrics in the speech bubbles allows the comic to appear like a drawn version of a rock opera, although these large balloons of text would seem a little incongruous to a regular comics reader. One possible reading mode could be to read the comic until you come to a balloon with lyrics and then play that track, then stop the record and read on until the next balloon. This would be the reading/listening mode that would most resemble the experience of watching a rock-opera in a theatre.

  • 23 Moreno Andreatta, Martin Granger, Tom Johnson, and Valentin Villenave, “Music, Mathematics and Lang (...)
  • 24 Gert Meesters, “Creativity in Comics. Exploring the Frontiers of the Medium by Respecting Explicit (...)

15Other music-comic albums include the work of Oumupo. Both Oubapo and Oumupo follow in the tradition of Oulipo (Ouvroir de la littérature potentielle or workshop for potential literature), founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lyonnais in 1960. They were part of a group of writers and mathematicians who sought to transform literature by imposing constraints on the creative process. This has since inspired constraint-based experiments in other artforms—known collectively as Ou-X-Po. The X is exchanged for the first two letters or abbreviation of each artform. Oumupo stands for Ouvroir de musique potentielle (often stylised as OuMuPo), and there have been several Oumupo undertakings since the 1960s. According to Andreatta et al., “[m]usic was very much included in Le Lionnais’ scope, and several Oumupo groups did coexist (in a rather informal way) over the next few decades” [italics as original].23 In 1992 Oubapo (Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle or OuBaPo) was established as a collective by founding members of French comics publishers L’Association, Jean-Christophe Menu and Lewis Trondheim, alongside other comics creators and theorists. According to Gert Meesters’ in his essay “Creativity in Comics”, Oubapo and its members came “up with explicit, self-imposed formal restrictions on their comic production.”24

16Comics and music Ou-X-Po creatives have occasionally come together to present work. At a joint concert under the banner of OuBaMuPo at a science fair in Strasbourg in 2017 Alex Baladi, Ivan Gulizia, Andréas Kündig, and Etienne Lécroart represented Oubapo alongside Moreno Andreatta and Valentin Villenave for Oumupo. However, more relevant to this essay is the series of CDs and comic books released by French record label Ici d’ailleurs… These were collaborations with musicians and comics artists associated with the L’Association Oubapo group. They released six CDs between 2004 and 2006, each in a generic Oumupo branded brown card sleeve. Only the die cut letter Os in the sleeve revealed the edition number and the name of the musical act, including Third Eye Foundation, Rob Swift, and DJ Krush. Each CD was accompanied by a comic booklet from artists including Jochen Gerner, Dupuy and Berberian, and Killoffer.

  • 25 DJ Krush and Killoffer, Oumupo 6 (Nancy: Ici d’ailleurs…, 2006) compact disc and comic.

17Disc 6 is by DJ Krush and Killoffer25 and there is no clear connection between the music and the comic. There are, for example, 13 tracks of music on the CD and 16 pages in the comic, so one page is not analogous to one track. Each artist has used constraints specific to their medium which are included on an insert card and printed in both French and English. The page count of 16 is one of the constraints of the comic. The main constraint for the musicians was to use the catalogue of Ici d’ailleurs… and its offshoot label 0101 as a resource for samples to make the music. For the comics artists, another constraint was that each frame of the comic must contain a hybrid of their own art with previously existing art. As well as the given constraints, adding your own was a constraint specified by Oubapo. Killoffer decided to illustrate the 1923 chess game between Marcel Duchamp and the creator of the Belgian Chess Federation, Edouard Verschueren, as his own constraint. Each square page of the comic is made up of four equal-sized square panels (another constraint), and in each panel there is a crowd of people drawn by Killoffer. There are also characters taken from the artwork of other comics artists and collaged into Killoffer’s crowd scenes. They represent the chess pieces and the moves they make—one knight is represented by a horse drawn by David B, and a pawn is a cat-like drawing by Julie Doucet, for example. The music, which is electronic and beat-driven, does not appear to correspond to the artwork in any obvious way, and there is little in the way of resonance that Blin-Rolland would consider necessary to be a musicomic.

  • 26 Philippe Paolucci, “Listening to Comics: When Digital Technology Makes the Ninth Art Audible,” L’éc (...)
  • 27 Ibid.
  • 28 Ibid.

18In his essay “Listening to Comics: When Digital Technology Makes the Ninth Art Audible,” Philippe Paolucci discussed the differences that sound makes to the reading experience of comics. Using Philippe Marion’s concept of homochrony/heterochrony, Paolucci states that “homochrony occurs when the user follows a predefined time sequence,” such as when they watch a movie, and that “heterochrony allows the reader to browse inscriptions (texts, images, etc,) at his own pace, outside of any temporal dictates,” such as when they read a comic or novel.26 A comic with an accompanying music (on CD, record, or other format) sits in an ambiguous position—if read to the pre-defined time sequence of the music it would be homochronous, but if the listening time is not equated with the reading time, then the experience is heterochronous, by Paolucci’s definition. As the music of the DJ Krush CD is “durational extradiegetic sounds,” that is, it lasts more than a moment (in contrast to sound effects) and exists outside the diegetic space of Killoffer’s comic, it is not as likely to impose a temporality or “reception time” on the reading.27 This means that the reader can choose to synchronise the music with their reading, but also that each media format is autonomous and can be experienced independently. Paolucci also stated that “intradiegetic sounds come closest to homochrony” but that these would need to be closely synchronised to the encourage the reader to follow it.28 The Flash Fearless comic/LP set could be described as partially homochromous, in that the speech balloons in the comic contain the song lyrics could be synchronised with the playing of the songs. However, the action depicted between these balloons contains no corresponding audio (such as a dialogue track) and can therefore be read with no accompanying music, and so makes a homochromous experience difficult.

19A creator who encourages homochrony in her work is Miranda Smart, a small press publisher and experimental comics maker. Smart’s 12-page riso-printed abstract comic Briz de Mar (2018) has a screen-printed cover and comes with a 7” vinyl record (or digital download link) containing a music track by Jope Sound. The intention is that the music should sync exactly with the reading experience. The music track lasts 2 minutes 41 seconds, which means that Smart and Jope Sound have designed the audio and visual elements so that it should take exactly that amount of time to read the comic. The download file version makes it easier to determine the start and end points of the audio than it would be on vinyl. Smart stated on her website that “The goal of each edition is for the reader to be so submerged in the work that they read along at the precise, intended pace it was drawn and scored.”29 Smart’s comic is heavily homochromous—there are sound effects of water and breaking glass, and specific noises in the score to correspond to the comic visuals and to help the reader move through the narrative. Smart and her musical collaborator worked to create a natural synergy so the reader could listen to the music and know exactly when to turn the page.30 However, some ambiguity remains, the water and glass noises correspond to images in Briz de Mar, but the comic is abstract and has no textual elements, so it is not always obvious how the musical cues correspond to reading. Smart followed this comic with Are You Satisfied? (2021), an 8-page concertina comic book that comes with a download code for a music track by experimental electronic act Zizany. The track is purely instrumental so is lacking what could be considered diegetic sounds, such as sound effects. It is, therefore, harder to precisely synchronise book and music but the shifts in musical mood and comic art do provide some resonance.

Pamplemoussi

20Pamplemoussi was published by L’Oie de Cravan in a limited edition of 800 in 2004. The publishers specialise in poetry but have also published comics and cartoons by artists such as Julie Doucet. Pamplemoussi is described on the website of Castrée’s last music project, Ô Paon, as “A book of drawings that includes the first record of songs by Geneviève Castrée. A little bit like a children’s book, there are animals and also half-naked women. Clumsy songs that remain the favourites of some people” (my emphasis).31 Each page of the book is one large panel, so the book’s size and layout encourage comparison to children’s books. Rifkind noted that Castrée’s “clear line” and “illustrative style” helped situate her work with children’s books as much as with comics.32

Figure : Cover of Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.

21Culturally, Pamplemoussi can be positioned somewhere in between the photocopied mini-comics of Castrée’s early career and the mainstream lithographic offset print production of her later work. While the inside pages are litho printed, the cover is screen-printed, and readers can see and feel the individual layers of ink on the cover, which is printed on light brown card stock in four colours. There is a mid-range blue for the sky and a slightly darker blue for the clouds, followed by black for the mountains then white for the snow, stars, and cover text (see Figure 1). It has fold-over French flaps which continue the cover image. The inside cover is also screen-printed but here only one colour is used, a pale blue, to create an intricate spider’s web pattern on the surface of the brown card. The tactility, and care in production, give it the look and feel (or aura) of an art object rather than a disposable mass-produced comic, which is enhanced by the limited print run. The size of the book also adds to the impact – it is 12” square, and is packaged with a long-playing vinyl record, as well as a printed sheet with English translations of the lyrics to the songs on the LP. Until this publication, Castrée could be considered a visual artist, a comics creator, and small press publisher, however, now she wanted there to be music to accompany the visual art. Unwilling to allow anyone else to create the music, Castrée taught herself how to make the music she felt was required, to “figure out a way to write songs and find a way to make some sounds come out of a guitar as I was singing them.”33 The following sections analyse some of the strips in the book along with the corresponding music. Each comic has a title page which most often depicts the creature in the title.

Figure : Pamplemoussi title page by Geneviève Castrée.

  • 34 Geneviève Castrée, Pamplemoussi. Montreal: L’Oie de Cravan, 2004. Comic and vinyl record.
  • 35 Perhaps the most famous graphical score is Stripsody (1966) by Cathy Berberian which uses comic boo (...)

22The LP opens with a seven second song, that is numbered ‘0’ on the centre label of the vinyl and titled ‘pamplemoussi.’ It consists of a three-note motif played three times on a recorder and finishes with the notes transposed in a final rendition. This simple riff (on an instrument many people only played while at primary school) emphasises the childlike elements of Castrée’s work. The title page of the comic depicts a topless young male wearing dirty pyjama bottoms sitting on an elephant beside nine children (see Figure 2). These visual motifs are repeated in the strip “We’re Wolf!” which was released the following year, suggesting a connection between the work. Castrée’s name is drawn like spaghetti coming out of the elephant’s trunk. The English lyric translation sheet describes the image as “a boy riding an elephant with his babies...”34 In front of the elephant are 12 flying owls, each carrying one letter of PAMPLEMOUSSI. The owls are wearing dresses with button-like dots on them, and the buttons are positioned on the dresses to resemble the fingering pattern to play specific notes on a recorder. This corresponds to the short, repeated recorder riff of the music track. We can see the music rendered in pictorial form on the owl’s costumes and the image works like a graphical score.35 The music could be considered diegetic, and we can synchronise our gaze along with the notes on the recorder and the resonance encourages a higher sense of homochrony in this short piece.

23The overlap of Castrée’s comics with artists’ books and graphical scores also suggests a possible inspiration in the work of Yoko Ono, particularly Grapefruit, her artists’ book of event scores published in 1964—pamplemoussi is French for grapefruit.

Figure : Page from “Chanson pour les têtes molles,” in Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.

24The first full track on Pamplemoussi, “Chanson pour les têtes molles” (Song for the soft heads) begins with whispered breathy vocals and gentle acoustic guitar strumming. The song is like a lullaby with a low hum of backing vocals, and the lyrics mention storms, impatience, bad vibrations, and bad people—“absolute zeroes.” In the comic, a group of children lie sleeping curled up together, like dogs or cats. The children are drawn to resemble Castrée’s avatar, and this is a recurring motif in her work, a representation of herself as an unruly group of children needing to be looked after but also not seeming to care. As the story progresses, a bearded head with eyes closed and yawning mouth emerges from the cloud and grows bigger each page (see Figure 3). The children begin to stir, some are rubbing their eyes but none of them look perturbed by the events. The children become entangled in the beard. The images and music suggest a waking up, a gentle beginning that also hints at possible darkness to come when the head attempts to eat the children. However, beyond the lullaby and the suggestion of bad people, there is no explicit connection or synchronisation with the images and the music. The mood is sombre and minor key. The comic and song can be experienced separately; however, the resonance of the song deepens the emotional pull of the story.

  • 36 See “We’re Wolf!” in Drawn & Quarterly showcase 3 (2005).
  • 37 Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, “Self-Regarding Art,” Biography 31(1) (2008): v-xxiii.

25In “Chanson pour les guêpes” (Song for the wasps) there are no wasps in the comic, but small ghostly faces appear in the background as a Castrée avatar appears to struggle to sleep. The figure is wrapped in a grey sleeping bag on a metal framed bed with a striped mattress and white pillow, which is also a motif that appears regularly in Castrée’s work.36 Apart from an image in the introductory paratexts of the book showing a naked figure covered in leaves eating a grapefruit, this is the first appearance of a character that looks to be Castrée’s autobiographical avatar. Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti use this term to denote the drawn version, or narrated “I”, of the cartoonist in autobiographical comics.37 The use of the slightly androgynous character drawn to look like Castrée, with messy short black hair, freckled cheeks, and, often, a striped sweater, suggests an autobiographical element to the work. Not necessarily in a factual way, but more in mood, emotion, or metaphor.

Figure : Page from “Chanson pour les guêpes,” in Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.

26The story pages have one large circular panel per page. Each is a black circle on a white page with the bed sitting in centre left of circle. The ground is densely hatched black lines that look like sea or swirling smoke. There are two white faces (made up of three dots) in the ‘smoke’ and the background above the bed is solid black. The figure looks to be waking up, or uncomfortable, and more faces appear in the smoke as the figure twists in the bed. After three pages the figure is sitting up waving their arms towards the faces (see Figure 4). It looks like a naked child and its body is almost completely outside of the sleeping bag. The faces are now in the sky, each trailing smoke, or waves behind it. On the final page, the figure looks to be waking up and taking a thumb from its mouth. The story could be a dream or a metaphor for waking, and the lyrics concern the lack of sleep, depression, and monsters and animals. The narrator likens themselves to an “abominable creature.” The music has faster strumming on a guitar with layered percussion and effects, such as water sloshing, along with at least two vocal tracks. It sounds a little more chaotic than before. There is a cello in the background, which comes to the fore towards the end, along with sloshing sound. Again, the music is more of an accompaniment to the comic rather than diegetic or synchronised sound, although the lyrics align more with the imagery.

Figure : Page from “Chanson pour le tigre,” in Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.

27On the title page of the next track “Chanson pour le tigre” (Song for the tiger), the avatar from the last story can be seen asleep in a sleeping bag and sucking her thumb. The bag is floating like a balloon and is attached to a small car driven by a hare. A speech balloon with an elephant inside has its tail pointing to the figure’s head, possibly indicating a dream. The page-size panels are circular (as they are in many of the strips) with a black border containing several flying kites—one of which has a flower/leaf on it. In the centre is a drawing of a small elephant in a forest. The detailed drawings of grass, ferns, and trees with leaves and flowers are typical of Castrée’s style. The figure is asleep on the elephant’s back and is naked apart from underpants and a covering of leaves. Later the figure wakes up and the elephant runs off. On the next page the figure reacts open-mouthed to a tiger that has appeared. The figure does not look scared although we can only see a quarter view of their face (they may be yawning). The tiger is leaping, and grass or leaves are flying around. It is wide eyed and baring its teeth but looks more startled than scary (see Figure 5). At the end, the tiger is being carried through the air by two kites attached to its back. There is a black cloud behind it and a puff of smoke like a speech balloon coming from its mouth. A crying face, similar to the main figure, is in the smoke. There is more of a jazzy, swing element to the music with drums, glockenspiel, double bass, and a staccato feel to the vocals. A recorder riff recalls the opening song. The translated lyrics have a paragraph from the main character’s point of view, they are “a pretty from the jungle” who has sharpened their teeth to protect them from the tiger. We only get the full picture of how the character is feeling with the song and comic combined—the ambiguous nature of the drawing is clarified by the lyric. While the music is not diegetic or synchronised, the lyrics add meaning to the storyline and underline the visual narrative.

Figure : Page from “Chanson pour la hase,” in Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.

  • 38 The De Luca Effect is named after Italian comics artist Gianni De Luca who frequently used multiple (...)

28In the final comic “La hase” (The hare), the title character looks more like a stuffed toy than a real hare. It has a surprised expression and a hole in its belly. Two kites are flying beside it and are tethered inside the hole, and one has a leaf or flower symbol on it. The first page shows multiple images of the hare in a De Luca-style effect that suggests movement through space and time by depicting multiple versions of the same character on the page with no borders separating them.38 The hare is moving towards the reader, each version bigger than the last and its belly grows even larger. In the second hare the image in the belly hole appears to contain tree trunks. In the largest/nearest hare the hole is very big, and we can see inside the forest to the sleepy and naked but for a few leaves, child-like character that looks like Castrée. Then we see another De Luca effect with several versions of the Castrée avatar behind the tree trunks, smiling or shouting and screaming with leaves covering their genitals like biblical fig leaves (see Figure 6). Their eyes are closed and later three stylised sausage dogs made from spider’s web (similar to those on the book’s inside cover) and with sharp teeth approach from outside the page. The dogs move closer and bite the leg of the figure, who reacts screaming. The figure becomes contorted, and a string is shown leading from their mouth to the next page. The string continues to a kite with the flower/leaf emblem. The background is black and there is a small rocky island drawn in white. This is the longest song on the record. It starts with guitar then bass drum and percussion, with low vocals. A violin comes in after a minute and vocal melody, guitar line and violin intertwine before building to a crescendo around five minutes. It then continues with shaker, guitar, and vocals more quietly and spaced out before ending on a whispered vocal. Lyrics discuss the hare trapped in a box it is unaware of. There is a desire to break free but with a knowledge that in other places people are just as mean and “on a different planet, you suffocate.” It is more difficult to synchronise the music to the comic as all the images are single panels on a full page and the strip is only nine pages long, while the song lasts for eight minutes. The music and comic again work as an accompaniment to each other. While there may not be a high degree of homochrony, it is possible to imagine the images projected behind the music if it was played live.

  • 39 Candida Rifkind, “Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives,” The Comi (...)
  • 40 Rifkind, Candida, “Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives,” The Com (...)

29The strips in Pamplemoussi feature recurring characters, such as the Castrée avatar and the babies (which can also be seen as Castrée avatars), as well as elephants, beds with striped mattresses, and string. This underlines themes such as depression and solitude, and Rifkind suggests that the bed acts as a site of “memory imagined as an inverted fairy tale” where Castrée goes to avoid emotion. The book feels very personal, as if it is detailing an anxiety or “tension between vulnerability and resilience” that Rifkind stated was present in Castrée’s work.39 Castrée’s final work, A Bubble, was completed by Anders Nilsen and published posthumously in 2018. This is a children’s board book that Castrée aimed to complete for her young daughter, that contains many of the visual styles and motifs in her earlier work. In a similar fashion to the music-comic albums under discussion, the pages are squarer than a traditional comic, and each contains a single image where Castrée and her daughter are separated by a circular bubble that is medical as much as it is metaphorical. Rifkind wrote that circular panels used in Susceptible stood out from the grid structure as a symbol of Castrée’s desire to break from her traumatic childhood experiences.40 However, the repeated use of the circular panel suggests that this signified not just an escape for Castrée but also a place of safety and comfort.

  • 41 Philippe Paolucci, “Listening to Comics: When Digital Technology Makes the Ninth Art Audible,” tran (...)

30The accompanying songs in Pamplemoussi help set the mood rather than the reading pace. They outline when to move onto the next story but not when to turn the pages of each story in the comic, so maintain a large degree of heterochrony. Paolucci noted the complication of programming synced sound into a digital comic,41 and, similarly, there is no way to accurately and consistently synchronise when a reader starts a turntable and places a needle on a record (or where exactly in the groove the needle will land) to when they start reading the comic. If playing the music from the LP then the reader will also need to stop halfway through to turn the record over, further complicating the reading/listening relationship.

Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ?

31Castrée’s next music-comic album was released on a music label rather than a print publisher. K Records is an independent record label based in Olympia, Washington, and Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? (2007) was an unlimited edition LP (it is still in print) with a colour comic printed using 4-colour offset lithography. The K Records press release describes the album as “a record by WOELV, a musical entity which consisted of a single member, Geneviève Castrée. This album is accompanied by a soft cover book containing lyrics (with multiple translations) and original artwork by Geneviève.”42 K Records was a significant supporter of feminist punk music and released records by many ‘riot grrrl’ bands in the 1990s. It was the largest label Castrée released her music on, however, she later set up her own label Disques Ô Paon. Although she continued to publish comics, Castrée forged a parallel (and intertwined) career as a musician. Here, she was recording under a new name, Woelv, although this would later change as Castrée released subsequent records as Ô Paon (which translates as O peacock). The press release stated that this album is accompanied by a book containing lyrics and artwork. For Pamplemoussi, Castrée said that she wanted the music to accompany the comic, so the emphasis shifted (if only slightly), from the comic being the primary artform previously, to the music being the main focus here.

32The overall package sleeve for the album is a wrap-around card, printed mainly in black, with drawings of eight Castrée avatars standing in green foliage wearing camouflage and red or green fabric strips masking their eyes (see Figure 7). Three figures have open mouths and look like they are singing. Long bands that look like elongated leaves have text on them, they state: “Chacun une victime, d’une façon ou d’une autre” (translation: Each one a victim, in one way or another); “Sentez vous responsables !(Feel responsible!); “Ô jeunesse en morceaux” (O youth in pieces); “Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? Par Woelv” (All Alone in the Forest in Broad Daylight, Are You Scared? By Woelv).

Figure : Cover of Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.

33The comic book is 12” square and perfect bound in a similar fashion to Pamplemoussi. However, there are no fine art/boutique publishing embellishments, as it is litho-printed in black and white with occasional spot colour in red. The cover depicts two figures in black and white on a black background. One is seated and looks like a Castrée avatar from the overall cover. Tears are rolling down their cheeks from under an eye mask. They are holding the hand of the other figure who is lying down. This figure looks unconscious or dead, and their body is covered in lines that give the impression of tree bark. Their eyes are black holes, and their mouth is gaping. They look like a zombie wearing ragged striped pyjamas. There are two speech balloons, each containing half of the title. The mood is dark, with death and war implied by the drawings on the comic and overall package covers. The images throughout are single drawings to a page, in a similar fashion to Pamplemoussi and children’s picture books. Most strips are four pages with several only two, and there are no title pages for the strips as there were in the earlier album.

Figure : Page from “Drapeau blanc,” in Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.

34The first comic, for the song “Drapeau Blanc” (White Flag), depicts five children having a snowball fight, two against three. The three are behind a wall made of snow, and on the fourth page, one child hits another in the mouth with a rock (see Figure 8). The pages consist mainly of white negative space and the edge of each has lyrics in four languages. Throughout the book there is a margin of around two inches on the outside of the pages with space for the handwritten lyrics in French and English as well as other languages such as Korean, Russian, and Arabic. The lyrics here are drawn in red in Castrée’s cursive handwriting and describe the fighting in more detail and allude to jealousy, violence, and warfare rather than a playground skirmish. They describe how the singer wants to sink in snow and hide from wars. The lyrics and drawings still feel personal but there is also a more obvious wider political awareness. The recording sounds higher fidelity than Pamplemoussi, and the song starts with a finger picking electric guitar and double tracked vocals. There is a slight pause at around a minute and then drums kick in like a marching band. The music becomes louder and more insistent with the singing becoming wailing before dropping away at the end. The music is connected to the song but there is no sense of homochrony in the reading.

Figure : Page from “La Petite Cane dans la nappe de pétrole,” in Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.

35In “La Petite Cane dans la nappe de pétrole” (The young female duck in a puddle of petrol) the art is dense black and dark grey with white spots depicting factory towers and chimneys in the background, one is spewing white smoke. A large ball of dense hatching (perhaps depicting a balloon of oil) takes up most of each page. It appears to be dripping from outside the top of the page and hangs over the sea and there are ghostly faces in the water. One duck sits in the oil balloon and there are dozens of white hatched patches swirling around. Initially, the duck seems placid but then is open-beaked and looks agitated, and then appears to be vomiting oil. On the last page only the duck’s head is visible, and it looks to be drowning and an empty speech balloon points to its mouth (see Figure 9). The lyrics are drawn in white in the black border in four languages including French, Korean, Japanese, and English. The lyrics appear to be a metaphor, an oil covered bird representing environmental catastrophe and difficult relationships between people. The comic is four pages long, but the song is nearer four minutes. The music begins with an insistent strummed acoustic guitar. The strumming building up becoming more chaotic as the drumming comes in. The singing is more like chanting. The instrumentation drops out apart from the distorted drum track, which sounds foreboding, and then the chanting comes back in on top. The combination of the art and music makes the destruction of the planet theme explicit but also feels like a personal statement of revenge.

Figure : Page from “Sous mon manteau,” in Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.

36In “Sous mon manteau” (“Under my coat”) ten toddlers are fighting. They are wearing camouflage uniforms/pyjamas and have leg irons around their ankles. One is topless and another has no trousers. The fight is very violent—one child has a broken bottle, and another is bludgeoning the next child with a rock. They are kicking, gouging, and stabbing each other. Next there are more children, and one is in a cage being spat at by the others while one child has a black eye and is passing a missile shell to another (see Figure 10). These children are not the Castrée avatar babies from earlier but drawn to be distinct from each other and Castrée. There is a worried looking woman dressed like Disney’s Snow White who pulls her cloak around her and holds the hand of one child while five others are still fighting. Next, a group of people are depicted standing under an American flag. A seated woman reads a tabloid magazine, and a seated man holds a beer can; an overweight woman has a dotted speech balloon, as if she is whispering, with the drawing of a naked woman’s body inside it, and all three are in leg irons. Beside them are two men in suits, one looks like George W. Bush, and a bearded man in a cowboy hat is holding the flag. The dialogue is in morse code, which is also written on the flag. The outside page edges have lyrics in four languages including French, Arabic, and English, written in Castrée’s cursive style. The Morse code translation is: “wars are fought by babies, your babies” with the flag stating “war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance strenght” [spelling as original]. Castrée has added a note that the song was written in Arabic using a small Arabic-English phrasebook, then translated into French, then English again to keep a child-like quality. The lyrics mention “noble souls abhor wrong-doing so violently that they have killed one another.” The music begins with folky guitar picking and spoken-singing which becomes double tracked and choral. In the middle, a low bowed bass line comes in before an organ, while the picked guitar riff continues. There is no denying the angry and political nature of the visuals and the lyrics, which also seem sarcastic and satirical, and both seem in contrast to the musical style.

Figure : Page from the strip “Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour,” in Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.

37The title track “Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour” (“Alone in the forest in the middle of the day”) is the final song. The 18-page strip consists of black pages containing handwritten testimonies and interviews with protestors, and people with experience of war around the world. These are written in English and French, and alternated with pages of drawings. A bomb drifts up the pages on the left after each page turn as if time is running in reverse. The illustrated pages begin in a forest of birch trees. Corpse like people of different nationalities float through the air with a Castrée avatar sitting curled into a ball on the white ground wearing striped pyjamas (see Figure 11). As different corpses with more horrific injuries float by Castrée is depicted screaming. One corpse is carrying its dismembered head, another a dead baby. Then Castrée is standing and looking away as the corpses drift off to the right of the page. Castrée is standing with hands over her eyes in anguish as the last corpse edges off the page. Castrée lifts a hand to reveal a corpse like face—dark eyes and lines on face and neck, and the trees in the background begin to fade. As Castrée becomes more corpse-like, her pyjamas become more ragged. Next Castrée is depicted covered in lines (like tree bark), with black holes for eyes and is beginning to float like the other corpses. Lastly, Castrée’s corpse is lying on ground wearing just a scrap of ragged pyjamas. The trees are gone, and the page is blank. The corpse is the same as on the comic’s cover, thus revealing that the image was a live Castrée holding the hand of a dying or dead Castrée. The accompanying song is the longest on the record at over 12 minutes. It starts with slightly folky and distorted acoustic guitar with quiet droning vocals and a distorted white noise texture in the background. Three minutes in, the music fades to white noise. Forest noises appear beside distant industrial and aircraft noises. The LP ends with distorted microphone noise then the sound of a plane taking off. This may be the bleakest imagery of the book, in what is the bleakest book of Castrée’s career. The inevitability of death and the destruction of the world loom over everything here. The world fades away on the page as the music becomes white noise. The whole music-comic experience resonates like a last howl at a terrifying, painful, cruel world. A creative punk scream in the face of unspeakable atrocity.

Conclusion

38The comics and songs on Castrée’s two music-comic albums stand up both as autonomous works and as accompaniments to each other. However, the songs also work as paratexts for the comics, often adding more information to the stories with both the lyrics and mood of the music. In “Chanson pour le tigre,” for example, the lyrics are partly from the main character’s perspective. The “pretty from the jungle” has sharpened their teeth to protect them from the tiger. We do not see the teeth as the figure is seen from behind at a quarter angle, but they may be yawning or baring their teeth. While the music is not diegetic or synchronised, the lyrics add meaning to the storyline and underline the visual narrative. In “Sang jeune,” the characters stumble around in ragged clothes sniffing glue. They become sick and unconscious, and there are pools of vomit on the ground next to where they lie. The song has a heavily reverbed guitar played at a slow pace with spare-sounding high hat and bass drum percussion. The quivering vocals come in slowly. It is woozy and funereal. The music adds to the lightheaded and sickly feeling that we see depicted with the characters. There is resonance but by Paolucci’s definition these are mainly heterochronous experiences.

39If we consider the music to encourage a homochromous reading, then each comic must be read during the time that it takes to play the song. Most of the songs on Pamplemoussi are between two to five minutes long, giving ample time to read the comics as they are between five to nine pages long and mostly feature one main image or panel per page. However, the reader must attempt to deduce from the songs, or decide for themselves, when to turn the pages, so only the overall length counts towards the homochromous experience. In Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? most of the songs are between two and four minutes long, although several are around a minute long. Most strips are four pages long and several are two, with the final strip being 18 pages. The shorter songs make a homochromous reading difficult but not impossible. It does not appear that the albums were created to encourage homonchronous reading, however, experiencing them both together does encourage resonance and turns the combined music-comic album elements into a whole that Blin-Rolland termed musicomics.

40As noted above, the idea of music-comic albums also situates comics in a wider performance related sphere, as well as encompassing artists’ and children’s books. Pamplemoussi in particular, with its fine art and boutique publishing trappings, sits alongside Miranda Smart’s limited edition riso- and screen-printed music-comic album Briz de Mar as well as work such as Yoko Ono’s event score collection Grapefruit. Smart’s comics are deliberately constructed to be heavily homochronous with sound effects of water and breaking glass, and specific noises in the musical score to correspond to the abstract comic images and to help the reader to move through the narrative. However, most of the strip/song combinations in Castrée’s music-comic albums only support a heterochronous reading. There are no sound effects or other synchronised audio tracks, only the length of time the songs take to play and the number of pages of the comics. One exception is Pamplemoussi’s short title comic and music track, with the buttons drawn on the owls’ dresses positioned to resemble the fingering pattern for a recorder. This song is only a few seconds long with a repeated riff played on recorder allowing a direct connection between comic and music. As noted above, this is the most explicit example of homochrony across both of Castrée’s music-comic albums. Outside of this example, it is possible to experience the albums of Genviève Castrée in a homochronous fashion, however, it is more likely that most people will experience the works with only a loose homochrony at best, and that for most, the reading will be a heterochronous experience.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Albertson, Jasmine. “Beyond A Crow: Looking at the Life and Works of Geneviève Castrée,” https://kexp.org/read/2019/3/28/beyond-crow-looking-he-life-and-works-genevieve-castree/ (accessed April 14, 2023).

Andreatta, Moreno, Granger, Martin, Johnson, Tom and Villenave, Valentin. “Music, Mathematics and Language: Chronicles from the Oumupo Sandbox” in Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, edited by Zoï Kapoula, 255-174. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018.

Blin-Rolland, Armelle. “Becoming Musicomic: Music and Comics in Resonance.” Modern Languages Open 1, no.2 (2019): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.235.

Block, Ursula and Glasmeier, Michael. Broken Music: Artists’ Recordworks. 2nd edition. New York: Primary Information, 2018.

Brown, Hillary. “Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016—review.” https://www.tcj.com/reviews/genevieve-castree-complete-works-1981-2016/ (accessed January 15, 2024).

Castrée, Geneviève. Pamplemoussi. Montreal: L’Oie de Cravan, 2004. Comic and vinyl record.

Castrée, Geneviève (recording as Woelv). Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? Olympia: K Records, 2007. Comic and vinyl record.

Castrée, Geneviève. Susceptible. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2012.

Castrée, Geneviève. “Book Notes—Geneviève Castrée Susceptible,” 2013a, https://largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2013/02/book_notes_gene.html (accessed June 10, 2023).

Castrée, Geneviève. “The Comics Journal: Interview with Naomi Fry,” 2013b, https://www.tcj.com/the-genevieve-castree-interview/ (accessed November 20, 2022).

Castrée, Geneviève. “NPR: Viking’s Choice: Ô Paon, ‘Fille Tannée/Fille Tendue’—interview with Lars Gotrich,” https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2015/01/27/381646932/vikings-choice-paon-fille-tann-e-fille-tendue (accessed September 20, 2023).

Castrée, Geneviève. A Bubble. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2018.

Castrée, Geneviève. Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016, edited by Phil Elverum. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2022.

DJ Krush and Killoffer. Oumupo 6. Nancy: Ici d’ailleurs…, 2006. Compact disc and comic.

Doucet, Julie. Dirty Plotte 12. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 1998.

Doucet, Julie. “Volcano” in Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016, edited by Phil Elverum, xxii. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2022.

Elverum, Phil. “Introduction” in Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016, edited by Phil Elverum, ix-xxi. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2022

Gravett, Paul. “Gianni De Luca & Hamlet: Thinking Outside the Box,” http://paulgravett.com/articles/article/gianni_de_luca_hamlet (accessed November 22, 2023).

Hague, Ian. Comics and the Senses. A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. 

Howe, Brian. “Tout Seul dans la Forêt en Plein Jour, Avez-Vous Peur? By Woelv—album review,” https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11983-tout-seul-dans-la-foret-en-plein-jour-avez-vous-peur/ (accessed September 20, 2023).

Lawley, Guy. “I Like Hate And I Hate Everything Else—The Influence Of Punk on Comics” in Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, edited by Roger Sabin, 83-97. London: Routledge, 1999.

Meesters, Gert. “Creativity in Comics. Exploring the Frontiers of the Medium by Respecting Explicit Self- Imposed Constraintsin Creativity and the Agile Mind: A Multi-Disciplinary Study of a Multi-Faceted Phenomenon, edited by Tony Veale, Kurt Feyaerts, and Charles Forceville, 275-292. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.

Nash, Eric P. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater. New York: Abrams, 2009.

Paolucci, Philippe. “Listening to Comics: When Digital Technology Makes the Ninth Art Audible.” Translated by Lise Thiollier. L’écoute (2019). https://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/540 (accessed February 14, 2023).

Perry, George and Aldridge, Alan. The Penguin Book of Comics: A Slight History. Reprint with introduction. London: Penguin Books, 1989

Rifkind, Candida. “Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 8, no.14 (2018), https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.128 (accessed November 30, 2022).

Smart, Miranda. Briz de Mar. London: Self-published, 2018. Comic and 7” vinyl record or digital download.

Smart, Miranda. Are You Satisfied? London: Self-published, 2021. Comic and digital download.

Thomas, Susan E. “Artists’ Recordworks in the Early Twenty-First Century.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 32, no.2 (Fall 2013), 253-273, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673516 (accessed April 23, 2023).

Various artists. Flash Fearless versus the Zorg Women parts 5 & 6. London: Chrysalis records, 1975. Comic and vinyl record.

Whitlock, Gillian and Poletti, Anna. “Self-Regarding Art.” Biography 31(1) (2008): v-xxiii.

Haut de page

Notes

1 Susan E. Thomas, “Artists’ Recordworks in the Early Twenty-First Century.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 32, no.2 (Fall), 262.

2 Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier. Broken Music: Artists’ Recordworks. 2nd ed. (New York: Primary Information, 2018), 9.

3 Christian Marclay crosses this divide as his work often involves the destruction of vinyl LPs which are then reassembled with different LP fragments and played, such as his early work ‘Recycled Records’ (1980−1986). Marclay also uses onomatopoeic comic sound effects in his later collages, such as ‘Sound Cluster’ (2017). While not ‘music-comic albums’ these works and their connections to music and comics merit further research.

4 Susan E. Thomas, “Artists’ Recordworks in the Early Twenty-First Century.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 32, no.2 (Fall), 254.

5 Armelle Blin-Rolland “Becoming Musicomic: Music and Comics in Resonance.” Modern Languages Open 1, no.2 (2019), 4.

6 Ibid., 7.

7 Phil Elverum, “Introduction,” in Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016, ed. Phil Elverum, (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2022), xii.

8 Guy Lawley, “I Like Hate and I Hate Everything Else—The Influence of Punk on Comics,” in Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin (London: Routledge, 1999), 90.

9 Ibid.

10 “Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016—review,” Hillary Brown, https://www.tcj.com/reviews/genevieve-castree-complete-works-1981-2016/ (accessed January 15, 2024).

11 Julie Doucet, Dirty Plotte 12 (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 1998), 27.

12 Candida Rifkind, “Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives”, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 8, no.14 (2018): 5, https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.128 (accessed November 30, 2022).

13 Julie Doucet “Volcano,” in Geneviève Castrée: Complete Works 1981-2016, ed. Phil Elverum (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2022), xxii.

14 “Book Notes—Geneviève Castrée Susceptible,” Geneviève Castrée, https://largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2013/02/book_notes_gene.html (accessed 10 June, 2023).

15 “Beyond A Crow: Looking at the Life and Works of Geneviève Castrée,” Jasmine Albertson, https://kexp.org/read/2019/3/28/beyond-crow-looking-he-life-and-works-genevieve-castree/ (accessed April 14, 2023).

16 “Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? By Woelv—album review,” Brian Howe, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11983-tout-seul-dans-la-foret-en-plein-jour-avez-vous-peur/ (accessed September 20, 2023).

17 “NPR: Viking’s Choice: Ô Paon, ‘Fille Tannée/Fille Tendue’—interview with Lars Gotrich,” Geneviève Castrée, https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2015/01/27/381646932/vikings-choice-paon-fille-tann-e-fille-tendue (accessed September 20, 2023).

18 Eric P. Nash, Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater (New York: Abrams, 2009), 57.

19 George Perry and Alan Aldridge, The Penguin Book of Comics: A Slight History. Reprint with introduction (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 256.

20 For a more detailed history of comics and performance see: Damon Herd, Comics and Performance: From ‘Chalk Talks’ to ‘Carousel’ https://comicsforum.org/2013/08/21/comics-and-performance-from-chalk-talks-to-carousel-by-damon-herd/

21 Ian Hague, Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 77.

22 Various artists, Flash Fearless versus the Zorg Women parts 5 & 6 (London: Chrysalis records, 1975), comic and vinyl record.

23 Moreno Andreatta, Martin Granger, Tom Johnson, and Valentin Villenave, “Music, Mathematics and Language: Chronicles from the Oumupo Sandbox,” in Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, ed. Zoï Kapoula (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 256.

24 Gert Meesters, “Creativity in Comics. Exploring the Frontiers of the Medium by Respecting Explicit Self- Imposed Constraints, in Creativity and the Agile Mind: A Multi-Disciplinary Study of a Multi-Faceted Phenomenon, ed. Tony Veale, Kurt Feyaerts, and Charles Forceville (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 275.

25 DJ Krush and Killoffer, Oumupo 6 (Nancy: Ici d’ailleurs…, 2006) compact disc and comic.

26 Philippe Paolucci, “Listening to Comics: When Digital Technology Makes the Ninth Art Audible,” L’écoute (2019), translated by Lise Thiollier, https://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/540 (accessed February 14, 2023).

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 https://www.mirandasmart.com/briz-de-mar

30 “Broken Frontier,” Andy Oliver, https://www.brokenfrontier.com/miranda-smart-yama-comics-heavy-metal-abstract-elcaf/ (accessed February 1, 2024).

31 http://www.opaon.ca/index.php/sections/le-passethe-past/ (accessed November 26, 2022).

32 Candida Rifkind, “Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives”, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 8, no.14 (2018): 9, https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.128 (accessed November 30, 2022).

33 “The Comics Journal: Interview with Naomi Fry,” Geneviève Castrée, https://www.tcj.com/the-genevieve-castree-interview/ (accessed November 20, 2022).

34 Geneviève Castrée, Pamplemoussi. Montreal: L’Oie de Cravan, 2004. Comic and vinyl record.

35 Perhaps the most famous graphical score is Stripsody (1966) by Cathy Berberian which uses comic book style onomatopoeic sound effects as the vocal score.

36 See “We’re Wolf!” in Drawn & Quarterly showcase 3 (2005).

37 Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, “Self-Regarding Art,” Biography 31(1) (2008): v-xxiii.

38 The De Luca Effect is named after Italian comics artist Gianni De Luca who frequently used multiple images on a page or panel to suggest movement across a landscape in time. “Gianni De Luca & Hamlet: Thinking Outside the Box,” Paul Gravett, http://paulgravett.com/articles/article/gianni_de_luca_hamlet (accessed November 22, 2023).

39 Candida Rifkind, “Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives,” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 8, no.14 (2018): 3, https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.128 (accessed November 30, 2022).

40 Rifkind, Candida, “Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: Graphic Memoir and Digital Afterlives,” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 8, no.14 (2018): 16, https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.128 (accessed November 30, 2022).

41 Philippe Paolucci, “Listening to Comics: When Digital Technology Makes the Ninth Art Audible,” translated by Lise Thiollier, L’écoute, https://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/540 (accessed February 14, 2023).

42 https://gb-krecs.glopalstore.com/collections/music/products/klp172 (accessed August 31, 2023).

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

Légende Figure : Cover of Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 169k
Légende Figure : Pamplemoussi title page by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 64k
Légende Figure : Page from “Chanson pour les têtes molles,” in Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 143k
Légende Figure : Page from “Chanson pour le tigre,” in Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1010k
Légende Figure : Page from “Chanson pour la hase,” in Pamplemoussi by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 126k
Légende Figure : Cover of Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 265k
Légende Figure : Page from “Drapeau blanc,” in Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 396k
Légende Figure : Page from “La Petite Cane dans la nappe de pétrole,” in Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 197k
Légende Figure : Page from “Sous mon manteau,” in Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 61k
Légende Figure : Page from the strip “Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour,” in Tout seul dans la forêt en plein jour, avez-vous peur ? by Geneviève Castrée.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/docannexe/image/9957/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 77k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Damon Herd, « Chanson Cachée: The Music-comic albums of Geneviève Castrée  »Comicalités [En ligne], La bande dessinée à voix haute, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2024, consulté le 12 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/9957 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12w73

Haut de page

Auteur

Damon Herd

Damon Herd is Programme Director of the MDes Comics and Graphic Novels at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee. He is an artist, educator, researcher, and comics maker with a PhD in Fine Art. His main research area is life narratives told in comics, with a particular interest in British comics, and the games authors play with truth. Other research includes the intersections of comics, fine art, and performance.
Damon is the founder and organiser of DeeCAP (Dundee Comics/Art/Performance). DeeCAP began in 2013 to create a comics experience in a very different environment from the usual solitary reading of strips in books or tablets. At a DeeCAP show visual imagery (usually comics) is projected onto a screen behind the presenters as they read out and interact with the pictures. He is a member of the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies at University of Dundee and an associate member of CoRH! - The Comics Research Hub at University of the Arts London. He is Creative Submissions Editor of Studies in Comics journal.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search