96
Popular Culture Review
L 'Association, Le dernier Cri (“The Latest Fashion”) and Ego Comme^"(France),
Strapazzin (Switzerland) and Boxer (Germany). Their movement embraces all
possible domains of strip making: production, publicity, marketing, sales and, last
but not least, criticism and theory^
One of the most striking features of the Autarcic Comix movement is its
innovativeness, whereas the rest of European comics production remains so morose
and gloomy. Even more important is the unusual coherence of the movement which
reconciles the collective and the individual. However, it is easy to identify any plate
of any of these artists and to acknowledge the particular value of his or her personal
contribution. One also immediately recognises the all-pervading influence of a real
“school”. But in contrast with former European comic schools, such as the FrancoBelgian school of the fifties and sixties (Merge, Jacobs, Martin), Autarcic Comix
leaves much more room for its different “members” and is not sympathetic to the
general spirit of contemporary culture. Autarcic Comix is a superb example of an
overtly “anachronical”, in this case anti-postmodern, movement. It may also be a
symptom of a more profound change in society, now that more and more voices
proclaim the end of postmodernism as the dominant ideology of our times.
Nevertheless, what Autarcic Comix symbolises is not some kind of post
postmodernism, but a radical and also political comeback of typical modern values,
which in Europe seemed lost by the mainstream adult comic pr oduction of the eighties.
In the following paragraph, I would like to give a small survey of what
appears to be the “program” of this movement (and 1 honestly confess that I will
do it with sympathy for the aims of the group). I will focus on the period in which
the first great publishing activities were launched, i.e., around 1995, a period which
showed a production more radical than what is emerging today. Whether this
program was successful or not is a question which cannot be commented upon at
this time because of its relative newness.
Let us first look at the anti-postmodern tendencies of Autarcic Comix. A
prominent characteristic of the Autarcic Comix graphic style is its marked rejection
of the mingling of techniques, materials and media, which is a distinguishing trait
of postmodernism. Almost every artist of the Autarcic Comix movement is mainly
interested in the exploration of the specific possibilities of the materials he or she
chooses to work with. By means of this more straightforward use of the medium,
the artists give expression to a personal artistic credo, but they also serve an
important pedagogical objective. Indeed, several artists of the Autarcic movement
are involved in teaching activities in popular and inner city areas, and their choice
for the simple use of a simple medium has much to do with their political
commitment in favour of the self-expression of minorities.
A second characteristic of Autarcic Comix is their very pronounced distrust
of the postmodern hobby horse par excellence: the citation, or more precisely the