The artist's book seized by the comic strip. Crossings, détournements

A Humument (1966-2016), Tom Phillips’s masterwork, is an artist's book which falls under the category of found text by virtue of its compositional strategies. The book indeed consists in a revisitation and a détournement of every single page of a Victorian novel entitled A Human Document, published in 1892 by a certain William H. Mallock. Each page of A Humument constitutes a verbo-iconic complex in which the words isolated by Phillips and the various visual elements with which he covers the source text come into interaction, in often very elaborate configurations. The hybrid constellations patiently developed by Phillips are usually grounded in a very broad intertextual network which incorporates the established arts (literature, painting, music, etc.) alongside other artistic forms considered minor, including comics. The aim of our essay is to study as closely as possible Phillips’s re-appropriations of codes specific to comics, which he mobilizes in ways which alternate between the parodic and the poetic. Our analysis will thus focus on the formal hybridizations that Phillips operates on several pages of his work; it will also give us the opportunity to interrogate the necessarily problematic relationships which potentially unite comics and avant-gardist practices at the intersection of verbal and iconic registers.