Art Brut at the Fringe of Comics

Comics and art brut do not seem to have much in common. On one hand, an extremely coded and constrained medium with their aligned and overlapped frames, speech balloons and “gutters” between the panels. On the other hand, an art movement described by its founder Jean Dubuffet as “an entirely pure, raw artistic operation that the creator fully reinvents in all its phases, as spurred uniquely by his own impulses”. Nevertheless, comics have continuously eroded their boundaries in the last thirty years. Mainly driven by alternative publishers, they have undertaken to exchange and dialogue with the other narrative and visual arts, notably with works made under extreme conditions or created by marginal artists, mentally disabled or living in psychiatric in mental institutions. The purpose of this lecture is to outline an emerging artistic field at the crossroad between art brut and comics.Study of the influence of comics and local media culture on three Japanese outsider artist