About

Born in the South of Belgium and raised in the North, I grew up between French and Flemish, forest and seaside, words and images, theory and practice. After my studies in History and Cultural Sciences, I concentrated on developing a personal form of 'writing with images', founding my practice and my reflection on the adjacent fields of film, literature and graphic storytelling.


Evolving from a partly autodidactic comics practice that started as alternative 1 or post-underground 2 up to so-called experimental 3, my graphic narrative work led to the realization of a PhD in the Arts.4 Within the framework of my doctoral research, I further developed a critical practice 5 and a theoretical/reflective stance 6 : alongside texts concerning word, image and narrativity, I made publications on the threshold of graphic storytelling and artist's books. 7 This development entailed a relative disentanglement of the verbal and the visual, stressing on its way the transformational potential of what I recently called post-comics.8


After more than ten years of practice, research, and lecturing, I now further explore the implications of words and images, as well as the possibilities of graphic literature's legacy in an expanded, postmedial context.9 My artistic, reflective, and educational activities stem from a lifelong practice of creative drawing, maintaining its ties with speaking several languages, writing in diverse formats and a necessity to inscribe oneself as a valid subject into this historical reality.10


The act of drawing and speaking with images leads to a necessary reinvestigation of the age-old traditions of writing/drawing and the book, and the contemporary conditions of telling, showing, and revealing.


Sébastien Conard,

May 2021

  1. E.g. my early works in Plots (2007-2010) and TiensTiens (2008-2012).

  2. Post-underground is a specific term used within comics studies: alternative comics.

  3. E.g. early experiments in oubapian vein and abstract comics such as Costa (2009).

  4. PhD in the Arts on Word, Image and Narrative at LUCA-KULeuven (2010-2016).

  5. E.g. critical texts on graphic novels in Rekto:Verso, nY, DW B and De Witte Raaf.

  6. E.g. on Duration in Comics (ECA, 2012) or Lively Letters (Image&Narrative, 2016).

  7. See my publications with Croxhapox and het balanseer amongst other things.

  8. Post-Comics has been a collective project and a group publication.

  9. E.g. the functionalities of the grid, the productive tension between series and sequence
    or the resistance of the     book and its influence on space, seeing, and reading.

  10. See the essay by Jan Op de Beeck concerning my work.


P.s.: This site was developped from 2021 on by the author with Google Sites.

Many thanks to Francis De Brouwere for photographing the book covers.