Rabiots / Restjes
Rabiots / Restjes is a thick little poetic graphic novel: it works both as a graphic poem and as a poetic graphic narrative - a handsized but prolonged example of comics poetry, so to speak. After working with students on a pile of cheap Dutch paperback collections of (mostly postwar) comics called 'Superstrips' (in the context of the Post-Comics project) I literally focussed on striking details in a few copies I had kept. I sent a selection of these digital pictures, showing hands, exclamation marks, graphic traces and so on, to Jan Baetens with the question to choose his favourites and to write poems departing from this material I supposed him to be familiar with if not well acquainted with. The idea here was to start from the 'traces' of comics, not only the literal (typo)graphic rests and impressions from this old batch, but also the remainders more likely to be expressed through the writings of a poet who had experienced such comics at their time of appearance - somebody well 'embedded' in this historical comics culture. From this primary set-up we developed a dialogue that led to the making of Rabiots. I ended up reworking a broad selection of photographed details by retracing them on the lightbox, and staging them in a thought-out sequence including the fourteen French poems by J.B. and their translation into Dutch by Sis Matthé. Restjes / Rabiots became a poetic and rhythmic montage comic, alternating revisited scraps and impressions of old comics, typographic fragments of Jan's poems (alludingly thematizing this specific cultural legacy), these poems and their translations entirely, the negativations, fadings and rasterizings of these texts and images, and their many entanglements. The making of Rabiots / Restjes ended up functioning as a complex machine that surprised me as its master maker and first reader. The result is a comic and tragic, adventurous, mysterious and often surprising booklet, that bluntly seem to 'transcend' comics, to put it in the words of one of its fine publishers in the exquisitely intriguing BLOW BOOK series.
224 pp., 7,6 x 11,6 cm, 3.000 copies, offset print, BLOW BOOK, 2023.
