Rethinking the "case mémorable" : Olivier Josso Hamel's Memories of Comics in "Au travail"

In 1984, introducing a new section of Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, Pierre Sterckx coined the concept of “case mémorable” (remembered panel) to refer to specific comics panels remembered from childhood reading because of their visual effect. The idea of a case mémorable, however, was not only a cognitive concept: it implied an active remembrance, as the magazine section urged readers to send in their analyses of their own remembered panels. It consisted in an intimate act of canonization based on the collective sharing of a personal history of comics. As Sterckx wrote, the case mémorable is “an atom of comics history.” French cartoonists Blutch and Olivier Josso Hamel have put the concept to fruitful uses in their autobiographical work, coupling the remembrance of their childhood to that of their reading experiences. This paper focuses in particular on Josso Hamel's Au travail, sketching out how the author represents an anti-narrative reading experience, projecting his own experiences onto the albums, reshaping their narratives along other axes. Redrawing these panels further compels the artist to reinvent his own graphic style. In this sense, Josso Hamel portrays what it means to remember and possess an image, raising compelling questions not only about quotation and appropriation but also about the relation between the single image and the narrative sequence, which are examined under the light of comics theory (Baetens, Marion) and film studies (Burgin, Mulvey). Through the analysis of Josso Hamel's bande dessinée, this paper revisits Sterckx's concept of the remembered panel as a citational practice loaded with memory-making effects.