Catherine Labio

The Architecture of Comics

Architecture has long been a prominent fixture on the comics page. In the early decades of the twentieth century Winsor McCay offered a veritable compendium of contemporary American styles to the readers of the weekly Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1913). The famous art nouveau bed scampering among the high-rises coexists with Beaux-Art palaces, gaudy amusement parks, substantial Victorian mansions, lonely shantytowns, and rows of shingle-sided homes (fig. 1). Buildings have also played a notable role in the history of Franco-Belgian comics, or bande dessinée (BD), especially in the last decades of the twentieth century, when architectural references, once mere notations used to situate the plot, came to drive it instead.1 In this tradition the tip of the iceberg has been the ongoing publication of François Schuiten and Benoı̂t Peeters’s Les Cités obscures, arguably the most innovative series of the late twentieth century. Starting with Les Murailles de Samaris (1982), set in an imaginary art nouveau city, detailed renditions of buildings and their urban environments dominate Les Cités obscures to the point where, one critic ob-

Reading by the Gold and Black Clock; Or, the Recasting of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie

Paul et Virginie, initially published in 1788 as an appendix to die tiiird edition ofBernardin de Saint-Pierres Études de la nature, tells die extravagandy popular tale ofa small Utopian matriarchy situated on die Ile de France (now Mauritius Island) and comprising two women (Mme de la Tour and Marguerite) , dieir respective children (Virginie and Paul), and two slaves (Domingue and Marie). When Virginie reaches puberty and begins to fall in love with Paul, Mme de la Tour sends her daughter to live in France widi a relative. The diversionary ploy fails in every respect. Anxious to leave Europe, Virginie sails home in the middle of the hurricane season and is shipwrecked near die island shores. She spurns die entreaties of a