Ilan Manouach

Ilan Manouach
Live at the Mississippi Studios in Portland
Born (1980-07-11) July 11, 1980 (age 46)
Athens, Greece
Known forVisual artist, publisher, musician,
Websiteilanmanouach.com

Ilan Manouach (born 11 July 1980) is a Greek-born, Brussels-based comics artist, researcher and publisher, known for conceptual comics that rework existing works and for Shapereader, a tactile system of comics for blind readers. His work is the subject of a critical anthology, Ilan Manouach in Review (Routledge, 2023). He holds a PhD from Aalto University (2022), was a postdoctoral fellow of the F.R.S.-FNRS at the University of Liège, and is principal investigator of The Knowledge Codex, a project on comics and climate representation funded by the Swedish Research Council at Uppsala University. He founded the Greek press Topovoros Books and the Brussels non-profit Echo Chamber.

Early life and education

Manouach was born in Athens on 11 July 1980. He trained at the École supérieure des arts Saint-Luc in Brussels (BFA, 2001), took an MA at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (2017), and in April 2022 defended an article-based doctorate, Estranging Comics: Towards a Novel Comics Praxeology, at Aalto University's School of Arts, Design and Architecture, with Jan Baetens as opponent and Craig Dworkin as thesis advisor. The thesis received the School of Arts, Design and Architecture's Dissertation Award 2022.

Comics

Early books

Manouach's first book, Les lieux et les choses qui entouraient les gens, désormais, appeared with the Brussels independent press La Cinquième Couche in 2003, and most of his later books were published there. Thierry Groensteen discussed his early narrative work in Bande dessinée et narration (2011), comparing its construction to jazz improvisation. Frag (2008) was the last of these narrative books; commissioned works of the period include Écologie forcée for the Biennale d'art contemporain du Havre (2010) and Les deux côtés d'un mur for the Sierre comics festival (2011).

Appropriations

From 2011 Manouach produced a series of unsigned reworkings of canonical comics, issued in La Cinquième Couche's Essaim collection.

Katz (printed November 2011) reproduces the French edition of Art Spiegelman's Maus with every character redrawn as a cat. It was first shown at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in January 2012, the year Spiegelman presided over the festival. Flammarion, Spiegelman's French publisher, filed a counterfeiting complaint in February 2012; the case came before the Paris tribunal in March and was settled with La Cinquième Couche agreeing to pulp the remaining copies. MetaKatz (2013) collected essays and documents on the affair.

Noirs (2014) is a facsimile of Peyo's Les Schtroumpfs noirs printed with all four offset plates in cyan, so that the whole book appears blue. Tintin Akei Kongo (2015, co-published with the Lisbon press MMMNNNRRRG) is a facsimile of Hergé's Tintin in the Congo translated into Lingala, a language in which the album had never been published. Riki Fermier (2015) removes every character except the pelican Riki from an album of the Danish series Petzi. Cascão (2019) bleaches pages of the Brazilian magazine Turma da Mônica.

Bill Kartalopoulos, writing in World Literature Today in 2016, characterised this body of work as "defamiliarizing comics". The Comics Journal has covered it in an overview of Manouach's "expanded comics" (2021) and a long interview (2025).

Shapereader

Shapereader is a tactile language for comics built from raised ideograms, or "tactigrams", standing for characters, objects, actions and emotions. Manouach conceived it during a 2013 residency at the Saari Residence in Finland; the Kone Foundation funded it that year, and the first work in the system, the 57-plate tactile novel Arctic Circle, was completed in 2014. The project was covered by Hyperallergic, The Cut, Wired (Germany), Fast Company, Le Monde and ActuaLitté in 2016, presented at the Angoulême festival and the Onassis Cultural Centre, and exhibited at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte, Helsinki, in 2017. Manouach published an account of the system in Leonardo in 2022.

Distributed labour and synthetic comics

Harvested (2016), an anthology of 500 artworks glimpsed in the sets of adult films, was assembled by scripts and sorted by crowdsourced microworkers, and issued as a ten-publisher co-edition. The Cubicle Island (2020) reprints desert-island cartoons from The New Yorker with new captions written by microworkers hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Peanuts minus Schulz (JBE Books, 2021) assembles Peanuts strips redrawn by more than a thousand microworkers from twenty countries; it was reviewed in The Comics Journal and by Jan Baetens in Leonardo Reviews, and Manouach described the method in The Comics Grid (2019).

The Neural Yorker (2019–2023), made with the engineer Yannis Siglidis, was a Twitter bot posting cartoons generated by machine-learning models trained on New Yorker cartoons and captions; Hyperallergic covered it in 2021. Fastwalkers (2021) is a comic whose images and text were generated with GAN and GPT-3 models; Manouach and Barbara Postema analysed its production in Critical Humanities (2024), and Miguel Peña Méndez in CuCo, Cuadernos de cómic (2024).

ONEPIECE (JBE Books, 2022) binds the 102 volumes of Eiichiro Oda's One Piece into a single 21,450-page book, issued in an edition of 50 as a sculptural object that cannot be read; The Guardian, Artnet News and IGN reported on it.

Tarwar (2025) is composed entirely of black panels selected by computer vision from digitised comics of many traditions; it was co-published in Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Portugal and Greece and reviewed in Efimerida ton Syntakton. Recent books also include Reading (Lendroit, 2024) and Lu X and Lu 0 (2024), which empty the Little Lulu strips of their characters.

Research

Manouach's doctoral publications include "Outlining Conceptual Practices in Comics" (European Comic Art, 2021) and "Comic Books as Ontographs" (Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación, 2021). He was an F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral fellow at the University of Liège (2023–2026), a visiting scholar at Harvard's metaLAB (2022–2025) and an affiliate of the Laboratoire Paragraphe at Paris 8 University. From 2026 he leads The Knowledge Codex: Comics as Expansive Graphic Repositories at Uppsala University, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2026–2029), and is a co-investigator on Synthetic Pasts, funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation. With Anna Foka he published "Comics as Heritage" in Heritage (2025).

Publishing and organisations

In 2012 Manouach founded Topovoros Books, an Athens press of which he is editorial director, publishing Greek translations of contemporary theory and political writing. Its list of some fifty titles includes Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto, Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, Mike Davis's Dead Cities, Eyal Weizman's Walking Through Walls, Hélène Cixous's The Laugh of the Medusa, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading", Byung-Chul Han's Shanzhai, McKenzie Wark's Capital Is Dead, Hito Steyerl's The Wretched of the Screen, Benjamin Bratton's Terraforming, Steven Shaviro's essays on accelerationism, Laboria Cuboniks's Xenofeminist Manifesto, Evgeny Morozov's The Santiago Boys, and Kenneth Goldsmith's Duchamp Is My Lawyer, as well as texts by Craig Dworkin, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Christine Delphy, Françoise Vergès, Saidiya Hartman, Bobby Seale, Marek Edelman, Guy Hocquenghem, Tiziana Terranova, Joanna Zylinska, Laurent de Sutter and the KLF. In 2017 he founded Echo Chamber, a Brussels non-profit for comics research. Echo Chamber was one of four partners, with the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), Aksioma (Ljubljana) and NERO Editions (Rome), in .expub | Exploring Expanded Publishing, a two-year Creative Europe project (2023–2025) whose closing book includes an essay by Manouach. With Kenneth Goldsmith he curated Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens at the Onassis Cultural Centre in 2018, and he maintains the Conceptual Comics collections on UbuWeb and Monoskop. He edited Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (Onassis Publications, 2022), has served as an appointed expert on the comics industry for the Belgian government and as a strategy consultant to the Onassis Foundation.

Editorial work

With Anna Engelhardt, Manouach edited Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (Onassis Foundation, Athens, 2022), an open-access glossary on artificial intelligence with some 150 contributors, among them !Mediengruppe Bitnik, K Allado-McDowell, Jamie Allen, Clemens Apprich, Tega Brain, Vera Bühlmann, Mercedes Bunz, Florian Cramer, Matt Colquhoun, Laurent de Sutter, José Luis de Vicente and Patricia Reed. He edited the two-volume Limbo (2011) and, with Xavier Löwenthal, the anthology Le Coup de Grâce (2006) for La Cinquième Couche, and Η χρυσή εποχή… (Kormoranos, 2007). In 2023 he and Benoît Crucifix issued a call for an edited volume on comics and computation; the resulting book, Synthetic Comics: Computation, Standardization, Automation, is announced by De Gruyter.

In April 2026 he organised COMMA (Comics and Machines), an international conference held at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Uppsala University.

Music

Manouach plays saxophone and has recorded as one half of the Athens noise duo Balinese Beast (with Giorgos Axiotis), in Glacial, an electronic-jazz project with the producer Giorgos Lemos that has released on the Hôtel Costes series, and with the Swiss accordionist Jonas Kocher in duo and trio formats on the Bruit label.

Discography

Reception

Ilan Manouach in Review: Critical Approaches to his Conceptual Comics, edited by Pedro Moura, was published by Routledge in 2023 with a foreword by Kenneth Goldsmith and chapters by, among others, José Alaniz, Jan Baetens, Benoît Crucifix, Simon Grennan, Ian Hague and Daniel Worden. A French expanded edition, Le cas Manouach, is announced by the Presses universitaires de Liège for March 2027. Further scholarly treatments include Crucifix's chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies (2020), Sébastien Conard in Collateral (2023), and Álvaro Pons Moreno and Noelia Ibarra-Rius in Norba (2024).

Bibliography

Books

Selected articles

Edited volumes

Works about Manouach

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Ilan Manouach - Monoskop". monoskop.org. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  2. 1 2 Kartalopoulos, Bill (2016). "Ilan Manouach: Defamiliarizing Comics". World Literature Today. 90 (2): 44–47. doi:10.1353/wlt.2016.0063.
  3. 1 2 3 Dunne, Carey (5 August 2016). "A Conceptual Artist Designs Tactile Comic Books for Blind Readers". Hyperallergic.
  4. 1 2 3 "Ilan Manouach in Review: Critical Approaches to his Conceptual Comics". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Manouach, Ilan (2022). Estranging Comics - Towards a novel comics praxeology. Aalto University. ISBN 978-952-64-0733-3. ISSN 1799-4942.
  6. 1 2 "Ilan Manouach – University of Liège directory". uliege.be. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  7. 1 2 "The Knowledge Codex – Comics as Expansive Graphic Repositories - Uppsala University". www.uu.se. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  8. 1 2 Hulot, M. (20 May 2015). "Δώρο 5 βιβλία του Τοποβόρου". Lifo.
  9. 1 2 "Echo Chamber Home". Echo Chamber. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  10. 1 2 3 "Ilan Manouach". Les presses du réel. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  11. ↑ "Limbo (textbook)". ORBi, University of Liège. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  12. 1 2 3 4 "Curriculum vitae – Ilan Manouach" (PDF). Laboratoire Paragraphe, Université Paris 8. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  13. ↑ "Dissertation Award 2022 presented to Ilan Manouach" (Document). Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. 2022.
  14. 1 2 3 "Les lieux et les choses qui entouraient les gens, désormais". ORBi, University of Liège. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  15. ↑ Groensteen, Thierry (2011). Bande dessinée et narration (in French). Presses universitaires de France. p. 31. ISBN 978-2-13-058487-2.
  16. 1 2 "Frag". ORBi, University of Liège. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  17. 1 2 "Écologie forcée". ORBi, University of Liège. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  18. 1 2 3 "Riki Fermier". ORBi, University of Liège. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  19. ↑ Friquet, Camille (March 2012). "La Cinquième Couche assigné par Flammarion pour contrefaçon". Livres Hebdo (in French).
  20. ↑ Lambrecht, Maxime (17 March 2012). "Katz détourne Maus : le droit d'auteur, un fardeau pour la libre expression artistique ?". ipDIGit (in French).
  21. ↑ "Ilan Manouach: Katz". UbuWeb. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  22. 1 2 Jooha, Kim (18 May 2021). "Expanded Comics: The Conceptual Comics of Ilan Manouach". The Comics Journal.
  23. 1 2 Girard, Quentin (31 January 2014). "«Les Schtroumpfs noirs» restent bleus". Libération (in French).
  24. 1 2 Moura, Pedro (April 2014). "Les Schtroumpfs noirs by Ilan Manouach". du9.
  25. 1 2 "Tintin Akei Kongo - Monoskop". monoskop.org. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  26. ↑ Nadel, Dan (29 January 2015). "Non Event". The Comics Journal.
  27. ↑ Manouach, Ilan (2019). Cascão. La Cinquième Couche / La Crypte Tonique. doi:10.5281/zenodo.11353502.
  28. ↑ Aman, Robert (September 2025). ""Comics people generally hate what I do": The Ilan Manouach Interview". The Comics Journal.
  29. ↑ "Ilan Manouach: Shapereader". Kone Foundation. 20 October 2017.
  30. ↑ Rom, Carri (1 August 2016). "A New Language Could Help Bring Comic Books to the Blind". The Cut.
  31. ↑ Brücken, Timo (1 February 2016). "Diesen Comic lest ihr mit den Händen statt den Augen". Wired Germany (in German).
  32. ↑ Brownlee, John (8 July 2016). "A Comic Book Artist Is Reinventing His Craft for Blind Readers". Fast Company.
  33. ↑ Engelbach, Cathia (31 January 2016). "Venez essayer la bande dessinée « tactile »". Le Monde (in French).
  34. ↑ "Bande dessinée pour aveugles : Shapereader invente un langage tactile inédit". ActuaLitté (in French). 11 August 2016.
  35. ↑ "Shapereader: Διαβάζοντας τα σχήματα". Onassis Cultural Centre (in Greek). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  36. ↑ "Ilan Manouach: Shapereader, 3–19.11.2017". Photographic Gallery Hippolyte. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  37. 1 2 Manouach, Ilan (2022). "The Tactile Comics of Shapereader". Leonardo. 55 (3): 291–296.
  38. 1 2 "Harvested". Lendroit éditions (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  39. 1 2 "The Cubicle Island". La Procure (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  40. 1 2 "Peanuts minus Schulz by Ilan Manouach". JBE Books. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  41. ↑ McCulloch, Joe (20 May 2021). "Peanuts Minus Schulz". The Comics Journal.
  42. ↑ Baetens, Jan (March 2021). "Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice". Leonardo Reviews.
  43. 1 2 Manouach, Ilan (2019). "Peanuts minus Schulz: Distributed Labor as a Compositional Practice". The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. 9. doi:10.16995/cg.139.
  44. ↑ Di Liscia, Valentina (29 August 2021). "Computer-Generated New Yorker Cartoons Are Delightfully Weird". Hyperallergic.
  45. 1 2 Postema, Barbara; Manouach, Ilan (2024). ""The Hard Work of Programming Germinates Soft Pleasures": Creating Synthetic Comics with AI Collaboration". Critical Humanities. 2 (2): 156–165. doi:10.33470/2836-3140.1053.
  46. ↑ Peña Méndez, Miguel (2024). "Fastwalkers de Ilan Manouach. La IA y el cómic conceptual". CuCo, Cuadernos de cómic (in Spanish) (22): 161–179. doi:10.37536/cuco.2024.22.2419. hdl:10017/62565.
  47. 1 2 Barnett, David (20 September 2022). "Longest single-volume book in the world goes on sale – and is impossible to read". The Guardian.
  48. ↑ Benzine, Vittoria (20 September 2022). "'One Piece' Is the World's Most Popular Manga. An Artist Turned All 21,450 Pages Into a Single Unreadable Book". Artnet News.
  49. ↑ Bashir, Dale (12 September 2022). "Ilan Manouach's ONEPIECE Art Project Compiles All 21,450 Pages of the Manga Into One Book". IGN Southeast Asia. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
  50. 1 2 "Tarwar – Ilan Manouach". La Procure (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  51. 1 2 "Tarwar". Biblionet (in Greek). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  52. 1 2 "Tarwar". After 8 Books. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  53. 1 2 3 4 "Ilan Manouach". La Procure (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  54. 1 2 "Lu 0 – Ilan Manouach". La Procure (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  55. 1 2 Manouach, Ilan (2021). "Comic books as Ontographs: The composition process of Abrégé de Bande Dessinée Franco-Belge". Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación (125). doi:10.18682/cdc.vi125.4553.
  56. ↑ "Ilan Manouach". Laboratoire Paragraphe, Université Paris 8 (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  57. ↑ "Synthetic Pasts (2026–2028)". Uppsala University. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  58. 1 2 Foka, Anna; Manouach, Ilan (2025). "Comics as Heritage: Theorizing Digital Futures of Vernacular Expression". Heritage. 8 (8): 295. doi:10.3390/heritage8080295.
  59. ↑ "Τοποβόρος". Topovoros Books (in Greek). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  60. ↑ ".expub – Exploring Expanded Publishing". expandedpublishing.net. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  61. ↑ "Conceptual Comics". UbuWeb. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  62. ↑ "Ilan Manouach". PILEn – Partenariat interprofessionnel du livre et de l'édition numérique (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  63. 1 2 "Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition". Onassis Foundation. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  64. ↑ "Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition". Canadian Centre for Architecture. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  65. 1 2 "Limbo (sketchbook)". ORBi, University of Liège. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  66. ↑ "Comics as Computation (Call for chapters)". Calenda. 26 July 2023.
  67. ↑ "Comics and Machines (Uppsala/Stockholm, 22–23 Apr 26)". ArtHist.net. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  68. 1 2 "Phase! 12". Animal Psi (in French). December 2014.
  69. 1 2 "Jonas Kocher". Bruit. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  70. 1 2 "Lemos launches Glacial". Resident Advisor. 5 January 2012.
  71. 1 2 3 "Glacial". Europavox. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  72. 1 2 3 "Ilan Manouach". Jazz Library (in Greek). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  73. ↑ "Balinese Beast – Balinese Beast". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  74. ↑ "Balinese Beast – Soft Offerings". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  75. ↑ "Various – Sonic Protest 2012". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  76. ↑ "Balinese Beast / Wham Jah". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  77. ↑ "Fusiller / Balinese Beast – Les Géométries Souterraines". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  78. ↑ "Balinese Beast / TBC & Guy Saldanha – Thunderbird Hotel". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  79. ↑ "Romvos – Undeveloped (Uncovering of a Liminal Space)". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  80. ↑ "Arnaud Rivière & Mario / Balinese Beast – SchengenShenzhen". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  81. ↑ "Glacial – Entropy EP". Discogs. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  82. ↑ "Kocher / Manouach / Papageorgiou". Bruit. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  83. ↑ "Hotel Costes Presents… Hardcore Lounge – Glacial". HighResAudio. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  84. 1 2 Moura, Pedro, ed. (March 2027). Le cas Manouach. Bande dessinée conceptuelle : détournement, appropriation, art synthétique, intelligence artificielle et distribuée (in French). Presses universitaires de Liège. ISBN 978-2-39008-127-2.
  85. ↑ Crucifix, Benoît (2020). "Drawing, Redrawing, and Undrawing". The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190917944.013.40.
  86. ↑ Conard, Sébastien (2023). "How a UCO led to CoCos: understanding Ilan Manouach's estranging hypercomics". Collateral (89).
  87. ↑ Pons Moreno, Álvaro; Ibarra-Rius, Noelia (2024). "Cuando el cómic se desborda". Norba. Revista de Arte (in Spanish). 44: 139–160. doi:10.17398/2660-714X.44.139. hdl:10662/24448.
  88. ↑ "La Mort du Cycliste". ORBi, University of Liège. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  89. ↑ "Arbres en plastique, feuilles en papier". ORBi, University of Liège. Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  90. ↑ Bi, Jessie (2018). "Blanco de Ilan Manouach". du9 (in French).
  91. ↑ "Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge". Lendroit éditions (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-14.
  92. ↑ Manouach, Ilan (2025). "Generative Palimpsests: The Feature Space of Synthetic Comics". In Lengyel, Dominik (ed.). EVA Berlin 2025: Electronic Media and Visual Arts. arthistoricum.net. pp. 33–34. doi:10.11588/arthistoricum.1568.c24035.