No [adaptation] is an island: on intericonicity in comic art adaptations

An attempt to frame and categorise the practice of ‘intericonicity’ (also known as “visual intertextuality”, “art quotes”, “interpictoriality”, “pictorial quotation”, “swiping”, and “visual optimal innovations”) has been made by Nina Heydemann within the domain of the “fine arts”. In an essay titled The Art of Quotation: Forms and Themes of the Art Quote, 1990–2010, Heydemann digs into a corpus of contemporary artworks referencing works of art from any historical period, and identifies six strategies of representation: ‘substitution’; ‘addition’; ‘subtraction’; ‘division’; ‘multiplication’; or ‘combination’.

This talk wishes to discuss intericonic referencing in the case of comics, more specifically within the context of comic art adaptations. The claim is that references to iconic artworks invite the observer to go above and beyond the (often limiting) tradition of comparative readings in adaptation studies, instead calling for a more active collaboration from the readers. The use of visual sources external to the adapted text — copied, modified, paraphrased in the adaptation — asks readers to engage with their personal image bank in an effort to identify the source image, period, and artist, and think about what function these quotes serve in the narration (Groensteen 2017, 206).

A look at a selection of intericonic references in comic art adaptations will allow for a reflection on the narrative functions of this phenomenon, and on the multidirectional intersections and perspectives that the art quote opens up in the interpretive act.

Works cited

Heydemann, Nina (2020), ‘The Art of Quotation: Forms and Themes of the Art Quote, 1990–2010. An Essay’, in Jacobus Bracker & Ann-Kathrin Hubrich (eds), The Art of Reception, 8-50 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars).

Groensteen, Thierry (2017), The Expanding Art of Comics: Ten Modern Masterpieces, tr. Ann Miller (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press).