Mémoire de la bande dessinée dans Au travail d’Olivier Josso Hamel

In the first volume of Au travail (2012), Olivier Josso Hamel remembers his childhood readings of classic Franco-Belgian comics by actually redrawing those fetishized panels into the texture of his own work. Rooted in an autobiographical approach, this quotational practice denotes a retrospective reflection on what Pierre Sterckx called the “case mémorable” (or “memorable panel”), that is fetishized panels stocked into the readers's memory. Au travail invites us to revisit the memorable panel, which is no longer limited to intimate reading memories but becomes a specific manner through which comics are citable, bound to specific aspects of “graphiation,” defining an individual and collective memory of its past.