We are happy to announce that Dr. Ilan Manouach, postdoctoral fellow FNRS at ULiège, affiliate Metalab at Harvard, affiliate Labo Paragraphe at Paris 8 and visiting professor at the University of Uppsala will present a keynote at the 4th International Comics Research Conference at Malmö University (12) 13–14 November 2026.
What Comics Know
What if comics were never really about drawing? What if the medium’s deepest infrastructure — sequential frames, spatial juxtaposition, the gap between panels where cognition fills in what isn’t shown — was always a knowledge technology waiting for machines to notice? Digitization didn’t disrupt comics. It revealed what was already there: a graphic system for organizing, encoding, and transmitting knowledge that operates independently of any single reader’s comprehension. Comics are now legible to software. They function as structured repositories — not of stories, but of relational data, semantic connections, reasoning architectures. As artistic research, this is where comics get interesting: not when artists express themselves through the medium, but when the medium’s computational logic outpaces the people who make it. The artist becomes a designer of epistemic conditions, not a maker of images. This talk draws on ongoing research into comics as computational objects — including work with the Semantic Web, web ontologies, and synthetic comic production — to map what a post-authorial artistic research in comics actually looks like. It asks what comics know that we don’t, and whether we need to.
Bio
Ilan Manouach (1980) is a comics artist and a postdoctoral scholar on Computational Creativity at the University of Liège. He is also an affiliate scholar at Harvard metaLAB and an affiliate researcher at Paris VIII with Labo Paragraph. He is the author of over 30 comic books and the editor of Chimeras. Inventory of Synthetic Cognition, a collective glossary on AI, with 150 contributors exploring a variety of epistemic perspectives on artificial intelligence: interspecies, crip, monstrous, feminist, distributed, and decolonial, among others. He is an appointed expert on the comic book industry to the Belgian government and worked as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation. He is the founder of Echo Chamber a non-profit organization dedicated to comics research (part of the Creative Europe consortium of Expanded publishing), and the founder of Topovoros Books, a Greek publishing house spearheading translations of cornerstone essays in humanities. He is the creator of Shapereader (2014-), a system of tactile comics for people with visual disabilities and the co-creator of the first algorithmic cartoon generator, The Neural Yorker (2019-2023). The critical anthology Ilan Manouach in Review, Critical Approaches to his Conceptual Comics published by Routledge is dedicated to analyzing his artistic work (currently being translated into French by Presses Universitaires de Liège). His latest books are Tarwar (NERO, 2025) — a conceptual comic book entirely composed of original black panels from international comic book — and Out Side (JBE Books).
Edited By Pedro Moura
