Ilan Manouach: Tarwar

Tarwar is Manouach’s latest comic book that builds upon his previous work Abrege de bande dessinee franco-belge while dramatically expanding scope to examine comics as a truly global medium. Using computer vision technology and his production studio to analyze over 12 million digitized comic book pages spanning continents, languages, and cultural contexts—from Korean webtoons and Indian superhero folktales to Brazilian quadrinhos and religious illustrated stories—the work identifies black panels as a remarkably omnipresent visual element that haunts comics across all traditions.

These mysterious semantic spaces, whether signifying “a night without moon,” “loss of consciousness,” or rolling blackouts, function as spatiotemporal units where narrative pauses, creating moments of introspection, ambiguity, and the unspoken that challenge conventional narrative flow and invite readers to become co-authors. Composed entirely of black panels from this vast corpus, Tarwar transforms this ubiquitous motif into a playful and enigmatic visual meditation that transcends linguistic boundaries, market norms, and stylistic conventions, revealing how comics serve as a graphic universal language that weaves together the interconnectedness of globalized readership through shared threads of storytelling.