Oubapo member Gilles Ciment came across these three strips while doing some research at La Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image, where he is General Director. They are from the 1960s and Gilles says they probably ran in the magazines Pif or Vaillant. Three different authors—Gotlib, Jijé, and Poïvet—were apparently given the same format and the same bit of text and came up with three different stories, each in a classic film genre: western, spy movie, and silent film (not a genre in the same sense but…). The text can be translated as “I forgot to put it out/turn it off”, depending on the context.
Here’s the first, the other two are after the jump:
The Oulipo has a concept called “Anticipatory Plagiarism” with which they retroactively claims as one of their own (by way of a whimsical accusation) predecessors who used formal constraints, word games, or notions of potentiality, among other things. These strips would then certainly qualify as anticipatory plagiarists of my Exercises in Style, then. Of course, we were all in turn plagiarized by Raymond Queneau, who in turn was totally ripped off by J.S. Bach a few hundred years earlier.
Color me flattered!
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