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Through the collection of the Vitra Design Museum, the exhibition Design and Comics: Living in a Box explores design and its relationship to the world of comics. To create a visual narrative that can be understood universally, comic artists have developed codes for conveying information, one of which is the placement of design objects.
At the beginning of the 20th century, press agencies imposed comic strips on the American press landscape. As their popularity exploded in Europe in the 1920s, comic artists, led by Belgians such as Hergé and Franquin, began to incorporate design objects to illustrate their work. Comic artists from all over the world followed suit. In the 1930s, readers discovered the expanded format of comic strips in the form of comic books.
During the 1940s and 1950s, new genres such as superheroes, horror, romance and science fiction gained in popularity. The more comics were published, the more design objects featured in their drawings. In the early 1960s, as the pop art movement took centre stage, the colourful, fantastical visual language of comic books left its mark on design, as seen in Maurice Calka’s Boomerang desk in 1969 and Eero Aarnio’s Tomato Chair in 1971. The 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of new talents at the crossroads of design and comics, such as comic artists/designers Joost Swarte and Javier Mariscal.
Today, as print versions of periodicals give way to digital formats, graphic novels and manga have become a source of inspiration for remarkable design objects such as the Manga Chairs series (2015) designed by the design studio Nendo.
The exhibition Design and Comics: Living in a Box in Brussels will pay particular attention to design in Belgian comics, and more specifically to the Atom style and Franquin’s characteristic Belgian playful modernism.