Cult Fiction is a Hayward Gallery touring exhibition which explores the reciprocal relationship between comics and art and features works where current social and political issues are aired in frank visual narratives.

The visual language of comics and graphic novels has influenced many contemporary artists, who have employed its conventions of pictorial narrative and unique fusion of word and image. Fine artists Adam Dant, Kerry James Marshall and Olivia Plender have published their own comics attracted by the mediums democratic format and its ability to reach and influence a wider audience than a gallery context would permit. Glen Baxter, Raymond Pettibon and David Shrigley use a combination of word and image in forms that are reminiscent of popular cartoons. The recurring themes and characters typical of comics iconography can be seen in Laylah Ali's cast of bowling-ball headed characters, or the ragged furry felines that appear in Jon Pylypchuk's sculptural tableaux. Liz Craft, Kerstin Kartscher and Paul McDevitt employ graphic elements from comic book imagery to create works that suggest narrative without using words.

The comics artists and graphic novelists are mainly from the generation of independent author-draughtsmen, whose subject matter tends to be offbeat and transgressive, and sometimes controversial. 'Real life issues', often approached in biographical or autobiographical styles, supplant moralistic tales of good and evil. Julie Doucet's diaristic portrayals of her character in vulnerable and compromising situations exemplify the genre's ability to communicate difficult emotional information, as do Debbie Drechsler's candid autobiographic explorations of childhood abuse. The true realities of life within a war zone are sensitively charted in Joe Sacco's award-winning Palestine, while everyday characters such as R Crumb's and Harvey Pekar's file clerk in American Splendor and Daniel Clowes' misfit David Boring become unlikely heroes of everyday tales. Classic Literature gets a make-over for the twenty-first century in Posy Simmonds' Gemma Bovery which is based on Flaubert's adulterous heroine Madame Bovary, and Melinda Gebbie's and Alan Moore's epic Lost Girls (shortly to be published in the UK) charts the sexual awakening of three characters from children's literature – Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Wendy from Peter Pan – as told by their older selves.

Cult Fiction has been originated by artist and curator, Kim L. Pace, and is co-curated with Hayward curator Emma Mahony. A fully illustrated catalogue, designed by Jacob Covey, Art Director of Fantagraphics Books, features essays by Paul Gravett and Emma Mahony and a picture-essay by Kim L. Pace. All of the participating artists in Cult Fiction have contributed a drawn self-portrait together with their handwritten answers to questions posed by the curators. The book is distributed by Cornerhouse Publications.

Featured Artists:
Laylah Ali
Glen Baxter
Stéphane Blanquet
Daniel Clowes
Liz Craft
R. Crumb
Adam Dant
Julie Doucet
Debbie Drechsler
Marcel Dzama
Melinda Gebbie
Mark Kalesniko
Kerstin Kartscher
Killoffer
Kerry James Marshall
Chad McCail
Paul McDevitt
Travis Millard
Kim L Pace
Raymond Pettibon
Olivia Plender
Jon Pylypchuk
James Pyman
Joe Sacco
David Shrigley
Posy Simmonds
Richard Slee
Carol Swain

The following article by Paul Gravett on the Cult Fiction exhibition first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Art Review, which introduced the first of a series of six (so far) original comic strips created  for Art Review by artists featured in Cult Fiction.

As Robert Crumb once said, "It's only lines on paper, folks!" But as he knew well, there's much more to comics than that. The artwork for them may be drawn specifically to be printed and sold in multiples rather than being framed and hung in galleries, but in recent years the original art from comics, now fetching high prices, has been increasingly exhibited in major institutions in the UK and USA. Crumb himself has had several solo shows, including London's Whitechapel Gallery, and is currently spotlighted at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco, where at the same time the city's Asian Art Museum presents Osamu Tezuka, Japan's 'God of Manga'.

So comics are no longer being considered solely as commercial products, found objects or anonymous source material. In their newly 'respectable' forms as works of art, drawing and 'authorial illustration', and as works of literature as graphic novels, comics are being re-evaluated, both in their own right and as formative and provocative influences on all kinds of visual artists. Reflecting this cultural shift, The Hayward Gallery has brought together comic artists, including Crumb, and fine artists inspired by comics in a new touring exhibition, Cult Fiction, to show their work alongside each other and on an equal footing. And starting this month, Art Review is commissioning a series of special comic/art pages, inviting artists featured in Cult Fiction to produce a two-page intervention into the magazine: art magazine, as comic, as art!

As long ago as 1967, Salvador Dali, who at the age of 12 had drawn comics for his sister and later as a storyboard for an unmade film, had predicted comics' ascendancy. On a visit to one of the first Parisian antiquarian bookshops to specialise in 'bande dessinée' rarities, balancing a carafe of iced water on his head to cool his boiling brain, Dali proclaimed, "Comics will be the culture of the year 3794. So you have 1827 years in advance, which leaves me the time I need to create a collage with these eighty comics I am taking with me. This will be the birth of Comic Art, and on this occasion we will hold a gigantic opening with my divine presence on March 4th 3794 at 19.00 hours precisely." Perhaps Dali's ethereal form will manifest itself a little earlier at the opening of Cult Fiction's tour in Walsall this month.

From Picasso to pop and beyond, art and comics have long been closely intertwined, feeding off and reinvigorarting each other, and seem to be becoming closer, converging in their concerns. Cult Fiction responds to the expanded possibilities in comics, from substantial dramas to daring experimentation, which have coincided with a decline in the dominance of painting and its emphasis on the large, one-off work. Simultaneously, the show exmaines a renewed interest among artists in what comics offer: their use of icons, symbols and multiple drawings, smaller and more immediate, with or without words, and conceived for reproduction and dissemination, not the scale and exclusivity of the gallery wall. Meanwhile, the dominance of story in comics is also being questioned, liberating comics strict linear narratives to be 'read' as puzzles, maps, diagrams, poems, or, as Philip Guston described his word-and-image Poem-Pictures, 'intimate and strange situations'.

Prepare for more such 'situations' as in future editions of Art Review.  This issue Paul McDevitt launches the series with an act of astronomical terrorism, the two culprits' faces, if not their bottoms, masked beneath their speech balloons. Over the coming months, explore other personal worlds and approaches: Travis Millard's toon-style fever-dreams; Killoffer's self-obsessed visions; Marcel Dzama's queasy storybook bestiary; Carol Swain's soft-drawn yet hard-edged social observations; Laylah Ali's fraught, fragile, ball-headed biomorphs; and yet others to come. What will fine artists make out of comics? What will comic artists make out of art? Turn to page 138 to find out.