Tarwar by Ilan Manouach

Publisher: Nero Editions, Rome, 2025

Editor: Paul Comoretto, Luca Reverdit, KangWei Peng, Antoine Graff

Format: Hardcover, sewn binding, 32.6 × 24.5 cm, full colour

Edition: First edition

Pages: 120

ISBN: 978-88-8056-299-3

Tarwar is a conceptual comic by Ilan Manouach that transforms one of the medium's most overlooked visual elements—the black panel—into the sole building block of an entire publication. Drawing on computer vision research and the analysis of millions of comic pages from around the world, the book isolates these moments of narrative suspension that recur across cultures, languages, and publishing traditions. Composed exclusively of black panels extracted from an immense global corpus, Tarwar questions how comics communicate through absence as much as through image, revealing silence, interruption, and darkness as a shared visual language. Developed through Manouach's ongoing Echo Chamber research project and editorialized by Paul Comoretto, Luca Reverdit, KangWei Peng, and Antoine Graff, the publication expands conceptual comics into the fields of data studies, visual culture, and computational publishing.