La Cinquième Couche

La Cinquième Couche was founded in 1993 by a group of students from the comics workshop of the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels, among them Damien Rocour, Sarah Masson, Michel Squarci, Sibylle Loof, Olivier Fable, Vincent Dutreuil, Nicholas Wood, Sébastien Kempenaers, Christophe Poot, Renaud De Heyn, and Xavier Löwenthal. The group initially published a fanzine under the same name; for its first years it remained an informal collective that self-published its members' work. Around the turn of the millennium, it restructured as a proper publishing house.

The name is a wry allusion to the art historian Clement Greenberg's four-stage model of modernism — La Cinquième Couche positions itself as a hypothetical fifth layer beyond that canon.

William Henne, who had published independently since 1994, joined the collective in 1998. By the 2010s, he and Löwenthal had become its co-directors. As of 2016, the catalogue counted over 110 publications (five issued between 1993 and 1998, the remainder from 1999 onward), with authors from Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Finland, the United States, and South Korea.

Between 2004 and 2007, 5c incorporated the contemporary literature journal Écritures into its catalogue. From 2010 to 2013, it also published the journal Soldes, Fins de Séries by Marc Borgers and Jean-Louis Sbille.

Katz (2012) — appropriation and legal controversy

Katz, by Ilan Manouach, is a reworking of Art Spiegelman's Maus in which every character — not only the Nazis — has been given a cat's head, dissolving the species-based allegory of the original. It was printed in November 2011 and first presented at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in January 2012, when Spiegelman himself was presiding over the festival's jury — a timing that was deliberate. Around one hundred copies circulated on the stands of various independent Franco-Belgian publishers, but the ISBN identified La Cinquième Couche as publisher.

Manouach's stated intention was to challenge the naturalisation of historical roles through species metaphor: representing all protagonists identically questions the implied fatalism of predator-and-prey iconography. Two weeks before the book's planned general release, Flammarion, the French rights-holder of Maus, served La Cinquième Couche with legal proceedings. Unable to sustain the costs of litigation, the press reached an out-of-court settlement; existing copies were destroyed.

The following year, 5c published MetaKatz (2013), a critical anthology documenting the affair, including legal filings, press responses, and essays, accompanied by a vinyl record of a musical piece commissioned to document the destruction of the remaining copies by fire.