The Francophone Bande Dessinée (Faux Titre 265)

274 Pages·2005·5.618 MB·English

by  Charles Forsdick, Laurence Grove, Libbie McQuillan

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Cover design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
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Textbook edition
ISBN: 90-420-1967-0
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
LIBBIE MCQUILLAN
The Francophone Bande Dessinée: An Introduction….…………………7
YVES COTINAT [TANITOC]
Style, havanes & vanités..……………...……………………..………15
CHARLES FORSDICK
Exoticising the Domestique:
Bécassine, Brittany and the Beauty of the Dead……………………...23
LAURENCE GROVE
BD Theory Before the Term ‘BD’ Existed………………………….39
JUDI LOACH
De nouvelles formes naissent:
Le Corbusier and the bande dessinée…...…………………………...51
LAURENT MARIE
Le Grêlé 7/13:
A (Communist) Children’s Guide to the Resistance……………...…73
WENDY MICHALLAT
Pilote: Pedagogy, Puberty and Parents…..………………….………83
MATTHEW SCREECH
Jean Giraud / Moebius:
Nouveau Réalisme and Science Fiction…………………………..…97
TERESA BRIDGEMAN
Figuration and configuration:
mapping imaginary worlds in BD……………………………….…115
ANN MILLER
Narratives of Adolescence, Ethnicity and
Masculinity in the Work of Baru…………………………………...137
DOMINIQUE LE DUC
Femmes en Images et Images de Femmes:
L’Héroïne de La Femme Piège d’Enki Bilal…………………….....149
LIBBIE MCQUILLAN
Les Bidochon assujettis académiques…..………………………….159
ROGER SABIN
Some Observations on BD in the US……………..………………..175
MURRAY PRATT
‘The Dance of the Visible and the Invisible’:
AIDS and the Bande Dessinée……………..………………………189
JAMES STEEL
Let’s party! Astérix and the World Cup (France 1998)..…………..201
List of Illustrations.........................................................................219
The Francophone Bande Dessinée: An Introduction
Libbie McQuillan
University of Glasgow
In the UK, the study of the Francophone bande dessinée, BD, is as yet
something of a minority interest within the field of Francophone cultural
studies. Nevertheless, it is increasingly becoming a fashionable research
area. A protean medium such as the BD inevitably opens itself to
differing areas of scholarly inquiry: the inherent flexibility of the hybrid
medium has precipitated several different critical responses in recent
years. But there is more to this growing awareness of the BD within the
British and Irish academy than a mere recognition of the varied
possibilities of the comics form. Perhaps what first drew the attention of
British and Irish scholars was the peculiarity of the BD’s cultural
recognition and more general widespread popularity in France and
Belgium. In comparison with Anglo-Saxon traditions of the comics form
the cultural esteem in which BD is held could not help but seem strange.
In both countries the announcement in the 1980s of future State-funded
projects made way for the opening of national institutes of conservation
and research in Centre belge de la bande dessinée (CBBD) in Brussels in
1989, and the Centre national de la bande dessinée et de l’image
(CNBDI) in Angoulême in 1990.
BD study is relatively new in Britain and Ireland. Indeed this
book is the first collection of essays exclusively dedicated to the study of
Francophone BD published in an English-language academic context. As
such, it would at first appear that the editors of this book are attempting
to innovate and initiate a new area of research. However, the BD has
been under critical scrutiny in France and Belgium for almost forty
years. The intellectualisation of the BD has a history, and this history is,
in part, entangled with the history of its institutionalisation. It was
precisely the process of critical inquiry, initiated in the early 1960s by a
handful of dedicated enthusiasts, the Club des amis de la bande dessinée,
8 The Francophone Bande Dessinée: An Introduction
that acted as the initial catalyst for the process of the Francophone BD’s
critical canonisation.
In France BD may very well now enjoy an international
reputation for quality, artistry and adulthood, and profit from generous
State subsidies. However, this has not always been the case. Post-war
censorship legislation—the law of July 1949 censuring the moral content
of children’s illustrés—relegated the BD to a juvenile pastime. BD’s
ambivalent past during de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic did not, however, stop
the medium becoming quickly and commonly accepted as an adult
activity in the 1970s, when the new adult BD first arrived in France. In
historical terms, very little time elapsed between the explosion in the
mid-1960s of the widely mediatised Astérix phenomenon and the
decision in 1982 to build a State-funded home for BD in Angoulême. In
France, during a brief twenty-year interlude, BD graduated from being a
legally protected medium for children to become a showpiece promoting
French culture in embassies around the world. The reasons for this shift
in status are many and varied. However, one of the main reasons for this
turn-around in post-war BD’s fortune was the process of BD’s
intellectualisation, which culturally promoted, historically chronicled
and critically celebrated the artistic revolution within the private world
of BD creation during the late 1960s and 1970s.
The first steps towards this process of intellectualisation were
taken, in 1961 in a somewhat obscure science fiction review, Fiction.
The journal, which for the main consisted of Anglophone short stories in
translation, published an article that longed nostalgically for ‘L’Age d’or
de la bande dessinée’, the golden age of 1930s American superhero
comic strips (see Strinati 1961).This article gave birth to a short series
of articles in the same vein and a subsequent survey to quantify the
extent of the BD’s popularity amongst the journal’s readership. Finally,
this led to the official establishment, in 1962, of the CBD (Le Club des
Amis de la Bande Dessinée), and its corollary journal Giff-Wiff,edited by
Francis Lacassin.
The CBD was soon to promote itself as a learned society. These
originalbédéphiles were historically responsible for the first prolonged
media interest of the comics form in France. Eventually the efforts of the
club led to the introduction of one of the first courses on the history and
aesthetics of the BD in France, run by Lacassin at the Sorbonne. The
1960s saw the introduction of the first fairs and conventions promoting
BD. For the first time entire books, rather than short articles were
devoted to the subject. In 1965, the first international congress on the
BD, at which several members of the CBD and several French
cartoonists attended, was held in Bordighera in Italy. It was only a
matter of time before the French organised a similar event of their own.
Libbie McQuillan 9
In 1967, the exhibition, ‘Bande dessinée et figuration narrative’, was
held at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. The exhibition organised
by SOCERLID (a splinter group of the CBD), was a success and shortly
afterwards similar events were organised in the provinces. In 1966, the
previously hostile Ligue de l’enseignement organised a conference in
favour of the BD. The tide for post-war BD was finally turning.
Contemporaneous with the success of René Goscinny and Albert
Uderzo’sAstérixseries, such fairs and exhibitions held nation-wide put
BD in the French cultural spotlight. The bédéphiles not only helped
promote the BD, but also profoundly influenced BD critical discourse.
The group was responsible for popularising both the term bande
dessinée and its abbreviation BD. Comparing the medium to cinema and
encouraging an archival research of BD’s history, Giff-Wiff was
responsible for the introduction of certain discourses surrounding BD. It
is to be noted that both the meta-language of the pseudo-cinematic
discourse and the scholarly investigations into BD’s past were adopted
in order to promote BD not as an aspect of mass culture but as a
respectable adult art form—the 9th art.
Towards the end of the decade, the Astérix phenomenon—
albums were selling millions of albums with each edition—brought BD
to the attention of the general public. A BD vogue swept French pseudo-
intellectuals. The initial journalistic response was, characteristically,
more interested in the possibilities of intellectualising BD than in the
media itself. BD was not, as yet, a widely respected form and even
though there was a general interest in Astérix there was, as yet, no
critical thinking on BD to which the commentator could refer. Indeed,
given the novelty of the attention surrounding BD, it is not surprising
that BD as a form was so misunderstood or that initial critical reactions
were based upon the reception of other comparable media. The fact that
a common word even to describe the medium itself was not officially
decided upon until the late 1960s perhaps best highlights this
problematic.
WhilstAstérix mania was sweeping the French press at the end
of the 1960s, in 1968, Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle was completing his
undergraduate dissertation, Tintin, bande dessinée: une approche
sémiotique, which he later developed into a thesis. Fresnault-Deruelle
was one of many young scholars who in the 1970s turned their critical
attention towards BD. Fresnault-Deruelle is perhaps the most famous,
since most published, academic writer on the BD of the period. In the
1970s in French and Belgian universities many theses and even more
undergraduate dissertations were to be devoted to various aspects of the
BD. Most of the work of the period that went beyond the undergraduate
level looked to semiotics for its inspiration and self-justification. Such