Comics and Novelization: A Literary History of Bandes Dessinées 2022055052, 2022055053, 9781032436647, 9781032482729, 9781003388210

Citation preview

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“The relationship between comics and literature is not one-​way traffic: literature is not only adapted in graphic novel format, it also owes a lot to the world of comics, appropriating its forms and themes in many ways. Relying on a strong theoretical framework and robust case studies, Benoît Glaude’s trail-​blazing study discloses this less known but vital dimension of intermedial connections in modern transmedia culture.” Jan Baetens, KULeuven, Belgium “The meticulous research and clever thinking shown in this new work represents some of the most influential scholarship in the last decade. Benoît Glaude is a scholar of the highest order and his nuanced treatment is rigorous and powerful.” Hugo Frey, University of Chichester, UK “Up until now, novelizations had attracted little academic interest. Benoît Glaude’s compelling study shows the interest of looking into this little-​ known corpus of texts adapting comics into literature. Nourished by fascinating case studies, his book considerably renews our approach to transmedia cultures and opens up a field of primary importance in our understanding of the history of the ninth art.” Sylvain Lesage, Université de Lille, France “This remarkable work of scholarship brings a new perspective and sharp analytical insights to the study of transmedia adaptation, while providing a master class in the close reading of some famous comics alongside the fascinating and little-​known novels that they have engendered.” Ann Miller, University of Leicester, UK

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Comics and Novelization

This book opens a novel perspective on comics and literature interactions. It claims that the two artistic media have always maintained a mutual emulation, for as long as they have coexisted in media culture. To demonstrate this, the present research does not focus on literary adaptations in comics form but rather on a literary corpus that remains virtually unexplored: comics-​related novels. The purpose of this volume is to inventory French comics-​related novels and to study them. Within the limits of the French-​speaking world, this book pieces together a literary history of bande dessinée through its novels, from the nineteenth to twenty-​first centuries. Although the comic strip –​including the aptly named “graphic novel” –​has sometimes been regarded as the disciple of an unsurpassable literary model, do these under-​studied adaptations in novel form not rather indicate a mutual relationship, or even an emulation, between the two media? Benoît Glaude is a researcher at Universiteit Gent and a visiting lecturer at Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He has published several books about French-​speaking comics, including his PhD on comics dialogues (La Bande dialoguée, 2019), as well as a volume on novelization in children’s literature (Les Novellisations pour la jeunesse, coedited with Laurent Déom, 2020).

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Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

151 Islam as Imagined in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century English Literature Clinton Bennett 152 The Politics of Remembrance in the Novels of Günter Grass Alex Donovan Cole 153 The Words of Winston Churchill Speeches 1933–​1940 Jonathan Locke Hart 154 The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies Edited by Christopher Lloyd and Hilary Emmett 155 Digital Literature and Critical Theory Annika Elstermann 156 Temporal Experiments Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature Edited by Bruce Barnhart and Marit Grøtta 157 Interpreting Violence Narrative, Ethics and Hermeneutics Edited by Cassandra Falke, Victoria Fareld and Hanna Meretoja 158 Comics and Novelization A Literary History of Bandes Dessinées Benoît Glaude For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​ Routle​dge-​Interd​isci​plin​ary-​Persp​ecti​ves-​on-​Lit​erat​ure/​book-​ser​ies/​RIPL

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Comics and Novelization A Literary History of Bandes Dessinées Benoît Glaude

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First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Benoît Glaude The right of Benoît Glaude to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Glaude, Benoît, author. Title: Comics and novelization : a literary history of bandes dessinées / Benoît Glaude. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022055052 (print) | LCCN 2022055053 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032436647 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032482729 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003388210 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.–France–History and criticism. | Graphic novels–France–History and criticism. | French fiction–Adaptations–History and criticism. | French fiction–French-speaking countries–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN6745 .G57 2023 (print) | LCC PN6745 (ebook) | DDC 741.5/944–dc23/eng/20230222 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055052 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055053 ISBN: 9781032436647 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032482729 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003388210 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003388210 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

Introduction: Comics-​related novels

Comics and literature  2 A novel perspective on comics and adaptations  6 Comics novelization and the visual turn of literary writing  10 Two adaptation processes generating comics-​related novels  13 Towards a literary history of bande dessinée  18

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1 Textual margins of early comics

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2 Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations

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3 Why self-​novelize a comic strip?

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How to verbalize a picture story?  27 Close reading: Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus  30 Captions rewritten as a bridge over redrawn illustrations  36 Big Little Books and the French book market: a missed rendezvous  41 From captioned picture stories to serials-​under-​images  43 Mickey et Minnie, a precursor to the modern French junior novelization  50

The literary adventures of Tintin  60 An issue of enunciative responsibility  63 Literary initiations to a visual universe  68 Close reading: The Adventures of Tintin  72 When comics fans write literary panels  77 From ekphrasis to fanfiction  81

The illusion of a deeper reading experience  92 Comics artists and literary illustration  97 A logic of supplement  101 Close reading: Acknowledgement of Murders, Ric Hochet’s First Case  106 From graphic to literary novels  110 A logic of substitution  114

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4 The comics heroes’ childhood told to children

How to relate the past of comics heroes  125 The literary prequels of French comics characters  128 Multiple childhoods of a Belgian-​Japanese comics heroine  132 Close reading: The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno  134 Comics-​related French junior novelizations  140 When a comics character writes his own autobiography  143

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations

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References

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Index

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Comics on the threshold of literary texts  155 Comics as a frame for multimodal storytelling  161 Comics in the factory of literary writing  167 Reading novels as comics scripts  173

Comics-​related fiction  184 Other primary sources  188 Secondary criticism  191

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Introduction Comics-​related novels

What do the following have in common? The Adventures of Superman (1942) by the American radio scriptwriter George Lowther, The Battle of Pharsalus (1969) by Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon, Tintin in the New World (1993) by the New York writer Frederic Tuten, El año que se escapó el león [The Year the Lion Escaped] (2000) by the Argentinian comics writer Carlos Sampayo, the French series of children’s novels Titeuf (since 2000) by Shirley Anguerrand and Little Vampire launched by Joann Sfar in 2020, several short stories in the collections Nicholas (1960) by the French comics writer René Goscinny, Fragile Things (2006) by the British author Neil Gaiman, and even Hiroshima: the Autobiography of Barefoot Gen (2010) by the Japanese mangaka Keiji Nakazawa. The answer is that these texts, coming from a variety of literary genres, are related to comics that pre-​existed them. If at first glance these examples seem exceptional, they are in fact part of a corpus that has never been inventoried or specifically studied.1 According to the non-​exhaustive list provided at the end of the book, comics-​related novels even appear to have multiplied since the 1990s, at least in the French-​language book market. However, this literary corpus remains virtually unexplored, as was still the case with film novels at the beginning of the twenty-​first century (Baetens, Novelization 1–​14). On the one hand, when comics scholars study a literary adaptation –​which is what a novelization undoubtedly is –​they are usually interested in the opposite process: the retelling of a literary narrative in a comics form. The latter visual medium seems to be assigned this secondary status,2 as if to remind us of its lower rank in the Western hierarchy of arts. For the majority of researchers, it seems inconceivable that comics inspire literature, while the opposite influence is obvious. On the other hand, literary scholars’ lack of interest in novelization may be explained by a cultural disregard for a genre of novels that have long been regarded as devoid of literary value,3 and this mistrust persists, particularly towards novelizations for the young. However, my interest today in comics-​related novels, as a literary researcher specializing in French-​speaking comics, is thanks to the recent prominence of the literary genre of novelization in cultural and film studies, which have mainly explored film novels. At the same time, adaptation studies have DOI: 10.4324/9781003388210-1

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2  Introduction: Comics-related novels been broadened beyond the novel-​to-​film relationship, by including more media and by extending the scope of the products and processes which may count as adaptation. Moreover, not all novels related to comics are novelizations. Thanks to its Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) provides the best-​known example4 of a contemporary novelist’s interest in the ninth art. However, rather than novelizing a particular work –​unless we consider that he novelizes the fictitious comic books of The Escapist –​Michael Chabon sets out in search of a history of the American comic strip, which he tells in a fictional form, through the careers of a duo of forgotten comics artists. This novel should be considered in relation to the archival turn that characterized graphic narrative at the time, or the “contemporary US-​based graphic novelists[’…] obsession with the irrecoverable archive of early popular culture” (Gardner 210). What if literary research were to be inspired by this novelistic project? Considering comics-​related novels, would it be possible to trace back a history of the ninth art through literature? This book attempts to do precisely that. Within the limits of the French-​speaking world, it pieces together a literary history of bande dessinée through its novels. Whereas the comic strip –​including the aptly named “graphic novel” –​ has sometimes been regarded as the disciple of an unsurpassable literary model, do these under-​studied adaptations in novel form not rather indicate a mutual relationship, or even an emulation, between the two artistic media?

Comics and literature This book does not aim to reactivate the long-​standing debate in English-​ language comics studies about whether comics are literary or not (for a state-​of-​the-​art review, see Miodrag). Leading comics scholars (e.g. Chute 269, 277, Kukkonen 85, 149–​150) have been applying the term to comics works that they consider both to have artistic merit and to support a literary analysis, i.e. a reading carried out with methods from literary studies. As the British scholar Paul Williams (160, 167) has recently pointed out, this literarization or “novelization”5 of the conception of comics was already taking root in the 1970s comics fandom in the United States. The literary tendency among fans and academics followed the arrival of alternative comics and graphic novels, in the last decades of the twentieth century, on a publishing market that was lacking cultural legitimacy, especially in comparison with literary publishing. If such a conception had the advantage of convincing literary researchers to take some comics seriously (especially graphic novels), it has never been uncontroversial, and it now appears a little “outmoded” (Miodrag 390). Many other scholars have been less quick to subordinate comics to literature, particularly on the Francophone side (Dürrenmatt 221, Frigerio 83, among others). A prominent theorist such as Thierry Groensteen, a fine

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  3 connoisseur of Rodolphe Töpffer’s theoretical writings that instituted, as early as the 19th century, an autonomous “littérature en estampes” [literature in prints], has decisively contributed to defining a means of expression in its own right, without refraining from considering it as fundamentally narrative. Indeed, storytelling is not the exclusive domain of literature, as specialists in film, television or game studies know. As he puts it (Groensteen, Comics and Narration 176), “it is indeed a literature that has come into being, that is to say a vast corpus of narrative works, structured according to genres, schools, collections, readerships”. One solution would therefore consist in studying a drawn literature –​ “littérature dessinée”, as Harry Morgan (21–​25) coined it, or “graphic literature” in the words of Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey (7) –​considering it as a close neighbour of traditional text-​based literature, without excluding the tools of literary analysis. Noting with Groensteen (Comics and Narration 161) “the irreducible doubleness of comics […,] both a form of literature and a visual art”, many cartoonists today6 claim the right not to choose a discipline to which comics would be subsumed, and in doing so, they consider them to be a fully-​fledged artistic medium. The literary scholar Jacques Dürrenmatt (55) echoes this indecision when he states that “Tintin is literature and something other than literature”. According to the American researcher Jared Gardner (177), this “sin of not choosing” may puzzle some scholars, “but it is precisely the inability or refusal to choose (between text and image, past and present, graphic and novel, popular culture and art/​literature, etc.) that draws creators to this form in the first place”. In addition, artists are perfectly free to opt for several means of expression. Nevertheless, to describe a continuum (whether literary or simply narrative) between, say, children’s picture books, comics for children, comic books, graphic novels, multimodal novels and traditional literary fiction would be simplistic and overgeneralizing. Their interrelationships are much more complex, changing over time, and that is why they deserve to be studied. The present book claims that comics and literature are two artistic media that have always maintained a mutual emulation, for as long as they have coexisted in media culture. This does not mean overlooking cultural hierarchies that have always existed. Novelization of comics is interesting, in this respect, in that it reverses the usual direction of traffic from a prestigious medium to one deemed to be lacking in legitimacy, and challenges assumptions about the history of the relationship between the two media. Nevertheless, as the American comics scholar Christopher Pizzino (91) advises us, “we must examine the ways that novelists’ interactions with comics, as a node in the network of which contemporary fiction is a part, are affected by cultural perceptions of comics as a lesser medium”. On another note, a search through novelizations, while focusing on a two-​way relationship between comics and literature, could not ignore dynamics that tie comics to audiovisual media.

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4  Introduction: Comics-related novels Novelization, as a literary genre, originated in connection with screens. While extending its meaning to comics adaptations, this study will not exclude the large body of novels adapting adaptations of comics to the big and small screens. The concept of novelization covers both product and production. While a novelization is a literary work resulting from a transmedia adaptation (in the sense of Linda Hutcheon’s famous product-​oriented definition of “adaptation as an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art” (170)), novelization is a writing process (the literary transposition of a narrative available in a non-​literary medium), whereas novelizations as a whole constitute a literary genre (an assembly of literary works applying a similar writing contract and involving a similar reading pact). Such a research subject lies not only at the intersection of two artistic media, but also at the crossroads of several disciplines: as a publishing product, novelization relates to the book industry and to book studies; as a textual production, it concerns literary studies; as a socio-​cultural practice, it regards cultural studies; as a transmedia creation process, it concerns adaptation studies. This literary study does not investigate all these fields of research, it merely proposes a text-​based, media-​historical and process-​oriented poetics of a corpus of novels that inherently implies an intermedial perspective. I use the adjective “text-​ based” in a very literal sense. Adaptation studies (Leitch 4) that perpetuate a postmodern conception of the text, following on from literary and film studies (Chatman, “Representation” 22, Saint-​Gelais 7, Letourneux 35), tend to extend this concept beyond its scriptural limits. For my part, I will avoid using the term “texts” to refer to artistic works that are not literary, whether they adapt or are adapted from another work. I use “literary” in a sense as literal as that of “text-​based”, with no implication of value judgment, i.e. without claiming to evaluate the artistic or cultural merit of the works studied. In this book, I will basically employ “literary” as a synonym for “text-​based”, and “non-​literary” as synonymous with “non-​text-​based”. In addition, in my view, a text-​based approach does not imply logocentrism but assumes the literary nature of a corpus of novels that is de facto a collection of written texts. As the text/​ image specialist Liliane Louvel (81) states, with regard to pictorial description in general, “language predominates since painting is put into words”. I will examine my corpus of texts through a narratological, empirical, bottom-​up approach driven by close reading. This literary method consists of a scrupulous word-​for-​word analysis of a short text, for instance a short story or a passage from a novel. To avoid over-​generalizing and decontextualizing the analysis of such limited excerpts, my close readings must consider this analysis without overlooking the reading process, a process that is always dynamic, but more so than ever when the narrative is seen by the reader as an adaptation of a previous narrative. Therefore, this formalist reading cannot ignore the processes of creation and reception, which are intimately linked with the materiality of the printed format.

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  5 Since Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus [Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus], self-​novelized in 1840 by Rodolphe Töpffer, the Swiss father of the comics medium, comics-​related prose has experimented with a multitude of material formats to host those “print-​based adaptations” (Newell 25). The tracing of a literary history of bande dessinée mainly in the twentieth century, in the present book, entails a consideration of these printed formats. The historical study of the French comics album (see Filliot, Lesage, Baudry and Litaudon), from its emergence in the nineteenth century to its standardization and massification between 1950 and 1990, has shown the decisive impact of this format on the creation and reception of works. The same could be expected from a study of the multiple formats of the novelizations of these albums. Before the digitization of artistic creation, mostly a twenty-​first century phenomenon, comics and literature shared the same types of periodical or book formats, sometimes rubbing shoulders in the same publishing house catalogues. They used the same tactile and visual channels through which, for example, the verbal exchanges of the characters could be conveyed in writing (apart from in wordless comics), or alternatively depicted graphically (if the novel was illustrated), and so on. A poetics of comics-​related novels may raise interesting issues in transmedial narratology, but it should not be detached from an empirical study of the works, considered in their context of production and reception. It cannot, therefore, dispense with a history of the printed formats that contributed to determining the forms of the literary narratives they hosted. The purpose of this book is to inventory French comics-​related novels and to study them, in order to write a literary history of bande dessinée. It postulates that it is the lack of knowledge of these novels that gives the false impression that they are merely bibliophilic curiosities or accidents of comic strip history. No criticism can be carried out without memory. A misfiled, unindexed and poorly preserved corpus, such as the one I am interested in, can only be misrecognized, despised or ignored, and inevitably under-​studied. What can we expect from the study of French comics-​related novels? This book aims, through the exploration of this corpus, at least to contribute to reorientating adaptation studies applied to comics towards an intermedialization. Until now, when comics studies have analysed so-​called “literary adaptations”, the automatic recourse to the concepts of source and target works, borrowed from traductology, has betrayed a conception of adaptation as translation, always situating the literary work at the source of its transposition into a comic strip. To unravel this conceptual metaphor, its assumptions that adaptation is a one-​way process, that it does not generate original creation and that it addresses an unsurpassable literary model must be questioned. To turn this perspective around, the novelization of comics is a potentially interesting case study, judging by the fresh wind that the study of this genre of novels has brought to research on relationships between literature and cinema.

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6  Introduction: Comics-related novels

A novel perspective on comics and adaptations We should not be surprised that the study of novelization emerged, at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, in the middle of an intermedialization of adaptation studies, whose result was to cast adaptation in far more generous terms as something that happened not only when novels became films but when films became novels, when comic books became films or films became comic books, or when films were interpreted and consumed as if they had been based on novels. (Leitch 4) The fresh interest in the genre stemmed both from a broader fascination with issues of intermediality and from a renewal of adaptation studies, to which novelization contributed. Among the architects of this reconfiguration, Linda Hutcheon (39) recognized the theoretical interest of these novels,7 which upset the conventional order of the most studied adaptations, “that is, from the telling to the showing mode, especially from print to performance”. At the turn of the twenty-​first century, as the boundaries between media became blurred, it seemed increasingly unwise to reduce the adaptive relationship to a one-​way translation, from a source work to a target work, generally from the most legitimate to the least recognized medium. The deterministic correlates of such a conception, which were, on the one hand, the originality and medium-​specificity of the source work and, on the other hand, the secondarity and fidelity of the target work, could be reconsidered. The intermedia network perspective replaced this linear conception of adaptation in order to better take into account the moving back and forth of stories –​or some of their central elements,8 constituting the “work’s network” (Newell 8) –​from one medium to another, as well as the interactions between the multiple participants in “the adaptation industry network” (Murray 69), who contribute in bringing adaptations into being. From this network perspective, adaptation is not part of a linear continuity but rather of a constellation of products and works that extend a fictional universe across media and that are generated and organized by multiple actors. This is obvious in the case of the tie-​ins that accompany the release of a Hollywood film. They are designed at the same time as the film is made; a novelizer adapts the script, just as a video game designer exploits the pitch bible, without either of them being able to see the as-​yet unfinished film. In addition, the constellation of works remains expandable over time: it may be extended by works subsequent to the film’s theatrical release. Although it is conducive to merchandizing, such a creative incubator cannot be reduced to its commercial virtues alone. The intermediality on which it is based puts the artistic autonomy and the hierarchy of values that drive the literary world,

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  7 both in its internal functioning and in its relations with other artistic worlds, into perspective. If we assume that “it is never a one-​sided exchange from book to film or film to book”, as did the pioneer in the study of novelization, Jan Baetens (Novelization 20), then the relationship between the film and the novelization should be considered as a cogeneration rather than as a filiation. The study of novelization can therefore be expected to tell us equally about each of the media involved, and this should no longer be surprising today. The adaptationists of the second half of the twentieth century were already approaching this idea by following their medium-​ specific comparative approach, even if they favoured the one-​sided novel-​ to-​film relationship. One tendency of these pioneering studies to consider the impact of film on modern fiction and the relations between fiction and film as distinctively modernist approaches to representation […] has continued to serve as the focal point for European intermedialists who have broadened its scope beyond novels and films to consider a much wider array of media. (Leitch 3) In order to think about such an interrelation, intermediality is an essential notion, as it designates all relations between media, in the sense of reciprocal relationships. Considering it as an effect, a product or a process, the German intermedialist Irina Rajewsky distinguishes three categories of narrow forms of intermediality (51–​53): intermedial reference, media combination and transposition across media. A priori, this book on the novelization of bande dessinée will predominantly focus on the last category, considered as a process of adaptation between two media. To discuss intermediality while avoiding its conceptual flexibility, in place of the term “intermedial”, I prefer to use “transmedial” –​whose prefix emphasizes passage and change –​using the word in a general way to describe any circulation from one medium to another.9 However, the categories of intermediality are not impermeable. In isolating the category of transposition across media, Irina Rajewsky (53) notes that adaptation is not limited to it. Indeed, novelizations, while transposing a narrative from one medium to another, can also produce a media hybridization and multiply references to the adapted work. Rather than disproportionately widening the perspective of my research, these two intermedial extensions of adaptation will allow me to clarify its contours. First observation: the novelization process can lead to a media hybridization, in the case of a film picture book or a novel illustrated with photograms or film stills. In his seminal essay on novelization, Jan Baetens, after devoting a chapter to the place of illustration in the film novel (Novelization 53–​60), describes other print-​based film adaptations as “visual novelizations” (45, 141–​142, 164–​165). As the visual double of the literary genre that is at the heart of his essay, visual novelization

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8  Introduction: Comics-related novels encompasses research topics with greater media hybridity, such as the film photonovel, the drawn novel, the adaptation into comics form, or the film picture book. Whether text-​based or visual, novelizations are rarely devoid of illustrations and very often lead to “a visual apprehension of the adapted work, including while reading”10 (Letourneux 390). The impossibility of completely removing the image –​despite the desire of literary adapters to limit its competition with the text (Baetens, Novelization 55) –​ is totally accepted by visual novelization. Unlike the film novel, it engages in retelling through a visual immersion in the filmic diegesis (Fevry 168). Visual novelizations of comics have been available on the French-​ language book market for a long time. In the 1950s, for example, when comics albums disappeared from Hachette’s publishing catalogue, some of their heroes “found a new life in collections that promoted a narrative without panels or speech bubbles, but where texts and images were combined on the page following a ‘cinematographic’ principle” (Baudry and Litaudon 18). A French series such as Alain Saint-​Ogan’s Zig et Puce (a flagship of Hachette’s catalogue since 1927, which had inspired Hergé’s early work) saw its last comics album in 1952 but continued immediately with two picture books for children in the series “Les Albums roses” [The Pink Picture Books] using the same format as the American Little Golden Books. The first of these, Zig et Puce et Alfred (1952), adapted four pages from the fourth comics album, Zig et Puce à New-​York (1930). Comics visual novelizations for young readers encompass several children’s picture books in the “Carrousel” series (1966–​1971) by Dupuis, featuring the Smurfs and Boule & Bill, among others, as well as albums adapted from comics-​related films. Examples of such film picture books include Tintin and the Golden Fleece (1965, from the French original released by Casterman in 1962), The Smurfs and the Magic Flute (1979, first published in 1975 in French by Dupuis), The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1978, French version published by Dargaud in 1976), among others. With a few exceptions, the present volume will not specifically consider this kind of comics novelization (for which a book would be needed) but will focus on novels without neglecting their graphic illustrations should they contain any. The obvious fact that adaptations refer to earlier works –​Rajewsky’s second observation –​should not be underestimated. According to Linda Hutcheon (8): “seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation is a form of intertextuality: we experience adaptations (as adaptations) as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation”. In the sense of the concept of intertextuality made famous by French Theory,11 the text as a patchwork of earlier texts presents a rewriting of the author’s and the reader’s memory of these. To analyse this phenomenon of reception in novelization, we could use the concept of “media memories” suggested by the comics scholar Maaheen Ahmed, i.e. the formal remanence, in a comics work, of images and tropes that evoke other media.12 As she defines them (Ahmed 3), “[m]‌edia memories […] encompass the general memories of

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  9 cultural practices and codes as well as the specific memories of works that continue to ‘haunt’ or resonate through cultural productions”. This concept can fruitfully be extended beyond comics to the study of adaptation as a process, as a performative and receptive practice. In recent decades, fidelity criticism applied to adaptations (as products) –​i.e. the evaluation established through case studies of “the responsibility of adaptations to communicate or evoke some essential features associated with the texts they are adapting” (Leitch 7) –​has been challenged as a method of critical reading (although it remains popular with film reviewers) without dismissing the question of fidelity. The concept of media memories makes it possible to objectify the impression of fidelity felt by readers when they think they find some features in an adaptation that they have associated with their memory of the adapted work. Comics-​ related novels involve a double reception process, as literary readings of comic strips that a fictional narrator communicates, in writing, to his or her own readers. Behind their narrator, such stories often bear the trace of the material and cultural conditions in which their (real-​life) authors –​occasional or assiduous readers, or even comics fans –​ discovered them. This discovery may have been recent for the writer, just as it may date back to their childhood. Although non-​autobiographical, these fictions may be imbued with childhood memories and emotional evocations of children reading comics. Novelistic passages in which an adult recounts a personal reading experience present what the musicologist Cormac Newark (166) calls a “ ‘nested’ reception, in which works of art, as well as generating their own reception, play an important part in representing –​hence reflecting and propagating –​the reception of others”. An explicit case of nested reception could be that of “oblique” novelizations (Baetens, Novelization 7) where a literary narrator tells a story previously recounted in a non-​text-​based medium as experienced by a character in the novelization.13 For example, a chapter of Human Nature (2022, from the French original published in 2020) by the French novelist Serge Joncour begins with a long (claimed14) quote from an adaptation in comics form –​i.e. a visual novelization –​of the first episode in the Japanese animation series Albator 1978, shown on U.S. television under the title Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years. This is how the passage ends: […] But I, Albator, and my loyal crew have broken these bonds of steel. None but we can alert our fellow men to the danger they face… Now, I am known to all as the Space Pirate Captain, wanted dead or alive, wherever I go… Sunday evenings were sacrosanct. No one turned on the television after supper, and Agathe would read aloud from her comic book, reliving the adventures of the lean, long-​legged Japanese cartoon hero, with his boyish charm and tousled hair forever falling into his eyes. (Joncour 63)

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10  Introduction: Comics-related novels The fictional scene takes place on a farm in the Lot department, in September 1980. Every Sunday, the farmer parents “made both girls read aloud” (63) to the whole family, rather than watching television. This time, the young reader bypasses the adults’ instruction, choosing to read the comic strip adaptation of a television series. This reading scene, in a novel that has nothing to do with novelization, plays on its readers’ nostalgia for the French television cartoons of the 1980s and their print tie-​ins. In another excerpt, from the coming-​of-​age novel Le Milieu de l’horizon [Beyond the Horizon] (2013) by Swiss Romand writer Roland Buti, a child narrator recounts his escape, from his harsh daily life in his farming family, into the reading of comics. The scene takes place in a similar setting to the previous one: a farm, in 1976. But Buti’s narrator is no longer really recounting a comics narrative, focusing as he does on the child’s reading experience. Description of reading practices takes precedence over novelization since the comics in question are not even identified here: I opened my comics albums and I became the master of time, very quickly scouring a page or, on the contrary, lingering on each panel to unearth a multitude of exquisite details. A first quick reading, turning eagerly the pages to find out the rest, never prevented me from going back at any moment, rereading this or that passage several times, stopping on a panel, entering inside it as one would visit a museum room […]. I would have liked to live forever in a drawing. (Buti 138–​139)

Comics novelization and the visual turn of literary writing These borderline cases (of comics’ citation or of allusion to comics) highlight the need to delimit the present research by selecting a portion of the potentially infinite corpus of French comics-​related novels for study. Not only novelizations but most contemporary novels reuse forms and images that constitute media memories. In the mid-​1990s, in the midst of the humanities’ iconic turn, the literary scholar Bernard Vouilloux (20) noted that “there are few writers who, recently, have not introduced painting into their field of reflection or included it in their poetic ‘doing’ ”. Of course, French literature as well as English literature has been “influenced by the visual arts” for centuries (Louvel 15, see also Hamon 231, Moon 359), and Vouilloux’s essay demonstrates this influence from the eighteenth century onwards. Nonetheless, focusing on French literature, he describes a paradigm shift throughout the twentieth century from the image inspired by literature to the literary work inspired by images (Vouilloux 20–​21). The nineteenth century had already made “a new ‘imagery’ ” available to writers, at the instigation of authors such as Töpffer and Champfleury, who found inspiration “particularly in non-​literary images, or in popular or industrial images, in order to better ‘go back’ afterwards to literature”

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  11 (Hamon 34). Since then, no longer content with the masterpieces of art history, contemporary writers have been using a wide variety of images as raw materials for literary writing. Through the 2000s, writers and publishers have been “far less secure in their cultural status and increasingly building bridges to the visual world” (Baetens and Frey 193, 216). For several decades now, comics fans have had the chance to find elements of comics universes in the diegeses of contemporary novels, for instance the Hergé characters in Pascal Bruckner’s Monsieur Tac [Mr Tac] (1976) or The Painted Lady (1983) by Françoise Sagan.15 The French writer and journalist François Cavanna turned it into a real exercise in style when he based the writing of his novel Maman, au secours! [Mum, Help!] (1990) on scattered panels from the work of Italian cartoonist Francesco Tullio-​ Altan. These borrowings from popular culture extend the possibility of reading a novel as an adaptation, i.e. of experiencing and interpreting a novel as if it were based on a previous visual narrative. Can we go so far as to consider contemporary writing as the generalized novelization of a visual culture that is more and more omnipresent and accessible? But, then, where might novelization end? Take the example of a picture story heroine who is as famous as Tintin in French popular culture: Bécassine. At the same time that Bernard Vouilloux was publishing his essay on paintings in literature, another French literary scholar, Chantal Thomas, was publishing her first work of fiction: La Vie réelle des petites filles [The Real Life of Little Girls] (1995). Many scenes depicted in this collection of microfictions are literary variations on images of childhood, constituting a personal visual memory, drawing for instance on painting (Las Meninas), tapestry (The Lady and the Unicorn) or an object to be photographed (The Doll). Three successive short stories (Thomas 90–​96) are devoted to Bécassine, the outdated heroine, still famous today in France, of an old long-​running series of captioned picture stories. In Thomas’s non-​ illustrated short stories, the character, freed from her original visual context, remains iconic in the sense that her name alone conveys a visual imagination. As a result, Bécassine is well suited to the microfiction genre since, being one of the “icons of popular culture, she does not require presentation and description, i.e. she spares telling” (Álvares 60, see also Sepulchre 109, 112). The first of Chantal Thomas’ three microstories, entitled “Bécassine dort mal” [Bécassine Sleeps Badly], is an “oblique” novelization of a comics album of the same title. In a way, it recounts a comics narrative as experienced by a child, even if it provides more information on reading practices than on narrative content. The short story features the little Théa, a girl who belongs to the fourth generation of a Catholic family of female readers of Bécassine albums. The little girl makes an avid, compulsive and identificatory reading of an album whose entire plot is reportedly based on the heroine’s difficulty in finding sleep. Identifying with her, as she is reading in bed rather than falling asleep, Théa “gripped,

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12  Introduction: Comics-related novels skips pages” (92), as if she were reading an adventure story such as that usually lived by the star heroine of the magazine La Semaine de Suzette [Suzette’s Week] (1905–​1960). The short story ends with the often artificial cliffhanger that used to close the serial’s instalments in the weekly magazine and that persists in the last panels of the pages republished in the albums: “What will our heroine do now? Théa, her senses on alert, her glasses on her nose, tries to guess what’s next. But Bécassine defeats all predictions” (92). Are we talking about an “oblique” novelization? This would require a source narrative. Which reader would bother to check if this episode was ever told in the hundreds of pages of the weekly serial? In the text, the title Bécassine Sleeps Badly is not presented as fictitious, it is mentioned at the top of a list of almost all authentic albums. However, two other titles implausibly exaggerate the ideological line (conservative, bourgeois and Catholic) of the comics series, La Machine à coudre de Bécassine [Bécassine’s Sewing Machine] and Bécassine va à confesse [Bécassine Goes to Confession], the latter being announced as a forthcoming album even though the series ended in the early 1960s. A few lines later, the narrator tells us that the episode of Bécassine’s bedtime “continues, in Théa’s imagination, her daydreams” (Thomas 91). These hints of fictionality remind the reader that the collection of childhood stories, ironically entitled The Real Life of Little Girls, mixes fact and fiction, memory and imagination, in the sense that it has manifestly drawn on its author’s visual memory but does not claim to deliver an autobiography or a socio-​cultural study of girlhood. As is the case with “notional ekphrasis”, when a writer describes an imaginary piece of art (Louvel 61), Chantal Thomas pastiches a fictitious album which suits her storytelling needs better than existing ones. A comics character such as Bécassine is a trope for adaptation, or a privileged “transfictional” operator. For Canadian literary scholar Richard Saint-​Gelais, narratives, whether or not by the same author, are transfictional when they share elements of their diegeses, such as characters, some of whom are particularly prone to “a transfictional empowerment” (377), as is the case with Bécassine. She was quick to experience transfictionality. Before the launch of her album series in 1913, the heroine made her “first foray into the world of books” (Lesage 50) in the summer literary supplements of La Semaine de Suzette. Take for example one of these annual volumes, Les Vacances de Suzette [Suzette’s Holiday], from the summer of 1909. It consists of 190 pages, in a format (14 × 21 cm) that is half the size of the weekly magazine. Its content includes one-​fifth non-​fiction texts, two-​fifths drama texts (including two playlets featuring Bécassine) and the same proportion of literary fiction, including a 27-​page story entitled Bécassine a mal au doigt [Bécassine Has a Sore Finger]. Written by Marie de Grand’Maison (pseudonym of Marie-​Félicie Dufour) and illustrated by Raymond de la Nézière, this short story makes no reference to the picture stories and does not mention their authors (at the time, Jacqueline Rivière and Joseph

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  13 Porphyre Pinchon). The original storyline of this transfictional narrative demonstrates the usefulness of books for basic education. At the beginning of the summer holidays, the nephews and nieces of the Marchioness of Grand-​Air come to show her their “livres de prix”, which are books they have received at school as a reward for their academic success. The chatelaine asks one of her nieces to help her maid Bécassine with her chores, as she is suffering from a paronychia. The child offers to teach the maid, older than she is, what she has learned at school, “because the first-​rate girl was really, on many matters, full of an ignorance exceeding any permission” (Grand’Maison 23). The literary prose takes the form of a didactic dialogue,16 with a burlesque age reversal. The child gives the maid “object lessons”, which consist of using everyday objects to learn a history lesson. Much of this teaching takes place in the castle library, which the girls are cleaning while talking about the history of books since ancient times. The place taken by written culture, in a book that took over from school during the holidays, almost makes one forget the non-​ book and non-​literary origins of Bécassine.17 Almost a century apart, this transfictional short story by Marie de Grand’Maison, as well as Chantal Thomas’ microfiction adapting a fictitious comics album, both raise “the question of whether a given adaptation needs to be identified, perceived, and acknowledged as an adaptation in order to count as an adaptation” (Leitch 15). These works, which raise an issue of intermediality insofar as they invite us to consider an interrelation between comics and literature, are not novelizations in the strict sense. Such texts are deemed to be the result of a literary process that consists of adapting into a novel a work that has appeared in a non-​ literary (i.e. non-​text-​based) medium. This writing process is close to other adaptive processes, which I place on the diagram on Figure 0.1. Novelization occupies one end of it, as a transposition from one medium to another, alongside other transmedia writing processes (nontext-​to-​ text), which are somewhat comparable to it. At the other end of the continuum, I place strictly textual processes (text-​to-​text), producing literary, intra-​media adaptations, which are certainly not novelizations.

Two adaptation processes generating comics-​related novels This distinction among literary adaptation processes remains purely theoretical. Empirically, we can see that the practices of novelization and transfiction (for example, the writing of a prequel relating the youth of a character who has appeared in a non-​text-​based medium) coexist in media culture. How may we explain the closeness between novelizations and transfictional expansions? In his seminal book, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997, from the French original published in 1982), the French narratologist Gérard Genette focuses on the literary relations between narrative texts, making a fundamental distinction between practices of transformation (parody, travesty, transposition) and practices

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14  Introduction: Comics-related novels

Transmedia processes

(literary transformation or imitation)

A textual rewriting

(citation, repurposing)

An intertextual paraphrase

(mention, allusion)

An intertextual reference

(parody, travesty)

A transformation across media

(ekphrasis)

What it is not

A narrativized description

(expansion, continuation)

A transfiction across media

(novelization)

A transposition across media

What novelization is

Intra-media processes

Figure 0.1 Situation of novelization among other literary adaptation processes.

of imitation (pastiche, caricature, forgery). Each relationship produces three writing practices corresponding to the three modes selected by Genette (28–​29): the playful mode with an entertainment function, the satirical mode whose function is derision and the serious mode (to which I will return later). While describing text-​to-​text relations, and thus intra-​ media relations, he foresees the “universal relevance” (392) of these two operations of literary rewriting, namely transformation and imitation. They are indeed found in novels resulting from transmedia adaptations. Genette himself identifies a literary transformation close to novelization when he evokes the “narrativization” of a drama text (278),18 i.e. its transposition into novel form. We can thus consider novelizations as fictional transformations carried out in serious mode, i.e. as literary transpositions (212), all the more so, since novelizations of film scripts (and this is also the case with narrativizations of drama texts) do not follow a transmedia process, in the sense that they do not adapt nontext into text. In order to guarantee a simultaneous release, both in bookshops and in cinemas, in the different languages in which the film is shown, Hollywood film novelizers generally work on the basis of scripts (text-​to-​ text), without being allowed to see the film, still unfinished, of which they tell the narrative framework. That being said, the concepts coined in Palimpsests have already been given intermedial applications. For instance, Liliane Louvel (56–​ 57) describes some “transpictorial” relations between images and texts, including the case in which “a Text A transforms or imitates an Image A”. Also continuing along the path mapped out by Palimpsests, Richard Saint-​Gelais abolishes the textual boundaries of imitation in serious mode with his concept of transfictionality:19

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  15 By “transfictionality”, I mean the phenomenon whereby at least two texts, whether or not by the same author, jointly refer to the same fiction, either because they take up characters, they extend a previous storyline or they participate in the same fictional universe. I’m giving here to “text” a broad meaning that also covers cinema, television, comic strip, etc. (Saint-​Gelais 7) This creative process, which is not necessarily a transmedia process, postulates that the fictional universes exist independently of the narratives that founded them and of those that maintain them. In other words, it “refers to the migration of fictional entities across different texts”, which may or may not fall within different media (Ryan 365). Of course, a transmedia adaptation into a novel is theoretically different from a fictional expansion, such as a prequel or a continuation, but the two literary undertakings are closely linked. Novelizations and transfictions share at least four common features. First, transfictionality supports a change of medium without difficulty, even if it does not necessarily imply it. Second, given “the dynamic of expansion common to all modes of adaptation” (Newell 19), any novelization could be described as a literary expansion, which seems obvious at least from a quantitative point of view. A study of the best-​selling French comics series Le Triangle secret [The Secret Triangle] and its sequel I.N.R.I., each of which resulted in a novel written by the comics writer Didier Convard, quantifies the narrative expansion for one of the albums: the first one in the I.N.R.I. series, which already extrapolates a few verses from the Gospels into 54 comics pages, was itself adapted into 147 pages of literary prose (Boillat, “L’amplification” 107). Admittedly, this comics album embroiders a transfictional expansion based on a passage from the New Testament, but the novelization it later underwent tells no other story than its own. A third point in common with novelization, and contrary to pastiche and parody, is that transfictionality always maintains “the identity of fictional entities through autonomous works” (Saint-​Gelais 55). Novelizations and expansions carry out a transformation or an imitation in a serious mode, “in principle (and in intention) purely formal, which affect meaning only by accident” (Genette, Palimpsests 214). The two corpuses of novels thus share their serious mode and they raise the same difficulties inherent in the establishment of this mode. The very act of transposing or extending a narrative is playful in nature, considering that any written work bound by constraints involves an exhibition of virtuosity, and that any reworking thereof inevitably results in a mixture of pastiche and homage. According to Jan Baetens (“Adaptation” 39), “every continuation and adaptation may also involve pastiche”, which is not supposed to be satirical; if a pastiche makes the reader laugh, “it is never at the expense of its model”; otherwise it falls into caricature.

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16  Introduction: Comics-related novels By studying the phenomena of serialization, the French literary scholar Matthieu Letourneux (37, see also 267–​268) also highlights a critical and playful deconstruction of genres: “like any game, the serial practice implies a constant oscillation between adhering to the rules laid down and highlighting their artificial nature”. Moreover, many novelizations openly assume that they belong to an entertainment literature that does not disdain self-​parody despite the common belief that popular literature only offers a first-​degree reading experience. The whole of popular literature is “parodic”, inasmuch as the excesses it spares or commands, far from disqualifying it, give it –​in the eyes of its users themselves –​an extra charm: crying like Margot is all well and good, but crying like her while laughing at the tears that are poured out with her about her is much better. (Grivel 25) This notwithstanding, without excluding effects of pastiche, parody or irony, the dominance of the serious mode in the transposition or continuation of a narrative can be recognized by the preservation of the integrity of its diegesis. Novelization and expansion are more diegesis-​ preserving than rewriting practices carried out in a playful or satirical mode. Serious mode requires maintaining the integrity –​but not necessarily the entirety –​of the static component (protagonists, chronotope, natural laws, social rules and values, etc.) of the “storyworld” that precedes the story, according to its definition by the narratologist Marie-​ Laure Ryan (364). A fourth common feature between transfiction and novelization is their tendency to favour serial reading. Whether a literary work adapts an existing plot or embroiders a new one, based on a pre-​existing diegesis, “it already enters into a logic of serial variation” (Letourneux 395). As a transfictional process, serialization postulates the constancy of the storyworld beyond the closure of each work that exploits it. According to Matthieu Letourneux (36), “[t]‌o view a work from a serial perspective is […] to insist on a reception of the work mediated through a broader set of ‘texts’, whether verbal, pictorial, filmic, video gaming, etc”. As observed above in a short story featuring Bécassine, the visual encyclopaedia that it activates dispense the narrator from describing the protagonists in detail, even in the absence of illustrations. The iconicity of famous comics characters may provoke a novelizing reading of texts that are not novelizations. Which modern-​day French reader could read the forgotten novels and novellas that were at the origin of the famous series La Famille Fenouillard [The Fenouillard Family], Les 4 As [The 4 Aces] or Largo Winch, without having their visual comic strip universes in mind, even though these were subsequent to their literary beginnings? To take a more universal example, outside of comics, today it would be difficult to read Dodie Smith’s novel The Hundred

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  17 and One Dalmatians, even with the original illustrations by Anne and Janet Grahame Johnstone, without investing the visual encyclopaedia of Walt Disney’s franchise, developed from the novel through four feature films and 65 television cartoons. In this case, by blurring the identification of a source work, seriality reinforces a phenomenon of “signature iconography” (Newell 10) that is specific to multi-​adapted works, such as classics or franchises. According to Kathleen Newell (8, 15), what adaptations rewrite or revise “may not be a specific source but an idea of a source”, in the sense “that elements considered central to a source text become so through successive adaptations that establish, work within, and reinforce a signature iconography”. When one develops a storyworld through multiple media and formats, it is not a source narrative but a fictional universe serializing multiple narratives that one seeks to adapt. The actual indistinction between the processes of novelization and transfiction in the writing of comics-​related novels justifies an extension of the corpus of my study of the novelization of bande dessinée, which will include not only novelizations but also literary expansions. By including writing processes that go beyond the strict framework of comics novelizations, this corpus broadens the intermedial scope of this study of adaptation. It nevertheless has its limits, which are of a media, modal, textual, material and cultural nature. This book will focus on the literary processes of adaptation across media located on the far left of the diagram on Figure 0.1, but it will say little about ekphrasis and will deal less and less with other writing processes as they move further to the right of the diagram. It will not deal with adaptations across media carried out outside the serious mode, i.e. those that deliberately threaten the integrity of a storyworld by imitating or transforming a previous story in a playful or satirical mode. This volume will centre on pieces of prose, i.e. an assembly of texts in which illustrations can play an important role, but it will not extend to visual novelizations (into drawn novels, anime comics, children’s picture books, etc.) except to mark the limit they represent for the corpus studied. The literary texts I am interested in still have material limitations since they mainly focus on printed media from the twentieth century, to the exclusion of digital media, especially the Internet, where comics-​related fanfictions have been flourishing in the twenty-​ first century. Lastly, this corpus of French comics-​related novels implies a cultural focus on bandes dessinées, excluding, among other works, Japanese light novels –​fiction for teenagers with some “mangaesque” aesthetical features (Danesin 14–​15) –​which have been translated into French since the 2000s, as well as junior novelizations of manga that have been written by French authors at the same time (see Suvilay). This book will look slightly more at Anglo-​American comics-​related novels, from a purely comparative perspective, given the importance of English-​ speaking comics for the history of French-​speaking bandes dessinées in the twentieth century.

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18  Introduction: Comics-related novels

Towards a literary history of bande dessinée I will now give an overview of the contents of the book. It is divided into four equally sized chapters. Each chapter is predominantly based on the study of a handful of works, covered from the oldest to the most recent, and also includes a close reading of a passage from one of them, such as the beginning of Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus, analysed in Chapter 1. Beyond close readings, the study of a literary genre such as novelization, i.e. the study of a set of texts functioning in a comparable way, belongs to a higher level than that of the text. This architextual level concerns abstract textual categories (genres, text-​types, modes of enunciation) which transcend a particular text. At this level of analysis, Chapter 1 examines the dominant text-​types in early comics verbalizations in the first century of the history of bande dessinée. During this period, spanning from the 1830s to the 1930s, dominated by the media dispositive20 of captioned picture stories, the links between the ninth art and literature were close. Several comics heroes by the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer and the German Wilhelm Busch circulated in France in a literary form. During the Belle-​Époque, the Fenouillard family appeared in an illustrated short story published in several instalments in the children’s press before continuing their serialized adventures in the form of picture stories. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bécassine, the Pieds-​Nickelés and the Espiègle Lili were published directly into picture stories in the magazines in which they starred, but their first steps into the world of books were literary. Thus, the modern format of the comics album, which became standardized in France and Belgium from the 1950s onwards (Lesage 71–​85), supplanted other pre-​existing prototypical formats, in which novelization may have played a role. From a literary perspective, Chapter 1 will study the textual margins of early French-​ language comic strips, posing the hypothesis that a functional porosity existed between the writing of picture captions and other more autonomous forms of textualization of picture stories. The comparison of the verbalization processes of vocalization, description and narrativization of picture stories will make it possible to distinguish three genres of comics-​related texts: caption, ekphrasis and novelization. Four literary works will receive special attention: the novel Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus (1840) by Rodolphe Töpffer, the short story collection Les Bons contes font les bons amis [Good Accounts Make Good Friends] (1863) by Champfleury, the novels Les Pieds-​Nickelés à la guerre [The Pieds-​Nickelés At War] (1917) by Louis Forton and Mickey et Minnie (1932) by Magdeleine du Genestoux. Chapter 2 moves from the text-​types to the enunciative issues of the verbalization of comics. How do these literary narratives address their readers? This chapter investigates the intermedia network of Tintin’s adventures, which grew with and after the publication of the famous

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  19 comics albums (1930–​ 1976). Despite the complexity, often pointed out by fans, of taking Hergé’s hero out of the comics, he has continuously been adapted to other media, including literature. By developing this all-​terrain logic to the present day, this storyworld, for readers of all ages including the niche market of comics fans, has expanded beyond the simple adaptation of stories from one medium to another. The five pieces of literary prose selected for this chapter reflect the diversity of literary outputs which maintain the integrity of the elements imported from the comics diegesis. This corpus includes a novelization of a comic strip, Tchang et le yéti [Chang and the Yeti] (2001) by Sandrine Willems, and another of a film which adapts several albums, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) written by Alexander Irvine, as well as two novelistic expansions of Tintin’s adventures series, Dupont et Dupond, détectives [Thomson and Thompson, Detectives] (1943) by Paul Kinnet and Tintin in the New World (1993) by Frederic Tuten, and also the novelization of a film with an original storyline: Tintin and the Golden Fleece (1965, from the French original published in 1962) by André Barret and Rémo Forlani. The different approaches taken to adaptation by the authors of these pieces of literary prose determine the enunciation of their comics verbalizations, i.e. the nature of the voice that narrates them (narrator) and the type of addressee (narratee) that this voice constructs. This chapter will show that it is a question of co-​enunciation, in the sense that literary storytelling always mobilizes knowledge of the diegesis of Tintin’s adventures, associated with reading memories that both the author and the reader have in mind. We will see that the reception of such an adaptation is never a passive process, as evidenced by bedephilia writings in which readers enunciatively empower themselves to novelizing their remembered readings of Hergé’s panels. Chapter 3 moves from enunciative issues –​who is telling a comic strip and to whom is it being told? –​to the question of motivations for writing: why novelize or self-​novelize a comic strip? Since the middle of twentieth century, scriptwriters, who often had experience of literary writing, could write for comics with a virtual self-​novelization in mind, just as today’s scriptwriters secretly hope for a film adaptation of their graphic narratives. This chapter focuses on those who have taken the step of writing, as well as the comics artists who illustrated pieces of prose by their scriptwriters, in the second half of the century. Until the 1970s, comics and their literary adaptations were published in the same children’s magazines, or in their supplements, such as L’Hebdomadaire des grands récits [The Great Stories Weekly] (1948–​1950), Fantax Magazine (1949), Les Aventures de Pif le Chien [The Adventures of Pif the Dog] (1954–​ 1957) or Tintin Pocket Sélection (1968–​1978), which were respectively related to Spirou, Fantax, Vaillant and Tintin comics weeklies. This predilection for the press21 might seem paradoxical, insofar as the dominant genre of twentieth-​century French literature, the novel, was mostly published in volume form. From the mid-​1970s onwards, comics authors

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20  Introduction: Comics-related novels published their novels in this form, in a culture in which books enjoyed strong legitimacy. Many of them were commented on in an eclectic book review column that lasted for 20 years in (À Suivre) (1978–​1997), a Franco-​Belgian magazine that hosted a number of early French-​language graphic novels. At that time, a literary conception of comics –​affecting the creation as well as the interpretation of graphic narratives –​coincided with the “renaissance” of comics seen as a new medium breaking down the barrier between image and writing (Gardner 178). The authors of early French graphic novels had new ambitions for their artistic medium, which they saw as capable of imitating literature (as a novel in comics form) or supplanting it (as a graphical language as such). These ambitions did not prevent them from publishing novels, with or without links to their comics. What then explains the persistence of literary writing’s appeal? From L’Hebdomadaire des grands récits to (À Suivre), this chapter goes through periodicals, an approach that does not prevent works from being considered more closely, such as François Rivière’s novels Fabriques [Factories] (1977) and Le Dernier crime de Celia Gordon [Celia Gordon’s Last Crime] (1979), Corto Maltese: Mémoires (1988) by Michel Pierre and Hugo Pratt, and Reconnaissance de meurtres, la première enquête de Ric Hochet [Acknowledgement of Murders, Ric Hochet’s First Case] (2010) by Tibet and André-​Paul Duchâteau. As we shall see in Chapter 4, talking about the past of a Franco-​ Belgian comics hero may appear unusual, if we are to believe the preface to the latter novel (which is attempting to do just that), but literature seems to lend itself to this practice better than comics. Indeed, twentieth-​ century French-​ language comics usually featured characters as they were, i.e. with immutable properties (age, clothes, etc.) and without any biographical background. When the heroes were children, they did not grow up but remained at primary-​school age, which was the age of their readership. As a result, a number of literary prequels told of comics heroes’ past, in place of comics that did not. Considering children’s literature, Chapter 4 deals with two questions: how does a literary piece of prose recount a comics hero’s childhood and how does it address such a narrative to children or teenagers (not specifically adult fans)? It will begin by comparing the mythic approach taken in American superhero founding stories with prequels of twentieth-​ century French-​ language comics series, particularly the children’s picture book How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion When He Was a Little Boy (1989) by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. I will then propose the close reading of a teen novel, L’Écume de l’aube, la première aventure de Yoko Tsuno [The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno] (1991), written by the comics author Roger Leloup, who used literary writing among other means, which he had already used in his comics, to complete the biography of his Belgian-​Japanese heroine. Finally, I will examine the most commercially successful comics-​related novel format since the beginning of the twenty-​first century, namely French-​style junior novelizations for

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  21 basic readers. Taking as a model the Titeuf series of novels, adapted from the eponymous best-​selling comics series, some of these novels constitute “confession novelizations” (Grignon 109), which are presented as literary autobiographies of children who are heroes of comics albums (such as Cédric or Kid Paddle), told by themselves in the first person, with illustrations taken from the comics or from animated cartoons adapted from them (which were broadcast on television at the time). All these novels, including those of Titeuf, follow the literary writing model of the Nicholas series of short stories (1959–​1964), a classic in French children’s literature, written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Jean-​ Jacques Sempé. We shall see that this work itself was born in comics form, so that some of Nicholas’s stories can be read as comics novelizations. Through readings of literary works for young readers, this chapter will distinguish two opposing ways –​in terms of narrative mode and plane of utterance –​ of telling and illustrating the childhood of a comics hero. The conclusion will synthesize the process-​oriented study of the comics-​ related novels that are covered throughout the book, though adding some more unexpected case studies. What difference does it make to read such and such a story in such and such a medium? The question inevitably arises when an adaptive process is (rightly or wrongly) identified by the reader. What does it imply, from a narratological point of view, to read a story as if it were retelling a previous one coming from another medium? This is not a scientific experiment, but an ordinary reading experience: “the current reading practice has become an adaptative reading”, as Jan Baetens (“Adaptation” 32, 36) wrote, “the audience is getting used to reading a work as both adapted and adaptable”. More specifically, what does it mean to read a novel as a comics novelization? This last section of the book explores these questions through pieces of literary prose (as diverse as a short story by Paul de Musset, a multimodal narrative by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, a Nouveau Roman by Claude Simon) that do not overtly present themselves as comics-​related texts. Indeed, it may happen that a reader suspects that an entire work or a passage of it may be an adaptation, even though the fiction does not present itself as such, and without necessarily being able to identify its source. From one to a few pages of the novel, the inclusion of a “partial or integrated novelization” (Baetens, Novelization 170) can be a source of literary innovation, as well as an unexpected reading pleasure. On a larger scale, comics fans have started getting used to reading entire novels written by comics authors, as comics scripts, hoping for their realization in comics form. We will see not only that they have sometimes had their wish granted, but above all that they actively participate in the integration of literary storylines into the canon of comics series, which they decisively contribute to patrimonializing. Beyond a poetics of comics-​related novels, interesting in itself because it has never been attempted, the study of this corpus should teach us as much about literature as it does about comics. How do these novels tell

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22  Introduction: Comics-related novels the story of the comic strip, and how do they show it in the process of telling its story? By going through a literary history of the comic strip, through texts that “make [it] speak” (Vouilloux 11) in its place, it is not a question of applying a logocentric perspective on the ninth art, i.e. of claiming that the comic strip, like a child who has not learnt to speak, needs literature in order to have access to speech,22 or of limiting it to what a literary text is capable of saying about it. On the contrary, a poetics of these comics-​related literary works may provide an opportunity to discuss their starting premise, namely that it is possible to put comics into words. * ** This book results from research conducted in Belgium, as part of a Fund for Scientific Research –​FNRS postdoctoral fellowship at Université catholique de Louvain, and of a Special Research Fund –​BOF postdoctoral fellowship at Universiteit Gent. I am grateful to these institutions for funding my research, and more personally to my successive directors, Jean-​ Louis Tilleuil and Maaheen Ahmed. My gratitude also goes to Emma Wilkinson, Moira Bluer, Alison Hughes and Céline Glaude for their help in writing this volume in English, as well as Maaheen Ahmed, Ann Miller and Benoît Crucifix for their pertinent advice and editing of the manuscript. The introduction owes a special debt to Laurent Déom. Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey and Sylvain Lesage have been a source of inspiration and encouragement. Although no book, be it an essay, a novel or a comic book, results from a purely solitary work, the failings of this one are, of course, my sole responsibility.

Notes 1 There is not yet a comprehensive study of the corpus, although scattered case studies do exist (see the bibliography at the end of this book, particularly the programmatic ­chapter 8 in Baetens and Frey, as well as ­chapter 9 in Lesage), some of which are brought together in a special issue of the journal Image & Narrative entitled “Transformed by Comics: The influence of Comics/​BD/​ Graphic Novels on the Novel” (Frey and Reyns-​Chikuma), as well as in the collections The Novel as Network (Lanzendörfer and Norrick-​Rühl) and Les Novellisations pour la jeunesse [Novelizations for Young Readers] (Déom and Glaude). 2 Although studies of literary works adapted into comics are gradually catching up with the evolution of adaptation studies, by considering adaptation as “a work that is second without being secondary” (Hutcheon 9). See, for English-​ written adaptation studies applied to French-​language comics, Blin-​Rolland and Mitaine, Roche and Schmitt-​Pitiot. 3 This obstacle is well known to specialists in film novelizations, if we are to believe Johannes Mahlknecht’s experience (140): I do not know of a single novelization of a successful film whose popularity, let alone critical reception, even remotely approximates that of the

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  23 original. And it should also be noted that novelizations of other media, like poetry or comic books, suffer a similar fate. 4 It has already been examined by leading comics scholars such as Hillary Chute, Marc Singer and Christopher Pizzino. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey (193–​195) identified, beside Michael Chabon’s novel, “a subfield of literary fiction” (see also Singer 274, who coined it “the comic-​book novel”), that focuses on the history of American comics, including authors such as John Stephen Fink, Jonathan Lethem, Tom De Haven, Robert Mayer, Jay Cantor, Rick Moody and Umberto Eco. 5 Paul Williams (6) uses the term in an unusual way, “to refer to the broad impulse to explain, justify, and advertise complete, long-​ form comics as novels”, during the long 1970s (ca. 1965–​1989) in the United States. 6 Unlike the generation of graphic novelists of the Franco-​Belgian magazine (À Suivre) (1978–​1997), as we will see in Chapter 3. 7 She mentioned (in 2006) a comics-​related novelization to illustrate the circulation of one work across successive media: Film adaptations of almost any medium are themselves open to (re-​) novelization today: K.J. Anderson has written a novel adaptation (2004) of James Robinson’s 2003 film adaptation of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s continuing comic book series/​graphic novel called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. (Hutcheon 38–​39) 8 By selecting elements of the work, as Kathleen Newell (8) argued, the adaptation process builds the “work’s network: the broad inventory of narrative moments, reference points, and iconography that comes to be associated with a particular work through successive acts of adaptation”. 9 The transmedia circulation of narratives, dating back to the origins of media culture, should not be confused with the notion of transmedia storytelling, developed by Henry Jenkins in reference to the media that have appeared since the end of the twentieth century (although the concept has illuminated the study of much older cases, such as Ally Sloper or Superman; see Kukkonen 74). In his view (Jenkins, Convergence 293), this consists of “[s]‌tories that unfold across multiple media platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the world, a more integrated approach to franchise development than models based on urtexts and ancillary products”. 10 All citations from French-​language works included in the bibliography have been translated for the purposes of this book. 11 For example, the Geneva literary theorist Laurent Jenny (36) wrote in 1976 that “[w]‌orks of literature are never mere ‘memories’, they rewrite what they remember, they ‘influence their precursors’, as Borges would put it. The intertextual attitude is thus a critical attitude, and that is what defines it”. 12 This concept may be reminiscent of the concept of remediation, for example when its advocates (Bolter and Grusin 15) claim that “What is new about new media comes from the particular way in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media”. However, the perspective of comics scholar Maaheen Ahmed is not that of media historians Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin: for her, it is neither about reporting an improvement in the media (ideology of progress) nor about demonstrating the superiority of visual media over others (ideology

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24  Introduction: Comics-related novels of immediacy). I will come back to the concept of remediation, challenged by comics novelizations, in Chapter 4. 13 Cinéma (1999) by Tanguy Viel, whose narrator is obsessed with Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Sleuth, is a classic example of “oblique” novelization in French literature. We may also cite Kafka (1992) by François Rivière (both a writer and a comics scriptwriter), a fiction in which three young cinephiles discover Steven Soderbergh’s film of the same name. Surprisingly, the novelizer specifies that he wrote this novel while in possession of the script but without having seen the film, which was only released when his book went to press (see Rivière’s interview in Groensteen, “Un roman” 180–​181). 14 The famous monologue that Albator pronounces in voice-​over, both in the first episode of the animated series and –​if we are to believe the novel’s narrator –​in the comics’ recitatives, is still used today as a pitch for the animated series on streaming platforms as well as on fans’ websites. In fact, it appears neither in the two French comic strip adaptations of the first animated episode (published by Dargaud in 1980 under the titles Albator, le corsaire de l’espace and Albator, la bataille de l’espace), nor in the original manga, translated only in 2002 in French. 15 From the French original published in 1981; see more examples in Langlois and Guillot and Petitfaux. 16 A literary form that brings it closer to the two comedies, in the same volume, that feature Bécassine and that were intended to be performed at home by the young readers. 17 However, an advertisement entitled “Que lire maintenant?” [What to read now?], inserted towards the end of the volume edited by Henri Gautier, recommended that readers buy the semi-​annual bound collection of the issues of La Semaine de Suzette, from the same publishing house, where Bécassine comics were published. 18 In a later essay, the same author explicitly analyses the “novelization effect” of the narrativization of a play in Théophile Gauthier’s Captain Fracasse (Genette, Métalepse 47). On another note, Thomas Van Parys (309) draws an architextual relationship between narrativizations of plays and novelizations of films since, in his view, the latter are definitely descended from the former. 19 Richard Saint-​Gelais (10) explains that not all the literary practices of transformation and imitation described in Palimpsests are transfictional. For example, parodies are not, because these rewritings by transformation do not preserve the integrity of the diegesis of their source narratives. A transfiction corresponds rather to a forgery in the model of Gérard Genette, who defines it as the serious imitation of another text, which he envisages especially through the case of continuation (Genette, Palimpsests 161–​213). Regarding serial creation, Matthieu Letourneux (258, 267) also postulates that the relationship between the serialized text and its generic architext “follows a logic of forgery”, even if he is keen to rehabilitate the parodic deconstruction at work in popular literature. 20 The notion comes from French Theory and has developed in film studies, where it is often translated as “apparatus”, while “dispositive”, calqued from the French, is also used (Albera and Tortajada 11–​14). The comics theorist Harry Morgan (127–​131, 384) has taken up the term to refer to the “spatial arrangement of any form of drawn literature”. In his view, “The spatial distribution of the text is part of the dispositive. A strip with speech bubbles and

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Introduction: Comics-related novels  25 a strip with captioned images thus belong to two different dispositives”. Prior to Morgan, Thierry Groensteen had used the concept in a similar sense, but restricting it to the classic bande dessinée arrangement of panels and bubbles, for which his translator Ann Miller chose the term “apparatus” (see her note in Groensteen, Comics and Narration 178). Since two translations coexist in English, and since I am using Morgan’s broader definition rather than Groensteen’s one, I have chosen the term “dispositive” for this book. 21 With the exception of visual novelizations for young readers which were published in book form (as noted above). 22 This preconceived idea must be regarded within the history of French comics. Up until the text entered the image by means of speech bubbles, which only came into general use in France around 1930, picture stories were “spoken” by their captions. According to the French dix-​neuviémiste Philippe Hamon (313), an image “cannot, of course, in the true sense and literally be ‘speaking’. […] There are therefore only spoken images, i.e. images accompanied by gloss, description, caption, title, or commentary”.

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1 Textual margins of early comics

Until the 1970s, in the French-​speaking world “the publication of comics in book form remained a marginal phenomenon in comparison to the press”1 (Lesage 33). What can be said, then, about secondary media productions such as novelizations? Literary adaptations of bandes dessinées played anything but a secondary role in the publishing history of the ninth art. The formats they adopted, whether they appear in collections or in stand-​alone volumes, were among the options considered by French-​language publishers for the first comics in book form. Up until the 1930s, they were more specifically novelizations of captioned picture stories, since this iconotextual media dispositive dominated French-​ language production for a century, starting with the experiments of Rodolphe Töpffer. It is worth noting that the father of the comic strip was also the first comics novelizer, since he self-​novelized his manuscript picture story featuring his antihero Dr Festus as early as 1833, long before he thought of publishing it as an album. From a literary perspective, this chapter will investigate the textual margins of early French-​language comic strips, from the 1830s to the 1930s. It will trace the textual borders of captioned picture stories, but it will not study the marginal space of the page (Kaenel, “Töpffer” 7, 22–​ 23). Nor will it attempt to analyse the peritextual spaces of the publishing formats that will be considered, even though they mark another, paratextual, border of the comic strip.2 This chapter focuses on the texts themselves, by posing the hypothesis that a functional porosity is at work in the writing of picture story captions and their novelizations. Four literary works will receive particular attention: Töpffer’s novel Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus [Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus] (1840), Champfleury’s collection Les Bons contes font les bons amis [Good Accounts Make Good Friends] (1863), Louis Forton’s novels Les Pieds-​Nickelés à la guerre [The Pieds-​Nickelés at War] (1917) and Mickey et Minnie (1932) by Magdeleine du Genestoux. The analysis of how these literary texts adapting picture stories function will focus on the dominant text-​types visible at the texts’ surface and, on a deeper “architextual” level,3 will distinguish genres of early comics verbalizations. The text genres of novelization, ekphrasis or image caption will be considered DOI: 10.4324/9781003388210-2

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Textual margins of early comics  27 as “sub-​classes of text-​types” (Chatman, “Representation” 24) such as narrative and description.

How to verbalize a picture story? In the introduction of his seminal essay Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Seymour Chatman attempts to verbalize a ten-​panel Sunday page by Frank O’Neal (of which he gives a reproduction) in seven sentences. The almost silent sequence contains only one thought bubble and three signs, drawn among the scenery, pointing to places. There once was a king. Standing on the tower of his castle, he saw something “that looked like fun” through his binoculars. He rushed downstairs and out of the castle and soon arrived at the Royal Casino. He played dice and lost. Leaving dejectedly, he happened upon the Royal Loan Company. A crafty thought came to him. He pawned his crown for a bundle of money so that he could go back to the Royal Casino to gamble some more. (Chatman, Story 37) This “verbalization” (181–​182) is comparable to a “narrativization” (Genette, Palimpsests 277), i.e. the change in mode of representation, from dramatic to narrative, which is at work in the adaptation of a play into a novel. Indeed, the text summarizes the events of the newspaper strip and transcribes the inner discourse of the comics hero, in the same way as “[Charles] Lamb’s Hamlet, or any other ‘tale from Shakespeare’, its characteristics being (a) reduction (it is a thirty-​page digest [of Hamlet’s tragedy]); (b) narrativization; and (c) focalization of the narrative on the eponymous protagonist” (Genette, Palimpsests 282). Chatman’s micro-​narrative tells the story of the comics sequence in the past tense by recounting events and describing entities (or “existents” of the story, in narratological jargon), without taking its graphic and media properties into account. There is not even a physical description of the character in this pure account of actions. The verbalization of the strip does not contain any enunciative trace of subjective involvement, nor does it indicate that it is retelling a pre-​existing narrative. Nevertheless, as Seymour Chatman notes, the exercise required a measure of interpretation. On the one hand, he had to fill in the gaps between comics panels, i.e. retrace the events alluded to in the gutters, and on the other hand, he had to infer some central events and the existent’s characterization from the events and existents represented. To justify his interpretations, the researcher added three pages of narratological comments and narrative expansions to the seven sentences of his novelization. With minor syntactical modifications to increase this verbalization from seven to ten sentences, it could just as easily caption the ten panels

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28  Textual margins of early comics of Frank O’Neal’s comic strip. Before it was reserved for novelizers and commentators, the task of verbalizing comic strips was long assigned to the authors themselves. In the French-​speaking world in particular, captioned picture stories dominated the ninth art for a century, from Rodolphe Töpffer’s manuscripts in the late 1820s onwards. The captioning of pictures was linked to a tradition older than the bande dessinée, which Töpffer (“Réflexions” 314) had observed in cycles of British engravings from the eighteenth century as well as in the popular imagery of his time. The Swiss comic strip pioneer, who ran a boarding school in Geneva, attempted a similar experiment to Seymour Chatman’s in one of his accounts of school excursions. In this narrative, lithographed in 1833 (Figure 1.1), he describes a series of four popular colour prints that he had seen hanging on the walls of an inn.4 In this ekphrasis, written in the present tense like the rest of the travel story, description prevails over narration. The phrases that introduce the verbalization amount to iconographic commentary: “In the first picture, it is…”; “The third picture represents…”; “Here is the moral caption word for word: …” After this colon, Töpffer retranscribes the caption of the image, which he has redrawn next to it, retaining some linguistic approximations (“que” [that] for “à qui” [whom], “nosse” for “noce” [wedding], “tandres” for “tendres” [tender]), but clarifying the clumsy syntax in a parenthesis: “she loved so much (her son)”. Note that this caption adds a narrative expansion to the engraving, which illustrates only its last sentence.

Figure 1.1 Rodolphe Töpffer, Voyage à la Grande Chartreuse, Geneva, Freydig, 1833, p. 38. Source: Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève, classification Coll Suz 65.

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Textual margins of early comics  29 Cécile prend le parti d’aller demander le pardon à son malheureux père, que [sic] sa faute avait fait perdre la raison. Elle arrive avec son fils dans une ville, qu’elle aimait tant (son fils). Elle y voit une nosse [sic] d’une amie qui lui rappelle sa faute. –​Arthur se trouvant en même lieu, a le cœur percé aux tandres [sic] paroles de Cécile. (Töpffer, Voyage à la Grande Chartreuse 38) [Cécile takes the decision to ask forgiveness from her unfortunate father, that [sic] her fault had made lose his mind. She arrives with her son in a town, who she loved so much (her son). There she sees a wedding of a lady friend that reminds her of her fault. –​Arthur, being in the same place, has his heart pierced by Cécile’s tender words.] The three verbalizations of picture stories that I have just presented are the result of different writing processes that determine three distinct genres. The text written by Seymour Chatman based on a Sunday comic strip is dominated by the narrative text-​type. Although this narrativization includes several stasis statements, i.e. ones that are descriptive, it has the basic structure of a narrative; it constitutes a micro-​novelization. Rodolphe Töpffer’s iconographic and metanarrative commentary on a series of popular engravings is rather of the descriptive type, in the sense that it marks a pause in the travel narrative to describe what the author calls “tableaux”. In contrast to the previous case, this text makes explicit reference to the captioned images on which it is based and gives an account of their properties, not only textual and iconic, but also plastic and media-​specific. It constitutes an ekphrasis in the sense of a “representation of a representation, [that] shows itself through this distance as a theoretical act of self-​reflexivity from an art form which discloses another art form” (Louvel 45). As for the caption that Töpffer retranscribes, it neither tells, nor describes, nor comments on the engraving from which it is inseparable. On the one hand, picture story captions do not constitute complete and autonomous narratives. On the other hand, although the narrator provides a point of view regarding the story, in general they judge neither the way in which the story is told nor the way in which it is represented. If metanarrative or iconographic comments were to occur, they would be seen as metaleptic, in other words as transgressing the “threshold of representation” (Genette, Métalepse 14). Thus, the first and third genres of image-​based texts have in common that they do not explicitly acknowledge the fact that they are based on an image, whose graphic properties they ignore. However, in the case of the novelization, this concealment of the image aims to render the literary narrative that it inspires autonomous, whereas in the case of the caption, the absence of reference to the image in the text is based on their spatial coexistence and their iconotextual complementarity. The caption is neither narrativization nor description, but the vocalization of a “spoken image” (Hamon 313) to which it is juxtaposed; it is the voice of the graphic

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30  Textual margins of early comics narrative. The remainder of this chapter will examine the relationships between these three processes of verbalization of early bandes dessinées.

Close reading: Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus At the time of his Voyage à la Grande Chartreuse [Voyage to the Grande Chartreuse], Rodolphe Töpffer self-​novelized his comics album Le Docteur Festus [Doctor Festus]. The manuscript that gave birth, in 1829, to this character of an armchair scholar disconnected from reality was greeted with enthusiasm in the bourgeois salons of the Genevan author’s acquaintances. Its only copy circulated as far as Goethe’s home in Weimar. Encouraged by this critical success, Töpffer produced a first novelization, which he illustrated and even had typographed and printed in Geneva in 1833 (Kaenel, “Töpffer” 8), but he refrained from marketing it, for fear of discrediting the academic status he had just acquired (he had been appointed assistant professor of modern literature at the Genevan Académie at the end of 1832). He nevertheless resumed his project at the end of the decade. Redrawn and rewritten, the picture story was published in 1840 in Paris and Geneva under the title Doctor Festus, at the same time as a second version of the novelization appeared, with the same publishers, under the title Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus [Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus]. Both works were published without an author’s name. The novelization posed serious “translation” problems for the Genevan artist, who assigned a secondary status to the novel compared to the graphic narrative: When translating Doctor Festus into prose, I was quite surprised and amused to see how the two languages differed, that in order to make the same things understood, it was necessary to take them from another end and show them from another side.5 In reality, the relationship between the two simultaneous versions of the same story appears less like a translation than a cogeneration. Contradicting the author’s statements, the Swiss literary researcher Yves Bridel (115–​118) hypothesizes that the 1840 album was influenced by the novel published in the same year, of which a foretext had existed since 1833, even though the 1829 manuscript picture story remained the source of the whole creative process. Indeed, like any self-​novelizer, Töpffer had privileged access to all his working documents. In order to retrace this adaptation process, I propose a comparative close reading of the two beginnings from 1840: the first four panels of the album, corresponding to the first five pages of the novel, preceded by a lithography. The captions of the picture story present an elementary narrative sequence in four sentences, from the beginning of the story until a midway evaluation (Töpffer, Docteur Festus 2–​ 3). The initial panel parodies

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Textual margins of early comics  31 an opening in medias res, as it shows a bourgeois in travelling clothes choosing a mount but opting for a mule that is not yet weaned, while rejecting a donkey and a mare. Étant entré un soir dans son écurie, le Docteur Festus y trouve un fort joli petit mulet. [Having entered his stable one evening, Dr Festus finds a very pretty little mule there.] The departure, delayed by the rearing of the mule, takes place in the second panel. Ayant attendu quatre ans, pour laisser grandir le mulet, le Docteur Festus part pour son grand voyage d’instruction. [Having waited four years to let the mule grow up, Dr Festus leaves on his great voyage of instruction.] The first two panels depict the hero in three-​quarter back view, which establishes a viewing with, i.e., a showing with external focalization, which contrasts with the zero focalization telling of the omniscient narrator of the captions. The latter recount the events enacted by the pictures. However, the narrator expresses himself in the present tense, a temporality that matches the immediacy of the visual narration. Moving from the planning to the execution of the journey, the third panel shows Dr Festus making his first trip beneath the belly of his mount. Le mulet se trouve être parfait, mais la selle mal sanglée. [The mule is found to be perfect, but the saddle poorly strapped.] In this action scene, the reader can no longer adopt the point of view of the character, who is blinded by the animal’s chest. The wide view of them galloping past a row of trees is followed abruptly by an interior scene in a narrow frame. This fourth panel zooms in on the hero, who is shown facing forward, sitting on a chair. The reader must conclude from this that Dr Festus has managed to stop at an inn. The change in the format of the panels underlines a temporary shift to a moment of introspection. The hero states the inevitable narrative sanction of this beginning, on the evening of the first day of his voyage: Avant de se coucher, le Docteur Festus veut rédiger ce qu’il a vu, mais il réfléchit qu’il n’a rien vu. [Before going to bed, Dr Festus wants to write down what he has seen, but he reflects that he hasn’t seen anything.] Despite the confident tone of the verbal narrator, several hints of a division in the enunciative voice reinforce the antiphrastic effect of the text-​image disagreements. Two ironic passages seem to be contaminated

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32  Textual margins of early comics by the enunciation of the candid and reasoning protagonist, whose point of view the image sometimes adopts. These are the euphemistic antiphrasis “un fort joli petit mulet” [a very pretty little mule] (where the ironic excess of qualifying terms is reinforced by the double meaning of “fort”, which can be interpreted as an adverb of intensity and as an adjective meaning “strong”), and the litotic zeugma “The mule is found to be perfect, but the saddle poorly strapped”. The narrator temporarily accepts two indisputable premises for the hero ((a) “The mule is found to be perfect”; (b) “Doctor Festus leaves on his great voyage of instruction”), and then notes that they involve concessions ((a) “but the saddle [is] poorly strapped”; (b) “but he reflects that he hasn’t seen anything”), which cast doubt on their validity. These are not so much statements as inferences, topoi, according to a logic that the narrator presumes to share with his reader but not with the character. The latter virtually argues against the common-​sense discourse of the narrator. The narrator, however, only takes a stance ironically, leaving the reader to judge for himself. The characters act and interact in pantomime in the image, without worrying about the commentary in the captions (Kaenel, “Les Voyages” 48), which, on the contrary, recount rather than enact the narrative, as evidenced by the absence of direct speech. The dialogical confrontation in the captions, between the senseless logic of the character and the ironic logic of the narrator, is the result of a writing process. Let us retrace, for example, the origins of the caption for the third panel, depicting the galloping mule carrying his rider under his body (Töpffer, Docteur Festus 3). A similar lithograph illustrates one of the surviving proofs of the draft novel abandoned in 1833 (Figure 1.2). The drawing captures a dynamic movement, freezing it like a split-​second photography. The mule is in profile, with all four legs extended, seeming to fly above the groundline and its own shadow, against a background of barely sketched trees that reinforce the effect of speed. Doctor Festus clutches the belly of his flying mount with his whole body. A reconstruction of the scene in real life would be impossible, not only because the horse’s gallop obeys a pictorial convention invalidated by chronophotography6 but also because of the implausible duration of Dr Festus’ horizontal position, since he is supposed to travel several leagues beneath his mount. The burlesque inversion of the rider’s usual position does not obey any natural laws, only a graphic logic. It is therefore difficult to put such an image into words, and we can well understand the reluctance of the French critic Charles-​Augustin Sainte-​Beuve (847) to comment on the humour of Töpffer’s “fantasies”: “I could not give an idea of them to anyone who has not seen them. This kind of humour can hardly be expressed in words; the only way to celebrate it is to taste it and laugh at it”. The first version of the caption, in the 1829 manuscript, appears flat, insofar as it does not include the irony and enunciative division of the later versions. It explains, completes and comments on the image (Bridel 112).

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Figure 1.2 Rodolphe Töpffer, Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus. Livre 1er, Geneva, A.-​L. Vignier, 1833, p. 10-​X. Source: Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève, classification Réserve BGE Cth 3469 BGE Hf 4172.

La selle ayant tourné le docteur Festus fait dix lieues dans une position peu commode et arrive à l’hôtellerie.7 [The saddle having turned, Doctor Festus rides ten leagues in an awkward position and arrives at the hostelry.] The final caption –​“The mule is found to be perfect, but the saddle poorly strapped” –​appears more concise and effective. The choice of a stative verb conjugated in the present tense clearly shows that it is not a matter of recounting an event, but of witnessing it without knowing the outcome (which is no longer related), because “in order to be set as such in a temporal expression [an event] must have ceased to be present and must no longer be capable of being stated as present” (Benveniste 211). This caption introduces, as we have seen, an enunciative dialogism. The origin of this ironic formulation can perhaps be found in an account of a trip made by Rodolphe Töpffer in the summer of 1837: L’autre mulet est excellent; seulement, il a l’habitude de s’abattre subitement, pour se vautrer dans la poussière. [The other mule is

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34  Textual margins of early comics excellent; only, he has a habit of suddenly falling down, to wallow in the dust.] (Töpffer, Voyages en zigzag 41) Indeed, it is not to the novelization that the final caption owes its effectiveness, let alone its conciseness, since a whole page of the novel relates the scene (Figure 1.2). The beginning of the novel published in 1840 repeats the opening of the aborted novel almost word for word, but not its illustrations. As we have seen, a copy of “Book 1” printed in 1833, preserved in the Library of Geneva, includes a lithograph similar to the galloping scene in the picture story. However, it bears a different caption: Malheureusement depuis le commencement du problème il avait tourné avec la selle…8 [Unfortunately, from the beginning of the problem he had turned over with the saddle…] The text of the novel is necessary to understand this “problem”. It concerns a scientific question that the scholar is trying to solve: must he go with the saddle underneath his horse, or not? While the scholar is absorbed in his thoughts, a “bovine fly […] flew straight to the [mule’s] tail, under which it insinuated itself until it reached the rectum”, as a result of which the animal “made three jumps and four farting sounds […] after which, feeling no relief, it took the bit in its teeth, and galloped for five hours” (Töpffer, Voyages et aventures 9–​10). It is only in the middle of this race that the rider changes his position. At the end of the second hour, as perspiration had soaked the saddle straps, the straps had widened by eight inches, as a result of which the saddle seemed to be turning […]. At this critical moment, Dr Festus deliberated whether he would turn with the saddle […]. Unfortunately, from the very beginning of the problem, he turned underneath the saddle, and he found himself stuck to the belly of the mule which continued to gallop. (10) The novel, which is a pastiche of scientific writing, elaborates on these circumstances so much that it postpones their consequence. This is, however, already depicted in the final edition by a lithograph inserted two pages earlier. Inserted just before the first chapter, it benefits from a more accomplished drawing than the lithographs in the 1833 proof; the modelling of volumes, the chiaroscuro and the detail of the scenery are more developed. It corresponds to this passage from the novel: “He [Dr Festus] found himself stuck to the belly of the mule, which carried on galloping. It was in this state that they arrived in front of the hostelry of the Golden Lion” (Töpffer, Voyages et aventures 10). Two pages after the illustration, the gag’s novelized punchline falls all the more flat because the story

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Textual margins of early comics  35 is clearly told a posteriori by an omniscient narrator. The characters no longer seem to live independently of his will. This close reading has made it possible to compare two verbalizations of the same sequence of a graphic narrative dating back to 1829. In one case, captions were used to vocalize images redrawn from the manuscript, while in the other, a novelistic text narrativized an album that was still in the process of being created, since it was between the manuscript and printed stages. From a formal point of view, the beginnings of both versions published in 1840 display comparable writing styles, marked by orality, recounting in a jocular tone and producing verbal clichés, without fear of syntactic solecisms. These beginnings are dominated by the narrative text-​type, even though they include some description and (ironic) explanation of the events. They do not belong to the argumentative text-​type, even though, on the one hand, the hero’s internal reasoning never ends (a parody of scholarly discourse) and, on the other hand, the work serves the aesthetic ideals of its author (a satire of literary realism). In contrast, the preface to the novel and the title page of the album contain anonymous argumentative peritexts. The title page of Doctor Festus, illustrated with an “autograph by the author” (Töpffer, Docteur Festus 1), bears two sentences in the artist’s hand. The second is a ritual formula: Go, little Book, and choose your world; for, in the face of foolish things, he who does not laugh, yawns; he who does not surrender, resists; he who reasons, misunderstands; and he who wants to remain solemn, is free to do so. It provides reading instructions and builds reader loyalty, since readers can find it on the author’s other albums, as well as in the preface to the novelization. As for the first sentence, it summarizes the plot of an album in which “the Voyages and Adventures of Doctor Festus are represented in their natural state”. The use of capitals highlights the title of the 1829 manuscript, which was also the title of the novel in both its versions (1833 and 1840). Does this mean that Doctor Festus represents events that are also related in another form “in their natural state”, i.e. in the form of a picture story album? The final preface to the novel explains its origins more clearly and advertises albums “by the same author”:9 this extraordinary story was composed using equally extraordinary processes. First formulated graphically in a series of sketches, it was then translated from these sketches into the text that follows. Today we are publishing the text and the sketches at the same time, separately from each other. It is thus the same story in a double form. (Töpffer, Voyages et aventures V–​VI) Did the paratextual status of this preface describing a process of adaptation not risk having an impact on the status of the literary work,

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36  Textual margins of early comics potentially read as a secondary work? In other words, did the novelization constitute an epitext or an autonomous text? In Töpffer’s eyes, the adaptive process had followed a logic of translation, or even a logic of “commentary”, as he wrote to his Parisian bookseller-​ publisher.10 A priori, the interest of a self-​novelization lies in the written representation of the source work and in the share of authorial commentary that the novel implicitly contains. But one would search in vain for such a self-​commentary in this novel. Only the preface mentions a source work, neither the text nor the lithographs refer to it. As for the writing of the novel, it is hardly “pictorial”, in the sense given to this notion by literary criticism: that of an inter-​semiotic “translation” effect, whereby a text generates a pictorial object more than describing it (Louvel 73). For the French text/​image specialist Liliane Louvel (16, 73), “the specific modality of the descriptive seen as ‘pictorial’ ” corresponds to “the inclusion of a reference to the visual arts in a literary text”. None of this is apparent in Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus, which does not represent the representation of the graphic narrative, it only represents what is represented. Certainly, the writer drew on his visual imagination, even if it meant that in certain scenes he added details, which, although worthy of his picture stories, exist only in the novel. This type of addition is italicized in the following example: the doctor, after having spun around one hundred and sixty-​nine times, found himself thrown to a height of twenty-​eight cubits […], but in falling back down, he grazed the main branch of a twelve-​year-​ old walnut tree, on which his shirt fortunately caught, and where he remained suspended, after having oscillated for a long time due to the elasticity of the branch. (Töpffer, Voyages et aventures 157, my emphasis) Nevertheless, when the preface writer speaks of a process of translation from “sketches” into a “text” (VI), for him it is a matter of telling the same story, focusing on the narrative framework and preserving the style of the captions. Thus, the place of Doctor Festus stops at the threshold of Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus, in other words at the peritext, the preface, and at the foretext, the origins, of the novel.

Captions rewritten as a bridge over redrawn illustrations It was not until the beginning of the media age in France, i.e. the 1860s (Letourneux 371), that the bande dessinée crossed the threshold of the literary text and entered it literally. This happened in the collection of children’s stories Les Bons contes font les bons amis [Good Accounts Make Good Friends] (1863), where the French writer Champfleury novelized the first two Münchener Bilderbogen by Wilhelm Busch, without even mentioning the German comics artist (who had not yet published his

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Textual margins of early comics  37 masterpiece Max und Moritz). The sources for these novelizations were two stand-​alone sheets published in German in 1859, containing 12 and 15 woodcuts respectively, with typographed prose captions, entitled Die kleinen Honigdiebe [The Little Honey Thieves] and Der kleine Maler mit der großen Mappe [The Little Painter with the Large Portfolio]. It seems that Champfleury mistook these loose sheets for productions of popular imagery, such as he was acquainted with in eastern France.11 After having been a leader among French realist novelists, as well as a friend of the painter Gustave Courbet, he devoted himself to his pioneering monographs on folk art, notably his Histoire de l’imagerie populaire [History of Popular Imagery] (1869). It was alongside this folkloristic research that he novelized the two Bilderbogen. Lavishly illustrated with black and white panels, signed jointly by the illustrator Edmond Morin and the wood engraver Alphonse Gérard, Good Accounts Make Good Friends was sold as a New Year’s gift book,12 in its large octavo format (18.5 × 27.5 cm), on thick glossy paper. The title announces a collection of humorous accounts, since it produces a pun on the proverb “les bons comptes font les bons amis” (literally “good reckonings make good friends”) by substituting the homonym “contes” (tales) for “comptes” (reckonings). However, its content is heterogeneous: in addition to the two novelized tales, there is a farce and a pantomime based on the popular puppet Polichinelle (French for Italian Pulcinella and English Mr. Punch), as well as a satirical “legend” well known to photographic historians: “The Legend of the Daguerreotypist” (see Rabb 10–​14). All these stories rely on burlesque action in which the speech of the characters is secondary. Even the text of the play, “Polichinelle et la Mort” [Polichinelle and Death], tells of a duel that appears choreographed in Morin’s drawings, in the spirit of the fights of the Théâtre de Guignol. The collection is aimed at novice readers. An alphabet primer can be seen in an illustration (Champfleury, Bons contes 44), lying among the toys in a child’s room, as well as a large book on the frontispiece of the work, being read to a girl by a boy. The art historian Ségolène Le Men (71–​72) notes that in France illustrated books for learning to read, which were expensive to print, remained in family use for a long time. It was only under the impetus of the Ferry laws13 in the 1880s that pictures invaded school textbooks and classrooms, even if printing did not get cheaper at the time. It was henceforth understood that the “image served the book and helped […] to gain access to written culture” (73), i.e. that it would assist novice readers until they could do without it. Champfleury, then, was one of the precursors of this education through pictures. He recommended that teachers use sequences of captioned images, praising the authentic simplicity of popular images (Champfleury, “Image” 1320). Like many contemporary intellectuals, he equated the populace with children, and in his view “[the] popular image engraved for the people spoke to the people” (Histoire XXII). In the nineteenth century, invasive images

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38  Textual margins of early comics inspired ambivalent reactions in writers,14 while naivety “became a value and counter-​value” (Hamon 35). The “naive clarity”, the primary quality that Töpffer too expected from popular imagery, depended not only on the image but also on “the caption, throwing an overabundant, but not superfluous light on a composition already expected to make itself understood” (Töpffer, “Réflexions” 336–​ 337). Champfleury joined in this defence of picture captions, if only to stimulate literacy: How many [common people] must have regretted not being able to read the explanatory captions of such interesting illustrations! There was certainly more than one who deplored their ignorance and said to themselves: “I want my children to learn to decipher these characters!” The image led to the study of reading, reading to writing. (Champfleury, Histoire 297) It is not surprising, then, that in an illustrated reading book whose manufacture was too costly to reach ordinary children, he chose to novelize two German sheets which, if not popular, at least set their humorous stories in a rural setting. His adaptation of The Little Honey Thieves features “Guillaume and Martin” (the first name corresponding to the German “Wilhelm”), two country children who try to observe a queen bee in her hive but return with their noses covered with bee stings. Curiosity replaces the greed that led to theft in the German picture story. In Busch’s last caption, the narrator formulates a moral concerning “den Folgen des Naschens” [the consequences of greediness], which places him on the side of the grown-​ups and in the tradition of the storyteller giving counsel to his readers (Benjamin 86, see also Feuerhahn 79). However, the adults’ discourse is discredited by their excessive attitudes: the father’s first instinct is to beat his children,15 who have already fallen victim to the bees, while the mother serves them their favourite food, which the children are incapable of eating. Exaggeration also characterizes the drawings: the children’s noses swell to twice the size of their little heads, necessitating enormous plasters, while the bees’ stings, as big as nails, have to be extracted with pincers. Edmond Morin’s illustrations are faithful to the compositions of Wilhelm Busch’s unframed panels, but not to their graphic style. The original woodcuts exploit the texture and expressiveness of the line, while the panels, redrawn in a romantic style16 with the excess of detail permitted by end-​grain wood engraving, soften the caricature effect. Similarly, the novelized text emphasizes the unrealism of the children’s disproportionately swollen noses, which “had formed as if by magic” (Champfleury, Bons contes 28). The other novelization, entitled “Le grand carton vert du petit peintre Bidois” [The Big Green Portfolio of the Little Painter Bidois], follows the countryside excursions of a dwarf painter, who fills a portfolio as big as himself with studies taken from life. According to Hans Joachim Neyer (10–​ 13), former curator of the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover,

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Figure 1.3 Champfleury, Les Bons contes font les bons amis, illustrated by Edmond Morin, Paris, Truchy, 1863, pp. 36–​37. Source: Author’s private collection.

the German artist trained as a painter at several European academies of Fine Arts in the 1850s, and “on walks in the foothills of the Alps […] he made small-​scale drawings from nature and recorded them in a sketchbook” (14). His picture story lists unexpected uses for the portfolio (Figure 1.3): umbrella, raft, tent, sledge, parachute… His panels do not adopt the point of view of the character, who is seen from the front in a medium long shot, thus leaving the verbal narrator free to imagine the drawings and landscapes that the painter has before his eyes. In Champfleury’s writing, the “Auszug zu einer Studienreise ins Gebirge” [Extract from a study trip to the mountains] became the story of a Parisian landscape painter’s training, up to his establishment in the capital, “where he obtained the greatest success at painting exhibitions, thanks to the varied motifs he had brought back from his travels” (Champfleury, Bons contes 40). Interpreting the illustrations as he pleased, the novelist resituated, for example, a mountain scene opposite a stormy sea: “At the bottom, enormous waves rose up in anger against a painter who had the audacity to defy them. Bidois, still painting, mocked the storm, singing and whistling in turn. In his garret, he would not have been more peaceful” (38). The praise for plein air painting, as well as the attack on studio photography in “The Legend of the Daguerreotypist” in the same

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40  Textual margins of early comics volume, remind us that Champfleury was a champion of literary and pictorial realism in France. His novelizations were three to four times longer than the entire text of their respective comics pages. In judging the work of the German artist, 20 years after he had so copiously novelized his first comics pages, the French writer nevertheless states that the comedy is drawn with so much clarity that the caption is, in a way, an unnecessary accessory. […] What is underneath is of little importance to me, I am not concerned with the allusions that may be found there: I watch and am carried away by the comic spirit, which is spread in profusion in all his [Busch’s] picture stories. (Champfleury’s preface in Grand-​Carteret XII) If he expressed himself in this way in 1885, it was because he feared finding satirical “allusions” in these captions that would taint the naive sincerity of the images, for he “found in this naïveté one of the great qualities of Gustave Courbet’s painting”, linking it “to the art of the folk imagier” (Schapiro 165). He thereafter seemed disconcerted by Wilhelm Busch’s last long satirical narratives, the increasingly militant Bildergeschichten, which no longer met his folk ideal. However, even if the Münchener Bilderbogen, where the German artist’s first works appeared, were content to “observe the Munich spirit” and had “neither opinions to uphold nor grudges to satisfy” (Grand-​Carteret 232–​ 233), they did not belong to folk art, but to the modern Munich art industry. Their publishing house, Braun & Schneider, obliged well-​ known artists to work in a standardized way to facilitate the reprinting of their woodcut drawings, while retaining the possibility of changing the composition of the pages (Neyer 32, 34). The pages of the Fliegende Blätter magazine could be reissued as loose sheets in the Münchener Bilderbogen series, before being collected in volumes of various sizes. Thus, the regular dimensions of Busch’s panels, as well as the absence of frames and colours, obeyed an editorial imperative for flexibility in the recomposition of the pages, which favoured both German-​language reprints and foreign pirating. The composition of the typographic text of Good Accounts Make Good Friends marries closely with the very free arrangement of the redrawn illustrations. The literary narrative establishes a bridge between the engravings, which is both material, marking a visible transition on the space of the page, and thematic, since it gives body to a story whose images constitute its skeleton. In “The Big Green Portfolio of the Little Painter Bidois”, the sequence of drawings is arranged in a column on the left half of the pages, which the reader can scan from top to bottom (Figure 1.3), without having to read the column of text to the right in order to follow the narrative thread. In “Guillaume et Martin”, the panels occupy the entire width of the page, like paragraphs. Each is accompanied

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Textual margins of early comics  41 by a narrativized description in the imperfect or present tense, which ends with a dialogue between the characters portrayed before a narrative in the simple past tense that transitions to the next illustration. Note that the literary descriptions of the images do not adopt the children’s point of view, as the narrator judges them to be incapable of “seeing clearly” because of their swollen noses or overactive imaginations (Champfleury, Bons contes 26, 32), as if blindness were the just punishment for childish curiosity. The preponderance of illustrations, which no longer had merely a secondary function of ornamenting the text as they did in the literary edition for adults, brought this children’s book closer to “picturesque literature”, which offered a multimodal reading experience and no longer just “a pure activity of the mind” (Arnar 342, 349).

Big Little Books and the French book market: a missed rendezvous Although the transmedia genre of novelization was rooted in literary adaptation practices that existed before it –​one can think of the ekphrasis of works of art, the retranscription of traditional oral tales or the narrativization of plays –​it was very much a part of the media culture that emerged in France around 1860. The pirate novelizations of Busch’s picture stories by Champfleury were precursors in this respect. Their media dispositive, based on the rewriting of captions as a bridge over redrawn illustrations, found a resounding success in the American publishing industry of the 1930s, with the publishing genre of Big Little Books. These literary works form part of the memory of American comics. The two fictional artists in Michael Chabon’s award-​winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), had their “best year ever” in 1941, not only through the sale of comic books but also through spin-​off products based on their superhero character, including the “sales of two hundred thousand copies apiece for each of two Whitman’s Big Little Books” (Chabon 291). Invented during the Great Depression by the subsidiary of Western Publishing (both based in Racine, Wisconsin), this oxymoronically named publishing genre enjoyed a golden age from 1932 until mid-​1938 (Lowery IV, 5–​7). These children’s books were sold at low prices, in the order of $0.10, thanks to a very large first run. They had a high page count (often 432 pages) in a small format (usually 9.2 × 11.4 cm) and were bound in a hard cover illustrated in colour. On the inside, almost every double-​page spread, printed in black and white, featured about 60 words on the left-​hand side and a framed, captioned illustration on the right-​hand side. These books, which featured closed narratives, capitalized less on serialization than on the popularity of transmedia heroes. The graph on Figure 1.4 quantifies, on the basis of the collector Lawrence Lowery’s guide, the direct sources of the storylines in all Whitman’s Big Little Books from the golden age. Of the 254 books

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42  Textual margins of early comics

Literature

Other media

Original storylines

Radio

Film

Comic strip

Adapted storylines

Figure 1.4 Direct sources of the storylines in 254 Whitman’s Big Little Books, published from 1932 until mid-​1938.

published up to mid-​1938, a quarter of the storylines were original, although some featured characters from other media and therefore constituted transfictions (Letourneux 399–​ 402). All the others were novelizations. A good half of the storylines came directly from daily and Sunday comic strips, some of which were themselves spin-​offs from radio programmes, cartoon series and film serials. The Withman Publishing Co. made a proposal to Walt Disney,17 as early as 1933, to license not the cartoons but the daily strips of Mickey Mouse, just as, in the years that followed, it adapted the topper strips derived from Silly Symphonies and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The standardized creative process was largely based on comic strips. A freelance, often uncredited author received the images selected by the editor and was responsible for writing a continuous text to fill the material space (of one page) and the narrative interval necessary to move from one image to the next. The captioned illustrations were either panels from daily and Sunday comic strips retouched by often anonymous artists, who “removed balloon wordings and filled in the space with additional lines or shading” (Lowery XXXV), or original artworks drawn in the graphic style of a comic strip panel.18 Thus, the ninth art was not only suited to Big Little Books because of the popularity of its characters in the 1930s but also because of the adaptability19 of its forms and storylines, composed of black and white panels, in a quantity and format ideal for

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Textual margins of early comics  43 illustrating a Big Little Book. The portions of narrative taken from these never-​ending serials could be calibrated to the right length to fill the book-​length texts of literary prose. In addition to the number of panels available in the strips, they offered the advantage of not having to be enlarged (at the risk of spoiling their print quality) to become full-​page illustrations in the small format of these books. Despite its popularity in the United States, the Big Little Books publishing genre was not widely exported abroad,20 to the extent that it remained unknown in several European countries such as France. Nevertheless, the principle of taking a certain number of panels to illustrate the literary retelling of a comic strip narrative, published in the form of a book, was not unknown in Europe,21 at least from the time of Champfleury onwards. The breakthrough of the Big Little Books format in the United States, before its replacement by the comic book format in the 1940s, can be compared to the French publishing experiments before the standardization of the album in the 1950s. The experiments in the novelization of bandes dessinées carried out in the first half of the twentieth century were seemingly isolated, but they stemmed from similar motivations, linked to the history of publishing and the history of education. In France, the ninth art was used more than it was across the Atlantic to teach children to read, in line with the image-​based education advocated by the Ferry laws. The use of the speech bubble, to replace captions which had become more and more copious with time, came later than in the United States and only became widespread at the beginning of the 1930s. According to the historian Annie Renonciat (155), maintaining the text under the image had a pedagogical justification, as it presented “the advantage, for parents and teachers, of promoting the learning and practising of reading, and of maintaining the traditional form and function of the textual elements”. This justification found its ultimate expression in the novelizations of bandes dessinées for young readers.

From captioned picture stories to serials-​under-​images French mass publishing blurred the boundaries between the press and the book, between an adult working-​class readership and a wide audience of children, and between picture stories and popular literature. This was the case with the literary publisher Fayard, who launched the collection of novels “Le livre populaire” in 1905 for only 0.65 francs, thanks to a very large first print run, as part of which they published the famous series of novels Fantômas. The identity of this popular collection, copied by all competing publishers, was based on its format –​that of a “book-​ brochure on acidic wood pulp paper” (Letourneux 115–​116) –​as well as on the standardization of its paratext, its colour-​illustrated cover, its fixed page count and its stable price. In addition, by launching the ten-​cent weeklies La Jeunesse illustrée [Youth Illustrated] and Les Belles Images [Beautiful pictures], in 1903 and 1904 respectively, the same publishing

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44  Textual margins of early comics house initiated a new formula for the children’s illustrated press, which placed emphasis on picture stories, and which was immediately copied by its competitors. The weekly magazine Les Belles Images was cheap (0.10 francs), thanks to large print runs, and its main goal was to entertain a wide spectrum of age groups, predominantly offering picture stories that recounted one-​or two-​page narratives, hardly ever developing into serials with recurring heroes (Renonciat 149–​ 150, 154). Each large-​ format comics page was divided into 12 panels of the same size, drawn in a realistic, static style and accompanied by 12 typographical captions of four to ten lines. Such a page model perpetuated the French concept of picture stories that had been standardized by Épinal’s popular imagery as early as the 1830s. This press formula achieved its greatest success at the hands of the Offenstadt brothers, who, from the beginning of the twentieth century, offered an emerging mass readership a large number of illustrated weeklies at a low price (0.05 to 0.15 francs): Le Petit Illustré [The Little Illustrated Magazine], L’Épatant [The Amazing One] and Fillette [Little Girl], among many others. Like Fayard, these press magnates also published popular literature, but they went further in their hybridization of literary and graphic print media. L’Épatant, which became the greatest popular and financial success of the Librairie Offenstadt, was half the size of Les Belles Images but had twice as many pages. Its content was more heterogeneous, mixing literary serials and advertisements with picture stories that appeared on average every two pages. The journal’s star characters were three swindlers making up the Pieds-​Nickelés22 gang, who were drawn into all kinds of reprehensible infractions by their opportunism and the greed for money. During wartime, the illegal activities they indulged in were legalized on grounds of patriotic duty. Take, for example, a page from the Pieds-​Nickelés, published in L’Épatant on 28 October 1915 (Figure 1.5). On a spying mission in Turkey, the three Frenchmen pose as German chemists who have come to advise the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V Reşâd (whose face is caricatured) during the Battle of the Dardanelles. Little is known of Louis Forton’s life during the Great War, other than that he was mobilized from 1914 to 1919 and that his first posting was precisely to the Dardanelles front. This posting did not prevent him from continuing to send his comic strip pages to Paris, enlisting his heroes in the French army. In this episode (Figure 1.5), the Turks are associated with the dirty warfare that French propaganda attributed to their German allies, although they were not the only warring countries to use chemical weapons. In contrast, Forton has drawn sabres and rifles in the hands of French and British landing troops. From the ramparts of a Turkish fortress, the Pieds-​Nickelés fire their cannons at an encampment of their fellow soldiers on the shore. They send harmless shells filled with bottles of liquor, wine and champagne, thus supplying their compatriots while emptying the Sultan’s cellars. Thematically, this account conforms to French propaganda by perpetuating the clichés of the front that circulated

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Textual margins of early comics  45 among the civilian population. This page emphasizes food rationing and aerial threats, two striking features of the infiltration of war in civilian life, but thanks to their outrageous burlesque they play down the physical wounds and psychological traumas infiltrating everyday life. These picture stories depict a relatively comfortable life at the front for the French infantrymen, punctuated by pleasing victories (although they lost the battle of the Dardanelles). The magazine also published serialized novels, such as those by José Moselli, who conducted his entire literary career through the periodicals of the Offenstadt publishing house. Of his 20 serials23 published in L’Épatant, 15 were in the form of illustrated texts, while the other five formed kinds of picture stories, with about ten images per page, spread out in strips above a continuous text of about 15 lines, composed in two or three columns. One of Moselli’s romans-​fleuves, published for 15 years in that form in Le Petit Illustré, introduced André-​Paul Duchâteau, born in Belgium in 1925, future writer of detective novels and comics scripts, to detective fiction: The first detective adventure I read when I was about six or seven years old was a comic strip, divided into geometrically laid out drawn panels, without speech bubbles and underlined by a typeset text: Iko Térouka, détective japonais [Iko Teruka, Japanese Detective]. (Duchâteau, 7 à 77 ans 28; on the novel in question, see Touchant 85–​88) The French collector Jean-​Louis Touchant (16) named this iconotextual dispositive “texte sous images” [text-​under-​images] or “feuilleton sous images” [serial-​under-​images] to distinguish it from picture stories in the strict sense, such as those of Louis Forton’s Pieds-​Nickelés. Forton’s strip gives priority to the drawings, that’s obvious. […] On the other hand, the text quickly becomes tiresome, stretched, even vulgar. It has only a relative importance. Conversely, the text of the serial below images takes precedence over its graphic reproduction […]. What is obvious is that the serial, when republished without its images, retains all its force and even, in our opinion, is read with greater pleasure. (Touchant 16) According to this Moselli fan, the publication mode of the serial-​under-​ images was imposed on the writer by the publishing house, with the aim of attracting Pieds-​Nickelés readers to serial novels (9), but he asserts that the “superfluous nature of the images” made the text difficult to read (80, 104) and that the novelist did not take them into account in his writing (194). In other words, the serial-​under-​images could be defined in his view as a particular way of illustrating a text that does not (despite

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46  Textual margins of early comics its presentation) have a caption function, in the sense that it does not give voice to a graphic narrative. Touchant does not further support his distinction. In the excerpt from the Pieds-​ Nickelés’s adventures presented in Figure 1.5, the pictures by themselves show a good-​natured and burlesque play. The sequence can be understood without even reading the captions. The autonomy assumed by the graphic narrative explains its success among an audience of novice readers and allows the captions –​ which straddle certain panels by being stitched together with suspension points –​to become desynchronized from it. An innovation of Forton’s, to improve the effectiveness of the visual narrative, was to include textual elements in the image in occasional speech bubbles, such as the exclamatory statement “Look out, there’s a shell!” or the simple exclamation mark in the bubble of the officer carelessly opening an unexploded shell. Conversely, the text of the captions can be read independently of the panels, like a serial-​under-​images. The continuous text of the captions constitutes a heterodiegetic narrative in the past tense, in a formal register, which is also the way that the French officers express themselves. Only the ordinary soldiers use some slang words, such as “marmite” [cooking pot] to mean “shell” or “cafetière” [coffee pot] to mean “head”. In comparison, the serials-​under-​images in L’Épatant were generally historical adventure novels, with academic drawings and captions twice as long as those on this page of the Pieds-​Nickelés. Despite this, the latter were still sufficiently abundant for their vocalization of the picture story to tend towards narrativization. Indeed, the comic strip page I have just described was converted into one page of a novel in 1917 (Figure 1.6), in the first of two volumes entitled Les Pieds-​Nickelés à la guerre [The Pieds-​Nickelés At War] (Forton 87), without modifying the text, but using only one panel as an illustration (a second one being reproduced on the reverse side of the page). Rearranged in two columns, the captions have become paragraphs, in which the lines of direct speech, in inverted commas in the picture story, are introduced by dialogue dashes. This series of books established Louis Forton as a serial writer comparable to José Moselli, such was its presentation in the catalogue of the Offenstadt house. Advertising by the publisher in the first volume of The Pieds-​Nickelés at War announces an “Collection d’aventures” [Adventure Collection] already numbering 42 novels at 0.25 francs, following on from a “Collection Chrysanthème” [Chrysanthemum Collection] at 0.50 francs, of which “[e]‌ach volume contains more than 10,000 lines of text in 128 pages, is decorated with numerous engravings and is bound in a superb colour cover” (Forton 2). The publishing characteristics of the “Chrysanthemum” and “Adventure” collections of popular literature, as they appeared during the Great War, were almost the same24 as those of the six Pieds-​Nickelés novels published between 1915 and 1917: poor quality paper, small format (15.5 × 21.5 cm), the same colour cover design, and the same internal design, in black and white

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Figure 1.5  Louis Forton, “Nouvelles aventures des Pieds-​ Nickelés (Suite.)”, L’Épatant, no. 380, 28 October 1915, p. 9. Source: Author’s private collection.

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Figure 1.6 Louis Forton, Les Pieds-​ Nickelés à la guerre. Croquignol, Ribouldingue, Filochard. Cinquième série d’aventures, Paris, Éditions de “L’Épatant”, 1917, p. 87. Source: Author’s private collection.

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Textual margins of early comics  49 with a text in two columns. Between 1916 and 1927, 27 of Moselli’s serial novels were republished in the “Adventure Collection”, 15 of which were reproducing the text of serials-​under-​images. These had therefore undergone the same adaptation as the Pieds-​Nickelés. In order to fit into the fixed page count of the collections in which they were republished, Forton’s and Moselli’s interminable serials had to be “cut up into semi-​ autonomous stories, following a principle resembling that of the adventure cycles (independence of the plots, but narrative continuity)” (Letourneux 121). The novels entitled La Bande des Pieds-​Nickelés [The Gang of the Pieds-​ Nickelés] (four volumes), then The Pieds-​ Nickelés At War (two volumes), were all subtitled with the first names of the heroes, Croquignol, Ribouldingue, Filochard. Their titles differed only in the numbering of the six “series of adventures” which were intended to form complete episodes. Note that Espiègle Lili, the heroine of the main series of picture stories in the magazine Fillette, drawn by André Vallet, also appeared in novels, with the same presentation. Her writer Jo Valle was part of Offenstadt’s team of popular writers, as he was the main contributor to the “Chrysanthemum” collection of novels. The publishing formula of serials-​under-​images disappeared at the outbreak of the Second World War,25 while literary serial novels and captioned picture stories both fell into disuse. In the case of the Pieds-​Nickelés, from the end of the 1920s onwards, the Offenstadt publishing house released albums containing the picture stories in their original form. A commercial failure of a competing publishing house shows the rapid evolution of comics publishing formats in the inter-​war period. In 1935, the French publisher of Le Journal de Mickey [Mickey’s Journal], Hachette, tried to translate Secret Agent X-​9 by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond into a series of booklets reminiscent of the Offenstadt brothers’ literary collections. Three 32-​page booklets (19.5 × 24 cm) constituted the only three issues of a monthly collection entitled “Aventures et mystères” [Adventures and Mysteries]. The booklets provided a complete novelization of the daily strip episode entitled “The Martyn Case”, which had begun a year earlier in the United States, and then started on the previous episode, “The Mystery of the Silent Guns”. Illustrating a continuous text composed in two columns, three panels per page had been taken from the strips, retaining their speech bubbles (but abbreviating their translated texts) and masking the deletion of the narrative recitatives and legal notices by a skilfully executed linking of drawings. As for the novelization, which was anonymous, it retained nothing of the original texts by Dashiell Hammett, whose name was not even mentioned. By contrast, the numerous drawings by Alex Raymond were reproduced with great fidelity, preserving the line, the shading and even the artist’s signature.26 Despite the abundance of illustrations, the literary adaptations of both Secret Agent X-​9 and the Pieds-​Nickelés were far from presenting their text as a bridge over comics-​based illustrations, i.e. a text that takes advantage of the original sequentiality of the drawings. Indeed, when

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50  Textual margins of early comics reading Hachette’s booklets, the reader could be thrown by the narrative desynchronization between the illustrations and the literary narrative. Apart from the first and last pages of the three volumes, the literary text lagged considerably behind the panels illustrating it. In four pages of the third issue (Agent secret 87–​91), the denouement of the novelization of “The Martyn Case” was even illustrated with the first panels of “The Mystery of the Silent Guns”, which introduced another storyline. Hachette discontinued the series at this point, and sold off the remaining copies of the three issues by collecting them in one volume.

Mickey et Minnie, a precursor to the modern French junior novelization This literary experiment was a synthesis of the Offenstadt brothers’ attempts to republish their serials-​under-​images as novelistic booklets and Hachette’s attempts to translate the Mickey Mouse or Felix the Cat strips with captions rather than speech bubbles. It is well known that in the 1930s Hachette paradoxically launched a comics magazine (Le Journal de Mickey) after having published comics albums (by Richard Felton Outcault, Alain Saint-​Ogan and Martin Branner), both of which imposed the use of the speech bubble in France, yet when it collected the comic strips of Patt Sullivan and Walt Disney’s cartoons in albums, it replaced their speech bubbles with captions. The signing of an initial contract for the rights to Mickey Mouse led to the publication, as early as 1931, of the first two in a long series of “Albums Mickey”, and to their novelization in 1932 as part of the “Bibliothèque rose illustrée” [Illustrated Pink Library]. This venerable collection of novels for young people, founded in 1856 with the help of the Comtesse de Ségur (Gornouvel and Nières-​ Chevrel 45–​46), had not changed its format since its inception (11.5 × 18 cm), still coming sturdily bound in a hardback cover in red percaline, even if the quality of the paper had declined, and bearing the unchanging gilded embossed ornamentation that adorned the titles of all the novels. However, the inclusion of a novelization in the collection in 1932 was part of a strategy of modernization,27 marked, as of the previous year, by giving each novel its own colour-​illustrated dust jacket with modern typography. Entitled Mickey et Minnie, the 240-​page novel (containing about 38,700 words) carried on its title page the words “By special arrangement with Walt Disney. Creator of Mickey and of Minnie”, as well as the name of the author Magdeleine du Genestoux, while the French adapters of the “Mickey Albums” remained anonymous. Only Walt Disney was credited in them as illustrator and copyright holder. The archives of the publishing house tell us, with regard to similar albums, that “the Hachette employees who adapted ‘Felix the Cat’ […] worked on black and white proofs: the speech balloons were masked by white paper stuck on and painted over in gouache, and then the drawings were inked in” (Renonciat 156, see also Baudry and Litaudon 7).

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Textual margins of early comics  51 Entitled Les Aventures de Mickey [The Adventures of Mickey] and Mickey chercheur d’or [Mickey the Gold Digger], the first two “Mickey Albums” reproduce three Disney strips per page, from the first series published in the United States to the middle of the ninth, according to the original numbering (Gottfredson 231–​253, 21–​69), i.e. the episodes Lost on a Desert Island (January–​March 1930) by Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks and Win Smith, and Mickey Mouse in Death Valley (April–​September 1930) by Walt Disney, Floyd Gottfredson, Win Smith and Jack King. However, some strips have been discarded (31 out of 211) and, as those that are included have had to be reduced in width to fit the vertical format of the Hachette albums (21 × 26.5 cm), they have had to be reduced on average by one panel. In all, one-​third of the original panels (307 out of 865) have disappeared from the first two French-​language albums. The novelizer Magdeleine du Genestoux probably used these as a basis for writing Mickey et Minnie, as she has not taken the strips abandoned by the adapters into account, with one exception. Over three pages (Genestoux 159–​163), she recounts a comic scene that does not appear in Mickey the Gold Digger, but which does correspond to an American strip (numbered 6–​27, reproduced in Gottfredson 46), which proves that she had access to the material available to Hachette’s iconographic department, who prepared the “Mickey Albums”. Moreover, the covers and title pages of the latter, as well as the colour-​illustrated dust jacket of Mickey et Minnie, and the 24 black and white illustrations inside the novel, are all original compositions by an anonymous artist, awkwardly inspired by Disney strips. It is not impossible that the novelizer also supervised the translation of the strips for the “Mickey Albums” and that the French artist Félix Lorioux28 anonymously illustrated the novel Mickey et Minnie. From 1919 onwards, Madeleine Arrigon, alias Magdeleine du Genestoux, was co-​head of the children’s publishing department at Hachette, while also writing novels for the “Illustrated Pink Library”. The illustrations of Mickey et Minnie, scattered sparingly throughout the text and without much narrative synchronization, perpetuate the ornamental function granted to images in French literary publishing without any attempt at iconotextual hybridization. The novelization follows the captioned strips, and even though it ignores a certain number of them (32 out of 180, primarily in the album The Adventures of Mickey), it only occasionally modifies the order.29 It has taken Magdeleine du Genestoux an average of 230 words to novelize a captioned strip, the captions of which contain an average of 70 words in The Adventures of Mickey and 60 words in Mickey the Gold Digger. In the French albums, although some captions are voiced conventionally by a narrator, the majority are written in direct speech. These dialogue captions, which very loosely translate the original English speech bubbles, are often reproduced word for word in the novel. But many of them are soliloquies rather than true dialogues, i.e. a single line, in direct speech, which a character utters without attempting to elicit any verbal

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52  Textual margins of early comics interaction with an interlocutor. In the bubbles of the original strips, Mickey already uses this type of solitary speech when he is alone in the scene. Rather than keeping this conventional direct speech, the novelizer has transformed most of these soliloquies into narrative discourse. For example, two panels at the beginning of The Adventures of Mickey (5), in which a homemade plane put together by the mouse disintegrated in mid-​air, are captioned: “Hey, motor, where are you going like that? Oh, how hard it is to become a great aviator. How do I look with my controls in my hands? Fortunately, I still have my cushion”. Note incidentally that the two original speech bubbles (Gottfredson 234) are much more concise: “What the X??XƟX?!!! There goes the MOTOR! I’m afraid this ship ain’t going to LAST!” While losing the self-​mockery of the soliloquy, the discourse reassigned to the narrator of the novelization maintains the personification of the machine and seeks to translate, through the alternation of verbal tenses, the freeze-​frame effect that makes the fall last: the motor, as if obeying a sudden decision, spins out in turn, and Mickey, who is now holding on to nothing but the broken controls, falls down with the wreckage of his aircraft. The fall lasted a long time, accelerating more and more. (Genestoux 24–​25) More rarely, the novelizer has drawn inspiration from the captioned soliloquies of the “Mickey albums”, like in this passage novelizing an entire strip (Disney, Chercheur d’or 27, Gottfredson 64), where one could almost forget that the hero is alone with his mount who cannot speak. Old chap, you nearly fell on me, said Mickey [to his horse]. Well there you are, you are out of danger too. But let’s take a little look at where we are and explore our place of refuge… It’s a rocky headland that juts out across the stream bed just before the waterfall. Good heavens! to get back to the edge, we would have to climb this steep cliff. Quite difficult that, especially with a horse. But what is this? The opening of a cave? Let’s go into this cave… Hey, hey! but this is not a cave. I can see daylight on the other side. My old steed, come with me, let’s find out where this tunnel leads to… (Genestoux 217) In reality, this passage, which imitates the enunciation of the captions in the French translation, is completely different from them in its use of presentatives (there, it’s, that, this). The same is true of the lexicons of vision and exploration, which animate the description of the place: “let’s take a little look at where we are and explore”, “I can see”, “let’s find out where…” These verbs, which are specific to the novelization, make it possible to describe everything shown in the images of the comic strip. The two novelizations of strips that I have just cited do more than vocalize the

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Textual margins of early comics  53 graphic narrative: to compensate for its absence in the novel, they narrativize it while seeking to preserve a certain visuality. Through questions and injunctions addressed to the reader, the narrator regularly invites them to imagine scenes of which a small minority are depicted in the illustrations of the novel. See him [Mickey] busying himself under the eyes of Piglet, Trotty, Quack-​Quack, Coquette and the other farm animals. (Genestoux 14) Picture the scene: the rhinoceros running away, the savages tumbling over each other and trying to free themselves from the rope. (49) But why the look of frightened surprise on Mickey’s face? While spurring the horses on, he has just noticed that one of the harnesses is broken. (128) After the wedding, Mickey and Minnie moved in with their uncle. Look at them, sitting side by side in the garden on a bench shaded by lime trees. They are now sated with adventures. (246) Note that, unlike the first three scenes, the last does not refer to any panel of the picture stories, but rather to an illustration placed as a frontispiece to the novel (Genestoux 2). And with good reason: a prologue and an epilogue framing the novelization completely invent a marriage between Mickey and Minnie that would have put a definitive end to their tribulations. While the French strips are the main source of the novel, 10 percent of the text departs from them to embroider totally new events or narrative transitions. * ** The example of the Pieds-​Nickelés novels, which compiled the captions of picture stories without altering them, and the case of Mickey et Minnie, which sometimes recopied and sometimes narrativized the captions of the French adaptations of the Mickey Mouse comic strips, show that the vocalization and narrativization of picture stories both converged, in the first half of the twentieth century, towards novelization. Magdeleine du Genestoux’s novel was the cornerstone of this development, bringing novelization into the venerable “Illustrated Pink Library” and giving the comics-​based novel its modern forms. By novelizing captioned picture stories rather than the strips with their original speech bubbles, Mickey et Minnie was following in the century-​old tradition of the Voyages and

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Figure 1.7  Advertisement for the first Pieds-​ Nickelés booklets, in L’Épatant, no. 378, 14 October 1915, p. 7. Source: Author’s private collection.

Adventures of Dr Festus. At the same time, Hachette’s novel heralded the forms of French junior novelization based on comics-​related animated cartoon series which would be standardized by the same collection, “Pink Library”, in the early twenty-​first century.30 From the 1830s to the 1930s, novelization emerged among other genres of picture story verbalization. The generic category, bringing together texts that functioned in a comparable way, falls within architextuality as defined by Gérard Genette (Palimpsests 4), i.e. “a relationship that is completely silent, articulated at most only by a paratextual mention”. The paratexts of the comics-​related novels discussed in this chapter referred to them in a variety of terms. Out of two anonymous reviews31 devoted to two of them, one spoke of a “prose translation of the Adventures of Dr Festus” and the other of the “acclimatization” of “two screen celebrities”, Mickey and Minnie, “to the land of La Fontaine and Perrault”, two classical French writers. In an advertisement by the Offenstadt brothers (Figure 1.7), only the name given to the printed format –​a “volume” rather than an “album” –​indicated the literary form of the first Pieds-​ Nickelés booklets. In the course of a century of publishing experimentation, the pure and simple description of comics seems more rarely found. It did exist, however, in pamphlets such as Ce que lisent vos enfants [What Your Children Are Reading] (1938) by Georges Sadoul. This includes an 18-​ page chapter on “What is contained in the foreign children’s press published in France”, which linked summaries of comic strip plots with continuous text transcriptions of their “texts and words” (24), to denounce the supposed danger of stories imported from Italy and the United States. These verbalizations of comic strip extracts do not have the autonomy of a work

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Textual margins of early comics  55 of literary fiction, since they support a text of an argumentative type, and they are in themselves presented as a non-​fictional commentary. Similarly, comics magazines sometimes supplied plot summaries to accompany instalments of serials-​under-​images and serialized picture stories. These summaries did not have the autonomy of a novelization either (or even that of a digest), as they lacked two characteristics of adaptation, namely extensivity and posteriority (Hutcheon XIV). The comic strip narrative had no real anteriority, as the serial continued in parallel with the brief summaries produced as it went along by the magazine’s editorial staff. Thus, the descriptions of bandes dessinées from the first century of the ninth art in France remained far removed from novelization. While the line between descriptive summary, retelling and commentary is clearly drawn in an essay such as Georges Sadoul’s, one might expect that it would not always be so clear-​cut in comics-​related prose. The experiment of verbalizing a comic strip attempted by Seymour Chatman in his essay Story and Discourse (36–​ 41) reveals the role of interpreter played by the novelizer, who is responsible for inferring a relatively large part of the visual narrative in order to write his literary account. In the next chapter, we will observe that the development of bedephilia in the second half of the twentieth century created the connection between ekphrasis and verbalization and produced some interesting fictional hybridizations with comics novelization.

Notes 1 All citations from French-​language works included in the bibliography have been translated for the purposes of this book. 2 For Gérard Genette (Paratexts 12), the paratext “in all its forms is a discourse that is fundamentally heteronomous, auxiliary, and dedicated to the service of something other than itself that constitutes its raison d’être. This something is the text”. 3 In the opening lines of Palimpsests (1), Genette defines the architext as follows: “the entire set of general or transcendent categories –​types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres –​from which emerges each singular text”. 4 To this day, these folk engravings have not been able to be authenticated (see Kunzle 77). Töpffer gives two descriptions of them: Voyage à la Grande Chartreuse 38–​39, “Réflexions” 320–​323. 5 Letter from Rodolphe Töpffer to Charles-​Augustin Sainte-​Beuve, 29 December 1840 (Gautier, Bouquet 107). 6 Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotographic sequence “The horse in motion” (1878) demonstrated that a galloping horse never leaves the ground with all four legs extended, in the way previously depicted by painters. 7 Rodolphe Töpffer, Les Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus, Geneva, 14 July 1829, second panel; manuscript preserved in Geneva’s Museum of Art and History (inventory number: MAH 1910-​0172). 8 Rodolphe Töpffer, Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus. Livre 1er, Geneva, A.-​L. Vignier, 1833, p. X; Print preserved in the Library of Geneva (classification: Réserve BGE Cth 3469 BGE Hf 4172).

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56  Textual margins of early comics 9 The anonymous author of the preface is undoubtedly the anonymous author of the novel. In the nineteenth century, it had become conventional to use the formula “By the author of…”, which Gérard Genette traces back to Jane Austen and Walter Scott (Paratexts 45, see also 183), but it was nonetheless “highly devious” in that it succeeded in creating an unnamed authorial entity, by linking two anonymous works with a shared publishing destiny. 10 Letter from Rodolphe Töpffer to Joël Cherbuliez, 4 July 1840 (Gautier, Bouquet 97). 11 It should be noted that in 1865, two years after the publication of Champfleury’s book, a pirate version of one of Busch’s comics pages that he had adapted, Die kleinen Honigdiebe, was published by Pinot & Sagaire in Épinal, in the form of a lithographed loose-​leaf with stencilled colour, entitled Michel et Dominique: les petits voleurs [Michel and Dominique: the little thieves]. 12 This is how it is presented in an advertisement by the publishing house Truchy, that appeared in La Correspondance littéraire, no. 8.2, 25 December 1863, p. 64. 13 The laws promulgated by the French minister Jules Ferry in 1881 and 1882 established compulsory primary education, made public schools free and secular, and organized mass literacy teaching for children under the Third Republic. 14 Even though the rise of illustrated books now seems inseparable from the Romantic publishing industry, the proliferation of images made writers uneasy (see Arnar 341, Hamon 283). Even Champfleury (quoted by Arnar 345) stated in a passage of his monograph on Les Vignettes romantiques [Romantic vignettes] (1883) that “any writer who gives importance to his ideas must make sober use of illustrations, otherwise he will turn his work into a pretext for images, that is to say, into a book that is looked at but not read”. 15 Note a redistribution of roles in the novelization, since the father disappears and is replaced by the mother, a figure associated with the instruction of children (Le Men 68), while the role of the healer passes from a barber-​surgeon to a “village schoolmaster who knew a little medicine” (Champfleury, Bons contes 31). 16 Before completing his training in London, the illustrator Edmond Morin made his debut in Paris in around 1846 with the publisher Aubert, when the latter was publishing the last of the “Jabot Albums”, imitating the piracies of Rodolphe Töpffer’s picture stories that had launched the collection in 1839 (Kunzle 143, 153, Filliot 40). Morin also illustrated the cover of an eccentric novel by Champfleury, Monsieur Tringle (1866), which in many ways resembled Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus, and which was adapted into a picture story by Léonce Petit (Kunzle 156). A review of this novel made a connection with Good Accounts Make Good Friends: “Monsieur Tringle is not a novel, it is an account. The author set out to justify the proverb: good accounts make good friends” (Boniface 2). 17 See Samuel E. Lowe’s letter to Walt Disney on 19 April 1933 (Lowery XXXI), that set up Whitman’s first licensing agreement. Note the very early date of the French publishing house Hachette’s first contract with Walt Disney, discussed below, which was “signed on 17 November 1930 and registered on 24 August 1931” (Baudry and Litaudon 26).

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Textual margins of early comics  57 18 In the recollections he shared with Lawrence Lowery (XXXIV), the prolific author Gaylord Du Bois described a creative process that was always based on comic strip panels: “For each BLB I was sent a thick handful of assorted clippings from newspaper comic strips. My assignment was to build a story around a certain already publicized hero, such as Tim McCoy, using one picture from these clippings for facing each page of print in the book”. However, the only Big Little Book he wrote about this Western movie star, entitled Tim McCoy on the Tomahawk Trail (1937, see Lowery 240), developed an original storyline, written especially for Whitman from an original artwork by Robert S. Weisman, as there were no comics of this character at the time. 19 Drawing on Simone Murray’s book on The Adaptation Industry, Jean-​Louis Jeannelle (97–​100) defines the adaptability of a novel into a film as a process that is perceived differently by film professionals: producers forecast the feasibility and profitability of a screen adaptation, while screenwriters evaluate the novel’s availability and plasticity for rewriting, whereas film critics gauge the adaptation’s desirability. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the notion of adaptability has been objectified by the book and film industries, for example by Monaco’s International Cinema and Literature Forum, which awards prizes each year for the Best Adaptable Comics and the Best Adaptable Novel (Murray 81, 91–​92). 20 In the 1930s and 1940s, it was exported mainly to Great Britain and Argentina, and to a lesser extent, for some translations of Disney Big Little Books, to Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands (Lowery XXXVIII, XLV, 430–​440). In the United States, faced with competition from comic books, sales of Big Little Books declined from the 1940s onwards. At the same time, Withman’s parent company, Western Publishing, launched another publishing genre in partnership with Simon & Schuster that was destined for great success, the Little Golden Books, which themselves were exported on a massive scale (including to France, see Baudry and Litaudon 16–​19). 21 These are more or less the circumstances in which the Czech writer Rudolf Těsnohlídek produced his serial novel The Cunning Little Vixen (1921), based on sequences of original drawings by the painter Stanislav Lolek, but these were not, strictly speaking, comic strips. The illustrated novel has remained famous for its adaptation into an opera by Leoš Janáček. 22 Literally “The Nickel-​Plated Feet”, emphasizing the heroes’ laziness, which would correspond to the English slang “The Lazybones”. 23 By going through all the periodicals of the Librairie Offenstadt from 1909 to 1940, Jean-​Louis Touchant (207–​215) has listed no less than 93 serial novels by José Moselli, all of them developing original storylines centred on heroes created by the author. A third of them originally appeared as serials-​under-​ images in Le Cri-​Cri, Le Petit Illustré, L’Épatant and L’Intrépide. After their initial publication, 38 of the 93 serials were republished or adapted (29 as literary texts, and 9 as picture stories or serialized comics pages) in other magazines or collections by the same publishers. 24 The notable differences of the “Adventure Collection”, in its pre-​ 1918 format, were a smaller page count (80 pages) and a very limited number of illustrations, which, where the novels were adapted from serials-​under-​images, were not by the same artists as the illustrations in the serials (Touchant 205). 25 It nonetheless inspired the graphic adaptations of Eugène Sue’s The Morne-​ au-​Diable by Georges Beuville in 1950 and Raymond Queneau’s Zazie in the

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58  Textual margins of early comics Metro by Jacques Carelman in 1966 (see Blin-​Rolland 89–​90), both artists born in France in the first half of the twentieth century who pursued their artistic careers outside of the comics field. 26 It is worth noting, however, that the last page of the first issue, melodramatically entitled L’Angoisse d’une mère [A Mother’s Anguish], added a previously unpublished panel to the nineteenth strip of “The Martyn Case”, although it bore the signature of the American cartoonist (Agent secret 30). 27 A page in the novel launched a competition for readers of the “Illustrated Pink Library” to “celebrate its brilliant revival” (see Hachette’s advertisement in Le Jardin des lettres, no. 15, March 1932, p. 14). 28 The writer and illustrator signed a few children’s picture books in Hachette’s “Silly Symphonies” collection in 1934 and 1935, before Walt Disney refused to allow names other than his to appear on these adaptations of his cartoons (Baudry and Litaudon 12). 29 The order of three strips had been reversed by mistake in the second album (Disney, Chercheur d’or 25–​26, compared with Gottfredson 62), but it was restored in the novelization (Genestoux 222–​226). The latter took more liberties with other strips from the same album, whose narrative followed the progression of a chase, frequently resorting to an alternating montage. The frequency of the movement back-​and-​forth between the pursuers and the pursued was toned down in the novel, without altering the narrative integrity of the strips. Compare Genestoux 183–​186 and Disney, Chercheur d’or 14–​15; Genestoux 193–​197 and Disney, Chercheur d’or 53–​54; Genestoux 214–​222 and Disney, Chercheur d’or 59–​61. 30 See Chapter 4 for more details on this subject. 31 The anonymous review of Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus appeared in the Journal de Genève (no. 11.111, 17 September 1840, pp. 1–​2), and that of Mickey et Minnie appeared in the Revue des lectures (no. 20.4, 15 April 1932, pp. 449–​450).

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2 Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations

If Tintin’s adventures were noticed when they came out of Hollywood studios in 2011, it was not their first American adaptation. Almost 20 years earlier, the New York author Frederic Tuten had published, in a literary form, an aesthetic, political and sentimental initiation of the Belgian comics character. In his dedication, the writer described his novel Tintin in the New World (1993) as a tribute “to the memory of [his] friend Georges Remi (Hergé)” (Tuten, Tintin 5). This literary tribute to Tintin’s creator met with mixed reactions on both sides of the Atlantic. A New York Times critic praised the “literary exercise”, “so richly inventive and so subtly textured” (White 91, for a similar Canadian example see Kelly), before another journalist from the newspaper met with the writer to discuss a “literary book”, “[r]‌ed meat for real readers and rich grist for the critics’ mill” (Cummings 13). On the contrary, most French-​ speaking critics agreed with an inflammatory opinion1 that appeared, before the translation of the novel, in the periodical of Les Amis de Hergé.2 According to this review by a tintinophile, Tuten’s (alleged) mercantile exploitation of Hergé’s work betrayed its spirit “to exorcize the writer’s apparent sexual fantasies or frustrations” (Sichère 43). It is easy to understand why this literary project did not find favour with all fans. Some were shocked by a lack of fidelity not so much to the source works as to the “consensus within the fan community itself” (Jenkins, “Star Trek” 100). Yet, according to Pascal Bruckner, Tintin in the New World should have satisfied life-​long fans (all now adults) who were waiting for a new adventure of the hero, since Hergé’s death ten years earlier, even if the novel could not avoid a coming-​of-​age.3 “This is perhaps”, the French essayist wrote, “the price that comics protagonists have to pay to enter literature: the price of maturity, of necessary disillusionment” (Bruckner, “Révolution” 50). This literary example shows, on the one hand, that the intermedia network of Tintin’s adventures is not limited to the children’s audience nor to visual media, and on the other hand, that the novels that are part of it are of particular interest to Hergé’s fans. This chapter focuses on a corpus of literary pieces of prose adapting the work of the founding father of Franco-​ Belgian comics, who still inspires most of French-​ speaking DOI: 10.4324/9781003388210-3

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60  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations publications devoted to comics. A bibliographical essay refers as “fictional amplifications” (Roche and Cerbelaud 183–​ 207) to one-​ tenth of the four hundred books which analyse the adventures of Tintin, considering novelistic essays with a text-​type more narrative than critical. Several of the works I will study, including Tuten’s novel, are on this list. The various adaptation projects and the different approaches taken to them by the authors determine the nature of the voice narrating these comics and the nature of the audience to which that voice is addressed. To study the enunciation of comics verbalizations, this chapter focuses on five texts adapting Tintin’s adventures, selected because they represent very different types of literary adaptations: Dupont et Dupond, détectives [Thomson and Thompson, Detectives] (1943) by Paul Kinnet, Tintin and the Golden Fleece (1965, from the French original published in 1962) by André Barret and Rémo Forlani, Tintin in the New World (1993) by Frederic Tuten, Tchang et le yéti [Chang and the Yeti] (2001) by Sandrine Willems and The Adventures of Tintin (2011) by Alexander Irvine. The corpus will also include a handful of short texts published in collections and fanzines, which will be described as fanfictions of Tintin’s adventures.

The literary adventures of Tintin In 2012 Hergé’s biographer Pierre Assouline (quoted in Chemin 6) told a Le Monde journalist that, “compared with games consoles, Tintin has the charm of a wooden toy”. He said this when The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn was showing in cinemas, accompanied by a video game for pre-​teens based on the film. At the same time, Simon Casterman (cited in Chemin 1), publisher of Hergé’s albums, said that “the release of the Spielberg film […] enabled thousands of children to discover a character they didn’t know”. Today, many children are probably familiar with Tintin and his world but how many of them have read the comics? This fictional universe has never been limited to comic strip. Far from it: from the 1930s onwards it was constantly being adapted for other media, under the control of Hergé and subsequently his beneficiaries. These commercial offshoots did not disappear with the author when he died in 1983. Quite the opposite in fact. Their numbers grew and were not adversely affected by the legal complications surrounding Hergé’s estate (Jouret 98–​109, 131–​137). Despite being frequently adapted, the Tintin albums have usually been regarded as unadaptable. For instance, Pierre Fresnault-​Deruelle considers them to be exemplary of the mediagenic nature4 of certain comics narratives. He referred to this as their “scenariography”, i.e. “something that, because of the lack of (summarisable) plot, makes an accomplished album truly unadaptable” (Fresnault-​Deruelle, Hergéologie 11). When he wrote this, the researcher had not yet had the opportunity to see Steven Spielberg’s motion-​capture adaptation: The Adventures of Tintin (2011). The film’s achievement is deliberately based on “paying

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  61 tribute” to Hergé’s clear line style, thanks to a “procedure that combines two cultural series: that of the captured image and that of animation” (Gaudreault and Marion 170, see also Spielberg’s interview in Chemin 5). Regardless of the author’s intentions, this example of cinematographic adaptation confirms that the inadaptability arguments can be reversed (Jeannelle 99) and also that the concept of mediageny, without discrediting it, must be used with the temporal context in mind. It cannot be ruled out that a mediagenic narrative will one day meet a new suitable medium. The presumed difficulties in getting Tintin out of the comics did not discourage the adapters. The fact that Hergé’s works were published in serial format has certainly made them easier to adapt. For example, the film Tintin and the Golden Fleece, which features an original storyline and was novelized, does not follow on chronologically from the previous comics album, Tintin in Tibet. They are both floating episodes of a disjointed series, mirroring the discontinuity already found in the original medium. Beyond the origins of their storylines (reworked or original), the five above-​listed works are literary transpositions, not to be confused with other passages of comics into novels. This excludes the many literary borrowings or distortions that simply cite or allude to Hergé’s universe. For example, Jean-​Pierre Verheggen’s collection of poems entitled Le Degré Zorro de l’écriture (1978) [Writing Degree Zorro] contains an intertextual distortion of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929). It is a continuous, exhaustive transcription of the thoughts reported by Snowy throughout the first album in the series. Since in the album this internal monologue does not appear in thought bubbles but in speech bubbles, the dog’s words are sometimes addressed to Tintin but they do not provoke any dramatic reaction or verbal interaction on his part. Only the reader is aware of them. Here is how Verheggen describes his poetic process: The process was simple, simplistic even: page after page, I lined up what Snowy said –​his responses to Tintin, his nostalgic thoughts of home, his various paranoias, his absolute contempt for foreigners, his inevitable and fundamental anti-​communism, his persistent distrust and his love of frolicking about! (Verheggen, J’aime 90) There is a hint of sexual goings-​on because the title of the transcription had erotic undertones: “In Russia, Snowy slept with Tintin an awful lot”. This “readymade” (in the sense of the term first coined by Marcel Duchamp5) aestheticizes our perception of the comics texts and warns us that the words must be read in conjunction with the images. The poetic distortion of this work, in the guise of an intertextual citation –​for which the poet was “on the receiving end of some quite horrible insults” (Verheggen, J’aime 89) –​committed two transgressions from the moment it was published as a collection; first, it paved the way for misconception

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62  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations of a work initially intended for young readers and second, it circumvented authorial self-​censorship. Contrary to the intention of the author, who thought of it as a youthful indiscretion, the first Tintin album was not reincorporated into The Adventures of Tintin series until 16 years after his death, encouraging piracies and pastiches in the intervening period. Citation is as far removed from novelization as allusion. A series of novels published between 2008 and 2016 by Le Léopard démasqué is one of the most publicized examples. The title of the series, Les Aventures de Saint-​Tin et son ami Lou [The Adventures of Saint-​Tin and his Friend Lou] immediately highlights a predilection for allusion. The French title parodies Les Aventures de Tintin et Milou and is a double phonic pun on the two names, since, in French, Saint-​Tin rhymes with Tintin and ami Lou rhymes with Milou (Snowy’s French name). Each of the titles and cover illustrations of the novels is a parody of an album by Hergé, but the plots and diegeses are quite different, even though some geographical names and surnames are puns. The orphaned hero, Saint-​Tin, is portrayed as a modern-​day journalist who thinks of himself as a spiritual son of Tintin. He [Saint-​Tin] dreamt that this nascent fame might give him more clues to his mysterious lineage. Having been tracing his ancestors for many years, he had very quickly suspected a filial link with a famous journalist who passed away in the 1980s. Would America offer up another piece of the family jigsaw? (Bonnefoi 12) The minor part played by a talkative parrot –​the “friend Lou” –​ represents this fictional creation, which is also talkative, but is most significantly not linked to any source work and lays no claim to adaptation or transfiction:6 “The art of mimicry had suddenly become old-​fashioned. Lou was setting his sights higher, he wanted to write a work of his own!” (21). Although this series of novels was the furthest removed from Hergé’s work, it is one of the very few literary creations to have been prosecuted for counterfeiting and parasitism by Hergé’s successors. The plaintiffs claimed that Les Aventures de Saint-​Tin et son ami Lou were “unauthorized adaptations of Hergé’s albums”, and as such the parody exception to copyright infringement did not apply because, they believed, “the desire to entertain the reader is distinct from the intention to parody”.7 The Paris Court of Appeal upheld that the notion of parody (unlike pastiche) allows for a change of medium, but on this basis it ruled that the novels at issue, while taking inspiration from Hergé’s work, were able to distance themselves sufficiently to avoid any risk of confusion, if only because they were in novel format and had original plots; that the intention to parody is obvious from the titles and covers of the books.8

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  63 Unlike the above examples, the works examined in this chapter were tolerated by the author or his beneficiaries. Hergé himself had “a rather passive relationship” with these transpositions, which interested him above all for the “promotional opportunities for his albums” and “[if] he annotated the screenplays that were submitted to him, it was above all with a protectionist perspective” (Schuiten and Peeters, L’Aventure des images 47). The holders of the moral ownership9 of the work were presumably more sensitive to the mode of literary adaptation than its generic distinctions, even if novelization and expansion (both in a serious mode10) were then the preferred choice, because these ones did not threaten the integrity of the original fictional world. Despite this authorial control, the Tintin-​related literary works show great diversity. On the one hand, this corpus includes a diversity of formats, both illustrated and non-​illustrated, some of which have been published as standalone volumes or albums and others that are only part of a larger work (literary collection, press serial, critical fanzine). On the other hand, this corpus involves a diverse array of authors, who are either adapters commissioned by a publisher, putting their literary skill at his service, or novelists who take up the pen on their own initiative, adopting a position of tintinophile. The six authors include two Belgians, two Frenchmen and two Americans. At the time when they adapted Tintin’s adventures into prose, Alexander Irvine was the only professional novelizer, and others were novelists (Paul Kinnet, Frederic Tuten and Sandrine Willems), who had more than one novel to their name, or screenwriters with no novel-​writing experience (André Barret and Rémo Forlani). The identity of the authors of the literary narratives is no less diverse than that of their narrators. While Hergé’s comics are told in zero focalization and without a verbal narrator, what kind of narrators recount their literary adaptations? In other words: which narrative voices take enunciative responsibility for these comics-​related texts?

An issue of enunciative responsibility Let me begin with the best documented genre: film novelization. It seems of course that there is no single transnational or transcultural form of the genre. The variation of formats can be seen in the albums of The Adventures of Tintin at the Cinema (Jouret 120–​125; Moine 124–​133; Lesage 350–​355). This sub-​series of visual novelizations was included, between 1962 and 1972, in Hergé’s comics albums series, to compensate for a drying up of his production. The book of Jean-​Jacques Vierne’s live-​ action movie Tintin and the Golden Fleece (1962) and the “album-​film” of Philippe Condroyer’s Tintin and the Blue Oranges (1964) combine a prose text with still images in accordance with the device of the official “album of the movie”. The French-​language “cinéalbum” of The Adventures of Tintin (2011), Steven Spielberg’s first motion-​capture film, like the “album du film” [film picture book] of Tintin and the Lake of Sharks (1972), a feature-​ length animation by Raymond Leblanc, are

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64  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations photonovels made up of still images with bubbles. Alongside the film photonovel of Lake of Sharks, a comic strip adaptation appeared in the press (never republished in an album), while the novelization of Raymond Leblanc’s animated film Tintin and the Temple of the Sun (1969) appeared in yet another format, an illustrated story with each page containing six captioned still images. Let us consider for a moment Tintin and the Golden Fleece: The Book of the Film, written by screenwriters André Barret and Rémo Forlani. The lavishly illustrated story book was included by Casterman (and translated by Methuen) in the comics series, by adopting its book format (23 × 30,5 cm), with 44 pages instead of the usual 62. This pagination is shorter than that of a novel and, more significantly, the picture book has more images than text. No fewer than 120 colour or black-​and-​white still image cut-​outs accompany the text in a flexible layout, most of them freeze-​frames of action scenes (fights, slapstick, altercations, trips, etc.), which outnumber the portraits and landscapes. The narrator –​ who is heterodiegetic in the original French version but autodiegetic (Tintin himself) in the English translation –​has opted for the epic preterite but pretends to discover the events as and when he narrates them. For example, when recounting a scene in which Captain Haddock narrowly escapes being hit by a barrel hurtling down the street (Figure 2.1), the narrator refers to it as an accident, even looking for a non-​violent explanation: “Could the barrel have fallen from the back of a lorry?” (Barret and Forlani 8). He even goes so far as to exonerate the accomplice from attempted murder, describing him as a “friendly” and “admirable guide” who had offered his services to Tintin and Haddock: “Mr. Malik was appalled, absolutely appalled” (9). The repetition of the adjective can, however, be interpreted as free indirect speech, attributable to the protagonists, in a novelization that, unusually, uses very little direct speech. The story books and film photonovels from The Adventures of Tintin at the Cinema are visual novelizations that differ greatly from the “novel of the movie” formats that are the most established, not only by the book industry but also by academic research. In 1975 the US movie industry extended copyright to works of corporate authorship, which helped to formalize the genre of novel-​like commercial novelization. Of course, this narrow definition does not prevent its own subversion, and even encourages unorthodox literary appropriations, especially on the web where copyright control is more relaxed (Jenkins, Convergence 136–​ 138). Nevertheless, this dominant format has eclipsed the variety of alternative formats. It is to be expected, therefore, that the inherent features of Hollywood novelization are the result of external writing constraints, which can be summarized as follows:11

• As a spin-​off, the literary work furthers the cause of the cine-

matographic work (always a mainstream film); however, both the

newgenrtpdf

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  65

Figure 2.1 André Barret and Rémo Forlani, Tintin and the Golden Fleece. The Book of the Film, trans. Leslie Lonsdale-​Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Methuen, 1965, pp. 8–​9. Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Alliance de Production Cinématographique.

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66  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations

•

•

Hollywood novelization and the film are script-​based to allow for the simultaneous release of the film and the book. The writing contract requires the novelizer to adhere closely to, and include all aspects of, the film (without having seen it) and neither his/​her novel nor his/​her name can overshadow the film; the work commissioned, at short notice, will appear relatively anonymized in the paratext12 of the novelization. The reading contract tacitly assumes that readers will be aware of the Hollywood blockbuster’s existence, will tend to view any infidelity thereto as accidental, and that the French version will appear to them to be a translation of an original English novelization (although not always the case).

A typical example of the Hollywood definition of the genre is the novelization of the first Adventures of Tintin movie by Steven Spielberg. Nevertheless, although it is not adapted from a film, Frederic Tuten’s Tintin in the New World is comparable in form to Alexander Irvine’s novelization because of its novel format, its marginalization of the image from the text, and even the narrative form of its first chapter. Even if the beginning of Tuten’s novel adopts a more sophisticated style, it features two trends that can be observed in Irvine’s incipit: the introduction of a heterodiegetic narrator and in-​ depth characterization of the hero, both of which are absent from Hergé’s comics. The characters’ past is given new light upon contact with literary memoirs. The Adventures of Tintin: A Novel intertwines several layers of memory: Haddock regained his memory through the memories of an ancestor and he leaves it to the reporter to then turn it into a story. Similarly, the hero of Tintin in the New World (87–​89) tries unsuccessfully to write his memoirs, and the task is eventually taken over by Captain Haddock, though it costs him his life. Despite this memory dimension of the two novels, their stories are not told by one of the protagonists but by an omniscient heterodiegetic narrator who reports the words and thoughts of the characters. However, even Irvine’s narration occasionally interweaves two voices, as can be seen in the description of Tintin’s apartment: The walls were nearly covered with photographs of places Tintin had been and people he knew. It was a tidy space, perfect for him… Well, it would have been tidy if it wasn’t cluttered with the various things he had collected on his adventures. But what was the point of having adventures if they didn’t result in some souvenirs? Tintin set the model ship on his sideboard and looked down at Snowy. “What is it about this ship?” he asked, not because he thought Snowy would answer but because he liked to get his thoughts straight by talking to someone who wouldn’t confuse him with answers. “Why has it attracted so much attention?” (Irvine, Adventures 13–​14)

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  67 Rarely encountered in The Adventures of Tintin: A Novel, similar dialogic narration can be found from the very start of Tintin in the New World. The reader finds the hero agitated, dispirited by the rain and disgusted by the adult novel he is trying to read, leading him to conclude: There it was. Adults! Always the same: all for lust and murder. Thank the stars he knew nothing of that. I shall always be glad to have stayed stunted at twelve, he thought. Quirk of biological fate–​my best luck. (Tuten, Tintin 10) The reporter monologues about the adventure novel in which the “lust and murder” indicate what lies ahead, then about his life, numb in the comfort of Marlinspike Hall. His statements are descriptive, no longer the performative statements found in comics albums, much to the regret of his dog Snowy: “Seldom hear Tintin talk so much. I like him better when he’s chasing villains or getting out of a scrape” (Tuten, Tintin 13). He then discovers a mission order from Hergé: “Follow now your destined but alterable track, which begins at Machu Picchu, Peru. Go there now” (14–​15). Inserted into the first chapter, the two texts read by Tintin provide the first mises en abyme of a story with a “nested structure” (Carpi 142). Unlike Irvine’s story, Tuten’s does not have a linear structure; it is driven by a postmodern aesthetics of fragmentation. Like this novel begun13 in the 1970s, most of the literary transpositions in Hergé’s lifetime were expansions of his work. In 1943 the Belgian novelist Paul Kinnet wrote a short serialized story centred on the investigators Dupond and Dupont (known as Thomson and Thompson, or the Thom(p)sons, in English) in the newspaper Le Soir,14 in the slot previously occupied by the prepublication of the Red Rackham’s Treasure daily strips. Hergé contributed hitherto unpublished drawings for the 41 daily appearances of Dupont et Dupond, détectives [Thomson and Thompson, Detectives]. The flashback narrative fills a narrative gap lying just before the epilogue of Red Rackham’s Treasure. The two policemen, considering their protection mission successfully completed, had taken leave of the heroes. The expansion of the serial tells of the pair’s independent murder investigation, while on holiday in the country, into a farmer who had been trafficking on the black market. The script is very much in keeping with developments in the Belgian crime fiction genre at the time, which was experiencing a golden age to which Paul Kinnet contributed profusely (Huftier 71–​73), particularly its portrayal of social behaviour in occupied Belgium and its ironic treatment of the anti-​heroes. The Thom(p)sons are caricatures of the detectives in English whodunits, those self-​taught amateurs who use investigation as a democratic way to explore reality. Unable to get to grips with the real world, the policemen have their heads constantly buried in a Manuel du parfait détective [Manual of the Perfect Detective], convinced that “Sherlock Holmes always had three or

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68  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations four copies in his pocket” (Kinnet 276). The story shows by reductio ad absurdum that “the Thom(p)sons are not viable when left to their own devices” (Fresnault-​Deruelle, Hergéologie 87). The four novelizations of the adventures of Tintin that I outlined are just as hesitant when it comes to enunciative responsibility. In Alexander Irvine’s novelization and in Tintin in the New World by Frederic Tuten, the stories are not told by one of the characters but by an omniscient narrator who reports the thoughts of the characters in italics. More unusually, the French version of Tintin and the Golden Fleece by André Barret and Rémo Forlani opens with a narrative from the main protagonist before immediately continuing with a heterodiegetic narrator. Only the second sentence of the story contains a first-​person narrative, fairly accurately translated in the English version: “Snowy and I were on holiday, down at Marlinspike Hall with Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus. We hadn’t a care in the world –​until the postman came” (Barret and Forlani 3). However, unlike the original text, which abruptly switches to the third person, the translation continues with first-​person narrative from Tintin. Likewise, although Hergé and Paul Kinnet tell their literary expansion of Dupont et Dupond, détectives in a collective voice –​“as the adventure is worth telling, we will begin the story tomorrow” (Kinnet 274) –​they quickly place it in the hands of a heterodiegetic narrator. We can see from these examples that Hergé’s stories are difficult to transpose into novel format without introducing an extradiegetic narrative voice. However, novelizations written in the first person do exist. The narrator in Sandrine Willems’ short novel Tchang et le yéti is an ageing Chang, who gives his version of his misadventure 30 years previously, in the comics album Tintin in Tibet, without mention of any prior encounter with Tintin (which happened in The Blue Lotus), and even less so with Hergé (whose friend Zhang Chong-​Jen was the inspiration for the eponymous character). The novelist transposes a homodiegetic narrative from Tintin in Tibet (Hergé, Tibet 58–​59), respecting the usual fidelity and exhaustivity constraints of commercial novelization. In short, she describes a comics passage reread by one of its characters. In the comics album, Chang tells his rescuers how he survived an air disaster that occurred in the Himalayas. This account alternates scenes of the narrator recalling the story in speech bubbles and flashbacks where he continues in voice-​over. The novelization strictly follows this storyline,15 but to give a new interpretation of it. The secondary character, who in the comics was the relatively passive object of the hero’s quest, benefits in the novel from an enunciative empowerment, which allows him, retrospectively, to deliver a contradictory point of view on the story of his rescue.

Literary initiations to a visual universe This overview of five literary prose adaptations of Tintin’s adventures does not bring closure to the issue of their enunciative responsibility. It

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  69 is shared by the narrator with his addressee, a veritable co-​enunciator of the narrative, who lies somewhere between the narratee whom the narrator aims at and the reader whom he actually reaches. In order to discover the enunciatees of these literary adaptations, drawing on the novels, I will start by asking what made two American writers adapt a Belgian comics series and what reception experience they offered to their readers. Obviously, their novels were not intended only for European tintinophiles. As I said before, The Adventures of Tintin: A Novel is a typical example of Hollywood novelization. The different stages of the adaptation process are listed on the title page in the style of film credits: “A novel by Alex Irvine /​Based on the screenplay by Steven Moffat and Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish /​Based on The Adventures of Tintin series by Hergé” (Irvine, Adventures VII). This paratext is somewhat anonymized since the name of the novelizer is hidden away in this legal information; in fact, it is not even visible on the book’s cover. The biographical note on the back flap of the dust jacket informs us that Irvine, born in 1969, is a professional novelizer, sci-​fi author and comic book scriptwriter. This novelization was published by Little, Brown and Company, a literary publisher (acquired by the Hachette Group in 2006) and the American publisher of the British translations of Tintin comics albums since 1974 (Gabilliet 259, Williams 41). Both the film and its novelization target an intergenerational and international audience, ranging from young American viewers unfamiliar with Hergé’s work (Butler 49) to tintinophiles the world over who collect spin-​off products of the comics made by Hergé and his art studio. The novel was translated into French by Casterman, his original publisher. This venerable Belgian publishing house, owned by French publishing groups (Flammarion then Madrigall) for the past 20 years, specializes in comics and children’s literature. Its novelizations therefore appear in a literary catalogue aimed at young people, even though they target an intergenerational audience.16 The novels inspired by comics or children’s albums cash in on the childhood nostalgia of adults –​who are the buyers and potential readers –​striving to appeal to them just as much as (if not more than) to their own children. The tintinophilia market is similar to the comics market in Great Britain, whose perception today “tends to be based around notions of a ‘collectibles’ market which has adults rather than children positioned as the main consumer (alongside a growing nostalgia industry of reprints of older titles)” (Gibson 152). While the Hollywood novelization is strictly standardized, the genre of Tintin in the New World is more difficult to define. Aimed at adults, this postmodern coming-​of-​age novel portrays a Tintin torn between the childhood he is leaving behind and the adulthood he is discovering. This is less a novelization and more a novelistic expansion, or American view, of two European works of fiction: The Adventures of Tintin and The Magic Mountain. He borrows his characters from both the Belgian comics series (Tintin, Snowy, Haddock) and the German novel (Clavdia,

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70  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations Peeperkorn, Naphta, Settembrini). Without being disjointed to the extent of the patchwork of texts that make up The Adventures of Mao on the Long March,17 Tuten’s first novel, Tintin in the New World also has a composite, polyphonic structure, in a departure from the artificial linear narrative of Hergé’s comics and the illusory biographical unity of Thomas Mann’s Bildungsroman. Writer Frederic Tuten adopts a very different approach to that of a novelizer; his name appears several times in the paratext of his novel and he is described on the jacket of the British edition as a writer “in the vanguard of 21st century fiction”. The back cover has a photo of the New York author posing as an “engaged, sceptical and liberal writer”, according to the statement accompanying it in the French edition published by Grasset in 1995. Like The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), Tintin in the New World has an original cover illustration and frontispiece by the artist Roy Lichtenstein and cites praise from the literary critic Susan Sontag on its jacket. The paratextual visuals are reproduced in the French edition, even though such visually rich paratext was rare for a French literary publisher such as Grasset.18 The novel was released simultaneously by Marion Boyars, an independent London publisher of humanities essays and highbrow contemporary literature, and by the New York-​based William Morrow (then part of the Hearst Corporation), a publisher of contemporary English-​ language literature that worked with authors such as Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman. The English novel has the subtitle a romance, which was inaccurately translated as “roman” [novel] in the French edition.19 Frederic Tuten’s narrative suggests two possible fates for Tintin after he meets Clavdia Chauchat, the plot’s femme fatale (and one of Thomas Mann’s characters): an idyllic life together20 or the alternative harsh “reality” that Tintin’s love is not reciprocated by Clavdia, so his road to maturity is a painful one. The couple’s idyllic life plays out like a sentimental soap opera with suspense and twists and turns but no happy ending because all the protagonists wake up. At the time of publication of Tintin in the New World, the literary scholar Daniela Carpi (148) linked it to an ongoing postmodern craze in Anglo-​American literature for romances, which supplemented literary realism and (auto)biography, as exemplified by A.S. Byatt’s Possession: a Romance (1990) and Julian Barnes’ Talking It Over (1991). In choosing “romance” as the subtitle, Tuten was reinforcing the intertwining of cultural works, which, in Tintin and the New World, breaks down the barriers between classic and popular forms, including the comic strip. The sequencing of the chapters is deliberately fragmented, to give the impression that the novelist had collated a series of comic panels or film shots. By way of a parody, the bracketed headings of some chapters give brief factual information, such as: “[Some weeks later. The port of Callao, Peru.]” (Tuten, Tintin 19), in the manner of the scarce recitatives found in Tintin’s comics albums. Several of them are similar to the technical instructions given in a shooting script (Raynauld 63):

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  71 [Prow side, Tintin alone. Eight bells. Wind, N by NW (Apollo’s wind). Snowy parades the deck, his snout aloft, sniffing the aroma of brine and dolphins.] (Tuten, Tintin 17) [Dusk, the same day. Tintin and Clavdia are seated beside each other on a veranda facing the mountains and the darkening jungle. Clavdia clears her throat and begins to speak to the young man, whose flushed face is averted from her.] (49) Like a fanfiction (Jenkins, “Star Trek” 99), Tuten’s novel reflects a willingness to learn from a popular work and put his personal stamp on it. Moreover, the novel tacitly relies on the intertextual culture of its readers because it does not describe Hergé’s characters, or those of Thomas Mann. It speaks volumes that this work appeared at the exact time when, in the United States, “fan writing ha[d]‌achieved a semi-​institutional status” (Jenkins, “Star Trek” 89), many years in advance of the French-​speaking world. This cultural lag could explain the legal precautions taken by the American novelist. The paratext confirms that Frederic Tuten’s literary appropriation is legal, as is his use of Roy Lichtenstein’s graphic interpretation (through the “grateful acknowledgement to Fanny Remi and the Hergé Foundation for their permission to use images from Tintin on the dustjacket and frontispiece of this edition” (4)). In sum, this sophisticated novel written by an author who introduced himself as a friend of Hergé (and as a kind of tintinophile) was intended for American and British readers who had discovered the expensive comics albums series, in translation, at a time (before 1993) when, in the United States, these albums were mostly purchased in privileged milieus21 (Gabilliet 263) and when, in Great Britain, they were mostly accessed by young readers in public libraries (Gibson 153). More recently, European scholars Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey (257) recommended to American students and researchers, a couple of biographical essays to learn about Hergé, “unless one prefers the more indirect and imaginary recreation of the Tintin character by Frederic Tuten in his novel Tintin in the New World”. In The Adventures of Tintin: A Novel, the detailed description of the characters is an indication that the novelizer was also addressing readers who had never seen them –​whereas, for Frederic Tuten’s novel Tintin in the New World, prior knowledge of the characters is required. The first chapter of Alexander Irvine’s novel begins with a portrait of Tintin and Snowy and ends with a dialogue that the hero overhears between a Brussels antique vendor named Crabtree, who has just sold a model ship to him, and a stranger who also wanted to buy it: Behind him, Tintin heard the bearded man say to Crabtree, “That young man. What’s his name?”

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72  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations “Him?” Crabtree said, sounding incredulous that anyone would ask such a question. “Everybody knows him. That’s Tintin”. Tintin smiled to himself. Maybe not everyone yet, he thought. But someday everyone would know him. That much was certain. (Irvine, Adventures 11) The novel introduces its readers to a transmedia diegesis by reinforcing, without changing, the immutable balance between the characters in the adventures of Tintin. Therefore, he does not tell the initiatory story of one of them, unlike Frederic Tuten in his Bildungsroman. In Tintin in the New World, Tintin’s encounter with characters from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) introduces him to philosophy, aesthetics and politics, and also love. The paradox of a novel of initiation with a fictional world such as The Adventures of Tintin: A Novel is that, unlike Spielberg’s film, it makes no reference to the graphic universe created by Hergé and his studio. Very present in the paratext, the film’s visual artwork –​i.e. its graphic identity, reproduced in promotional material (Mahlknecht 140) –​relegates the novel to a secondary status to itself and contrasts with the complete absence of Hergé’s graphic work. In the novelization, the image takes precedence over the writing process and is part of the novel’s memory. As such, Alexander Irvine’s narrator seems at times to be telling the story of Steven Spielberg’s film as though he could see it (yet Irvine only had access to the script). For instance, “Tintin could also see that Marlinspike Hall was falling into neglect” (Irvine, Adventures 25), or: Tintin saw a large banner hanging above the square. […] The others [Thompson and Thomson] looked up and read the banner, which was mostly occupied by a dramatic portrait of the Milanese Nightingale herself. Apparently, she was an opera singer; her actual name was Bianca Castafiore. Tintin thought it was a very dramatic portrait. (172–​173)

Close reading: The Adventures of Tintin In Irvine’s novelization, the relationship with the two original visual media raises the question of “media memory” (Ahmed 3); in other words the formal retention in the novel of intermedia tropes and images that evoke the film or comic strip. What remains of them in a novelization that focuses on the screen adaptation of the story? The iconography of the novel does not seek to compete with the visuality of the film; it avoids doing so, first by (de)limiting the images taken from the film and second by limiting their use to categories specific to the still image, such as landscape paintings, interior portraits, posters and actors’ portraits. The jacket of the original English-​language version features the film poster and the only images inside the book are a frontispiece of Snowy the dog

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  73 jumping out of a porthole (recalling, in the history of books, the medallion frontispiece tradition) and a star taken from the poster, which, recurring throughout the novel, is used to mark the start of each chapter and in place of an asterism, i.e. a typographical device to divide the text. On the page after the frontispiece, the first sentence of the English version does in fact describe Tintin sitting for a portrait: “Tintin was getting his picture painted in the Old Street Market with his dog, Snowy, lying at his feet” (Irvine, Adventures 1). The novel’s narrator does not mention the fact that the artist has Hergé’s face in the film, which means the artist’s comment does not have the desired effect: “I have to say, your face is familiar. Have I drawn you before?” (2) As we can see here, one of the “media affordances” of films and comics is that they can present scenes at a single glance, but this requires being “more specific than novels are about the way an element looks in the storyworld” (Kukkonen 75). The commercial novelization does contain an ekphrasis, a detailed description of the street portrait scene, something it usually takes care to avoid:22 “There”, the artist said at last. “I believe I’ve captured something of your likeness”. He showed Tintin the picture, and Tintin admired it. The artist had done a good job, he thought. Tintin looked at himself on the paper and saw his hair with the flip at the front that no amount of combing or wetting could flatten. He was wearing his tan spring overcoat over a blue sweater and a white shirt. In the picture he was looking off to the side as if he had just seen something very interesting. (Irvine, Adventures 3) The French edition has a hors texte signature, with 16 colour still images without captions, inserted into the middle of the volume, and its jacket reproduces one of the film posters. With these exceptions, the French version does not treat the image any differently from the original novelization. Like most commercial novelizations, it “in no way seeks to compete with the image, but concentrates on narration, while literary adaptation emphasizes (or flat-​out invents) what cinema less easily renders: an overarching narrative voice” (Baetens, Novelization 50, 55). At the climax of both versions of the novel, when the heroes discover, in the cellars of Marlinspike Hall, Sir Francis Haddock’s three-​cornered hat filled with gold and precious jewels, they seem to regret the lack of importance placed on illustrations: “Tintin wished he had a camera” (Irvine, Adventures 225). Throughout the novel, the hero has the clue to the plot right before his eyes. It is up to him to dispel the illusions and show discernment. The investigation is less about cerebral deduction than visual discovery, based on Captain Haddock’s family memory. “Only a true Haddock will discover the secret of the Unicorn” (20), the ship of his ancestor, which sank at the end of the seventeenth century.23 In the album The Secret of

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74  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations the Unicorn (14–​26), the captain gives Tintin, who visits him at his flat, a vivid account of his reading of his grandfather’s handwritten memoirs, that he has just devoured in one sitting, with such greed and inebriation (since he has never stopped drinking rum) that he confuses reality and fiction. Identifying himself with the corsair whose hat he wears and whose sword he brandishes, he introduces his story to Tintin like this: Old manuscripts by Sir Francis Haddock… Look, I started reading them yesterday evening, and read all night… […] I was still reading when you came in. That’s why you found me a little… over-​excited. But what a story! Just listen to it! (Hergé, Secret 14, panels 9–​11) Obeying the first injunction, “look”, Tintin opens a volume on the first page, without any illustrations, and then carries out the second instruction, “just listen”, keeping his eyes on the captain. The intradiegetic narrator tells the story in the present tense and speaks on behalf of the crew, in the first person plural. A little further on, he enjoins Tintin to “look” once again, in the direction of his forefinger pointing to the void, which indicates a shift in the deictic center of the narrative. The pirate ship in turn goes about –​and look! She’s hoisted fresh colours to the mast-​ head! […] The red pennant!… No quarter given!… A fight to the death, no prisoners taken! You understand? If we’re beaten, then it’s every man to Davy Jones’s locker! (17, panels 3–​5) Despite the “we” that includes the hero among the corsairs crew, Tintin fixes his gaze on the storyteller, adopting a passive spectator position that contrasts with his interlocutor’s theatrical performance. The embedded narrative constitutes a flashback or a dramatized analepsis, in the sense that it “involves an enactment of the past, that is, a shift from one space-​ time to another” (Baroni 312). The story is transported to the seventeenth century to show the naval battle, narrated by Haddock, pitting the Unicorn against a pirate ship. Although they stand in different space-​time, the two nested narratives continue simultaneously, shown in a cross-​cut, thanks to a recurrent “fading effect” (Baroni 313). The storyteller does not confine himself to the narrative mode of representation, but he himself plays, in a dramatic mode, the costumed role of the hero of his story. About ten returns to the storyteller mimicking the scene, holding a glass of rum in his hand, punctuate the flashback; they ensure a gradual and repetitive transition from one space-​time to another. With their similar faces, hats and swords, the captain telling the story in a mimetic way and his ancestor playing his own role perform the same gestures and adopt the same body postures, ensuring a permanent link between the two narrative levels (Figure 2.2).

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Figure 2.2 Hergé, The Secret of the Unicorn, trans. Leslie Lonsdale-​Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Methuen, 1959, p. 16, panels 6–​7. © Hergé/​ Moulinsart 2023.

In Steven Spielberg’s film there is no longer question of manuscripts, but of the oral transmission of the Haddock family story from generation to generation. Lost in the desert with Tintin, the captain discovers his power to see again this tragic episode in his ancestor’s life. His first vision gives rise to a flashback that is interrupted when the two characters faint from thirst and exhaustion, and that resumes when they wake up in an aid station. At the beginning, the spectator sees with the captain, subject to hallucinations, the Unicorn sailing through sand dunes. The narrative then shifts to the seventeenth century. The first dramatized analepsis begins and ends by adopting the internal point of view of Sir Francis Haddock: at the beginning, the corsair sees a Jolly Roger flag through his spyglass (as in the album: Hergé, Secret 15, panels 5–​7); at the end, he sees the pirate captain coming towards him through flames, on the Unicorn’s deck. This internal focalization is predominant in the flashback of Captain Haddock’s second vision that relates the confrontation between the corsairs’ leader and the pirate captain. Both scenes use the same fading effect as in the comic strip, i.e. the back and forth between the dramatized embedded narrative, pitting the pirate against the corsair, and the storytelling scene in the main narrative, performed by Captain Haddock. During all this time, the minor role played by a relatively passive Tintin is maintained in the space-​time of the main narrative, without displacing its deictic centre. The listening hero merely encourages the storyteller to continue his narration, without witnessing the naval combat that Haddock and the film’s viewers see. Tintin thus guarantees

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76  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations the distinction between reality and fiction, as defined by the film’s diegetic universe. In verbal narratives, the distinction between recounting and re-​ enacting past events24 is more difficult than in visual narratives, but it still exists (Baroni 317, 320–​324), as is the case with the novelization of The Adventures of Tintin. The captain first sees a mirage: “Look, Tintin! We’re saved! […] Water! Water!”, while his companion of misfortune brings him back to reality: “It’s just a mirage! […] Captain, you’re hallucinating” (Irvine, Adventures 136–​137). Then Haddock enjoins Tintin to look at something else: He pointed toward a dune and said, “Look, did you ever see a more beautiful sight? She’s turning into the wind, all sails set!” He had fallen in the middle of his misery, but now he got up again and described his vision. “Triple-​masted, double decks, fifty guns…” Tintin had been about to take drastic measures to snap Captain Haddock out of his hallucination, but this description stopped him dead. Was the captain seeing…? “The Unicorn?” Tintin said softly. (137) The literary narrative describes the non-​verbal performance of the film’s actors and makes explicit everything that the audience can infer on its own. This time, the hallucinating man is no longer brought back to reason by his interlocutor, who starts playing the game, encouraging him to continue describing his vision. The first embedded narrative occurs gradually; it begins in the form of a description in the present tense (137–​139), while the main narrative is in the past tense. This start of an analepsis is not yet dramatized, but the use of hypotyposis25 and the verbal present tense trigger a progressive immersion within the scene described. The captain’s description of the ship is so vivid that Tintin “could almost see it, the sand becoming ocean and the Unicorn, flying the king’s ensign, surging into view” (138). The narrator interrupts this narrativized description to explain the meaning of the red flag and then, after a simple line break, the embedded narrative, shifting to epic preterite, takes on its autonomy: Then Captain Haddock peered through his empty bottle as if it were a spyglass, and Tintin was lost in the story once again. “All hands on deck!” Sir Francis commanded. […] Turning to his first mate, he added, “Prepare to bring her about, Mr. Eckles!” “Aye, aye, Captain!” Eckles said. “Prepare to bring her about!” (139) The captain has to break off his tale several times, because of memory lapses, despite Tintin prompting him: “What else can you see?”; “Captain, who did he [Sir Francis Haddock] see?” (138, 141). These gradual transitions from one narrative level to another, ensuring a discursive

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  77 fading effect to be compared to the fading effect of film and comics, pave the literary way from the recounting to the re-​enactment of past events. Meanwhile, Tintin plays the role of an ideal spectator, uninvolved in the reconstruction of the historical scene, a role with which the reader can identify. When the flashback resumes, “Tintin again felt he could almost see and hear the story that Captain Haddock told” (153), even though the latter was the only one to see the vision: “Haddock backed away from the bookshelf, still seeing something no one else in the room could see” (155). Even if this thematization of visuality, throughout the novelization, comes from the film script, it contrasts with “the antivisual writing in a novelized text” (Baetens, Novelization 51). The relationship with the visual is problematic in commercial novelization for a very practical reason –​the writer only has the film script –​and because “literature’s innovative potential is greater in the area of narrative voice than in recalling images through repeated descriptions” (50).

When comics fans write literary panels These literary adaptations of Tintin’s adventures contain media traces of comics. Can one go so far as to track down, in the novel, the memory of the material conditions in which the novelist read the comics album? From media memory, I move on to remembered reading, now tackling first-​person narratives. Returning to the French-​speaking field, I recall that the literary serial Dupont et Dupond, détectives, published by Hergé and Paul Kinnet in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir during the Second World War, began in the first-​person plural. The story opened as follows (Figure 2.3): As our readers already know, on their return from the memorable Sirius expedition to the scene of the Unicorn shipwreck, Thomson and Thompson took two weeks’ holiday staying with a farmer friend of theirs. — Fresh air, Thomson said, the only thing I know that can revive a man’s spirits. — I’d go even further, Thompson added. That’s the only thing I know! — An end to the daily grind! — I’d go even further: An end to the daily grind! We have seen how our two detectives’ wishes have come true. They have built up their muscles through healthy work on the land. And their stay would have been idyllic if their peace and tranquillity had not been disturbed by an extraordinary adventure. (Kinnet 274) The first instalment can be read as an ekphrasis although, because of the subsequent instalments, I have already interpreted the whole series as

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Figure 2.3 Paul Kinnet, “Dupont et Dupond, détectives”, illustrated by Hergé, in Hergé, Le Feuilleton intégral (1940–​1943), Brussels, Casterman–​ Moulinsart, 2017, p. 274, first strip. © Hergé/​Moulinsart 2023.

a transfictional expansion. This “narrative of a contemplative moment” (Louvel 80), accompanied by the illustration, does not suspend the narrative, especially as the description is narrativized by the dialogue. This introduction of a new episode, through a narrative engagement combining analepsis and metalepsis, tells the story of an earlier strip published in Le Soir in which the detectives Thomson and Thompson took leave of Captain Haddock, walked to the countryside and immersed themselves in the “hard and healthy work of the fields” (Hergé, Rackham 57, panel 5). In this new textual environment, the elements of a work of fiction (the dialogue and panel adapted from Red Rackham’s Treasure) that have been captured in a transfiction have thus been defictionalized, as is evidenced by the subsequent narration (a narrative told in the passé composé tense with the present as reference time) and the metalepsis operators “As our readers already know” and “We have seen how […]”. Paradoxically, the elements captured in the transfiction seem to be asserting the truth of the original story, relating it as fact, thereby acknowledging the pre-​existence of another work without damaging the fictional community uniting both of them (Saint-​Gelais 234, 253). This opening text can be read as an ekphrasis of the accompanying panel, as well as an event report of a comic strip that had been published in Le Soir a few weeks earlier. In both cases, the reader identifies the serious mode of the continuation –​he can see that the previous narrative is taken at face value, including the literary maintaining of the comics dialogue’s humorous tone –​and he understands that narration gradually takes precedence over artistic description. This mix of text-​types to put into words a comics panel brings to mind some of the literary genres developed, since the 1960s, in critical books and fanzines. The case mémorable [memorable panel], launched in the 1980s by one of the main French-​language critical fanzines, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, is a perfect example of that (see Crucifix 26–​31).

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  79 The genre was born in a column that appeared thanks to a new formula of the magazine. In the editorial launching this formula, the editor-​in-​ chief Thierry Groensteen announced that, although “comics can be the subject of very diverse approaches, from ingenuous reading to the most erudite analysis”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée would privilege the point of view of the connoisseurs who were “the semiologist and the belletrist, the psychoanalyst and the philosopher, the theorist as well as the practitioner” (Groensteen, “Éditorial” 3). However, the new cases mémorables section’s director, Pierre Sterckx, presented it as a concession to “ingenuous reading” by opening it up both to guests who are more or less far removed from bedephilia and to the periodical’s readers, to any fan who has been obsessed with comics since childhood. Send us your texts. They should praise a memorable panel from your childhood and add the same exercise about a second exemplary image that you would have encountered as a forever fascinated reader, but this time as a teenager/​adult. […] The whole of it not exceeding 5 sheets of 30 lines /​60 lines. (Sterckx 67) The column appeared only 14 times over three years (1984–​1986), to deal with 22 panels, all reproduced in black and white illustrations. The 17 authors of the texts were –​according to the notices provided by the column –​four artists (a photographer and three comics artists), four writers, four men of the theatre or the cinema, and five specialists in the study of images. An art history student was the only reader of the Cahiers –​as well as the only woman and, at 21, the youngest contributor –​ who spontaneously responded to Pierre Sterckx’s call, so he had to solicit the other ones (according to Sterckx’s introduction, in Roman 65). Seven of them could be recognized as bedephilia experts by fans reading Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, because they had already published there, while the others appeared to them as casual childhood readers of comics. Thirteen of the 22 memorable panels were presented by their authors as childhood discoveries, made between the ages of 6 and 12, half in the press and half in albums; the other nine panels were presented as recent discoveries. At the end of the experiment, Pierre Sterckx (quoted in Groensteen, “Propos” 60) regretted that few Cahiers’ readers had taken part in it and explained it by the fact that “most of the published texts did not play the dialectical game of knowledge and emotion; often semiology took over, completely paralyzing the private aspect”. The art critic was taking up a classic distinction in art criticism, between aesthetic judgment (an evaluation legitimized by theory) and ethical judgment (the expression of a personal affect without resorting to theory), which could be linked to two identities of the comics fan, that of the expert and that of the gourmet. An additional reading of a panel discovered in adulthood was authorized in the initial instructions, but several contributors restricted themselves to

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80  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations this sole exercise, without revealing anything of their reading memory. In other words, they delivered an image analysis, as others before them had done, outside the cases mémorables column, in Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée. For instance, the French semiologist Pierre Fresnault-​Deruelle chose a memorable panel from the recent album La Blanche Morte [The Dead White Woman] (1983) by Patrick Cothias and André Juillard. His study of the panel was in response to an analysis that Thierry Groensteen had made of it, two months earlier, in the issue that launched the cases mémorables –​but outside the column. Conducted by both theorists, such close readings consist of an empirical analysis of the relationships between all the signs –​not just the words –​visible on the surface of the page, at the level of a single image, including an evaluation of its impact on the interpretation of the entire work. Pierre Fresnault-​Deruelle has been one of the main French comics scholars who felt there was a critical interest, regardless of fetishism for comics (Crucifix 28–​29), in releasing (“liberating”) some panels in the adventures of Tintin from their narrative sequences (Fresnault-​Deruelle, Hergéologie 133). While studying his memorable panel, he briefly compared it to another, from The Seven Crystal Balls, which was also reproduced in the article. Significantly, while he selected a scene famous for its impact on young readers –​the one in which a frightening mummy enters at night, through the window of a bedroom where Tintin is asleep –​he preferred a reasoned iconological study over a memorial interpretation. Rather than comparing the bedroom window to those “fervent paintings framed by the night” evoked by Pierre Sterckx (67) when he launched his column, Pierre Fresnault-​Deruelle described “the black space denoting the night [which] reveals itself, a posteriori, a few panels later, as the screen of fantasy” (“Le secret” 71, see also Hergéologie 102–​103). Tintin’s awakening allows the reader to reinterpret the scene as a dream and it allows the iconologist, both to recognize, in the window/​screen, the pictorial device of the painting within the painting and to study the narration features of the narrative within the image. In sum, this close reading shows that it is not enough to describe textually a panel taken from a comics to write a case mémorable. Actually, it is a relatively short text about a panel that, when remembered, evokes memories of childhood reading. It constitutes a genre in the sense of an assembly of texts applying a similar writing contract and involving a similar reading pact. The bedephilia genre contains, in its name, the “promise” (Jost 104–​105) to reveal a panel worthy of memory, and it establishes a bilateral “contract” (Vouilloux 111–​112) between the author and the reader. As in the descriptions of official paintings at the Parisian Salons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “spectator/​ describer” must describe in words the visual effects of the picture and the emotional state into which these effects have (re)immersed her/​him, by (re)looking at it, while the reader “records the effects produced by the text in order to produce an effect on him/​her” (116). However, unlike

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  81 the Salons’ literary reviews, the memorable panels were often familiar to readers of Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée; they were all the more recognizable as their reproduction always accompanied the texts. Widely known in France and abroad, Hergé’s work occupied a great place among them.26 A second difference with the Salon’s reviews is the interactivity that the cases mémorables promoted. A reader’s individual expression was validated collegially, since compliance with the rules of the genre was controlled both by the editorial board and by the fandom27 built around the Cahiers. When the only case mémorable written by a magazine’s reader was published, it was introduced by a reminder of the rules of the genre and of the control exercised jointly by the editorial staff, who “reserve(s) the right to reject texts that it feels do not conform to the spirit of this column”, and by the readers who were writing to the board, if we are to believe Pierre Sterckx (introducing Roman 65): “your letters have taught us how much this column fascinates most of you”.

From ekphrasis to fanfiction Therefore, the formal characteristics of the genre were well defined. The texts were the result of a work of writing, far from the “overwhelming rush of memories” and “the resulting rich and often impassioned accounts, with their emotionally charged elements” in adults’ interviews about their comics-​specific reading autobiographies (Gibson 151–​152). To describe them, I take four texts which drew from Hergé’s work and which undeniably belong to the genre of the case mémorable: those of Marc-​ Henri Wajnberg, Florence Roman, Michel Serres and Vincent Amiel. These four texts are all voiced into two parts: an explanation precedes a description. The conclusion of Amiel’s text summarizes the two successive approaches: These are two different fascinations […]: the first one, that of my memory, seemed very vague, inexplicably strong; why did I love such an image […]? It is by trying to understand, that gradually the second one came into play: everything that makes up the narrative was there [within a single panel]. (Amiel and Lahougue 71) The first part of the texts, expressed in the first person, explains the subjective choice of a panel (among others, sometimes mentioned), referencing it, giving the biographical context of its discovery and identifying the emotions it aroused in the young reader. Most of the contributors noticed, in relooking at their memorable panel, the permanence of their childhood emotions:

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82  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations Seeing it again today, it is easy for me to understand the fascination I must have felt when I first saw this image. (Roman 66) It took a deadly boring week to know what became of Tintin. We no longer realize […] the anguish of such a wait. I relive it intensely 45 years later, at the moment of turning the page. (Burton and Serres 69) After an explanatory part, the texts continue by adopting the distanced point of view of the adult, making less use of the first person indicators, to propose a description of the panel, with the two moments expected in this text-​type: the inventory of the parts (of the described object) and their linking. But establishing connections between these elements often went beyond the panel itself, to extend to the scale of the comics narrative, in contradiction with the intention of Pierre Sterckx (67), who focused on “The panel, not the sequence. An image, not the story”. This failure to remove the narrative reinforced Benoît Peeters’ position of rejection, who asserted that “[t]‌here are no memorable panels” (Peeters, “Les cases” 88, see also Schuiten and Peeters, L’Aventure des images 27), in the sense that no comics panel can be separated from the sequential continuity into which it fits. This explained, according to him, why “the panels that many of us have in our memory often turn out, if we check it out, to be nothing more than imaginary reconstructions of a series of panels” (Peeters quoted in Groensteen, “Propos” 61). Author of a case mémorable, the Belgian filmmaker Marc-​Henri Wajnberg had experienced this when he searched in vain for the yeti’s tears and Chang’s yellow scarf in Tintin in Tibet’s last panel, which only existed in his memory. Interestingly enough, he made up for the absence of the elements he would have liked to find in the image with the narration. After a long explanation, his description concludes like a narrative: with a final situation and an evaluation. He [the yeti] is alone, he is a monster, a “poor lonesome cowboy”.28 And in the end, he is weaned from any hope of affection, from all the joy of his relationship with Chang. One plunges him into absolute celibacy. It’s terrible, and yet he accepts it. In his great sadness, he is very wise. He could have intervened. He is very close to Tintin and Chang, he could have attacked them. And finally, he even stops shouting. He falls silent. He has understood that Chang is better with men. As for him… Yeti’s place is in the snow. This is a myth. Let him stay there. (Wajnberg 71) In this case, the narrative remains “at the service of” (Chatman, “Representation” 26) a bedephilia genre in which description is the overriding text-​ type. However, the propension of cases mémorables

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  83 to summarize the plot, as in a book review, and to use the power of hypotyposis to make the image present give two opportunities to slide into narrativization. Some of these texts take these up and are, therefore, borderline cases of novelization, although the origin of the genre was based on anti-​narrative intentions. These ones take the form of short fanfictions placed in an autobiographical perspective. Apart from the Cahiers de la bande dessinée, this is evident in some references to Hergé’s panels in collections of literary tributes such as Drôles de plumes [Curious Writers] (2001) and Nous Tintin [We Tintin] (2004), which revives the genre of the case memorable. The text that Belgian writer Sandrine Willems devotes, in the collective book Nous Tintin,29 to one of the first panels in The Castafiore Emerald begins with the observation that “everything, right to the end, is a discordance between [her] memories and reality”, i.e. the work of Hergé (Willems, “La petite pie” 44). The panel she thought she remembered does not exist, but she uses this fanciful memory of something she read as a child as a starting point for telling her own version of the story, which she must have reread, reluctantly. This disillusioned reading alternates between description (without, however, dwelling on Hergé’s graphic style) and narrative. Finally, the narrativized enumeration of a series of animal metamorphoses scattered throughout The Castafiore Emerald has the vivid, picturesque effect of hypotyposis: “a swarm of wasps attacks intruders, whom Snowy, in turn, is stalking; an owl invades the attic; a woodpecker observes the observer; a magpie brands as a lout the thief who steals his stolen treasure [etc.]” (Willems, “La petite pie” 45). Ekphrasis remains within the confines of novelization, producing as it does this kind of narrativized description in a metaleptic power play that sees a narrative of the action take over from a description of the work. Commercial novelization takes care to avoid this animated tableau effect, but it can be found in some examples of “oblique” novelization (Baetens, Novelization 7) that openly acknowledge their literary creation process. Before contributing to the collective work Nous Tintin, Sandrine Willems had published one such novelization entitled Tchang et le yéti [Chang and the Yeti], at the Belgian publishing house Les Impressions nouvelles, run by Benoît Peeters. After the experience of the cases mémorables in Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, he was well placed to understand the writer’s sensitivity to the memorial reconstruction of panels that do not exist. In Tintin in Tibet, the orphan Chang was expected at the London home of the brother of his Chinese guardian, but his plane crashed in the Himalayas (Figure 2.4). After a lengthy expedition, Tintin and Captain Haddock, with the help of Sherpas and Tibetan monks, had found the adolescent with the yeti that had taken him in. In order to reinterpret Chang’s rescue, which he perceives as him being kidnapped from his new father, the yeti, Sandrine Willems fictionalizes30 the original story; “the process involves accusing its author of fabrication in her treatment of the given facts, which did indeed take place, but in a

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84  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations

Figure 2.4 Hergé, Tintin in Tibet, trans. Leslie Lonsdale-​Cooper and Michael Turner, London, Methuen, 1962, p. 58, panels 4–​ 5. © Hergé/​ Moulinsart 2023.

completely different way” (Saint-​Gelais 256). The narration assumed by Chang takes on a testimonial value: Because they lied to you. You believed this picture book of my story that was produced in your own continent because that version suited you. Like a good little boy, I cried at being isolated so far from humans and the adventurers who came looking for me appeared to be rescuers. […] So forgive my slight hostility to these abysmal characters who stole my life: this so-​called hero who seems to be so proud of the fact he has a dog’s name –​Tintin –​that his hair stands on end, while his even more pitiful dog stoops so low as to speak. (Willems, Tchang 13–​14) The novel’s text thus alludes to the comics album that, contrary to standard novelization practices, is not referred to in either the paratext or the jacket artwork (though it is alluded to in the title). The autodiegetic narration could have joined the ranks of the first-​person biographical novel. However, Sandrine Willems adopted an identification/​distancing stance with her narrator, according to Jan Baetens (“Postface” 197): “the more the narrator talks, the more we get the distinct feeling that it is the author who is writing”, which “creates a muted tension, […] an implicit polyphony at the heart of what appear to be otherwise unspectacular narratives”. In fact, Tchang et le yéti is part of a series of “miniature novels” by the same author, Les Petits Dieux [The Little Gods], each one telling the story “in the form of a monologue, of a mythical or historical character whose fate was marked by an animal” (Willems, Tchang

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  85 7). By mentioning the autobiographical dimension of these stories –​“as though”, the author says, “by dint of living all these lives in your own thoughts, you make them your own to the point where what you write is pure autobiography” (Willems, Balthazar 10) –​she freely acknowledges the liberties she has taken with Tintin in Tibet to spark visual memories. As she herself says, “the best panels in our books are ones we have dreamt: my weeping yeti is nowhere to be found” (Willems, “La petite pie” 44) in the album,31 even if we do hear it give a “heart-​rending cry” of “sorrow” (Hergé, Tibet 59). This memory process justifies the fact that her autodiegetic narrator visualizes some fictional memorable panels. For example, the orphan Chang describes his mother’s daily rituals, which he sees in his memories, then he changes his mind: “Maybe I’m even making it up, maybe these faint memories are things I read about my homeland while in exile” (Willems, Tchang 115). Sandrine Willems uses these non-​ existent “memorable panels” to circumvent a media constraint of literary writing. In contemporary movie novels, Jan Baetens (Novelization 56) observes “the genre’s hesitancy toward the image in general”. More prosaically, Johannes Mahlknecht (159) refers to the novel’s lack of visual elements, its inability to reproduce the spectacle of Hollywood special effects. And yet the narrator in Tchang et le yéti, in a bold departure from the usual antivisual writing of novelizations, does indeed see snippets of remembered images. Thus, in her prose, Sandrine Willems does not use comics to remediate the lack of image in her not illustrated novel but rather exploits literary parameters that are only brought to our attention through the connection with Hergé’s work. * ** Despite the legitimate literary ambitions of the comics-​related pieces of prose studied in this chapter, they do not enjoy a complete autonomy as literary works, in relation to the comics album they adapt or to the comics fictional universe they expand upon. Quite the opposite, in fact. They demonstrate an affiliation with Hergé’s work, albeit in different ways: a movie derivative (Tintin and the Golden Fleece, The Adventures of Tintin), an interlude in the author’s company (Dupont et Dupond, détectives), a writer’s tribute (Tintin in the New World) or a reader’s autobiography (Tchang et le yéti). The various approaches taken to adaptation by the writers depends on a particular situation of utterance that puts all of them in the position to tell a story in the second degree. This explains the tendency of their narrators to adopt a distanced enunciative position. Even though many literary adaptations of Tintin’s adventures involve intermittent enunciative splits or bear other traces of hesitation in the enunciative voice, they are mainly told by an extradiegetic narrator, by way of zero focalization, which owes as much to the omniscient narrator of the realist novel as to the abstract narrator-​spectator of Hollywood novelization. Paradoxically, this way of narrating the comic

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86  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations strip from the outside, through the voice of an extradiegetic narrator, offers a literary device equivalent to the zero f​ocalization narration, without a verbal narrator, in the comics of Tintin. According to Émile Benveniste’s classic distinction between history and discourse planes of utterance (206–​ 209), such narratives fall under historical utterance, concealing the narrator’s situation of enunciation. On the contrary, coming under the discourse plane of utterance (Benveniste 208–​ 209), other literary adaptations of Tintin’s adventures give the reader information about the enunciator (identity, location, time frame, addressee). Besides the case of readers’ autobiographies, some adapters have empowered a character enunciatively by giving him or her the floor in a first-​person narrative. This writing exercise seemed to be facilitated by the choice of a secondary character like Chang, while the experience applied to Tintin may have produced a derisory effect. The promotion of the hero as an introspective narrator contrasts with his lack of inner life in the comic strip. Furthermore, we know that the pronoun ambiguity of the “narrated I”, which is also the “narrating I”, paves the way for a narrative transgression (Genette, Métalepse 109–​110) which is likely to alter the convention of fiction for the narrator to tell the story of a comic strip. Here is the reason: the fictional contract consists of pretending that the narrative reports events that actually happened, although “ ‘pure’ fiction in theory lacks sources” (Genette, Paratexts 211). Novelization presents a particular reading pact in that it tacitly assumes that the reader is aware of the adapted work’s existence. To a certain extent, the events that an adaptation recounts have happened twice. In order to maintain the fictional contract, most narrators of Tintin’s literary adventures do not refer to the comic strip, leaving this task to the paratext. If the narrative is linked to the comics series, the narrator jeopardizes the fictional contract, either by fictionalizing a source narrative while rectifying its misconceptions or by defictionalizing it, treating it as a factual account that can be taken over. In all these cases, the narrator takes advantage of media memory effects, sharing the enunciative responsibility for the narrative with the narratee, counting on the reader’s knowledge of the diegesis of Tintin’s adventures. We can really speak of a co-​enunciation. However, these comics-​related literary works are not reducible to novels written for (and by) comics fans; in fact they address a variety of audiences: daily press readers, film spectators, casual childhood readers of comics, comics fans, etc. For many French speakers, the names of the protagonists in the adventures of Tintin alone convey a visual memory, they provide a backdrop against which the novelizer can build. Even if his/​her purpose is to introduce the readers to a transmedia diegesis, as was the case with the novelization of Spielberg’s film, s/​he never starts from scratch. In sum, the role of the readers in such adaptation processes is eminently active, as evidenced by some of them who empowered themselves enunciatively, to the extent that they novelized their remembered readings of Tintin’s panels.

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  87

Notes 1 Titles of subsequent reviews speak for themselves: “How awful! Tintin loses his pants” (Burnier 40) or “Destination: none. Where the American novelist Frederic Tuten, choosing Tintin as his hero, plunges Hergé’s character into this cruel world” (Planes 33). All citations from French-​language works included in the bibliography have been translated for the purposes of this book. 2 This fan’s opinion is not expressed on behalf of the Belgian association of tintinophiles. In 1989, their periodical had already published an anthology of literary excerpts (Langlois) which showed a favourable disposition towards Tintin’s appearances in novels, which should be linked to the prestige of literature in the French-​speaking world. Two other Amis de Hergé provided, outside the magazine, a less aggressive review of Frederic Tuten’s “whimsical and disjointed novel” whose reader, according to them, “does not know exactly, coming out of this whirlwind, what he has discovered and what he has lost…” (Roche and Cerbelaud 189). 3 The French essayist himself had staged Tintin in his novel Monsieur Tac (43–​ 59) published in 1976. His opinion on Frederic Tuten’s work was shared by a Quebec literary critic who stated that “it is indeed a novel, not a comic strip. The characters we are familiar with take on a whole new dimension and force the reader to mature with them” (Poulin 6). 4 Opinion shared by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion (169–​170): We might think that the closer a work is tied to “its” medium (that is what mediagenic means), the more it will be seen as “unadaptable” and difficult to “transfer” to another medium. And this is the case with the work of Hergé, who constructed a verisimilar graphic and narrative system with a very dense self-​referential consistency. 5 Like Marcel Duchamp’s artistic repurposing of artefacts from everyday life, this writing exercise poetically distorts disparate elements from a comics album, considered as a raw material drawn from an art supposedly less legitimate than poetry. By including textual excerpts from Tintin in the Land of the Soviets in a collection that pastiches the title of Roland Barthes’ literary essay Writing Degree Zero, Jean-​Pierre Verheggen links (with derision) these comics texts to “écriture blanche”, a deliberately neutral prose experimented in mid-​twentieth-​century French literature. 6 As a reminder, Richard Saint-​Gelais (7) defined “transfictionality” as “the phenomenon whereby at least two texts, whether or not by the same author, jointly refer to the same fiction, either because they take up characters, they extend a previous storyline or they participate in the same fictional universe”. 7 Paris Court of Appeal, section 5, second chamber, decision of 18 February 2011, SAS Arconsil versus Moulinsart SA. 8 Ibid. (my emphasis). 9 In French copyright law, the author’s moral rights are stronger than in the United Kingdom or United States. Up to 70 years after his death, the French author’s heirs reserve the right, even if they have concluded a copyright assignment contract, to prohibit a project of adaptation that they consider disrespectful of the spirit of the original work.

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88  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations 10 As a reminder, Gérard Genette (Palimpsests 28–​29) distinguished between three modes of literary adaptation: playful, satirical and serious. Even if Tintin in the New World is on the edge of satire, this novel like the other literary adaptations studied in the present chapter takes Tintin’s fictional universe seriously and they retain, unlike parodies, “the identity of the fictional elements in autonomous works” (Saint-​Gelais 55). 11 For more information about this commercial definition of the genre, see Van Parys and also Mahlknecht. 12 The epitext circulating outside the book complements the peritext (which surrounds the text within the book) to form the paratext, as defined by Gérard Genette (Paratexts 5, 12). 13 In an autumn 1988 interview (Wolmer 29), Tuten said the project dated back to 1971, at the time when he was bringing out his novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March. Several chapters of Tintin in the New World (1993) were pre-​published in literary journals between 1975 and 1984 (for a list compiled by the author, see Tuten, Tintin 4). In the interview, Tuten said his novel was set in Peru in 1968, at a time when readers were awaiting Tintin’s final return to South America, which did not happen until 1976 in Tintin and the Picaros. 14 The French-​speaking Belgian daily newspaper founded in 1887 (still existing today) was confiscated from its owners by the occupying Germans from 1940 to 1944 and entrusted to a collaborationist editorial staff, which earned it the nickname of Soir volé [Stolen Soir]. Throughout the war, Hergé prepublished there serially the contents of four Tintin albums, plus half of a fifth, as well as the literary interlude Dupont et Dupond, détectives written by a Le Soir journalist. Linked to the fascist Rex party, Paul Kinnet was one of the Belgian writers who “held the keys to wartime publishing” (Huftier 80 and 102). Because of these connections, Hergé was investigated, but not convicted, by the Belgian judiciary after the war. 15 Except for the detail of the transitional object. In the original version, Chang deliberately abandons a scarf, a good omen symbol the Tibetans give to their guests (Hergé, Tibet 61), to signal his presence to his rescuers. In the novelized version, he accidently loses a teddy bear, which serves as a similar signal, but introduces an element of infantile regression in the character. In the album (28–​29), Tintin does in fact find such a toy in the wreckage of the plane, but does not make any connection between it and the adolescent Chang. 16 The novels based on the comics series Alix (2004), written by Alain Hammerstein-​De Kuyssche after the animated television series was broadcast, carry the Casterman Jeunesse [youth] logo but Le Roman d’Ernest et Célestine (2012) [The Novel of Ernest and Celestine], written by Daniel Pennac, who was also the screenwriter of the animated film based on the children’s picture books series, is clearly aimed at an intergenerational audience. 17 In her interpretation of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Véronique Béghain demonstrates that the hotchpotch of fragments of texts, marked by typographical spaces, has a tendency, according to a “monstrative logic” (Béghain 128), “to give spatial form to the novel, which lends itself more than any other to a visual exploration” (93). Insofar as several fragments reflect the styles of great American authors, they offer “a new notion of literary memory […] extending the spatial metaphor” (90). 18 The jacket of the first French translation of Frederic Tuten’s novel, published under the title Les Aventures de Mao pendant la Longue Marche, which

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Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations  89 appeared in Gallimard’s “Du monde entier” [Worldwide] foreign literature collection, contains a photo of the writer but omits Lichtenstein’s lithograph portrait of Mao. 19 English literary theory has drawn a distinction between a novel, established in the eighteenth century, with its aspirations to realism, and a romance, encompassing a modern adventure or romantic novel as well as a popular medieval form, which relies more on myth and fantasy. But both terms are translated into French as “roman”, while the Anglicism “romance” refers only to a sentimental novel. 20 Mao’s character in Frederic Tuten’s first novel also aspires to an orderly life, which is just as impossible as Tintin and Clavdia living together as a couple: But what was more important [Mao wondered]: to live by the lights of duty (and suffer) or to assume the responsibility for one’s own true desires and be sometimes happy, though unrespectable? He was forty-​ five years old; he could not wait much longer to start a new life. With the revolution over, he could retire, and with a wife like Claretta he could write poetry. (Tuten, Mao 85) 21 Among Hergé’s American readers –​when his albums were taken over by Little, Brown and Company, which was publishing serious books –​were comics fans who thought (mistakenly) that “Franco-​Belgian albums augured a comics culture where the primary purchasers are adults, not children” (Williams 41), because of “the greater variety of genres” (42) and of “the lavish material qualities of the albums” (52). In addition, a 62-​page long story could be described as “novel length” in the North American comic book market of the 1970s, since “48 pages was the approximate length that comics began to be advanced and accepted as novels” (108), while they were mainstream standards of Franco-​Belgian bandes dessinées. 22 In its modern acceptation, an ekphrasis simply is a description of a piece of art, which means that, insofar as it represents a representation, it is “a form of applied theory and of narrativized description” (Louvel 98–​ 99). Even if, theoretically, novelization may constitute “an extended ekphrasis in prose” (Newell 31), modern commercial film novelizations are generally not verbalizations of visual representations since they do not adapt the film itself but its screenplay, which explains that these “anti-​adaptations” usually feature “antivisual writing” and have an “anti-​ekphrastic character” (Baetens, Novelization 51, Van Parys 306). 23 The film and the novelization date the event to the year 1676 (Irvine, Adventures 19), in contrast to the comics album, which mentions 1698 (Hergé, Secret 14). 24 The differentiation of narrative modes (which goes back to Plato) between enacting and recounting contrasts the showing, or a direct “unmediated presentation” of an event, and the telling, or the event “uttered as such by a narrator” (Chatman, Story 32). 25 According to Bernard Vouilloux (49), “the tableau effect”, specific to “some vivid and animated descriptions”, comes from “hypotyposis, a literary device that works by imitation, whose power of presence (it is an operator of intensity), used in the different kinds of description –​but also in narration –​is a matter of expression”. The verbal present tense in the description contributes

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90  Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations to this presentification effect. For Liliane Louvel (51), “hypotyposis does not concern an art object identified as such, but rather evokes a painting indirectly, thus producing a ‘painting-​effect’ ”, on which it differs from ekphrasis, another type of pictorial description. 26 One contributor out of two mentions Hergé. Marc-​Henri Wajnberg, Florence Roman, Michel Serres and Vincent Amiel reread one of his panels that leave its mark on their childhood memory, Pierre Fresnault-​ Deruelle and Jean Lahougue (re)discover others with an adult look, while Benoît Peeters and Stefan de Jaeger stated that they were hesitant to choose a panel by the same author. 27 This is a formalization of “the moral economy of the fan community” which exists in every fandom, in the sense that “fans, like any other interpretative community, generate their own norms that work to insure a reasonable degree of conformity between readings of the primary text” (Jenkins, “Star Trek” 87, 99). The control over cases mémorables was collaborative, insofar as the editorial board of Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée was taking into account the readers’ interaction, whom it considered as peers since it also gave them an opportunity of participation in the column (on the control at stake in the consumers’ interaction or participation, see Jenkins, Convergence 133). 28 The quotation in inverted commas, in English in the French text, refers to the song that the cowboy hero sings in the last panel of all the albums in the Belgian comics series Lucky Luke, which has been running since 1947. 29 The title Nous Tintin had already been used, in 1987, for a collection of about 30 imaginary album covers of Tintin’s adventures. This coincidence shows that the literary genre of case mémorable is similar to the graphic genre of redrawing (Crucifix 33–​34) in that they both differ from the pastiche to which these false covers belong. These “also launch a genre in its own right […]. There are now thousands of them…” (Roche and Cerbelaud 217). 30 Pascal Bruckner’s novel Monsieur Tac [Mr. Tac] (1976) takes this transfictional strategy a step further. Meeting Tintin and Snowy during their journey on the moon, the novel’s hero persuades the comics’ hero that he is pure fiction. Tintin feels betrayed by his genitor: “Do you mean that Mr. Hergé doesn’t write my stories after the real events that happened to me?” (52), “So I can only live them because he has already written and drawn them?” (55). In this completely fanciful narrative, the fictional world of Tintin’s adventures is fictionalized. 31 Perhaps there was a telescoping of reading memories between the tearless yeti of Tintin in Tibet and the gorilla that actually cries in The Black Island (Wajnberg 71).

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3 Why self-​novelize a comic strip?

At the end of the comics album Quelques mois à L’Amélie [A Few Months in L’Amélie] published by Dupuis in June 2002, an eight-​page afterword invites the reader to continue the reading experience through excerpts from a novel, released the same month by the bedephilia publishing house PLG. The album’s editor introduces the excerpts with a mise en abyme: In parallel with the creation of his comic strip, Jean-​Claude Denis wrote a literary version of A Few Months in L’Amélie. And this novel is none other than Aloys Clark’s manuscript, which he gives to Marianne to read at the end of the present album. (Claude Gendrot’s afterword1 in Denis, Quelques mois 73) In the graphic novel, a middle-​aged Parisian writer, Aloys Clark, recounts the depression he is going through following personal hardships (divorce, alcoholism, loss of his parents, lack of inspiration), and from which he draws his next novel. Featured in most panels, the character is the main thread of a narrative that alternates silent passages with recitatives, written in the past tense and in the first person, with sequences using speech bubbles. Repeating and expanding all these texts, the novel relates the scenes of the graphic narrative one after the other, as a novelization would, except that it appeared at exactly the same time as the album and only makes a discreet mention of it (on the page that lists other books by the author). The anti-​adaptation stance is reinforced by Jean-​Claude Denis’ illustrations, drawn in a graphic style very different from the comic strip. Unpopulated landscapes and interior settings without inhabitants, which look as if they have been drawn in situ, are sketched with a thick, sooty black line. While the album presents a kind of “making-​of” of the novel, only the latter recounts how the story ends, in a four-​paragraph open ending. Hence, Aloys Clark’s Manuscript (as the novel’s subtitle translates) offers a narrative supplement, as do many novelizations.2 Beyond the literary theme of the story, what motivated Jean-​Claude Denis to self-​novelize his graphic novel and to entrust his manuscript to a publisher belonging to the bedephilia movement? In addition to the literary ambitions of certain authors of bandes dessinées, which have always DOI: 10.4324/9781003388210-4

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92  Why self-novelize a comic strip? existed, the proliferation of their novels in France in the second half of the twentieth century seems to be related to several factors: the promotion of literary reading by educators, the explicit opening of comics magazines to a teenage readership (from the 1940s) and then to adults, the development of bedephilia from the 1960s onwards, including as a publishing niche, and the accession of comic strips to books, insofar as they migrated massively from the press to albums between 1950 and 1980. From that time on, the novels written and illustrated by the authors of the corresponding comics series followed a serial logic of supplement,3 establishing a reciprocal relationship between the two media, in contrast to the Hollywood novelization’s ambition to be the film’s “double” or “tracing” (Baetens, Novelization 46). Up until the 1970s, literary expansions appeared mainly in children’s magazines or their supplements such as L’Hebdomadaire des grands récits (Dupuis), Fantax Magazine (Mouchot), Les Aventures de Pif le Chien (Vaillant) or Tintin Pocket Sélection (Dargaud-​Lombard). From the mid-​1970s onwards, authors of bandes dessinées published their novels in book form, in a culture in which books enjoyed strong legitimacy. The logic of supplement –​exemplified by Corto Maltese’s literary Mémoires [Memoirs] (1988), written by Michel Pierre, as well as the novel Reconnaissance de meurtres, la première enquête de Ric Hochet [Acknowledgement of Murders, Ric Hochet’s First Case] (2010) by André-​ Paul Duchâteau –​was even perpetuated in a cradle of the French graphic novel like the Franco-​Belgian monthly (À Suivre). However, we shall see that it was not the only logic that produced self-​adaptations of bandes dessinées, with two novels in which François Rivière cryptonovelized his album Le Rendez-​vous de Sevenoaks [The Sevenoaks Rendezvous] (1977).

The illusion of a deeper reading experience As the previous chapters have shown, the cross-​ media circulation of comics characters is as old as the ninth art. The foreword written by Josette Frank on behalf of the Child Study Association of America, for the novel The Adventures of Superman (1942) by radio scriptwriter George Lowther, assumed that most readers already knew the superhero, whether from comic strips, animated cartoons, or radio programs, since they “may have heard his challenging voice on the air-​waves” (Frank’s foreword in Lowther IX–​X). In contrast to the transmedia circulation that Superman or Flash Gordon experienced from the 1930s onwards in the United States (Bould 20–​21, Frahm 199), in the French-​speaking world they remained confined to children’s comics magazines. They disappeared from these during the 1940s, as a result of restrictions on American imports into German-​occupied France and Belgium, and in the face of anti-​American militancy that was already active in the interwar period in both countries (see, for instance, Sadoul 19–​27). The implementation of the French law of 16 July 1949 on publications intended

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  93 for young people made the undesirability of translated American comics official, while favouring Franco-​Belgian creations. This political-​ideological context pushed French-​language publishers into launching local ersatz American heroes, surfing on the continental wave of the whodunit (Huftier 35–​ 36) and abandoning superheroes (Reyns-​Chikuma 352–​353), as well as investing in means of expression complementary to comics. For example, the Belgian comics artist Jijé (Joseph Gillain) completed two episodes of Superman in Spirou, one in 1941 and the other in 1946, in order to launch his own to-​be-​continued comic strips: the investigations of Jean Valhardi and a biography of Saint John Bosco. Although he took the place of the American superhero,4 the Italian saint had less in common with Superman than did Valhardi, a young insurance investigator with a powerful hand-​shake. Having begun in the middle of the war, his first serial was hastily completed in 1943, due to the Dupuis comics magazine being banned by the German occupiers. To keep readers going, a colour album was published at the end of 1943, printed on low-​quality paper, containing the entire long-​running serial published in Spirou. At the same time, the detective continued his investigations in other printed formats published by Dupuis, with a “spoken novel”5 serialized in a short-​lived youth movement bulletin, then with a comic strip narrative published in a collective album, and, finally, with the detective novel L’Étrange Réveillon de Jean Valhardi [Jean Valhardi’s Strange Christmas Eve]. The emergence of pieces of comics-​related prose, stimulated by wartime publication restrictions, was also stimulated by the iconophobic and logocentric spirit of the censors who enforced the Law of 1949 on publications intended for young people. Article 3 of the Law “established a Commission in the Ministry of Justice charged with the oversight and control of publications for children and adolescents” and gave it the power to make recommendations to publishers to “improve publications”.6 At the beginning of the 1950s, these censors criticized publishers for “tending towards the progressive elimination of text in favour of images”: Reading a modern children’s magazine no longer involves any intellectual activity: the image is everything, and this “reading” consists of a passive surrender to sensory impressions that exert a violent suggestion and eliminate all critical control. As for the imagination, its scope is narrowed by the concrete representation of the totality of the scenes narrated.7 This criticism was obviously aimed at comics. To remedy “the progressive elimination of text”, the commission advised publishers to “precede or follow the ‘balloon’, as often as possible, with an explanatory or descriptive text, in order to develop the child’s desire to read”.8 In addition, it disapproved of the exclusive presence of comics in magazines and ensured that editorial, literary or instructive content was maintained.

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94  Why self-novelize a comic strip? In this respect, it was supported by another press control body under the Ministry of Information. Since 1950, the Commission paritaire des papiers de presse (literally the Joint Committee on Newsprint Papers, renamed ten years later the Joint Committee for Publications and Press Agencies) has issued a “certificate of registration”9 to periodicals that request it. This registration number, called the “numéro de commission paritaire”, facilitates the distribution of a magazine on newsstands and gives it access to most of the public aid allocated to the press in France. Among the conditions to be fulfilled in order to benefit from this registration, the Joint Committee imposed, and still imposes today, a minimum proportion of editorial content on comics magazines.10 The post-​war period saw the development of comics-​related prose. Anticipating the legislation, two literary magazines were launched almost simultaneously to extend the adventures of comics heroes in novel form: the monthly Fantax Magazine from the Mouchot publishing house in France, and La Collection (retitled L’Hebdomadaire in the eighth issue) des grands récits [The Great Stories Collection/​Weekly] from Dupuis in Belgium.11 The ambition of both was to offer a deeper reading experience to teenage readers of comics. To escape the anti-​American censorship resulting from the Law of 1949 (Reyns-​Chikuma 351), the Lyon-​based publisher Pierre Mouchot entirely converted his comics periodical Fantax Magazine (1946–​1949), which imitated and sometimes plagiarized American comic books, into a popular literature magazine of the same name. He provided some of the illustrations himself, as he was the cartoonist (under the pseudonym “Chott”) of Fantax comics series. Published alongside detective short stories unrelated to the comic strip, the serialized novel by André Compère (signing with the anglicized pseudonym “J. F. Ronald-​Wills”) which took up most of each issue focused on this vigilante hero, a London diplomat who wears a superhero outfit when he carries out night-​time investigations. A “Warning” from the publisher invited “all fans of detective adventures [who] have followed with interest the exciting episodes of ‘Fantax’s’ perpetual struggle against the men of the underworld” to enjoy a deeper reading experience, in the absence of spectacular pictures. In view of the success of our drawn novels, we thought that many readers would be happy to penetrate into the intimacy of the famous “vigilante” further and in greater depth than through pictures. They will find here a “Fantax” that is perhaps less spectacular, but the very quality of the emotions they will experience while reading the various episodes […] will more than compensate for the lack of illustration. (Mouchot’s preface in Ronald-​Wills 1) The Great Stories Weekly from Dupuis ran for about a hundred issues between 1948 and 1950, 26 of which featured the comics hero Jean Valhardi, with illustrations by his cartoonist at the time, Édouard “Eddy”

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  95 Paape. Each issue featured the full text of a novella of about 30 pages. In the foreword of the first detective booklet, Jean Doisy (the pen name of Jean-​Georges Evrard) addressed “A word to Jean Valhardi’s friends”, i.e. to the readers who had grown up following the hero in Spirou magazine from 1941 onwards. The scriptwriter of the comics series, author of the novels, addressed his teenage readers as follows: as the years pass for you, we know that you remain, perhaps, more particularly faithful to the memory of Jean Valhardi. […] So, for those of you for whom stories in pictures are no longer enough, we have prepared this series. (Doisy, Vol sans voleur 2) Unlike Fantax, the Belgian investigator continued his graphic adventures in parallel with his new literary life, as shown by an advertisement inserted in an album that invited readers to continue reading by switching to novels (Figure 3.1). Valhardi himself addresses the collection to his readers: Are you interested in my adventures?… …I’m very flattered! But if you want to read some more, ask for The Great Stories, a series created especially for you! (Jijé 21) The peritextual discourse of the two literary magazines supported the position of the Commission for the Oversight and Control of Publications for Children and Adolescents. The latter, in keeping with the principle of education through pictures advocated during the Third Republic (see Chapter 1), only tolerated the reading of comic strips as a stage in the learning of literary reading. The publishing houses Dupuis and Mouchot sought to transfer a readership that was growing older from one of their press titles to the other. In order to offer comics readers a deeper reading experience, their literary magazines opted for an autodiegetic narration. The original storylines of the novels took the form of autobiographies transcribed by a confidant of the hero, who was an editor of his magazine. The Fantax comics series was already presented as a report on an authentic personality, with whom a member of the editorial staff corresponded by letters. The “Warning” in the first issue using Fantax Magazine’s literary formula explained that “a series of adventures touching more closely on the private life of the sympathetic policeman” could not be recounted as a “drawn novel”, even though they had been related by the hero, from his London home, to the same editorial collaborator (Pierre Mouchot’s preface in Ronald-​Wills 1–​3). Similarly, Jean Valhardi contributed to some of the editorial content of Spirou magazine as if he really existed. His first novella in The Great Stories Weekly, told in the first person,

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96  Why self-novelize a comic strip?

Figure 3.1 Jijé, Valhardi II. Jean Valhardi, détective. Album n° 2, Marcinelle, Dupuis, 1948, p. 21. © Jijé–​Jean Doisy, 2023.

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  97 purported to transcribe an oral account he himself had given to the editors of Spirou “who had become [his] secretaries” (Doisy, Vol sans voleur 2). Playing on the flexibility of the autobiographical genre, the authors of these comics-​related novels adopted the stance of biographers, claiming to have collected and transcribed, in the first person, pseudo-​memoirs delivered by Fantax or Valhardi. However, was the psychological profile of the hero-​narrators really deepened in this way?

Comics artists and literary illustration Observing the relations between words and images provides an initial answer to this question. Take the novels of Jean Valhardi in The Great Stories Weekly. Their prototype was provided as early as 1943 by the stand-​alone booklet Jean Valhardi’s Strange Christmas Eve, which scattered a few of Jijé’s drawings in Doisy’s text, captioned with a line of dialogue or another quotation from the novel, as well as a reference to the corresponding page. The illustrations were not synchronized with the literary narrative: only two of the 13 images represented an episode narrated in the same double-​ page spread, the others being slightly ahead or (less often) delayed with respect to the surrounding text. These night-​time action scenes exploited the expressionistic contrast between black masses and a bright light source. Made with brush and Indian ink, dynamic compositions such as a frame exit (Figure 3.2) were reminiscent of comics and even cinema. By referring both to the novel’s diegesis and to the fictional universe of the Jean Valhardi comics series, illustrations such as these mirror the supplementarity of the comics-​related novel. On the one hand, “the image is dispensable to the narrative, because it is a supplement to it”, with no autonomy from the text that is necessary for its deciphering; on the other hand, the illustration affects the reading experience both “by supplementing specific aspects and scenes of the text” and “through the fragmentation of text and image” that it induces (Blin-​Rolland 67–​68, 73 and 85). Although the aim of this novel was to keep Spirou readers in touch with the series interrupted by the war, this prequel did not refer to any previous narrative. It featured a novice Valhardi, who had just found his first job in an insurance company and was going on a trip to the Ardennes with a childhood friend, Maxime Dormond. After having scripted action-​packed graphic narratives and written, also for Dupuis, detective novels mixing mystery and adventures, Jean Doisy sought in Jean Valhardi’s Strange Christmas Eve to renew his inspiration by recounting a non-​event. As in Stanislas-​André Steeman’s novel Légitime Défense [Legitimate Defence] (1942), the hero is mistaken in thinking he is witnessing a crime. Finding by chance a lighted house in the middle of a snowy Ardennes forest, Jean Valhardi interferes in what turns out to be a private settlement of an old dispute between prominent local people. However, the scenes illustrated by Jijé focus on the high points of the narrative, so that they announce a plot full of twists and turns. At the end of the narrative, realizing that he

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98  Why self-novelize a comic strip?

Figure 3.2 Jean Doisy, L’Étrange réveillon de Jean Valhardi, illustrated by Joseph Gillain, Marcinelle, Dupuis, 1943, pp. 42–​43. © Jijé–​Jean Doisy, 2023.

has made “much ado about nothing”, the hero, who is barely 20 years old, becomes anxious at the idea that he will not be able to return to adventures and he opens up to his friend Maxime about it: –  Not even a victimless crime, grumbled Valhardi, resignedly. – Victimless crime! Note that, my boy, it’s a find: it will make a wonderful title for a detective story. (Doisy, L’Étrange réveillon 63) Five years later, the first novel in The Great Stories Weekly also based its plot on a misunderstanding, as its title announced: Vol sans voleur [Theft Without a Thief]. The main novelty was the first-​person enuncia­ tion by Valhardi: If I tell you about my school years, it’s because my first mission was then […], and the best part was that I thwarted a thief who didn’t exist! […] Something along the lines of the victimless crime you’ve heard about elsewhere. (Doisy, Vol sans voleur 3) This other prequel, explicitly linked to the previous one, continues to go back into the character’s past. A group of pre-​adolescent friends, including

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  99 Jean Valhardi and Maxime Dormond, have contributed money in order to go camping in the summer, but their fund disappears. It turns out that all the playmates had been suspicious of each other and that one of them had “taken this money to prevent the alleged theft” (31). Valhardi’s literary debut was a departure both from comics and from adventure, since it was mired in false plots. The young cartoonist Eddy Paape, who had taken over the comics series still scripted by Jean Doisy, illustrated Theft Without a Thief, trying to reproduce the dynamism and chiaroscuro of his predecessor, Jijé. This resulted in discordant viewpoints between the first-​person text and the unfocalized illustrations. The adventures did not begin until Valhardi’s third novel, Sur le Rail [On the Railway], which finally follows the detective at the age when he was conducting his comic-​strip investigations. The colour cover and the five black-​and-​white interior illustrations of this booklet appear still more marginalized, since the quotations that continue to caption them emphasize their pleonastic value, and since they are no longer mingled with the text but are placed on full pages. Despite their marginalization, these depictions of decisive revelations or actions at their climax appear to be anchored to the text by a close narrative synchronization. The night scene on the cover of the booklet (Figure 3.3) foreshadows the focalization of the literary narrative: a torch beam illuminates the hero, in a cinematic medium-​long shot, seen over the shoulder of his adversary (the saboteur of a high-​speed railway line), who, armed with a revolver, is holding him at gunpoint. This narrative focalization comes from the comic strip. As an exception, and the only one of its kind in the collection, this novel was a novelization of 15 comics pages of the same title –​the first collaboration of Doisy and Paape. While the graphic narrative had no recitative and presented the actions as if they were happening live, the novelization is told a posteriori by the hero himself. Despite this retrospection, the narrator-​character of the novel keeps the suspense going; he respects the linear progression of the story, so that he seems to experience his adventures, one after another, without knowing the outcome. He does everything to mitigate the subjectivity of his narration, so much so that his inner life continues to seem, as in the comics, unfathomable. The writing of the novelization contrasts with Jean Doisy’s detective novels of the 1930s –​and the experience of the comics script may have contributed to this evolution –​leading to an emphasis on instinct, following his model Stanislas-​André Steeman (Huftier 44, 49), “with a behaviourist perspective to the detriment of the psychological perspective” (83). In a sense, the combination of an external focalization and an internal point of view in the novelization was already present in the comic strip of the same title. Indeed, the graphic narrative seems at times to be delivered in a variable internal focalization, passing alternately through the consciousness of the detective and that of the criminal. As on the cover of the novelization, a cinematographic device produces an effect of viewing

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100  Why self-novelize a comic strip?

Figure 3.3 Jean Doisy, Sur le rail, illustrated by Eddy Paape, Marcinelle, Dupuis (Collection des grands récits), 1948, front cover. © Fondation Paape–​ Jean Doisy, 2023.

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  101 with (a showing with external focalization), which consists of framing the saboteur from behind, adopting the point of view of a mobile viewer who is invisible to the protagonists. In doing so, the comics narrative reduces their psychology to a series of behaviours, among which are their speech patterns. Far from introspection, the characters remain as close as possible to the action presented in the image; in other words they “exist so strongly that they can dispense with having an inner life” (Magny 43). According to the French woman of letters Claude-​Edmonde Magny (23–​24), in her essay on The Age of the American Novel published in French in 1948, filmmakers at the time drew heavily on novelistic devices to produce first-​person film narratives: “in the past year there have been a great number of movies in which […], at a crucial moment of action, we completely identify with the vision of the main character”. On the Railway was published the same year as this essay attesting to the popularity of behaviourist narratives in France. The essayist explains the success of external focalization as a convergence of cinematic and novelistic storytelling devices, but the way she describes them inevitably brings the comic strip to mind: The author leaves us free to make what we will of this. His job is to place the facts before us, not to help us understand them. The novel thus appears to be much less an art of language than we might a priori have expected it to be. Its aim is to show rather than to say […]. Because of this aesthetic imperative of discretion and taciturnity, one might even say that the novel, like the cinema, is essentially an art of ellipsis. (Magny 48–​49)

A logic of supplement The Great Stories Weekly disappeared in February 1950, leaving a lot of unsold copies at Dupuis, while Fantax Magazine’s literary formula had only six issues in 1949. These commercial failures led their publishers to refocus on comics, but they did not discourage competitors12 from reattempting the experiment. For example, the quarterly Les Aventures de Pif le Chien [The Adventures of Pif the Dog] (second series, 1954–​ 1957) serialized the literary “Memoirs” of its main character, to which it added a 60-​page illustrated novel published as a special issue: Pif à la chasse aux lions [Pif on the Hunt for Lions] (1955) by Raymond Lavigne, with illustrations by José Cabrero Arnal. A later example will allow me to take stock of a logic of supplement that characterizes all these self-​ adaptations written and illustrated by the authors of the corresponding comics series. Alongside the Tintin weekly magazine, its publishers, Dargaud and Le Lombard, released some 40 issues of the quarterly comics magazine Tintin Pocket Sélection, from 1968 to 1978. With just under two

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102  Why self-novelize a comic strip? hundred pages and at the price of two issues of the weekly, they were distributed at newsstands and by mail order, independently of the magazine subscription. Their covers mentioned the “Pocket” format (19 × 12 cm) and announced the “Selection” of content taken from the “Tintin” magazine, but emphatically presented as original. The difference in periodicity and format, compared to the comics weekly (28 × 20 cm), dictated the production of original complete stories and complicated their republication in albums, as it required a recomposition of the comics pages. Most of Tintin’s series played the game, particularly those that had introduced the narrative format of the “récit complet” [complete story] into the weekly,13 at the urging of the scriptwriter and editor-​ in-​ chief Greg (Michel Regnier). This format corresponded to that of the short story in literature, i.e. a comics narrative published in a single instalment. The quarterly was not so much a showcase as a supplement to Tintin, in both senses of the word: substitution and supplementation. Following a marketing logic, it was a substitute for Tintin on the “petits formats” market (see Lesage 274–​277), that of the cheap comics periodicals that published complete rather than to-​ be-​continued stories. Borrowing their pocket format, their paper and their binding, Tintin Pocket Sélection presented a “selection” of short, original and partially coloured graphic stories, while its competitors published black and white comics imported from abroad and translated into French. While targeting the “petits formats” readership, the quarterly also supplied those Tintin readers who were willing to pay extra to read more episodes of the same series. The weekly regularly advertised the supplement, at the risk of saturating its own market. This surplus effect, which was felt in stories less inspired than those of Tintin, or more poorly produced than them, was aggravated by the lower print quality of Tintin Pocket Sélection. Some of these stories which give characters “un supplément d’existence” [an extra existence] (Saint-​Gelais, back cover) took a literary form. Thirteen 60-​page “original novels” appeared, plus one of 30 pages, embroidering original storylines experienced by the magazine’s heroes, with illustrations by their cartoonists. Apart from four novels entrusted to the novelizer Jacques Acar, the others were written by the scriptwriters of the comics series (François Craenhals, André-​Paul Duchâteau, Christian Godard, Yves Duval and Jean Van Hamme). A text presenting the “exclusive collection” emphasized the originality of the literary narratives and invited readers to keep these “petits formats”, at a time when no one –​ not even comics fans –​was thinking of incorporating this type of publication into the cultural heritage (Lesage 275–​277): These novels will not be published in any other form in French and will not be published in stand-​alone volumes. You are starting today […] a unique and privileged collection. Make sure you gather it all together by following our releases regularly!14

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  103 The fact that five narratives continued, in literary form, series that were to provide no further new episodes for Tintin magazine (Corentin, Howard Flynn, Les Franval, Les Panthères, Yorik des tempêtes) shows that Tintin Pocket Sélection was able to substitute for it. From this perspective, text-​ dominant literature appeared to provide an outlet for comics heroes. As in The Great Stories Weekly, the novels’ iconotextual dispositive distanced itself from the ninth art. Each one was enhanced, on average, by seven black-​and-​white full-​page illustrations, with no frame other than the edges or white margins of the page, drawn by the cartoonist of the comic strip, in the same style and using the same technical processes. These drawings were original, just as the storylines were unpublished. Unlike the photographs in film novelizations,15 these drawings were not primarily intended to establish a connection with the visual artwork of the source work, they relied on the evidence of this contact to offer something new. It was not a question of showing heroes posing in static compositions, even less of suggesting a setting, but of presenting confrontations between characters or staging a line of dialogue. One might suppose that the artists’ predilection for pregnant moments in literary narratives stemmed from their practice of drawing comics. However, they respected the limits traditionally set for illustration: neither invasion of the textual space, nor narrative or informative competition with the literary narrative. In all cases, the novelistic text was self-​sufficient, while the plot could not be deduced from the few images. Furthermore, although some of them were captioned, none contained speech bubbles, recitatives, or onomatopoeia. Despite this distancing from the ninth art, the Tintin Pocket Sélection novels had little autonomy from their main series.16 Most of the novels took a serial rather than biographical approach to the characters. Only two are narrated in the first person, one by the detective Ric Hochet, and the other, centred on the aviator Martin Milan, presented as a transcript of “Statements collected and illustrated by Christian Godard”. The hero-​narrator of the first novel presents the comics authors, Tibet and Duchâteau, also illustrator and writer of the short novel, as his biographers: “I have the privileged status of a reporter-​investigator, more of an investigator than a reporter, because I hardly ever write, leaving it to my favourite historiographers to recount my adventures” (Duchâteau, “La soirée de meurtre” 69). At the beginning of the second novel, the cartoonist Godard leaves his studio, “[his] tape recorder under his arm”, to catch his character Martin Milan at his Parisian apartment (Godard 69–​70). With these two exceptions, the majority of the literary stories in Tintin Pocket Sélection were entrusted to extradiegetic narrators who did not notice the change of media, beginning without preamble to tell an additional episode of the comics series. Only one of them presented itself, in an introductory paragraph that was reproduced as an advertisement in Tintin (Figure 3.4), as a prequel to the meeting of the heroes before their graphic adventures. This naval adventure fiction, like most of the corpus, followed the writing model of the nineteenth-​century realist novel. The

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104  Why self-novelize a comic strip?

Figure 3.4  Advertisement, including an excerpt from a novel by André-​ Paul Duchâteau illustrated by Eddy Paape, published in Tintin (Belgian edition), no. 3, 15 January 1974, not paginated. © Fondation Paape, 2023.

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  105 children’s novel in general remained relatively faithful to it, at the time of Tintin Pocket Sélection, while being deaf to the condemnation of Realism by avant-​garde trends (Surrealism, Nouveau Roman, etc.). The novel Le Diable dans la vallée [The Devil in the Valley], based on Chevalier Ardent by the Belgian cartoonist François Craenhals, is a good example of this. Its narration takes the past simple as its verbal tense of reference, which is reserved for literary use in French, and which detaches and autonomizes the diegesis from the actuality of the enunciative voice. The storytelling is carried out by an extradiegetic narrator, quite distinct from the author as well as from all the characters, who is discreet, concealing its situation of enunciation, thus falling under the historical plane of utterance (in the sense of Émile Benveniste, 206–​208). A division of voices separates the narrator’s discourse, expressed in a formal register, from the dialogues between the characters. The latter show rare discursive markers of orality, which are rather archaic, seeking to reconstitute a semblance of medieval French. Without any ambition to depict a social reality, the literary narrative is based, like the Chevalier Ardent comics series, on documentation that is just sufficient to produce an effect of reality. It favours action and avoids any dead time: it leaves no room for lyricism, character studies or descriptions (of either characters or settings). In an exacerbated way in the novel, the convention of literary realism leads to a refusal of implausibility and, even more so, of oneirism, whereas the medieval comics series tended towards the fantastic (see Dayez 68). The novel shows the hero as a lord administering his fiefdom (he examines the accounts, administers justice, inspects his domain, supervises road works), far from the marvellous and exotic nature of his usual quests. Although he discovers a clearing on his own land that seems to him to be “a little earthly paradise” and that reminds him of “old legends, old fantastic tales”, he soon finds “a sense of reality” and learns not to be deceived by appearances (Craenhals 87–​88, 118). The settled knight longs for adventure: “after two weeks of this hard cerebral labour, Ardent soon found that he was losing his lust for life […] and resolved to leave these matters forever to his intendants” (70–​71). We can read between the lines his intention to return to comics after a literary interlude. The narrative expansion is primarily aimed at “pitching a character” (Ryan 382), without making him evolve psychologically and without extending the narrative arc on which the literary and comics episodes take place: For this reason, the memorable characters who inspire one story after another tend to be superhero types who do not evolve from one episode to the next: types such as Odysseus, Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones or James Bond. In this case, the storyworld develops through an accumulation of episodes that follow a standard and infinitely repeatable narrative pattern, the pattern of the individual problems solved by the hero. (382–​383)

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106  Why self-novelize a comic strip?

Close reading: Acknowledgement of Murders, Ric Hochet’s First Case Whether they are recounted in the first or third person, all these novels from the 1940s to the 1970s, written and illustrated by the creators of the comics characters whose adventures they extended in literary terms, were the result of a logic of supplement. The popular hero Ric Hochet gave this logic an exceptionally broad development. The cartoonist Tibet (Gilbert Gascard) and the scriptwriter André-​Paul Duchâteau began their collaboration in the middle of the 1950s in the magazine Tintin, by publishing two comics stories of five pages featuring their character, first as a 13-​year-​old newspaper salesman, then as a young journalist (Duchâteau and Tibet, Premières armes 3–​12). Knowing that his scriptwriter was also an author of mystery novels, Tibet considered making Ric Hochet a “son of Jean Valhardi”, the investigative hero of Spirou, a rival magazine to Tintin, who had marked his childhood (Dayez 75 and 86). André-​Paul Duchâteau had acquired a taste for mystery games by reading Le Jury during the war, a bi-​monthly detective collection that had published his first novels, as well as “two or three detective problems” that he had sent to it (Duchâteau, 7 à 77 ans 34 and 136). From 1959 to 1993, Tibet and Duchâteau serialized their hero in Tintin, through numerous comics serials and a hundred or so illustrated short stories –​mainly one-​page literary riddles that were posed to the reader, but also longer texts. All these narratives were based on the deductive and playful structure that was found, condensed, in Ric Hochet’s literary riddles. The authors introduced the principle to their readers as follows: We asked him to tell you from time to time on this page about the various investigations in which he has been involved. In order to put your sagacity to the test, Ric Hochet, playing the game loyally, will communicate to you each time all the elements that have enabled him to solve the problem by identifying the culprit or culprits. In short, Ric Hochet challenges you fairly. (Duchâteau, “Surprise de Noël” 35) Fifty years later, the last Ric Hochet episode written by Duchâteau, which appeared in the form of a detective novel, offered its readers a slightly novel literary experience. In 2010, the comics series’ audience no longer had the youthful age of Tintin readers, even if it was partly composed of readers of the magazine who had remained faithful to the series of albums, which had continued after the disappearance of its prepublication medium in 1993. It was therefore not specifically targeting young readers that Le Lombard, the Brussels publisher of the comics series, published Acknowledgement of Murders, Ric Hochet’s First Case. The unillustrated novel was co-​signed by the cartoonist Tibet, who died

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  107 a few months before its publication, while the back cover credited the writing to André-​Paul Duchâteau alone. In his last novel, Ric Hochet takes on the role of narrator himself, telling us about one of his first exploits as a schoolboy when he was being brought up by an aunt in Brussels after the death of his parents.17 In addition to its status of prequel, the particularity of this detective story is that it offers a roman à clef to crime literature fans. The narrator-​character is absolutely distinct from the author who signs the book, but “the reader has reason to believe that the story of what happened to the character is exactly that of the author’s life”, which makes it an “autobiographical novel” in the sense coined by Philippe Lejeune (201). Although it does not say so, Acknowledgement of Murders is based less on the Ric Hochet comics series than on three books by Duchâteau published ten years earlier by a small Belgian publishing house, Memor. These are the novels Meurtre pour meurtre [A Murder for a Murder] (1998, first published in 1942) and Équation à deux “inconnus” [Equation with Two Unknowns] (1999, first edition of another wartime manuscript), along with the autobiography 7 à 77 ans: Souvenirs d’un scénariste [From 7 to 77 Years Old: Memories of a Scriptwriter] (2002). The beginning of the 2010 novel transposes the beginning of the novelist’s autobiography (compare Duchâteau and Tibet, Reconnaissance 11–​17, and Duchâteau, 7 à 77 ans 34–​47), when Ric Hochet visits the Belgian writer Stanislas-​André Steeman at his home to submit a synopsis of a crime novel for his collection Le Défi.18 A leading figure in Belgian detective literature, like his contemporary Georges Simenon, Steeman did indeed direct the collection Le Jury (1940–​1944) for which André-​ Paul Duchâteau wrote the two novels (without being able to publish the second one), A Murder for a Murder and Equation with Two Unknowns, that he reattributed to the hero of Acknowledgement of Murders. Yet the novelist had portrayed himself, in his early novels, under the name of Cécil Cambermont and in the guise of the schoolboy he was at the time. Seventy years later, the pupil Henri Hochet claims to be not only the author of the previous novels, but also the true author of the exploits of his literary double, Cécil Cambermont, which he says actually took place in his secondary school (Duchâteau and Tibet, Reconnaissance 15–​ 16, 26–​27, 61). Acknowledgement of Murders is presented as a third enquiry in the same chronotope, a neighbourhood of a Brussels municipality under the German occupation, involving the same pupils and teachers inspired by the real ones André-​Paul Duchâteau had met at the time, to which are added new fictional characters and several authentic collaborators of Le Jury (Stanislas-​André Steeman, Thomas Owen and Flore Many). The beginnings of the last Ric Hochet novel and André-​Paul Duchâteau’s first novel, Acknowledgement of Murders and A Murder for a Murder, lend themselves to comparison. Both non-​illustrated whodunits follow the investigations of autofictional teenage heroes, who gather clues in

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108  Why self-novelize a comic strip? a familiar environment until they have enough to challenge the reader (Duchâteau, Meurtre 24, Duchâteau and Tibet, Reconnaissance 139). The hero then obtains a confession from the culprit, but is unable to prevent him from disappearing and thus escaping from the police. While both stories are told in the first person, only A Murder for a Murder is told entirely in that manner. In the foreword to Acknowledgement of Murders, Ric Hochet states that he “chose the novel form for once”, alternating chapters of reported action involving events he could not have witnessed and autodiegetic chapters “narrated in the first person by the pretentious and slightly naive teenager [he] was at the time” (Duchâteau and Tibet, Reconnaissance 8). In the forewords, both novels’ narrators affirm the authenticity of the facts they are about to relate, though in different ways. The narrator of the latter presents himself as “primarily a storyteller, not a memorialist, and the form of the novel being more familiar to [him] than the objective account” (8). In contrast, the narrator of the first story states that “A Murder for a Murder is not a novel; even less a character study. It is a simple account of the facts, written ‘day after day’ on the last blank pages of a Latin notebook” (Duchâteau, Meurtre 3). The novel published by Duchâteau at the age of 16 begins with a long narrative exposition, following the hero-​narrator’s journey from his home to the classroom where he has to take a Latin test, which provides a physical and moral portrait of the main characters who cross his path. Recounting each of his days of investigation in the past tense, he brings the reader into his daily life, through routine scenes centred on brief dialogues without any description of places. This opening is almost entirely directed towards telling. Set in a place where written culture is taught, where knowledge of Latin takes precedence, A Murder for a Murder is the story of successive tailings by a witness-​voyeur who listens more than he observes. The teenage hero picks up clues from the conversations of adults that he spies on, without paying attention to what he sees, even though the visual memory of a clothing detail finally enables him to solve the mystery. In this psychological huis clos, the narrative tension is based solely on curiosity, since the investigation begins after a single murder has been committed, whereas suspense is mixed with curiosity in Acknowledgement of Murders: the hero follows the progress of a series of crimes, at a sufficient distance not to be placed in jeopardy. At first glance, the first-​person writing of half of Acknowledgement of Murders seems similar to that of A Murder for a Murder. However, the use of the present tense produces an effect of showing and of suspense, which is reinforced by the other half of the novel, narrated in zero focalization, also in the present tense, in order to show the suspects and the future victims in action, without preventing the reader from entering their thoughts. The detective narrative begins in medias res, with a robbery scene told in external focalization, by an extradiegetic narrator. The scene has a high degree of visuality while being soundtracked by the occasional

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  109 noises of an air raid siren, two exclamations of surprise and the creaking of a door, which evoke comics onomatopoeias (see also onomatopoeias in Duchâteau and Tibet, Reconnaissance 59). In a novel, both paragraphs and dialogue sequences have a semantic and visual function in the arrangement of the narrative text (Martin 175, 208). The textual structuring of the opening reinforces its visuality; the discourse turns into a sequence of views, involving the reader in a participatory reading. The first four paragraphs describe pictorial subjects arranged in closed architectural frames –​a street end, a door or window frame –​as if they were a sequence of drawn panels (“horizon”, “silhouette”, “features”) in black and white (“glimmers”, “light reflections”, “obscured”, “blue-​black”, “darkness”): The Saint-​ Servais church rises majestically at the top of Louis Bertrand Avenue, touched by the first glimmers of an uncertain daybreak looming on the horizon. The signal for the end of a late alert still rings out on this rainy night in March 1944. Allied planes flew over the town, but fortunately the anti-​aircraft defence could not reach them. Barely discernible, light reflections appear here and there in the poorly sealed gaps in the windows of buildings, obscured with a blue-​black fabric. The silhouette, bent under the weight of a bag, barely emerges from the darkness of the street and dives straight away into a doorway on the right side of the church. Using keys, the man, whose features are hidden by a thick scarf, quickly opens the door, which creaks slightly as he closes it behind him. (Duchâteau and Tibet, Reconnaissance 9) The two novels’ beginnings, staged in radically different ways, are separated by a long practice of comics scripting. In his autobiography, André-​ Paul Duchâteau retrospectively acknowledged the influence of script practice on his literary writing:19 When I started writing, […] [t]‌he neophyte that I was let himself be guided above all by the words, which were almost incidentally responsible for revealing images. The discovery of comics breakdown and, almost at the same time, of TV storytelling deeply modified my automatic habits […]. From now on, everything had to be seen, first and foremost, and nothing could be left in the protective and sometimes vague shadow of words. This new language has profoundly influenced, afterwards, the other novels I have written. Previously, there was a narrator who was narrating. In the following novels, the narrator was still there, but he was pointing a video camera. (Duchâteau, 7 à 77 ans 227)

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110  Why self-novelize a comic strip?

From graphic to literary novels Duchâteau’s two novels were also separated by decades of literarization –​ or “novelization”, as coined by Paul Williams –​of the ninth art. The preconceived notion that mainstream comics were no longer sufficient for either their readers or their authors, who would have been looking for a hypothetical deeper reading experience, resurfaced throughout the twentieth century. From the 1960s onwards, this claim met with “a clear social demand”, shared by the authors and the public, for “more mature material” and “less stereotypical forms” (Baetens, Rebuilding 7). These new ambitions for the ninth art strengthened its relationship with literature, and writing comics-​related novels was only one step along that road. Other ways of opening up the border between comics and literature were attempted, including by the Franco-​Belgian monthly (À Suivre), which deliberately moved into literary territory in 1978. In its first issue, an editorial by editor-​in-​chief Jean-​Paul Mougin predicted “the bold entrance of comics into literature”, while an article by François Rivière, entitled “The Popular Novel: Ancestor of the Comic Strip”, established a filiation with the serial novel (AS 1: 3 and 71).20 According to the French literature scholar Fabrice Leroy (253), “Mougin’s sentence could have well been formulated in reverse: ‘(À Suivre) will be the bold entrance of literature into comics’ ”. The Parisian editorial board of the monthly magazine and the staff of Casterman, the Belgian publishing house that produced both the magazine and the resulting comics albums, did not use the term “roman graphique” [graphic novel], but rather “roman en bande dessinée” [novel in comics form], evoking a nineteenth-​century literary conception, “and even an unabashedly traditional and almost romantic one, strongly influenced by, on the one hand, Auteur theory (the model of the author being here the writer, and not the film director), and, on the other hand, adventure narrative”21 (Baetens and Frey 203). Although their book size was larger than a novel book size, and even though they did not disdain serialization, the adult albums that issued from the magazine (À Suivre) differed from the standards (especially the limited number of pages) of mainstream French-​language comics. For 20 years, a number of early French graphic novels appeared, divided into to-​ be-​ continued “chapters”, in this monthly magazine, which also offered the editorial content of a cultural magazine, including articles on literature and book reviews. Despite its interest in literature, the editorial board published only a few fictional texts.22 Yet many early French graphic novelists who were part of the magazine’s first generation of authors tried their hand at literary writing, outside the pages of the magazine: Jean-​Claude Denis, Jean-​Claude Forest, Philippe Paringaux, Benoît Peeters, Hugo Pratt, François Rivière, Carlos Sampayo, Jacques Tardi, Jean Teulé, Daniel Varenne and Gérard Dewamme.23 Interestingly, these graphic novelists were more inclined to write novels than to make

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  111 literary adaptations in comics form (on this relative absence, see Baetens and Frey 150). The book review column of (À Suivre) provided, over a period of 20 years, a panorama of literary productions linked to the world of the ninth art. Its book reviewers rarely looked favourably on the comics authors’ novels, reproducing a tendency to “compartmentalize” in the literary field, which hardly allows a writer to “move from one category to another” (Baetens, Réseau 11). When one of the (À Suivre) authors gave in to literary temptation, the magazine presented it as a passing fancy. When Jacques Tardi published his illustrated novel Rue des rebuts [Reject Street] (1990), after having illustrated Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1988), Jean-​Paul Morel excused this “small misdemeanour that no one would think of reproaching him for” and evoked fatality: “You could probably have guessed that, by stretching the bubbles, finally realizing one of his dearest dreams: putting Céline in pictures, Tardi would end up giving in to the demon of writing” (AS 153: 95). The same critic, in judging Jean Van Hamme’s novel Le Télescope (1992), was concerned about the dispersion through the media of the scriptwriter, “who perhaps has difficulty finding his way in his own life(s)” (AS 190: 142). Jean Teulé’s literary debut was no exception, although he did abandon comics for literature. Seeing him persevere on the novelistic path, with Rainbow pour Rimbaud (1991) and L’Œil de Pâques [The Easter Eye] (1992), Morel worried about “Teulé being possessed by the demon of writing” (AS 171: 97). However, Nicolas Finet’s review of Balade pour un père oublié [Trip/​Ballad for a Forgotten Father] (1995) recognized the literary style of the comics artist turned writer: “Jean Teulé’s third rendezvous with the novel, and always this little music of words, falling slightly out of sync, something that he has made his own” (AS 212: 146). When authors such as François Rivière, Pierre Christin or Benoît Peeters were no longer on their first novel and when their talent had convinced prestigious literary publishers, (À Suivre) critics judged them less harshly. On another note, they were not as hard on children’s novels, whose ambitions for literary legitimacy they judged to be lower, therefore allowing themselves to praise their illustrations and visual imagination, as was the case with Jean-​Claude Forest’s Lilia entre l’air et l’eau [Lilia Between Air and Water] (1983, AS 70: 96–​97) and Roger Leloup’s Le Pic des ténèbres [The Peak of Darkness] (1989, AS 136: 18). Most book reviewers linked the novel to the artist’s comics universe, identifying a playful (re)writing relationship between the two. The critic Jean-​Pierre Raymond described Le Voleur de dentelles [The Lace Thief] (1986) as a “[c]‌lassic adventure novel, [considering that] this book by Gérard Lauzier and Marie-​Ange Guillaume can be read without displeasure or surprise. The themes dear to the famous cartoonist can be found in it” (AS 97: 96). Concerning L’Irrésistible bibliographie critique et polissonne de Carl-​ Emmanuel Derain [The Critical and Naughty Bibliography of Carl-​Emmanuel Derain] (1987), a novel by Benoît Peeters

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112  Why self-novelize a comic strip? and Christian Rullier, Jean-​Luc Cochet wrote that “[t]he whole game of the book […] aims to launch the fictionalizing machine in order to put it in phase with perpetual motion –​a sport which will certainly sound familiar to fans of Obscure Cities” (AS 111: 97). In reviewing a crime fiction novel by Philippe Paringaux, Privé d’amour [Deprived of Love /​Love Investigator] (1997), Nicolas Finet described a parody of a noir novel, centred on a pathetic detective “whose improbable collection of major flaws –​vicious, liar, coward, hypocrite, the list is endless –​should make one laugh or cry. The plot is as good as the character, derisory” (AS 236: 52). For critics, these novels appeared to be written with the virtuosity and servility of pastiche. Their authors could only practice literary writing as a recreational exercise between two “novels in comics form”. What then about genuine comics-​related novels? In a review of Frederic Tuten’s Tintin in the New World (1993, translated into French in 1995), Jean-​Paul Morel identified the “novel’s crux” in a four-​word pitch: “Tintin discovers […] his penis” (AS 209: 143). According to the critic, the novelist had little interest in the character: “Tuten only attempts to identify the doubts and questions of Tintin’s father”. The novelizations signed by Hugo Pratt that explicitly transposed his comics increased the critics’ embarrassment. In reviewing Le Roman de Criss Kenton (1989), self-​ novelizing Pratt’s comics series Fort Wheeling, Claudine Legardinier essentially pointed to a quantitative achievement: “We know that Proust glued scraps of paper onto his already written sheets to expand the narrative indefinitely; Pratt, in another genre, is capable of producing ten pages of a novel for a few half-​dozen panels” (AS 144: 96). The posthumous publication of the novelization of Ballad of the Salt Sea, entitled Corto Maltese (1996), in Denoël’s literary series “Empreinte”, was perplexing for Nicolas Finet, who even doubted that the (deceased) signatory was the author. By its failure, according to the critic, the novel “does a useful job in itself, underlining the extent to which both literature and comics participate in a specific imagination and expression” (AS 224: 103). These misgivings perhaps explain why (À Suivre) did not mention the novel Cour des mystères [Court of Mysteries] (1997), published in the same literary series, in which Pratt novelized Corto Maltese in Siberia. Nor was there any mention of the hero’s Memoirs (1988) written by Michel Pierre, although they were published by Casterman in the series of Corto Maltese comics albums. The prose Memoirs were a continuation of the logic of supplement that had been typical of comics-​related novels in French-​language comics magazines for children. Fans never stopped asking Hugo Pratt for a complete biography of his hero –​when they did not write it themselves, after his death, as was the case of Marco Steiner with the novel Le Corbeau de pierre: La jeunesse de Corto Maltese [The Stone Crow: Corto Maltese’s Early Years] (2015). This transfictional path had been opened up by Pratt in the early 1980s in the comics album La Jeunesse [The Early Years] (1983), in which he returned to his hero’s adolescence. In January 1986,

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  113 (À Suivre) advertised a deluxe edition of the album, with a 64-​page peritext illustrated with archival photographs from the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as watercolours by Pratt. Among the peritexts written by fans, the Spanish comics critic Juan Antonio de Blas claimed to document Corto Maltese’s relationship with the writer-​adventurers Joseph Conrad and Jack London. The advertisement announcing the deluxe album, annotated by fans for fans, promised answers to these questions: Who is Corto Maltese? What do we know about his adventurous youth? Do we have any documents? Any testimonies? What evidence suggests that our hero met Rasputin and Jack London during the Russo-​Japanese War? (AS 96: 100) In the same month, Michel Pierre began publishing the hero’s Memoirs, using the documentary style of peritextual writing and illustration added to the deluxe edition of The Early Years. These pseudo-​ memoirs were serialized in Corto, another magazine from Casterman, based on Pratt’s hero, which offered comics stories of far-​flung adventures and photographic reports on exotic countries to a male audience. The Memoirs took the form of prose illustrated with original watercolours and archival photographs that were supposed to attest to the authenticity of the biographical facts. The falsifier of these iconographic documents held an “agrégation in history, [and was] a lecturer at the Paris Institute of Political Studies” (Pierre, dust jacket), but his stance was that of a fan-​documentarist and not a historian, although his writing style was impersonal, neutralized by the documentary perspective. Legitimizing the fanfiction, Hugo Pratt’s watercolours contained handwritten annotations allegedly by Corto Maltese, speaking in the first person. In sum, this biography, expanding on the peritext of the deluxe edition of the comics album recounting The Early Years of Corto Maltese, continued the logic of supplement that fostered the comics-​related literary texts of previous decades. With the exception of a passage of four comics pages, narrated by characters from the series (Pierre 34–​37), these Memoirs written by a biographer took the form of a continuous text that followed the linear temporality of a biography and was embellished with purely illustrative images. The literary effect was reinforced (or perhaps undermined24) in the album edition by the addition of chapter headings worthy of the picaresque novel, such as “In which Corto Maltese is still a child, born on 10 July 1887 on the island of Malta, and in which we learn that he starts out under happy auspices” (17). The album was included in the series of Corto Maltese’s “novels in comics form”, mentioning only Hugo Pratt on its cover, relegating Michel Pierre’s name to the back flap of the dust jacket. The strategy of paratextual autonomization, which had expanded a comics’ peritext into a whole book that entered the same series of

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114  Why self-novelize a comic strip? albums, was one of the means by which Corto Maltese established its literary status, “more because of the critical discourse surrounding it than because of the author’s original intentions” (Frigerio 57).

A logic of substitution The way in which the first generation of (À Suivre) authors saw the writing of a novel, even when they made no connection with comics, symmetrically reflects the position of their graphic works with regard to literature. The “novels in comics form” could invade literature in at least two ways: either by taking it over or by supplanting it. The nuance may seem subtle, but it is significant: comics are defined as a relay of literature when they take over from the literary medium by creating a derived graphic form, or as a substitute for literature when they attempt to replace it by revealing a literariness of their own (Baetens and Frey 178 and 209, Dürrenmatt 61, 200). In theory, these intermedia relationships are reciprocal; they apply to both (À Suivre) graphic novels and comics-​ related novels. At the end of the 1960s, Hugo Pratt had already conceived his comics series Corto Maltese in Italy following a logic of literary relay, i.e. establishing the adventure fiction genre and including numerous literary references25 (Leroy 256, Frigerio 51–​57). It is not surprising, therefore, that he encouraged (and himself indulged in) the novelistic transposition of his storyworld, which he could see as an ultimate relay handover between graphic and literary novels. In this way, the novelization Corto Maltese (published in French in 1996) constitutes a relay of the “novel in comics form” La Ballade de la mer salée [Ballad of the Salt Sea] (1975, first serialized in Italy from 1967 to 1969), insofar as it literarily transposes its story. As for Corto Maltese’s Memoirs, they extend the logic of literary relay characteristic of the comics album series that they are included in through their book format, contributing above all to pitching a character who fascinated the readers, by gathering and supplementing the biographical data scattered in the comics series. The present chapter has mainly highlighted such an intermedia handover, identifying a logic of supplement at work in many comics-​related novels. The same applies to (À Suivre) graphic novels, which, after the first experiments in substitution,26 have toned down their power struggle with literature, positioning themselves either as a relay for the popular novel (thus opting for the mainstream side of literature, far from the legitimacy to which the avant-​garde might aspire in the literary field), or as something other than literature. There is, however, another logic animating some of the novelistic self-​adaptations of bandes dessinées. A contemporary example of the above shows the opposite logic to that of supplement, namely a logic of substitution. Before contributing to (À Suivre) as copywriter and scriptwriter, François Rivière had scripted Le Rendez-​ vous de Sevenoaks [The Sevenoaks Rendezvous] for the comics artist Floc’h, which was serialized in Pilote Mensuel from April to

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  115 September 1977 and published as a standalone album the following year. As stated in the authors’ foreword, published only in the monthly comics magazine, their project “would also like to establish a mischievous relationship between comics and other genres through references”.27 Their hero, the young short-​story writer George Croft, investigates London’s literary circles in 1949, on the trail of a missing writer and playwright, Basil Sedbuk, who had plagiarized his own fantasy stories as long ago as 1926. This “anticipatory plagiarism” exacerbates the uncanny feeling of a reader discovering that a text “borrowed elements […] from future texts” (Bayard 244–​245). Several works over a period of 30 years have developed the fictional network of The Sevenoaks Rendezvous. The first of these, which does not explicitly refer to it, is the novel Fabriques [Factories], printed in September 1977, which was published under the sole signature of François Rivière. It was followed by a sequel in the same literary collection, “Fiction & Cie” at Seuil publishing house, entitled Le Dernier crime de Celia Gordon [Celia Gordon’s Last Crime] (1979). While a series such as Corto Maltese is rooted in comics (despite its adaptations across media) and focuses on “ ‘[p]‌itching a character’ [which] means creating a fictional individual who seems to possess a life of its own”, the fictional network set up by Rivière emancipates itself from comics, although it remains inside print culture, and aims “to pitch a whole world rather than a character” (Ryan 382–​383). The novels’ relationship with The Sevenoaks Rendezvous is neither that of a supplement nor of a novelization in the strict sense. The novelistic diptych could be read as a cryptonovelization, an implicit source of which would be the concomitant comics narrative. In the comics album, a journalist-​writer from the present, George Croft, investigates a writer-​ playwright from the past, Basil Sedbuk, who, like him, has written a collection of macabre short stories entitled Nightmares. Meanwhile, literary critic Francis Albany and mystery writer Olivia Sturgess follow, from afar, the tragic quest of their fellow short-​story writer. The novels tell the “night-​stories” of another novelist, Celia Gordon, i.e. the repressed sexual fantasies that irrepressibly haunt her nocturnal half-​sleeps. She can only interrupt them by falling into a deep sleep or leaving the bed to write. Her preface writer Francis Albany, for whom she has a platonic affection, participates in the same fantasy world, even though he suffers from sexual inhibitions like her. A facetious homodiegetic narrator mocks their prudishness, revealing to the reader what he imagines their respective desires to be, “under the disapproving eye of dear Celia Gordon and the utterly incensed eye of the literary critic” (Rivière, Fabriques 43). He dialogues indirectly with both gainsayers, who sometimes take over the narration. The main narrator portrays himself as a young man named Francis, thus partly confusing himself with Francis Albany. The relationship between the novels and the comics album is cryptic. In the first-​person narrative provided by the narrator, sexual repressions

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116  Why self-novelize a comic strip? become screenplays for pornographic films performed by young characters called the “children of the gardens”. In this way, both novels describe Celia Gordon’s writing practice as the filmmaking of a juvenile film crew.28 Yet the recurring motif of a mosaic of screens or photographs also refers to the comic strip or the photonovel. The narrator-​Francis likens to hopscotch the way he browses “all the surrounding images, [which] never stop changing” inside a “richly illustrated book” (Rivière, Dernier crime 48). I would like to draw a little picture here, write a couple of words below it, and I’d like us to leave it at that, forever. […] As you know from my first novel [Factories], I love to amaze you with crude details, short so-​called realistic sequences, and for this unreasonable, almost confusing purpose, I sometimes jump from one image to another as if I were myself wearing the famous sandals. (47–​48) Media memories of comics “haunt” (Ahmed 15) both novels, in a discreet but constant fashion. The novels describe the trompe-​l’œil of the film set like panels on a page, “this fascinating alignment, a sequence of attractive, shallow images, constantly served by a swarming gang of volunteer actors perfectly versed in the excesses of a perverse dramaturgy” (Rivière, Fabriques 42). When an actor needs to contact the screenwriter for a pornographic scene, he uses a payphone “that appears in that comic strip Joe likes so much” (15). Is it the Metropolis phone booths where Superman changes clothes or more likely the London booth where George Croft cancels his meeting with Francis Albany in The Sevenoaks Rendezvous? In the comic strip, the recitative that follows this phone call refers to Croft’s “enigmatic find” (Floc’h and Rivière 7): the collection of gothic short stories entitled Nightmares, which torments its owner in the same way that night-​stories haunt Celia Gordon in her dream-​books written by François Rivière. Moreover, some of the characters’ words in the novels appear in a literary transposition of comics speech bubbles. For example, when the actors reproach the novelist for portraying herself through “an inaccurate drawing”, they express their recrimination in a comics balloon: “NO, the latter shouted angrily, THREE TIMES NO, MRS. GORDON!” It’s a poster with jagged edges, a painted cardboard effigy, with garish colours and clumsy features, like the ones they put up in front of fairground stalls. There I am! she shouts. The inverted commas are opened wide. All the children are again attentive to the slightest noise, the slightest glimmer, the slightest movement of her pen. She narrates. (Rivière, Fabriques 28–​29) Despite their kinship, the works were received in separate ways. The scriptwriter Benoît Peeters attributes his vocation for comics writing to

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  117 the reading of the album The Sevenoaks Rendezvous, in 1978, in which he recognized only “faint coincidences with the novel” (Peeters, “Rendez-​ vous” 23) that could only be Factories. With regard to literary reception, Marie-​Anne Macé (20–​24) gives a substantial place to François Rivière’s two novels in her book on Le Roman français des années 1970 [The French Novel of the 1970s], but without addressing the comic strip. More recently, Jacques Dürrenmatt (30–​33, 130) compares the works by contrasting, on the one hand, a modern fiction that interweaves enunciative voices and focalizations, and on the other hand, a comics narrative whose plot is set in literary circles and which plays on a literary device of mise en abyme, while maintaining an imperative of readability and perpetuating the classic clear line style (notwithstanding a gory tone). However, in his comparative approach, Dürrenmatt pays little attention to the intermedia and transfictional interactions between the Nouveaux Romans and the comics album. To take one example, the key sequence of Albany and Gordon’s meeting in a private garden in Sevenoaks, told in both Factories (64–​65) and Celia Gordon’s Last Crime (55), presents a more conventional narrative than the rest of the two novels, setting up a focalization similar to that of the comic strip. The two passages told in the present tense are presented as additional information on Francis Albany, since “it is his biography that interests us” (Rivière, Dernier crime 55). They quickly trace the life histories of the two characters, focusing alternately on each of them, even reporting a dialogue between them “just as the behaviourists do”, i.e. limiting themselves “to simply reproducing their words and quietly informing the reader” (Sarraute 113).29 These passages from the novels are comparable to a three-​panel sequence (Floc’h and Rivière 42), in which the writer Olivia Sturgess30 tells her friend Francis Albany about her childhood encounter with the playwright Basil Sedbuk, in a Sevenoaks garden, at the time he was writing Nightmares. The woman of letters, by revealing her encounter with George Croft’s anticipatory plagiarist, suggests that she has a narrative responsibility for the whole story, since she has held the key to the mystery from the beginning, but she stops in time to avoid a metaleptic breach between the narrative levels. In this way, the comic strip blurs the distinction between narrator and character, with an alternation of focalizations that evokes the Nouveau Roman, even if it appears to safeguard the rigorous narrative and stylistic framework of the clear line. Without us knowing who is telling the story, the comic strip develops an “overwhelmingly metafictional quality […] through its graphic representation of the [potential] narrator[s]‌” (Geuzaine 122), whether it be Olivia Sturgess, Francis Albany, Basil Sedbuk or George Croft. The anonymous graphic storyteller has the gift of ubiquity but not omniscience, even while giving the impression of focusing on a hero (George Croft, whose inconsistency he will eventually denounce) and delivering the characters’ thoughts. In both novels, similarly, the narrative levels

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118  Why self-novelize a comic strip? are embedded without communicating with each other, because the many professional storytellers –​narrator, writer-​screenwriter, film director, book reviewer –​deliver their stories in external focalization. The homodiegetic narrator does not know the exact nature of the writer’s feelings for Francis Albany, whom he suspects of being homosexual, but he does not cross the narrative levels to address his questions directly to them. In sum, if François Rivière places the novelist at the “front of the text’s stage” (Macé 20), thanks to a polyphonic narration in the first person, it is in order to better denounce the artifices of novelistic fiction, and his narrator-​Francis is no more or less disembodied than the graphic storyteller is in The Sevenoaks Rendezvous. * ** At the end of this chapter, we can ask ourselves whether literary adaptation, as a cultural practice, does not reveal above all a “writerly strategy”, at least a “writer’s stance” (Baetens, “Adaptation” 43). From the post-​ war period onwards, self-​novelizations were not only motivated by the political-​ideological context, they were also driven by the will of writers. In the case of Jean Doisy, he made his literary debut in the mystery novel, a genre that enjoyed critical legitimacy and commercial success in occupied Belgium (Huftier 53–​ 55), taking advantage of the closure of the borders with France during the Second World War. The crime fiction that Doisy had been writing since the 1930s was the most legitimate facet of his literary career. He based his authorial stance on the main profession of a man of letters, without distinguishing his production as a journalist for the various magazines of the Dupuis publishing house from that of a writer for the collections of popular novels published by the same family of Belgian publishers-​printers. Significantly, when he wrote comics scripts out of necessity, while he was serving (without the title) as editor-​in-​chief of Spirou, he did so as a novelist. For Jean Valhardi’s investigations, the cartoonists Jijé and then Paape had to do the script breakdown themselves, almost performing the task of literary adapters, on the basis of the novel-​ like scripts provided to them by the writer-​journalist. Probably still dissatisfied with the graphic realization of his stories, Doisy seized the opportunity to write comics-​related novellas offered to him by The Great Stories Weekly at the end of the 1940s. In this way, despite the collaboration of an illustrator, he could reconcile the storytelling tasks –​separated between him and the artist in the comics’ production process –​as “complete authors” do (i.e. comics artists who combine scriptwriting and drawing). However, the scriptwriter did not take advantage of this to develop a recognisable writing style, and the same can be said of most of the authors of comics-​ related prose mentioned in this chapter (the main exception being, for this aspect as for many others, the literary writing of François Rivière). For the first Spirou editor-​in-​chief, the horizon of the comic strip was literary: its reading was to prepare children for reading novels, so it could

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  119 logically end up in literary adaptations. However, it was not yet conceivable that comics could inspire novels. Until the 1970s, comics-​related novels were at best aimed at teenagers, and the influence of comics on children’s literature remained suspect. The French children’s literature scholar Marc Soriano (73) considered Georges Chaulet’s novel series Les 4 As [The 4 Aces] and Fantômette to be “comics disguised as books and which have all the negative features of bad comics without their advantages”, concluding that this kind of children’s novel “unteaches to read”. He was not unaware that The 4 Aces had first appeared as novels (1957–​1962), written by Georges Chaulet and illustrated by François Craenhals, before the two authors turned them into a long-​running series of comics albums. The artist corroborated Soriano’s opinion, since he remembered that, at the time when The 4 Aces existed only in literary form, he had “pointed out to the Casterman publishing house that these Chaulet stories really do resemble comics scripts” (Craenhals quoted in Dayez 67). As time went on, writers’ interest in comics was no longer considered shameful. For example, the American writer Jerome Charyn, interviewed in (À Suivre) in 1980, declared his desire to write a graphic novel, which he did four years later by publishing The Magician’s Wife –​recipient of the Alfred award for best French album at the 1986 Angoulême festival –​ with the French comics artist François Boucq in the same magazine. He claimed that he had conceived an earlier novel as a comics script: I learned to read in comic books. I recently wanted to make one, and for practical reasons –​cost too high –​this project did not succeed. This is the text that Ramsay will soon publish in translation: The Franklin Scare. […] With regard to my novelistic technique (the rapid change from one scene to another), comics and cinema have a definite influence. (Charyn quoted in Weinzaepflen 101) Ten years later, Jerome Charyn explained to Frederic Tuten that the interview with the magazine (À Suivre) triggered his career as a graphic novelist in France (see Charyn quoted in Tuten, “An Interview” 96). He extended the commentary on his novel The Franklin Scare to his entire literary work: “what I think I’ve been doing throughout my entire life is writing comic books in novel form” (98). In contrast to the novels by writers inspired by comics, most of the promotion of novels by comics authors was focused on comics readers, far from the legitimizing agencies of the literary field. The artistic marginalization of these literary works is comparable to that of comics artists’ canvases in relation to the world of painting: Developing in a vacuum, almost detached from artistic evolution and the risks taken by plastic artists, “comics painting” is based on a

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120  Why self-novelize a comic strip? fundamental ambiguity: with few exceptions, its eventual success is due to the notoriety acquired elsewhere by the artist rather than to its own strength. (Schuiten and Peeters, L’Aventure des images 37) Even the novel Acknowledgement of Murders: Ric Hochet’s First Case, despite its autofictional form referring to literary history, was published in 2010 by a comics publisher:31 Le Lombard. At the time of its cartoonist’s death, it brought to a close the long-​running Ric Hochet series, which included a hundred or so pieces of literary prose and nearly 80 comics albums. The writing of an autobiographical novel bears witness to the anxieties of a comics writer who expresses himself in a medium that is not fully recognized as art, and could be suspected of a lack of credibility, whereas a written autobiographical novel –​thanks to the legitimation of literature –​may seem more reputable. For the octogenarian André-​Paul Duchâteau, it was also a question of revealing the literary coherence of a multimedia work begun in 1942 with A Murder for a Murder and rewarded in 1974 with the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. In contrast, Ric Hochet’s comics had achieved commercial success in inverse proportion to their critical recognition (see Tibet’s interview in Dayez, 84–​85, on this point). Paradoxically, Duchâteau gave Acknowledgement of Murders to his comics publisher, who had no experience in literary publishing and book distribution. Finally, this novel, like the majority of those that have been presented in this chapter, shows the convergence of the authors’ literary ambitions and the publishers’ efforts to maintain the place of comics heroes in media culture. On the basis that “adaptation truly is everywhere”, Jan Baetens (“Adaptation” 31) recently pointed out that the works themselves in today’s media culture “can only survive if they constantly migrate from one medium to another”.32

Notes 1 All citations from French-​language works included in the bibliography have been translated for the purposes of this book. 2 For Linda Hutcheon (118), novelizations offer “various supplements” to films, as “they provide insights into the characters’ thought processes and more details about their background. And, after all, that is what novels have always done well”. 3 Although in this chapter this concept will essentially refer to a phenomenon of intermedia seriality, its name evokes the “logic of supplementarity” coined by Jacques Derrida, which is no stranger to adaptation (Blin-​Rolland 7) and more specifically to novelization (Newell 32). For Jan Baetens, who has in mind published film scripts by Ingmar Bergman that he considers to be self-​ novelizations, “a novelization is a ‘supplement,’ that is, in the Derridean sense of the word, the addition of a ‘detail’ that reveals a lack or flaw in an existing ‘whole’ ” (Baetens, Novelization 177).

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  121 4 It was presented in this way in Spirou, on 6 February 1941: “Marc, Modern Hercules [a.k.a. Superman], having re-​established order in his country and given the readers of ‘Spirou’ a thousand thrilling adventures, retires from business, happy to take a rest for a while and to give way to Saint John Bosco, friend of young people” (reproduced in Pissavy-​Yvernault 9). 5 The “spoken novel” genre is mentioned in the subtitle of the literary serial, entitled Les Bandits aériens [The Air Bandits], before this remark addressed to the youth movement instructors: The following story is unpublished. It can be simply read, but it is interesting to involve the audience to a greater extent in the adventures of Valhardi, one of the big names of the “Journal de Spirou”. The text will benefit from being commented on. (reproduced in Pissavy-​Yvernault 35) 6 “Loi no. 49–​956 du 16 juillet 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse”, Journal officiel de la République française: Lois et décrets, no. 169, 18–​19 July 1949, pp. 7006–​7008. 7 “Recommandations de la Commission de contrôle”, Enfance, no. 6.5, 1953, p. 497. 8 Ibid., p. 501. 9 “Décret no. 50–​ 360 du 25 mars 1950 portant reconstitution de la commission paritaire des papiers de presse”, Journal officiel de la République française: Lois et décrets, no. 74, 26 March 1950, p. 3335. 10 Today, the website of the Joint Committee for Publications and Press Agencies (www.cppap.fr/​publi​cati​ons-​enfa​nts-​et-​de-​ban​des-​dessin​ees/​, accessed on 8 September 2022) requires that youth publications, as well as teen and adult comics magazines, have a minimum editorial content of 10 percent, and prohibits a single story from taking up more than half the total number of pages. 11 Fantax Magazine was released from June to November 1949, with 68 pages, in 13,5 × 21 cm format; The Great Stories Weekly ran from February 1948 to February 1950 and had 36 pages measuring 13,5 × 19 cm. 12 Even Spirou magazine occasionally serialized comics-​ related novels, for example Les Robinsons du rail [The Robinsons of the Railway] (1964) starring the weekly’s main characters Spirou and Fantasio, together with André Franquin’s antihero Gaston Lagaffe. 13 During the same period, Super Pocket Pilote (Lesage 278–​ 282) was a publishing experiment similar to Tintin Pocket Sélection. By no longer contenting themselves with stand-​alone gags and one-​or two-​page serial instalments, Tintin and Pilote sought to compete with the successful Pif Gadget model based on “complete stories”. 14 Advertisement in Tintin Pocket Sélection, no. 15, 1972, p. 72. 15 This is the opposite of film novelizations in general, where illustrations “reproduce or transform an already-​existing image” (Baetens, Novelization 55), whether they are posters, actor portraits, still photographs or photograms. 16 Significantly, seven of them have reappeared in their literary form since 2001, in complete reissues of the comics series. An eighth one, featuring the hero Corentin, under the pen of Jean Van Hamme, was adapted into comics by the cartoonist Christophe Simon: Les Trois perles de Sa-​Skya [Sa-​Skya’s Three Pearls] (2019, see Van Hamme, Mémoires 17).

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122  Why self-novelize a comic strip? 17 This was not his first “First Case”, since an isolated comics page published in Tintin in 1966 already bore this title and showed the hero at middle school age (Duchâteau and Tibet, Premières armes 29). 18 At the end of the 1960s, the Belgian publishing house Hallet tried to resurrect the collection Le Jury under the name Le Défi [The Challenge], under the editorship of Stanislas-​André Steeman, but it ended after four volumes, including a republication of André-​Paul Duchâteau’s A Murder for a Murder. 19 Similarly, on rereading his first novel, Notre pain de chaque nuit [Our Nightly Bread] (1998), the Beninese scriptwriter and writer Florent Couao-​Zotti (46–​ 47) noticed in retrospect an influence of the former practice on the latter: “I perceive some of these signs which, if they are not directly related to comics, nevertheless seem to establish a distant link with the genre: the use of short, visual scenes and the use of onomatopoeia”. 20 In the rest of the chapter, references to (À Suivre) will appear in brackets, indicating the page number after the monthly issue. 21 Similarly, as Paul Williams (131–​132) has shown, the role played by hard-​ boiled crime fiction, pulp fiction, or nineteenth-​century Realism in the literary reconceiving of American comics, from the 1970s onwards, “evidences the internalization of comics’ lowly social status and the dependency of the comics world on external cultural categories” (3). 22 From 1978 to 1982, about 30 original short stories and the same number of short stories already published elsewhere appeared, but there were no more until the monthly magazine disappeared in 1997. The unpublished pieces of prose were written by French journalist-​writers, such as Hervé Prudon, or writers close to the (À Suivre) team of artists, such as Jean Vautrin, along with only two comics authors (René Hausman and François Rivière), all of whom had in common the championing of genre fiction or the adventure novel. Note the presence of a short story by Marc Petit (AS 24), who would later participate in the literary movement of La Nouvelle Fiction [New Fiction], as well as a short story by Eugène Savitzkaya (AS 10), who was already recognized at the time as a poet and for two novels published by Minuit. 23 Some literary works written by (À Suivre) authors but not connected with comics: Gérard Dewamme, Les Saisons de la vie: Accordailles, illustrated by Jean-​ Claude Servais, Brussels, Le Lombard (Prestige), 1985; Jean-​ Claude Forest, Lilia entre l’air et l’eau, illustrated by Daniel Billon, Tournai, Casterman (L’ami de poche), 1983; Gérard Lauzier and Marie-​ Ange Guillaume, Le Voleur de dentelles, Paris, Olivier Orban, 1985; Philippe Paringaux, Privé d’amour, illustrated by Jacques de Loustal, Paris, Balland, 1997; Benoît Peeters, Omnibus, Paris, Minuit, 1976; Jacques Tardi, Rue des rebuts, illustrated by Jacques Tardi, Châtenay-​Malabry, Beaulet, 1990; Jean Teulé, Rainbow pour Rimbaud, Paris, Julliard (L’Atelier Julliard), 1991; Daniel Varenne, Accident, Périgueux, Fanlac, 1994. 24 In French literature, this type of “descriptive intertitles in the form of noun clauses” (Genette, Paratexts 300), in use since the end of the Middle Ages, had been popularized by François Rabelais and was still in vogue in nineteenth century comic novels, for instance in the novelization of Doctor Festus. In the case of Corto Maltese’s Memoirs, this recourse to dated chaptering did not tend towards the greatest literary legitimacy, but rather indicated “either the adoption of a narrative rhythm of a serial (and therefore ‘popular’

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Why self-novelize a comic strip?  123 […]) nature, or a parodic outlook that marks its distance from literature” (Frigerio 28). 25 These were in forms, namely long-​length narratives in black and white, to which the French public was not accustomed, to the point of seeing in them “the signs of a greater literariness of the comic strip”, whereas they resulted from the material constraints of the Italian popular press (Frigerio 46–​47). 26 Exemplified by the transmedia serialization of Schuiten and Peeters’ Obscure Cities, to which the conclusion of this book will return. 27 Foreword to “Le Rendez-​vous de Sevenoaks”, in Pilote Mensuel, no. 35, April 1977, p. 50. 28 In the comics album The Sevenoaks Rendezvous (Floc’h and Rivière 27–​29), Croft has a nightmare in which he sees himself sitting with Sedbuk in directors’ chairs in front of a film set on which Sturgess and Albany are dancing together. 29 This kind of novelistic dialogue was condemned by the Nouveau Roman. The writer Nathalie Sarraute (114) criticized “the short, brisk, lifelike conversations” which reminded her of “the heavily circled little clouds that issue from the mouths of the figures in comics supplement drawings”. 30 Celia Gordon and Olivia Sturgess can be compared, but not confused. In addition, to spice up the fictional networking, the novels take up the character of Sedbuk but bring him closer to Albany than to Gordon. 31 It is worth noting that few comics publishers have released comics-​related novels for adults. Exceptions exist, such as Didier Convard’s Neige: le sourire du fou [Snow: The Fool’s Smile] (1991), which was published by Glénat, or the novelizations co-​written by scriptwriters Patrick Cothias and Patrice Ordas, released from 2010 to 2012 by Grand Angle, the publishing house of their comics series: L’Œil des dobermans [Eye of the Dobermans], L’Ambulance 13, etc. Co-​publishing has been even less attempted, except when Glénat partnered with the literary publisher Mazarine to draw two novels from the Triangle secret comics universe: Les Larmes du Pape [The Tears of the Pope] (2006) and Les Cinq templiers de Jésus [The Five Templars of Jesus] (2007), both written by Didier Convard. 32 This Darwinian vision of adaptation is echoed by Armelle Blin-​ Rolland (101), who considers that “adaptation appears a necessary cultural practice”, building on Linda Hutcheon’s idea that “adaptation is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places” (Hutcheon 176).

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4 The comics heroes’ childhood told to children

While Alix l’intrépide [Alix the Intrepid], the first volume of the French sword-​ and-​ sandal comics series, begins with the Roman conquest of a city in the ancient Near East, its junior novelization opens with a bucolic scene: The edge of the wood opens onto a green esplanade. In the distance, the hills and valleys of the country of the Aedui and Sequani unfold. For his first solitary escapade outside the village walls, the child found a shady spot under the ash trees. (Hammerstein 7) Although based on the album, the 2004 novel of the same title opens with an original prologue in which the orphan hero dreams of his early childhood with his mother in Gaul, before waking up as a teenage slave in Khorsabad. The back cover announces that “[t]‌his first adventure of Alix the intrepid contains all the keys to the comic strip, which makes a dramatic entrance into children’s literature”.1 Indeed, in the rest of the novel, as in the comics album, a Roman patrician reveals to the hero his rank as a Gallic chieftain and adopts him just before he dies. This maiden narrative changes the character’s civil status from Assyrian slave to Gallo-​Roman aristocrat, which it sets –​like his age and appearance –​definitively. While the portrayal of a comics hero’s past was not common in twentieth-​century French-​language comics, the prologue to Alix the Intrepid novelization shows an evolution in the approach to their childhood.2 This final chapter considers two questions: how do you narrate a comics hero’s childhood in literary form and how do you do it for young readers? It will begin with a comparison between the literary reboots of Spider-​ Man that have flourished in France since 2002 –​ containing endless accounts of the superhero’s origins –​and prequels about twentieth-​century French-​speaking comics heroes, particularly the picture book How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion When He Was a Little Boy (1989), narrated by Asterix. We will then move on to reading a teen novel L’Écume de l’aube, la première aventure de Yoko Tsuno [The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno] (1991), written DOI: 10.4324/9781003388210-5

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  125 by the author of the popular comics series. For Roger Leloup, the literary prequel was one of many ways that he had already used in his work to complete the biography of his Belgian-​Japanese heroine. The last third of the chapter will examine “confession novelizations” (Grignon 109) for learner readers, which take the form of literary autobiographies of comics child heroes. These French junior novelizations, published since the 2000s in the wake of the commercial success of the Titeuf (known in English as Tootuff) series of novels, are illustrated autodiegetic stories (narrated in the first person by their hero) for young readers, whose publication coincided with the broadcasting of the televised cartoons adapted from the same comics. All the literary narratives studied in this chapter relate the childhood of French-​speaking comics heroes for children and teenagers and do not specifically target adult fans.

How to relate the past of comics heroes Chapter 2 approached, among other novelizations of Hergé’s fictional universe, that of the film The Adventures of Tintin written by Alex Irvine. The American publishers of the novel, Little, Brown & Co, also published in 2016 and 2017 a dozen other adaptations by the same novelizer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When reading the blurbs of these novels, which develop the transmedia universe built on superhero comics, we can easily deduce similarities with the American portrayal of the characters in The Adventures of Tintin. They follow a strict narrative pattern when relating the heroic origins of several heroes from the Marvelverse: Before he was the Incredible Hulk, Dr Bruce Banner was a renowned scientist. Now in hiding from the US military, he’s on the hunt for a cure to the gamma radiation that poisoned his body and releases his unbridled rage. When a new, stronger foe named the Abomination rears his head back home, [etc.]. (Irvine, Hulk back cover) Before he became one of our planet’s finest defenders, Thor was once just a powerful and arrogant royal from another realm. Robbed of his powers and sent to Earth to live among humans, Thor learns much about humility. His newfound strength is tested when a villain [etc.]. (Irvine, Thor back cover) In this series of novels, Irvine tells similar origin stories: a fallen hero, whose downfall is caused by a flaw that is deeply rooted in his personal history (when violent, the Incredible Hulk externalizes the suppressed rage of a child who was beaten; Thor’s strength reminds him of his arrogance as a divine young warrior), uses his superhuman powers as a shield against enemies of humanity. This account of the heroes’ origins takes on

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126  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children mythical proportions, just like the story of Superman’s heroic origins,3 which has been told through many different media (including a novelization that dates back to 1942). In Anglo-​ American superheroes’ transmedia universes, the multimedia retelling of the heroes’ origin story allows additional readers to be regularly introduced, dispensing them from reading the many previous episodes. Sometimes, in the case of the reboot (Saint-​Gelais 395–​396), the recalling of the founding story even makes a clean break with the past. No superhero universe seems to avoid it, not even the graphic Bildungsroman (Gordon 268) of Peter Parker, alias Spider-​Man. Since the character’s creation in 1962, his comic books have been constituting his coming-​of-​age novel, from his early adolescence to his life as a married man, providing both a serial and biographical perspective on him. A number of literary interpolations have added episodes to the superhero’s life. The American librarian Robert Weiner (262–​268) listed 30 of them between 1965 and 2005, making Spider-​Man the most novelized Marvel superhero, after the X-​Men, over this period. In the late 1970s, he took his first steps in literature with a Big Little Book, followed by two volumes of a series of novels centred on Marvel characters. The series was launched with a Spider-​Man novel prefaced by its creator, Stan Lee. [I]‌t took a long time. But we’ve finally reached this dizzying plateau. You now hold in your hand… the first Spider-​Man novel! Few people could be better qualified to author this landmark edition than Marv Wolfman and Len Wein. They have both served as editors and written Spider-​Man stories while in the Marvel bullpen. […] So let’s lose ourselves in a new and different reading experience as we leave our own improbable universe to enter the real world–​the fresh and fascinating world of the amazing Spider-​Man! (Lee’s preface to Wein and Wolfman 8–​9) The reader was invited by the preface writer to immerse himself in the fictional universe, as he was used to do when reading the comic books, without being confused by “a new and different reading experience”. The two pocket books dedicated to Spider-​Man in this “Marvel Novel Series” were mainly aimed at fans, offering them original stories that were integrated in the serial continuity of the comics they knew. The first one was presented as “An instant collector’s item: Spidey’s first full-​length novel!” (Wein and Wolfman, back cover). After a dip in the 1980s, 21 Spider-​Man prose novels published between 1994 and 2002 continued to be linked to the universe of the comic books series, adding new episodes. Robert Weiner gives some opinions on these novels, collections of short stories and choose-​your-​own-​adventure books. While limiting himself to recommending “canons”4 which he identifies by their (sales) success with fans, he briefly argues his opinions for lesser-​known novels. He especially appreciates the deepening of Peter

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  127 Parker’s psychology, as well as any additional biographical information on secondary characters. He applauds, for example, Adam-​Troy Castro for “a fantastic trilogy” in which the writer pulls the Sinister Six out of retirement: “the author gives insight into Spider-​Man’s psyche, and provides interesting background information about several other characters” (Weiner 263). Regretting only a few “obscure references to several characters from [non-​comics] popular culture”, the librarian passes on the overall opinion of the “Publishers Weekly, which says that these novels ‘uphold the Marvel tradition’ ” (264). While he disapproves of thematic mixes, he does not disdain a creative blending of literary genres, for example when one novel provides articles about Spider-​Man in the Daily Bugle newspaper or another gives excerpts from the private diary of the villain Lizard. These novels are aimed at fans, as they all tend to induce serial reading by integrating the comic book series. Whether such a literary adaptation develops an existing plot or embroiders a new one, starting from a pre-​ existing diegesis, it implements a “logic of serial variation” (Letourneux 395). As a transfictional process (Saint-​Gelais 7), serialization postulates the persistence of the diegetic world beyond the closure of each work inscribed in the same series. The Spider-​Verse is based on a founding story which is the main gateway to serial reading. Unlike the novels of the same period, the adaptations into television series broadcast in the late 1970s in the United States, one animated and the other live-​action, revived the story of Spider-​Man in its early days, while the original comic books were republished in chronological order. These adaptations and republications were intended to introduce Spider-​Man to a new audience in the United States and abroad. Indeed, the television series, reserved for American television, gave rise to three films for export, which were shown in French movie theatres.5 This strategy of conquering a new audience was amplified from the beginning of the twenty-​first century. Unlike all the previous novels, the last six books on Robert Weiner’s list, published between 2002 and 2004, did not relate original adventures. On the contrary, they retold “the origin story” and “everything in the Spider-​ Man mythos” (Weiner 267), either by novelizing the contemporary blockbusters directed by Sam Raimi, or by taking the point of view6 of the superhero’s wife, Mary Jane Watson, in connection with the new Ultimate Spider-​Man Universe. At the turn of the twenty-​first century, Marvel broke with four decades of serial continuity by relaunching Peter Parker’s comic book misadventures at their starting point, under the new “Ultimate Spider-​Man” label. Subsequently, several cartoon TV series and two film reboots –​Sam Raimi’s trilogy (2002–​2007) and Marc Webb’s two films (2012–​2014) –​adopted the same strategy to reach the widest possible audience. Remarkably, the Bibliothèque nationale de France [National Library of France] online catalogue shows the existence of only four French translations of the 30 novels listed by Weiner before 2005, and these are novelizations of Raimi’s films. Since then, a flood

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128  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children of Spider-​Man novels for young readers,7 starting from its heroic genesis, has reached the French-​speaking book market. These include both translations and French creations. Although a mythical tale is the foundation of most transmedia superhero universes, such a tale is not common in French-​language comics.8 In the American manner of Hulk’s and Thor’s blurbs cited above, the text on the jacket of the first edition of The Adventures of Tintin: A Novel presents the old seadog Archibald Haddock as a penniless aristocrat who has to face “enemies and great danger at every turn” (Irvine, Adventures front flap) to recover his inheritance. To emphasize the character’s downfall, Haddock was initially portrayed in the film and its novelization –​ that mainly adapt the two-​part adventure of The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure –​as an alcoholic ship captain robbed of his ship’s command. This is exactly how we first encounter him in the earlier album The Crab with the Golden Claws. Suffering from alcoholic amnesia, which caused him to lose his riches and forget his own family history, “Captain Haddock wasn’t bold and resourceful like his ancestors” (Irvine, Adventures 131). By contrast, the true hero –​Tintin, the eternal child –​seems to be beyond reproach, with no ties and no past. According to Jean-​Marie Apostolidès (13, 85), the probable orphan has to “invent a family of his own choosing, i.e. a brotherhood” and he founds this family in the two-​part adventure of The Unicorn, by leading all its members (Tintin, Snowy, Haddock, Calculus, Thompson and Thomson) in search of signs of a common ancestor: Sir Francis Haddock. A direct descendant of the seventeenth-​century French corsair, Captain Haddock plays a key role in the reconstruction of the past they all share. This biographical perspective only came after ten albums of Tintin’s adventures which had revealed nothing of the characters’ past. It could explain Steven Spielberg’s choice of the two central albums of the series, together with The Crab with the Golden Claws, for his first adaptation aimed at an audience potentially unfamiliar with Hergé’s comics. Similarly, Tintin’s first albums translated in Britain and the United States in the late 1950s were the three chosen by the American director, plus King Ottokar’s Sceptre.9

The literary prequels of French comics characters The heroes of twentieth-​ century Franco-​ Belgian comics were usually introduced without biographical background, but with immutable properties (age, personality, language, etc.). The relationships that the hero established with new characters could enrich the actantial system, but after the account of the encounter, they no longer varied in later instalments. In short, time has no bearing on these fundamentally serial characters. According to Umberto Eco (20), the appearance of literary figures such as Fantômas in the Belle Époque inaugurated the era of “inexhaustible characters” in Western popular literature. If a perfect example of the

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  129 superhero type such as Superman was born in a mythical tale, retold over and over again, which went back to his early extraterrestrial childhood to explain the origin of his superpowers, he stabilized in adulthood to live action-​packed adventures out, during which he overcame all kinds of challenges full of unexpected events, but which left no residual marks on him. Paradoxically, this mythical hero immersed in the space and time of his readers must, unlike them, “remain ‘inconsumable’ and at the same time be ‘consumed’ according to the ways of everyday life” (Eco 16). The heroes of Franco-​Belgian comics seemed even less alterable than their American counterparts, especially as they were devoid of their mythical and mutant properties. Never changing their looks, keeping even their clothes, most of these French-​ speaking heroes were never born, and never aged or died. Admittedly, some subterfuges have made it possible to give a genealogy or the beginning of a biography to some of them: Alix investigated witnesses who had known his missing parents; Timour and Corentin travelled through time via ancestors or descendants who had a similar appearance to them; Spirou and Lucky Luke lived their childhood through avatars (Little Spirou, Kid Lucky) stabilized at the age of primary schools. In comparison, Thorgal and Buddy Longway looked like forerunners when, after becoming fathers, they received their own origin story in comics form, respectively in Child of the Stars (1984) and Le Dernier rendez-​vous [The Last Rendezvous] (1987). A belated development in the history of Franco-​Belgian comics, this biographical approach to the characters nevertheless fascinates their literary adapters. Accounts of heroic origins are much more common in novels than in the comics from which they were taken. These prequels serve the same teleological purpose as a Bildungsroman, i.e. defining the characters’ final personality, generally re-​establishing the chronology of biographical events to bring the novel full circle. The first chapter of the novel L’Enfant des étoiles [Child of the Stars] (2009) –​which takes its title from the seventh Thorgal album, although it changes the chronological order of the adventures scattered over several others –​introduces the virile hero as a newborn, combining the biblical stories of the sacrifice of Jonah and the birth of Moses with the story of Superman’s origins. Having miraculously survived a storm at sea, the crew of a Viking longship come across a floating metal crib, fallen down from the sky. Inside, the ship’s captain finds “a baby as naked as a jaybird, screaming at the top of its lungs […] as though the child had just been brought into this world by his own wife” (Sarn 15); the Viking adopts him and gives him two mythological names: Thorgal Aegirsson. Coming after several adventures of the adult hero, this prequel (initially a comic strip and then adapted as a novel) offers a fictional addition to the comics series that is really quite different from a founding story. A more striking example is the story How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion When He Was a Little Boy. In this literary prequel, we discover the origins of the superhuman strength of Obelix, which, according to

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130  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children Chris Reyns-​ Chikuma (355–​ 356), makes him one of the few French superheroes, admittedly satirical and parodical, but the only (or almost only) one who has not fallen into oblivion. Unlike the other inhabitants of the Gallic village who resist Roman occupation, Obelix (the obese sidekick of the hero Asterix) does not need to drink the potion that makes you invincible because –​as he is briefly reminded in each album –​he fell into it when he was a little boy and the effects on him are permanent. The prose story of this event in Asterix’s and Obelix’s childhood was given two pages, written by René Goscinny and with three illustrations by Albert Uderzo, in the 20 May 1965 issue of the weekly comics magazine Pilote. In 1989, on the initiative of Uderzo, who added significantly more illustrations, it was published (without textual changes) in the form of a children’s picture book of around 30 pages. This new format aimed the story at an audience younger than the readers of Asterix comics, even though the piece of prose was aimed at both children and their parents.10 When first published, Pilote announced an exclusive revelation about a mystery that had been intriguing its readers. As such, the story satisfied a pre-​existing demand, adapting to the language of the readers of a magazine for young people, without neglecting older readers, just as the Asterix albums had done previously. In the preface to the picture book (“To the reader”), Uderzo reminds us that “[t]‌he Asterix strip cartoons had been appearing for six years at this time [1965], and Asterix and Obelix themselves are about six years old in this story, which is told by Asterix himself” (Goscinny, How Obelix 5). The children’s book appears to be targeting readers of this age. Although it follows the children’s picture book model, the layout and format, apart from the smaller number of pages, are those of the comics album series. Like the story book of the animated film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix11 (1976, translated in 1978), How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion incorporates the comics album series without itself falling into the comics medium, which is why collectors catalogue it as a “hors-​série”. Nicolas Rouvière did not believe it possible to adapt this literary tale into comics because it was such a good fit for the children’s picture book genre. The French literary scholar argues that it is particularly suitable for this medium –​and therefore representative of a mediagenic narrative –​ because of an “advent of time” in the course of the story, evolving from a timeless iterative narrative to a captioned dialogue that involves a continuous immediate present, thereby explaining why the work illustrates “a birth into the comics medium” (Rouvière 55–​57). In the picture book, Albert Uderzo himself supplemented the large illustrations on each double page with captions, opposite René Goscinny’s text, which transcribe the direct speech of the characters shown. This media dispositive is reminiscent of the old satirical or literary captioned engravings, which were part of the “cultural series” (Gaudreault and Marion 183) that passed through the crucible from which comics emerged in the nineteenth century. Thus, in this picture book, which concludes with the words “The

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  131 End… or the beginning”, the emergence of the dialogue scene, between text and image, would be inextricably linked to the birth of Asterix in comics form. Goscinny’s text moves towards the contemporary literary model of his own collection of Nicholas short stories (1960–​1964). The first half of the French version of How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion is dominated by an iterative narrative in the imperfect tense (used here to indicate repeated actions in the past), all related by Asterix, with no dialogue between the characters. However, this passage in the middle of the text marks a change of style: “Obélix sera le Romain ! me répondit Gommarabix. Nous, on sera les Gaulois, et Obélix sera le gros de la troupe ennemie !” Moi je ne voulais pas, mais tous les autres ont crié: “Par Toutatis !”, “Par Bélénos !” et ils ont sauté sur ce pauvre Obélix, qui les regardait très étonné. Bien sûr, je l’ai défendu, et, franchement, ce fut une assez belle bagarre. Mais, quand les autres en ont eu assez, mon bon Obélix, assis par terre, avait un œil poché, il saignait du nez, et il pleurnichait. “Ça ne peut pas continuer comme ça, j’ai dit à Obélix. Il faut que tu apprennes à te défendre”. (Goscinny, Comment Obélix 22) “Obelix can be the Roman!” said Bionix. “We’ll be the Gauls, and Obelix can be a large body of troops”. I didn’t want to play, but all the others shouted, “By Toutatis!” and “By Belenos!” and they jumped on poor Obelix, who was looking at them in great surprise. Of course I defended him, and to be honest, it was a really good punch-​up. But when the others had had enough, poor old Obelix was left sitting on the ground with a black eye and a nosebleed, sniffling. “This can’t go on”, I told Obelix. “You’ve got to learn to defend yourself”. (Goscinny, How Obelix 20) In this passage, the literary effect achieved by addressing children in their own language rounds off the construction perfectly. In the French text, the main tense switches to the passé composé, a perfect tense still combined with an imperfect that is no longer iterative but singulative (relating to a one-​off event). This, together with the numerous instances of reported speech from this point onwards, enables us to follow more closely the sequence of events being related, just like in comics narratives. In literary story, the narrative mode is actualized, based on its own situation of utterance: Asterix “relates the facts as a witness, as a participant” (Benveniste 210), thanks to a combination of past tenses that link the event being recounted to the present tense narrative, the standard comics narrative tense. However, the oral style of the literary story does not find its inspiration solely in the comics albums of Uderzo and Goscinny.

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132  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children Obviously, the second part of the text of How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion has been influenced by the Nicholas children’s stories, which René Goscinny and the press cartoonist Jean-​Jacques Sempé had also published in Pilote. I will come back to this at the end of the chapter. Unlike the founding stories of foreign franchises such as Spider-​Man, which allow for reboots, most of the biographical prequels of Franco-​ Belgian comics series are told retrospectively, once and for all. You do not need to know them before you begin to read the series because, as the series progresses, Thorgal’s extraordinary otherness and Obelix’s superhuman strength are presented to the reader as established facts and are to be accepted without further explanation. Over the course of the albums, loyal readers can build up an encyclopaedic knowledge of the fictional universe by picking up information scattered throughout the series, but no prior knowledge is required. Although talking about the past of a Franco-​Belgian comics hero might appear unusual, in the twentieth century, it seemed that literature lent itself to this practice better than comics. The fascination of novelizers for biographical add-​ons could be related to the secondary status of novelization, which cannot be considered as part of the canon but can claim the status of “hors-​série”, in collectors’ jargon, a standalone non-​series book, literally “outside of the [comics] series”.

Multiple childhoods of a Belgian-​Japanese comics heroine It was in a novel – L ​ ’Écume de l’aube, la première aventure de Yoko Tsuno [The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno] (1991) –​that the comics artist Roger Leloup decided to tell the story of his heroine’s childhood and adolescence, a decision he justified in an interview: A hero is not a fully rounded character without a past, a family. This is what I wanted to give her. Because this is something very intimate, I could only do it through written work and not through comics. When you create a comic strip, the characters are intrinsically linked to their action. If you write a novel, you can enter their minds. (Leloup, À propos 38) A recent article (Bauwens 181) reported the surprise of Japanese journalists when, in 2010, they discovered that Yoko Tsuno was their most famous compatriot in Belgium and yet her albums had not been translated in Japan. The Belgian sci-​fi series introduced Japanese culture to a generation of French-​speaking baby-​boomers –​apparently a majority of female readers (if we are to believe Bauwens 185) –​who had been teenagers before French manga translations surged in popularity (a craze that has been going strong since the mid-​1990s). The octogenarian Belgian comics artist Roger Leloup has for 50 years been striving to give his heroine Yoko Tsuno more biographical background and psychological

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  133 depth. One of the many tools he used to do this was the literary prequel The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno. This teen novel has not been translated into English, unlike the album series, which the British publisher Cinebook has been translating since 2007. The French-​language sci-​fi series –​with 30 albums to date –​has centred around a female Asian character since its inception in 1970, when the heroes of Franco-​Belgian comics were predominantly male, white and European, and had barely broken away from the “Yellow Peril” prejudice. Roger Leloup gave his heroine the first name and features of a French actress of Japanese origin, Yoko Tani, and the surname “Tsuno”, taken at random from a map of Japan.12 In 1970 she appears to be around the age of 20 when she makes an appearance in Spirou magazine with two male sidekicks of the same generation. As the albums progress, the character matures imperceptibly but her features defy the passing of the years, particularly since the theme of eternal youth permeates this sci-​fi series. For instance, in The Curious Trio (1972) and On the Edge of Life (1977), several girls and young women, having spent decades or centuries in slumber, are reawakened thanks to a technology that stopped them ageing. Apart from her two European male assistants, the heroine’s affinities lie primarily with female characters, as Alain Boillat (“Yoko” 212) observes: whereas the male characters, if they cannot be traced back in some way to Yoko’s family circle (father, uncle, father’s friend) or associated, as in the case of scientists, with the maternal function of giving birth, are mostly hostile to her. Yoko Tsuno’s homosociality stems from her solidarity with these sisters, who often originate from another place or time, and so are immigrants like her (since she moved from her native Japan to Europe). Through mirror effects, which drive mutual empathy, Yoko can recognize their otherness, at times coming closer to them through unconscious imitation (when she adopts their style of dress). Specifically, she surrounds herself with several protégées who are about five years old and goes as far as to adopt one of them. The children take on the same visual identity as the heroine in their adventures with her, as can be seen in the similar postures and clothes of Poky and Yoko on the covers of The Light of Ixo (1980) and The Archangels of Vinea (1983), and of Morning Dew and Yoko on the covers of The Dragon of Hong Kong (1986) and Les Exilés de Kifa [The Kifa Exiles] (1991). At a later date, Roger Leloup (quoted in Couvreur 25) stated that he gave the first name of one of these fictional little girls, Annick in the untranslated Aventures électroniques [Electronic Adventures] (1974), to the five-​year-​old Korean girl he himself adopted. Yoko’s adoption of Morning Dew thus takes on an autobiographical resonance for the author, who sees her as both the daughter (or little sister) and a double of Yoko.

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134  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children For me, these characters are a way of giving Yoko a childhood. In my mind, Morning Dew is very much Yoko as a child. That’s the wonder of comics! You really can give birth to the ideal child, the one you wanted to have. (Leloup quoted in Couvreur 24) Alongside childhood by proxy, Roger Leloup uses a more classic sci-​fi method to piece together Yoko’s biography. In The Time Spiral (1981), the heroine meets a female teenage time traveller and uses her machine to go back in time. The album tells the story of their 1943 trip to Indonesia to destroy an underground compound where research is being carried out on anti-​matter, which, it is thought, will cause the end of the world in a distant future. They find themselves consciously facing the grandfather paradox devised by French sci-​fi writer René Barjavel13 and popularized in the American film Back to the Future (1985). Although she had not yet been born in the 1940s, there Yoko Tsuno meets a maternal great-​uncle who had died at the end of the war, and who was supervising the anti-​ matter work for the Japanese army. When she introduces herself to him in 1943, he puts her in contact with her future mother, then aged 13, by phoning her. When Yoko refuses to talk to her, her great-​uncle picks up the phone and says to his niece, “One day you’ll get married and you’ll have children!… Of course!… Have you already thought of a name for your daughter?… Yes?… YOKO?!!… Of course I approve!” (Leloup, Time Spiral 33). Once back in her own time, the heroine calls her mother, who confirms the strange conversation in 1943 did happen and explains her choice of name, “I stammered ‘Yoko.’ It was my favourite doll’s name!… When you came into the world, I thought back to my uncle” (45).

Close reading: The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno Perhaps to avoid the time paradoxes inherent in the heroine’s travels into her own past, Roger Leloup came up with another way of delving deeper into her biography: he wrote a literary prequel. He had novel-​writing experience, since he used to write his scripts as novels first, then extract “the quintessence” of them to create his comics (Leloup, À propos 41 and 45), and had already published a first sci-​fi novel, Le Pic des ténèbres [The Peak of Darkness] (1989). In the preface to his second novel, L’Écume de l’aube [The Froth of Dawn] (1991), the author placed its origins eight years further back in time, i.e. in 1983. At the time, he was facing a veto from Dupuis, the publisher of the comics album series that held the adaptation rights. Wishing, despite this, to try his hand at writing, he embarked on another novel about an extra-​terrestrial android’s mission to Earth in the Middle Ages, which was completely separate from Yoko Tsuno’s storyworld. This is how the comics artist remembers his encounter with

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  135 the director14 of the “Travelling” book series in March 1988, who would publish his two novels: When it [the typescript of The Peak of Darkness] was finished, I sent a copy to Laffont and Hachette… no response, but at the Brussels Book Fair I met Arnaud de la Croix, whom I knew from his articles on comics. He was also working at Duculot and asked me if I would consider writing a novel for them. I said “I’ll bring it to you!” (Leloup quoted in Martens IV) In 1990 The Peak of Darkness was awarded what is now the Grand Prix de l’imaginaire in the “Children’s novel” category. In view of this literary success, Dupuis authorized the publication of The Froth of Dawn in the same collection, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Yoko Tsuno series, seeing it as a “form of complementary advertising” (Martens VI). Brought out by the Belgian publisher Duculot in the same teen novels series, the two works have many points in common: layout of the collection, paperback format, pencil illustration on the covers, syntactic structure of the titles. While there are no illustrations inside The Peak of Darkness, in The Froth of Dawn the font is larger and there are several full-​page illustrations to make up for the shorter text –​the first novel had around 78,600 words, compared with 53,900 in the second. As a result, both volumes are of the same thickness, which was unusually large in the “Travelling” series. Roger Leloup explains, “I wrote this in the style I liked to read as a boy” (Leloup quoted in Martens IV). He refers to Jules Verne,15 the nineteenth-​century French science fiction writer, whose technical inspiration leaves its mark on his comics and whose style influences his literary writing. The comics artist also remembers that he followed the same process when writing his two literary works: I had a friend who typed up the texts, editing them at the same time. She used to come every morning and write down the story I dictated to her without knowing what I was going to tell her the next day […], because if I had had to put pen to paper, I would have got distracted tweaking the text and thus lost all spontaneity. (Leloup, À propos 41–​43, see also Martens IV) The events of the literary expansion, The Froth of Dawn, take place prior to the comics album’s narrative arc. The subtitle The First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno links this literary prequel to the instalments of the series, but this coming-​of-​age novel is not so much an episode as a story of how it all began. The heroine had already returned to the house where she was born, in the ninth comics album entitled Daughter of the Wind (1979). At the time her father, a geophysicist, was competing with another Japanese scientist to create and control typhoons. However, by putting a number of obstacles in her way, the narrative delays Yoko’s

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136  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children reunion with her father and even more so with her mother –​described as living “as always, in the shadow of [her] father and his scientific team” (Leloup, Daughter 16) –​since she only makes a fleeting appearance as a housewife on the last page. In this album, Yoko spends more time with her former master, the gardener of a Buddhist monastery near the family home. Named Aoki, this friend of her grandfather “raised [her] in place of [her] father, too busy… of [her] mother, overworked” (15). However, only a recall scene when they are reunited and a three-​panel flashback (showing Yoko as a child) refer back to her apprenticeship with Aoki (15–​16 and 30–​31). Noticing that the adventure had eclipsed the biography, Roger Leloup took up his biography project again with a novel, recounting a “first adventure” written in the past tense, which follows the heroine from her early childhood until an initiatory trip to Hong Kong, after she graduated as an electronics engineer. Before embarking on her studies in Tokyo, she fulfilled the lifelong quest of her grandfather, a pearl oyster farmer, by finding a transparent pearl called “the froth of dawn” just before he died. We learn in the foreword to the novel that this symbolizes Yoko’s childhood, just as dawn begins each day, and the oyster pearl mysteriously darkens at the end of the story. The last words are “she had come, as a child, to this southernmost tip of China and she left as an adult. […] She had the world at her fingertips and a great thirst for discovering it” (Leloup, Écume 279). Most of The Froth of Dawn takes place in the Tsuno family home on a fictional rural Japanese peninsula, which is also the setting for the Daughter of the Wind. There is as yet no sci-​fi element, although Yoko’s geophysicist father already has his own lab beneath the house. Whereas he quells typhoons in Daughter of the Wind, he remains powerless against the one that ravages the island during the novel. He has two sisters living nearby and he lives with his father and spouse, a housewife, in the large Tsuno family home. In 1950s Japan, this was the traditional family model that would shortly be challenged by the rural exodus and the nuclearization of the Japanese family. The illustrations in the novel show us people in traditional dress; even Yoko herself does not dress in Western style before her final trip to Hong Kong. Her paternal grandfather married his Hong Kong servant, Yoko’s grandmother, who died shortly before she was born. The Tsuno family unites Japanese and Chinese cultures through this British colony, which was handed back to China in 1997. The novel does not refer to Japan’s expansionist past, ignoring both the victims of Hiroshima and those of the War of the Empire. There is, however, mention of the husband of a paternal aunt of Yoko who died in combat “at the end of this senseless war, just before the monstrous bomb was dropped on Hiroshima” (Leloup, Écume 46). But his memory is treated in a burlesque way. Little Yoko is playing with the soldier’s funeral urn and accidently scatters his ashes in the family garden. Her grandfather helps her replace them with the ashes from a wood fire to trick her aunt, who has an obsessive devotion to the urn. When her

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  137 niece was eight years old, she had been a war widow for 20 years, which places Yoko’s childhood in the “high increase” phase (1955–​1972) of the Japanese Economic Miracle. Although the narrative is heterodiegetic, the retrospective storytelling focuses on Yoko’s memories. For the first years of her life, the narrator admits that “it is difficult to reconstruct life’s very early memories. […] Everything Yoko knew about her family she had gleaned from conversations she had heard” (Leloup, Écume 11). Her parents had conceived their only daughter after living together for 10 years. Her mother, the gentle Masako, who had hoped for a son, was taken by surprise at the unexpected birth of this daughter. So, because she had not thought of a name for her, she chose that of her favourite doll as a child, calling her Yoko. (13–​14) We have seen that this was already a key detail in The Time Spiral. Similarly, in the comics album On the Edge of Life (42–​43), the heroine, recovering from a gunshot wound, says she feels “like… a doll… a broken one”, because the doctors “had to open the ‘doll’ to repair it”, but she suffers no ill effects: “the healing from [her] operation is total and perfect”. If American superheroes’ plasticity enable them to undergo spectacular metamorphoses, despite the mutants’ inner struggle to take control of their body, the transformation of Franco-​Belgian comics heroes is limited to temporary changes of clothes. For instance, Tintin dresses for the mission ahead but for the rest of the time reverts to his usual beige plus-​fours and blue sweater. And yet Yoko Tsuno changes her outfit so often that, in the cartoonist’s hands, she becomes “a kind of doll that can be dressed in various ways, just like the toys of the little girls reading the book” (Boillat, “Yoko” 214). This creates a tension between the status of playful object and that of narrative subject. Nevertheless, while these outfits accentuate her femininity –​always within the limits of decency –​ Yoko systematically outperforms her male companions and enemies in her intrepid actions. Born in the young Japanese democracy, the electronics engineer breaks free from her patriarchal guardians. For her comics adventures, she remains around the age of 20 and for a long time does not envisage love or motherhood, believing neither of them compatible with the independence required for adventure. In the literary prequel, she is promised to a childhood friend, Shinzi, whom she refuses to marry when she learns of his affection for another girl. He and Yoko save a little boy, Kio, from drowning in a scene that becomes a metaphor for the birth of the child they will never conceive. Kio battled against the liquid death that was filling his lungs and clung frantically to Yoko. They would both have gone under if Shinji,

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138  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children in a few strokes, had not joined them. […] A moment later, Kio was lying on the fine sand like a sodden rag doll. One of the fishermen rhythmically folded and unfolded his arms over his chest. Kio shook his head from side to side, coughed, spat and, in an anxiety-​filled wheeze, restarted his little lungs. Someone brought a blanket and the shivering child was wrapped in it. (Leloup, Écume 100–​103) The scene is illustrated with a pencil drawing (Figure 4.1) in a style that, despite the different technique, is not unlike the ink drawings in comics. The illustrations in The Froth of Dawn are extremely accomplished sketches with clean contour lines (no signs of retouching) and intricately detailed reliefs and shadows. The choice of pencil drawing ties in with Roger Leloup’s perception of writing, which he compares to an outline that readers can change by inking it (figuratively speaking) themselves. He justifies the lack of illustrations, with the exception of the pencil drawing on the cover, in his previous novel, The Peak of Darkness, as follows: Each page brought its own image, though I did not wish to illustrate the volume so that readers would have complete freedom to dream and recreate this universe according to their own interpretation. I wanted to hand them the pencil so they themselves could draw what the words brought to mind. (Leloup quoted in Martens IV) After the rescue of the drowning child, Yoko’s mother makes this prediction: “Later, you too will perhaps have a naughty little girl and you will understand why, today, I am upset” (Leloup, Écume 105). But her daughter refuses to live by tradition: Custom has it that a woman should listen to her husband… […] Yoko did not like this type of “custom”, believing that she had as much right to ask questions as to give answers. The submissive woman was not her “style”. (163) To escape an arranged marriage, she announces she wants to study in Tokyo. Shinzi’s father asks her, “What prospects does electronics engineering offer?… Raising your children like robots? And he burst out laughing, pleased with his quip. –​No, repairing one’s children’s robots, Yoko replied curtly” (187). Just as her own parents had put off having a child when her father began his scientific career, she puts off marriage for the sake of science, and later for the sake of adventure. The novel The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno retrospectively launches the adventures of a young adult woman potentially ready for both love16 and motherhood. She fulfils this desire, which

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  139

Figure 4.1 Roger Leloup, L’Écume de l’aube. La première aventure de Yoko Tsuno, illustrated by Roger Leloup, Gembloux, Duculot (Travelling), 1991, p. 101. Source: Reproduced by kind permission of the author Roger Leloup.

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140  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children does not cross the minds of her male and female companions, who are not characterized in such detail, when she is entrusted with the care of Morning Dew by her dying Chinese grandfather in the album The Dragon of Hong Kong. Through this gesture, one of the very few heroines of Franco-​Belgian comics offers an unprecedented means through which readers can identify with her as she balances family and working life. If the adoption of a child by a single working mother such as Yoko is a way of breaking away from the patriarchal authority, it also comes across as a rather conservative fulfilment of her femininity, “in a civilization in which the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is subsumed under maternity” (Kristeva 133). As in the superhero genre, the adoption wavers between the inalterability of popular heroes and the cultural taboo of depicting birth, but it does not distance Yoko from the Western model of a good mother. In Les Exilés de Kifa [The Kifa Exiles], finding herself accused of putting Morning Dew in danger by involving her in her adventures, she retorts “I’m raising a Chinese girl for the year 2000… not for folklore…” (Leloup, Exilés 33).

Comics-​related French junior novelizations The format of Roger Leloup’s comics-​related novel has survived until today, characterized by stories some two hundred pages long told in the third person by an extradiegetic narrator, with relatively few or even no illustrations (except the cover) and aimed at two audiences: teenage readers and adult fans. Keeping alive the Hollywood novelization tradition, these works are either standalone attempts by comics writers (see for example Convard, Cothias and Ordas, Christin, Robber) or series novelizations, such as Amélie Sarn’s Thorgal (Milan), Largo Winch by Gilles Legardinier (J’ai lu), Seuls by Kidi Bebey (Pocket Jeunesse), Lanfeust de Troy by Christophe Debien and Patrick Bauwen (Hachette) and La Rose écarlate by Sarah Cohen-​Scali (Hachette). These novel series, based directly on comics or written from their screen adaptations, are by writers close to literary or audiovisual circles (not the comics world) who are prepared to work for hire and adhere to the writing constraints of Hollywood novelization. However, since the early twenty-​first century, the commercially successful literary adaptations of comics universes have come in another publishing format: first readers. These are illustrated paperbacks with fewer than a hundred pages, aimed at children who are learning to read. Since 2000, junior novelizations have made a significant breakthrough (Figure 4.2) in the French annual rankings of the 50 best-​selling pocket books for young readers, established jointly by market research institutes (Ipsos or GfK) and by the interprofessional magazine Livres Hebdo. These short novels established a French equivalent of North American junior novelization, as a means of learning to read literature (Newell 38–​ 39). In the United States, these non-​ serialized novelizations are

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Figure 4.2 The place of comics-​related novelizations in Livres Hebdo’s annual top 50 best-​selling pocket books for young readers on the French-​ language book market (2000–​2020).

characterized by their pocket format (cheap, paperback, in a soft cover), by their didactic purpose (their typography in large characters, their division into short chapters and their literary style, calibrated according to a scale of reading levels) and by their layout perpetuating the Little Golden Books tradition, with a pagination and a text–​image relationship close to those of children’s picture books. The French counterpart to this novelization format is distinguished by the serialization of the volumes, by their superior quality of manufacture (thick paper, semi-​rigid cover, with a spot varnish highlighting the portraits of the heroes against a coloured

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142  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children matte background) despite a similar selling price (around five euros), by the absence of a didactic paratext (although the same audience of children learning to read is targeted) and by the density of the layout, following the model of the novel rather than that of the picture book. The justified blocks of text contain illustrations often framed with a black line, which rarely invade the margins of the page. At the origin of the publishing phenomenon of French junior novelizations is the series of novels Titeuf, present (in strength) in the sales charts from 2000 to 2005, then again (for a single title) in 2007 and in 2011. The first novelizations of the series were published from 2000 onwards in Hachette’s collection “La Bibliothèque rose” [The Pink Library] and sold 120,000 copies apiece. The novelizer who was writing under the pseudonym “Shirley Anguerrand” was none other than Hélène Bruller, an illustrator in her thirties who was at the time the partner of Titeuf’s author (Philippe Chappuis, alias Zep) and who was also beginning to publish comics. The tremendous success of the series of novels encouraged Hachette to multiply the number of contracts with audiovisual rights holders, and soon to dedicate its two oldest children’s novel series entirely to publishing under licence: the “Pink Library” dating back to 1856, and the “Green Library”, launched in 1923. Of the 97 novelizations that appeared at least once in the annual rankings of the 50 best-​selling pocket books for young readers from 2000 to 2020, only 11 were not published by Hachette17 (nine for Pocket and two for Gallimard). Many literary contents created from foreign franchises are not translated but written by French authors.18 Less than one in four bestsellers in young readers’ novelization –​2219 of the 97 novels –​comes from American production companies (mainly Disney Productions), in translation. The influence of North American formats –​the Hollywood novelization for teenagers and adults, as well as the American junior novelization aimed at beginner readers –​thus seems limited, even if nothing prevents French novelizers from applying the recipes of the Hollywood novelization.20 Among these bestsellers, comics-​related junior novelizations come from three French-​language series (Titeuf, Cédric, Le Petit Nicolas) and one Italian (W.I.T.C.H.). These sales charts do not include any novelizations of Japanese manga or American comics, although both are numerous in the Hachette catalogue (on this (relative) commercial failure, see Suvilay 88–​91 and Danesin 12–​13). Alongside a Petit Nicolas novel by Emmanuelle Lepetit and two novelizations of W.I.T.C.H. translated from English (written by Elizabeth Lenhard on behalf of Disney Italy),21 the main comics-​related sales success after Titeuf is the series of Cédric novels, also published in the “Pink Library” collection, the first seven volumes of which reached the “top 50” sales of pocket books for young readers. While the comics album series was scripted by Raoul Cauvin and the cartoons were written by television screenwriters, another comics scriptwriter, Claude Carré, was recruited to write the novels. In light of their

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  143 market success, Hachette entrusted the author with the novelizations of other comics series adapted for television (Marsupilami, Kid Paddle). The success of the formula encouraged competing publishers to imitate it, even if they never reached the same sales heights. At Hachette, Pocket Jeunesse, Mango, Casterman, Bamboo, Rageot, Soleil and Glénat, the covers of comics-​related French junior novelizations carry the logo of the editorial catalogue or that of the collection to which they belong and above all the logo of the franchise –​bearing the name of a famous character –​which marks the identity of the novel series. The other legal notices are relegated to a copious copyright section in small print just before or after the title page. The hero appears on the front cover of these paperbacks, in close-​up and often alone, which allows the reader to identify the main protagonist and which also activates a horizon of expectations. The cover’s illustration is generally in a comics (or sometimes animation) graphic style. It shows characters standing out against a simple coloured backdrop or, more rarely, a basic setting blending into a monochrome background. Mention of the author on the cover is limited and non-​specific. There is no mention at all on the Le Petit Nicolas front cover in Gallimard’s “Folio cadet” series and, for Cédric and Titeuf in Hachette’s “Bibliothèque rose” series, the covers name comics authors and not novelizers. Limiting references to authorship in the paratext, a feature of commercial novelizations, adds to a certain transparency effect, as though the story was going to tell itself. The author’s relative anonymity, compared with the visibility of the franchise logo, establishes the eponymous hero as a potential subject of the narrative enunciation.

When a comics character writes his own autobiography The publication of these comics-​related French junior novelizations was always accompanied by the broadcasting of TV series adaptations from the same comics series. And yet, in Titeuf, The Smurfs, Yakari and Cédric novels published by Hachette, everything referred back to the comics. The Kid Paddle series launched in 2004 in the “Green Library” collection marked a transition. The comics artist author provided illustrations for each cover, as well as a full-​page drawing that was reproduced in all the volumes just after the title page. In this drawing, an exceptionally gifted friend of Kid is standing in front of a blackboard covered in mathematical formulae, showing him an example of a storyboard and an example of a cartoon photogram and delivering a long technical commentary. Following this informative introduction to the world of animation, the other illustrations inside and on the back cover were provided not by the comics artist but by an animation studio. On each double page, three storyboard panels (on the left page) sit opposite a photogram (on the right page), with the four illustrations arranged horizontally on a coloured strip to look like cinematographic film. These novels therefore offer a dual “media memory” (Ahmed 3), since they explicitly refer to both the

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144  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children comics series and the animated cartoons they are novelizing, and are thus a good example of these “older media [that can] refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Bolter and Grusin 15). The series of novels launched since 2005, such as Lucky Luke, Boule & Bill or Le Petit Nicolas, were more often illustrated, both on the cover and inside the books, with cartoon photograms. In the Cédric series, in contrast, while each novel contains two short stories relating to two episodes of the cartoon series, each one is illustrated with panels from the corresponding comics story. This return to the comics album works because its graphic style is replicated in the animated cartoon, in which the characters are depicted in solid colours with black outlines and no volume effect. Most of the panels are taken from the original comics story but some are brand-​new and others come from other Cédric comics stories. They are cropped and sometimes the panel’s frame is removed, as are the speech bubbles (but not the onomatopoeias). When selecting the panels, long-​lasting scenes, such as dialogue scenes, take precedence over scenes showing a short-​ acting event so that the illustrations can be used as a common thread for the entire double-​page text. On average, half of the double-​page area is given over to the image, which frames the scene and never takes up a whole page. Illustration dispenses with the need for a lengthy description of the setting and characters, with the novelizers relying on the readers having prior knowledge of the diegesis. The comics universes of popular series such as Cédric and Kid Paddle activate a visual encyclopaedia and so the narrator has no need to describe the protagonists in detail. In addition, some novels provides notes on the characters in their peritext, taken from the TV series’ bible, in simple language for young readers. In the course of the narratives, the characters’ description remains incomplete –​a feature of novelizations for children (see Sepulchre), and more broadly related to “the novel’s capacity to avoid being specific” in the literary representation (Kukkonen 90) –​they are literary described using the main attributes given to them in the TV series’ bible, since the literary illustrations show their full appearance, as is the case when they appear on screens (Chatman, Story 44, 224, Ryan 368). In contrast, the narrator does have to briefly, but clearly, describe their states of mind, as these would be expressed on TV by the body language of the animated characters. In comparison with Cédric and Kid Paddle novels, both of which fall into the illustrated novelization category, Titeuf novels rather appear to be visual novelizations. Each volume comprises 14 novelizations of 14 gags on one comics page, taken from several albums, with no regard for their chronology and with no link to the animated cartoons. The chapters are illustrated with one panel per page, taken unaltered from the original, reproduced with its frame and text. The panels at the start of each chapter and in the tailpiece are almost always the first and last on the novelized comics page, as Laurent Bozard (26) pointed out, while other

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  145 panels are incorporated into the text after an ellipsis or a colon. These are not merely for illustration; they are to be read after the text so as not to miss any information (iconic and textual) that they provide and that are necessary to follow the story. In this media dispositive similar to that of a visual novelization, the text and images are complementary. As for their literary writing style, the Kid Paddle, Cédric and Titeuf novels follow the same model, which is the series of Nicholas short stories (1959–​1964) by René Goscinny, illustrated by Jean-​Jacques Sempé. It turns out that the Nicholas short stories themselves first appeared in comics form before finally adopting the literary format that would make their name, so that some of the stories can be read like the novelization of a primitive comics gag. The French press cartoonist Jean-​Jacques Sempé created the character in 1954 in humorous cartoons and cover illustrations for the Belgian general-​interest magazine Moustique. They were so well received by the readers that the editor-​in-​chief asked him to serialize the character in the form of one-​page gags that would grace the colourful back cover of the weekly magazine. Jean-​Jacques Sempé met the brief with the writer “Agostini”, René Goscinny’s nom de plume, with around 30 gags in a one-​page waffle-​iron layout of 12 panels spread over four strips. Despite its popularity with the readers, the character suddenly disappeared from the magazine in 1956 only to reappear three years later, in its definitive literary form, in the Sunday supplement of the Gironde daily Sud Ouest and, at the same time, in the magazine Pilote. Between 1960 and 1964 the authors, with the literary publisher Denoël, brought out one collection a year, containing less than half of their short stories, before ending their collaboration. So this classic of French-​language children’s literature does in fact have a link to comics. In the first collection alone, Nicholas (1960), the plots of five of the 19 short stories took their inspiration from pre-​existing comics pages, not to mention the fact that the visual medium influences the writing and illustration of the work as a whole. For example, the short story “The Bike” (Goscinny, Nicholas 89–​95) novelizes the seventh comic strip gag (Goscinny and Sempé 34). The comics’ approach is strictly visual and based on humorous drawing: to teach Nicholas to ride the little bike he has just given him, his father gets on it himself to show him how it is done. Just as in the original comic strip, Jean-​Jacques Sempé’s drawings for the short story “The Bike” illustrate this comical device really well. The comedy of situation is visual, after the manner of a press cartoon: an adult in a suit and tie perched upright on a bike that is too small for him (and obviously enjoying it) juxtaposed with the child running behind in what should have been the adult’s place. In the comics page, the dialogue accentuates the generational role reversal. The father’s words evolve from those of an adult, measured and authoritarian, to those of a child, egotistical and nonsensical: “Look, Nicholas, I’m a train… choo… choo… choo…” Nicholas systematically ignores his father’s instructions. In response to the first

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146  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children “There’s a surprise for you outside. Guess what it is”, his son comes up with silly answers: “A real car?… An elephant?” He also refuses to obey two further instructions “Look!” and “Run behind me and you’ll see how I do it…”, because he stops on the pavement to play with a friend he has bumped into. The children’s dialogue, which is far from natural, mimics adult small talk: “Hello, Nicholas… I’ve got some marbles, Nicholas. Shall we play marbles?”–​“If you have marbles then let’s play marbles, Timothy”. The farcical situation of the father, who is now riding a child’s bike on his own, is reinforced by two old women who see him go past: “Poor soul! –​It’s awful when you lose your marbles!…” The text on this page is deliberately redundant and it seizes every opportunity to reinforce the comical generation reversal. The farcical scenes suggest we do not take Nicholas’ story literally. The subsequent first-​person storytelling is indicative of a diary format, or that of a “composition française”, an essay French pupils were asked to write in school to give their personal perception of an event that had happened to them (Perrot 252–​254). The way Nicholas reports his father’s words and actions is kind: Papa, il est resté avec moi dans le jardin. “Tu sais, il m’a dit, que j’étais un drôle de champion cycliste et que si je n’avais pas connu ta mère, je serais peut-​être passé professionnel ?” Ça, je ne le savais pas. Je savais que papa avait été un champion terrible de football, de rugby, de natation et de boxe, mais pour le vélo, c’était nouveau. “Je vais te montrer”, a dit papa, et il s’est assis sur mon vélo et il a commencé à tourner dans le jardin. Bien sûr, le vélo était trop petit pour papa et il avait du mal avec ses genoux qui lui remontaient jusqu’à la figure, mais il se débrouillait. (Goscinny, Le Petit Nicolas 111) Dad stayed out in the garden with me. “Did you know I used to be a top-​ranking cyclist?” he asked me. “I might have turned professional if I hadn’t met your mother”. Actually I didn’t know. I knew that Dad had been a top-​ranking soccer player and rugby football player and swimmer and boxer, but the cycling was a new one on me. “Here, I’ll show you”, said Dad, and he got on my bike and started riding round the garden. Of course the bike was too small for Dad and he had trouble with his knees which were somewhere up by his face, but he managed. (Goscinny, Nicholas 90) In addition to providing the tale’s plot and diegesis, the comics page was able to contribute to the verbal style typical of the Nicholas short stories. Some of the features of this humorous style were already present in the comics speech bubbles: the dislocation (“Papa, il est resté avec moi dans le jardin”, literally “Dad [he] stayed out in the garden with me”)

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  147 and, although both are lost in translation, the overuse of deixis (“Ça, je ne le savais pas […] c’était nouveau”, literally “That, I didn’t know that […] that was new”), the scant, but rarely colloquial, vocabulary, the anacoluthons and the frequent repetition of vocabulary and syntax. Of course, other literary features of this short story do not come from comics, for example the basic reporting clauses (“he asked me”, “said Dad”), the abrupt digressive changes of subject, the mismatch of verb tenses and the multivocal use of reported speech. A juxtaposition of short unrelated clauses (asyndeton) or –​the opposite –​clauses that are connected when they have no functional relationship (zeugma), produces an inner monologue effect in the short story. These are also found in the sequential art of comics, where the three little dots and transitions from one bubble to the next act as logical connectors between the short and often fragmentary clauses. Since 2000, many comics-​related French junior novelizations have had a storytelling similar to that of the Nicholas short stories. Their narration, assumed by their hero, falls within the discourse plane of utterance (Benveniste 208–​ 209). That said, metaleptic effects like those René Goscinny could produce by questioning the readers of Nicholas or How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion are rare in the Titeuf, Kid Paddle and Cédric novels. Even without the metalepsis, the slightly familiar register of the style –​particularly in the Titeuf novels where the dialogue is nevertheless more urbane than Titeuf comics dialogues, famous for their misuse of language –​introduces what Daniel Delbrassine (143) called “confidential chatter” in reference to a corpus of French teen novels published in the late 1990s. The junior novelizations in my corpus also maintain “the illusion of a verbal communication in which the narrator attempts to feign a conversation directed at the readers” (Delbrassine 143; see also Jost 103). This “enunciatory feint” plays on the similarity in form of the children’s novel and intimate literary genre formats to produce a “feigned utterance, uttered in the first person, which makes the distinction between invention and testimony undecidable” (Jost 113), even if this uncertainty only lasts for the time of reading. Without going as far as metaleptic address, however, their autodiegetic narrators create a closer relationship of trust with the readers, for want of being able to hold a real conversation with them. Of course, this confidential narrative mode and the novelizer disappearance (into the paratext) behind the comics hero do not make these fictions autobiographical. To be complete, an “autobiographical pact” should establish an “identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist” (Lejeune 193) and guarantee that what has been written, delivered by the hero-narrator, reflects the voice of the author who is letting us in on his perception of the world. In sum, in this corpus of comics-​related French junior novelizations, many of the novels have a pseudo-​autobiographical reading pact and a verbal style inspired by the Nicholas short stories, to the extent that they form a subgenre, which Prisca Grignon (109) called “confession

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148  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children novelization”. These were a prominent feature of the “Pink Library” and “Green Library” catalogues in the 2000s. At the request of the publishers,22 these novels are much more than a simple reproduction of the storyline and dialogues of the cartoons or comics. * ** Why are novels of comics so inclined to embrace the biography and autobiography literary genres, whose “referential texts […] claim to convey information about a ‘reality’ which is external to the text and hence to be subject to the test of verification” (Lejeune 211)? These novelizations refer to comics or cartoons as a source to which they give documentary value. Their tacit acknowledgement of the pre-​existence of the adapted work goes some way towards de-​fictionalizing the events and the diegesis of the original story. In the novelizations of Titeuf, the comics panels are de-​fictionalized by the process of moving them into a new textual environment. Admittedly, the intimate register makes the status of the illustrations ambiguous, as they are by no means feigning a childish graphic style; the reader must “accept the convention of this juxtaposition of a written voice and an image describing actions simultaneously” (Perrot 258). Nevertheless, the coexistence of this double enunciation (graphic and textual) on the page is resolved simply by emphasizing the primacy of the original story: the novel gives us the impression that it is commenting on the comics from which the illustration is supposed to have been taken. Adopting the narrative style of a confidant justifying his past actions is reminiscent of the intimate literary genres. This de-​fictionalization is drawn to our attention, in comparison with Titeuf comics, by the subsequent narration, the change of narrative voice (the story is now being told by its hero) and by the contextual introductions and evaluative conclusions attributed to the hero-narrator. These addenda by the novelizer highlight Titeuf’s role as commentator. Reproducing the panels as illustrations appears to assert the factual nature of the initial story, which the literary narrative re-​interprets as a true story that really happened (a past event), thereby tacitly acknowledging the pre-​existence of the adapted work. For instance, in the fourth novel, C’est pô malin… [It’s not clever…] (2000), which combines gags from the second, fifth and seventh comics albums, the arrival of a baby in Titeuf’s family takes second place and yet it was the main event of the seventh album, Le Miracle de la vie [The Miracle of Life] (1998). Whereas in the comic strip, the arrival of a little sister turns life upside down for Titeuf and his family, the novel only alludes to the event, some 20 pages in, presenting it as a fact the reader already knew. When one of the hero’s classmates tells him that his parents are “sex maniacs” because they have conceived a child, the narrator provides this explanation: “At the time, my little sister had not yet been born, mummy had her in her tummy. This creep knew that, I don’t know how”

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  149 (Anguerrand 29). In confession novelization, the hero-narrator uses a verbal style that mimics direct speech, offering “a show of zero mediation” and an “ephemerality” that “is a promise of authenticity” (Jost 110). This autodiegetic narrator does not present himself or herself as someone telling a story s/​he has made up, but as someone who is telling us and explaining events that really did happen to him/​her in the past. By contrast with junior novelization, the norm in Hollywood novelization, represented by The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno, is a tendency to play down the visual by making little use of the literary description and even less of the iconographic illustration in order to emphasize the story and dialogue, both delivered by an extradiegetic narrator (which is less often present in films, TV series or comics, although all three media have the possibility of setting up such a narrator). According to Émile Benveniste’s classic distinction between history and discourse planes of utterance (206–​209), Hollywood novelization falls under historical utterance, concealing the narrator’s situation of utterance. Therefore, taking into account the literary illustrations, we have two opposite ways of telling the story of a comics hero’s childhood in novel form (Figure 4.3), represented, on the one hand, by the prequel to Yoko Tsuno series (telling mode and history plane of utterance) and on the other hand, by the prequel to Asterix & Obelix (showing mode and discourse plane of utterance). Of course, other combinations are possible, as the close reading of the novel Acknowledgement of Murders, Ric Hochet’s First Case has shown (in Chapter 3). On another note, a common feature of these novels, as of most novelizations in general, is the important place taken by dialogue reported in direct speech. The French-​style junior novelizations have enjoyed significant commercial success since the year 2000, which cannot be attributed solely to the craze for first readers among adults prescribing book lists.23 This success might surprise given that these novels seem to escape the “remediation”

telling

showing

The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno

dialogue

discourse

history

How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion When He Was a Little Boy

Figure 4.3 Prevailing narrative mode and plane of utterance in three literary prequels to twentieth-​century French-​language comics series.

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150  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children logic. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (44–​50) propounded this concept to describe the advent of a new medium created by grafting the aesthetic appeal of an older medium –​what they called “hypermediacy” –​onto the form of another supposedly more immediate (less effort required to apprehend the story) and more transparent (less presence of the narrative teller) one. The two researchers identified this trend through the successive adaptations of particularly popular works. The entertainment industry defines repurposing as pouring a familiar content into another media form; a comic book series is repurposed as a live-​action movie, a televised cartoon, a video game, and a set of action toys. The goal is not to replace the earlier forms, to which the company may own the rights, but rather to spread the content over as many markets as possible. Each of those forms takes part of its meaning from the other products in a process of honorific remediation and at the same time makes a tacit claim to offer an experience that the other forms cannot. (Bolter and Grusin 68) The concept is based on the hypothesis that the Western history of media is driven by a quest for transparency of representation. This dynamic would imply a remediation, in the sense of shifting away from an old medium that supposedly exposes mediation more to a new medium that offers a more immediate illusion. By championing the superiority of visual media, this theory relegates literary novelization to the ranks of anachronistic “anti-​ remediation” (Baetens, Novelization 46–​49), which is reinforced by the heterodiegetic and iconoclastic nature of movie tie-​in novels for an adult audience. The standard Hollywood novelization formula, which is more or less a fit for the fictional prequel The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno, systematically introduces an extradiegetic narrator and is wary of illustration, unlike the formats closer to visual novelization such as that of Titeuf novels. Compared to them, the Yoko Tsuno novel turns to be less immediate and more hypermediated, in that it appears to be constantly inhabited by the comics series. In contrast, through their original storytelling, the Titeuf’s confession novelizations prove that literature can do more than support the shift from one medium to another: it can even aim for optimal immediacy of the narrative mediation. Of course, it is not being suggested that we pit the narrative performance of the novel against that of the comic strip, but rather that we observe what happens when the two media hybridize. Rather than seeing novelization as an anachronistic anti-​ remediation, Jan Baetens (Novelization 44) recommend, “we might speak of a textual genre’s contamination by a visual practice”. This is what French junior novelizations are doing both when placing themselves at the boundaries of visual novelization and when using referential literary techniques. I would therefore

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  151 put forward the hypothesis that the media anachronism of these first readers –​considering they were aimed at young readers who were probably watching the televised cartoon adaptations of the comics –​has influenced their literary form by forcing them to merge with a referential genre (autobiography) and a visual medium (comics). Being used to constraint writing practices, novelizers rapidly adopted these additional writing guidelines. Last but not least, beyond the visual paradigm of remediation, French junior novelization also offers its readers a form of individual appropriation of animated cartoons adapted from comics, which are intangible audiovisual works (Fevry 165). Like other merchandise from audiovisual comics-​related franchises –​school supplies, clothing, bedding, toys, etc. –​the literary book helps bring a fictional world into the reader’s bedroom.

Notes 1 All citations from French-​language works included in the bibliography have been translated for the purposes of this book. 2 It foreshadows the comics sub-​series Alix origines, launched in 2019, which recounts the hero’s childhood in Gaul, for a younger readership than the main series. Some legitimized artists see this development of sub-​series as a marketing strategy to “get a few crumbs from the success” of a comic strip that is “developing in a nostalgic and self-​referential way” (Schuiten and Peeters, L’Aventure des images 20–​21). 3 For a critical discussion of the “myth of Superman” as described by Umberto Eco, through an intermedia recontextualization of this origin story, see Frahm. 4 The fans’ discourse contributes to establishing certain novels as part of the “canonical” storylines (Jenkins, “Star Trek” 100–​101, Convergence 281, see also Saint-​Gelais 423–​424), i.e. as instalments that may integrate the official continuity of the series of Spider-​Man’s adventures. 5 Three films were released in French theatres between 1978 and 1981. The Spider-​Man comic books had been introduced in France ten years earlier by the Lyon-​based publishing house Lug, which was taken over by Semic in 1989. First appearing in the ephemeral Fantask magazine in 1969, the superhero took up residence in 1971 in Strange, another magazine from the same publisher, in which he was one of the star characters for a quarter of a century. Lug also dedicated Spidey magazine and the album series “Une Aventure de l’Araignée” [A Spider’s Adventure] to him. In spite of this, at the time in France, these translations remained marginalized on the book market and culturally despised (Reyns-​ Chikuma 350, 354–​ 355, Lesage 287–​293). 6 Re-​telling events as seen by various characters in the story is a well-​known writing exercise among fanfiction writers (Jenkins, Convergence 181). 7 Between 2011 and 2018, Hachette’s “Green Library” collection translated four novelizations of feature films and published 18 junior novelizations –​ both free translations (attributed to French “adapters”) and original works by French authors –​from several cartoon series broadcast at the same time on French television stations.

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152  The comics heroes’ childhood told to children 8 With the exception of the founding story that opens Yakari’s comics series, which has been novelized several times, for instance in a first reader written by Florence Mortimer: Yakari et Grand Aigle (2006). 9 They were not popular across the Atlantic, where they kept the image of “comics marketed in a relatively expensive book format to be read either in French or British English and thereby catering primarily to urban children raised in cosmopolitan middle-​class milieus” (Gabilliet 262–​263). 10 The hero-​ narrator calls out to his young readers, for example in this passage: “And as I looked out of the hut, who did I see coming? Yes, you’ve guessed it: Getafix the druid!” (Goscinny, How Obelix 26–​28). The dual address, an enunciation directed to a dual audience of children and adults, manifests itself in the puns, a process extensively used in the comics series, which can only be understood by older readers. For example, in the passage quoted below, the French surname “Gommarabix” (translated as “Bionix”) merges the words “gomme arabique” [gum Arabic], while the clause “Obélix sera le gros de la troupe” plays on the double meaning of the substantive “le gros”, pejoratively designating a fat person, in addition to the meaning retained by the translators: “Obelix can be a large body of troops” (my emphasis). 11 According to the French historian Sylvain Lesage (356–​359), the third Asterix animated feature film, released in 1976, repositioned the book in an intermedia network, since it introduced an original storyline that generated books (among other tie-​ins), unlike the previous Asterix films, which were adapted from comics albums. 12 Since the comics album The Dragon of Hong Kong (1986), commissioned by a Hong Kong publisher, the author has been linking his Japanese heroine to China. He reinterpreted the toponym “Tsuno” as combining the sounds of “Lao Tzu” (the Chinese founder of Taoism) and “noh” (the Japanese lyrical drama), to give her both cultural origins (Leloup quoted in Couvreur 6). 13 In an afterword entitled “To be and not to be” added by the author, in 1958, to the second edition of his novel Le Voyageur imprudent (translated the same year under the title Future Times Three). 14 Promoted to editor of the “Travelling” series in 1988, Arnaud de la Croix had also collaborated, as a comics fan, with Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée. He became a children’s literary editor (and later a comics editor) at Casterman, when Tintin’s Belgian publishing house took over Duculot’s children’s catalogue in 1993. The two novels by Roger Leloup were published by Casterman after this date. 15 H. G. Wells’ psychological tendency may also have affected his work, under the influence of Edgar P. Jacobs. Before joining Spirou magazine, Roger Leloup trained with masters of the “Brussels School”, contributing to the colours of an episode of Blake & Mortimer, as well as to the settings of several Hergé albums and to those of Jacques Martin’s Lefranc and Alix series. 16 Confronted with seduction in The Archangels of Vinea (1983) and Wotan’s Fire (1984), Yoko, as does Superman, abides by an “implicit vow of chastity” that “is one of the conditions that prevents his [her] slowly ‘consuming’ himself [herself]” (Eco 115). 17 The history of the relationship between Hachette and novelization began in the 1930s (see Chapter 1). The success of the junior novelizations in the 2000s had been prepared by the “Pink Library” from the 1970s (see Gornouvel and

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The comics heroes’ childhood told to children  153 Nières-​Chevrel 54–​55), not only by continuing to publish novelizations of Disney feature films, but especially by opening its doors to novelizations of French and Japanese cartoon series from Récré A2 (a children’s programme broadcast from 1978 to 1988 by the French public channel Antenne 2). In this way, Georges Chaulet (alias Bob Robert), a pillar of the “Pink Library” with his series of Fantômette novels, novelized Candy Candy and Inspector Gadget in the 1980s. It is worth remembering that he was also the scriptwriter, since 1964, of the long-​running comics series Les 4 As [The 4 Aces], published by Casterman, which he had previously created in a novel form. 18 The best-​selling French novelizers of foreign franchises are Elisabeth Barféty (Yo-​kai Watch), Kidi Bebey (Chica Vampiro), Olivier Gay (The Loud House), Natacha Godeau (Pokémon and Frozen), Catherine Kalengula (L.O.L. Surprise), Sophie Marvaud (Winx Club) and Katherine Quenot (Frozen). 19 These are series of novels derived from North American television productions (Violetta, Franklin, So Little Time, etc.) and novelizations of blockbusters such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantastic Beasts (Harry Potter), The Phantom Menace (Star Wars) and Minions. 20 Furthermore, some North American blockbusters are novelized by French authors for the French-​ speaking market. However, in this case, local novelizers must comply with the working conditions and writing constraints of Hollywood novelizers (Grignon 138). 21 The author of the novel La Photo de classe [The Class Photo] was probably unaware that she was novelizing a cartoon episode adapted from a Nicholas short story (“A Photograph to Treasure”, in Goscinny, Nicholas 4–​9) inspired by a gag cartoon and a comics page published in Moustique magazine (no. 1582, 20 May 1956, p. 1 and 80; partially reprinted in Goscinny and Sempé 32). In the case of W.I.T.C.H., comics pages reproduced in the novels (which novelized them) signalled to French readers that the Italian transmedia did not only exist on television, but also through comics translated for the French girls’ magazine W.I.T.C.H. Mag (then republished in twelve albums by Glénat in 2011 and 2012). 22 In a 2007 interview, the publisher Charlotte Ruffault (quoted in Grignon 395), the instigator of the specialization of “Bibliothèque rose” and “Bibliothèque verte” in licensed publishing, stated that “a script in dialogue is cold and even slightly overdone with small links to make it look like a novel it is cold and mechanical”. 23 On the contrary, these commissioned works position themselves, throughout their production and distribution process, furthest away from professional readers, as a paraliterature without legitimization and without memory (few titles, despite their large print runs, are reissued). Retailed in self-​service, they are displayed in large quantities, especially in supermarkets.

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Conclusion Reading novels as comics novelizations

In the second half of the twentieth century, the cultural context of the French-​speaking world was conducive to the crossing over of bandes dessinées into novels: while media culture had become increasingly intermedialized throughout the century, the Dadaists and Surrealists had normalized the integration of popular references, including references to comic strips (Chute 289–​290), and were imitated by other avant-​garde artists. Postmodern literature subsequently developed an intertextual conception of the novel as a patchwork of quotations, incorporating lowbrow materials as a source of innovation in storytelling. Thus, in the 1980s, a French specialist in the Nouveau Roman genre of novels was in favour of literary experiments in “written comic strips”, at a time when, in his words, “deficient writing borrows its model from the visual arts”1 (Lieber 44–​45). The idea caught on, on the other side of the Atlantic. In a much-​quoted 2004 article from The New York Times Magazine, the American critic Charles McGrath prophesied a handover from dying novels: “Someday the novel, too, will go into decline […]. This won’t happen in our lifetime, but it’s not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be. It might be comic books”. More broadly speaking, consumer culture has challenged the boundary between the highbrow and the lowbrow in literary culture. Indeed, according to American literary scholar Michael Moon (355), the “convergence of ‘high and low’ ” did not wait for postmodernity, as for a long time “the impact [had been] strong in both directions between, say, an ostensibly lowbrow practice such as cartooning and the middle –​to highbrow practices of writing and reading novels”. The difficulty lies in removing this object of study from the critical register implied by the high and low divide, without ignoring the fact that “novelists’ interactions with comics […] are affected by cultural perceptions of comics” (Pizzino 91). While the recognition that comics have an influence on literature is not new,2 it is still necessary to separate it from the culturally created hierarchy of artistic media, starting by avoiding the one-​sided notion of influence. To echo the ambitions of an article by Hillary Chute (271) on American novels such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the present book “is not DOI: 10.4324/9781003388210-6

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  155 simply concerned with how graphic narrative impacts fiction, but more centrally, it is concerned with the dialogue and connection between the two forms”. This concluding section will show that this intermedia dialogue dates back to the nineteenth century, with the question of one medium’s place in another appearing at its outset. The framing, embedding or nesting of comic strips in literature raises more than a narratological issue. As the musicologist Cormac Newark (167) explained, regarding the nested reception of musical works within comics and literature, [t]‌he nesting of opera within fiction represents the harnessing of opera’s cultural potential –​its emotive power, its mores, its important place in society and so on –​in the service of a medium that is much more sensitive to that potential, and much more capable, in turn, of throwing it into expressive relief, than criticism is. It is not a question of asserting that, thanks to ekphrasis, “the novel can easily sum up all other genres or media”, but on the contrary of showing that fiction engages with comics in “a relationship that is not rhetorically contained –​and thus limited –​within the form of the novel” (Pizzino 96, 105). Beyond the “theme” of the novel or the “scenario” of its plot, this last part proposes a poetic approach to the place of the bande dessinée in the novel, particularly in the double threshold that is the novel’s narrative frame and writing factory. A corpus of pieces of prose, sometimes unexpected, will allow us to observe comics at the edges, inside or on the horizon of literary texts, which will be read as comics novelizations or, conversely, as comics scripts. These will be the short story Le Cavalier Servant [The Cavaliere Servente3] (1857) by Paul de Musset, the multimodal novel La Route d’Armilia [The Road to Armilia] (1988) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, the Nouveau Roman The Battle of Pharsalus (1971, from the French novel published in 1969) by Claude Simon, as well as two novels by comics authors: Flash Gordon in The Caverns of Mongo (1936) by Alex Raymond and L’Avion qui tuait ses pilotes [The Plane That Killed Its Pilots] (1971) by Jean-​Michel Charlier.

Comics on the threshold of literary texts What place did comics hold in nineteenth-​ century novels? Théophile Gautier’s 1863 foreword to his novel Captain Fracasse (IV) invited the reader to a visual performance, which brought the reading of picture stories to mind: The characters are presented there as in nature by their external form, with their inevitable background of landscape or architecture. Their costumes are described, their gestures drawn; and when they speak, they use the language of their time. Imagine that you are leafing

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156  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations through some Callot’s etchings or Abraham Bosse’s engravings historiated with legends. (Gautier, Fracasse IV) Admittedly, Gautier did not refer directly to picture stories, although he knew Töpffer’s work well, having devoted an article to him in La Revue des deux mondes (Kunzle 4, 113), and, while he tried his hand at novelization in Captain Fracasse, it was by narrativizing a fictional play (Gautier, Fracasse 167–​186, see Genette, Métalepse 41–​49). What can be retained from this novel, however, is that it illustrates nineteenth-​century French literature’s discovery of its own intermediality, whether it be in the pre-​text, at its germination stage, at its “factory” stage, at the level of the printed text (which features frontispieces and illustrations) or at its later modifications and rewritings (for instance, a theatrical adaptation by the writer himself, or a film version later on). (Hamon 230) Other literary fictions such as William Makepeace Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond (1852) were more blatantly inspired by early comic strips than Captain Fracasse. While Thackeray’s novel has often been considered a pastiche of eighteenth-​century literature, the American Victorianist Robert Fletcher (392) identified one of its pre-​texts in a contemporary medium: a picture story from Thackeray’s youth, The Count’s Adventure, whose hero was based on an eccentric Scot whom he knew. The British author produced this graphic work for the amusement of his relatives during a stay in Paris in the mid-​1830s, after seeing Töpffer’s manuscripts at Goethe’s house in Weimar. According to Fletcher (379), “the interdependency of word and image (and the consequent narrative effects) best represented in the comic strip is also at work in Thackeray’s unillustrated historical novel”. In French literature, the short story The Cavaliere Servente, published in La Revue des deux mondes in 1857 by Paul de Musset provides a similar reading experience. The absence of illustrations4 testifies to the literary ambitions of the short-​story writer, whose brother Alfred de Musset is known to have tolerated illustrations only for his minor works written by several hands (see Arnar 348). The subtitle of Paul de Musset’s short story, Scènes de la vie italienne [Scenes of Italian Life], links it to his other fictions and travelogues set in Italy. In the preface to a volume edition of The Cavaliere Servente (Musset, La Chèvre I–​ VI), the author placed his Scenes in the tradition of Stendhal’s Italian Chronicles, although he set them in contemporary Italy. The plural of the subtitle also referred to the plurality of “scenes” told in The Cavaliere Servente, in a way similar to the multiple panels of a comic strip. The first paragraph indicates their source, like an “incorporated prologue” of a medieval novel (Genette, Paratexts 167–​168), where one

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  157 storyteller endorses his or her story with another, pre-​existing in the oral tradition. A few years ago, in the back of Caffè Florian in Venice, there was a dark room reserved for chess players, which for this reason was called the scacchi room, but which should rather have been called the gossip room. There, every night at midnight, I was able to witness for one year the making of a scandalous chronicle, full of comical facts and curious episodes. The most knowledgeable contributors to this chronicle were Maître G… the notary, and Doctor F…, a fashionable doctor. A young artist would forthwith produce pen-​and-​ink drawings of the most beautiful anecdotes each day. Towards the end of the winter, this series of drawings formed an album similar to those of Töpffer, with this allegorical title: The Story of Three Black Goats and Three White Goats. (Musset, “Le Cavalier servant” 617) A homodiegetic narrator describes the making of a drawn album, of which he relates a subplot rather than that of the “three brown ladies and three blonde ladies”5 that he initially announced (617). The book of drawings used as a narrative reservoir and a narrative framework is close to an amicorum album. In vogue during the Romantic period, this popular object in high society collected handwritten, sometimes risqué, contributions “on the blank pages of an album which is at the disposal of a small society of friends, and which is often attached to a fixed place (salon, café, studio, college…)” (Hamon 335). The “chambre des scacchi” [the scacchi room], a back room of a Venetian café reserved for chess players, is merely a room with a fire, i.e. a room of public life. Its setting (the nocturnal darkness, the hearth, the familiar audience) reactivates the tradition of storytelling around the fire, although the work that is produced there departs from the ancestral model in its high-​society theme and book form. Paul de Musset was well acquainted with these conditions of creation, since he had taken part, almost 20 years earlier, in the production of a picture story that remained in manuscript form. He described it in his Biography of Alfred de Musset: In the evening, the family used to assemble around the famous writing-​table, to chat or sketch […]. Auguste Barre, who lived near us, used to come to work upon an album of caricatures in the style of Toppfer’s [sic], representing the series of events and catastrophes attendant upon a marriage treaty repeatedly broken off and renewed. […] Alfred and Barre wielded the pencil, and the rest of us made up the explanatory text, which was no less absurd than the drawings. (Musset, Biography 209–​210, see also Kunzle 150) The de Musset brothers’ library included several picture story albums known as “Albums Jabot” published by the Parisian publishing house

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158  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations Aubert, such as the piracy of Rodolphe Töpffer’s Les Amours de Mr Vieux Bois [The Loves of Mr Vieux Bois] (1839). They became so interested in them that, during Alfred’s convalescence in the spring of 1840, they produced a satirical picture story entitled Le Mariage de Pauline Garcia avec Louis Viardot [The Marriage of Pauline Garcia and Louis Viardot], covering the social event of April 1840 which gave it its title. In their roman à clef, the poet Alfred de Musset (Mr a.d.m.) and the sculptor Jean-​Auguste Barre (Mr B.) portrayed themselves as rivals of the opera director Louis Viardot (Mr V.), in order to seduce his future wife, the singer Pauline Garcia (Miss G.). The sudden passion that blinded the three suitors was a whim and seemed all the more ridiculous because they were no longer young men. These characters of old boys in love were inspired by Mr Vieux Bois, a middle-​aged man, the hero of an album by Töpffer, who falls in love at first sight with an unnamed young woman, the Beloved Object. This sentimental inspiration can be found once again in the fictional picture story that The Cavaliere Servente claims to novelize. The narrative passes through the mind of a homodiegetic narrator. This Frenchman staying in Venice observes the society of the Caffè Florian for several evenings. He reconstructs a high-​society intrigue that is in the news, listening to the retrospective account of an abbot, and then spying on conversations from the scacchi room. All these idle voyeurs belong to privileged social classes. The story that arouses the curiosity of the French tourist concerns an unfaithful husband, the Marquis Saverio B., his young wife Lucia B. and a friend of the Marquis, the knight Giacomo Forcellini. The young lady, in love with the knight but married by her parents to the marquis, plays the role of a transactional object, like Mr Vieux Bois’s Beloved Object. The meeting of the future spouses transposes the first pages of Töpffer’s album: The girl’s beauty made a strong impression on the Milanese’s fiery imagination. He returned home in an agitation that he took to be love. […] Saverio took it into his head to marry this beautiful girl, only to satisfy a whim. […] He sighed heavily; he beat his chest and raised his arms to heaven, addressing the cruel fate with the most vehement apostrophes; but he added that he would die of pain if he did not obtain Lucia’s hand. (Musset, “Le Cavalier servant” 621–​622) The narrative takes place some 15 years after the unhappy marriage of Lucia and Saverio B. The knight Forcellini is now living openly under the roof of the marquise, separated from her unfaithful husband. This voyeurism-​centred narrative could have favoured description and a “staging of focalization and vision operators” (Louvel 90). However, beyond the prologue mentioned above, the degree of visuality of the story remains limited. Its pictorial modulations are concentrated in the brief transitions in internal focalization which return to the narrator’s point of view, between the snippets of narrative reconstructed in external

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  159 focalization from the conversations. Nevertheless, these transitions are depictive: not only do they belong to the showing narrative mode, but they also abound with pictorial markers. In particular, the narrator describes four frozen scenes that he observes from a distance. These passages, textually framed, receive their own paragraph. In one of them, the artist of the Caffè Florian synthesizes in one caricature6 a significant moment in the embedded narrative related by the chess players to each other. This ekphrasis establishes a descriptive pause, marked by the use of the imperfect tense in the French text. It appeals to the reader’s visual culture by comparing the drawing to a well-​known sculpture: Without waiting for further information, the artist opened his album, asked for the writing case and composed a beautiful pen drawing in which the knight Forcellini was seen warming in his bosom a snake with a human form, whose tail enveloped in its folds the waist and arms of the marquise, like those of Laocoon in the ancient group. (Musset, “Le Cavalier servant” 627) The other three pictorial descriptions depict the only three scenes in the embedded narrative that the narrator saw with his own eyes –​one taking place on the balcony of the marquise’s palace (624), the other two in her theatre box (619 and 642). These are tableaux vivants (living paintings), fairly common in the nineteenth century in France, “a kind of mise en scène of a famous painting or historical event, which is a hybrid form drawing from the theatre, from painting, and from real life” (Louvel 50, 94). According to the narrator, the theatre box offered “to the spectators the peaceful picture that had been observed for fifteen years” (Musset, “Le Cavalier servant” 642). The pictorial effect is produced by the vision through the eyes of the observer and by the freezing of the spectators during the performance. Described as pictorial subjects arranged within the architectural framework of the theatre box, they form a composition compared explicitly to Veronese’s Apotheosis of Venice. With respect to the love scene on the balcony –​a literary and pictorial cliché since Romeo and Juliet, spoofed by Töpffer in The Loves of Mr Vieux Bois –​it is described with a certain degree of pictorialization. Musset’s narrator-​voyeur frames the nocturnal picture on the moonlit facade, then on a window, and he uses a pictorial vocabulary, namely to render the chiaroscuro: At one of the windows the graceful silhouette of a young girl was outlined against a luminous background. Below the balcony, I saw a long black spot in the reflection of the canal; it was a gondola standing still at the foot of the wall. (624) What are the relationships between this short story and the comic strip? Without mentioning the thematic reminiscence of The Loves of Mr Vieux

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160  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations Bois, the album made by the characters in the manner of Töpffer frames a literary narrative with several embedded levels and combining the points of view of numerous witnesses. To a lesser extent, the black-​and-​white line drawings are reflected in the pictorial descriptions, although these Scenes of Italian Life also refer to the Italian artistic heritage (the Laocoon, the Veronese). The Cavaliere Servente produces a “novelization effect”, as Gérard Genette (Métalepse 47) described it in Captain Fracasse, by alternating between pictorial descriptions of the framework narrative written in the French imperfect tense and returns, without any transitions other than paragraph breaks, to the embedded narrative related in the French simple past tense. The change in verbal tense produces a “metaleptic coup de force” (49) by shifting critical commentary into the realm of fiction. The narrator no longer recounts the picture story, but the story itself. Last but not least, the short story develops the imagery of the emerging ninth art. Twenty years earlier, Rodolphe Töpffer recalled that he had produced his first manuscripts in the familiar setting of his boarding school, where he even had the idea of novelizing one, before showing them in society salons: It was also to their great pleasure that, during the winter evenings, I composed and drew before their eyes these crazy stories, mingled with a grain of seriousness, which were destined for a success that I was far from foreseeing, and I then imagined translating into prose, from the sketches, this Histoire du docteur Festus [History of Doctor Festus] which I published only this year [1840].7 This literary representation of the making of a picture story, like the similar passages (quoted above) in The Cavaliere Servente and The Biography of Alfred de Musset, testifies to the writer’s nostalgia for oral storytelling. According to a romantic conception described by Walter Benjamin (91–​92), the quality of the oral tale lies in the renunciation of psychological nuances in the characters, in favour of the universality of the characters, and in the valorization of the narrator’s voice. Töpffer’s picture stories, as well as The Marriage of Pauline Garcia and Louis Viardot by the de Musset brothers, share these characteristics. Their verbal narrator, by lending his voice to the images that unfold before the reader’s eyes, perpetuates the spirit of conversation of the salons where these manuscripts were circulating. The short image captions are primarily narrative and not explanatory, which distinguishes them from the industrial press and the realistic novel, where “no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation” (Benjamin 89). Instead of explaining facts, the album of Doctor Festus –​as its close reading in Chapter 1 showed –​delivers extraordinary events to the perplexity of the reader, while the novelization drowns them in a deluge of explanations, whose excess makes them parodic.8 Admittedly, The Cavaliere Servente lacks the eccentricity of the Voyages and Adventures

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  161 of Dr Festus; Paul de Musset’s short story delivers, classically (Chatman, Story 51–​52), overt explanations for improbable events or for the unexpected actions of the characters. Nevertheless, the Caffè Florian’s evenings perpetuate the ancestral art of the storyteller, who brings together a local community. In addition, the literary writing of the two comics-​related prose narratives shows a relatively limited degree of pictorialization. Just as the Doctor Festus album positions itself at the threshold of its novelization Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus (more precisely in the novel’s pre-​text and peritext, as shown in Chapter 1), the comics medium stands on the threshold of The Cavaliere Servente, a position that allows it to frame the short story.

Comics as a frame for multimodal storytelling The notion of picture frame comes from art history, where its study deals with the material object –​i.e. the ornamental and protective border edging the picture –​as well as with pictorial framing and the aesthetic and diegetic boundaries of the image. The frame is also significant from a narratological point of view, in literature or comics as in any other narrative medium, since narratology has appropriated the concept to study the embedding of narrative levels and, more broadly, the demarcation of entry into representation. The narratological metaphor was built on the idea of a single picture, which favoured the meaning of a liminal physical location or a “threshold” of representation and interpretation (Genette, Paratexts 2). Considering this definition as restrictive, the American narratologist Eric Berlatsky (179) suggests describing multiple literary framings by taking the multi-​framed arrangement of a comics page as a model. It is worth noting that, unlike novels and short stories, comics have a fixed-​page layout that does not (or only very rarely) vary from edition to edition.9 The “comics multiframe” was coined by Thierry Groensteen (after the Belgian philosopher Henri Van Lier) and refers to the grid visually shaped on the page by all the frames outlining the panels (Groensteen, Comics and Narration 12). Indeed, the frame has (also) become a key concept in comics studies. In the strictest sense, it refers to the often-​black line that encloses some comics panels, while others do not have one, and the term is also used, by metonymy, as a synonym for panel.10 From a functional point of view, the comics frame outlines the image by affecting the framing of its content and by delimiting an off-​frame, or even by determining its general meaning via an expressive frame. The comics medium is unique in “manifesting material frames and the absence between them –​therefore literalizing the work of framing” (Chute 271). The comics multiframe model empowers the reader of the novel, for whom the main point is no longer “to cross one border into a representational world, but to confront a wide variety of frames, to navigate them, and to emerge with a text that is largely his or her own construction” (Berlatsky 184).

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162  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations An excellent illustration of this is provided by the text-​based narrative The Road to Armilia, which was included in the Obscure Cities (also known in English as Cities of the Fantastic) series of comics albums by Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten in 1988, following its partial publication in the magazine (À Suivre). The book portrays graphically what Paul de Musset’s short story Le Cavalier servant described literarily a century earlier: the comic strip produces a narrative framing of a literary text. The album, published by Casterman, was manufactured with the same care as the Memoirs of Corto Maltese (mentioned in Chapter 3),11 published the same year by the Belgian printer and publisher. Both books are printed in colour and focus on a continuous narrative text accompanied by images from various sources, including a few comics pages. In the same way that the format and paratext of the Memoirs incorporates them into the series of Corto Maltese comics albums without indicating the literary nature of the volume, an advertisement in (À Suivre) incorporates The Road to Armilia into “Schuiten and Peeters’ Obscure Cities cycle”,12 by putting it on the same footing as the first album in the comics series, The Great Walls of Samaris. The similarity to Pratt and Pierre’s album stops with the choice of the term “cycle”, which draws a distinction with the notion of “series”. The fictional universe of Obscure Cities is a matter of cycles, in other words, [of] ensembles aiming to insist on the effect of the world and on the diegetic coherence from one work to the next, whereas the series developing in popular literature insist, on the contrary, on a principle of reiteration. (Letourneux 296) In the words of Schuiten and Peeters (L’Aventure des images 48–​49 and 60–​ 61), their expanding universe offers multiple entry points to readers: without “the slightest separation between the parent work and its periphery”, it expands into different media according to “a logic of rebound”, to form “a network in which the most circumstantial element is likely to profoundly alter the project”. The logic of cross-​media expansion therefore bears no further resemblance to that of the supplements characteristic of the Corto Maltese series (see Chapter 3), especially since Obscure Cities abandons the series principle of a recurring and unchanging hero. The French literature scholar Adélaïde Russo (217) considers this cycle of graphic narratives drawn by François Schuiten to be “Peeters’ most inventive contribution to the contemporary literary landscape, the one that most corresponds to the widening of the literary field at the current time [1999]”. More recently, the Belgian scholar of literature and cultural studies Jan Baetens (Rebuilding 3) stressed the “powerful literary dimension” of Obscure Cities, “which immediately makes it a good candidate in bridging the gap between two worlds, that of comics

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  163 and that of writing”. Without foresaking (À Suivre)’s taste for popular literature, Benoît Peeters’ scriptwriting bore the modernist imprint of the Nouveau Roman,13 at least in its early stages, insofar as it relied on the theme of specularity, the literary staging of creators (particularly writers), the use of metalepsis and mise en abyme, and the play on “referential illusion” which reaches its culmination in the double ending (see Baetens, Réseau 59, regarding this feature of Peeters’ storytelling). As had been the case in The Great Walls of Samaris, The Road to Armilia ends with a twist that generates a change of perspective and a reversal between reality and fiction, leading to a second denouement. For most of the narrative, a young narrator recounts the rescue expedition he claims to have led by airship from the metropolis of Mylos to the polar city of Armilia. The latter has been overrun by ice since the halt of the machine that maintains its temperature at a viable level. The hero, Ferdinand Robur Hatteras, the child of a prominent family in Mylos, has the mission of delivering the formula for restarting the machine to an engineer in Armilia. When we see the hero-​narrator succeed in his mission, we discover that he has imagined the whole story, from his prison cell in a Mylos airship factory where he is exploited like an enslaved child. The imaginary travelogue constitutes “a variation on the emancipatory power of fiction” or “an illustration of the evasion offered by reading” (Baetens, Rebuilding 46, 122). The Road to Armilia has a multimodal form14 that is very different from the previous comics albums in Obscure Cities, including the large-​ format album L’Archiviste [The Archivist] (although this is an illustrated fictional essay). Nevertheless, the role played by the comic strip is crucial. The album consists mainly of the autofictional narrative of its hero-​ narrator, presented as a travel journal, which is framed by drawn images in two ways: through vertical embeddings and horizontal embeddings (Bertlatsky 178). At the album level, the literary narrative is embedded in a comic strip narrative consisting of two prologue pages and five epilogue pages, plus eight panels interspersed with the illustrated literary narrative. After the paratext of the album, which merely links Armilia to the Obscure Cities series and constitutes a threshold between the real and fictional worlds, it is through the comic strip that the reader enters the “Counter-​Earth fiction” of the Obscure Cities (Baetens, Rebuilding 29, 43). The “multiverse” (57–​58) is first explored from an external point of view, through an unfocalized comics narrative, then it is seen –​or so it would appear –​from an internal point of view, that of the child-​ narrator bent over a manuscript placed on the iconographic documentation that feeds the story he is inventing (Figure 5.1). At the page level, the journal, continued through framed and justified blocks of text, appears surrounded by and interspersed with illustrations and occasional comics panels, all produced in the graphic style of Obscure Cities. Tension is nevertheless created between, on the one hand, the smaller comics panels printed in solid colours using the blue print colouring technique, and,

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164  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations on the other hand, the panoramic illustrations, which often occupy a whole page (or even a double page) and use the direct-​colour technique, with hatching lines in coloured pencil that are reminiscent of nineteenth-​ century engravings (see Baetens, Rebuilding 11, 54, regarding this pictorial tension). While the handwritten text (lettered by Étienne Schréder in the definitive edition)15 can be assumed to be in Ferdinand’s hand, the illustrations and comic strip sequences (drawn and lettered by François Schuiten) can only be linked to another, unidentified graphic enunciator. One page of the album (Schuiten and Peeters, Armilia 23) shows an extract from the travel journal framed by illustrations, above a comic strip in which Ferdinand is writing the same text and illustrating it clumsily, copying an engraving from the magazine L’Illustration (Figure 5.1). The boy is writing on a pile of loose sheets placed on top of a (fictitious) issue of the French magazine founded in 1843, as well as on hardback books from the nineteenth century (The Little Mermaid and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras can be identified), and a forthcoming title in the Obscure Cities series: Brüsel. This page plunges us into the heart of the “factory” of the narrative, in the literary sense developed by the French nineteenth-​century specialist Philippe Hamon among others. According to Hamon (33), the “factory” as a “place of image production” belongs, along with the “shop” as a place of storage and display, to the recording spaces of the writers’ “image library”. In this sense, the factory is not a catalogue of images to be written, but a process of writing, creating relationships and imagining. As the comics multiframe format attests, “what happens in between frames [or images], outside of them, and beyond them is as much a part of the narrative fabric as what is represented within frames” (Chute 275). Despite reading being prohibited in Mylos, the child-​ writer reads and connects texts and images from varied sources, in accordance with a “horizontal embedding” (Bertlatsky 178) comparable to the closure process in which the comics reader fills in the gaps between panels. Far from being literary illustrations, these “[n]‌on verbal elements are part of the narrative discourse” (Hallet 156), since they were at the narrator’s disposal and are displayed (albeit redrawn) as the narrative unfolds, just as the manuscript is at once produced and reproduced in the album of The Road to Armilia. The text does not generate the illustrations, it emerges from them. These supposedly redrawn illustrations are provided as a frame for a supposedly reprinted travelogue. The materiality of the manuscript pages is revealed, on the one hand, by a model of sequential juxtaposition alien to literature (Martin 143) which makes a temporal simultaneity possible, and, on the other hand, by the materiality of the handwritten text which is also characteristic of comics (197). To write the script for The Road to Armilia, Benoît Peeters describes a constrained writing exercise that was similar to the creative writing process followed by his hero-​narrator: “I can still see myself working with my ten or twelve images spread out in a bar in Beijing” (Peeters

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  165

Figure 5.1 Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten, Les Cités obscures: La Route d’Armilia, Tournai, Casterman, 1990, p. 23. © Casterman. Reproduced by kind permission of the authors and Éditions Casterman.

quoted in Jans and Douvry 84). The story was born from a first set of drawings by François Schuiten, some of which were inspired by previous illustrations and advertising works. In an interview published in 1994, the authors explain that the book responded to a commission for

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166  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations a “portfolio” received from the Danish publisher Bogfabrikken16 within the context of an exhibition (see Jans and Douvry 83). However, in spite of the place occupied by the image in the multimodal narrative, the latter has an undeniable literary dimension. Note, for example, that the key to the plot is verbal: it is a cryptic formula that the young hero has great difficulty in retrieving from his memory. He tries various combinations of letters and words to reconstitute it, which reminds us of Benoît Peeters’ taste (following Raymond Roussel, a tutelary figure of the Nouveau Roman) for anagrams and double homophones in his novels (see Russo 211, Baetens, Réseau 78, 86). As Hillary Chute (269) remarks, “[t]‌he connection between contemporary fiction and graphic narrative is most clear in a shared obsession with borderlands, hybridity and boundary-​ crossing”. In the eyes of its writer, the iconotextual hybridity of The Road to Armilia reinforces a literariness unique to comics, which reverses the tutelage of written language over narrative: The Road to Armilia is the album for which we went the furthest in the graphic aspect and the literary aspect. Comics often confine the text to a utilitarian role, serving the narrative. In this album there is an aspect that is truly linguistic, literary… (Peeters quoted in Jans and Douvry 86–​87) A hybrid work such as this one demonstrates that “the novel and the comic strip can use the same visual processes for comparable effects” and justifies “studying so-​ called visual literature and comics on an equal footing” (Martin 198, 12). Significantly, French-​speaking critics encountered “the difficulty of avoiding novelistic frames of reference when reading long [graphic] narrative works” (Williams 22) such as The Road to Armilia, a difficulty experienced by American comics fans at the same time, whose reviews highlighted novel-​like traits even when they opposed the idea that a comic strip could be considered as a novel. This particular Franco-​Belgian work shows that the skills developed through reading comics may be applied to other multimodal narratives, and that the generic boundaries between these are not impermeable. In the 1989 Angoulême Festival catalogue, Nicolas Finet (6–​7) classified The Road to Armilia in a new publishing category which he named the “graphic novel”, whose birth he attributed to Autrement, the publishing house of Los Angeles, l’étoile oubliée de Laurie Bloom [Los Angeles, the forgotten star of Laurie Bloom] (1984) by Enki Bilal and Pierre Christin. The journalist, a regular contributor to the editorial columns of (À Suivre), proposed this generic distinction in a 16-​page booklet inserted in the festival catalogue, imitating the layout of Gallimard’s prestigious Collection Blanche, which he entitled Le Roman graphique est-​il soluble dans la bande dessinée? [Can the graphic novel be dissolved in the comic strip?]. Under this heading, he gathered not graphic novels in the strict sense, but rather “ambiguous products, because they are deliberately

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  167 hybrid. Partly novels through the writing technique and the abandonment of speech bubbles, partly comics through the treatment of the images and the personality of their authors” (Finet 7). He mainly identified multimodal narratives based on a continuous literary text, but also novels such as Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1988), illustrated by Jacques Tardi of Futuropolis, as well as a single graphic novel in the true sense: a translation from Flammarion of Maus by Art Spiegelman. It is worth noting that Finet is going too far in affirming an “abandonment of speech bubbles”, since they appear in Maus as well as in many of the works that he cites. In defining what he meant by “graphic novel”, he referred to the launch of (À Suivre) in 1978, which “relied heavily on the theme of the ‘novel in comics form’ to impose the idea of ambitious pictorial narration” (Finet 8). However, he did not target the comics albums that Casterman drew from the monthly magazine, but rather the multimodal narratives that appeared in short-​ lived collections in the 1980s, such as “Script” from Futuropolis, “Albums” from Autrement, Dargaud’s “Hors-​Texte” and Flammarion’s “Roman BD”. Surprisingly, he did not adopt the novel-​like book format of certain collections as a distinctive criterion. Among those he left out (like “Prestige” from Le Lombard) was “Autodafé” (1982–​1983) from Les Humanoïdes associés, launched with the French translation of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), which brought together works that were very different in terms of graphic style and iconotextual dispositive (from film photonovel to autobiographical manga). The unity of the book collection was based on its graphic novel format, bringing together “smaller and longer books in black and white”, designed to look like novels, all of them exploring “various articulations of text and image” (Méon 120, 126–​ 127). In reality, most of these books had only the smaller book size and the long-​ length format of the graphic novel, as well as “the aspiration to be taken seriously and to be rated as comparable to the novel” (Baetens and Frey 197). In its standard album format, The Road to Armilia, without being a graphic novel, is part of the same “more encompassing cultural fields and practices (graphic literature, visual storytelling)” (7).

Comics in the factory of literary writing The short story Le Cavalier servant, the illustrated novel Voyages and Adventures of Dr. Festus, and the multimodal novel The Road to Armilia all make their connection to comics apparent from the outset. It can also happen that the idea of a link to comics comes not from the work itself but from the reading process. As Linda Hutcheon’s famous saying (XIV) goes, “we use the word adaptation to refer to both a product and a process of creation and reception”. According to Jan Baetens (“Adaptation” 32), “the current reading practice has become an adaptative reading; we increasingly see the works we are faced with as adaptations […], all the while having in mind the adaptations that could be made in turn”.

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168  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations It only takes a fairly short passage to give the reader the impression of a momentary preoccupation of the narrative with a comic strip, which begins to emerge from the text among the many “images already seen by the writer [that] solicited and mediatized his inspiration” (Hamon 231). To illustrate this, I will use the case of a partial novelization integrated into a French Nouveau Roman. La Bataille de Pharsale (1969, translated in 1971 as The Battle of Pharsalus), the ninth novel by the already renowned French author Claude Simon, elicited a considerable critical reception. The tone was set by two articles published in 1970 by two specialists of the Nouveau Roman, followed by a conference given by the writer at Cerisy in 1971. The three texts were partially translated in a collection edited by Celia Britton in 1993. In the first article, “The battle of the phrase”, Jean Ricardou makes a stylistic study of the textual mechanisms of “the production of the text” (see Britton 99) and the structural connections (transitions, relations) between the multiple fragments brought together by the novel. He reconstructs the verbal fabrication of the text by highlighting part of its intertext: an epigraph quoted from Valéry, and several excerpts borrowed from Apuleius and Proust (whose punctuation has been removed and whose authors are not mentioned). Ricardou makes only a cursory allusion to painting, by studying the occurrences of the word “yellow” among other verbal initiators of text generation: “this first aggressive colour makes the whole text colour-​orientated. Hardly surprising, then, is […] the introduction of painting and painters” (see Britton 104). In the second article, entitled “Ut pictura poesis”, Françoise van Rossum-​Guyon expresses an intuition, confirmed by Claude Simon during his Cerisy conference (see Britton 42, 44), that the compositional model of The Battle of Pharsalus comes from the visual arts, which would explain the abundance of “allusions to painters and their paintings” (84). The literary scholar begins by listing some “more or less animated scenes or tableaux” (85–​86), above all finding static visual scenes that allow another interpretation of Valéry’s formula “Achille immobile à grands pas” [Achilles running motionless], already studied by Jean Ricardou (98, 100–​101). Françoise van Rossum-​Guyon asserts that these spectacular scenes, which are visions captured (perceived, imagined or remembered) from the viewpoint of an observing subject, “are characterized initially by their fragmentary and static quality” (86–​ 87). These two frequently quoted articles durably establish the idea that the text of The Battle of Pharsalus is generated not only by the words, but also by the images. Rereading these articles 50 years later, we also notice that, just as Ricardou was attentive to the most prestigious literary intertext, van Rossum-​Guyon focused on paintings at the expense of holy pictures, comic strip panels, advertisements, postcards and other photographs described in the novel. Since 1970, the raw materials of Simonian writing, drawn from all kinds of written and visual sources, have been studied with less selectivity.

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  169 To date, there are five pages of The Battle of Pharsalus (42–​46) to which researchers have paid little attention17 (except for Lieber 48–​49, Bonhomme 4). This passage relates the reading, carried out by a character in the novel, of a three-​panel comic strip in a daily newspaper. The shift into ekphrasis through a reading scene is not the most original of the multiple narrative transitions18 employed in this challenging Nouveau Roman, which requires its reader “to glue together the fragments of the fiction” (Jenny 47–​48). Located in the last third of the first part of the novel, which interweaves eight plots centred around different locations, actions, characters and (presumably) narrators, this one is recounted by a homodiegetic narrator. He describes a voyeur “spying listening” (Simon, Battle 41) to a love scene that he cannot see as he is outside the apartment in which it is taking place. The voyeur imagines himself in a corridor adjoining the bedroom, even though he is standing in front of the building’s facade, hiding behind a newspaper, like in the tailing sequences of detective stories. While the newspaper chops up the scrutinized facade, “the upper edge of the pages forming an obtuse angle over which he can see the window” (42), this architectural multiframe formed by the door and the windows offers a transition to the description of the comics grid printed on the newspaper page. This is not an oblique novelization of a visual narrative, telling “the story through the protagonist’s repeated visioning of it” (Baetens, Novelization 7). It is the description of a narrative without the staging of a plot, rather than an actual narrative, or even an analysis of the comic strip sequence such as comics fans were beginning to publish at the time the novel appeared. From the 1960s onwards, the fanzines and critical works of French-​language bedephilia published transcriptions of scenes that resembled the shot-​by-​shot transcriptions of finished films in the French monthly review L’Avant-​scène Cinéma (see Raynauld 12). The excerpt from Claude Simon’s novel displays the formal tendencies of these, especially the focusing on the narrative rather than the story. Firstly, the narrator describes the panels in order, noting the iconic motifs and textual content, and studying their relationships within the compositions. He uses the descriptive present tense, presentative structures (“the first square showing”, “can be seen”, “can be read the words”, etc.), the lexicon of vision (“spying”, “watching”, “inner spectacle”, “invisible spectacle”) and the technical terms of visual studies (“background”, “foreground”, “outline”, “triptych”), sometimes supplemented by metaphors. While the expressions “comic strip” and “balloon” are indeed present, a “square” indicates a panel, “un nuage blanc” [a white cloud] (translated non-​literally as “a white balloon”) is a speech bubble, whose tail is described as “a zigzag”. Secondly, the narrator analyses the formal relationships between the three panels, paying particular attention to variations in framing and pinpointing the positions of the cartoonist and the reader in relation to the scene, but without making any interpretation of the meaning of the story.

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170  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations To use Philippe Hamon’s terminology (315), this ekphrasis “speaks” an image already “spoken in text”, insofar as the daily strip contains words. The verbal exchange between its characters is retranscribed in the novel in capital letters, describing the iconic (the non-​verbal) and media components (the cutting of the scene, the composition of the panels, the appearance of the bubbles) of the conversation in the comic strip. The material description of the words leads to a reflection about their status in relation to the diegesis. Leaving aside the convention that “[t]‌he speech balloon creates the pretence of speech and works autonomously in the image” (Blin-​Rolland 93), how could the characters’ perception of it be imagined? This semiological question is not incongruous in “The Battle of Pharsalus, a novel that proposes a reflection on signs and in which graphic symbols multiply” (Bonhomme 9; see also the “perfect lesson in semiotics” described by Lieber 47, 49). As Bérénice Bonhomme notes (4), Claude Simon had, in an earlier novel, Histoire (1967), already shown a fascination for the graphic, almost tangible materiality of the words emanating from the mouths of comics characters. The novel describes a man “barely controlling his mouth, as if I could positively see him swallowing the words about to emerge, as if I could even see them forming like those balloons that swell between the lips of the characters in comic strips” (Simon, Histoire 60). American readers were introduced to this intermedia comparison by the best-​selling hardboiled detective novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981) by Gary Wolf. In this fiction, the cartoon characters communicate with speech bubbles that are “painstakingly described” by the human hero-​narrator, in other words these described balloons constitute “a verbal representation (word) of a visual representation (balloon) of a verbal representation (speech)” (Newell 183). Years before Wolf, Simon used “ekphrastic strategies to bring the image of the speech balloon ‘before the eyes’ of the reader” (184). He deliberately chooses a banal scene of sentimental narrative so that the reader’s eye is not distracted by the content of the conversation: I’M TELLING YOU ALL THIS BECAUSE I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I NEVER STOP THINKING OF YOU DARLING, the words apparently floating in mid-​air inside a perfumed balloon filling the whole upper part of the square revealing just beyond the hand holding the receiver […] her dark gaze both vigilant and absent and fixed on nothing […], without really seeing, staring at an inner spectacle, perhaps the form the color of the words just spoken as if they appeared to her not printed and enclosed in balloons but rising up out of the void. (Simon, Battle 44) The unidentified strip alternates between a demi-​mondaine and her boxer lover, whom she contacts by telephone at his gymnasium to warn him about an acquaintance who has just escaped from prison. The entire

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  171 comics passage imitates the outrageous staging of telephone communication that can be found to an equal extent in television soap operas, sentimental photonovels and comics. Similarly, the description of an Italian Renaissance painting, a hundred pages later, signals a “telephoned” composition, worthy of a literary “painting”, i.e. overplayed by its petrified actors and predictable in dramatic terms: t‌ he warriors of Piero della Fancesca motionlessly slaughtering each other with slow gestures “telephoned” like bad heavyweights planted or rather rooted in the center of the ring mountains of meat bludgeoning each other with blows that would kill an ox eyes stupid snorting shaking their heads spattering blood on the starched shirtfronts and the minks in the first row until one of them without warning without taking a step suddenly collapses all in a heap the referee rushing forward raising the victor’s arm (Simon, Battle 111) This description –​strangely silent compared to that of the daily strip –​ emphasizes the pictorial scene. However, the comparison with a fistfight evokes a daily strip action scene, for example one of Superman’s boxing matches in “The Comeback of Larry Trent” (1939) by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (37), with its ideographic sprays of drops of sweat, but without the comic strip’s soundtrack. While the strip described in The Battle of Pharsalus illustrates a hand-​to-​hand combat, like the painting by the Italian master Piero della Francesca, in contrast it only indirectly describes the fighting, which remains situated off-​frame, giving rise to a great variety of sounds. the words exploding with the deafening sound of thunder rolling and echoing between the walls of the gymnasium among the smell of liniment and just as the scalloped balloon conceals what is happening in the ring keeping in the mute background the muffled echoes of the blows the panting of the fighters the crunching of the resin under the soles (Simon, Battle 43) If I mentioned Superman, without being able to confirm that it is the source of the unidentified strip of The Battle of Pharsalus, it is also because of the reference to Hercules in early French translations of the superhero strips.19 By contrast, Jean-​Claude Lieber (48) considers that Claude Simon constructs an imaginary strip, to which he had already alluded in the novel Histoire (1967): the sequel to the adventures of the detective in tiny images now the boxer telephoning a woman lying in bed telephoning too in the second image and again the boxer the words doubtless explosive

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172  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations terrible since they appear not in the usual balloons escaping from human lips but in a kind of cloud with torn ragged edges (Simon, Histoire 93) In literary writings, descriptions of imaginary pieces of art, that suit the writers’ storytelling needs better than existing ones, are not an uncommon phenomenon (Louvel 61). A short story contemporary with The Battle of Pharsalus is The Origin of the Birds (1967) by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, translated in subsequent years into English and French, in the collection Time and the Hunter (1969) /​Temps zéro (1970). Throughout the story, a male narrator asks the reader to imagine a comic strip that he describes, claiming that “these stories can be told better with strip drawings than with a story composed of sentences one after the other” (Calvino 168). He considers that comics supplement the limitations of literary description: “you can image for yourselves a series of adventurous strips […]: I leave these to you. To tell the story I should somehow describe what Or was like; and I can’t” (173, see Minato for an in-​depth reading of the short story). What contribution do comics make amidst the other visual media described in The Battle of Pharsalus? The composition of the novel is based on the temporal simultaneity of all its components, which are associated on a formal rather than a narrative basis; in other words this composition has pictorial rather than literary qualities. During his Cerisy lecture (“Fiction word for word”, see Britton 44), Claude Simon stated that [l]‌ike the painter, and despite the fact that instead of a surface he only has a duration at his disposal, the writer can nevertheless succeed in “abstracting elements from different series” and assembling them in a sort of mechanism or system which is not, of course, optical, but scriptural. This mode of novelistic composition evokes the multiframe of a comics page, whose reading requires filling in the gutters between the pictures.20 At the end of The Battle of Pharsalus (178–​187), a writer, sitting at his desk in front of a window, begins writing on a blank page after observing his immediate surroundings. The following sentence concludes the description of a postcard depicting a military trumpeter in armour, before moving on to another object on the desk (a box of paper clips): “All these elements seem inlaid together like marquetry” (186). As Jean Rousset noted (1210), this transition between two descriptions applies as much to the assembly of metal plates constituting the soldier’s armour as it does to the “montage of broken and juxtaposed scenarios” that characterizes the novel as a whole. Would not the comic strip be even more fitting than “marquetry as a spatial figure of the written text” (1210)?

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  173 The contribution of comics is not only found at the structural level, but also at the textual level of The Battle of Pharsalus. The novel juxtaposes not plots but visual scenes with motifs that are, if not immobile, at least slowed down or “running motionless”, in Paul Valéry’s words. A freeze-​ frame effect constantly affects the reading experience. The description of a work of a discontinuous nature, such as a comics panel, in the linear continuity of the novelistic writing, intensifies the effect “of intertextuality [which] is that it introduces a new way of reading which destroys the linearity of the text” (Jenny 44). We know that Claude Simon deliberately reversed the relationship between action narration and object description that is usually established by the novel, by placing action narrative in an ancillary and subordinate position to description (Rousset 1207). Yet comics have introduced an innovation “in the field of storytelling”, according to Hugo Frey and Jan Baetens (180), that is “the redefinition of the relationship between narration and description”, which are no longer mutually exclusive. For instance, in the multimodal novel The Road to Armilia, as is the case in graphic narratives, “both aspects coincide: it is not possible to narrate without describing, and conversely all descriptions will be deciphered immediately in relationship with their contribution to the story” (Baetens and Frey 180). The purpose of reading a partial novelization within The Battle of Pharsalus is not to compare the narrative performances of literary and graphic novels. Nor is it a question of reconstructing Claude Simon’s image library (or rather comics library), but rather of considering what reading a novel like a comic strip could teach us about the two media and their interactions.

Reading novels as comics scripts To conclude this book, I will return to one of the readerships (sizeable, though not the only one) of comics-​related novels, namely comics fans. Indeed, the latter were pioneers in reading novels as comics novelizations by developing a particular reception strategy, which consists of reading novels as comics scripts. For a long time, French publishers have been making “published scenarios” available to cinephiles, a term which covers several items, not to mention making of books: namely, pre-​production screenplays, novelizations of scripts or “scene-​ by-​ scene transcriptions of the finished motion picture” (Raynauld 12). Diverse examples of “adaptation’s print-​ based ‘afterlife’ ” (Murray 15) have thrived since the late 1980s, although they may have seemed anachronistic in relation to the visual turn negotiated by media culture in the twentieth century. More and more foretexts, which tend more towards document or more towards fiction, depending on the case,21 are also being made available to comics fans, who actively contribute to unearthing them. Just as film enthusiasts are fascinated by films that have never been made (Jeannelle 97–​98), comics enthusiasts are always in search of little-​known storylines

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174  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations or unrealized scripts that they can incorporate into the canon of comics series that they establish within their fandom. For example, a record in Bédéthèque22 mentions, among the contents of a collection of Flash Gordon comics by Alex Raymond, “4 pages explaining the script of ‘Flash Gordon in The Caverns of Mongo’ ”. Indeed, the collection, published in 1971 –​the second volume of a lavish French republication of all the Sunday pages featuring the hero, renamed Guy L’Éclair, that were translated in the 1930s for Robinson magazine –​ included an additional storyline unknown to French readers (Raymond, Guy L’Éclair 122–​125). By so doing, this complete edition incorporated the literary storyline –​even if it made do with its so-​called “script” –​into the canon of adventures of a character important to the beginnings of bedephilia in France. These beginnings were driven, in the 1960s, by a generation of readers who had been fascinated as children by the pre-​war magazine Robinson (Lesage 388–​399). But of what was this unpublished work the “script”? In addition to the Big Little Books published by Whitman, which novelized the Sunday comics pages of Flash Gordon from 1934 onwards (see Lowery 85–​ 89, 453–​ 455), Grosset & Dunlap published a long-​ length novel signed by the comics artist Alex Raymond himself, which developed an original storyline: Flash Gordon in The Caverns of Mongo (1936). It was never translated into French, but in 1964 the comics fan Pierre Couperie published a “digest” of it in the critical fanzine Giff-​ Wiff. The eight-​ page text was presented as “a condensed novel”, in reference to the type of rewriting popularized by the French edition, launched in 1947, of the American magazine Reader’s Digest. However, unlike a digest, Couperie’s text did not have narrative autonomy, for on the one hand it described more than recounted the other text, which it mentioned explicitly, and on the other hand it was written in the present tense (whereas Alex Raymond’s novel was written in the past tense), as is usual for a descriptive summary, intended to support a metaliterary commentary. This text, which appeared in a critical fanzine, was indeed more akin to reading notes, as subjective opinions were expressed in brackets and in footnotes. Apart from one instance of an “I” in a footnote, these opinions were expressed in the first person plural as if they represented the views of all the members of the Club des bandes dessinées [Comics Club] of which Giff-​Wiff was the bulletin. This can be seen in the following excerpt combining objectivity (summaries and quotations) and subjectivity (comments and interpretations): Gonth is very pushy, Camille [Dale] is worried –​and, my goodness, so are we –​[and she] tries to convince him to wait calmly for the victory in order to make her his queen, but he roars with laughter at such naivety: “the royal wedding will be a public ceremony, but what goes on within the basalt walls of my palace is another matter!” And he could still torture Guy [Flash]… Camille resigns herself to

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  175 his advances. “The cold, slimy touch of his hands”, “his soft lips on hers”, poor Camille reaches the stage of saying “No-​no-​no-​no”, and the reader of wondering whether Raymond is about to step outside the usual boundaries of the genre, when, thank God, a messenger appears. (Couperie 33) While denouncing the accentuation of gore and sexualization in the novel, compared to his own memories of the comics he had read as a child,23 the comics fan was astonished that “Raymond, whose visual imagination was prodigious, was able neither to evoke nor to describe” (38). This sweeping opinion allowed him to pronounce a retrospective sentence: the novice writer could have made an honest disciple of Edgar Rice Burroughs if he had not been predestined for comics. In spite of this lukewarm criticism, Couperie included his digest in 1971 in the lavish reissue (mentioned above) of the comics pages of Guy L’Éclair, which he himself prepared, participating in the constitution of a canon on behalf of a French fandom fascinated by the American hero. Paradoxically, at the same time as canonizing his text, he added an introduction to it and rewrote the conclusion, in order to denigrate the novel thenceforth and to question its authorship. Is Alex Raymond really the author? He had other things to do then; he didn’t even illustrate it: the book contains a single, very mediocre illustration by a certain Robb Beebe. Should we attribute The Caverns of Mongo to Bob [sic] Moore who worked on the script of “Flash Gordon” before 1940 and from an imprecise date? It is very difficult, in order to be sure of this, to compare the style of a comic strip and that of a novel. (Couperie’s text reprinted in Raymond, Guy L’Éclair 123) Let us note that Pierre Couperie only mentions this ghostwriter here (while getting his first name wrong), whereas he does not talk about him in his introduction to an album which gathers together Sunday pages, published in the United States from 1936 to 1938, which were indeed scripted by Don Moore. The raising to eminence of a supposedly complete author (Alex Raymond) is in contradiction with the idea that a shadow scriptwriter would make a more plausible literary adaptor than he would. That said, the hypothesis is consistent –​anachronistically since Moore’s scripts date back to the 1930s –​with the writing conditions for film novelizations that were being established at the time Couperie took up his pen. According to the rules in force in the United States since the 1970s, the screenwriter is considered to be the creator of the story of the film (unless it is an adaptation; see Murray 145) and is paid as such by the publisher of the novelization, in addition to having a right of precedence if they wish to write it themself (Mahlknecht 148).

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176  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations During the same period, Hachette entrusted the novelization of Les Chevaliers du ciel [The Aeronauts] for the “Bibliothèque verte” to Jean-​Michel Charlier, the scriptwriter of both the television series and the comics series on which it was based, Tanguy et Laverdure. In addition to the simultaneity of their publication, both in 1971, Charlier’s novel and Couperie’s digest have met with a similar fate among comics fans.24 In 2017, the teen novel entitled L’Avion qui tuait ses pilotes [The Plane that Killed Its Pilots] was included in a complete edition of Tanguy and Laverdure. The numerous illustrations by Jijé, the artist at the time of the comics series, and the subtitle of the novel, Une aventure de Tanguy et Laverdure [An Adventure of Tanguy and Laverdure], were more reminiscent of the ninth art than the eighth. It seems, however, that the novel took its “basis” (Ratier 15) from the script of two episodes of The Aeronauts broadcast by ORTF (21 and 28 December 1969). If we rely on this comparison made by the comics enthusiast Gilles Ratier, which is plausible because Tanguy et Laverdure was fed to a great extent by reciprocal exchanges between the television series and the comic strips (Lesage 364), the writing process would therefore have come close to that of a novelization. As was the case with Flash Gordon in The Caverns of Mongo, by including a little-​known storyline in the reissue of a serial corpus, it was integrated into the canon of a series made classic by bedephilia. At the end of the 2010s, Dargaud publishing house released both the complete edition of the aviation comics series (including the novel by Jean-​Michel Charlier) and an adaptation of the novel in two comics albums that formed “A ‘Classic’ adventure of Tanguy and Laverdure /​ Text by Charlier /​Drawn by Durand”, with this precision on the title page: “Adapted by Patrice Buendia from the novel by J.-​M. Charlier: The Plane that Killed Its Pilots” (Charlier and Durand 1 and front cover). This posthumous self-​adaptation goes beyond any strategy of the scriptwriter, who died in 1989, since “readers set out to make self-​adaptation in place of the author” (Baetens, “Adaptation” 35). It may be thought that the adaptation filled a double gap felt by the reader of the novel: the absence of the screenplay, which seems relative “since it is easy to imagine a novelization having little trouble following in a screenplay’s footsteps” (Baetens, Novelization 71), and the more glaring lack of the comic strip (given the quantitative gap between the 40 or so non-​sequential drawings that illustrate the novel and the 92 comics pages necessary for its adaptation). Thus, even a novel based on the plot of an adventure of heroes from visual media, being necessarily limited in its description of a comic strip as yet undrawn, puts into perspective the claim that a comics-​related novel can “make readers feel nothing is lost by not having seen [the comic strip]” (Pizzino 94). These comics-​ related novels, welcomed by fans as pseudo-​ scripts, show the participatory culture in which their authors are embedded. Another comics-​related novel, Les Robinsons du rail [The Robinsons of the Railway] (1981), published in album form almost 20 years after its

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  177 publication in Spirou magazine, was presented as follows on its back cover: “For those who have read all of Franquin. […] This is not a comic strip (but what a good script it would be!)” (Delporte, Robinsons back cover). Bedephilia publishers feed the appetite of fans for little-​known storylines, and especially for unrealized scripts. The comics fandom participates in the constitution of a canon, officializing “the manner in which novelization can expand the range of intertexts through which a given work or franchise is viewed” (Newell 27). However, do these scriptwriters’ novels resemble authentic bande dessinée scripts? From Jacqueline Rivière to André-​Paul Duchâteau, the first French-​ speaking scriptwriters had acquired their writing experience in journalism or literature. In contrast to the complete authors who both wrote their own scripts and undertook their graphic realization, these scriptwriters, when they first started, may have had only a vague idea of the specificities of comics narration. In the 1950s, comics scriptwriting became more professional and opened to people from less literary backgrounds, which led to the replacement of novel-​like scripts by the foretextual forms that are still in use today. The cardinal stages taught by comics writing manuals correspond roughly to three of the stages of a screenplay (Raynauld 61–​63): the synopsis, the scene-​by-​scene breakdown, and the dialogue continuity. Although most scriptwriters wrote true scripts from then on, some still felt the temptation for novelistic writing. For example, in the 1980s the French illustrator and scriptwriter Jean-​Claude Forest continued to draft his scripts in the form of “a very detailed synopsis”: To start with, I always write a copious synopsis, almost a small novel, into which I cram everything that comes to mind: snippets of dialogue, indications of the setting, etc. Then I cut it up chapter by chapter, as the graphic realization progresses. (Jean-​Claude Forest, quoted in Groensteen and Peeters 108–​109) Note that he published his first novel in 1983, Lilia entre l’air et l’eau [Lilia Between Air and Water], illustrated in a graphic style very similar to his own by Daniel Billon, who had drawn the last Barbarella comics album the previous year. The transition to literary publishing marked a turning point in the second half of the twentieth century in the literary factory of comics, which moved from the novel-​like scripts to a scriptwriter’s novel that sometimes resembled novelization as practised in the film industry. According to Jan Baetens (Novelization 170), “[n]‌ovelizations are not only often based on scripts, which they rewrite in order to dissimulate their supposedly nonliterary aspects, they are also often taking a form that can be easily confused with them”. Thus, at the start of production of the successful series Le Triangle secret [The Secret Triangle], “Jacques Glénat told [Didier] Convard to transform the unfinished version of a previously written novel into a comics script” (Boillat, “L’amplification”

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178  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations 107), and the publisher remembered this when he co-​published, with the literary house Mazarine, two novels rewritten by the scriptwriter: Les Larmes du Pape [The Tears of the Pope] (2006) and Les Cinq Templiers de Jésus [The Five Templars of Jesus] (2007). Similarly, in the afterword to the novel Welcome to Hope (2008), its author Damien Marie, who is also the scriptwriter of the eponymous comics series, presents it as the first draft of a script: The conception of a comic strip was originally the goal of my work. But in order to get a better “feel” for my characters, I started a more sensitive writing process than the long, discontinuous litany of a script […] and the whole story ended up existing as a novel before returning to its original purpose. […] A simple transition, just by specifying the place and the character in the preamble of the chapter, allowed me to switch from one character to another. (Marie 120–​121) Despite the brevity of the chapters with headings such as “Hope–​ Kansas /​Cody” or “On the road–​Hope /​Scott” (7–​8), this novel, released in the same collection (Grand Angle) as the comics series, is the result of editorial groundwork, i.e. of a process of rewriting with a view to being published at the same time as the finished graphic work. The case of Jean Van Hamme is different again. He published his first novel Largo Winch et le groupe W [Largo Winch and Group W] (1977) through Mercure de France, from an aborted draft script,25 as he did later with Le Téléscope [The Telescope] (1992), published by Le Cri, before finding the opportunity to adapt each of them into comics (see Van Hamme, Mémoires 36–​ 42 and 99–​ 100). Formally, none of these published texts correspond to any of the theoretical stages of writing a comics script, and for good reason: they are not aimed at a cartoonist but at the niche market of bedephilia. For fans, these literary self-​adaptations have the double advantage of, on the one hand, indirectly keeping track of the working documents to which their authors had privileged access, and, on the other hand, implicitly producing an authorial commentary likely to generate a reinterpretation of the adapted work by the reader. * ** This book has provided an overview of a poorly catalogued and understudied corpus, offering a basis for further study of these comics-​related novels, while also affording some first original insights into them. As signalled in its introduction, this volume has followed both a text-​based research method, based on a number of close readings, and a media-​ historical, process-​oriented approach, constantly taking into account the historical and cultural context of the production and reception of the works. It may be criticized for not constituting a work of meta-​commentary. This

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  179 can be explained not only by the lack of knowledge of a corpus that had first of all to be unearthed, but more importantly by a conscious rejection of any transhistorical or essentialist approach toward relationships between comics and literature. “The study of adaptation can never be a goal in itself”, as Jan Baetens (“Adaptation” 43) writes: “[t]‌he aim of such a study should be to highlight the manifold character of the work as virtually adapted and virtually adapting, as well as to show the multifarious nature of its enunciation”. Of course, this book does not exhaust the avenues opened up by the “novel” perspective that it applies to comics and adaptation studies. The work undertaken here could be pursued both from a literary perspective and in directions that go beyond literature, even if these could also enrich literary studies. I see at least three additional steps that could be taken by literary researchers. Firstly, to produce more close readings of French comics-​ related novels (a corpus that is growing every day) and to contribute to a comparative study with other cultural areas, for example by looking at the many Japanese manga-​ related novels. Secondly, to summarize these readings by indicating their contributions to a transmedial poetics. A consolidated analysis of such literary narratives circulating through different printed or digital formats may contribute to a transmedial narratology, not in the specific sense of “transmedia storytelling” as defined by Henry Jenkins (Convergence 293), but more broadly “referring to those narratological approaches that may be applied to different media, rather than to a single medium only” (Rajewski 46). Lastly, the importance that comics have acquired for literature over the years may provide the critic with a new perspective for rereading literary history, no less, namely for attempting “to draw out, in his own time, the transitory organization of the realm of literature, along with the complex and anachronistic play of influences that determine it” (Bayard 240). But avenues for development are also to be sought beyond the novel. This book has focused on pieces of prose, i.e. a set of continuous texts in which illustrations could play an important role, but it has not extended to works of greater textual or iconotextual hybridity. Novelizations of comics exist with a non-​ linear presentation, for example within the book Tryphon Tournesol et Isidore Isou, published in 2007 in the literary collection “Fiction & Cie” by Emmanuel Rabu. For 30 pages (63–​92), the French artist retranscribes verbatim what he calls an “almost hypergraphic reading” of The Calculus Affair by Hergé. The layout of this comics verbalization is reminiscent of a “rough-​script” (Baetens, Novelization 177), whereas it is in fact a “reading” of the finished work, carried out according to a “hypergraphic” rewriting process invented in 1950 by Isidore Isou, the founder of the avant-​garde Lettrism movement. The Lettrist retranscription of The Calculus Affair plays on the graphic substance of the typographed words and the material space of the printed page. The text, structured by subheadings listing the seven days of the comic strip story, is accompanied by references in small

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180  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations type, specifying the time (in brackets) and place (in the margin) of the action, and expanded with other details in footnotes. The typography highlights words, which appear framed, in capitals, italics or in bold. This text lists the “actions proper” (Rabu 91) of the graphic narrative in a dry and chronological manner, with a geographical map as the only illustration. This account based on the story does not constitute a digest, but a sort of scene-​by-​scene breakdown (Raynauld 61–​63). During this stage in the writing of a film, situated between the dialogue continuity and the shooting script, all the scenes are summarized, one after the other, without their dialogue (but with some sound effects). Emmanuel Rabu’s descriptive process,26 applied to an album published in 1956, only approaches a script-​like foretext in its formal presentation; in all other respects it could be analysed as a non-​linear comics-​related literary work. To go even further, the writing of a literary work from a comic strip can lead to an media hybridization, in the sense of either visual novelization or multimodal storytelling. It is apparent that, among other hybrid forms, comics-​ related children’s picture books or adult multimodal narratives merit further research. It is quite possible that comics studies and literary studies will mutually enrich each other’s research methods (see Martin, for a good example of this), making it possible to study how these iconotextual productions recount other iconotextual productions, namely bandes dessinées.

Notes 1 All citations from French-​language works included in the bibliography have been translated for the purposes of this book. 2 For example, the Irish author Joyce Cary, praising The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the year the Pulitzer Prize-​winning novel was released, relayed a rumour that was circulating about Ernest Hemingway: It has been said that this great artist belongs essentially to the world of the strip cartoon and there is something in judgement for those who understand the difference between “Lear” and “Silver King”. Both are melodramas for barnstormers but one is tailored by genius and the other is a reach-​me-​down from the slop-​shop. (Cary 4) 3 The Italian expression “cavaliere servente”, calqued into French, refers to a gallant, also called “cicisbeo”, accompanying a married woman in broad daylight, in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century Italy. 4 La Revue des deux mondes, a respected literary and political journal, took a stand against literary illustrations in 1843 (Arnar 351). 5 In 1848, Paul de Musset had published a novella in a volume entitled La Chèvre jaune [The Yellow Goat], which he republished in 1869 in a collection including The Cavaliere Servente. In it, he allegorically linked a goat to a young woman. The daughter of a Sicilian notary fell in love with a goatherd and promised him the same fidelity as his favourite goat. However, the notable father refused this low-​class son-​in-​law and slandered

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  181

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him away, driving his daughter into madness and condemning the goat to the stake! This caricature, probably preceded by others representing the same characters in the Caffè Florian album, indicates that it is a “hybrid album” (Filliot 42), developing a narrative through a compilation of captioned drawings that would have been less sequential than Töpffer’s panels. Harry Morgan (45) calls “cycles of drawings” such narratively related images that do not appear on the same page. Letter from Rodolphe Töpffer to Charles-​Augustin Sainte-​Beuve, 29 December 1840 (Gautier, Bouquet 103). The Parisian distributor of the novel used it as a selling point –​“the author has made it easier to understand by the volume of text” –​although he did not give an engaging notice in his catalogue: “one will undoubtedly like it better autographed than printed; the talent of the cartoonist is necessary to sustain attention” (Cherbuliez 251–​252). A member of the Oulipo group, François Caradec was inspired by this feature of the comics page, when he made it a writing constraint for his collections of microfictions. He described his “bandes dessinées en prose” [prose comics] as follows: They are small texts that I write, stemming somehow from the idea of a page for each text. I make albums for myself, and there it is. If I published my manuscripts, which are usually in the form of a typed A4 page, it would indeed be a comics album, it would be page by page. (Caradec quoted in Menu 47)

10 Similarly, a film frame refers to the image projected on the screen or to a still image of the photographic film, both of which appear to be surrounded by a rectangular black frame. 11 Printed in colour on heavy paper (140 grams offset paper), in a 22.5 × 29.5 cm format, with a sewn binding and a hardback cover, inside a colour dust jacket printed on coated paper. With fewer pages than the Memoirs (143 pages), The Road to Armilia (64 pages) came close to the standard format of the French-​ language bande dessinée: an A4 hardback full-​colour album with 44 or 62 comics pages. 12 Advertisement for The Road to Armilia album, in (À Suivre), no. 125, June 1988, p. 49. 13 When he was barely 20 years old he had written a pastiche of the Nouveau Roman, Omnibus (1976), released by the Minuit publishing house, which was home to the literary movement. Investigating the disappearance of a certain “Claude Simon”, the narrator reconstructs the betrayal inflicted on the writer, in the middle of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, by his literary ghostwriter Jean Pastissou or Pastichou. 14 As defined by Wolfgang Hallet (151–​152), the “multimodal novel” combines “a wide range of different semiotic modes”, i.e. semiotic resources used as modes of communication and meaning, to the point of changing “the notion of ‘narrative discourse’ in the traditionally word-​based genre of the novel”. Following the example of Côme Martin (8), I prefer to speak of “multimodal narratives”, since a hybrid work such as The Road to Armilia cannot be categorized in “a literary sub-​genre” (Hallet 156) nor in a comics sub-​genre.

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182  Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations 15 The present reading of The Road to Armilia uses this edition, which was hand-​lettered in 1990, while the first edition, published two years earlier, was typographed using Futura, a typeface whose modernity evokes Bauhaus. 16 The image-​based creation process was based on that of a previous album, L’Archiviste, responding to “a commission by the Casterman publishing house” for “a simple ‘poster album’ ”, but which became “a story in its own right” (Schuiten and Peeters, L’Aventure des images 50). 17 It should be noted that Françoise van Rossum-​ Guyon (see Britton 93) comments on this passage without mentioning that it describes a daily comic strip, since she only discusses the comparison –​effectively established by Claude Simon (Battle 44) –​with a magic lantern projection. This allows the literary researcher to link the passage with a scene from In Search of Lost Time, thus reinforcing the place of the Proustian intertext in The Battle of Pharsalus. 18 Regarding the variety of transitions in The Battle of Pharsalus, see Ricardou’s paper in Britton. 19 The “The Comeback of Larry Trent” episode was released under the title “Marc, Hercule moderne” (unknown translator, in Spirou, no. 16, 20 April 1939, p. 4), which was the name of Superman in this translation. 20 The fragmentary nature of comics narratives has often been connected to modernist or postmodern experiments in the novel, especially since comic strips and literary modernism emerged with the turn to the twentieth century. A fundamental difference, according to Jared Gardner (XI), is that, unlike writers who deliberately chose discontinuity (against the realist novel) and gained cultural prestige for the novel, comics artists have never had the choice not to make use of the gutter. Conversely, the “same characteristics have often been precisely what have marked comics –​always bound by visible gaps, discontinuities, and apparatus –​as all that is antithetical to art” (XII). 21 Going as far as the borderline case of a fictionalized “making-​of” of a comic strip (Boillat, “L’amplification” 102). 22 “Bédéthèque” is the online database of the BD Gest’ portal for collectors. See the record in question: Jean-​Philippe Vignau, “Flash Gordon (Serg). Vol. 2 –​ 10/​1936 to 10/​1938”, online record, created on 27 September 2003, modified on 5 February 2017, www.bed​ethe​que.com/​BD-​Flash-​Gor​don-​Serg-​Tome-​2-​ Vol-​2-​10-​1936-​a-​10-​1938-​29633.html (accessed 12 September 2022). 23 As science-​ fiction specialist Mark Bould (20–​ 21) has observed among American fans of Flash Gordon, this “imaginative reconstruction of a pure ‘original’ ”, reportedly consisting of “innocent adventurous fun”, places this original in the Sunday pages rather than in the many adaptations and spin-​ offs that have flourished since the birth of the transmedia character. 24 Similarly, we have seen (in Chapter 3) that several of the comics-​related novels published in Tintin Pocket Sélection in the 1970s were integrated into the complete editions of the comic series in which they had appeared as a literary supplement, and that at least one of them was adapted into comics form (Simon and Van Hamme). 25 Literature was therefore a second choice for “one of the authors often considered the furthest from a literary conception of comics” (Frigerio 30–​ 31), even though he poses as a writer in the portrait photograph adorning the front cover of his Mémoires d’écriture [Memoirs of Writing] (2015), writing at his desk with a goose quill! Indeed, although he novelized the television

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Conclusion: Reading novels as comics novelizations  183 series Les Steenfort, maîtres de l’orge (1996) himself, he left the writing of the Largo Winch (2001–​2002) and Thorgal (2009–​2010) novels to the novelizers Gilles Legardinier and Amélie Sarn. 26 This personal “reading” is not enunciated in the first person, although it does at times betray the critic’s subjective perspective, through discreet modalization markers (the adjectives “mysterious” and “strange”, the adverbs “visibly” and “obviously”), occasional interpretations (including a summary of communicational “interference”) and the typographical highlighting of certain elements of the plot rather than others.

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References  185 Charlier, Jean-​Michel, L’Avion qui tuait ses pilotes: Une aventure de Tanguy et Laverdure, illustrated by Jijé. Paris: Hachette (Bibliothèque verte), 1971. Charyn, Jerome, The Franklin Scare. New York: Arbor House, 1977; Le Marin blanc du président, trans. Brigitta Hessel. Paris: Ramsay (Mots), 1980. Chaulet, Georges, Les 4 As et le serpent de mer, illustrated by François Craenhals. Tournai: Casterman (Relais), 1962. Christin, Pierre, Lininil a disparu, illustrated by Jean-​ Claude Mézières. Paris: Mango, 2009. Cohen-​Scali, Sarah, La Rose écarlate: Bas les masques. Paris: Hachette, 2009. Convard, Didier, Le Triangle secret: Les larmes du pape. Paris, Mazarine: Grenoble, Glénat, 2006. Convard, Didier, Neige: le sourire du fou. Grenoble: Glénat, 1991. Cothias, Patrick and Patrice Ordas, L’Œil des dobermans, Charnay-​lès-​Mâcon, Bamboo (Grand Angle), 2010. Couao-​Zotti, Florent, Notre pain de chaque nuit. Paris: Le Serpent à plumes (Fiction: Domaine français), 1998. Couperie, Pierre, “Flash Gordon in The Caverns of Mongo. Un roman d’Alex Raymond condensé par P. Couperie”, trans. Pierre Couperie. Giff-​Wiff, no. 5–​6, 1964, pp. 30–​44. Craenhals, François, “Le diable dans la vallée”, illustrated by François Craenhals, Tintin Pocket Sélection, no. 21, 1973, pp. 69–​128. Daubert, Michel (ed.), Nous Tintin. Paris: Télérama–​Brussels, Moulinsart, 2004. Delporte, Yvan, La Flûte à six Schtroumpfs, illustrated by Peyo. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 1975; The Smurfs and the Magic Flute, trans. Anthea Bell. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979. Delporte, Yvan, Les Robinsons du rail, illustrated by André Franquin and Jidéhem. Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 1981. Denis, Jean-​C., Quelques mois à L’Amélie: Le Manuscrit d’Aloys Clark. Roman, illustrated by Jean-​C. Denis Montrouge, PLG, 2002. Doisy, Jean, L’Étrange réveillon de Jean Valhardi, illustrated by Joseph Gillain. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 1943. Doisy, Jean, Sur le rail, illustrated by Eddy Paape, Marcinelle. Dupuis (Collection des grands récits), 1948. Doisy, Jean, Vol sans voleur, illustrated by Eddy Paape. Marcinelle: Dupuis (Collection des grands récits), 1948. Duchâteau, André-​ Paul and Tibet, Reconnaissance de meurtres, la première enquête de Ric Hochet. Brussels: Le Lombard, 2010. Duchâteau, André-​Paul, “La soirée de meurtre. Une enquête de Ric Hochet. 1ère partie”, illustrated by Tibet, Tintin Pocket Sélection, no. 28, 1975, pp. 67–​98. Duchâteau, André-​Paul, “Relevez le gant! Par Ric Hochet, reporter-​détective. Énigme no. 1. Surprise de Noël”, illustrated by Tibet, Tintin (Belgian edition), no. 51, 17 December, 1958, p. 35. Forton, Louis, Les Pieds-​ Nickelés à la guerre: Croquignol, Ribouldingue, Filochard. Cinquième série d’aventures. Paris: Éditions de “L’Épatant”, 1917. Gaiman, Neil, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. London: Headline Review, 2006; Des Choses fragiles: Nouvelles et merveilles, trans. Michel Pagel. Au Diable vauvert, 2009. Genestoux, Magdeleine du, Mickey et Minnie, unknown illustrator. Paris: Hachette (Bibliothèque rose illustrée), 1932.

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186 References Godard, Christian, “Rendez-​vous avec une ombre. Propos recueillis et illustrés par Godard”, illustrated by Christian Godard, Tintin Pocket Sélection, no. 18, 1972, pp. 69–​128. Goscinny, René, Comment Obélix est tombé dans la marmite du druide quand il était petit, illustrated by Albert Uderzo. Paris: Albert René, 1989; How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion when He Was a Little Boy, trans. Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. London: Orion Children’s Books, 2009. Goscinny, René, Le Petit Nicolas, illustrated by Jean-​Jacques Sempé. Paris: Denoël, 1960; Nicholas, trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Phaidon, 2005. Goscinny, René, Les 12 travaux d’Astérix, illustrated by Albert Uderzo. Paris: Dargaud, 1976; The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, trans. Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978. Grand’Maison, Marie de, “Bécassine a mal au doigt”, illustrated by Raymond de la Nézière, in Les Vacances de Suzette: Pour 1909. Paris: Henri Gautier, 1909, pp. 22–​30, 101–​109, 159–​167. Hammerstein, Alain, Alix l’intrépide, illustrated by Jean-​ François Charles. Brussels: Casterman, 2004. Irvine, Alexander, The Adventures of Tintin: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011; Les Aventures de Tintin: Le Roman du film, trans. Marie Hermet. Brussels: Casterman, 2011. Irvine, Alexander, The Incredible Hulk. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015; Hulk, trans. Christophe Rosson. Paris: Hachette (Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One), 2016. Irvine, Alexander, Thor. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015; Thor, trans. Christophe Rosson. Paris: Hachette (Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One), 2016. Joncour, Serge, Nature humaine. Paris: Flammarion, 2020; Human Nature, trans. Louise Rogers Lalaurie. London: Gallic Books, 2022. Kinnet, Paul, “Dupont et Dupond, détectives”, illustrated by Hergé, in Hergé, Le Feuilleton intégral (1940–​1943). Brussels: Casterman–​Moulinsart, 2017, pp. 273–​285. Lavigne, Raymond, Pif à la chasse aux lions, illustrated by José Cabrero Arnal. Paris: Vaillant (Les Aventures de Pif le Chien), 1955. Legardinier, Gilles, L’Héritier. Une novélisation de Gilles Legardinier, d’après la série télévisée inspirée du personnage créé par Jean Van Hamme . Paris: J’ai lu, 2001. Leloup, Roger, L’Écume de l’aube: La première aventure de Yoko Tsuno, illustrated by Roger Leloup. Gembloux: Duculot (Travelling), 1991. Lepetit, Emmanuelle, Le Petit Nicolas: La Photo de classe. Paris: Gallimard (Folio cadet. Premières lectures), 2012. Lowther, George, The Adventures of Superman, illustrated by Joe Shuster, introduction by Roger Stern. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1995. Marie, Damien, Welcome to Hope: Roman. Charnay-​lès-​Mâcon: Bamboo (Grand Angle), 2008. Mortimer, Florence, Yakari et Grand Aigle. Paris: Hachette (Ma première bibliothèque rose), 2006. Musset, Paul de, “Le cavalier servant. Scènes de la vie italienne”, Revue des deux mondes, no. 85, 1857, pp. 617–​643. Musset, Paul de, La Chèvre jaune, histoire sicilienne, suivie du Cavalier servant et du Procès de Pascal Zioba. Paris: Dentu, 1869.

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References  187 Nakazawa, Keiji, Hiroschima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen, trans. Richard Minear. Lanham, NC: Rowman & Littlefield (Asian Voices), 2010. Peeters, Benoît and François Schuiten, Les Cités obscures: La Route d’Armilia. Tournai: Casterman, 1990. Pierre, Michel, Corto Maltese: Mémoires, illustrated by Hugo Pratt. Tournai: Casterman, 1988. Pratt, Hugo, Corto Maltese, trans. Fanchita Gonzalez Batlle. Paris: Denoël (Empreinte), 1996. Pratt, Hugo, Cour des mystères, trans. Fanchita Gonzalez Batlle. Paris: Denoël (Empreinte), 1997. Pratt, Hugo, Le Roman de Criss Kenton, trans. Paolo Rota. Lausanne: Favre (Littérature), 1989. Rabu, Emmanuel, Tryphon Tournesol et Isidore Isou. Paris: Seuil (Fiction & Cie), 2007. Raymond, Alex, Flash Gordon in The Caverns of Mongo, illustrated by Robb Beebe. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1936. Rivière, François, Fabriques. Paris: Seuil (Fiction & Cie), 1977. Rivière, François, Le Dernier crime de Celia Gordon. Paris: Seuil (Fiction & Cie), 1979. Robber, L’Antiquaire sauvage: Un roman de Tif et Tondu, illustrated by Blutch. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2019. Ronald-​Wills, J. F., “La perle de Manille. Nouvelles aventures inédites de Lord Horace Neighbour”, illustrated by Pierre Mouchot. Fantax Magazine, no. 1, 1949, pp. 5–​26. Sagan, Françoise, La Femme fardée. Paris: Ramsay, 1981; The Painted Lady, trans. Lee Fahnestock. New York: Dutton, 1983. Saint-​Ogan, Alain, Zig et Puce et Alfred. Paris: Hachette (Les Albums roses), 1952. Sampayo, Carlos, L’Année où le lion s’est échappé, trans. François Gaudry. Paris: Métailié (Bibliothèque hispano-​américaine), 2004. Sarn, Amélie, L’Enfant des étoiles, illustrated by Grzegorz Rosiński. Toulouse: Milan, 2009. Sfar, Joann, Petit vampire: Le Film d’horreur!, Paris: L’École des loisirs (Mouche), 2020. Simon, Claude, La Bataille de Pharsale. Paris: Minuit, 1969; The Battle of Pharsalus, trans. Richard Howyard. New York: George Braziller, 1971. Steiner, Marco, Le Corbeau de pierre: La jeunesse de Corto Maltese, trans. Christophe Mileschi. Paris: Denoël (Denoël & d’ailleurs), 2015. Thomas, Chantal, La Vie réelle des petites filles. Paris: Gallimard (Haute enfance), 1995. Töpffer, Rodolphe, Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus. Geneva: Ledouble; Paris: Cherbuliez, 1840. Tuten, Frederic, Tintin in the New World: A Romance, illustrated by Roy Lichtenstein. London: Marion Boyars, 1993; Tintin au Nouveau Monde: Roman, trans. Maurice Rambaud. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1995. Van Hamme, Jean, “Les trois perles de Sa-​Skyia. Un roman de Vanham d’après les personnages de Cuvelier”, illustrated by Paul Cuvelier. Tintin Pocket Sélection, no. 30, 1975, pp. 67–​98. Van Hamme, Jean, Largo Winch et le groupe W. Paris: Mercure de France, 1977. Van Hamme, Jean, Le Téléscope, Brussels: Le Cri, 1992. Van Hamme, Jean, Les Steenfort, maîtres de l’orge. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1996.

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188 References Verheggen, Jean-​Pierre, Le Degré Zorro de l’écriture. Paris: Christian Bourgois (T.X.T.), 1977. Wein, Len and Marv Wolfman, The Amazing Spider-​Man: Mayhem in Manhattan, illustrated by Cathy Carucci, introduction by Stan Lee. New York: Pocket books (Marvel Novel Series), 1978. Willems, Sandrine, Tchang et le eti. Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles (Les petits dieux), 2001. Wolf, Gary, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.

Other primary sources Amiel, Vincent and Lahougue, Jean, “Les cases mémorables de Jean Lahougue et Vincent Amiel”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 63, 1985, pp. 69–​71. Boniface, Louis, “Nouvelles diverses. Paris, 2 juillet”, Le Constitutionnel, no. 51(184), 3 July, 1866, p. 2. Bruckner, Pascal, “Révolution à Moulinsart. Tintin pour les dames”, Le Nouvel observateur, no. 1595, 1 June, 1995, p. 50. Burnier, Michel-​Antoine, “Quelle horreur ! Tintin perd sa culotte”, L’Express, no. 2289, 18 May, 1995, p. 40. Burton, André and Michel Serres, “Les cases mémorables de Michel Serres et André Burton”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 62, 1985, pp. 69–​71. Butler, Betsy, “Tintin as an unproductive journalist, but a wholesome hero”, Communication Booknotes Quarterly, no. 44(2), 2013, pp. 49–​62. Cary, Joyce, “I Wish I Had Written That”, New York Times Book Review, 7 December, 1952, p. 4. Champfleury, “Image, Imagerie”, in Ferdinand Buisson (ed.), Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire. Paris: Hachette, 1887, pp. 1319–​1320. Champfleury, Histoire de l’imagerie populaire. Paris: Dentu, 1869. Charlier, Jean-​Michel and Matthieu Durand, Une aventure “Classic” de Tanguy et Laverdure: Menace sur Mirage F1: Adapté par Patrice Buendia du roman de J.-​M. Charlier: L’Avion qui tuait ses pilotes. Paris: Dargaud (Zéphyr), 2016. Chemin, Anne, “Hergé: tous droits réservés”, Le Monde: Culture & idées, 14–​16 July, 2012, pp. 1, 4–​6. Cherbuliez, Joël, Revue critique des livres nouveaux publiés pendant l’année 1840. Geneva–​Paris: Cherbuliez, 1840. Couao-​Zotti, Florent, “Itinéraire d’un écrivain-​scénariste”, Notre librairie. Revue des littératures du sud, no. 145, 2001, pp. 42–​47. Couvreur, Daniel, De la Terre à Vinéa, les coulisses d’une œuvre, Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2012. Cummings, Mary, “A comic-​strip hero matures (in a book)”, New York Times, 11 July, 1993, p. 13. Dayez, Hugues, Le Duel Tintin-​Spirou: Entretiens avec les auteurs de l’âge d’or de la BD belge. Brussels: Luc Pire, 1997. Denis, Jean-​C., Quelques mois à L’Amélie. Marcinelle: Dupuis (Aire libre), 2002. Disney, Walt, Les Aventures de Mickey, unknown translator. Paris: Hachette (Albums Mickey), 1931. Disney, Walt, Mickey chercheur d’or, unknown translator. Paris: Hachette (Albums Mickey), 1931. Doisy, Jean and Eddy Paape, “Sur le rail”, in Yvan Delporte, Jean Doisy and Eddy Paape, Valhardi: L’intégrale (1946–​1950). Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2016, pp. 69–​83.

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References  189 Duchâteau, André-​Paul and Tibet, Premières armes. Brussels: Le Lombard, 1997. Duchâteau, André-​Paul, 7 à 77 ans: Souvenirs d’un scénariste. Brussels: Memor (Transparences), 2002. Duchâteau, André-​Paul, Équation à deux “inconnus”. Brussels: Memor (Couleurs), 1999. Duchâteau, André-​Paul, Meurtre pour meurtre. Brussels: Beirnaerdt (Le Jury), 1942. Finet, Nicolas, “Le roman graphique est-​il soluble dans la bande dessinée?”, in Nicolas Finet (ed.), Angoulême 89, le magazine! Catalogue officiel du 16e Salon international de la bande dessinée. Angoulême: CNBDI, 1989, pp. 1–​16. Floc’h and François Rivière, Le Rendez-​vous de Sevenoaks. Paris: Dargaud, 1978. Fresnault-​Deruelle, Pierre, “Le secret derrière la porte”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 57, 1984, pp. 70–​71. Gautier, Léopold, Un Bouquet de lettres de Rodolphe Töpffer. Lausanne: Payot, 1974. Gautier, Théophile, Le Capitaine Fracasse: Tome premier. Paris: Charpentier, 1863. Gornouvel, Bénédicte and Isabelle Nières-​Chevrel, Les 150 ans de la Bibliothèque rose. Rennes: Bibliothèque de Rennes Métropole, 2006. Goscinny, René and Jean-​Jacques Sempé, Le Petit Nicolas: La bande dessinée originale. Paris: IMAV, 2017. Gottfredson, Floyd, Race to Death Valley. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books (Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse), 2011. Grand-​Carteret, John, Les Mœurs et la caricature en Allemagne, en Autriche, en Suisse. Paris: Louis Westhausser, 1885. Groensteen, Thierry and Benoît Peeters, “Jacques Lob–​ Jean-​ Claude Forest. Entretien”, in Benoît Peeters (ed.), Autour du scénario: cinéma, bande dessinée, roman-​photo, vidéo-​clip, publicité, littérature. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles (Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles), 1986, pp. 103–​109. Groensteen, Thierry, “ ‘Un roman qui parle du film’: entretien avec François Rivière sur la novellisation de Kafka”, in André Gaudreault and Thierry Groensteen (eds), La Transécriture pour une théorie de l’adaptation: littérature, cinéma, bande dessinée, théâtre, clip. Québec: Nota bene–​Angoulême, CNBDI, 1998, pp. 179–​183. Groensteen, Thierry, “Éditorial”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 56, 1984, p. 3. Groensteen, Thierry, “Propos à bâtons rompus”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 70, 1986, pp. 59–​61. Guillot, Claude and Dominique Petitfaux, “La BD dans le texte”, Le Collectionneur de bandes dessinées, no. 59, 1988, pp. 10–​22; no. 66, 1991, pp. 28–​35; no. 74, 1994, pp. 19–​27; no. 81, 1996, pp. 25–​27. Hergé, Le Secret de La Licorne. Tournai: Casterman, 1943; The Secret of the Unicorn, trans. Leslie Lonsdale-​ Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Methuen, 1959. Hergé, Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge. Tournai: Casterman, 1945; Red Rackham’s Treasure, trans. Leslie Lonsdale-​ Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Methuen, 1959. Hergé, Tintin au Tibet. Tournai: Casterman, 1960; Tintin in Tibet, trans. Leslie Lonsdale-​Cooper and Michael Turner. London: Methuen, 1962. Jans, Michel and Jean-​François Douvry, Schuiten & Peeters autour des Cités obscures. Saint-​Égrève, Mosquito (Bulles dingues), 1994.

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190 References Jijé, Valhardi II: Jean Valhardi, détective: Album no. 2. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 1948. Kelly, Deirde, “Taking Tintin out of the comics”, Toronto Star, 14 August, 1993, p. 12. Langlois, Jacques, “Tintin ça va loin”, Les Amis de Hergé, no. 9, 1989, pp. 31–​34. Leloup, Roger, À propos de Yoko Tsuno: Une interview de Stephan Caluwaerts et André Taymans. Hélécine: Les Éditions À Propos, 2001. Leloup, Roger, La Fille du vent. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 1979; Daughter of the Wind, trans. Jerome Saincantin, Chartham, Cinebook Ltd, 2009. Leloup, Roger, La Frontière de la vie. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 1977; On the Edge of Life, trans. Luke Spear, Chartham, Cinebook Ltd, 2007. Leloup, Roger, La Spirale du temps. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 1981; The Time Spiral, trans. Luke Spear, Chartham, Cinebook Ltd, 2008. Leloup, Roger, Le Pic des ténèbres, illustrated by Roger Leloup. Gembloux: Duculot (Travelling), 1989. Leloup, Roger, Les Exilés de Kifa. Marcinelle: Dupuis, 1991. Lowery, Lawrence Frank, The Golden Age of Big Little Books. Danville: Educational Research and Applications LLC, 2007. Martens, Thierry, “De la BD au roman”, in Roger Leloup, Le Dragon de Hong Kong: Le Matin du monde: Les Exilés de Kifa. Paris: Rombaldi, 1998, pp. I–​VI. McGrath, Charles, “Not Funnies”, New York Times Magazine, 11 July, 2004, nytimes.com/​2004/​07/​11/​magazine/​not-​funnies.html (accessed 12 September 2022). Menu, Jean-​ Christophe, « François Caradec: Bandes dessinées en prose », L’Éprouvette, no. 1, 2006, pp. 41–​49. Musset, Paul de, Biographie de Alfred de Musset: Sa vie et ses œuvres. Paris: Charpentier, 1877; The Biography of Alfred de Musset, trans. Harriet Preston. Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1877. Peeters, Benoît and François Schuiten, L’Aventure des images: De la bande dessinée au multimédia. Paris: Autrement (Mutations), 1996. Peeters, Benoît, “Les cases mémorables de Benoît Peeters”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 65, 1985, pp. 88–​89. Peeters, Benoît, “Un rendez-​vous décisif”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 68, 1986, p. 23. Planes, Jean-​Marie, “Objectif nul. Où le romancier américain Frederic Tuten, choisissant Tintin pour héros, plonge le personnage de Hergé dans ce monde cruel”, Sud Ouest, 14 May, 1995, p. 33. Poulin, Daniel, “Tintin pour les 18–​78 ans…”, Le Devoir, 2 September, 1995, p. 6. Ratier, Gilles, “Charlier romancier pour les jeunes lecteurs”, in Jijé and Jean-​ Michel Charlier, Tanguy et Laverdure: L’intégrale 7. La Nuit du vampire. Paris: Dargaud, 2017, p. 15. Raymond, Alex, Flash Gordon: “Guy L’Éclair”, vol. 2, trans. Édouard François. Ivry-​sur-​Seine: SERG, 1971. Roman, Florence, “Les cases mémorables de Florence Roman”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 61, 1985, pp. 65–​67. Sadoul, Georges, Ce que lisent vos enfants. Paris: Bureau d’éditions, 1938. Sainte-​Beuve, Charles-​Augustin, “Poètes et romanciers modernes de la France. XLIII. M. Rodolphe Töpffer”, Revue des deux mondes, no. 25, 1841, pp. 838–​865. Sarraute, Nathalie, The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, trans. Maria Jolas. New York: George Braziller, 1963.

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References  191 Shuster, Joe and Jerry Siegel, Superman: the Dailies 1939–​1942. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2006. Sichère, Patrick, “Tintin en Amérique”, Les Amis de Hergé, no. 19, 1994, pp. 42–​43. Simon, Christophe and Jean Van Hamme, Les Trois perles de Sa-​Skya. Brussels: Le Lombard, 2019. Simon, Claude, Histoire. Paris: Minuit, 1967; Histoire, trans. Richard Howard. New York: George Braziller, 1968. Soriano, Marc, Guide de littérature pour la jeunesse: Courants, problèmes, choix d’auteurs. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. Sterckx, Pierre, “Les cases mémorables de Pierre Sterckx”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 56, 1984, pp. 67–​69. Töpffer, Rodolphe, “Réflexions à propos d’un programme”, Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, April 1836, pp. 314–​341. Töpffer, Rodolphe, Le Docteur Festus. Geneva: Ledouble–​Paris, Cherbuliez, 1840. Töpffer, Rodolphe, Voyage à la Grande Chartreuse. Geneva: Freydig, 1833. Töpffer, Rodolphe, Voyages en zigzag ou Excursions d’un pensionnat en vacances dans les cantons suisses et sur le revers italien des Alpes. Paris: Dubochet, 1844. Tuten, Frederic, “An Interview with Jerome Charyn”, Review of Contemporary Fiction, no. 12(2), 1992, pp. 96–​114. Tuten, Frederic, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, illustrated by Roy Lichtenstein. New York: Citadel Press, 1971; Les Aventures de Mao pendant la Longue Marche, trans. Maurice Rambaud. Paris: Gallimard (Du monde entier), 1974. Van Hamme, Jean, Mémoires d’écriture. Charnay-​lès-​Mâcon: Bamboo (Grand Angle), 2015. Verheggen, Jean-​Pierre, J’aime beaucoup ma poésie. Carnières-​ Morlanwelz: Lansman (Chaire de poétique), 2010. Wajnberg, Marc-​Henri, “La case mémorable de Marc-​ Henri Wajnberg”, Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 59, 1984, pp. 70–​71. Weiner, Robert, Marvel Graphic Novels and Related Publications: An Annotated Guide to Comics, Prose Novels, Children’s Books, Articles, Criticism and Reference Works, 1965–​2005. Jefferson, MI: McFarland, 2008. Weinzaepflen, Catherine, “Jerome Charyn par-​delà le polar” (À Suivre), no. 24, 1980, p. 101. White, Edmund, “Sapristi! Is this our Tintin?”, The New York Times, 6 June, 1993, p. 91. Willems, Sandrine, “La Petite pie du rossignol”, illustrated by Hergé, in Michel Daubert (ed.), Nous Tintin. Paris: Télérama–​ Brussels, Moulinsart, 2004, pp. 44–​45. Willems, Sandrine, Balthazar et moi. Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles (Les petits dieux), 2002. Wolmer, Bruce, “Frederic Tuten: Beauty is politics and a hedge against vulgarity”, Bomb, no. 25, 1988, pp. 26–​29.

Secondary criticism Ahmed, Maaheen, “Instrumentalising Media Memories. The Second World War According to Achtung Zelig!”, European Comic Art, no. 12(1), 2019, pp. 1–​20.

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192 References Albera, François and Maria Tortajada (eds), Cine-​ Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (Film Culture in Transition), 2015. Álvares, Cristina, “Um caso de migração intermedial de personagens. Bécassine et Corto Maltese em três novelas breves de Chantal Thomas”, Máthesis, no. 22, 2013, pp. 47–​65. Apostolidès, Jean-​Marie, Tintin et le mythe du surenfant. Brussels: Moulinsart, 2003. Arnar, Anna, “Je suis pour… aucune illustration: le phénomène du rejet de l’illustration en France au XIXe siècle”, in Maria Teresa Caracciolo and Ségolène Le Men (eds), L’Illustration: Essais d’iconographie. Paris: Klincksieck (Histoire de l’art et iconographie), 1999, pp. 341–​363. Baetens, Jan and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Baetens, Jan, “Adaptation: A Writerly Strategy?”, in Benoît Mitaine, David Roche and Isabelle Schmitt-​ Pitiot (eds), Comics and Adaptation, trans. Aarnoud Rommens and David Roche. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018, pp. 31–​46. Baetens, Jan, “Postface. Pour une tradition incandescente”, in Sandrine Willems, Les Petits Dieux. Brussels: Espace Nord, 2017, pp. 179–​202. Baetens, Jan, Le Réseau Peeters. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Faux titre), 1995. Baetens, Jan, Novelization: From Film to Novel, trans. Mary Feeney. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press (Theory and interpretation of narrative), 2018. Baetens, Jan, Rebuilding Story Worlds. The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (Critical Graphics), 2020. Baroni, Raphaël, “Dramatized Analepsis and Fadings in Verbal Narratives”, Narrative, no. 24(3), 2016, pp. 311–​329. Baudry, Julien and Marie-​ Pierre Litaudon, “Hachette entre héritage et renouvellement (1920–​ 1960): comment ‘faire collection’ face au défi des albums ‘transmédiatiques’?”, Strenæ, no. 11, 2016, pp. 1–​29. Bauwens, Jessica, “Yoko Tsuno and Franco-​ Belgian Girl Readers of Bande Dessinée”, in Fusami Ogi, Rebecca Suter, Kazumi Nagaike and John Lent (eds), Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (Palgrave studies in comics and graphic novels), 2019, pp. 181–​198. Bayard, Pierre, “Anticipatory Plagiarism”, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, New Literary History, no. 44(2), 2013, pp. 231–​250. Béghain, Véronique, Les Aventures de Mao en Amérique, Paris: PUF (Lignes d’art), 2008. Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller”, in Id., Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2007, pp. 83–​109. Benveniste, Émile, “The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb”, in Id., Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press (Miami Linguistics Books), 1971, pp. 205–​215. Berlatsky, Eric, “Lost in the Gutter: Within and Between Frames in Narrative and Narrative Theory”, Narrative, no. 17(2), 2009, pp. 162–​187. Blin-​Rolland, Armelle, Adapted Voices: Transpositions of Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit and Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro. Oxford: Legenda (Transcript), 2015. Boillat, Alain, “L’amplification des évangiles par la bande (dessinée) à l’aube du XXIe siècle”, Études de lettres, no. 280, 2008, pp. 91–​109.

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References  193 Boillat, Alain, “Yoko Tsuno: l’ambivalence du héros féminin face à diverses formes d’altérité”, in Loïse Bilat and Gianni Haver (eds), Le Héros était une femme… Le genre de l’aventure. Geneva: Antipodes (Médias et histoire), 2011, pp. 211–​226. Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bonhomme, Bérénice, “Claude Simon: une contestation du texte par l’image”, Cahiers de Narratologie, no. 16, 2009, pp. 1–​14. Bould, Mark, “Adapting Flash Gordon”, Film International, no. 26, 2007, pp. 18–​26. Bozard, Laurent, “Encrages en jeunesse. Regards sur la novellisation pour enfants de bandes dessinées”, Image & Narrative, no. 17(3), 2016, pp. 21–​31. Bridel, Yves, “De Festus à Festus”, in Danielle Buyssens, Jean-​Daniel Candaux, Jacques Droin and Daniel Maggetti (eds), Propos töpffériens. Geneva: Société d’études töpffériennes–​Chêne-​Bourg, Georg, 1998, pp. 109–​119. Britton, Celia (ed.), Claude Simon. Abingdon: Routledge (Modern Literatures in Perspective), 1993. Carpi, Daniela, “Tintin in the New World: révision d’un mythe”, trans. Angela Manes, in Anna Soncini Fratta (ed.), Tintin, Hergé et la “Belgité”. Bologna: CLUEB (Bussola), 1994, pp. 137–​150. Chatman, Seymour, “The Representation of Text-​Types”, Textual Practice, no. 2(1), 1988, pp. 22–​29. Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Chute, Hillary, “Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the Framing of Comics”, Modern Fiction Studies, no. 54(2), 2008, pp. 268–​301. Crucifix, Benoît, “Rethinking the ‘Memorable Panel’ from Pierre Sterckx to Olivier Josso Hamel”, European Comic Art, no. 10(2), 2017, pp. 24–​47. Danesin, Maxime, “L’aube des light novels en France”, Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia, no. 29, 2016, pp. 7–​29. Delbrassine, Daniel, “Stratégies de séduction du lecteur dans le roman pour adolescents”, in Cécile Boulaire (ed.), Le Livre pour enfants: Regards critiques offerts à Isabelle Nières-​Chevrel, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006, pp. 135–​146. Déom, Laurent and Benoît Glaude (eds), Les Novellisations pour la jeunesse: Nouvelles perspectives transmédiatiques sur le roman pour la jeunesse. Paris: Louvain-​la-​Neuve, Academia (Texte-​Image), 2020. Dürrenmatt, Jacques, Bande dessinée et littérature. Paris: Classiques Garnier (Études de littérature des XXe et XXIe siècles), 2013. Eco, Umberto, “The Myth of Superman”, trans. Natalie Chilton, Diacritics, no. 2(1), 1972, pp. 14–​22. Feuerhahn, Nelly, “Champfleury et le miel de Wilhelm Busch”, Ridiculosa, no. 9, 2002, pp. 75–​99. Fevry, Sébastien, “D’une image à l’autre: la novellisation en album”, Recherches en communication, no. 31, 2009, pp. 155–​172. Filliot, Camille, “Les premiers albums de bande dessinée au XIXe siècle: quelle identité éditoriale, quel usage culturel et social?”, in Viviane Alary and Nelly Chabrol Gagne (eds), L’Album: le parti pris des images. Clermont-​Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-​Pascal, 2012, pp. 39–​46.

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91

Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 57n19 refers to note 57 on page 19. Acar, J. 102 adaptability 21, 42, 57n19; see also inadaptability Ahmed, M. 8, 22, 23n12, 72, 116, 143 Angoulême International Comics Festival 119, 166 Anguerrand, S. 1, 142 animation: animated feature film 61, 63–​64, 75, 130, 152n11, 170; animated television series (adapted from comics) 21, 54, 88n16, 127, 142–​144, 150–​151; anime comics 9, 17, 24n14; Disney cartoons 17, 42, 50, 58n28, 153n17 anonymous adaptor 35, 42, 49–​51, 56n9, 66, 69, 143 autobiography: autofiction 107, 120, 163; diary 127, 146; pseudo-​ memoirs 66, 74, 92, 97, 101, 107, 112–​114, 120; reader’s autobiography 9, 12, 81, 83–​86; see also confession novelization autodiegetic narrator 64, 84, 85, 95, 108, 125, 147, 149; hero-​narrator 97, 103, 108, 147–​149, 152n10, 163–​164, 170; homodiegetic narrator 68, 115, 118, 157–​158, 169; see also first-​person narrative autonomy (as literary works) 54–​55, 85, 103, 174 Baetens, J. 7–​9, 15, 21, 71, 83–​85, 120, 150, 162–​167, 177, 179 balloon see speech bubble Barjavel, R. 134 Barret, A. 19, 60, 63, 64, 68

Bauwen, P. 140 Bebey, K. 140, 153n18 behaviourism 99, 101, 117 Benveniste, É. 33, ​86, 105, 149 Beuville, G. 57n25 bible (scriptwriting) 6, 144 Bilal, E. 166 Billon, D. 122n23, 177 biography: biographer 60, 97, 103, 113; complete biography 20, 112–​114, 125–​129, 134 Blas, J.A. de 113 Blin-​Rolland, A. 97, 123n32, 170 Boillat, A. 15, 133, 137, 177 book series: “Albums Jabot” 56n16, 57; “Albums Mickey” 50, 51, 52; “Les Albums roses” [The Pink Picture Books] 8; “Bibliothèque rose” [Pink Library] 50–​54, 58n27, 142–​143, 148, 152n17, 153n22; “Bibliothèque verte” [Green Library] 142, 143, 148, 151n7, 153n22, 176; “Big Little Books” 41–​43, 57n18, 57n20, 126, 174; “Carrousel” 8; “Fiction & Cie” 115, 179; “Grand Angle” 123n31, 178; “L’Hebdomadaire des grands récits” [The Great Stories Weekly] 19, 20, 92, 94–​101, 103, 118, 121n11; “Little Golden Books” 8, 57n20, 141; “Marvel Novel Series” 126; “Travelling” 135, 152n14 Boucq, F. 119 Bruckner, P. 11, 59, 90n30 Burroughs, E.R. 175 Busch, W. 18, 36, 38, 40, 41, 56n11 Buti, R. 10

02

200 Index Calvino, I. 172 canon 21, 126, 132, 151n4, 174–​177 Caradec, F. 181n9 Carelman, J. 58n25 Carré, C. 142 cartoon see animation Castro, A.-​T. 127 Cauvin, R. 142 Cavanna, F. 11 Céline, L.-​F. 111, 167 Chabon, M. 2, 23n4, 41, 70 Champfleury 10, 18, 26, 36–​41, 43, 56 chaptering: of comics 110, 177; of comics-​related novels 70–​71, 73, 113, 122n24, 141, 178 Charlier, J.-​M. 155, 176 Charyn, J. 119 Chatman, S. 27–​29, 55 Chaulet, G. 119, 153n17 childhood: childhood memories 9, 11, 69, 79–​81, 90n26, 106; comics heroes’ childhood 20–​21, 69, 97, 117, 124–​153 children: children’s literature: 20, 21, 69, 119, 124, 145; children’s magazine 18, 19, 44, 54, 92, 93; children’s novel 1, 105, 111, 119, 135, 142, 147; children’s picture book 3, 8, 20, 58n28, 130, 141 Christin, P. 111, 140, 166 Chute, H. 2, 23n4, 154, 164, 166 clear line 61, 83, 117 Cohen-​Scali, S. 140 comic-​book novel 23n4 comic novel 122n24 comics magazines: (À Suivre) 92, 110–​114, 119, 122, 162–​163, 166–​167; Les Aventures de Pif le Chien 19, 92, 101; Fantax Magazine 19, 92–​97, 101, 121n11; Le Journal de Mickey 49–​50; Pilote 114, 121n13, 130–​132, 145; Spirou 93–​97, 106, 118, 121, 133, 177; Tintin Pocket Sélection 19, 92, 101–​105, 182n24; W.I.T.C.H. Mag 153n21 comics verbalization 18–​19, 26–​30, 35, 54–​55, 59–​60, 179 commentary: authorial commentary 36, 119, 178; critical commentary 55, 160, 174; image commentary 25n22, 28–​29, 32 complete author 118, 175, 177

complete edition 174, 176, 182n24 complete story 102, 121n13; to-​be-​continued story 93, 110 continuous text 42, 45, 46, 49, 54, 113, 179 Convard, D. 15, 123n31, 140, 177 copyright 50, 62, 64, 87n9, 143 Cothias, P. 80, 123n31, 140 Couao-​Zotti, F. 122n19 Couperie, P. 174–​176 Courbet, G. 37, 40 Craenhals, F. 102, 105, 119 crime fiction: Belgian crime fiction 65, 99, 107, 118, 122n18; detective novel 45, 93, 106–​112, 118; hardboiled 122n21, 170; mystery novel 97, 106, 115, 118; whodunit 67, 93, 107 Croix, A. de la 135, 152n14 Debien, C. 140 Denis, J.-​C. 91, 110 description: descriptive summary 55, 174; narrativized description 14, 41, 76, 83, 89n22; pictorial description 4, 36, 89n25, 159–​60; see also text-​type Dewamme, G. 110, 122n23 dialogue (literary writing): direct speech 32, 46, 51–​52, 64, 130, 149; and illustration 41, 97, 103, 130, 144; see also speech bubble digest 27, 55, 174–​176, 180 discontinuity: closure (reading process) 27, 164, 172; comics discontinuity 61, 147, 173, 178, 182n20; fragmentation (literary writing) 67, 70, 88n17, 168–​169 Disney, W. 17, 42, 50–​51, 56n17, 58n28 dispositive 18, 24n20, 26, 41, 45, 103, 130, 145, 167 Doisy, J. 95–​100, 118 Du Bois, G. 57n18 Duchâteau, A.-​P. 20, 45, 92, 102–​110, 120, 122n18, 177 Dürrenmatt, J. 2–​3, 117 Duval, Y. 102 Eco, U. 23n4, 128–​129, 151n3 education through pictures 37–​38, 43, 95 Eisner, W. 167

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Index  201 ekphrasis 14, 26–​29, 41, 73, 77–​83, 89n22, 159, 169–​170; notional ekphrasis 12, 172 embedding: embedded narrative 74–​76, 118, 159–​160; horizontal embedding 163–​164 enunciative responsibility 63, 68, 84, 117; enunciative empowerment 19, 68, 86 expansion: continuation 14–​16, 24n19, 78, 112; narrative expansion 13–​17, 27–​28, 67–​69, 105; prequel 13, 20, 97–​98, 103, 107, 124–​137, 149–​150; sequel 15, 115, 171 extradiegetic narrator 68, 85–86, 103–​108, 149–​150 fan: bedephilia 79–​82, 91–​92, 169, 174, 176–​178; comics fan 19, 21, 77–​79, 86, 173–​176; fan community 59, 90n27; fandom 2, 81, 90n27, 174, 175, 177; fanfiction 17, 60, 71, 81, 83, 113, 151n6; fanzine 60, 63, 78, 169, 174; tintinophile 59, 63, 69, 71, 87n2 fictional universe 6, 15–​17, 60, 87, 97, 132; Marvelverse 125–​128; Obscure Cities multiverse 162–​163; storyworld 19, 73, 114, 134 fictionalization 83, 86, 90n30; defictionalization 78, 86, 148 film novel 1, 7–​8; film novelization 22n3, 63, 89n22, 103, 121n15, 175; film picture book 7–​8, 63 Finet, N. 111–​112, 166–​167 first-​person narrative 68, 77, 84, 86, 101, 115; first-​person enunciation 98–​99, 108, 146; see also autodiegetic narrator first reader 140, 149, 151, 152n8 Floc’h 114 focalization: external focalization 31, 99, 101, 108, 118, 158; internal focalization 75, 99, 158–159; viewing with 31, 75–​77, 99, 101, 159; zero focalization 31, 63, 85–86, 108 Forest, J.-​C. 110–​111, 122n23, 177 foretext 30, 36, 173, 177, 180; pre-​text 156, 161 Forlani, R. 19, 60, 63, 64, 68 Forton, L. 18, 26, 44–​49 founding story 20, 126, 127, 129, 132, 152n8; Bildungsroman 70, 72,

126, 129; coming-​of-​age 10, 59, 69, 126, 135; origin story 125–​127, 129, 151n3 fragmentation see discontinuity frame: framing 53, 101, 155, 161, 162, 169; freeze-​frame effect 32, 52, 64, 159, 173; multiframe 161, 164, 169, 172; narrative frame 155, 160–​161; off-​frame 161, 171; paragraph (as a framing device) 40, 46, 103, 109, 156, 159–​160; picture frame 31, 41, 80, 97, 142, 161, 181n10; unframed 38, 40, 103, 144 franchise 17, 23n9, 132, 142–​143, 151, 153n18, 177 Franquin, A. 121n12, 177 French legislation: copyright law 87n9; Jules Ferry laws 37, 43, 56n13; law on publications intended for young people 92–​94, 121n6; Joint Committee for Publications and Press Agencies 94, 121 Fresnault-​Deruelle, P. 60, 68, 80, 90n26 Frey, H. 3, 23n4, 71, 173 Frigerio, V. 2, 114, 123 Gaiman, N. 1, 70 Gardner, J. 2–​3, 20, 182n20 Gautier, T. 24n18, 155–​156 Gendrot, C. 91 Genestoux, M. du 18, 26, 50–​53, 58n29 Genette, G. 13, 14, 24n19, 54–​56, 87–​88, 160 ghostwriter 175, 181n13 Glénat, J. 123n31, 143, 153n21, 177 Godard, C. 102–​103 Goethe, J.W. von 30, 156 Goscinny, R. 1, 20–​21, 130–​132, 145, 147 Gottfredson, F. 51–​52 Grand’Maison, M. de 12–​13 graphic novel 2–​3, 20, 91–​92, 110, 114, 166–​167 Greg 102 Groensteen, T. 2–​3, 25n20, 79, 80, 161 Guillaume, M.-​A. 111, 122n23 Hallet, W. 181n14 Hammerstein-​De Kuyssche, A. 88n16, 124 Hammett, D. 49

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202 Index Hamon, P. 25n22, 38, 156–​157, 164, 168, 170 Hergé 8, 11, 19, 59–​90, 125, 128, 152n15, 179 hors-​série 130, 132 Hutcheon, L. 4–​8, 23n7, 120n2, 123n32, 167 hybridization: hybrid album 166, 167, 181; iconotextual hybridization 51, 166, 179; media hybridization 7, 8, 44, 150, 159, 180 illustration (of comics-​related novels): absence of illustration 11, 16, 56n14, 107, 140, 156, 180n4; illustration redrawn from the comics 28, 30, 34–​41, 71, 78, 90n29, 164; illustration reproduced from the comics 21, 42–​43, 46, 49–​50, 144, 148; original comic-​ style illustration 42, 51, 97–​103, 138, 143, 163, 176–​177; original non-​comic-​style illustration 38, 57n24, 91; synchronisation of illustrations with the text 46, 50–​51, 97, 99 immediacy (transparency of mediation) 23n12, 31, 143, 149–​150 inadaptability 60–​61, 87n4 influence: intermedia influence 10, 109, 119, 122n19, 145, 151, 154, 179; literary influence on comics 1, 30, 110; stylistic influence 23n11, 132, 135, 152n15 intermediality 6–​7, 13, 156; intermedialization 5–​6, 154 intertextuality 8, 23n11, 71, 154, 173, 177; intertextual citation 14, 61, 168 Irvine, A. 19, 60, 63, 66–​69, 71–​72, 125 Isou, I. 179 Jeannelle, J.-​L. 57n19, 61, 173 Jenkins, H. 23n9, 71, 90n27, 179 Jijé 93, 97–​99, 118, 176 Joncour, S. 9 Juillard, A. 80 Kinnet, P. 19, 60, 63, 67–​68, 77–​78, 88n14 Lauzier, G. 111, 122n23 Lavigne, R. 101

Leblanc, R. 63–​64 Lee, S. 126 Legardinier, C. 112 Legardinier, G. 140, 183n25 Lejeune, P. 107, 147–​148 Leloup, R. 20, 111, 125, 132–​140, 152 Lepetit, E. 142 Leroy, F. 110 Lesage, S. 12, 26, 102, 152n11 Letourneux, M. 8, 16, 24n19, 49, 127, 162 Lettrism 179 licensing 42, 56n17, 153n22 Lichtenstein, R. 70, 71, 88n18 light novel see manga-​related novel literarization 2, 110; literariness 114, 123n25, 166 literary adaptation (in comics form) 1, 5, 8, 9, 57n25, 111 literary legitimacy 87n5, 111, 114, 118–​120, 153n23; books legitimacy 20, 92 logocentrism 4, 22, 93 Lorioux, F. 51 Louvel, L. 4, 12, 14, 29, 36, 89n25, 159 Lowery, L. 57n18, 41 Lowther, G. 1, 92 Magny, C.-​E. 101 Mahlknecht, J. 22n3, 72, 85 making-​of book 91, 157, 160, 173, 182n21 manga-​related novel 1, 17, 24n4, 142, 179 Mann, T. 70–​72 Marie, D. 178 Martin, C. 180, 181n14 Martin, J. 152n15 media: media age in France 36; media culture 3, 13, 23n9, 41, 120, 154, 173; media memories 8–​10, 72, 77, 86, 116, 143; mediageny see inadaptability memorable panel 78–​83, 85, 90 metalepsis 29, 78, 83, 117, 147, 152n10, 160 mise en abyme 91, 117, 163 mode (of adaptation): playful 14–​17, 111; satirical 14–​17, 37, 130; serious 14–​17, 24n19, 63, 78, 88n10

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Index  203 mode (of representation): dramatic 27, 74–​76, 171; recounting 27, 32, 64, 76–​77, 97, 108, 113, 136; showing 6, 31, 89n24, 101, 108, 149, 159; telling 6, 11, 36, 89n24, 108, 149 Moore, D. 175 Morel, J.-​P. 111–​112 Morgan, H. 3, 24n20, 181n6 Morin, E. 37–​39, 56n16 Mortimer, F. 152n8 Moselli, J. 45–​46, 49, 57n23 Mouchot, P. 92, 94–​95 Mougin, J.-​P. 110 multimodality: multimodal narrative 21, 166–​167, 180, 181n14; multimodal novel 3, 155, 167, 173, 181n14; multimodal storytelling 41, 161, 163, 180 Murray, S. 6, 57n19 Musset, A. de 156–​158, 160 Musset, P. de 21, 155–​162, 180n5 Nakazawa, K. 1 nested reception 9, 155 network 6, 18, 59, 115, 123n30, 152n11 Newell, K. 17, 23n8 Nézière, R. de la 12 Nouveau Roman 21, 105, 117, 123n29, 154–​155, 163–​169, 181n13 novel in comics form: 20, 110–​114, 167 novelization: confession novelization 21, 95, 125, 143, 147–​149, 150–​151; cryptonovelization 92, 115; Hollywood novelization 64, 66, 69, 85, 92, 140, 142, 149–​150, 153n20; junior novelization 17, 20, 50, 54, 124–​125, 140–​143, 147, 149–​152; oblique novelization 9, 11, 12, 24n13, 83, 169; partial novelization 168, 173; self-​ novelization 5, 19, 26, 30, 36, 91–​123, 178; visual novelization 7–​9, 17, 63–​64, 144–​145, 150, 180 O’Neal, F. 27–​28 onomatopoeia 103, 109, 122n19, 144 Ordas, P. 123n31, 140 original storyline 42, 57, 61, 95, 102, 174 Paape, E. 95, 99–​100, 104, 118 painting 10–​11, 39–​40, 119, 171; tableau effect 80, 83, 89n25, 159, 168

paratext 43, 54, 55n2, 66, 69–​72, 86, 142–​143, 162–​163; peritext 26, 35–​36, 88n12, 95, 113, 144, 161 Paringaux, P. 110, 112, 122n23 parody 13–​16, 35, 62, 70, 112 pastiche 12, 14–​16, 34, 62, 112, 156 Peeters, B. 21, 82–​83, 90n26, 110–​111, 116, 155, 162–​166 Pennac, D. 88n16 photography: chronophotography 32, 55n6; daguerreotype 37, 39; and literary writing 113, 116, 168; photogram 7, 121n15, 143–​144, 181n10; portrait photograph 64, 72, 88n18, 121n15, 182n25 photo-​novel 116, 171; drawn novel 8, 17, 94–​95; film photonovel 8, 64, 167 picture story 11, 26–​58, 156–​160; Bilderbogen 36–​37, 40 Pierre, M. 20, 92, 112–​113 piracy 56n16, 62, 158; plagiarism 94, 115, 117; repurposing 14, 87n5, 150 pitching a character 105, 114–​115 Pizzino, C. 3, 23n4, 154–​155 plane of utterance: discourse 86, 131, 147, 149; history 105, 149 popular imagery 28, 37–​38, 44 postmodernity 4, 67, 69–​70, 154, 182n20 Pratt, H. 20, 110, 112–​114, 162 prose comics 181n9 Proust, M. 112, 168, 182n17 Queneau, R. 57n25 Rabu, E. 179–​180 Raimi, S. 127 Rajewsky, I. 7–​8 Raymond, A. 49, 155, 174–​175 reading: adaptative reading 21, 167; deeper reading experience 92–​95, 110; learning to read 37, 43, 95, 140, 142; literacy 38, 56n13; literary reading 9, 92, 95; reading pact 4, 66, 80, 86, 147; remembered reading 19, 77, 86 realism 35, 40, 70, 89n19, 105, 122n21 reboot 124, 126–​127, 132 recitative 49, 70, 91, 116 remediation 23n12, 85, 149–​151 Renonciat, A. 43–​44, 50 Ricardou, J. 168

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204 Index Rivière, F. 20, 24n13, 92, 110–​111, 114–​118, 122n22 Rivière, J. 12, 177 Romanticism 38, 56n14, 89n19, 157, 160 Ronald-​Wills, J.F. 94 Rossum-​Guyon, F. van 168, 182n17 Roussel, R. 166 Ruffault, C. 153n22 Ryan, M.-​L. 15–​16, 105, 115 Sadoul, G. 54–​55, 92 Sagan, F. 11 Sainte-​Beuve, C.-​A. 32 Saint-​Gelais, R. 12, 14–​15, 24n19, 84, 87 Saint-​Ogan, A. 8, 50 Sampayo, C. 1, 110 Sarn, A. 129, 140, 183n25 Sarraute, N. 117, 123n29 Schréder, É. 164 Schuiten, F. 21, 155, 162–​165 sci-​fi 69, 132–​136 script (comics): comics script 21, 99, 109, 177; novel-​like comics script 118–​119, 134, 153n17, 177; reading novels as comics script 21, 155, 173–​178; unrealized script 174, 176–​177 script (film): animation script 142, 153n22; film script 6, 14, 66, 72, 77, 120n3; screenplay 63, 69, 89n22, 116, 173, 176–​177; screenwriter 57n19, 63–​64, 88n16, 116–​118, 175; shooting script 70, 180 Ségur, Comtesse de 50 Sempé, J.-​J. 21, 132, 145 seriality: serialization 16, 41, 110, 127, 141; serial novel 45, 49, 57, 110; serial-​under-​images 43, 45–​46, 49–​50, 55, 57 Serres, M. 81, 90n26 Sfar, J. 1 Simon, C. 1, 21, 155, 168–​173, 181n13, 182n17 Sontag, S. 70 Soriano, M. 119 speech bubble: abandonment of 8, 45, 167; influence on literary writing 78, 123n29, 146–​147; removed in adaptations 42, 50, 103, 144; transposed into novels 116, 169–​172 Spiegelman, A. 167

Spielberg, S. 60–​63, 66, 72, 75, 86, 128 spin-​off product see tie-​in spoken novel 93, 121n5 Steeman, S.-​A. 97, 99, 107, 122n18 Steiner, M. 112 Sterckx, P. 79–​82 story book see film picture book storyworld see fictional universe strip: daily strip 42, 49, 67, 169–​171; topper strip 42 substitution 102–​103, 114 Sue, E. 57n25 Sunday page 27, 29, 42, 174–​175, 182n23 supplement: logic of supplement 92, 97, 101–​102, 106, 112–​114, 162; logic of supplementarity 120n3 Surrealism 105, 154 Tardi, J. 110–​111, 122n23, 167 teen novel 20, 124, 133, 135, 147, 176 Těsnohlídek, R. 57n21 Teulé, J. 110–​111, 122n23 text-​type: argumentative text-​type 35, 55; descriptive text-​type 18, 27, 29, 78, 82; explanatory text-​type; narrative text-​type 18, 27, 29, 35, 60, 78 Thackeray, W.M. 156 theatre: drama text 12, 14; narrativization of plays 14, 24n18, 27, 41, 156; puppetry 37; theatrical performance 74, 24n16, 121n5, 159 Thomas, C. 11–​13 Tibet (cartoonist) 20, 103, 106–​109, 120 tie-​in 6, 10, 150, 152n11; spin-​off product 41–​42, 64, 69, 182n23 Töpffer, R. 5, 10, 18, 26–​38, 157–​160 Touchant, J.-​L. 45–​46, 57 transcription: retranscription 41, 54, 61, 103, 179; scene-​by-​scene transcription 169, 173, 180 transfictionality 12, 14–​15, 87n6 translation: adaptation as translation 5–​6; novelization as translation 30, 35–​36, 49–​50, 54, 66, 160 transmedia storytelling 23n9, 179; transmedial narratology 5, 179 transposition across media 7, 13–​14, 63; literary transposition 4, 14, 61, 67, 114, 116

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Index  205 travelogue 28–​29, 39, 134, 156, 163–​164 tribute 59, 61, 83, 85 Tuten, F. 1, 19, 59–​60, 63, 66–​72, 112, 119 typography: typed 30, 37, 40, 44–​45, 135, 179; typeface 50, 182n15, 141, 143, 180; typescript 135, 181n9 Uderzo, A. 20, 130–​131 Valéry, P. 168, 173 Valle, J. 49 Van Hamme, J. 102, 111, 121n16, 178 Varenne, D. 110, 122n23 Verheggen, J.-​P. 61, 87n5 Verne, J. 135 Viel, T. 24n13 visuality: antivisual writing 77, 85, 89n22, 149; degree of visuality 77, 108–​109, 158–​159; lack of visuality 73, 85, 94, 138, 150, 176; lexicon of vision 52, 169; visual artwork 72, 103; visual encyclopaedia 16–​17, 144; visual imagination 11,

36, 111, 175; visual memory 11–​12, 86, 108; voyeur 108, 158–​159, 169 vocalization 18, 29, 35, 46, 53 voice: enunciative voice 31, 81, 84–​85, 105, 117, 147; narrative voice 63, 68, 73, 77, 148; voice-​ over 24n14, 68 Vouilloux, B. 10–​11, 22, 80, 89n25 Wajnberg, M.-​H. 81, 82, 90n26 Wein, L. 126 Weiner, R. 126–​127 Willems, S. 19, 60, 63, 68, 83–​85 Williams, P. 2, 23n5, 110, 122n21 Wolf, G. 170 Wolfman, M. 126 writing: literary writing’s appeal 20, 111; scriptwriting 118, 163–​164, 177; writing constraint 15, 64, 68, 140, 151, 164; writing contract 4, 50, 56n17, 66, 80, 87n9, 142; writing exercise 11, 27, 59, 79–80, 86–​87, 151n6; writing factory 155–​156, 164, 167–​168, 177 written comic strip 154 Zep 142

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