Ninth Art. Bande dessinée, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964-1975 3031170008, 9783031170003

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

NINTH ART Bande dessinée, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975

Sylvain Lesage

Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

Series Editor Roger Sabin, University of the Arts London, London, UK

This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.” It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular one. Those capital letters have been earned. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history, aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of 60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to 50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it can’t progress without a little prodding. Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on the boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels for international media, and consults on comics-related projects for the BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference.

Sylvain Lesage

Ninth Art. Bande dessinée, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975

Sylvain Lesage IRHiS University of Lille Lille, France

ISSN 2634-6370 ISSN 2634-6389 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ISBN 978-3-031-17000-3 ISBN 978-3-031-17001-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Jean-Claude Forest/Le Terrain Vague 1964 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Fiona, whose love and friendship bring so much energy in my life. To Gabrielle and Mathilde, with whom it is so much fun to read comics together.

Acknowledgements

A book is always a collective adventure, and I’d like to start by thanking the many people who contributed, one way or the other, to shape the reflexion that led to this book. Roger Sabin offered me to publish my work with authors I admire and who have nourished me intellectually: I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity. This project was punctuated by a research trip to Columbus, Ohio, which broadened my perspective—a few days before the first lockdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically narrowed the horizons of our daily, and professional, lives. Thanks to Maggie Flinn for the invitation that opened up so many horizons—many of those yet to explore! In the years leading up to the publication of this book, pieces— more or less important—were read, suggested, or discussed with Laurent Gerbier, Benoît Crucifix, Gaëlle Kovaliv, Benoît Peeters, Jessica Kohn, Irène Le Roy Ladurie, Maggie Flinn, Jan Baetens, Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Jared Gardner, Carol Tilley, Jenny Robb, Marie Derrien, Isabelle Licari-Guillaume, Gert Meesters, Florian Moine, Benoît Glaude, Pierre Nocerino, Roel Daenen, Nicolas Labarre, Inès Bahans, and many others. Special thanks also to the irreplaceable Catherine Ferreyrolle in Angoulême, Susan Liberator in Columbus and Bernard Desmaele in Tournai: archivists and librarians play a key role in the dissemination of knowledge.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publication of this book was made possible thanks to help from my research unit, IRHiS (Institut de recherches historiques du Septentrion), which has consistently supported my work, and by the MESHS (European centre for humanities and social sciences, MESHS-Lille, France).

Contents

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1

“Ninth Art”, and the Gentrification of Mass Culture

2

Barbarella: Inventing Adult Comics Through the Book

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Flash Gordon and the Transatlantic Construction of Ninth Art Heritage

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Astérix and the Transformation of the Comics Market René Goscinny, Albert Uderzo, Astérix et les Normands, 1966

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Sharks, Pirates, and Ghosts. Authorship and the Challenge of Transmedia Storytelling

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5 6 7 8 9

Futuropolis: A Hub for Independent Bande Dessinée and a Crucible for New Formats

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Author, Artist, Publisher: Claire Bretécher, Les Frustrés, 1975

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La Ballade de la mer salée and the Emergence of the European Graphic Novel

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And Afterwards? bande dessinée: Part Art, Part Industry

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Author Index

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Subject Index

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About the Author

Sylvain Lesage is Associate Professor in contemporary history at the University of Lille, and editor-in-chief of the journal Neuvième Art, published by the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée in Angoulême. He specialises in book history and media studies, with a particular interest in comics. His Ph.D. dissertation provided the material for two books: Publier la bande dessinée. Les éditeurs franco-belges et l’album (Presses de l’Enssib, 2018) and L’Effet livre: métamorphoses de la bande dessinée (Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2019). .

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5 Fig. 4.1

Bande dessinée et Figuration narrative, poster for the exhibition held at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, 1967 Pierre Vankeer, Morris, “Neuvième Art”, Spirou Magazine # 1392, 1964, p. 85 Jean-Claude Forest, cover of Griada of A. Kolpakov, Paris, Hachette, 1962, «Le Rayon fantastique» Jean-Claude Forest, “Barbarella”, V Magazine, 572, Autumn 1963, 1968, p. 53 Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Paris, Le Terrain Vague, 1964, np (pl. 35) Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Paris, Le Terrain Vague, 1964, cover Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Paris, Losfeld, 1968, cover Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Nikita Mandryka, “Jules l’Éclair”, Métal hurlant #2, 1975, p. 15 Avventure di Gordon, Nerbini, 1935 Alex Raymond, Flash Gordin, Club des bandes dessinées, 1963 Subscription pamphlet for the republication of Flash Gordon, 1967 (Etienne Robial Archives, Cité de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême) Alex Raymond, Flash Gordon, Socerlid, 1967: title page “Le Phénomène Astérix”, L’Express # 796, 19 September 1966

6 8 28 31 33 35 40 51 59 64

67 68 75

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4

Ad published in Pilote no. 111 (12/7/1961), p. 8 Initial print run of the Asterix series, 1961–1979 (data extracted from the Dépôt légal records, Archives nationales / BnF) Astérix series print runs in 1966, according to Dépôt légal archives René Goscinny et Albert Uderzo, Astérix. Le Menhir d’or, Paris, Philips, 1967 Casterman catalogue, 1966, Tournai, Casterman archives André Barret, Hergé, Tintin et les oranges bleues, Tournai, Casterman, 1965 (cover) Greg, Hergé, Tintin et le lac aux requins, Tournai, Casterman, 1973, (cover) Casterman catalogue, 1968 (cover) Tintin et le lac aux requins, Tournai, Casterman, 1973, p. 5 Hergé exhibition poster, Angoulême, 1977 Etienne Robial (right, in overalls) in the Futuropolis bookshop, ca 1974, Futuropolis archives. Looking at the shelves, one may observe that Robial’s refusal of belgeries was more of a posture than an actual practice The early days of a publishing venture, Futuropolis, 1974 Graphic coherence even ran as far as the book boxes. Shipping slip designed by Florence Cestac, undated [1978] (Futuropolis archives, © Florence Cestac) The early consecration of Claire Bretécher: Schtroumpf. Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée #24, 1974 The old guard, and the new. Claire Bretécher on national television for Tac au Tac, alongside Jean-Claude Fournier, Albert Uderzo, and André Franquin Creative autonomy and editorial emancipation: L’Écho des Savanes #4, 1973. Cover art by Claire Bretécher. Note the ironic subtitle: “Picture book for adults” Le Nouvel Observateur, August 1979 Pif Gadget #66, 25.05.1970, editorial Hugo Pratt, Rendez-vous à Bahia, Tournai, Casterman, 1973 Corto Maltese, La Ballade de la mer salée, Tournai, Casterman, 1975, cover Back cover of the reprint of Hugo Pratt’s La Ballade de la mer sale, Casterman, 1978 (detail)

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82 83 86 97 100 101 105 108 112

123 125

131 142

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150 152 162 164 166 167

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6

Jean Yanne, Tito Topin, La Langouste ne passera pas !, Tournai, Casterman, 1969 Jacques Tardi, promo shoot for Casterman after winning the Angoulême Grand Prix. On the shelves behind him, his series (Adèle Blanc-Sec), his (A Suivre) novels—especially Ici Même, and the large 30 × 40 published by Futuropolis more than a decade earlier

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CHAPTER 1

“Ninth Art”, and the Gentrification of Mass Culture

Abstract In France, comics are commonly referred to as the “ninth art”. What does this expression mean? Where does their specific status come from? This introductory chapter looks at the singular status of comics in the French cultural landscape, and at some of the signs of their artistic reappraisal. In the 1960s, fans started reappraising comics as an art form, linking the comic strip to the fine arts system, just as the latter was fracturing. Then, from the 1970s onwards, cultural policies offering unique support mechanisms validated this status as the “ninth art”. The hypothesis guiding this chapter is that comics’ elevation to the status of an art owes a great deal to another specificity of the French comics market, namely the large-scale switch to books at a very early stage. Albums ushered in another way of relating to comics, giving rise to new ways of creating, distributing, and reading bandes dessinées. In focusing on seven different albums and their formal print qualities, this book sets out to reconstruct transformations to comics in the years 1964–1975, as they shifted from mass entertainment to the art world. Keywords Legitimisation · Cultural policies · Material bibliography · Book printing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_1

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S. LESAGE

It is nowadays obvious in French-speaking circles to refer to comics as the “ninth art”. Plentiful indications signal its recognition as an art. In the wake of the Lungheretti report flagging the structural problems in the domain, the French Ministry of Culture named 2020 the Year of the Bande Dessinée.1 Comics pages regularly come up for auction, where they sell for record sums; they are exhibited in the greatest museums. Having long been taught at school and studied at university, comics are no longer banished to the cultural underworld. Another singular characteristic is that French comics—or, as they are commonly known, bandes dessinées 2 —have come to be largely identified with books. Any presence of comics in periodicals is now residual. Apart from magazines linked to Disney, only a few titles subsist: Le Journal de Spirou, Fluide glacial . Instead, it has become a separate segment in the book market, driven by 5000 or so publications per year, with sales of about e500 million (Lungheretti 2019). This dynamic sector accounts for about 10% of the overall French publishing market, with sizeable imports and exports, and close links to video games and cinema. In other words, it is structured as a cultural industry (Guilbert 2021). The shift from the press to book form occurred during the 1960s. Major magazines such as Le Journal de Spirou, Le Journal de Tintin, and Pilote started putting together a catalogue of albums to give their strips a second lease of life in bookstores. And it was over the same period that the expression “ninth art” started to make its way into public discourses. These two phenomena—the publishing transformation and the cultural reappraisal—were closely linked. It seems hard to deny that the sacrosanct symbolic value placed on books played a leading role in bestowing new dignity on comics, particularly in a bookish nation such as France. This book explores how the shift to book form enabled comics to be transformed into the ninth art. The ninth art is underpinned by artistic 1 This initiative, called BD 2020, inevitably ran up against the singular health context, draining the event of much of its substance; however, it shows that issues to do with graphic creation are recognised at the highest level of state. 2 The term bande dessinée started to be commonly used in the 1950s. It is somewhat ironic that it came to designate a French way of creating graphic stories (see, for instance, Miller 2007; Grove 2010), as the term was originally coined for a form of graphic narrative inspired by American comics. In the 1950s, the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle in charge of comics censorship began using the term bande dessinée in deploring the importation of “American-style” children’s comics, and their use of speech bubbles. On this question, see Ory (2020), Baudry (2022).

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practices which are in turn rooted in material realities and reading practices. The ambition of this book is, therefore, to grasp how material aspects relating to publication encode the bande dessinée’s cultural value. It seeks to apprehend this phenomenon by looking at a singular field: that of the Franco-Walloon system of comics publishing.

1964–1975: Eleven Decisive Years This book looks at the radical change in the status of comics in the French-speaking world over a brief period, the decade 1964–1975. As in other Western societies of the time, France was affected by sweeping changes in its social fabric. The baby boom and economic growth gave rise to new social categories and unprecedented cultural practices, driving politicisation and protest. In 1962, young people’s horizons altered in France with the end of the Algerian war. In June 1963, 150,000 flocked to the free concert staged on Place de la Nation in Paris to mark the first anniversary of the magazine Salut les copains. The scuffles which broke out only fuelled fantasies about young people heading to perdition (Tamagne 2018), and illustrated the emergence of a “new age category”—identified in the heat of the moment by sociologist Edgar Morin as “10- to 19-year-olds”, whom he named docagénaires, in an attempt to translate the word teenagers: adolescence as a category was still in gestation (Morin 1962, 2008). Economic prosperity and swelling numbers of young people meant people studied for longer. Adolescents and young adults became a specific market targeted by the media and industrialists. Pocket money and first wages were spent on clothes, records, magazines, and other cultural products underpinning a specific cultural identity (Sohn 2001; Bantigny 2007). This youth culture was part of a transnational circulation (Briggs 2015), raising the question of Americanisation against the backdrop of the Cold War and the globalisation of mass culture. This emerging youth culture which was internationalised and quick to protest culminated, of course, in May 1968. The demonstrations and strikes rocking the country and profoundly questioning the established socio-political order were part of a geopolitics of protest running from Berlin to Chicago to Mexico, underscoring the increased globalisation of political imaginaries (Loyer 2009). These protests were far from quelled by De Gaulle’s attempt to take things in hand. The 1970s were marked by a large number of social protest movements which built on and prolonged

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1968. Left-wing, trade union, feminist, and ecologist activists battled on all fronts to change mentalities and the balance of power. Seen from this perspective, “everything is political”, including production relations, ways of life, culture, and the media. The political revolution was indissociable from the ideological revolution. France’s legalisation of contraception in 1967 followed by that of abortion in 1974 suffice to illustrate the scale of the transformations affecting the country over the course of the decade. This decade of protest from 1964 to 1975 also affected French comics, which were undergoing far-reaching alterations. Reading practices evolved, artist profiles became more diverse, and the ambitions they placed in their works also changed. The rigid constraints weighing down on comics since the 1949 law on youth publications started to fissure. The ecosystem built up after the Second World War based on illustrated youth magazines was remodelled under the liberating effects of this wind of change. One work illustrates this shift in status better than any other, Barbarella. In 1964, the publisher Éric Losfeld brought out an album compiling the erotico-spatial peregrinations of Jean-Claude Forest’s heroine. The event was significant for many reasons. For the first time, a publisher of literature—not a children’s or mass entertainment publisher—was bringing out comics. And doing so in an upmarket form, that of an album with a cloth spine, thick paper, stitching, and jacket, marking the emergence of a new public: adult men ready to spend substantial sums on reading comics. This album triggered lively discussion in 1960s France. On the one hand, there were those who were offended to see comics as a vehicle for eroticism, light-years away from the recommendations of the Censorship Committee set up by the 1949 law on youth publications. On the other hand, there were those who feted Barbarella as a heroine flouting taboos and engendering a truly adult form of bande dessinée. When Barbarella was forbidden by the censors, the early circles of comics enthusiasts rallied round, with Jean-Claude Forest an eminent member. Yet it was not their calls for artistic freedom that saved Barbarella from the oblivion to which the censors wished to consign it, but Roger Vadim’s spectacular film adaptation. From this moment on, re-adapted and redressed for the comics, Barbarella became a central character in the history of the medium, typifying the moment when comics threw off their childish garb and started evolving towards an art form.

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In addition to the publication of Barbarella as an upmarket album, 1964 saw the beginning of a regular column in Le Journal de Spirou about comics heritage, further illustrating shifts in how comics were viewed. This transformation in status largely stemmed from early fans, who were commenting, defending, and glorifying comics as a new art form. In 1961 these enthusiasts started to band together in the pages of Fiction magazine, before setting up the Club des bandes dessinées (Comics Club) in 19623 ; nevertheless, 1964 marked yet another turning point. The Club fell victim to a quarrel between the old guard (who loved the comics of their youth) and a vanguard (who extended their embrace to contemporary creation). The old guard regrouped as the Centre for the study of graphic literature (Centre d’étude des littératures d’expression graphique, CELEG), while the modernisers hotfooted off to found the Civil society for studying and researching drawn literature (Société civile d’étude et de recherche de la littérature dessinée, SOCERLID) and its journal, Phénix. SOCERLID’s ambitious publications (encyclopaedias and historical overviews) gave new amplitude to discussion of comics, particularly its 1967 exhibition “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative”, whose extensive media coverage made it a landmark in winning recognition of bande dessinée as one of the arts (see Fig. 1.1). In 1964, the Journal de Spirou began to present the work of these early circles of enthusiasts in a column called “Neuvième Art” (see Fig. 1.2). The author of Lucky Luke, Morris (Maurice de Bevère), and Pierre Vankeer, a pioneering Belgian collector, began penning a column which popularised the expression.4 This column, subtitled “Musée de la bande dessinée”, ran from December 1964 to June 1967, over which time it explored the comics past, covering a broad spectrum taking in Rodolphe Töpffer, Gustave Verbeeck, and Adolf Oberländer, alongside Flash Gordon, Alley Oop, Mutt and Jeff , and Krazy Kat (re)introducing these masters of the form to their young readers. Rather than a small circle of amateurs, a broader public of fans now started to emerge. Francis

3 For a discussion of the history of the French comics fandom, see Demange (2017) and Gabilliet and Labarre (2021). I discuss this more at length in Chapter 4. 4 Earlier traces of the expression may be found: for example, the series of articles about bandes dessinées by the enthusiast Claude Beylie in the journal Lettres et médecins (Beylie 1964). But what took place with Spirou was of a different stamp and echoed far more widely.

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Fig. 1.1 Bande dessinée et Figuration narrative, poster for the exhibition held at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, 1967

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Lacassin’s decision to title his 1971 work Pour un neuvième art, la bande dessinée consecrated the expression once and for all. In the mid-1970s, as Forest was bringing out the second volume in his adventures of Barbarella (Forest 1974), the landscape had radically altered from that confronting him a decade earlier. Comics had become a book market phenomenon, backed up by festivals, and an established cultural form for adults. It was at this stage that the magazines L’Écho des Savanes , Métal hurlant , and Fluide glacial were founded, illustrating the dynamism of creation for adults, together with the sizeable impact of the magazine Pilote, the seedbed from which these offshoots grew. These magazines opened new vistas for comics. In Métal hurlant , Moebius refused to be limited to conventional plots: “there is no reason for a story to be like a house with a door to enter, windows to look at trees, and a chimney for the smoke”, instead staking out the right to come up with “a story in the shape of an elephant, a corn of wheat, or the flame of a matchstick”.5 In L’Écho des Savanes , Fluide glacial , Métal hurlant , and Ah! Nana (which started appearing later, in 1976–1978), a new generation of men and women authors explored new territories, pushing back the formal limits of French comics (Miller 2007; MacLeod 2021). In the meantime, another apparently opposed change was taking place: the shift to book form. In 1974 the French publishing union (Syndicat national de l’édition, SNE) started publishing statistics for comics, which now amounted to a specific market sector. Increasingly, comics were on sale in bookshops. As remarked earlier, this was the other major singularity of the situation in France. The winds of freedom blowing over bande dessinée in the 1960s and 1970s formed part of a global phenomenon in which underground and alternative currents were springing up worldwide—California, the Netherlands, Japan, and Argentina—with the assertion of adult reading practices part of a fundamental shift. One characteristic, however, sets the Franco-Walloon situation apart: the importance of the book form. What with Éric Losfeld publishing Pascal Thomas’s Pravda la survireuse, Guy Pellaert at Futuropolis translating Vaughn Bodé, Artefact publishing Schlingo, and Actuel compiling Gilbert Shelton, booksellers were at the centre of the market for adult comics in France. Thus Futuropolis started out in 1974, establishing its

5 Moebius, editorial in Métal Hurlant no. 4, 1975.

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Fig. 1.2 Pierre Vankeer, Morris, “Neuvième Art”, Spirou Magazine # 1392, 1964, p. 85

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position as the most important alternative publishing house within a few years, and drawing many smaller publishers along in its wake: Artefact, les éditions du Fromage, Tousse Bourrin, Minoustchine, Déesse, Michel Deligne, Bédéscope, Jonas, Transit, Pepperland, and so on. It was also in 1974 that the Angoulême Comics Festival was first held, a French version of the Italian festival at Lucca. This was the culmination of efforts by fans to promote comics, and the initiative received the backing of the local public authorities, before the Ministry of Culture came onboard a few years later (Lesage 2020). Thanks to the festival, the processes of artistic valorisation and heritagisation gathered momentum. In 1976, the Angoulême Fine Arts Museum started buying original pages, thus contributing to this intermediary object becoming established as a yardstick for artistic value (Moine 2013). The poster for the first festival used a panel drawn by Hugo Pratt, one of the rising stars in the new Parisian comics scene. For though Pratt was an Italian artist, and had spent time in Brazil and Argentina, and while his work bears the traces of American authors, particularly Caniff, it was in France that he achieved consecration. 1975 was also the year when the Franco-Belgian publisher Casterman brought out his La Ballade de la mer salée, which came to be a central reference in the advent of graphic literature in the French-speaking world, as a model for the “roman (à suivre)” (novel [to be continued]). The change in status also stemmed from the fact that comics were becoming an object of research over the period 1964–1975, in the wake of studies by enthusiasts. Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle’s 1970 doctoral thesis on comics was published two years later (Fresnault-Deruelle 1972). In 1975, Serge Tisseron’s pioneering doctoral thesis was written partly in bande dessinée form (preceding Nick Sousanis by four decades) (Tisseron 1975). These sweeping changes lie at the heart of an academic article by Luc Boltanski in the very first issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Boltanski 1975); the journal founded by Pierre Bourdieu. Boltanski tests field theory by applying it to bande dessinée (Beaty and Woo 2016). He shows how the reappraisal performed by enthusiasts was part of a broader dynamic recomposing social structures in France during the post-war boom of the Trente Glorieuses, thereby transforming cultural practices. With children staying in schooling for longer, and mass access to university and academic knowledge, new literate publics emerged who were eager for new objects. At the same time, artists were investing new ambitions in their works, and aspiring to the status of artist, structuring

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tensions between a mass distribution pole (what we today call the mainstream) and an artistic pole. Although Boltanski’s analyses have been extensively discussed (Maigret 1994, 2012; Kohn 2018), there can be no doubt as to the validity of his observation of a change in how comics were seen. Thus two parallel phenomena were played out over the period 1964– 1975. The publishing shift towards book form occurred at a moment when comics were coming to be seen in a new light. It is the intertwining of these two phenomena that I examine in this book, carrying on from earlier projects on how the comics publishing landscape was transformed by albums (Lesage 2018) and how this affected ways of creating, distributing, and consuming comics (Lesage 2019).

Seven Albums Exemplifying ´ Transformations to Bande Dessinee The book form thus played a central role in the emergence and structuring of a ninth art, a process I describe in these pages. Rather than decomposing its facets in theoretical form, because I am a historian, and thus a pragmatist, I explore this decade in the history of bande dessinée by focusing on seven emblematic books. Each chapter is built around a single album, chosen as an observatory for changes affecting publishers, criticism, academic discourse, and so on. My aim here is to sketch an embodied history rooted in objects and tracing reading practices, drawing on the tools of material bibliography as a preliminary to a sociology of texts (McKenzie 1986), and the various works analysing how the form of a text may change how we comprehend it (Thérenty 2009; Souchier 2007). Rather than taking the album as a complete and stabilised form, it is a matter of seeing how it results from a complex history and numerous interventions. The aim, therefore, is to understand how a cultural form encodes reading, applying to comics the analyses of Hoggart, de Certeau, and other cultural studies specialists (Hoggart 1957; Certeau 2011). Seeking to explore how a medium is determined by its publication forms (Gardner 2012; Williams 2020; Gabilliet 2013), this book provides a history of Franco-Belgian comics based on its publication formats and modes of production. It also considers how a canon was built up for the ninth art, together with this canon’s blind spots (Beaty 2012; Beaty and Woo 2016).

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Each of the seven albums studied shines a spotlight on some of the transformations taking place in the sector. I do not cover everything, and it has been hard to select these case studies. I have set aside many books which deserve to be included. To give but one example, the place allotted here to the Communist illustrated magazine Pif in no way corresponds to its importance in the comics landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, when it sold half a million copies a week and acted as a nursery for artists (Rannou 2022). I had to leave Pif aside, because of the magazine’s curious decision to steer clear of albums (for discussion of one of Pif ’s incursions into the book market, see Lesage [2022]). Due to its political reticence about a format deemed responsible for turning an object of popular culture into a bourgeois artefact, and the commercial flop of the few forays it did make, Pif missed out on the publishing revolution, watching from the sidelines as the ninth art became heritagised. Though not exhaustive, my corpus seeks to address different aspects in the progressive transformation of French comics into the “ninth art”. The second chapter examines an eminently canonical work, Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella. Generally hailed as the advent of the adult bande dessinée, Barbarella was published as an album by Éric Losfeld in 1964 before being substantially reworked for republication in 1968. In the comics landscape of the 1960s, Barbarella was on a plane apart: as a free woman forthrightly living her sexuality, and openly assuming her body, Barbarella no doubt echoed transformations in sexuality affecting France at the time (Fishman 2017). In tracing the work’s path to publication, we can watch as book publishers move into the comics market and see how stories are transformed by being published in book form. The importance of this book stems largely from the symbolic aura of its publisher, Éric Losfeld, renowned for having published André Breton, Boris Vian, Eugène Ionesco, and many others, an aura which thus extended to Forest’s tale initially published in the erotic press. Barbarella thus provides an excellent observatory for studying transformations to a work as comics move from magazine to book form, and for understanding the inner workings of the censorship weighing on French comics. Barbarella acted as a test for the 1949 law on youth publications, crystallising various ways of envisaging the possibility of adult comics. The various editions of Barbarella, and the circulation of the work from the erotic press to an upmarket album and then to Hollywood cinema, before returning to the album in strip form, bring into focus the tensions affecting comics in the mid-1960s.

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In Chapter 3, we move away from what was happening in France to look at transatlantic circulations, through the example of the 1968 republication of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, and what this can tell us about the French comics fandom and the assembling of a heritage. This chapter explores the paths taken by this reappraisal, and the ways in which comics came to be recognised as cultural heritage via initiatives to republish works. Comics fandom in the French-speaking world had deep links with nostalgia, and this nostalgia focused particularly on the United States, whose comic strips of the 1930s were a lost paradise for 1960s adults. Flash Gordon was central to the elevation of bande dessinée, a process driven by rivalry between CELEG and SOCERLID, between France and the United States: Alex Raymond’s series inspired virtually unanimous fascination and went through various republications, casting light on the contours of their communities. Using the Nostalgia Press republication, Socerlid’s Flash Gordan (1968) illustrates how an awareness of comics heritage came to the fore, together with the ambition to legitimise the form by upmarket republications of masterworks of the past. While Barbarella and Flash Gordon provide a way of examining the transition to an adult readership, Chapter 3 switches focus to an eminently transgenerational work, and still the most popular series in France today (Vincent Gérard et al. 2020), namely Astérix, addressed here through the ninth album in Goscinny and Uderzo’s series, Astérix et les Normands, published in 1966. Often celebrated for its remarkable capacity for satirising French society of the Trente glorieuses, Astérix is also a genuine publishing phenomenon. Like his predecessors and rivals, Dargaud, the publisher of Pilote, printed four-colour albums taken from the pages of this magazine in print runs of several thousand copies. But the runaway success of the Asterix albums definitively upended the French comics market. With Astérix et les Normands, the series became one of the most important publishing phenomena in twentieth-century France, with sales topping 1 million copies. Astérix provides a way of understanding how the 48-page colour hardback became the standard format for mainstream publishing, triggering lasting change to the sector. Astérix accelerated the shift from magazine to book form, but also to other media, for the success of Astérix was also built on its many adaptations (for radio, records, and cinema) and countless advertising iterations. In other words, Astérix et les Normands enables us to understand the mechanisms by which comics

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were built up as a mass consumer product, turning children into new consumers of cultural goods. Chapter 5 takes us back across the Belgian border, since it focuses on the other central figure in children’s comics, Tintin. Although Tintin sits atop the summit of the comics canon, I have decided to approach the matter from an oblique angle by studying Tintin et le lac aux requins, published in 1973. It may seem counterintuitive to select one of the few Tintin albums not drawn by Hergé, but an album which reworked the content of an animated film released in cinemas. The period 1964–1975 saw Hergé enter creative decline, having no doubt peaked in Tintin au Tibet (1960) and Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963). Ten years after the latter, only one new Tintin adventure had been published, Vol 714 pour Sydney (1968). Le Lac aux requins typifies the growing permeability between the media used by the cultural industries (magazines, books, films, and games), and the increasingly paradoxical situation in which Hergé and Casterman, his publisher, found themselves: on the one hand, Hergé was ever more celebrated and on the way to being crowned grand master of the ninth art. On the other hand, his infrequent productions obliged his publisher and studio to dream up ever more inventive ways of bringing comics characters to life. Tintin et le lac aux requins —pulled in different directions as a multimedia variant yet equally an act of authorial consecration and—thus casts a particularly bright light on the tensions in mass-market comics, caught between an aspiration for artistic recognition and the need to diversify. Chapter 6 looks at three books published simultaneously by the Futuropolis bookstore in 1974: Calvo, Gir, and Tardi. The store had opened recently and had become one of the nerve centres reappraising the heritage of the ninth art. It had been bought by a couple of young designers, Étienne Robial and Florence Cestac, who moved into publishing. From this point of view, 1974 marked a watershed in the history of fandom: the market was maturing enough for expensive arty books to be put on sale in generalist bookstores, rather than reprints circulating among crusading enthusiasts as had previously been the case. The first three titles clearly indicate Futuropolis’ cultural ambitions: first the republication of a “forgotten” master, Calvo, followed by the publication of works by two young authors, Tardi, and Gir who was mutating from his identity as Jean Giraud to that of Moebius, his alter ego. The outsize formats reveal the publishing house’s singular vision

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of the future of comics: Futuropolis’ books were radically different from the forms inherited from children’s albums, seeking both to promote the authorial identity of the artists and to impose a unique visual identity. Chapter 6 considers the work of Claire Bretécher and especially the self-publication of Les Frustrés in 1975. After working for Spirou, Record, and Tintin, Bretécher came to the fore in the 1970s in the pages of Pilote. Alongside Gotlib, Mandryka, Moebius, Druillet, and a few others, she was part of a generation of artists who, on leaving Pilote, sought to revolutionise comics. One key facet of this post-Pilote revolution was the invention of new publishing structures, capable of giving room to original voices. This quest for editorial and creative independence culminated in 1975 with the publication of Les Frustrés, a mocking chronicle of transformations to French society. Week after week in the pages of L’Obs, Bretécher depicted the left-wing intelligentsia’s convictions and contradictions, criticising the ambiguities of a self-assured middle-class. By deciding to self-publish the numerous one-page stories, she had drawn for L’Obs, Bretécher took a bold step towards independence, showing just how much the market had changed over the course of the previous decade. Les Frustrés thus illustrates the definitive shift of bande dessinée to the book sector, and the new respectability the medium enjoyed with an audience of adult intellectuals. Artists could now shake off their reliance on publishers to become the actors of their own artistic destiny. However, the way in which Claire Bretécher has long been singled out as the only female author of importance in the history of comics is illustrative of blind spots in scholarship about the history of comics. The eighth and final chapter is based on a work published in 1975, and far better known internationally, Hugo Pratt’s La Ballade de la mer salée, marking a turning point in the history of bande dessinée and thus an appropriate end point for my argument in these pages. In publishing these contemplative meanderings stretching over 161 pages as a single book, Casterman closed the cycle opened by Losfeld in 1964 and opened a new one. Like Losfeld a decade earlier, the publisher of Tintin was simply compiling a strip which had been published as episodes in the French and Italian press. Like Losfeld, Casterman was offering a new reading of these disparate episodes, now gathered as a long continuous story in black and white, in a publication which helped give birth to the graphic novel in France. Except now it was a top publisher entering the field of mainstream adult comics, providing both commercial muscle

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and unprecedented respectability. La Ballade came to be the model for the literary aspirations of comics, and the model for adult comics as recognised and celebrated in festivals. Thus in the space of just eleven years, comics were turned inside out by the shift to book form. This transformation took place on either side of the border with Belgium, with France and Wallonia forming a unified market,6 though with different cultural effects. While cultural products circulated freely on both sides of the political border—stopping, however, at the linguistic border running across Belgium—legitimisation had very distinct effects on either side of the border, France being a country where cultural dignity is encased in a far more rigid hierarchy. At the end of the day, examining the effects produced by the book form provides a way of examining the consecration mechanisms enabling cultural practices to be enfolded within the bosom of the arts, in a move which thoroughly redefined the cultural hierarchies in French society (Lahire 2004; Coulangeon 2021).

References Bantigny, Ludivine. 2007. Le plus bel âge? Jeunes et jeunesse en France de l’aube des «Trente Glorieuses» à la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Fayard. Baudry, Julien. 2022. La généralisation de la bulle de bande dessinée en France entre 1904 et 1940: étude systématique d’une évolution de la culture visuelle. Sociétés & Représentations, no 53. Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics versus art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. 2016. The greatest comic book of all time: Symbolic capital and the field of American comic books. Palgrave Pivot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Beylie, Claide. 1964. La bande dessinée est-elle un art? Lettres et Médecins. Boltanski, Luc. 1975. La constitution du champ de la bande dessinée. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1 (1): 37–59. https://doi.org/10.3406/arss. 1975.2448. Briggs, Jonathyne. 2015. Sounds French: Globalization, cultural communities, and pop music, 1958–1980. New York: Oxford University Press. de Certeau, Michel. 2011. The practice of everyday life. University of California Press.

6 Nevertheless, I only use the expression “Franco-Belgian” comics extremely sparingly, for though often used by collectors its lack of precision gives rise to a string of problems.

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Coulangeon, Philippe. 2021. Culture de masse et société de classes: Le goût de l’altérité. Paris: PUF. Demange, Julie. 2017. Bédéphilie. In Dictionnaire esthétique et thématique de la bande dessinée. Neuvième Art 2.0. http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/spip.php? article1169. Fishman, Sarah. 2017. From Vichy to the sexual revolution: Gender and family life in postwar France. New York: Oxford University Press. Forest, Jean-Claude. 1974. Les Colères du Mange Minutes. Barbarella 2. Paris: la Marge. Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. 1972. La bande dessinée: l’univers et les techniques de quelques « comics » d’expression française. Hachette Littérature et Sciences humaines. Paris: Hachette. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2013. Of comics and men: A cultural history of American comic books. Reprint édition. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul, and Nicolas Labarre. 2021. Bédéphiles et fans: un amour structurant. Comicalités. Études de culture graphique, no Histoire et influence des pratiques bédéphiles. https://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/ 5139. Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the history of twenty-first-century storytelling. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Grove, Laurence. 2010. Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée in Context. Polygons. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. Guilbert, Xavier. 2021. Panorama de la BD en France, 2010–2020. Centre national du Livre. Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The uses of literacy: Aspects of working-class life, with special references to publications and entertainments, 1 vol. London: Chatto and Windus. Kohn, Jessica. 2018. Travailler dans les petits Mickeys. Les dessinateursillustrateurs en France et en Belgique (1945–1968). Thèse de doctorat en histoire, Paris III. Lahire, Bernard. 2004. La culture des individus: dissonances culturelles et distinction de soi. Paris: La Découverte. Lesage, Sylvain. 2018. Publier la bande dessinée. Les éditeurs franco-belges et l’album, 1950–1990. Papiers. Villeurbanne: Presses de l’Enssib. ———. 2019. L’effet livre. Métamorphoses de la bande dessinée. Iconotextes. Tours: Presses universitaires François Rabelais. ———. 2020. Angoulême and the ninth art: From comics fandom to cultural policies. The Journal of Comics and Culture 5: 69–90.

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———. 2022. Discussing gender in a communist comics magazine: Corinne et Jeannot, 1970. In Sugar, spice, and the not so nice, par Eva Van de Wiele et Dona Pursall. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Loyer, Emmanuelle. 2009. Mai 68 dans le monde: internationales, transnationalisme et jeux d’échelle. In Des sociétés en crise: une perspective globale/Societies in crisis: A global perspective, édité par Drame, Patrick, Lamarre, et Jean, 7– 17. Presses de l’Université Laval. https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/ hal-00972887. Lungheretti, Pierre. 2019. Rapport: La bande dessinée, nouvelle frontière artistique et culturelle - Ministère de la Culture. http://www.culture.gouv.fr/Act ualites/Rapport-La-bande-dessinee-nouvelle-frontiere-artistique-et-culturelle. MacLeod, Catriona. 2021. Invisible presence: The representation of women in French-language comics. Bristol: Intellect Books. Maigret, Éric. 1994. La reconnaissance en demi-teinte de la bande dessinée. Réseaux 12 (67): 113–140. Maigret, Éric. 2012. Bande dessinée et postlégitimité. In La bande dessinée: une médiaculture, par Éric Maigret et Matteo Stefanelli, 130–148. Paris: Armand Colin/INA. McKenzie, Donald Francis. 1986. Bibliography and the sociology of texts. Panizzi lectures. London: British library. Miller, Ann. 2007. Reading bande dessinée: Critical approaches to Frenchlanguage comic strip. Bristol, UK; Chicago, IL: Intellect Books. Moine, Florian. 2013. Bande dessinée et patrimoine – Histoire du Musée de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême (1983 – 2010). Mémoire de master d’histoire. Paris: Paris I. Morin, Edgar. 1962. L’esprit du temps: essai sur la culture de masse, 1 vol. La Galerie 21. Paris: Grasset. Morin, Edgar. 2008. «Salut les copains. I-Une nouvelle classe d’âge» et «Salut les copains. II-Le “yé-yé”». Le Monde, 6 juillet 2008. Ory, Pascal. 2020. Mickey go home! The de-Americanization of Bande Dessinée (1945–1950). Traduit par Jean-Paul Gabilliet. Journal of Comics and Culture 2020 (5): 91–109. Rannou, Maël. 2022. Pif Gadget et le communisme. 1969–1993, un hebdomadaire de BD et ses liens avec le Parti communiste français. Mémoire vive. Montrouge: PLG. Sohn, Anne-Marie. 2001. Âge tendre et tête de bois: histoire des jeunes des années 1960. La vie quotidienne. Paris: Hachette littératures. Souchier, Emmanuël. 2007. Formes et pouvoirs de l’énonciation éditoriale. Communication & Languages 154 (1): 23–38. https://doi.org/10.3406/ colan.2007.4688.

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Tamagne, Florence. 2018. La “Nuit de la Nation”: culture jeune, rock’n’roll et panique morale dans la France des années 1960. Criminocorpus. Revue d’Histoire de la justice, des crimes et des peines, 11 (octobre). https://doi. org/10.4000/criminocorpus.4481. Thérenty, Marie-Ève. 2009. Pour une poétique historique du support. Romantisme, 143 (1): 109–115. https://doi.org/10.3917/rom.143.0109. Tisseron, Serge. 1975. Contribution à l’utilisation de la bande dessinée comme instrument pédagogique: une tentative graphique sur l’histoire de la psychiatrie. Thèse, Lyon. http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/asclepiades/ pdf/tisseron.pdf. Vincent Gérard, Armelle, Cécile Chaniot, and Maëlle Lapointe. 2020. Les Français et la BD. Paris: Centre national du Livre. https://centrenationald ulivre.fr/donnees-cles/les-francais-et-la-bd. Williams, Paul. 2020. Dreaming the graphic novel: The novelization of comics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Barbarella: Inventing Adult Comics Through the Book

Abstract In the history of French comics, Barbarella is usually perceived as a turning point towards the “adult” bande dessinée. Released as an album by avant-garde publisher Eric Losfeld in 1964, Barbarella is key to the Bildungsroman narrative structuring the history of the ninth art. Whereas Astérix plays on the ambiguities and multi-layered readings of both children and their parents, Barbarella—a sexualized space opera created by veteran comics artist Jean-Claude Forest—unquestionably targets a male adult audience. A closer reading of Barbarella allows us to nuance this simplistic interpretation of French comics history. The 1964 album was a reprint of a story previously released in serial instalments in the pornographic V magazine. When published as a book, Barbarella was thoroughly transformed by the materiality of the format, allowing for a new narrative rhythm, structured in chapters. The monumentality of the book engendered an auteur-driven approach to comics. Barbarella, then, represents a key moment in comics publishing, and a crucial model for the literary turn in comics. Its reception, both by the then-emerging fan culture and by the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle in charge of comics censorship, throws light on the difficulties facing the emerging “adult” comics scene. Roger Vadim’s problematic adaptation (and the new version of the book released alongside the movie) played a major role in the canonisation of Barbarella as a pop icon.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_2

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Keywords Book history · Publishing format · Graphic novel · Censorship · Adult comics · Comics historiography · Adaptation

From the gallery walls of the Angoulême comics museum to Ariana Grande’s music videos, Barbarella is everywhere.1 If there has ever been a comic lost in the mists of its own myths, it is Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella. Barbarella first appeared in album form in 1964, published by Éric Losfeld, before being republished in a significantly altered version in 1968. Since then, the adventures of Forest’s nude heroine have been regularly reprinted, both in French and in English. It is not hard to understand the interest in Barbarella, who exploded onto the bande dessinée landscape of the 1960s. As a free-spirited “liberated” woman (a point I will return to) enjoying her sexuality and fully inhabiting her body, Barbarella certainly responded to the transformations in female sexuality marking France at the time, when both the representation and lived experience of sexual mores were shifting. On a Cannes beach just ten years earlier, Brigitte Bardot had popularised the bikini swimsuit.2 Cinema rapidly embraced frank new representations of sexuality (Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu… créa la femme turned Bardot overnight into an international sex-symbol and star on its release in 1956, while Louis Malle’s Les Amants came out two years later). Private sexual practices, including premarital sex, changed more slowly, but no less surely as Anne-Marie Sohn explains, “the 1960s saw teen sexual activity become the rule” (Sohn 2001, 152). The French family planning movement took shape in 1960 and was instrumental in legislation authorising contraception in 1967 (the Neuwirth law).

1 This article is based on a presentation made at the conference, “Les petits aventuriers du quotidien”, organized in Reims by Alexis Lévrier and Guillaume Pinson (29–30 June 2017), and subsequently elaborated at the Liège theater in a presentation to the Imagination Seminar, on 29 March 2017, upon invitation by Dick Tomasovic. It has been translated by Margaret C. Flinn. I’m very grateful to all of these people, but particularly Maggie, for allowing this text—like Barbarella herself—to continue its galactic adventures. This text was previously published in Inks, The Journal of the Comics Studies Society (vol. 6, no. 2: 119–141). © The Ohio State University. 2 It is worth noting that Brigitte Bardot was the model on which Forest drew Barbarella, whose name is reminiscent of “B.B.”, as she was commonly called.

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With its celebration of liberated sexuality and its uninhibited representation of nudity, Barbarella reflects the ever less rigid sexual morality of the period. Nonetheless, its run-ins with the French censors illustrate the backlash against these sexualised representations of women’s bodies. In many ways, then, Barbarella comes across as a turning point or shift towards the “adult” bande dessinée, with all the ambiguity the word implies: Is it a matter of thematic transformations, with a progressive turn towards a more transgressive bande dessinée? The fact that it coincided with the “Asterix phenomenon” in France in around 1966 (see Chapter 3) seems to attest to this: Goscinny and Uderzo’s Gaulish series addressed educated adults who delighted in the light humour, allusions to current events, and knowing winks towards bookish culture. Was a transformation in readership afoot? The increasing number of periodicals explicitly targeted at adults seems to support this, first among which was the founding of Hara-Kiri in 1960, by François Cavanna and Professor Choron, whose troubles with the censors later gave rise to Charlie Hebdo. A teen audience was also emerging, as evidenced by the (admittedly unhappy) experiment of the periodical Chouchou (launched in 1964 by the publisher Daniel Filipacchi). Filipacchi had built up a real social phenomenon with the magazine Salut les copains, which sold more than one million copies and played a key role in the rise of rock music in France. In 1964, he sought to accompany the rise youth culture with a comics weekly directed by none other than Jean-Claude Forest: the short-lived Chouchou. What with the Asterix phenomenon and the return of a more antiestablishment drawing style, new avenues opened up for bande dessinée in the 1960s, allowing it to become a more “adult” form of expression. If the text and character of Barbarella have come to embody the bande dessinée’s emancipation from the yoke of childhood entertainment in 1960s France, this is not without its ambivalences. The flood of discourse surrounding Barbarella seems, at first, to act as a screen, preventing us from grasping the importance of the phenomenon; but ultimately, this flood of discourse, petitions, and criticism reception, even in their approximations and exaggerations, in fact, constitutes the discursive construction of Barbarella as the tipping moment when French comics became the ninth art.

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´ Comes of Age? Barbarella: bande dessinee Barbarella is a young woman wandering the solar system following some never-explained romantic setbacks. In the first chapter, she has a layover on Cristallia, a city of giant greenhouses. While there, she reconciles two enemy peoples and ends the oppression of the Orhomr. In Chapter 2, her spaceship is captured on the planet Lythion by giant jellyfish captained by pirates, and she confronts their sovereign, the mythological Medusa. After several episodes, the narrative ends up stabilising around the planet Sogo, a city of perversity—a city also clearly influenced by Alex Raymond’s planet Mongo, which Forest greatly admired. Barbarella has regularly been seen as a pertinent lens through which to view the transformations to bande dessinée—its permeability to pop aesthetics (Frey and Baetens 2019), for instance, or the transformation of sexual relations as embodied by Barbarella (Vaissade 2009; MacLeod 2021). The perspective I take in this chapter is a bit different. I instead examine the work’s origins, as well as the different formats as it passed from one iteration to another, thereby building up a material bibliography attentive to a plurality of readings offered by the various editions (McKenzie 1986). By tracing this work’s path to publication, we also will see a condensed version of the comics market and its various formats, with the arrival of book publishers on the bande dessinée market and the transformation of comics narratives by their publication as books. In the often all too cursory history of the bande dessinée canon, Barbarella holds a place apart, one example of which comes from the catalogue of the Angoulême Bande dessinée Museum. In 2000, this museum (which opened in 1990) published a catalogue which carefully reproduced some of its original artwork collection. The museum models itself on fine art museum practices and thus attempts to further the legitimisation of bande dessinée through all the external signs of a fine arts museum, beginning with the conservation of original artwork and the publication of a catalogue. Much can be said about these strategies (Moine 2013), but what is of interest here is the title of this catalogue: Astérix, Barbarella et Cie (Groensteen 2000). That Asterix be at the heart of this museum’s consecration strategies is hardly surprising: for several decades, Goscinny and Uderzo’s hero has been the most popular comics character. The choice of Barbarella is more striking: it is not a question of gender parity, nor one of alphabetical order, for the early twentieth-century heroine Bécassine enjoys far broader popularity to this day. It is rather the “adult”

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status of this work that this choice is signalling, its capacity to signify bande dessinée as resolutely anchored in the domain of the “ninth art”. This is not the only example of how this work has been mythologised. In the vulgate of ninth art history, Barbarella is sometimes presented as a co-creation of Éric Losfeld, a porn publisher known for his editions of the Marquis de Sade, André Breton, Boris Vian, and Eugène Ionesco among notable others. From Arcanes to Terrain Vague (essentially the translation of his family name), Éric Losfeld embodied intransigent publishing dead set against censorship—above all of eroticism, the favourite terrain of the publisher of Emmanuelle, but also of resistance to the war against Algerian Independence. Losfeld’s publication of Barbarella thus represents the moment when comics publishing (briefly) crossed paths with the most demanding of literary publishing (Urbain-Archer 2019). In a second facet of the Barbarella myth, the text is often presented in comics histories as marking the birth of the “adult” bande dessinée. In his Dictionnaire Mondial de la BD, Patrick Gaumer notes: “Barbarella is a symbol. She is also the first heroine of what is today called adult comics” (Gaumer 2010, 52). At the time it was published, certain critics even saw Barbarella as the birth of the graphic novel: “A new genre is born: the drawn novel. Jean-Claude Forest has just published an example with Terrain Vague. […] This comic was not created for children, only adults (or grown children) are capable of fully appreciating it” (Le Peuple, 25 February 1965, quoted by Benoît Preteseille 2020). In fact, these two facets of the “Barbarella myth” work together. Bande dessinée histories date Barbarella to 1964, the year of its publication by Terrain Vague, forgetting or only mentioning as an afterthought its publication in the pages of V Magazine. In the catalogue of the Angoulême Bande Dessinée Museum, Thierry Groensteen states, “If the adult bande dessinée enjoyed nearly all its success in the press, a book publisher played an important role that should not be overlooked. Éric Losfeld, a publisher of surrealist and erotic novels, among other things—including the famous Emmanuelle—, was often plagued by the censors. It was he who published the first collection of the adventures of Barbarella, in 1964, which was immediately banned by the censors” (Groensteen 2000, 172). Éric Losfeld maintains this myth in his autobiography, Endetté comme une mule, where he goes even further, posing as the true author of Barbarella, with Forest being, at the end of the day, nothing but a vulgar executor: “Of course Barbarella was drawn by Jean-Claude Forest, but I’m really

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the incestuous father of Barbarella, if not her lover. […] I am mainly responsible for this book” (Losfeld 1979, 111). However, the 1964 publication by the Terrain Vague imprint which has become such a landmark was, in fact, the second edition of a book whose first volume had gone through no fewer than seven successive versions, with important revisions and modifications from one version to the next. “Barbarella” had initially been published serially from 1962 to 1964 in an erotic magazine which took many of Forest’s drawings, namely V Magazine. There is, therefore, a decided paradox in viewing Barbarella only through its Losfeld iteration. I would, therefore, argue that, more than other noteworthy works in the history of bande dessinée, Barbarella has been cut loose from its serial origins, to be thought of only as a book. This phenomenon is not exclusive to Barbarella: from Bécassine to Corto Maltese and from Tintin to Asterix, it is books that have structured the history of the ninth art, that are preserved by collectors and studied by researchers (Lesage 2022). But if Tintin, for example, is studied mainly through the Casterman albums, there is at least a vague if incomplete awareness that its publication in the Petit Vingtième, Le Soir, and the Journal de Tintin broadly shaped Hergé’s writing. The publication of the Hergé Feuillton intégral, begun in 2015 and unfortunately incomplete (Hergé 2015–2018), clearly participates in an archaeological reappropriation, re-establishing the text’s periodical-based origins.3 Barbarella, in contrast, has been more thoroughly dissociated from its plebeian serial origins to become something completely other. My ambition here is thus to return to the source, to what Barbarella was before Losfeld, and, by exploring the gaps between the book and serial publications, understand how the publication of the book radically transformed the graphic narrative. In addition to this examination, an instance of the “historical poetics of format” (Thérenty 2009), I would like to consider the reasons why its periodical origins have been obscured, and how they can shed light on the cultural trajectory of 1960s bandes dessinées. In so doing, I will show how in addition to being a sexual revolution, Barbarella was also—and perhaps above all—a publication revolution.

3 Hergé and Tintin hold a special place in fandom memory and in the bookstore market: the field of Tintin studies is a segment to itself, as the evidenced by Olivier Roche’s work sketching its boundaries (Roche and Cerbelaud 2014).

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Jean-Claude Forest and Barbarella However, inflammatory he may have been, Losfeld was above all a wellestablished literary publisher. The origins of Barbarella, however, are at some remove from the prestige attached to the publisher of Henry Miller and Fernando Arrabal. V Magazine, where the heroine was truly born, was set up after the Second World War by two former resistance fighters from the Mouvement de Libération Nationale, Max Juvénal and Pierre Fribourg (Joubert 2007, 99). After initially seeking to model itself on Life, with its feature stories and photo-journalism, V Magazine quickly turned towards much lighter journalism, even drawing the ire of the Ministry of Information representative on the Commission of Surveillance and Control in charge of applying the 16 July 1949 law on youth publications (Joubert 2007, 948). In the early 1960s, French comics were still subject to the restrictive laws and policies adopted in the immediate post-war context, which sought to combat the comics’ deleterious effects on children. In the wake of two decades of polemics about the supposedly crime-inducing effects of comics, this law was passed which went on to have a major impact on the history and framing of child and youth culture (Ory 2020). Bande dessinée specialists are familiar with the moral order this law imposed upon illustrated youth magazines, particularly article two, which dissuades any publication of elements that might “demoralise youth”. This deliberately vague and catch-all formulation translated into self-policing (Crépin 2001; Méon 2004). Representations of criminality, evocations of sensuality, or recourse to unbridled imagination were all potentially threatened by legal action; even though actual guilty verdicts were quite rare, the Commission devoted itself to forceful persuasion. Thus, the passage of the 1949 law resonated with measures adopted by other democracies where youth cultures were on the rise (Barker 1984; Nyberg 1998; Lent 1999; Hajdu 2009). But one of the particularities of the French legislation was that these measures for children’s periodicals were backed up by measures extending the Commission’s oversight to publications “of all kinds”, through article 14 of the law: on the grounds of protecting France’s youth, the entire press and publishing industry found itself under surveillance, for the applicable provisions (forbidding sale to minors, public display, and advertising) could sign the death sentence of newspapers offering questionable products. For instance, these provisions were invoked against the gay press

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in the 1960s and 1970s. And so during the 1950s, V Magazine—just like Paris Tabou, Paris-Hollywood, or Paris Cocktail, none of which targeted children—sparked hostility from the Commission, causing the magazine to regularly change name. Then finally, in 1961, the heavy hand of the Commission fell upon the magazine (at the time called V Sélections ) with a triple ban on sale to minors, public display, and advertising. In summer 1961, the magazine was relaunched under a new name, V Magazine, this time promising an “expurgated” version, in the words of the publisher who was attempting to placate the Commission of Surveillance and Control. It was in this expurgated version that “Barbarella” appeared in the following year. To better understand how serial publication fitted into the magazine’s way of functioning, it is useful to go over its contents. Let us take, for example, issue 570 of spring 1963. Strikingly—and the same is true for any issue of the era—the contents seem to be nothing but a parade of pin-ups, either in the form of starlet portfolios (Cathia Caro, the “woman-child with a very Oh-la-la! neckline!”), tourism articles (about the Costa del Sol, in order to show Andalusian women in bathing suits), “features” (“The starlets festival”, an article on the strategies employed by aspiring actresses at Cannes trying to draw attention to themselves by drawing attention to their disrobed bodies), historical novellas (“The Love of Malica”, a historical novel about Conquistadores who seized upon languid young virgins), and “humorous” drawings. In short, everything is a pretext for showing nude women and for staging heterosexual male fantasies in which women are reduced to hypersexualised objects: the male gaze is turned on full blast. At the time he started working for V Magazine, Jean-Claude Forest was already well into a long and prolific career of drawing for serial publications (Lefèvre-Vakana 2004). Born in 1930, he belonged to the generation of authors who “took advantage of the expansion of the drawing sector at the time of the Liberation” (Kohn 2018, 64). He started in 1949 at O.K., before working for a plethora of other titles throughout the 1950s, publishing in Vaillant and its offshoot 34 Caméra, as well as Fillette, Mireille, Suzette, and Lisette, and notably drew the French versions of the adventures of Charlot and Bicot (Perry in Winnie Winkle). In the late 1950s, Forest’s career reached a decisive turning point when he started working for France-Soir, where he adapted novels, such as Henry Castillou’s “Thaddea” and Daniel Gray’s “The Lord of the Isles,” to name but two. The importance of the daily press in the history of bande dessinée is still underappreciated. Nonetheless, data

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compiled by Jessica Kohn in her thesis shows that it was there (in the most widely read paper in France) that artists were best paid (Kohn 2018). I would also argue that it was equally important that Forest was working in a sector where comics were reaching a broad public of all genders. At the same time, Forest began to illustrate the covers of Fiction, which was the main sci-fi magazine of the period and went on to become the breeding ground for comics fandom, as well as for the collection “Le Rayon fantastique”, which was central to the formation of the sci-fi canon, co-directed by Georges-Hilaire Gallet, who was also editor-in-chief of V Magazine. It was Gallet who approached Forest in the mid-1950s to publish in his magazine. Forest was always flexible in his drawing style, and he opted for a much more conventional style in the pages of the magazine than he used for the covers of Rayon fantastique, for which audacious graphics were encouraged (Fig. 2.1). In V Sélections and then V Magazine, Forest illustrated erotic adventure stories, most often set in an exotic location—it was here that he learned the language of disrobed bodies. He rubbed elbows with artists such as Georges Pichard (a mainstay of the magazine with his saucy drawings and his ink and wash short story illustrations) and Robert Gigi, two names that were credited in Chouchou a few years later (1964–1965)—the first magazine to explicitly target a “youth” (adolescent) audience. As for Barbarella, apparently it was Georges-Hillaire Gallet who commissioned Forest to do an erotic series with a female protagonist, giving Forest carte blanche to write his own story (Lefèvre-Vakana 2004). Forest’s narrative, staging the trials and tribulations of the young and beautiful Barbarella (who is extremely hard not to see as a Brigitte Bardot knock-off), appeared at the rate of eight pages per issue, in eight instalments, (ten pages for the first two), from spring 1962 through to January 1964. On the face of it, the serial is fairly classical in presentation, following the space opera codes devised in American comics of the 1930s which had fascinated Forest as a child—and that a core audience of comics fans (including Forest) were in the process of rediscovering. Moreover, if the heroine’s first name could be derived from combining Arabelle, a mermaid character Jean Ache had been drawing in FranceSoir since 1950, with the evocative word “barbarian”, certain names and costumes in the series show the clear influence of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. Forest had supervised the first commemorative reeditions of Flash Gordon for the first Club des bandes dessinées , published in March 1962 following a flurry of fan mail in Fiction magazine (Demange 2017).

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Fig. 2.1 Jean-Claude Forest, cover of Griada of A. Kolpakov, Paris, Hachette, 1962, «Le Rayon fantastique»

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In the pages of V Magazine, amid starlet clichés, “locker room” humour, and an atmosphere driven by heterosexual male sexual obsessions, it is hard to see what might have been particularly shocking about Forest’s serial. While Barbarella does not shy away from flaunting her pulchritude, and more than once gets out of a scrape by deploying her charms, any specifically sexual representations of her are few and far between (Bergen 2020). We are a long way from explicit pornography here, and Jean-Claude Forest in fact reported on his restraint in drawing the serial: When Barbarella was published for the first time in V Magazine, the editor-in-chief, who was clever and well-versed in run-ins with the censors, said: “Don’t be frightening. If you put a pair of breasts here and an ass there, that’s OK, but it has to be discretely spread out through the pages.” In the first version for the magazine, there was a little line above the breasts and on the edge of the buttocks to indicate a bra or panties. When the first album came out, I removed those lines, and the censors went nuts. After the film, when Losfeld re-published Barbarella, I put the lines back, and the readers thought it wasn’t the original. Later, for the Livre de Poche edition, they told me “It’s for adults, so take off the bra and panties,” and so on and so forth…. (Forest 2006, 19)

To my mind, the most significant aspect of the situation is this: in this magazine which systematically objectified women, Barbarella is admittedly a very sexualised character, but she is above all a heroine who controls her own body and sexuality, and who chooses her own partners, including non-human ones. Barbarella as a feminist heroine? That would clearly be going a step too far. Catriona MacLeod rightly points out the extent to which Barbarella, despite her apparent sexual freedom, remains an object of contemplation: “Barbarella represents fetishized erotism, the reader’s desire and little else” (MacLeod 2021, 60). But her basic status as heroine was already significant in and of itself. Barbarella was a free and independent woman in an era when nearly all women in Franco-Belgian comics were devoted spouses, daughters, sisters—in other words, minor undeveloped characters. Moreover, in a magazine that could hardly brag of being nuanced, Forest was careful in his writing, filling the narrative with clever references and sharp dialogue, including the exchange between Barbarella and Aiktor, the obedient and multi-talented taxi-robot (Fig. 2.2). Here we see one of the strongest affirmations of Barbarella’s sexual emancipation, as

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she is the only one to take pleasure in these sexual relations. For its part, the robot observes, with some sadness, that its sexual technique is “a bit mechanical” (V Magazine # 572: 8, p. 35).

A Publishing Innovation: The Album for Adults Beyond the extravagant claims of Éric Losfeld, we do not know (for lack of documentation) what sparked his interest in Forest’s serial, or what convinced him to move into comics publishing. Losfeld’s interest in comics is difficult to trace. However, as Benoît Preteseille has shown, “Éric Losfeld was part of the network of magazines that undertook a conversation about bande dessinée” (Preteseille 2020, 18). The deluxe edition of 1964 followed in the footsteps of the first wave of French comics fandom. The “Club des bandes dessinées ” (later called the Centre for the study of graphic literature), an idea originating in the reader’s mailbag at Fiction magazine, was launched in spring 1962. Jean-Claude Forest was one its earliest members, which is of course no coincidence. As publisher of the magazine Midi-Minuit fantastique, Losfeld was introduced to this tight-knit circle where a love of comics, cinema, and sci-fi were interwoven. Through his bookstore, Losfeld was in contact with many of those active in early comics fandom, which was crystallising in the first half of the 1960s. Forest insisted on the interaction between the Club des bandes dessinées (CBD) and Éric Losfeld as crucial for the publication of his book: “If Barbarella came out as an album, it’s because of the interest driven by the Club des BD, of which Francis Lacassin, Alain Resnais, and I were founding members. This Club played a part in Losfeld becoming interested in comics, and in Barbarella….” (Minoustchine 1973). As Benoît Preteseille has noted, Losfeld certainly had his hands on issues of Giff-Wiff . He could have read sociologist Edgar Morin (a central figure in 1960s French cultural sociology) who suggested to the CBD’s general membership that they should “get in contact with serious coffee table book publishers sensitive to aesthetic issues and encourage them to publish deluxe editions, with prefaces and critical apparatuses written by well-known figures” (Lacassin 1963). It was exactly this plan, Preteseille notes, that Losfeld followed the next year in publishing the luxurious Barbarella (Preteseille 2020, 22). It must be said that Forest had an eminent position in the CBD and its magazine Giff-Wiff . He was a member of the editorial board and had come up with the magazine’s title

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Fig. 2.2 Jean-Claude Forest, “Barbarella”, V Magazine, 572, Autumn 1963, 1968, p. 53

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and designed its masthead. He was moreover the art director and director of the club’s re-editions, a lynchpin position. In other words, Losfeld sensed the Zeitgeist with incomparable flair. He also had another card up his sleeve, of course: the capability to bring out books with modest print runs, when comics were still the domain of the children’s cultural industry. The price at which he sold the first edition did not lend itself to large circulation. Although “Barbarella” first came to life in the pages of an erotic magazine, its heroine was absolutely reborn when story was published as an album, both because the text was re-written, and because of the scale of the public response to the album, even though its print run was modest. The eight episodes of Forest’s serial amounted to 68 pages. At the time, when envisioning the transposition in format, it made sense to refer to the model of the Tintin albums, published in colour by Casterman since the 1940s, which had become the gold standard for deluxe editions. In contrast, Dupuis brought out lower price paperback albums of 48 pages. It is in the context of these publishing standards (hardbound 64-page editions with Lombard, 48-page paperback or hardback editions with Dupuis) that one needs to consider the novelty of Losfeld’s project. Even more than the unheard-of thickness of the paper (conservatively weighed at 200 g/m2 ), the layout of the book itself represented something new, as did the way the layout offered new readings. Whereas the narrative had previously been fragmented into discrete episodes published at several months’ interval, the Losfeld edition moved beyond the narrative’s serial structure. Each episode became a chapter, separated from the others by a blank double-page spread bearing the chapter number. Each of the eight episodes had had a title: The Flower Planet, Medusa’s Prisoners, The Hunt for the Trident, Dolls of Yesteryear, The Labyrinth of Sogo, Funny Games!, The Queen’s Failure/Queen in Check, and Sogo’s Venom. But none of them were retained in the book. The finiteness of the volume, its subdivision into distinct chapters, and the use of colour to differentiate each chapter, all had a deep impact on the work’s meaning, as evidenced by the fact that the colours used in V Magazine version were altered. Losfeld’s main innovation doubtless lay in a simple but radical decision: to consider each of the serial episodes as resembling a chapter in a novel (Fig. 2.3). This seems fairly innocuous: it is simply the transposition of Barbarella’s discrete adventures from the pages of V Magazine,

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where each episode was separated from the others by its quarterly publication. Each instalment thus had some form of closure, in which Barbarella generally headed off towards new horizons and new adventures. As a general rule, Barbarella confronts a maniac, more or less resolves the situation, and wins over other species, before then being confronted by even more formidable enemies—except at the narrative’s end, where the pace of her adventures slackens. By its very nature, the serial is a “suspended narrative” where each closure is a springboard towards the next episode (Revaz 2016). Thus, Losfeld’s tour de force consisted in transforming each of these episodes not into a continuous narrative but into a series of chapters, based on a literary model. The hybridisation of literature and comics operates through a double intervention: the name of the publishing house (the publisher of Vian and the surrealists) and the use of chapters with blank pages to mark the narrative rhythm. Fifteen years later, the old publishing house of Casterman harked back to this when seeking to consolidate the literary dimension of You Are Here?, a narrative that opened and forged

Fig. 2.3 Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Paris, Le Terrain Vague, 1964, np (pl. 35)

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the identity of (A Suivre)—scripted by none other than Jean-Claude Forest.4 The work’s reception reflected the novelty of the book, as can be seen in the Belgian newspaper Le Peuple, 25 February 1965: “A new genre is born: the drawn novel. Jean-Claude Forest has just published an example at Terrain Vague editions”. The Losfeld edition of Barbarella had a jacketed, cloth-bound cover, along the lines of book club editions: nothing at all to do with the albums that Jean-Claude Forest had published to that point, notably with the Société Parisienne d’éditions. Aside from the book’s title, the jacket bore the name of the publisher, and, more unusually, that of the author and the year. But the illustration is the most striking aspect due to its radicality (Fig. 2.4): a tightly-framed image of the heroine with a clear, if ambiguous, erotic charge. Barbarella faces the reader, with her hair streaming in the wind, wearing a torn dress, and giving a good look at her body: if the torn clothing implies rape, the heroine’s frank gaze contradicts that suggestion. Barbarella’s eroticism is thus established right from the cover, with its tension between a liberated woman in charge of her own body and an object of heterosexual male fantasy. The illustration reproduces the dots of the Ben Day printing process—considerably enlarged—in a nod towards Roy Lichtenstein who, in 1961, had already used Ben Day dots for Look Mickey!, before systematically using them from 1963 onwards. In a comics album market occupied solely by press publishers or publishing groups from popular printing, Losfeld’s initiative (as the publisher of the surrealists and of erotica) was necessarily explosive. He basically broke all the rules and codes holding for the market at that time, as if deliberately signalling that the book was for a whole new clientele. Through these paratextual markers, the album thus proposed a new form of adult bande dessinée. But the expression “adult bande dessinée” has caused so much confusion that it needs to be clarified. Adult comics did, in fact, exist well before Barbarella: Forest’s series for France-Soir are a good example. But to speak of adult bande dessinée implies a broader interest in comic strips published in the general press together with certain small-format publications. One also needs to take into account erotic comics which circulated more discretely. Losfeld

4 Jean-Claude Forest, Jacques Tardi, You Are Here?, Tournai, Casterman, “Les romans (À Suivre)”, 1979.

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Fig. 2.4 Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Paris, Le Terrain Vague, 1964, cover

was one of the players in this movement: Bernard Joubert considers him to be responsible for the publication of Suzanne écolière d’amour, an oblong book of 58 pages published prior to 1962 (Joubert 2018). The “story”—a string of scenes of penetration, often rapes—is thin and the drawing crude: the images “are for the most part awkward copies of pre-existing comics, notably Stan Drake’s The Heart of Juliet Jones and Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby” (Preteseille 2020, 26), both of which had appeared as strips in France-Soir. In other words, comics destined for an adult audience, though everywhere, were marginal, and most people continued to think of comics as a medium dedicated to children. It is, therefore, important to distinguish actual reading practices—about which we have very little data—from

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discursive positioning. In their efforts at legitimisation, the fans of the 1960s championed the idea of a bande dessinée that had come of age, in a market that largely anticipated the Bildungsroman of the American comic which came to maturity in the 1980s (Pizzino 2016). Indeed, the fans who emerged in this era (among whom Forest was a key player) asserted the integrity of bande dessinée as an art form, as opposed to the censors who were busy casting it as children’s entertainment. Thus, the Club des bandes dessinées set about demonstrating “that bande dessinée is an adult art and a means of expression equal to cinema and literature” (Lacassin 1963, 6). The movement to legitimise bande dessinée thus took two parallel paths, the first asserting the quality of the (ninth) art through the strategies of exhibitions, republications, etc., and the second arguing for the intrinsic qualities of bandes dessinées by distinguishing those who read them. Thus, the historian Pierre Couperie, another major figure in this first wave of fandom, mocked the determinism of Fredric Wertham’s writing (Wertham having insisted upon comic book reading as a factor in criminality): The verdict was never in doubt: reading American comics dulls the mind then leads to crime. Any child who is a devoted reader of the magazines in which they appear can only be–or become–an ignoramus dreaming of assassination. As for adults who persist in liking them, they are like drug addicts, taking refuge in irreality for want of being able to adapt to the world in which they live. […] We now know what becomes of such young halfwits destined to the guillotine. They haven’t done so badly after all, the prophets of doom having failed to predict that they would go on to become assistant managing directors, faculty members at university, doctors, engineers, librarians, or film directors […]. The Club’s membership includes more talents than many learned associations in the provinces. What a blow to venomous theories! (Couperie 1962, 10)

Thus, contrary to appearances, the advent of the “adult” bande dessinée did not reside in graphic narrative using adult themes: that practice goes back to Töpffer and was visible, albeit marginally, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was the shift to the book format which was viewed as problematic, as shown by the reaction of the Comission de surveillance et contrôle sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse. Despite the Commission’s very marked hostility towards V Magazine, which was closely monitored, the publication of “Barbarella” did not trigger any

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particular reaction. By contrast, the book published in late 1964 became the object of febrile debate at the Commission on 11 March 1965, when two different positions clashed. On the one side, as Bernard Joubert (2007) has shown, certain members argued that the price of the album (54 Francs, 73 Euros in today’s money), its luxury printing (heavy-weight paper, fancy binding, and dust jacket) made it a coffee table book, for which censorship was less stringent. Targeting well-off collectors, the book certainly did not constitute a threat to public order. There we see a classic tale of republican censorship, as analysed by Annie Stora-Lamarre, who distinguishes between eroticism for enlightened connoisseurs, which can be tolerated, and mainstream pornography for the masses, which is to be repressed (Stora-Lamarre 1989, 2005; Kuhlmann et al. 1989). On the other side, several members saw the book as a true menace. They feared that “the bande dessinée appearance might mislead adults wanting to buy an album for their children”.5 This reasoning was not new: already back in 1957, the Commission’s report had flagged the problem of the appearance of adult comics, which, it argued, was “all the more damaging given that some parents think that they are ‘for children’”.6 The Commission rallied to this dangerous confusion between erotic comics and child readership, and the work was banned from sale to minors, from public display, and from advertisement by a ministerial decree of 12 April 1965. These sanctions were not only a weapon of dissuasion against Losfeld’s supposed followers, they were also a means of choking off the album’s commercial viability. The danger Barbarella embodied thus lay not so much in its contents as in its publication format. The book format, particularly Losfeld’s deluxe version, granted respectability, bestowing a dignity that threatened traditional cultural hierarchies. The fans who defended Barbarella were not wrong: in publishing these albums, it was the emancipation of comics from child readership that was at stake. As Jean-Claude Romer writes, “Publishing bandes dessinées for ADULTS in collections, booklets, or books—under wraps, if necessary—means a damning ‘limited to adults’ label. To finally be able to make bande dessinée into an adult art form, 5 Archives of the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle, report of meeting no. 68 of 11 March 1965. 6 Archives of the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle, 1957 sub-committee report of 1 July 1957, p. 3.

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freed from limitations, Terrain Vague’s Les Aventures de Barbarella could be a chink in the wall…” (Romer 1964). This censorship—that Losfeld tried to circumvent in 1966 by bringing out a reprint, with just a few re-touches here and there, but under his own name—was a godsend to activist fans, because it created a space for discussing bande dessinée as an art form open to adult appropriation. The Commission thereby ratified the subversive nature of the work, thereby paradoxically undergirding its prestige.

From Print to Screen and Back Again: Barbarella Goes to Hollywood The lively debate about the very possibility of adult comics among fans and their perception of the censors as being out-of-touch with current thinking was of far less significance for the work’s trajectory than the second significant transposition of “Barbarella”. After making the leap from erotic press to avant-garde luxury publishing, it made a second jump, this time to the big screen, by way of a nine-million-dollar super production released in 1968, produced by Dino de Laurentis and directed by Roger Vadim, who cast his partner Jane Fonda in the title role. The film also attracted the censor’s ire, as the film’s central focus right from the opening credits (in which a weightless Barbarella gets completely undressed) is Jane Fonda’s body. As Frédéric Hervé shows, censorship exerted a chilling effect: the film’s provocations were ultimately rather limited, with Barbarella’s sexcapades often represented via ellipses—which though faithful to Forest, were also a cautious move (Hervé 2015). In many ways, the film seems fairly understated compared to the audacity of the V Magazine version of the story. As Jean-Noël Lafargue has observed, the Barbarella-mistress-of-her-destiny gives way to “a rather featherbrained ingenue who goes from the arms of one man to the next not because she wants to, but because it doesn’t occur to her to say no to anyone who wants her” (Lafargue 2009). Thus on changing medium the incident of Barbarella’s sexual relationship with the android was dropped, and allusions to Barbarella’s attraction towards women were also systematically erased. No doubt these excisions stemmed from the caution required of the director of a big-budget film. But even in the remaining racy passages, the gaps are significant. Roger Vadim did keep the excessive mechanism by which the locksmith (Durand Durand) wants to kill Barbarella by pleasure. It is nonetheless troubling to note

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that in the comics, Barbarella says “you should be ashamed” whereas in Vadim’s film, it is Durand Durand who scolds Barbarella for taking so much pleasure. It is thus striking to note the extent to which the film, released in the middle of the sexual revolution, eschews the most innovative aspects of Forest’s sexually emancipated character. The script, written by Terry Southern, who also penned Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Easy Rider (1967), thus deprives Barbarella of all autonomy. Instead, she is more at the mercy of events and other (above all male) characters’ desires and machinations. Certain critics, such as Jacques Boivin, got fairly hot under the collar about this: Where Forest reveals a candid, touching, or sympathetically mischievous Barbarella, Vadim gives us a Barbarella who is idiotic, sophisticated, or perverse. The gratuitous striptease in the guise of the opening credits sets the tone: the philosophy of “free love” is no longer a noteworthy historical fact, but instead just becomes Vadim indulging a voyeuristic audience.7

The film’s success, including release in about 15 countries in 1968–1969, was accompanied by the republication of the album. Several versions of the book were published abroad in 1968–1969, in Germany, Norway, and of course the United States, where the album of Forest’s pages was also accompanied by a serialisation of the film. In France, a new version of the album was produced to accompany the film’s release. The differences between these two editions testify to the displacement of Jean-Claude Forest’s original. The imposing dimensions of the 1964 volume (25 cm × 35 cm) were now reduced to a more commonplace 21 cm × 27.5 cm, and the luxurious cloth binding and Lichtensteinian dust jacket were replaced by a softback cover. The dust-jacketed book had shrunk into a small booklet, at an affordable price (18.50 francs). The cover reproduced a still from Vadim’s film (Fig. 2.5): this republication thus took the work one step further from its periodical origins. Instead of an artistic legitimisation of a serial narrative (the Lichtenstein-Losfeld model), we have a Hollywood film validation, thereby displacing the centre of gravity of the transmedia ecosystem.

7 Jacques Boivin, “Sexophonie dans le planétarium”, Miroir du Fantastique no. 8, December 1968, p. 402.

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Fig. 2.5 Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella, Paris, Losfeld, 1968, cover

It is in fact not only the dressing up of the narrative as book that is transformed, but its very contents. Barbarella is systematically depicted in lingerie, whereas in the original edition she had been drawn completely nude, albeit a nudity that was sketched in simple curves, modestly refraining from any overly daring anatomical detail. This re-dressing is not without its absurdity, for instance when Barbarella remarks to a merman

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contemplating her avidly while she showers that “It won’t be the first time an extra-terrestrial sees me naked”. The new Barbarella, re-clad in undergarments, obviously loses in erotic charge.8 The changes did not stop at a newly clad Barbarella, for the internal organisation of the book was completely upended. The colours adopted for the first edition were altered, but above all the episodes were no longer divided into chapters separated by a page bearing the printed chapter number, a change which had a deep impact on the narrative economy. What had been a discontinuous narrative, along the lines of the serial novel, became a continuous one, whose character leapt jerkily into view. The many temporal ellipses, which made sense in a publication where each new episode was delayed by three months, and which had been broadly preserved by Losfeld’s chaptered structure, now became glaring gaps. The reading experience of these editions was thus far less smooth, verging on incomprehensible when compared to prior versions. Above and beyond this new narrative logic, the film’s main addition resides in the character’s new fame—especially as the renown of the director and main actors (Jane Fonda, David Hemmings, and Marcel Marceau) attracted extensive television coverage even before the film was released, at a time when curiosity about comics was just taking off. In parallel, the figure of Barbarella spread through various media. In 1967, while the album was still banned from sale, Serge Gainsbourg, one of the hottest and provocative artists of the French musical scene, sang in “Qui est in, qui est out”, of his love for Forest’s creature: “Barbarella keep on your boots / and tell me once and for all / that you love me, or else / I’ll send you back to your science-fiction” (Gainsbourg 1967).9 Barbaralla’s aura did not prevent French television from commissioning an animated series from Forest, broadcast from October 1965 to April 1966, titled Marie Mathématique and presented as “Barbarella’s little sister”, with a title song composed by none other than Gainsbourg. The film adaptations and its success spawned countless new Barbarellas—who was prismatically refracted via film posters, the covers of novelisations, and dolls, escaping her original author a little more 8 Catriona MacLeod discusses in depth the sexualization of Barbarella. She does not, however, differentiate between the various versions of Forest’s work, although the various interventions significantly altered the eroticism of the narrative. 9 Barbarella garde tes bottines / Et viens me dire une fois pour toutes / Que tu m’aimes / Ou sinon / Je te renvoie à ta science-fiction.

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each time. These new media variants retained Barbarella’s (eminently ambiguous) sex-symbol status—as did the reappropriation of Barbarella’s visual imaginary by the singers Kylie Minogue (1994) and Ariana Grande (2014), both of whom reprised several decades later the weightless striptease from the film’s famous opening. Barbarella was thus the object of two symbolic appropriations, causing it to break free of the sphere of the erotic serial. The first was Losfeld’s daring move in turning the serial into a previously unknown object, an adult comics album. He even successfully repeated the formula, and though his venture into adult comics albums was brief, it marked a significant turning point.10 He brought out fewer than 15 adult comics titles in all, some of which promoted authors previously relegated to the background (Druillet, or, in some respects, Cuvelier, who had languished with Corentin and broke out with Epoxy), or in other cases, revealed completely new authors (Guy Peellaert, Nicolas Devil, or Alain Tercinet, who only ventured into comics with Losfeld). A point they had in common was a new approach to the book-object, marked by rigorous production, a desire to propose new graphic languages (literary-graphic experimentation with Tercinet, pop comics with Peellaert, psychedelics with Nicolas Devil), and different formats. Despite the brevity of Losfeld’s involvement with bande dessinée, his fresh publishing approach forged him a particular status, straight out of his own romantic imaginary. The second appropriation breaking Barbarella free from its origins in Forest’s series was Roger Vadim’s baroque cinematic adaptation, whose international success sparked a fad for Barbarellaesque heroines—Vampirella, for instance, created for Warren in 1969 by Forrest Ackerman, Frank Frazetta, and Trina Robbins, but one could also cite Jungla, Lucifera, and many others. The final step, then, in the construction of the Barbarella myth was canonisation. This stage was based largely on Losfeld’s publication of the albums and her accession to planetary celebrity through her appearance on film. Canonisation was also fuelled by the multiple republications of the work, each articulating a displacement of the original work. The Livre de Poche republication in 1974 certainly testifies to the “classic” status Forest’s work had achieved. In the same year, he published Les Colères du Mange-Minutes with Kesslering, a sequel to the adventures of Barbarella. The only comics in the Livre

10 For in-depth analysis of Eric Losfeld’s editorial work, see Preteseille (2020).

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de Poche collection, which played a central role in transmitting French literary heritage, was the 1965 pocket paperback edition of nineteenthcentury La Famille Fenouillard, while Gallimard’s comparable collection, Folio, had only brought out a handful of Wolinski and Peanuts titles (Lesage 2011). In appearing as a pocket paperback, Barbarella was thus consecrated as part of the emergent canon of graphic literature. Ten years later, Dargaud republished Barbarella in large format, in a limited collection called “Les heroines de la BD”—which other than Barbarella (1984) only included two titles, both from the Blanche épiphanie series (1984), also originally published in V Magazine in the wake of Barbarella’s success. Humanoïdes associés then republished Barbarella in 1994 and once again in 2015. Barbarella, celebrated as one of the noteworthy figures of bande dessinée, had become canonical. But that no doubt enviable place in the Pantheon of the ninth art is not without misunderstandings, and the sulphurous aura surrounding the Earthling youth of the year 40,000 no doubt tends to obscure the literary qualities of Forest’s fantasy, which came to full bloom in his following narratives, from Hypocrite (3 volumes published between 1971 and 1974), to La Jonque fantôme vue de l’orchestre (1981), without forgetting You Are Here? (1979) for which Tardi was illustrator. This latter work, published by Casterman (the historical publisher of Tintin) in episodes in the magazine (A Suivre) and then as an album, definitively established Forest as a key figure in the emergence of the French graphic novel (Crucifix and Lesage 2020); it was later translated in English by Fantagraphics under the title You Are There (2009). Since the 1990s, the arrival of new generations of alternative bande dessinée publishers has resulted in renewed appreciation of Jean-Claude Forest as a heritage figure, notably through the intermediary of l’Association, a publisher that played a central role in building an alternative independent bande dessinée publishing sector (Beaty 2007). By republishing several of Forest’s lesser known stories (Forest 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007), l’Association thus shifted Barbarella’s status from being a singular figure to being one aspect in the work of a singular auteur. * ** Jean-Claude Forest’s trajectory allows us to follow the inner workings of the varying processes of canonisation at work in French comics. Thus, Barbarella precipitated—in the chemical sense of the term—the rise of the

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adult bande dessinée. Although the serial created by Forest in the pages of V Magazine played but a supporting role, its successive editions reveal what was at stakes in this process. As I have shown, the passage from the pages of a pinup magazine to Losfeld’s luxury edition furnished the opportunity for a radical rewriting of the work through its paratexts. The forms in which Barbarella has been offered to readers have deeply altered its meaning, giving Forest’s creation an unhoped-for afterlife. Barbarella condensed the evolution that took another decade to come fully to fruition. But this episode illustrates how the contours of the adult bande dessinée were redefined via complex interactions between the auteur, readers, publishing and entertainment entrepreneurs, and morality brokers. It is in this interplay that the subversive energy of Barbarella is manifest—an energy that surpasses anything Forest could have imagined when he inked his first pages for V Magazine. Barbarella is thus a mythic bande dessinée figure as she reveals the way in which the history of the ninth art has been built around fictions which are all the more seductive for resting upon tangible elements. The celebration of Losfeld as the creator of adult comics is thus symptomatic of how fans have constructed the legitimacy of the ninth art by taking a certain number of works and hitching them to domains that were already legitimised: the erection of Barbarella in the pantheon of the ninth art thus occurred largely though capillarity. Over and above a sexual revolution and the rise of adult comics, what Barbarella emblematises is the process by which certain publishers positioned a bande dessinée as a book to enhance its appeal (Lesage 2018)—thereby obscuring decisive role periodicals played in renewing graphic imaginary language. Margaret C. Flinn, translator

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Bibliography Barker, Martin. 1984. A haunt of fears: The strange history of the British horror comics campaign. London: Pluto Press. Beaty, Bart. 2007. Unpopular culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bergen, Véronique. 2020. Barbarella: une space oddity. La fabrique des héros. Bruxelles: les Impressions nouvelles. Couperie, Pierre. 1962. Sociologie Du CBD. Giff-Wiff , no. 3–4: 9–13. Crépin, Thierry. 2001. Haro sur le gangster!: la moralisation de la presse enfantine, 1934–1954. Paris: CNRS. Crucifix, Benoît, and Sylvain Lesage. 2020. (À Suivre) Overseas: The Transatlantic Circulation of the French Graphic Novel. Journal of Comics and Culture 5, no. US Comics in France / Bande dessinée in America: 131–51. Demange, Julie. 2017. Bédéphilie. In Dictionnaire esthétique et thématique de la bande dessinée. Neuvième Art. http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/spip.php?articl e1169. Frey, Hugo, and Jan Baetens. 2019. Comics Culture and Roy Lichtenstein Revisited: Analysing a Forgotten ‘Feedback Loop.’ Art History 42, no. 1: 126–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12416. Forest, Jean-Claude. 2001. Hypocrite et le monstre du Loch Ness. Paris: l’Association. Forest, Jean-Claude. 2004. Mystérieuse: Matin, midi et soir. Paris: l’Association. Forest, Jean-Claude. 2005. Comment décoder l’étircopyh. Paris: l’Association. Forest, Jean-Claude. 2006. Entretien Avec Christian Marmonnier. Bananas, no. 2. Forest, Jean-Claude. 2007. N’importe quoi de cheval. Paris: l’Association Gainsbourg, Serge. 1967. Comic strip. Paris: Bagatelle. Gaumer, Patrick. 2010. Dictionnaire mondial de la BD. Paris: Larousse. Grande, Ariana. 2014. Break free. Republic. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=L8eRzOYhLuw. Groensteen, Thierry. 2000. Astérix, Barbarella & Cie : Histoire de La Bande Dessinée d’expression française. Paris / Angoulême: Somogy / Centre national de la bande dessinée et de l’image. Guillaume, Marie-Ange, and José-Louis Bocquet. 1997. René Goscinny: biographie. Arles, Actes Sud. Hajdu, David. 2009. The ten-cent plague: The great comic-book scare and how it changed America. Picador. Hervé, Frédéric. 2015. Censure et cinéma dans la France des Trente Glorieuses. Paris: Nouveau monde. Joubert, Bernard. 2007. Dictionnaire des livres et journaux interdits par arrêtés ministériels de 1949 à nos jours. Paris, Éd. du Cercle de la Librairie.

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Joubert, Bernard, ed. 2018. Panorama de la bande dessinée érotique clandestine. Paris: Dynamite. Kohn, Jessica. 2018. Travailler dans les petits Mickeys. Les dessinateursillustrateurs en France et en Belgique (1945–1968): des passeurs culturels? thèse de doctorat en histoire sous la dir. de Jean-Paul Gabilliet et Laurent Martin, Paris III. Kuhlmann, Marie, Nelly Kuntzmann, and Hélène Bellour. 1989. Censure et Bibliothèques Au XXe Siècle. Bibliothèques. Cercle de la Librairie. http:// catalogue.bnf.fr/servlet/biblio?ID=35008808&idNoeud=1.4.1.1&SN1=0& SN2=0&host=catalogue. Lafargue, Jean-Noël. 2009. L’ordinateur de Barbarella. Le dernier des blogs. http://hyperbate.fr/dernier/?p=8659. 6déc. 2009, consulté le 23 février 2018. Lacassin, Francis. 1963. Notre Assemblée Générale. Giff-Wiff , no. 7: 7. Lefèvre-Vakana, Philippe. 2004. L’art de Jean-Claude Forest. Angoulême: Éd. de l’An 2. Lent, John A. 1999. Pulp Demons: International dimensions of the postwar anticomics campaign. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Lesage, Sylvain. 2011. «L’impossible seconde vie ? Le poids des standards éditoriaux et la résistance de la bande dessinée franco-belge au format de poche. Comicalités, La bande dessinée: un «art sans mémoire?». http://journals.ope nedition.org/comicalites/221. ———. 2018. Publier La Bande Dessinée. Les Éditeurs Franco-Belges et l’album, 1950–1990. Papiers. Villeurbanne: Presses de l’Enssib. ———. 2022. Bande Dessinée et Histoire. Esquisse d’un Bilan Historiographique. Sociétés & Représentations, no. 53 (paraître). Losfeld, Éric. 1979. Endetté comme une mule ou la Passion d’éditer. Paris: Belfond. MacLeod, Catriona. 2021. Invisible presence: The representation of women in French-language comics. Bristol: Intellect Books. McKenzie, Donald Francis. 1986. Bibliography and the sociology of texts. Panizzi lectures. London: British library. Méon, Jean-Matthieu. 2004. La protection de la jeunesse comme légitimation du contrôle des médias. Amnis. Revue de civilisation contemporaine Europes/Amériques, n°4, h. http://journals.openedition.org/amnis/720. Minogue, Kylie. 1994. Put yourself in my place. Deconstruction—Mushroom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9t6wef5xlE. Minoustchine, Marc. 1973. Interview with Jean-Claude Forest. Submarine 4–5: 5–6. Moine, Florian. 2013. Bande dessinée et patrimoine – Histoire du Musée de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême (1983–2010). Mémoire de master d’histoire. Paris: Paris I.

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Nyberg, Amy. 1998. Seal of approval: The history of the comics code. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Ory, Pascal. 2020. Mickey go home! The de-Americanization of Bande Dessinée (1945–1950). Transl. Jean-Paul Gabilliet. Journal of Comics and Culture, no. 5: 91–109. Pizzino, Christopher. 2016. Arresting development: Comics at the boundaries of literature. Austin: University of Texas Press. Preteseille, Benoît. 2020. Eric Losfeld, Bandes Dessinées et Recherches Graphiques. Thèse en bande dessinée, Poitiers/EESI. http://theses.fr/s22 0960. Revaz, Françoise. 2016. «Le découpage des histoires à suivre», dans Alain Boillat et al., Case, strip, action! Les feuilletons en bandes dessinées dans les magazines pour la jeunesse (1946–1959). Gollion, Infolio. Roche, Olivier, and Dominique Cerbelaud. 2014. Tintin, bibliographie d’un mythe, 1 vols. Bruxelles: les Impressions nouvelles. Romer, Jean-Claude. 1964. Barbarella Mon Amour. Giff-Wiff , no. 11: 6. Sohn, Anne-Marie. 2001. Âge tendre et tête de bois: histoire des jeunes des années 1960. La vie quotidienne. Paris: Hachette littératures. Stora-Lamarre, Annie. 1989. L’Enfer de la IIIe République: censeurs et pornographes (1881–1914). Paris: Imago. ———. 2005. Censorship in Republican Times: Censorship and pornographic novels located in L’Enfer de La Bibliothèque Nationale, 1800–1900. In Censorship in Republican Times: Censorship and pornographic novels located in L’Enfer de La Bibliothèque Nationale, 1800–1900, 48–66. Rutgers University Press. https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813541044-004. Thérenty, Marie-Ève. 2009. Pour une poétique historique du support. Romantisme 143 (1): 109–115. Urbain-Archer, Anne. 2019. L’encadrement des publications érotiques en France (1920–1970), 1 vols. Littérature et censure 5. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Vaissade, Marie-Christine Lipani. 2009. La révolte des personnages féminins de la bande dessinée francophone. Le Temps des médias 12, no. 1: 152–62.

CHAPTER 3

Flash Gordon and the Transatlantic Construction of Ninth Art Heritage

Abstract The 1968 republication of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon has a lot to tell us about French comics fandom and how a comics heritage was assembled. This chapter explores this reappraisal, and the ways in which comics came to be acknowledged as cultural heritage via initiatives to republish works. Comics fandom in the French-speaking world (bédéphilie) was deeply linked to nostalgia, focusing particularly on the United States, whose comic strips of the 1930s were a lost paradise for 1960s adults. Flash Gordon played a central role in raising the cultural status of bande dessinée, a process driven by rivalry between CELEG and SOCERLID, between France and the United States: Alex Raymond’s series triggered virtually unanimous fascination and went through various republications, casting light on the contours of their communities. Based on the Nostalgia Press republication, Socerlid’s Flash Gordan (1968) illustrates how an awareness of comics heritage came to the fore, together with an ambition to legitimise the form by upmarket republications of masterworks of the past. Keywords Heritage · Nostalgia · Cultural transfers · Fandom · Reprints

Flash Gordon holds a central place in French fandom memory and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_3

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discourse, as may be seen in the many republications of Flash Gordon (Flash Gordon) from the 1960s through to the present day. Ranging from the most popular small formats to luxurious republications and colouring albums, Flash Gordon is everywhere, and his notoriety is based on circulating from one medium to another. One example of Flash Gordon’s centrality comes from the 1970s, when the magazine Métal hurlant set about reconfiguring the contours of drawn science fiction: this involved not only the graphic experimentations of Moebius, Druillet, and a few others, but also, as of its second issue, Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Nikita Mandryka’s adventures of “Jules l’Éclair” (éclair being the French for flash), a burlesque parody depicting Flash Gordon at the restaurant or at the estate agents, derisively highlighting the grandiloquence and racist underpinnings of the series created by Alex Raymond (see Fig. 3.1). But what makes Flash Gordon interesting is not only its centrality in fandom memory: the case of Flash Gordon also illustrates a certain way of relating to American comics, and the 1968 republication in fact resulted from three decades of circulations across the Atlantic. This chapter sets out to explore this centrality and these circulations, returning to the origins of the publishing project which, in 1968, resulted in the luxury black-and-white album, a reprint of the Nostalgia Press republication (Raymond 1967, 1968), rounding off the consecration of American newspaper comic strips.

Flash Gordon and the De-Americanisation ´ of French Bandes dessinees Over the past couple of decades, the question of how Franco-Belgian comics were built up in relation to America has emerged as a major field of research, focusing on the question of Americanisation, and its counterpart, de-Americanisation. The Americanisation of bande dessinée and illustrated magazines for children dates to 1934 when Le Journal de Mickey was launched, radically altering the landscape of child reading. Hot on the heels of Le Journal de Mickey, other titles soon appeared, such as Robinson and Hop-là!. These imported American comic strips en masse—or at least seemingly American ones, for some of this new production in fact came from Italy, which had already been hit by American influence. By generalising the use of speech bubbles and injecting the compositions with a vivacity and

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Fig. 3.1 Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Nikita Mandryka, “Jules l’Éclair”, Métal hurlant #2, 1975, p. 15

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dynamism partly borrowed from cartoons, these magazines completely reshaped French-language bandes dessinées (Baudry 2022). This Americanisation during the 1930s was countered by what Pascal Ory has called a process of de-Americanisation (désaméricanisation) during the 1940s (Ory 1984, translated Ory 2020). Faced with the scale of concern triggered by these imported American comic strips, the French parliament passed a 1949 law on youth publications amid an atmosphere of moral panic. Thierry Crépin has pointed out that this 1949 law embodies a triple concern (Crépin 2001): educators’ concern that this form of comic might stultify children; illustrators’ concern denouncing unfair competition from these low-cost imported series; and generalised concern in the post-war years when the question of delinquent youths lay at the heart of public debates, and bandes dessinées looked like the ideal culprit—just as a few years later the comic book industry came under fire from the Kefauver committee (Nyberg 1998). On 16 July 1949, with the Cold War looming on the horizon and in a spirit of great unanimity which saw a meeting of minds across all parties, from the Communists to the Catholic right,1 the French National Assembly passed law no. 49–956 on youth publications. Given the ineffectiveness of legal proceedings, the Commission de Surveillance et de Contrôle—full name the Committee for Monitoring and Controlling Youth and Teenage Publications—part of the Justice Ministry, whose members were educators and representatives of family associations, of publishers, and of authors, gradually assumed discretionary power. The fact that this power was based more on intimidation then on the letter of the law did nothing to alter its disruptive capacity: American comics had become clearly undesirable. Bringing bandes dessinées to heel meant de-Americanisation, resulting in a synthesis between the graphic dynamism of American comic strips and the pernickety moralism of Belgian Catholicism: The Belgian formal synthesis resided in this simplified realism, halfway between burlesque distortion stemming from the traditions of caricature, a virtually unique French style until the 1930s, and the violent naturalism of the American revolution. In this way fantasy and science fiction were

1 The Communist Party eventually abstained as a tactical precaution after France became sucked into the Cold War.

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excluded on principle, as were, in the vein of comedy, parody and derision. The ligne claire [clear line] flattened a world of constrained passions and rule-bound confrontation.2 (Ory 2020)

And Flash Gordon held a special place in this reflection on Americanisation and de-Americanisation, first because the series elicited strong reservations from the moment it first appeared, and second because it was a major source of inspiration for “de-Americanised” bandes dessinées. It is no doubt superfluous to go over what Flash Gordon is about: the space opera series, created by Alex Raymond in 1934, tells the story of a young polo champion and Yale graduate who, accompanied by Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkov, confronts the dangers of Mongo after this planet narrowly has missed the Earth. The series was initially drawn solely by Alex Raymond (assisted by scriptwriter Don Moore as of August 1935), with other illustrators contributing as of 1940, particularly Austin Briggs and Dan Barry, who resumed the daily strips in 1951 together with a Sunday page as of 1967, on which they continued to work through to 1990. Three serial films adapted Flash to the cinema between 1936 and 1940 (Labarre 2011). In France Flash Gordon was known as “Guy l’Éclair” ever since its appearance in the pages of Robinson before the war, and in Hardi présente Donald after the war. Before the war, the series had already spurred the wrath of Georges Sadoul, who was not yet the great historian of cinema (his 6-volume Histoire du cinéma started appearing in 1946). At the time, he was the editor of the Communist illustrated magazine Mon Camarade, and in a pamphlet called Ce que lisent vos enfants set about warning parents of the dangers to which children were exposed by reading American comic strips (Sadoul 1938). Among the various series triggering his anger, Flash Gordon had pride of place: Guy l’Éclair is a story about scantily clad heroes and buxom heroines along the lines of Brick Bradford […]. On arriving on an unknown planet, Guy grapples with a Chinese baddie called the King of the Universe. Abetted by an inventor who dreams up the most baroque inventions as easily as

2 The klare lijn or ligne claire is a term that appeared in the 1970s, when a younger generation revisited the aesthetics of Hergé and his followers in the Journal de Tintin (Edgar P. Jacobs, Jacques Martin…). For an introduction to the problems raised by the term, see (Screech 2005).

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Harpo Marx pulls a burning blowtorch out of his pocket, Guy l’Éclair– who in the space of just three months in Robinson is named king seven or eight times–wages woeful war against his enemy. One may watch armies burnt alive, floods drowning men in their tens of thousands, bombs raining down on towns, explosions, and a whole string of such incidents prone to nurture a child’s taste for peace and respect of human life. Each episode is so improbable and so stupid that Brick Bradford’s adventures at the centre of the earth look logical and realistic in comparison.3

From the outset, Flash Gordon provoked the ire of the Commission de Surveillance et de Contrôle and, together with Mandrake, was issued with repeated warnings, as shown by the committee minutes. The Commission advised its publisher to pull the plug on these two series, deemed the most unwholesome in Hardi présente Donald, in the wake of which Paul Winkler ditched the series to avoid direct confrontation with the Commission—which duly started assuming a less hostile attitude towards his magazine. In addition to this, Flash Gordon was a key vector in de-Americanising bande dessinée, for an opera singer unwittingly launched one of the most influential careers in bandes dessinées after stepping in to complete an adventure left unfinished after the circulation of flongs across the Atlantic was interrupted. This author was Edgar P. Jacobs, who finished the Guy l’Éclair pages for Bravo, before going on the following year to start a science-fiction story steeped in Flash Gordon, Le Rayon U . He became Hergé’s assistant, playing a major role in reworking the Tintin adventures for the colour albums on which the series’ legend is founded. Jacobs, whose taste for grand spectacle hit the mark, went on the create his own series, Blake et Mortimer, which soon became one of the pillars of the post-War Franco-Belgian bande dessinée. Another de-Americanisation which needs mentioning here is the major series Les Pionniers de l’Espérance, which started appearing in 1945 and was based on the initial plot outline of Flash: a team of astronauts aboard the rocket Espérance (Hope) blasts off for the mysterious planet Radias, which is threatening the Earth. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, Les Pionniers de l’Espérance was published in Vaillant —which went on to become Le Journal de Pif , a magazine overseen by the French Communist Party—staging a cosmopolitan team of adventurers 3 Georges Sadoul, Ce que lisent vos enfants, op. cit., pp. 25–26.

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tasked with defending the planet Earth and its values of liberty, fraternity, and social and technological progress, against all sorts of extra-terrestrial enemies. Running uninterruptedly from 1945 to 1973, Les Pionniers de l’Espérance was one of the few series of the period to bring science fiction to life in the pages of children’s magazines. And so Flash Gordon was a major influence for generations of FrancoBelgian artists. The question of Flash Gordon and its sulphurous status in the pages of children’s comics has already been discussed by Crépin in his invaluable Haro sur le gangster (Crépin 2001). The line I wish to take here is somewhat different: I will examine how Flash was exhumed and reappropriated by the fandom circles which were emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. As a classic work Flash Gordon was invested with very varied symbols. I will thus focus on the 1968 republication by SERG (Société d’étude et de réalisations graphiques ), a printer which turned to publishing for comics fandom. This 1968 edition may be used as a prism to observe the contours of fandom, the tensions within it, and the way in which it helped define the shapes of a canon for the ninth art, a ninth art it thus placed within a transatlantic relationship. So this chapter focuses on this republication of Flash Gordon, the way in which it illustrates a fascination with American comic strips, and the issues behind publishing heritage. In other words, Flash Gordon underwent a triple migration over the course of the 1960s: it embarked on a historical migration through several generations of readers, opening up the possibility for a rereading of it as heritage; a geographical migration, crossing the Atlantic Ocean; and at the same time a transmedia migration towards the pages of a book, on being taken up by a new type of cultural entrepreneur. And it is this triple circulation that I wish to examine here.

A Flash of Nostalgia To properly appreciate the role Flash Gordon played in structuring French fandom, we first need to go over a few stages in the history of this movement. It grew out of science-fiction fandom, with its starting point being an article published in Fiction, the French edition of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction published by OPTA since 1953, which gradually opened its pages to cinema, art, and general literature (Bréan 2012). In its July 1961 issue, Pierre Strinati published a short text about science-fiction bande dessinée in France. This got the ball

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rolling on the structuring of French fandom, with many readers writing in (several hundred according to Francis Lacassin),4 some of whose letters were published in the pages of Fiction nos. 93 and 96. This bubbling enthusiasm resulted in a “referendum on a future bandes dessinées club” in issue 98 (January 1962), with initial results being revealed in the magazine’s 100th issue in March of the same year. This club was officially set up in late March, with the founding of the “Club des bandes dessinées” (CBD, hereafter the Club),5 presided by Francis Lacassin, a key figure in the early years of French fandom. The Club’s members included leading intellectuals and artists (the sociologist Evelyne Sullerot and the filmmaker Alain Resnais), along with certain central figures in the small world of bande dessinée, notably Jean-Claude Forest and the writers Jacques Lob and Rémo Forlani. The Association soon started publishing a bulletin, as of summer 1962, named GiffWiff after a fabulous creature figuring in The Katzenjammer Kids. At the suggestion of Alain Resnais, the Association was renamed the Centre d’étude des littératures d’expression graphique (CELEG) on 5 November 1964. In parallel to this, it set up a “patronage committee” of intellectuals and media figures such as Jean Adhémar, the curator of prints at the Bibliothèque nationale, the publisher Jean Chapelle, Federico Fellini, and the newspaper editor Pierre Lazareff, with sociologist Edgar Morin and René Goscinny coming on board the following year. The change in name and the setting up of this committee of eminent figures from the media world stemmed from a quest for respectability, something the name “Club des bandes dessinées” clearly failed to inspire. In parallel to the legitimisation of detective novels and the structuring of film fandom (Baecque 2003), bande dessinée acquired its own fandom recruiting its cultural entrepreneurs from among bande dessinée professionals (with a high proportion of scriptwriters), the arts, and the intelligentsia. In 1964, five members of the Club broke away over a disagreement about the its objectives and board to set up a splinter organisation, the Société civile d’études et de recherches sur les littératures dessinées 4 Francis Lacassin, “Comment le club des bandes dessinées est devenu le CELEG”, Giff-Wiff , no. 20, May 1966, pp. 34–37. 5 Despite the announcement in Fiction’s January 1962 issue, the association’s statutes were only filed with the relevant authorities on 29 March 1962 and then published in the Journal officiel (the official gazette of the French state) on 8 April 1962, a delay caused by difficulties in setting up the association’s board.

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(SOCERLID), headed by Claude Moliterni. Under Claude Moliterni SOCERLID set up its own review, Phénix, to rival with CELEG’s GiffWiff . Though using different methods, the ambition of both associations was to legitimise the “ninth art”. Despite having a different stance towards bande dessinée’s past and present, CBD-CELEG and SOCERLID both strove to promote great bande dessinée works of the past, particularly by issuing reprints. Flash Gordon became one of the vectors for this way of conceptualising bande dessinée as the ninth art. Nostalgia for a “golden age” played a central role in the early days of the Club (Gabilliet 2016). The editorial of the first issue of Giff-Wiff thus stated: “The comics which disappeared with the French defeat in 1940 had left their readers with a nostalgia which, curiously, seems to have become increasingly haunting over recent years” (Couperie 1962a). This nostalgic groundswell often figured in members’ letters. Their nostalgia was for a precise period and precise publications, the period described by Pierre Strinati as a “golden age”. Pierre Couperie’s study of the profile of the first 300 members shows that most were born during the period 1926–1934, and though now in their thirties retained fond memories of what they had read as a child in the pages of Robinson, L’Aventureux, Hop-Là!, and Hurrah!. Hence a generation which grew up with this series of magazines. Their childhood coincided exactly with what turned out to be these titles’ shortlived existence (1934-1942). Their almost abrupt disappearance at the height of their success–for many children in the zone libre it was the clearest sign that the war was lost–left a genuine feeling of frustration which is no doubt at the origin of the Club. (Couperie 1962b)

As Thierry Groensteen notes, “the vocation of the club was thus primarily to keep alive memories of a vanished past”, and this “past which interested the Club was narrowly delineated: it started in 1934 (the date when Le Journal de Mickey was launched) and ended in 1942 [with the ban on importing American comics]. It coincides exactly with the period when the French illustrated press was colonised [sic] by comics of American origin” (Groensteen 2006, 112). As a central figure in the American comics imported into the illustrated press for children in the interwar period, Flash Gordon was ripe for nostalgic reassessment in the early 1960s.

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This nostalgia gradually crystallised around republications. From the moment it was set up, the Club set itself several objectives, often repeated in the pages of Giff-Wiff : “combating anti-comic prejudice; combating bad comics; raising the general level of bandes dessinées; triggering and overseeing the reprinting of classics from the golden age before their destruction” (Resnais 1964). But among the various motivations voiced by the Club, nostalgia soon came to dominate, hence defending bande dessinée and “good” bandes dessinées became a largely secondary concern, as did struggling against censorship. In the letters leading up to the founding of the Club, one of the readers of Fiction had suggesting creating a club with two possible purposes: organising a circulating library and pooling fragments of collections to form complete series of which photocopies could be made. This reader envisaged a sort of library available to subscribers modelled on the Cinémathèque Française. But collectors’ practical concerns (old copies could be damaged by handling) carried the day, and the first issue of Giff-Wiff explicitly fixed republishing as a major objective for the Club. It was possible to access series from this “golden age” thanks to the support of Paul Winkler of the Opera Mundi agency, who agreed to let the Club use “originals” (in fact flongs). It was in this context that Flash Gordon became a major project in the digging up of comics heritage.

Flash Gordon, an Object of Fascination As for many American series of the interwar period, the rediscovery of Flash Gordon arose from sustained interaction between France and Italy. Although writing in 1964 Strinati observed that “the ‘trip to Italy’ was a necessity for lovers of American comics” in 1964 (Strinati 1964), some bookstores sold Italian editions (see Fig. 3.2). The first “heritage” reprint of a past great was by Florence-based Nerbini, the publisher of Topolino and L’Avventuroso, which before the war had brought out small softbacks, particularly of Flash Gordon and L’Uomo mascherato (The Phantom) (Antonutti 2013). In 1957– 1958 Nerbini launched a four-colour republication of 21 large square format (31.5 cm × 31.5 cm) “albums” of Alex Raymond’s Avventure di Gordon published between 1946 and 1948 (in three colours). Unlike the editions produced immediately after the war, Nerbini did away with the “apocryphal” episodes drawn by Guido Fantoni. It was especially once

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Fig. 3.2 Avventure di Gordon, Nerbini, 1935

the Spada brothers in Rome became involved that these republications acquired scale. They bought up Nerbini’s collections and in the early 1960s launched complete chronological reissues of Nerbini’s great American series, starting with Mandrake, L’Uomo Mascherato, Cino e Franco (Tim Tyler’s Luck, which in French had appeared under the title Raoul et Gaston), and then, in 1964, set about republishing Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. Despite their defects—the reduced format resulted in many remounts, with “apocryphal” and edited illustrations, cuts, forgotten episodes, and so on—these republications fuelled nostalgia for 1930s comics. The year 1965 catalysed these changes, when the first “International Comics Fair”

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was held in Bordighera, in February, by the University of Rome’s Institute of Education and by the Centre for Sociology of Mass Communication, in partnership notably with CELEG in France. That same year, one of its organisers, Rinaldo Traini, issued republications of Caveman Uup (Vincent T. Hamlin’s “Alley Oop”) and of Captain Easy. In the meanwhile, Linus , a magazine launched in April 1965, started republishing American series such as Pogo, Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, and Li’l Abner.6 There was also a growing number of fanzines offering republications of American series, notably Milan-based Comics Club 104, as of spring 1966, and Genoa-based Comics Worldi, as of May 1967.7 These republications played a major role in the growing awareness of the past of the ninth art, and in the attention paid to the material qualities of heritage republications. These Italian republications circulated widely in France. Extracts from Italian booklets regularly appeared in the pages of Jean Boullet’s fanzine Le Kiosque, who ran one of the first bookstores in France to specialise in comics. A decade later they appeared in the catalogue of Futuropolis, another key actor structuring the graphic avant-garde. These Italian booklets were clearly a reference for an entire generation of fans. The 1968 republication of Flash Gordon coincided with an increasing desire within French fandom to re-Americanise the heroes’ and series’ names. The first republications by the Club were mainly of titles found in “golden age” magazines, which back in the 1930s had adopted French names for their child readers. Although Popeye did not stay Mathurin for long, and though, unlike in Italy, Mickey retained his American name (no doubt on the strength of the considerable success of his film adventures), many heroes were given French names: Brick Bradford became Luc Bradefer, Flash Gordon became Guy l’Éclair, and so on. On rediscovering the series of their childhood, the Club’s fans also reappropriated heroes’ original names, which they had not previously known, on occasions further discovering their foreign origins. One of the first tasks the fans set about was drawing up correlation tables (“Pour 6 Giuseppe Peruzzo, “Histoire de la revue Linus ”, Neuvième Art, no. 11, October 2004, pp. 18–31. 7 Among those working on this latter fanzine were two collectors, Ernesto Traverso and Silvano Scotto, who founded the “Club Anni Trenta” in 1969, which over the course of the 1970s considerably raised the standard of republications (producing entire oeuvres, respecting formats, and so on).

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cause de naturalisation” 1963). This task was complicated whenever a given hero had been named differently from one publication to the next. For instance, Brick Bradford had been Luc Bradefer in Robinson but remained Brick Bradford in Hurrah!. Lyman Young’s “Tim Tyler’s Luck” was “Raoul et Gaston” in Aventures, published by Librairie Moderne, but “Richard le Téméraire” in Le Journal de Mickey. As for readers who encountered Superman before 1942, they knew him as “Yordi” if they read Aventures or the complete stories in the “Collection dessins animés ”, “L’Homme d’acier” (the Man of Steel) in Les Grandes aventures, “Marc, l’Hercule moderne” if they read Spirou (which initially ran reprints of Schuster and Siegel’s adventures, before entrusting a relocalised version to Jijé), as “François l’imbattable” (created by Brantonne) in Les Grandes aventures and Hurrah!, as “Le Surhomme” in L’Audacieux and L’Aventureux, and as “Dan Garet” in Aventuriers d’aujourd’hui. It was only after the war that the name “Superman” became established, first in Spirou (1945) then in L’Astucieux (1947). However, the Club used the French titles for its republications, except for the first two volumes, which each had a double title, Brick Bradford/Luc Bradefer and Flash Gordon (Guy l’Éclair). The following republications, however, stuck with the French titles: Le Voyage dans la pièce de monnaie was subtitled Luc Bradefer, while Raoul et Gaston, Le Fantôme, and Félix le Chat retained their French names. By keeping the French title, the Club republications accentuated their nostalgic function, namely to recall a vanished past, and so these episodes were given a title likely to reawaken these memories. Above and beyond any position towards (de-)Americanisation, priority was given to the nostalgic rereading of unfindable, forgotten, or unpublished episodes, rather than to building up a history of comics based on any rigorous documentary basis. These retrospective onomastic considerations were not motivated by matters of identification. French fandom was built up through exchange, through transatlantic circulation. This is one of the major areas of overlap between film and comic fandoms which shared a common endeavour: reappraising a cultural form perceived as minor by adjoining it to the fine art system. As is well-known, the French New Wave was based on a policy of auteurs , rooted in reappraisal of Hollywood cinema—particularly Alfred Hitchcock, who gave a legendary interview to François Truffaut (1966)—in opposition to old-school “French quality”. In many

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ways, Flash Gordon had a comparable focal position to that of Hitchcock—though only partly, for Truffaut was interested in showing that it was possible to be filmmaker, an Author with a capital A, within American cinema, the studio system, and genre films. He thus sought to show how artistic creativity could be found even in studio work, countering the vision opposing industrial production in the States to film d’auteur in France. Conversely, for comics fans, their drawing on Uncle Sam stemmed more from the dual status of a fantasised retrospective of modernity (the 1930s as a “golden age”) and the fact that comics held a very different place in the American cultural landscape to the subaltern status thrust upon bande dessinée in France, viewed as a subculture fit solely for infants, illiterates, and imbeciles. This gap resulted mostly from distribution channels: whereas in France strips were distributed primarily in magazines specifically for children (Vaillant le journal de Pif, Le Journal de Mickey, Le Journal de Spirou, Tintin, etc.), they were given a prominent place in the American press. In other words, whereas French-language bandes dessinées were entertainment products for children, comic strips were viewed in the States as a major social phenomenon. Endowing republications with a luxurious form was a way to display the cultural dignity to which bande dessinée aspired. Flash Gordon illustrates how French fans wished to consecrate a form of bande dessinée which through its narrative ambitions and aesthetic grandiloquence was intended for adults.

´ Fandom as Papyrophilia Bande dessinee In the early days of the Club, optimistic projects were hatched to set up a “Library”, a unique collection holding all the bande dessinée classics— amounting, in fact, to the few American comic series of their childhood. However, the project to republish these works on a subscription basis rapidly ran into a wall: despite the palpable enthusiasm in readers’ letters, there was a dearth of actual subscribers. Despite the triumphalism voiced by the Club, the figures available for print runs show how small their activist base actually was, with 326 copies of Popeye et les Harpies (1964), 425 for the first publication of Mandrake roi de la magie (1964), and only 276 for Raoul et Gaston au royaume du passé (1964). Over the course of repeated calls to subscribe straightaway for various projects in the pipeline, an image transpires of what those running the Club thought of as a good fan: a serious reader who did not flutter from

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one series to another, making do with one or two titles, but supporting the collective effort to rehabilitate the great heritage of the past. Pierre Couperie even voiced his surprise that certain members happily settled for just their copy of Giff-Wiff . This magazine, whose original purpose was only to act as a newsletter, as a place where members could swap information and bibliographies before republications, ended up becoming the central locus where fan culture and sociability was built up. The changeability of the clientele for the heritage republications complicated the task of the apprentice publishers. Given the small number of members, prices were high, and so colour-printing was out of the question. To rediscover the magic of the colour magazines of years gone by, and prior even to the founding of the Club, the earliest fans soon decided to use slides, reinventing, in their own way, comics on screen. Among nascent fandom this practice was central to their collecting and viewing practices. The propagandists at SOCERLID were keen users of slides in their public talks and lessons, and slides were also used intensively in the first exhibitions and conventions. Projecting bandes dessinées on slides was part of a long history of collective reading based on viewings, with sound effects and dubbing to supplement the images being read—a sort of technically sophisticated spin-off from collective reading by siblings or groups of friends. In the early 1960s slides provided a way of bringing the greats back to life, for they provided members with colour reproductions at prices that print quite simply could not match. Slides offered an economical solution and were used for at least one episode of Jungle Jim and two of Guy l’Éclair 8 (see Fig. 3.3). These achievements between 1962 and 1964 fell far short of the ambitions stated when the programme was launched in the first issues of Giff-Wiff . While the cover proudly announced a programme of 400 pages, in instalments of twenty-odd pages, the Club made no more than 75 or so. Admittedly, using colour slides raised numerous difficulties, relating not only to producing pin-sharp photos of them, but also to handling and reading practices. While defending this solution, one early member conceded that “although presenting these pages as slides to be viewed on a screen makes handling them a bit more complicated, their transparency, luminosity, and the fact that they can be enlarged (to 4 or 8 The two series in question were “Guy l’Éclair en Frigie”, for which subscriptions were opened in October 1962 and April 1963, comprising, respectively, 24 and 23 slides; stocks of these episodes were soon exhausted.

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Fig. 3.3 Alex Raymond, Flash Gordin, Club des bandes dessinées, 1963

5 times their original size, or even a lot larger) means their quality can be improved even further” (Thevenon 1962). Although three out of five members had voted in favour the consultation conducted by Fiction, the programme was soon dropped. Was this due to technical disappointments resulting from the use of slides? While certain members were delighted to rediscover, in colour, forgotten episodes (or ones they did not know, such as an unpublished episode of “Guy l’Éclair”), the experience was a disappointment, for the use of slides was a barrier to the nostalgic epiphany linked to the paper, the format, the smell of the ink, the pleasure of contemplating a double page, the frisson on turning the pages. Writing of

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his disappointment, Édouard François notes: “the screen or frosted glass will never offer the same joy as turning the pages, and especially of your nose almost touching the paper, not to speak of the drudgery of fiddling with the focus and passing from one slide to the next” (François 1964). In November 1963, at a meeting of the Belgian section—whose numbers were swelling under the stewardship of Pierre Vankeer—it rejected the colour slides solution and instead called for republications using the Electro-rex technique, a process derived from stencil duplicating, used to reprint Popeye: les sources de jus d’épinard (1963). This type of mimeography was used due to its low cost, but soon suffered from competition from offset, the cost of which for black and white was hardly any higher than for mimeo, but offered incomparably better quality, particularly thanks to the remarkably fine lines, unlike mimeo, which could only produce relatively thick lines and could not render shadings. As we may see, the history of fandom and its unearthing of the great heritage works of the past was bound up with the history of the rapid changes in printing technologies during the 1960s. The sizeable share of articles and debates about technique in the magazine’s pages and in the Club’s debates is attributable to its members’ amateurism: they had little inside knowledge of the book industry, and they learned about republication as they went along. It is also illustrated by the importance of the physical substrate used to reappropriate childhood memories, the reason behind these republications. Piecing together the reasons why these collectors wanted to republish the greats of the past is complex. Although those running the Club devised a model of reading, it was only partly followed, as indicated by their repeated complaints about members. The ideal collector as constructed in the pages of the Club’s newsletter was a well-off, erudite man with encyclopaedic curiosity, but reasons of nostalgia seemed to predominate in the selective subscriptions, threatening the Club’s operations and slowing the anticipated rhythm. It also goes to show the extent to which reading practices always disrupt the framing planned by editors and publishers, and may give rise to forms of textual poaching (de Certeau 1990). At the end of the day, it was SERG that published SOCERLID’s Flash Gordon. Despite the growing visibility of comic fandom in the media world, no commercial publisher became fully involved in these republications. SERG was in fact a printer which published under its own name works akin to self-publications. The publishing dimension was kept to a strict minimum. When dissidents left CELEG, SOCERLID

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launched Phénix, entrusting SERG with printing this magazine. In 1967 SOCERLID achieved consecration, when the “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative” exhibition was staged, a turning point in the consecration of bande dessinée as an art form. It was SOCERLID which devised this exhibition, held at the Musée des Arts décoratifs, in the enclosure of Palais du Louvre; SERG printed the catalogue—at the time the sole comprehensive work aggregating the knowledge built up by comic and bande dessinée fandom (Couperie et al. 1967). The printer went on to become a “publisher” of works produced by SOCERLID, though these works were in fact financed by subscription (see Fig. 3.4). In 1968 the first volume in the SERG “bandes dessinées” collection was announced in the “rumours” section of Phénix as “a work produced by SOCERLID”: this work was Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. Subsequently, while continuing to republish greats of the past (Burne Hogarth’s Drago, Harold Foster’s Prince Valiant ), SERG moved into newly created bandes dessinées, starting with an adaptation of three texts by Edgar Allan Poe (Thomas 1968), followed by Jean-Claude Forest’s Hypocrite series (Forest 1971) and two series which, like “Barbarella”, portray scantily clad heroines, who had initially frolicked on the pages of V Magazine: Robert Gigi and Claude Moliterni’s Scarlett Dream (Gigi and Moliterni 1973), and Georges Pichard and Jacques Lob’s Blanche Epiphanie (Pichard and Lob 1973). In addition to publishing recent series by authors associated with SOCERLID—intended for an adult readership given the works’ eroticism—SERG also published critical works, bringing out a Histoire de la bande dessinée d’expression française in 1972, followed the next year by a collection of interviews with Pratt, Fred, and a few others, both authored by Claude Moliterni and then, in 1974, a bande dessinnée encyclopaedia which in fact never got beyond the letter D (Couperie et al. 1974, 1975). But the great project occupying fans was producing a luxury edition containing all the pages of Flash Gordon created by Alex Raymond, using Woody Gelman’s 1967 edition. SERG produced four volumes in all. The first of these came out in 1968, and over the course of its 140 pages reproduced adventures of Flash first published in 1938–1939. The republication was not chronological, for the following two volumes worked back through the years, containing the episodes first published between October 1936 and October 1938 (vol. 2), then between January 1934 and October 1936 (vol. 3)—the period 1940 to July 1941 thus not being covered (see Fig. 3.5).

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Fig. 3.4 Subscription pamphlet for the republication of Flash Gordon, 1967 (Etienne Robial Archives, Cité de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême)

It was a luxurious edition with thick paper and deep blacks. Although the spectacular colours had been part of the charm of reading the pages in Robison (where the series started appearing in 1936), the republications were in black-and-white. This choice was a determining factor in the consecration of comic strips which these republications brought about. The blacks produced by SERG are particularly intense, admirably showcasing Alex Raymond’s graphic talent. In fact, the making of these republications followed the precepts employed for the “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative” exhibition: the primacy given to American comic

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Fig. 3.5 Alex Raymond, Flash Gordon, Socerlid, 1967: title page

strips; an insistently spectacular dimension with hugely enlarged panels by Hogarth, Caniff, and Raymond; the priority given to black-and-white, both as a matter of economy and to extol the quality of the draughtsmanship. While comic strip originals were not yet viewed as the purest expression of the creative act, this taste for black-and-like drawings is indicative of a wish to magnify the illustrator’s aesthetic act, in an attempt to bring comic strips nearer to classical pictural practices. The SERG republication applied these precepts to its formal characteristics, with deep blacks and especially imposing dimensions magnifying Alex Raymond’s stagings. The printed surface (excluding the margins) ran to 24.5 cm × 30.5 cm, containing only two strips, most of which comprised six panels, sometimes eight or nine. Each panel was thus of a comfortable size. Everything about this edition emphasises the series’ spectacular dimension, including the title page depicting Flash fighting, cutlass in hand, amidst a sumptuous setting. The critical apparatus likewise insisted

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on the spectacular dimension, describing Flash Gordon as “the comic strip adventure” and including at the end of the book an article already published under the eloquent title “Flash Gordon, le mythe, l’épopée” (Flash Gordon, the myth, the saga) (Couperie and François 1967). ∗ ∗ ∗ Although SOCERLID’s Flash Gordon was intended to make a major impact in promoting comic strips and their heritagisation, it is hard to ascertain whether it fulfilled its objective. While Flash Gordon was not the first republication, it was still the most ambitious of its period, signalling by its formal characteristics the new way of viewing comic art. Flash Gordon found himself snatched from (very relative) obscurity and transposed into a paper monument, endowing him with unparalleled historical depth. As Benoît Crucifix argues, reprints “are always on a cusp between monumentality and documentality, canon and archive” (Crucifix 2020, 92). When republishing greats from the past became a key segment driving the comics market over the course of the following decade, black-andwhite became a distinctive characteristic. The publisher to adopt the most systematic approach to formal matters was Futuropolis with its “Copyright” series, but publishers from Glénat to Alain Deligne were keen to reprint in black-and-white. To such an extent that despite considerable changes in technical constraints, the more mainstream publishers have recently alighted on black and white as a way of promoting the aesthetic qualities of their products. For instance, even Belgian bandes dessinées for children, originally devised in colour, have been reproduced in luxury black-and-white heritage editions, ranging from Jerry Spring (2010–2012) to luxurious facsimile editions of Franquin’s original pages in Spirou. Even though the initial material was indeed provided by Woody Gelman, the effects SOCERLID’s Flash Gordon produced on the French landscape were in fact very different. French publishing was caught up in a dynamic to promote the artistic dimensions of bande dessinée centred on the original page, a graphic style (preferably spectacular) of the author become artist, of an entire accompanying discourse, making it easier to transfer bande dessinée towards the respectability of a ninth art.

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References Antonutti, Isabelle. 2013. Fumetto et fascisme: la naissance de la bande dessinée italienne. Comicalités. Études de culture graphique, mars. https://doi.org/10. 4000/comicalites.1306. Baecque, Antoine de. 2003. La cinéphilie: invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture. Histoire de la pensée. Paris: Fayard. Baudry, Julien. 2022. La généralisation de la bulle de bande dessinée en France entre 1904 et 1940 : étude systématique d’une évolution de la culture visuelle. Sociétés & Représentations, no. 53. Bréan, Simon. 2012. La science-fiction en France: Théorie et histoire d’une littérature. Paris: PUPS. Certeau, Michel de. 1990. L ’invention du quotidien. I, Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard. Couperie, Pierre. 1962a. Quand les contes de fées deviennent réalité. Giff-Wiff , no. 1: 1. Couperie, Pierre. 1962b. Sociologie du CBD. Giff-Wiff , no. 3–4: 9–13. Couperie, Pierre, Proto Destefanis, Édouard François, and Maurice Horn. 1967. Bande dessinée et figuration narrative: histoire, esthétique, production et sociologie de la bande dessinée mondiale. Édité par Musée des arts décoratifs. Paris: SERG. Couperie, Pierre, Henri (1946–. ...) Filippini, and Claude (1932–. ...) Moliterni. 1974. Encyclopédie de la bande dessinée. (Encyclopédie de la bande dessinée; 1). Ivry: Éditions SERG. ———. 1975. Encyclopédie de la bande dessinée. (Encyclopédie de la bande dessinée; 2). Ivry: Éditions SERG. Couperie, Pierre, and Édouard François. 1967. Flash Gordon (Guy l’Éclair). Phénix 3 (avril): 3–7. Crépin, Thierry. 2001. Haro sur le gangster!: La moralisation de la presse enfantine, 1934–1954. Paris: CNRS. Crucifix, Benoît. 2020. Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Graphic Novel, post 2000. Thèse de doctorat en langues, lettres et traductologie, Liège/Louvain. Forest, Jean-Claude. 1971. Hypocrite et le monstre du Loch Ness. Ivry: SERG. François, Édouard. 1964. Une solution au problème des rééditions en couleurs. Giff-Wiff 10 (juin): 18–19. Fronval, George, and Claude Moliterni. 1972. Histoire de la bande dessinée d’expression française. Collection Phénix. Ivry: Éditions S.E.R.G. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2016. «Âge d’or de la BD» et “golden age of comics”: Comparaison des notions fondatrices de la bédéphilie dans l’aire franco-belge et aux États-Unis (1961–2015). Le Temps Des Médias 2 (27): 139–151. Gigi, Robert, and Claude Moliterni. 1973. Araignia : Scarlett Dream. Ivry: SERG.

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Groensteen, Thierry. 2006. La bande dessinée : un objet culturel non identifié. Essais. Angoulême: An 2. Labarre, Nicolas. 2011. Two Flashes. Entertainment, Adaptation : Flash Gordon as Comic Strip and Serl. Comicalités. Études de Culture Graphique. http:// comicalites.revues.org/249. Nyberg, Amy. 1998. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson [Miss.]: University Press of Mississippi. Ory, Pascal. 1984. Mickey go home ! La désaméricanisation de la bande dessinée (1945–1950). Vingtième Siècle. Revue D’histoire 4 (1): 77–88. https://doi. org/10.3406/xxs.1984.1718. ———. 2020. Mickey Go Home! The De-Americanization of Bande Dessinée (1945–1950). Traduit par Jean-Paul Gabilliet. Journal of Comics and Culture 2020 (5): 91–109. Pichard, Georges, and Jacques Lob. 1973. Blanche Épiphanie. Ivry: SERG. «Pour cause de naturalisation». 1963. Giff-Wiff 5–6 (mai): 28. Raymond, Alex. 1967. Flash Gordon. New York: Nostalgia Press. ———. 1968. Flash Gordon, 1: 1939–1941. Flash Gordon. Paris: SERG. Resnais, Alain. 1964. Notes sur un voyage aux USA. Giff-Wiff , no. 12: 9. Sadoul, Georges. 1938. Ce que lisent vos enfants: La presse enfantine en France, son histoire, son évolution, son influence. Paris: Bureau d’éditions. Screech, Matthew. 2005. Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes dessinées and FrancoBelgian Identity. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Strinati, Pierre. 1964. Bandes dessinées et science-fiction au premier festival de Trieste. Giff-Wiff 9 (mars): 34. Thevenon, Jean-Fraçois. 1962. Les prochaines réalisations du club. Giff-Wiff 1: 4. Thomas, Alexis, trad. 1968. Trois histoires extraordinaires. Ivry: SERG. Truffaut, François. 1966. Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock. Paris: R. Laffont.

CHAPTER 4

Astérix and the Transformation of the Comics Market René Goscinny, Albert Uderzo, Astérix et les Normands, 1966

Abstract Published in 1966, Astérix et les Normands is a good vantage point from which to observe the publishing and cultural phenomenon that the series represents. Often celebrated for its remarkable capacity for satirising French society of the Trente glorieuses, I argue here that Astérix is first and foremost a genuine publishing phenomenon in that one of the reasons it resonated so widely in French society was precisely because of its success. Like his predecessors and rivals, Dargaud, the publisher of Pilote, printed four-colour albums taken from this magazine’s pages in print runs of several thousand copies. But the runaway success of the Astérix albums definitively upended the French comics market. With Astérix et les Normands, the series became one of the most important publishing phenomena in twentieth-century France, with sales topping 1 million copies. Astérix provides a way of understanding how the 48-page colour hardback became the standard format for mainstream publishing, triggering lasting change to the sector. Astérix accelerated the shift from magazine to book form, but also to other media, for the success of Astérix was also built on its many adaptations (e.g. radio, records, and cinema) and countless advertising iterations. In other words, Astérix et les Normands enables us to understand the mechanisms by which comics were built up as a mass consumer product, turning children into new consumers of cultural goods. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_4

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Keywords Book history · Publishing · Astérix · Consumer culture · Adult comics · Cultural legitimisation · Historiography

In 2021, the French army, in the presence of the head of state, conducted its first space exercise, dubbed Astérix.1 Although the exercise came nearly one year to the day after the death of Albert Uderzo, it was not intended as a direct tribute to the illustrator of the series about the Gauls. With France seeking to set out a spatial doctrine, it was in fact an indirect tribute to the first French artificial satellite, Astérix, launched in November 1965, when Goscinny and Uderzo’s series was meeting with growing success. If Barbarella is testimony to the emergence of transgressive comics, Astérix is a different kind of landmark. In the mid-1960s, the series created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo was a runaway success with critics and the public. Within a few short years, the series portraying the Gaulish village “still holding out against the Roman conqueror” had become a veritable cultural and social phenomenon. The 1968 cabinet meeting when De Gaulle reportedly indulged in calling each of his ministers after a character illustrates how Astérix was not just a form of entertainment, but a metaphor for a certain France under De Gaulle (Rouvière 2006). And this was indeed how the series was presented in the main centre-left magazine, L’Express. This magazine, founded in 1953, had spearheaded the fight to end torture in Algeria, publishing Sartre, Malraux, and Camus, before mutating, in the wake of Algerian independence, into a news magazine modelled on Time. In September 1966, this bourgeois-liberal magazine devoted its cover and a long article to the “Astérix phenomenon” (see Fig. 4.1). This marked a turning point in the coverage of comics, with the media now turning its back on ritual denunciations of the effects of reading “comics” to instead celebrate the forceful humour of the series. In other words, Astérix and Barbarella were two sides of the same movement, the emergence of an adult bande dessinée readership. On the one hand, Barbarella was the standard bearer for confronting taboos and tackling sexuality, despite the moral framework imposed by the 1 https://www.defense.gouv.fr/air/dossiers/asterx-les-combattants-du-spatial/asterx-lepresident-de-la-republique-rencontre-les-combattants-du-spatial.

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Fig. 4.1 “Le Phénomène Astérix”, L’Express # 796, 19 September 1966

1949 law on publications for minors. On the other hand, Astérix represented a family bande dessinée, which could be read on several levels, and which intellectuals could read unabashed. Astérix was thus a dual “phenomenon”: it left the ghetto of entertainment for children and the uneducated, and, by its public success, fundamentally altered the comics landscape. Through Astérix et les Normands (published in English as Asterix and the Normans ), this chapter throws light on how Astérix represented a turning point for bande dessinée, going over the scale of its colossal success and the reasons for it. It then shows how Astérix is indicative of the industrialisation of album production, before finally examining Astérix’s place in an expanded multimedia landscape. Literature on Astérix tends to insist on how Pilote acted as a crucible for adult bande dessinée (Michallat 2018; Aeschimann and Nicoby 2015). My purpose here is different: I wish to show how Astérix constituted a publishing and transmedia phenomenon which revolutionised the comics landscape.

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The Colossal Success of Astérix Astérix et les Normands stages the issue of virility and fear. The little village is chosen by two very different groups as a place to learn. On the one hand, Goudurix (Justforkix), a superficial young Lutetian sent to stay with his Armorican uncle who is tasked with making a man of him. On the other hand, the Vikings (or “Normans”) who, on the contrary, want to learn what fear is. Their chief, Olaf Grossbaf (Olaf Timandahaf), has heard that “fear gives you wings”, and, taking the expression literally, wants to learn how to fly. They seize the person who seems to be a master of fear, fearful young Goudurix. To get out of this tight spot, the Gauls confront the Normans with the most frightening thing they know, the singing of their bard, Assurancetourix (Cacofonix). All is well that ends well: the Normans discover fear, while Goudurix overcomes his, and a banquet symbolically seals the restoration of equilibrium. If this chapter focuses on the ninth episode in the series, Astérix et les Normands, it is not because it is the most successful, or the funniest, or the most original—many others could lay claim to these titles. It is primarily because it corresponds to the time when the success of the series accelerated spectacularly, going on to change the face of bande dessinée. This success was especially spectacular for occurring so late in the two authors’ careers. Typically for comics creators in the 1950s and 1960s, this was first played out in the press. Born, respectively, in 1926 and 1927, Goscinny and Uderzo had experienced a series of failures and partial successes since the early 1950s. Indeed, the origins of Astérix owe much to their disappointments. René Goscinny was born in Paris but grew up in Buenos Aires, before taking his first steps as an illustrator in the United States. On failing to make a name for himself in America, he returned to Europe, where he met Albert Uderzo. We […] realized at a very early stage that we complemented each other wonderfully, Uderzo explained. [Goscinny] felt that drawing was not his strong point and prevented his humour from finding fullest expression. Personally, I was more at ease with drawing. We launched into much creative research, working elbow-to-elbow. (Uderzo, in Philippsen 1985, 62)

The partners started with a humoristic series Oumpah-Pah (OmpaPa), but failed to find a publisher for it. This was followed by Jehan Pistolet corsaire prodigieux (la Libre Belgique, 1952) then Luc Junior

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(1954). Goscinny and Uderzo were fired for union activism along with Jean Hébrard and script writer Jean-Michel Charlier, and the four created various press publications as advertisements for particular brands. So when François Clauteaux, who knew Jean Hébrard, decided to create a serious magazine for children, he turned to this talented foursome; in spring 1959, plans were launched for a weekly, Pilote, in an atmosphere of great creative freedom: We had been freed from the pernickety and crushing constraints of publishers, agents, and clients to please […]. We did what we wanted, we were our own bosses and only received orders from ourselves.2

The only condition laid down by François Clauteaux, who headed the magazine’s initial team, was that “all the heroes of their stories be French”.3 Goscinny and Uderzo started by tackling the Roman de Renart, a landmark in the French literary heritage from which they drew a humorous animal fantasy (Picaud 2013). But the pair learnt that the tale had already been used as inspiration by Jean Trubert, in the Bravo and Vaillant weekly. So they had to go back to the drawing board. With deadlines pressing, they decided to draw on the history of France, a traditional source for didactic series, which were common in French illustrated magazines subject to the 1949 law on protecting minors. The two authors soon settled on the Gauls: in 1960s France, in the throes of decolonisation, “our ancestors, the Gauls” was still the inaugural history lesson learnt by all young schoolchildren (Bourdon 2017). And no humorous series had as yet exploited this field. The two authors, who had a complex relationship with their French identity—Goscinny, who was born in Paris but grew up in Buenos Aires, thought France seemed a “fabulous and exotic country where we went on holiday–Nanterre and the Deux-Sèvres were Timbuktu” (Guillaume 1987, 17), while Uderzo was born into a family of Italian immigrants— thus set about exploring, via Astérix, a central myth of French history. As Nicolas Rouvière has shown, their sharp-humoured reading of Gaulish history, based around a village which “still holds out against the invaders”, is deeply linked to De Gaullian ideology (Rouvière 2006). It must

2 Idem, p. 115. 3 Astérix, journal exceptionnel, Les éditions Albert René, 1994.

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be admitted that the myth of Gaulish origins has always been ideologically laden. When Prussia defeated France in 1870, this myth was central to reaffirming downtrodden French identity (Venayre 2013). In 1960s France, the parallel with the myth of France as the land of resistance (Rousso 1987) was transparent, and writing in L’Express Jean-Noël Gurgand, unwittingly inaugurating the tradition of culturalist readings of bande dessinée, suggested that Goscinny and Uderzo’s series parodied de Gaulle’s act of resistance (Gurgand 1967). The series coincided with de Gaulle’s presidency and the accompanying upheavals (the end of the Algerian war, leaving NATO, and Franco-German reconciliation), and explicitly addressed resistance and fierce independence.

The Triumph of the 48-Page Colour Hardback Format As mentioned previously, the success of Astérix is often attributed to the role played by Pilote as the crucible for adult comics (Aeschimann and Nicoby 2015). Yet the series’ success far exceeded the pages of a children’s magazine. At a time when magazines had a print run ranging from 150,000 (Le Journal de Spirou) to 450,000 (Le Journal de Mickey),4 by the mid-1960s Astérix albums were topping an initial print run of one million copies. This was a major upheaval which redefined the equilibria in the comics field, even though it took two decades for the consequences to fully transpire. To appreciate its significance, we need first to see how albums became the new standard for bande dessinée. In the nineteenth century, comics started out as a book form (Smolderen 2009; Filliot 2011), before switching firmly to children’s press at the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, comics were overwhelmingly a press phenomenon (Boillat et al. 2016). The most popular series were sometimes published as a book compilation at Christmas time, but this was in all respects marginal, and bande dessinée marched to the (essentially weekly) rhythm of the press. In the early 1950s, this started to change when certain press publishers started to build up a catalogue of albums drawn from their press titles.

4 Wendy Michallat mentions a print run of 310,000 copies per week in 1963 (Michallat 2018, 84), which represents “the nadir of the magazine’s fortunes” (Michallat 2018, 93).

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Dupuis, a press publisher since the 1930s, thus sought to move into the book trade in the 1950s with albums taken from the Journal de Spirou. Likewise, Le Lombard, founded by Raymond Leblanc to publish Le Journal de Tintin, soon spotted the commercial potential of these albums. It entailed minimal risk, after all: the series had already been published in the magazine’s pages, where they had carved out a readership. Surveys conducted each year in the pages of these magazines precisely measured the popularity of a given series, thus making it possible to gauge its commercial potential. In gradually placing albums at the heart of their publishing policy, Dupuis and Le Lombard opened up new ways of reading bande dessinée. Instalments of one or two pages with a week’s wait between episodes were replaced by a format to be read in one go and which encouraged rereading. Loose plots improvised over the course of the weeks gradually gave way to more carefully constructed narratives. It was within this context that the role of the scriptwriter emerged. Goscinny took over the script for the Lucky Luke series as of 1955–1956, even though he was only credited for this work years later. Indeed, it was one of the singularities of bande dessinée that professional identities were built around the figure of the author, paradoxically transposed to the artist, and not the writer—despite an entrenched logocentric tradition in France. When Goscinny and Uderzo launched Astérix, the shift from press to book format was already well under way; but it was Astérix which crystallised and accelerated this change. As we have already seen, though Astérix was a publishing phenomenon, the series originated in illustrated magazines for children. Astérix et les Normands thus provides an observatory for apprehending the changes under way in bande dessinée in the mid-1960s, boosted by the success of Astérix. Pilote was launched in 1959 by a group of entrepreneurs, then bought by Dargaud in December 1960 for the token price of one franc. Georges Dargaud had started out in advertising, before investing in the popular press after the Second World War (La Mode du tricot, Le Chic de Paris, Rustica, etc.). His masterstroke came in 1947, when he acquired the French rights to the Belgian weekly Tintin. He also obtained the rights to the first Le Lombard albums, thus circumventing the rigours of the 1949 law on foreign publications for minors.5 These albums were strictly

5 This did not include the Tintin albums, published by Casterman.

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identical to those published by Le Lombard, but were brought out under the Dargaud imprint, thus allowing the punctilious censors to view them as French books. One year after purchasing Pilote, Dargaud launched a collection of albums published under the same name: these were modelled on the format adopted by the competition, namely 48-page colour hardbacks, halfway between Le Lombard’s luxury albums and Dupuis’s more affordable ones. Every year, following an identical layout, Dargaud produced an album in the Barbe Rouge, Michel Tanguy, and Astérix le Gaulois series (see Fig. 4.2). But albums were as yet only a secondary component in a collection’s economy, based primarily on the press, as very clearly indicated by the name chosen for the collection, identical to that of the magazine. In the publishing economy of the early 1960s, the book was still the adjunct to a narrative designed by and for the press. It was precisely this bande dessinée ecosystem that Astérix upended. Initially, the print runs of the first Astérix albums (6000, then 15,000 copies) placed it in the periodicals-based comics economy; the print runs

Fig. 4.2 Ad published in Pilote no. 111 (12/7/1961), p. 8

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for La Serpe d’Or (1962, Ast érix and the Golden Sickle,) and Astérix chez les Goths (1963, Asterix and the Goths ) were very close to those of Le Lombard at the time. Georges Dargaud, who on launching the first Astérix title was aware of how Le Lombard had marketed its albums over the previous decade, clearly drew inspiration from this example to gauge his collection’s commercial potential. Over the course of the decade, Georges Dargaud adopted an increasingly tight publishing schedule. While sixteen months elapsed between the weekly instalments in Pilote and the publication of La Serpe d’or in book form, this dropped to eight months for Le Combat des chefs (Ast érix and the Big Fight ), then to just four or six months. This accelerating schedule stemmed from an ambitious commercial strategy to cash in on the series’ success through book sales. In parallel to this, the print runs shot up. For the first volume in the series, Astérix le Gaulois (Ast érix the Gaul ), only 6000 copies had been printed; six years later, over one million copies were printed of Astérix chez les Normands. When we look at the print runs, we may detect three main stages in short succession (see Fig. 4.3). In 1963–1964, Dargaud decided to reprint the first three volumes and to expand the initial print run of the fourth volume, to an ambitious 60,000 copies, at a time when the allcategory publishing average was 15,265 copies for a new publication and 21,402 for a children’s book. One year earlier, Les bijoux de la Castafiore (The Castafiore Emeralds ) had come out with 200,000 copies,6 but this was the seventh volume in the series (seventh given that the first volume; Tintin au pays des Soviets [Tintin in the Land of the Soviets ] was no longer part of the catalogue), which was already in its thirty-fourth year. The decision to publish two albums in the same year, 1965, marked a change in scale, with a strategy to saturate media space and bookstores, and 1963 had seen the first reprints. In 1965, the first five volumes were reprinted twice, while Astérix et Cléopâtre (Astérix and Cleopatra) was reprinted thrice. The print-run figures for 1966, the year when the “Astérix phenomenon” exploded, are fairly eloquent in that regard (see Fig. 4.4). Within this single year, 3.6 million albums were printed in all. Although this does not directly tell us what the sales figures were, it gives a precise idea of the series’ huge popularity. With so many books in place in stores, backed up by advertising, it is hardly surprising that the media

6 Casterman archives, manufacture notes, July–September 1963.

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Fig. 4.3 Initial print run of the Asterix series, 1961–1979 (data extracted from the Dépôt légal records, Archives nationales / BnF)

picked up on it, from L’Express through to the New York Times (Riding 1996). The following year, 1967, two albums were printed with a run of over one million copies: Astérix et les Normands (1.2 million) and Astérix légionnaire (Asterix the Legionary, 1 million copies). A milestone had been reached, and though print runs continued to rise, further increases were incremental. Print runs never subsequently dropped below the one million mark, with a first peak at 1.5 million copies for Astérix chez les Belges (1979, Asterix in Belgium), the last album to be written by René Goscinny, published shortly after his death. The two-million mark was breached in 1991, with La Rose et le Glaive (Asterix and the Secret Weapon), then the three-million mark in 2005 with Le ciel lui tombe sur la tête (Asterix and the Falling Sky). In the meantime, the two authors’ quarrel with Dargaud, then the death of René Goscinny, impacted massively on production. Though envisaged when Goscinny was still alive, the shift over to self-publication only occurred after his death, overseen by Uderzo who founded the Éditions Albert-René. Uderzo continued the creative and publishing work accomplished with Goscinny. Additionally, before his death in 2020, Uderzo laid plans for the series to continue, handing

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Album Title

First print run

Reprint

Le combat des chefs

200,000

400,000

Astérix chez les Bretons

400,000

500,000

Astérix le Gaulois

350,000

La serpe d’or

350,000

Astérix et les Goths

350,000

Astérix gladiateur

350,000

Le tour de Gaule d’Astérix

350,000

Astérix et Cléopâtre

350,000

Total

600,000

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3,000,000

Fig. 4.4 Astérix series print runs in 1966, according to Dépôt légal archives

over the creative reins to the pair formed by Jean-Yves Ferry and Didier Conrad, and selling his publishing house to Hachette, the largest French publisher which thereby got hold of a particularly profitable asset. Over the past half-century, Astérix has enjoyed consistent and tremendous success, topping French publications, racking up over 375 million sales worldwide, and with translations into over one hundred languages. While the earliest translations date back to the 1960s (into Portuguese, English, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian, and so on), the tempo picked up in the 1970s, with translations into non-European languages: Japanese (1974), Afrikaans (1975), Persian (1977), Hebrew (1980), and Arabic (1980) (Cros 2018). The 1970s also saw Astérix translated into many regional languages: Basque and Breton (1976), Valencian (1976), and Frisian (1978), a movement which accelerated in the 1990s, with a whole series into German languages (Swabian, Colognian, Limburgish, Palatine, Bavarian, etc.). Despite being highly idiosyncratic, Astérix is the topselling French series worldwide, as if its models of cultural resistance to the invader could be mobilised in very different contexts.

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The Construction of a Media Phenomenon Astérix thus partook in the industrialisation of bande dessinée albums. However, albums were only one way of accessing Goscinny and Uderzo’s work. One of the particularities of the Astérix series is that it pursued, from the outset, a transmedia strategy. By the late 1950s, record players and transistors had become common consumer items with a massive presence in families, thus acting as vectors for youth-oriented mass culture. Listening to the radio and records became a personal activity, facilitating a new relation to sound culture (Fesneau 2011). Astérix is no doubt one of the first comics heroes to have left the printed page behind and simultaneously invested several different media. In the United States, the radio series broadcast by the Mutual Broadcasting System in the 1940s had done much to enhance the popularity of Superman, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and had shaped many of his characteristics (such as kryptonite, introduced in 1943 when an actor fell ill) (Scivally 2007). Radio and records likewise played a key role with Astérix. In the 1960s, records spearheaded the popularisation of Astérix, before the ORTF TV series started broadcasting in summer 1966. Dargaud’s strategy was based on the idea that comics needed to be promoted via media other than print. Records and adaptations for radio and cinema soon accompanied the work created for Pilote. To understand this multimedia positioning of Astérix, we need to go over the adventure-packed origins of Pilote. The people behind Pilote worked in the world of radio and advertising: François Clauteaux, a former advertising manager with L’Oréal and father of a child advertising star, Rodolphe, and Jean Hébrard, an advertising broker with World Press, where he met Jean-Michel Charlier, René Goscinny, and Uderzo, who all worked for the company. When Georges Troisfontaines fired Goscinny in 1956, the latter moved into advertising, joined by Charlier, Uderzo, and Hébrard. Jeannot, then Clairon and Pistolin were all used to help sell chocolate, pasta, or cereal brand via tokens to be collected. It was this team which designed a magazine initially intended as a spin-off from a popular RadioLuxembourg programme. In 1963, the writers Jean-Michel Charlier, and René Goscinny took over Pilote, partly founding the myth that it was a different type of publication, an authors’ magazine, explaining why it gave an opening to a new generation of artists. But it was only at a late stage

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that creators took charge, as Wendy Michallat points out in her detailed account of how the editorial line took a while to settle down (Michallat 2018, 81–106). In the meantime, Dargaud had already launched an across-the-board diversification strategy to boost his magazine’s impact and put it on a firmer financial footing. In October 1960, the first radio adaptation of Astérix was broadcast on Radio-Luxembourg, at the same time as Michel Tanguy and Le Démon des Caraïbes, about a jet pilot, a privateer, and his pirate father. This Pilote programme was suspended on 11 February 1965, but in 1966 another adaptation was broadcast as a series on France-Inter , the most prominent radio station of the moment, with Roger Carel and Jacques Morel performing the voices of Astérix and Obélix.7 In 1961, Festival released a record of Astérix le Gaulois, a few months before the album was published by Dargaud. Similarly, in 1962, La Serpe d’or was released as a record at the same time as it was published as an album. The records, like the albums, were presented as a “story from the Pilote magazine”. This provided a way of situating the work and tying it to the magazine, and so building a media network linking the magazine, record, and book. The case was entirely different concerning Astérix, Le menhir d’or (1967) (see Fig. 4.5). This followed a unique path since it was a record made from an original script by Goscinny and Uderzo, which was only published as an album in 2020. This record, released by Philips, had a carefully selected cast, particularly, for the role of Astérix, entrusted to Roger Carel, who went on to perform the voice for the animated films. The idea of making a record from an original script at the very moment when the “phenomenon” was exploding shows that the print album did not have the magical status it does today. The series was also soon adapted as animated films seen as an essential tool for conquering foreign markets. Two films were initially made amidst the Astérix craze, in 1967 (Astérix le Gaulois ) and 1968 (Astérix et Cléopâtre). Both were produced by Belvision founded by Leblanc, and were (fairly flat) adaptations of the script developed by Goscinny and

7 These adaptations fed media curiosity, while relaying the increasing media coverage of Astérix. For instance, on 2 July 1966, two months before Astérix appeared on the cover of L’Express, a programme called “Micros et cameras” ran a 15-min slot on sound effects for Astérix, with an interview of Goscinny (but not Uderzo), with discussion alternating between the bande dessinée pages and sound demonstrations.

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Fig. 4.5 René Goscinny et Albert Uderzo, Astérix. Le Menhir d’or, Paris, Philips, 1967

Uderzo in the albums. After these initial experiments, Les douze travaux d’Astérix (1976) was a more elaborate product. Goscinny and Uderzo then founded the Idéfix studios, with Georges Dargaud. Although Astérix le Gaulois had been made without consulting the authors, they were now partners. The Idéfix production studio, in which they invested much time and money, sought to produce better quality works than the first two films, drawing on better material and better illustrators and technicians. As Pascal Ory observes about the studio in his biography of Goscinny:

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Though short lived (four years), this should not hide its almost historic importance, acknowledged only by professionals, who are not about to forget the outstanding opportunity given to them. As one of them later said: “Few people know that in creating Idéfix, Goscinny and Uderzo did as much to revolutionise French animation as they had to revolutionise bande dessinée”. (Ory 2007, 213)

Raymond Leblanc, Georges Dargaud, and René Goscinny shared the same dream: drawing on the bande dessinée catalogue to found a new European cinema of animated films to rival American heavyweights such as Disney and Hanna-Barbera. And indeed, the catalogue of albums published by Dargaud and Le Lombard provided a treasure house of stories to be exploited. So there was a progressive shift from the world of print publication towards engaging with new media. From this point of view, the period 1967 (La Grande Traversée) to 1976 (Les douze travaux) stands out as a watershed in Astérix publishing. Ten years after having upended the comics market by breaking through the threshold of 1 million copies, books had become just one product among others, and no longer stood at the heart of the Astérix system. By this stage, the official albums brought out by Dargaud were no longer the sole publications, as there were an increasing number of advertising variants on the Astérix universe: advertising editions of Astérix et les Normands in 1967 (for Solonia fertilisers) and in 1972 (for Elf oil), the publication in 1970 of a compilation of unpublished texts, under the title Astérix à Romainville, for Pelletier biscuits, and so on. To this one could add the publication from 1972 to 1974 of 16 fourteen-page albums for children, called Idéfix, la mascotte d’Astérix et d’Obélix, the publication from 1971 to 1974 of 3 pop-up books, and the 1973 publication of 18 mini-albums (24 pages, 13.5 × 15.5 cm), given to clients of Elf petrol stations, and containing pages already published in albums. More broadly, Les douze travaux d’Astérix signals a complete reversal: unlike the two earlier adaptations (from the book to the film), it was the film which was adapted as books, with an album of illustrations drawn from the animated film and a series of mini-albums. It was not illustrations by Uderzo which were published, but photos from the Idéfix studios. This marked a change in paradigm. Astérix had become a transmedia work (Jenkins 2006), equally at home on records or on film, on cheese boxes or in albums, in games books, in mini-albums, and so on. And so after having radically transformed the comics publishing landscape by placing

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books at the heart of its ecosystem, Astérix went on to expand far beyond the printed page.

´ for Adults Astérix and Bande dessinee In addition to the capacity of the Astérix series to redefine the bande dessinée publishing ecosystem, it also represented a decisive step towards the advent of a bande dessinée “for adults”. It was only in the 1980s that the category of “adult bande dessinée” appeared in publishing statistics and prizes at the Angoulême festival. When analysing changes to the “bande dessinée field” in 1975, Luc Boltanski dated the appearance of the first “magazine for adults” to 1964, with the launch of Chouchou. For Luc Boltanski, the shift in readership initially concerned older teenagers and young adults with spare time on their hands, whom he called “new adolescents” acting as cultural intermediaries via their prolonged years in the expanding education system (Boltanski 1975). In addition to the emergence of comics fandom (see this chapter), recognition of the “Astérix phenomenon” confirmed it was now commonplace for adults to read comics; L’Express emphasised the levels of reading open to informed readers: “Did not the French of 1966 recognise their own self-image in these indomitable, brave, fierce, stubborn, quarrelsome Gauls, always ready for a feast and to joke around?”.8 Many observers between the early 1960s and mid-1970s noted the existence of an adult comics readership. This observation has been taken up and incorporated into the popular history of comics, in which the 1960s are viewed as a landmark period in the emergence of adult bandes dessinées. However, the idea that a “bande dessinée for adults” was built up in the mid-1960s is largely a myth. First, there are no reliable sources on comics readership before the early 1980s. It is thus hazardous to posit a fundamental cultural shift given that we do not truly know who read comics on either side of this symbolic watershed of the mid-1960s. Additionally, adult comics undoubtedly existed well before the 1960s: an adult readership was thus not solely the future of bande dessinée, or its past (of satirical productions in the nineteenth century), but also its present. As Harry Morgan observes:

8 Anonymous, “Le phénomène Astérix”, L’Express, 19 September 1966.

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Reducing pre-1968 bande dessinée to the world of childhood is only possible if it is reduced to the sole domain of illustrated magazines for children which flourished as of the early 20th century. In which case the “shift to adults” does not designate the invention of a more evolved form of bande dessinée […] but the acknowledgement that, at a certain moment, children’s literature (the sole recognised for bandes dessinées ) managed to propose works that could be read by people of all ages […], and that among the major magazines for children one of them [Pilote] gradually addressed an older public (of students and high-school students rather than middle-school and primary-school pupils). (Morgan 2003, 164)

Comics were commonplace in the general press—still largely overlooked by historians—and read by adults. And a whole series of specialised publications-targeted adult readers, particularly via small format publications. In Belgium, the Héroïc-Albums sought “to please not only teenagers, but to present realist illustrated stories which are as artistic as possible and unencumbered by any ridiculously childish spirit”.9 There were many forms of comics for adults during the post-war years, which were still prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. They are, however, little known, for they belong to the large galaxy of forms not accredited by enthusiasts and historians of the ninth art. In other words, the path of respectability, and hence heritagisation, necessarily involved illustrated magazines and albums, the two media initially privileged by illustrated stories for children. This is where Astérix played a central role. Astérix represents the stage when adults could admit that they read comics. Does this have something to do with the many references to school culture, the mocking staging of French society, and the play on stereotypes? These no doubt have something to do with it. Thanks to the gentle irony of its authors, Astérix triggers different types of reading, based on knowing the codes of literary culture, political current affairs, and social debates. But it is no doubt excessive to view the “Astérix phenomenon” as the moment when comics opened up to an adult readership. The legitimisation of bande dessinée, which involved affirming an adult dimension to the medium elevated to the rank of an art form, was thus accompanied by a strategic blindness to adult bande dessinée reading practices prior to the 1960s. The term “adult” here in fact refers

9 An excerpt from the editor’s wishes for 1951, quoted in Thierry Martens, Le journal de Spirou, 1938–1988: cinquante ans d’histoire(s), Marcinelle, Dupuis, 1988, p. 59.

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to a socio-generational category, that of educated adult men, as Luc Boltanski’s article suggests almost accidentally in its discussion of shifts in readership: Without losing its traditional public–children, working class adults, and “parents” from the middle classes, who “borrow” their children’s bandes dessinées and consume them in a playful and distant manner characteristic of how the cultivated classes relate to symbolic goods deprived of legitimacy–bande dessinée, a bit like B-movie cowboy, detective, or “swordand-sandal” films in the 1950s, is nowadays acquiring a new public with new dispositions such as to modify how they relate to it. (Boltanski 1975, 40)

In Boltanski’s Bourdieusian analysis of how the comics field is structured, adult readers are divided into cultural minors, that is, working-class parents incapable of distanced reading, and middle-class adults capable of cultural distancing which they apply to their children’s books. Unlike Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy which postulates oblique forms of consumption of delegitimised cultural goods (Hoggart 1957), Boltanski views critical reading as the preserve of the educated classes, thus illustrating the difficulties French sociology has in integrating tools developed by cultural studies (Pasquier 2005). The existence of comics specifically for an adult readership that could be appropriated in various ways by readers of varying competence was not envisaged before the mid-1960s by Luc Boltanski, who seized on the agenda of those calling for the legitimisation of the ninth art, while at the same time deciphering its stances. The extent to which an adult comics readership had been extensively downplayed was in itself a key signal. The appearance of the “adult bande dessinée” as a distinct category is indicative of the conditions of the groups of authors, readers, and critics who used this generational label as a way of constructing the dignity of the ninth art. The move to legitimise bande dessinée took two parallel paths, the first asserting its status as the (ninth) art, through exhibitions, reprints, and other events, and the second arguing for the intrinsic qualities of bande dessinée on the grounds of the distinction of its readers. This desire to legitimise comics by its readers comes across clearly in the fans’ grey literature. Thus Pierre Couperie draws on the statistics of the young Club des bandes dessinées to mock the determinism of Fredric Wertham presenting

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the reading of comics as an irrefutable factor in the propagation of crime and violence (see Chapter 2) (Couperie 1962, 10). However, while arguing that adults could read comics in nonpathological ways, the early fans particularly prized those they had read as children, viewing the series they had read in magazines in the 1930s as canonical. They thereby presented themselves as facilitating the birth of an adult bande dessinée. And while the intellectual construct of a shift to an adult readership was largely artificial, these 1960s enthusiasts nevertheless played a key role in the emergence of publishing for adults. Or to put it differently: if there is a bande dessinée “for adults”, it came about via the market structure in which adult readers were a specific market segment—a market in which Astérix, as I have shown, played a central role. Thus the appearance of an adult bande dessinée, or a bande dessinée for adults, taken together with the appearance of the category as a separate statistical segment in French publishing, raises a central question about changes to publishing forms: that of the role played by books in the emergence of legitimised adult modes of readings, and, simultaneously, that of the effect these presumed adult modes of reading had on the emergence of new formats. The two are intimately connected: the discursive construction of an adult readership for comics expanded the possibilities for authors and publishers who, in the 1960s and 1970s, were fundamentally transforming the bande dessinée landscape. The colossal success of Astérix necessarily amplified this trend, opening up new perspectives for several generations of creators.

References Aeschimann, Éric, and Nicoby. 2015. La Révolution Pilote. Paris: Dargaud. Boillat, Alain, Françoise Revaz, Marine Borel, and Raphaël Oesterlé. 2016. Case, strip, action ! Les feuilletons en bandes dessinées dans les magazines pour la jeunesse (1946–1953). Gollion, Suisse: Infolio. Boltanski, Luc. 1975. La constitution du champ de la bande dessinée. Actes De La Recherche En Sciences Sociales 1 (1): 37–59. https://doi.org/10.3406/ arss.1975.2448. Bourdon, Étienne. 2017. La forge gauloise de la nation: Ernest Lavisse et la fabrique des ancêtres. Lyon: ENS Éditions. Couperie, Pierre. 1962. Résultats du référendum. Giff-Wiff 3–4 (décembre). Cros, Bernard. 2018. Du village d’Astérix au village global: historique de cinquante ans de succès. In Le tour du monde d’Astérix, édité par Bertrand

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Richet, 19–38. Monde anglophone. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle. http://books.openedition.org/psn/6991. Fesneau, Elvina. 2011. Le poste à transistors à la conquête de la France: la radio nomade, 1954–1970. Bry-sur-Marne: INA Éditions. Filliot, Camille. 2011. La bande dessinée au siècle de Rodolphe Töpffer: catalogue commenté des albums et feuilletons publiés à Paris et à Genève, de 1835 à 1905. Toulouse 2. http://www.theses.fr/s34211. Guillaume, Marie-Ange. 1987. Goscinny. Les Auteurs par la bande. Paris: Seghers. Gurgand, Jean-Noël. 1967. Le phénomène Astérix. L’Express, 19 septembre 1967. Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Martens, Thierry. 1988. Le journal de Spirou, 1938–1988: cinquante ans d’histoire(s). Marcinelle: Dupuis. Michallat, Wendy. 2018. French Cartoon Art in the 1960s and 1970s: Pilote Hebdomadaire and the Teenager Bande Dessinée. Studies in European Comics and Graphic Novels 6. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Morgan, Harry. 2003. Principes des littératures dessinées. Essais. Angoulême: Éd. de l’An 2. Ory, Pascal. 2007. Goscinny, 1926–1977: La liberté d’en rire. Paris: Perrin. Pasquier, Dominique. 2005. La « culture populaire » à l’épreuve des débats sociologiques. Hermès, La Revue 42 (2): 60–69. Philippsen, Christian. 1985. Uderzo : De Flamberge à Astérix. Paris: Philippsen. Picaud, Carine, éd. 2013. Astérix de A à Z . Paris/Malakoff: BnF/Hazan. Riding, Alan. 1996. Asterix, France’s Superman and Ego. The New York Times, 15 octobre 1996, sect. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/15/ books/asterix-france-s-superman-and-ego.html. Rousso, Henry. 1987. Le Syndrome de Vichy : 1944–198... XXe siècle. Paris: Seuil. Rouvière, Nicolas. 2006. Astérix ou Les lumières de la civilisation. Partage du savoir. Paris: PUF/Le Monde. Scivally, Bruce. 2007. Superman on Film, Television, Radio and Broadway. McFarland. Smolderen, Thierry. 2009. Naissances de la bande dessinée: De William Hogarth à Winsor McCay. Bruxelles: Les Impressions nouvelles. Venayre, Sylvain. 2013. Les origines de la France: Quand les historiens racontaient la nation. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

CHAPTER 5

Sharks, Pirates, and Ghosts. Authorship and the Challenge of Transmedia Storytelling

Abstract Although Tintin sits atop the summit of the comics canon, my choice in this chapter is to approach the matter from an oblique angle by studying Tintin et le lac aux requins, published in 1973. It may seem counterintuitive to select one of the few Tintin albums not drawn by Hergé, but instead an album which reworked the content of an animated film released in cinemas. The period 1964–1975 saw Hergé enter creative decline, having no doubt peaked in Tintin au Tibet (1960) and Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963). Ten years after the latter, only one new Tintin adventure had been published, Vol 714 pour Sydney (1968). Le Lac aux requins typifies the growing permeability between the media used by the cultural industries (magazines, books, films, and games), and the increasingly paradoxical situation in which Hergé and his publisher, Casterman, found themselves: on the one hand, Hergé was being crowned grand master of the ninth art. On the other hand, his infrequent productions obliged his publisher and studio to dream up ever more inventive ways of bringing the character to life. Tintin et le lac aux requins casts a particularly bright light on the tensions in the bande dessinée market, where the aspiration for recognition got caught up in

Tintin and the Lake of Sharks, London: Methuen, 1973. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_5

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the shift in children’s cultural practices and the need to tackle competition from audio-visual media. This tale of pirates and counterfeits is thus, paradoxically, an ideal vantage point for examining the challenges of authorship in the advent of the ninth art. Keywords Authorship · Audio-visual adaptations · Novelisations · Collective creation

Blistering barnacles—what is this about some unknown Tintin adventure? It might seem counterintuitive to select Tintin et le Lac aux requins (1973, Tintin and the Lake of Sharks ) to study how bande dessinée came to be constructed as a fully-fledged category.1 Indeed, the book lies at the junction of apparently irresolvable tensions. On the face of it, a Tintin album would appear to be the most canonical of bandes dessinées. From an early stage, Hergé was portrayed as an unrivalled master, and commentary on his work is so extensive as to make up a sub-field in bande dessinée studies(Roche and Cerbelaud 2014). Within Hergé’s oeuvre itself, nothing is more canonical than the Tintin adventures. Yet Tintin et le Lac aux requins has been relegated, rejected even, for apparently flying in the face of Hergé’s canonisation. Many Tintin fans would contend that it is not an authentic Tintin adventure. Not only is it a novelisation, that is, an adaptation, a version at one remove from the oeuvre—always a suspect undertaking—it is, further, an ambiguous novelisation. Despite lying at the heart of the canon, Tintin et le lac aux requins is thus in the unenviable position of being a simulacrum—a Tintin album, yet not a Tintin album. The interest of Tintin et le Lac aux requins thus lies in its testing the limits. It acts as a borderline case to better apprehend how the bande dessinée market, caught up in a conflict between authorship and the rollout of products across multiple media, underwent radical overhaul over the course of the 1970s.

1 This chapter is based on research on the outstanding Casterman archives held at the Archives de l’État belge, in Tournai. I thank its curator, Bernard Desmaele, and Florian Moine. I have also drawn on the judicious advice of Benoît Glaude and Laurent Gerbier, whom I’d like to thank as well.

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A Tintin Album? When discussing Les Aventures de Tintin, convention dictates that only those albums drawn by Hergé be included, amounting to 24 in all. Among these, Tintin et l’Alph’Art (Tintin and Alph’Art) has a place apart, given that Hergé did not complete it. This is how the works are classified in the bibliographical databases beloved of collectors, be they paper (BDM ) or online databases (www.bedetheque.com and www.bdt heque.com). It is also how Casterman, the publisher,2 proceeds, as does www.tintin.com, the official website of Moulinsart, the limited company which manages Hergé’s work. Wikipedia also lists 24 albums in the “classic” series, including the 22 canonical albums (from Tintin au Congo (Tintin in the Congo) to Tintin et les Picaros (Tintin and the Picaros), hence setting aside the first volume, Tintin au pays des Soviets, long relegated from the official series3 and Tintin et l’Alph’Art, which Hergé left unfinished on his death in 1983). The “Tintin film” albums—those made from live-action films (Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or [1961, Tintin and the Golden Fleece] and Tintin et les Oranges bleus [1964, Tintin and the Blue Oranges ]) and the album adapted from the animated film Tintin et le Lac aux requins (1973)—tend to be treated separately. This seems a matter of common sense of distinguishing between the original work by the master and those issuing from a process of adaptation. Yet if we look in greater detail at the oeuvre, any sharp division between personal work and collective endeavour soon blurs, given Hergé’s extensive reliance on a studio to support various aspects of his creative work after the Second World War. While he had worked on his own during the 1930s, as was the rule at that time, Casterman’s suggestion that all his black-and-white albums be reworked for publication in colour brought about a change in his work method. For this suggestion to be economically viable, Hergé would have to condense the material of his tales, running to over 100 pages, to a standard 62-page format. This entailed revamping the oeuvre, leading Hergé to work with a team of colourists and assistants, the most famous of whom

2 https://www.casterman.com/Bande-dessinee/Collections-series/les-aventures-de-tin tin/les-albums-de-tintin. 3 The album was deemed too controversial by the publisher, despite Hergé’s insistence to reprint the story (Assouline 1996).

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was Edgar P. Jacobs who went on to create the Blake and Mortimer series of albums. The role played by this studio is still largely taboo in the case of Hergé, the master, as if mentioning it might tarnish his aura. For instance, the major exhibition at the Grand Palais in 2016 breathed scarcely a word about this cooperation. For that matter, the publisher’s catalogues introduced any strict division between the two series only gradually. Through to the late 1960s, as bande dessinée fans were erecting their monument in Hergé’s honour, Casterman defined his work on very different grounds to those used in the field of specialist criticism, emphasising the coherence of a product range including Tintin colouring albums, Tintin LPs, and Tintin films (see Fig. 5.1). It was especially as of the 1960s that the series was rolled out as radio programmes and animations, with spin-off products in the form of board games, records, colouring albums, and so on. Yet it was the Tintin film adaptations which reached the widest audience, with previously unpublished adventures such as Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or, directed by Jean-Jacques Vierne in 1961, and Tintin et les Oranges bleus by Philippe Condroyer, released in 1964. In both, the lead was played by the young Jean-Pierre Talbot. Nearly ten years later, Tintin et le Lac aux requins was released, an animated film produced by Belvision and directed by Raymond Leblanc,4 based on an original story by Michel Greg, the editor of the Journal de Tintin who shared many of his ideas with Hergé.5 The album is no doubt one of the least known Tintin stories, and it is worth going over the main lines of the plot. Tintin and Haddock go on holiday to Syldavia, staying in a lakeside villa rented by Professor Calculus. On their way there, they run into Thompson and Thomson,

4 The film is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaLKCC

rwq84. 5 When Hergé lacked inspiration in the late 1950s, he approached Greg for storylines. Greg worked on an abandoned project called Les Pilules (1960), as well as on Tintin et Thermozero, also launched in 1960, which went through a series of graphic scripts before being abandoned. Greg produced the story for the feature film Tintin and the Temple of the Sun, in 1969. It was also Greg who wrote the story of what is no doubt the most ghostlike of Tintins, Tintin et la Société Générale des Minerais, a short film made in 1969 to advertise a Belgian mineral transport company (available at https://tintinomania.com/ tintin-et-la-sgm-video). When Hergé died in 1983, leaving Tintin et l’Alph’Art incomplete, Bob de Moor considered getting Greg to complete the story. On this point, see (Dayez 1999).

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Fig. 5.1 Casterman catalogue, 1966, Tournai, Casterman archives

who are on a secret mission. When flying over the lake, said by the local inhabitants to be “cursed”, their private plane runs into engine trouble, and the pilot bails out, leaving the heroes to their fate. Tintin manages to land the plane, and the group is saved by two Syldavian children, Niko and Nouchka, who come to their assistance. They take them to Calculus’s villa, who reveals his revolutionary new project, “sorts of photocopies in relief” (p. 7). This invention is coveted by “Mr Big”, the “Shark King”, who wants to use the machine to produce forgeries of art works stolen from museums and stored in his underwater hideout beneath Lake Pollishoff. Mr Big steals Calculus’s plans for the invention, has Niko and Nouchka kidnapped, and blackmails Tintin into handing over the professor’s machine. Tintin manages to elude the surveillance of the cook, in the pay of Mr Big, discovers where the art works are stored, and contacts the police, with the help of Bianca Castafiore, whom he meets by chance on a country road. He returns, bringing back the shark-like submarine made by Calculus in a previous album. Tintin, followed by Haddock and

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Snowy in the submarine, heads off to an appointment with the gangsters and discovers that the Shark King is none other than his sworn enemy, Rastapopoulos. Niko and Nouchka escape but are recaptured. Rastapopoulos gets hold of Calculus’s machine, but it runs out of control and starts destroying his underwater lair. With the police patrolling the lake, Rastapopoulos ties up Tintin in his hideout, into which water is flooding, and sets about recuperating the works of art. Tintin and the children manage to escape in the nick of time, just before the hideout is destroyed, and head off in pursuit of Rastapopoulos, whom they capture. The local inhabitants hold a great party to thank Tintin. The plot thus draws on several devices used in the original series: the replacement of one museum object by another (the theft of a pearl in the oceanographic museum, at the beginning of Tintin et le lac aux requins, is reminiscent of the stealing of the Arumbaya fetish in L’Oreille cassée (The Broken Ear)); the encounter with Castafiore on a road in Syldavia (Le Sceptre d’Ottokar (King Ottokar’s Sceptre)); and the use of a miniature submarine, taken from Trésor de Rackham le Rouge (Red Rackham’s Treasure). As is often the case with Hergé, the plot proceeds by building up and reemploying narrative lines begun elsewhere. At the heart of the work is the issue of art, and the question of what is original and what a copy—a question which is in fact central to the status of this book and the issues it raises with regard to the history of bande dessinée. The question reappears for that matter in Alph’Art and was one in which Hergé, an art collector, was keenly interested. As is well known, Hergé was also fascinated by ghosts, and many spectres are to be found throughout his oeuvre, from the phantasmagorias of Tintin au pays des Soviets (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets ) to the hallucinatory dreams in Cigares du pharaon (The Cigars of the Pharaoh) (Fresnault-Deruelle 2017). Here, we are confronted with a different type of ghost, an ectoplasm even—one of Captain Haddock’s favourite insults: a hybrid creation which looks like Tintin, but is a soulless Tintin, lacking his creator’s kiss of life.

Novelisations: A Marketing Strategy Indeed, the album was the result of a series of interventions. Like other Tintin film adaptations, an “album of the film” was brought out. When they were produced in the 1960s, Belvision’s first series of animations based on Hergé’s albums had not been accompanied by any specific

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albums, but by novels illustrated by photos from the film. Admittedly, Hergé did not figure as author of these adaptations, but his status as author of the original series was flagged by a surtitle (“based on Hergé’s characters”), while a medallion depicting the figures of Tintin and Snowy linked up the paper and celluloid worlds. The first series of animated films produced by Belvision in the early 1960s (1959–1964) were adaptations of Hergé’s albums (Couvreur 2013), and so, logically enough, did not give rise to any specific spin-off publications. However, the original works created for the cinema were accompanied by specific albums (see Fig. 5.2). Those of Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or (1962) and Tintin et les Oranges bleues (1965) had a medallion of Tintin and Snowy on the cover, clearly inserting these albums within the multimedia universe of Hergé’s series. However, the heading and the words “based on Hergé’s characters” to be found on the cover of Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or were dropped for the second album. Here, Tintin and Snowy figure more discreetly, Hergé is no longer credited on the cover, the typeface is different, and the three photo vignettes signal a clear departure from the carefully drawn poster covers of Hergé’s albums. Nevertheless, the back cover of each presents the list of Hergé’s albums published by Casterman. These albums are thus clearly presented as part of the overall Tintin series, while offering a different type of reading since the albums reproduce photos from the film accompanied by large chunks of text (Fig. 5.3). But when the album Tintin et le Lac aux requins came out in 1973, the presentation was further removed from Hergé’s series (see Fig. 5.2): neither his name nor that of his original series, Les Aventures de Tintin, featured on the cover, the only reference to which was the name of the hero, Tintin. It was as if Hergé had wanted to distance himself further from this product, explicitly attributed to Greg, and about which Hergé was widely known to be unhappy. Despite these differences, the context to the two adaptations was the same. These transpositions of Tintin to the screen, and the albums taken from the live-action films, were an attempt to extract Casterman from a crisis that was increasingly threatening to engulf it. Casterman, based in Belgium near the French border, was an old provincial publishing house. It was notable for being both a publisher and a printing company and had been handed down from one generation to the next (Moine 2020a). Casterman had long specialised in Catholic works—the company was a papal publisher—and in edifying literature. Hergé had started gathering

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Fig. 5.2 André Barret, Hergé, Tintin et les oranges bleues, Tournai, Casterman, 1965 (cover)

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Fig. 5.3 Greg, Hergé, Tintin et le lac aux requins, Tournai, Casterman, 1973, (cover)

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the serialised Tintin adventures into an album (the Editions du Petit Vingtième publishing house acting as a fig leaf for self-publication), but, following a chance encounter, Casterman started publishing Hergé’s work in 1934. Much of Casterman’s prosperity derived from this venture. After the Second World War, with Casterman having convinced Hergé to switch to colour productions, the business was long based on two pillars: on the one hand, the Farandole collection of albums, which included the famous Martine series about a girl and her dog, and, on the other, Les Aventures de Tintin. Florian Moine has demonstrated just how important Tintin was for Casterman. Starting in the 1960s, Casterman’s reports distinguished between Hergé products and the rest of its children’s catalogue. In the financial year 1969–1970, Hergé’s albums accounted for over one third of its French subsidiary’s turnover, rising to nearly half (45%) in the mid-1970s.6 Hergé products thus had a great influence on the company’s results during this period: for instance, when Tintin et les Picaros came out in 1976, the album accounted for 16% of the publishing arm’s revenue. Additionally, each time a new album came out, this engendered a peak in sales for the series as a whole, a well-known effect for book series. It was thus crucial for Casterman that there be regular additions to the series, both because of the commercial significance for its publishing arm and for the work it generated for its printing house. But Hergé, who had cut his teeth in the press and learnt to provide a new episode every week (or every day when working for dailies), was by now producing less and less. With his career solidly established, Hergé began to question the artistic value of his work, and this slowed down his production. Undoubtedly, these doubts provided the material for the best episodes in Les Aventures de Tintin. As has been well documented, Tintin au Tibet (Tintin in Tibet ) drew on the existential crisis Hergé was going through as he was separating from his first wife (Assouline 1996). But for Casterman, the situation was uncomfortable. Unlike the rival series Astérix, whose creators Goscinny and Uderzo brought out at least one new album per year, Hergé was producing fewer and fewer new works. Coke en stock (The Red Sea Sharks ) was published in 1958, Tintin au Tibet in 1960. There was then a three-year interval before Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963), 6 Moine, “Casterman (1919–1999). Une entreprise du livre, entre Belgique et France”, 348.

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then another five years before Vol 714 pour Sydney (1968). As for the final album to be published during Hergé’s lifetime, it only came out after another eight years had elapsed, in 1976. Bringing out films was thus a way for Casterman to partly compensate for the absence of any new Tintins . Although the albums derived from the films were not really works by Hergé, they provided a way of maintaining Tintin book sales, of presenting new products, and thus of boosting the series as a whole. Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or (1962) was first published during the lapse between Tintin au Tibet (1960) and Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963, The Castafiore Emerald); Tintin et les Oranges bleues appeared between Bijoux de la Castafiore and Vol 714 pour Sydney (1968, Flight 714 to Sydney). As noted by Florian Moine, “the publisher established visual continuity between the novelisations of the films and the Hergé albums”(Moine 2020b, 126). The format and layout of the novelisations’ play on serial similarities to the bande dessinée albums: the covers of the French albums displayed the heads of Tintin and Snowy, the accustomed series logo, and the text banner, Les Aventures de Tintin, to which was simply added “au cinema”. The back cover presents the album alongside the other titles in the series, and the endpapers are identical. The main differences to the classic albums are the reduced number of pages (48, the standard number for bandes dessinées, as against 62 for the Tintin model), and the fact that the author’s name did not appear on the cover. Indeed, on viewing the proofs Hergé insisted that his name be removed.7 However, the novelisations were not purely a matter of generating material to make up for the absence of new Tintin albums to go on sale. They were also part of a broader multimedia strategy, arising from considerations about how traditional publishers were to survive. Indeed, it was mainly over the course of the 1960s that TV reached French households (Gaillard 2012). While barely 10% of homes had a TV in the late 1950s, 62% did by 1968. This rapid change in the media landscape was not without consequences for book publishers. As seen earlier, Dargaud adopted a particularly ambitious multimedia strategy for Astérix, with his adventures appearing on LPs, on the radio, on TV, and at the cinema. In the mid-1960s, Dargaud reaped the benefits of this all-out investment in multiple media when sales topped the symbolic figure of 1 million per album. 7 Archives Moulinsart, letter from Hergé to Louis-Robert Casterman, 23 February 1962, quoted in (Moine 2020b).

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Thus adapting Tintin for the cinema, be it as live-action or animated films, was not purely a response to Hergé’s creative slowdown. It also reflected Casterman’s new position, and indeed that of publishers generally, who were viewing cinema and television as a new sector into which to expand their business. Casterman’s 1968 catalogue illustrates this spectacular about-turn. It depicts children gathered around a TV set watching Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock, and Professor Calculus. (See Fig. 5.4). Strikingly, the image the publisher has chosen to depict itself is of a rival medium. But in presenting children gathered around the TV to watch the paper hero’s adventures on the screen, this catalogue also stages one of the publisher’s fantasies, namely carrying its child readers from the pages of its books over to the TV screen. In this scheme of things, children would gradually drop reading to focus their attention on animated adventures and, if publishers were to safeguard the works on their catalogue, they would be well advised to provide TV variants of their print products. Casterman thus presented its diagnosis of how the child culture industry was shifting and being recomposed with the generalisation of household TVs. Children’s first contact with the bande dessinée might well be via the screen, meaning publishers had to rethink their business and move beyond the paradigm of the printed page.

A Print Version of an Animated Film? In comparison with the two earlier “film albums”, Tintin et le lac aux requins takes a very different form. Le mystère de la Toison d’Or and Les Oranges bleus were live-action films, hence their novelisations took the form of stories illustrated by stills from the film. This was accompanied by copious text to tell the story, which functioned independently of the stills. There was no dialogue between text and image, the stills serving primarily as illustrations. Tintin et le lac aux requins is entirely different, being a sort of a hybrid, marginal form, a sort of para-bande dessinée. In terms of appearance, it is indubitably a bande dessinée: the characters are drawn, the story is divided up into panels, and the dialogues are conducted via speech bubbles. But in focusing on shrinking the material from a one-hour-andthirteen-minute film into just 44 pages, the Hergé studio, which carried out the adaptation, made at times drastic condensations. Was the album meant to be read independently, or as an ancillary–to remember the film?

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Fig. 5.4 Casterman catalogue, 1968 (cover)

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This classic question regarding novelisations is raised particularly acutely here (Glaude 2018). Like most Tintin stories, this album went through a whole series of different versions. Such modifications in the canonic corpus of Hergé adventures are abundantly and minutely documented. Eminent specialists have tracked down the nuances of these versions, together with the processes of rewriting and re-adapting, which for the most part led to the same stories being taken up in different forms. For example, in the case of The Black Island, several successive versions are known to exist: the version published in Le Petit vingtième (“Les nouvelles aventures de Tintin et Milou”),8 that published in Cœurs vaillants (“Tintin et le mystère de l’avion gris”, the title being derived from the adventures starting point, 1938–1939), the 127-page black-and-white album published by Casterman in 1938, the 62-page colour album they published in 1943, and the updated version published in Le Journal de Tintin in 1965 and as an album in 1966, in which the decors had been thoroughly reworked. Each of these versions is well known, thanks especially to the work of Hergé’s various biographers and that of his most attentive exponents, including Philippe Goddin, the official biographer of the Fondation Moulinsart, which manages Hergé’s legacy, (Goddin 2003) and Etienne Pollet, a former editor with Casterman(Pollet 2005). These are only the main alterations. For there are a whole series of minor modifications that are hunted down by Tintin enthusiasts: a change to an end page, a variation in the presentation of the latest published titles, a slight change in the title structure of the hero on the title page— all crucial elements for distinguishing reprints and re-publications from one another, and thus identifying the commercial value of each album. And the financial stakes are indeed considerable. The BDM , the valuation catalogue used by collectors, lists prices varying considerably ranging from the first colour edition of L’Île noire (1943, The Black Island), estimated at e4–5000, to a post-war version published in 1946 estimated at “only” e800, a later edition from the mid-1950s, estimated at e160, dropping to e25 for editions after the late 1960s.9 The various official and unofficial versions of the Lac aux requins are far less well documented. Still, they throw fascinating light on the

8 In the issues of 15 April 1937 and 16 June 1938. 9 Identifying the correct print run has such an impact that the BDM argus always

dedicates a specific section to Tintin albums.

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tensions surrounding Tintin authorship (s). There are several “official” French versions of Tintin et le lac aux requins. A black-and-white comic strip version, reportedly drawn by Hergé’s main assistant, Bob de Moor, appeared in French and Belgian newspapers to coincide with the film’s release. This version was then distributed in the Netherlands as colour pages, in 1973 in Pep magazine, and in 1974 in Televizier magazine. But surprisingly, when Casterman decided to produce “the album of the film” in 1973, it did not reuse this available material. Instead, it opted for the strange and visually disconcerting formula of reusing stills from the film, a strong reminder of the object’s transmedia lineage. We are far removed from clear lines, pure forms focusing on a uniform outline, and plain blocks of colour building up depth. Stylistically, the album collapses three different codes (see Fig. 5.5): the characters present the “clear line” typical of Hergé’s style (Screech 2005); the decor uses stills from the film; and the text, in the form of speech bubbles and banner boxes, are a typographical addition. Why such a seemingly surprising choice? Various documents in the archives indicate that Hergé wished to clearly differentiate it from the stories that bore his name. He thus refused to allow the emblematic blue end pages indicating each album had its place in an overall series, welcoming the reader with a portrait gallery of the characters recurring from one album to the next. It might appear anecdotal: the end pages are indeed still there, but in grey rather than blue. However, this is not some marginal detail, bearing in mind that the original drawing of the preceding end pages, dating from 1937, was auctioned for a record price of e2.5 million (Zennaro 2014).10 . Hergé’s very clear refusal indicates his determination to differentiate the album of the film from the “normal” series. As we have seen, the cover has neither the generic title, “Les Aventures de Tintin et Milou”, nor the little medallion drawn by Hergé. And the author’s name is absent. In addition to not figuring on the cover, Hergé’s name only appears in small type on the title page alongside the name of the producer and scriptwriter. In other words, while Tintin is present and designated on the cover, Hergé was careful to distance this book as far as possible from his own work. To definitively remove any remaining ambiguity, the cover drawing 10 A further indicator of the special value of these pages is the fact that they remain, as of today, one of the items that the Moulinsart estate, which handles Tintin copyrights, categorically refuses to be reproduced.

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Fig. 5.5 Tintin et le lac aux requins, Tournai, Casterman, 1973, p. 5

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showing Tintin is framed by a simulacrum of a reel of film, signalling the cinematographic origins of these printed pages. This notwithstanding, the para-text on the back cover subsumes “Les Aventures de Tintin au cinéma” within the category of “albums d’Hergé”. This precaution is related to the object’s lack of semiotic clarity. In borrowing the narrative device of the albums, Tintin et le lac aux requins is in fact far more misleading: in using video stills from an animated film, presented in panels with the addition of speech bubbles, the work is far more likely to be attributed by its readers to Hergé. In this it differs from La Toison d’Or and Les oranges bleues, albums in which texts are illustrated with photo stills, where there was little risk of such confusion. In other words, Tintin et le lac aux requins presents a clear case of refused authorship, in which several possible definitions of authorship come into play.

Authorship Conflicts For what ultimately makes, Tintin et le lac aux requins an interesting case is the way in which it yokes together different ways of thinking of authorship, hence presenting conflicting ideas about who the author of a bande dessinée was. In the early 1970s, a growing tension emerged between two different figures of the creator. The first was that held by the children’s culture industry: like Dargaud and Lombard, Casterman envisaged multimedia strategies in which the tales were adapted to several different media. In this context, the author was eclipsed by the character and series. Casterman’s “1966 collections” catalogue provides a clear illustration of this representation emphasising the synergies between media (see Fig. 5.1). Tintin is admittedly represented by the covers of Bijoux de la Castafiore and Tintin en Amérique (Tintin in America), but above all by the full-length photo of the actor who played Tintin in the films, Jean-Pierre Talbot, which presents striking parallels with the medallion depicting Hergé, who in turn presents a troubling resemblance with the young Talbot. The photo shows a smiling Hergé holding a telephone receiver, thus suggesting immediate communication between author and readers. The author is not depicted here as an artist, but as the friend of children “aged 7–77”(Kohn 2018). But at the same time, an effort is made to “artify” bande dessinée (Heinich and Shapiro 2012). Two years after the publication of the Tintin et le lac aux requins album, Luc Boltanski published a much

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discussed article about the structure of the field in the first issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, the journal founded by Pierre Bourdieu (Boltanski 1975). In this, Boltanski sets out for the first time, for a relatively circumscribed terrain, an occurrence of Bourdieu’s sociology of fields structured by an opposition between a commercial pole and an artistic pole (Beaty and Woo 2016). Boltanski’s focus is on the avant-garde represented by young authors (Gotlib, Moebius, Fred, etc.) publishing in alternative reviews, with Hergé relegated to the mass market. The main reason for this is the rationalised production methods used by the Hergé studio, a rare example resembling American studiobased production. Yet this was the very period when Hergé was becoming established as one of the key figures in the legitimisation of bande dessinée as the ninth art. Enthusiasts hailed Hergé as the preeminent guardian figure of contemporary Franco-Belgian bande dessinée production. The cultural recognition bestowed on Hergé consecrated him as an author. In the early 1960s, when television started taking an interest in bandes dessinés, few illustrators appeared on screen. As Jessica Kohn has shown, for those that did, “their repeated presence shows that they were the bestknown of the period. Hergé, Uderzo (and Goscinny), sometimes Sempé, Cabu, Morris, or Forest–pretty much the same as those who contributed to fanzines”(Kohn 2018, 390). Hergé was the first illustrator to be filmed for French television, first appearing on Pierre Desgraupes’s famous programme, Cinq colonnes à la une, in 1960 when a “Tintin” animated film was broadcast in the United States. The programme emphasised the man and the artist as opposed to the businessman: When going to visit Hergé–the creator of Tintin– at home, we were expecting to meet a European Walt Disney, a very rich, very busy, very self-confident businessman. We found an elderly young man, who was kind, simple, and spends five days a week in his workshop like an artist.11

This long programme (10 minutes at prime time) considers many aspects of Hergé’s oeuvre, from his studio work to his relation to readers. As the 1960s progressed, illustrators gradually began to appear on the airwaves, with Hergé being a central figure, together with the Goscinny-Uderzo pair, in the emergence of the author as a public figure. 11 “Tintin, version US”, Cinq colonnes à la une, ORTF, 15/01/1960 [online]. URL: http://www.ina.fr/video/CAF93010093/tintin-version-us-video.html.

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This recognition was also conveyed by the specialised bande dessinée press. In 1971, Schtroumpf magazine published a long special dossier about Hergé—so long in fact that it ran over two issues. It included Numa Sadoul’s first published interview with Hergé, under the title Tintin et moi (1975), the basis of further exchanges. Under Sadoul’s questioning, Hergé sets out his ideas about his work as an author, and the interview, which has been regularly republished since, remains a landmark of the genre (Sadoul 1975). Hergé’s albums were, for that matter, systematically dissected in the national press, a privilege shared by few albums other than the Astérix series. From an early stage, intellectuals examined his work, such as Michel Serres, who in 1970 published an analysis of Bijoux de la Castafiore in the prestigious journal Critique (Serres 1970). On becoming minister of the interior, Michel Poniatowski envisaged his role, somewhat paradoxically, along the lines of Hergé’s reporter, proclaiming, on taking up his role as “number one cop in France”, “neither Tarzan nor Zorro, I wish to be Tintin” (Sarrazin 1977). The 4th Salon de la bande dessinée in Angoulême, in January 1977, provides a spectacular illustration of Hergé’s status. The 1977 festival was marked by a series of catastrophes, but Hergé’s attendance finally established the festival as one of the leading events of its kind, of which there were an increasing number. The local press referred to a “solemn communion”,12 nicely capturing the mechanism by which bande dessinée authors, in the wake of writers and painters, were being granted sacred status. The reason Hergé went to Angoulême was because of an exhibition in his honour staged at the town’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, which, for the occasion, inaugurated the Saint-Ogan gallery to exhibit the first original pages collected by its curator. This gallery, the embryo of the current Angoulême Musée de la bande dessinée, precociously ushered bande dessinée into the field of the consecrated arts, and indeed, the poster depicts Tintin on the verge of entering the museum. Rather than seeking to evoke Hergé’s oeuvre or the characters in the series, it instead chose to portray the museum itself as the central figure. The subject is not so much Hergé or Tintin as their entering the museum (see Fig. 5.6). The recognition of the status of bande dessinée author, and conflict over authorship, transpired above all in parallel yet rival publishing 12 Thus the editorial of La Charente Libre declared: “Angoulême 4 needed to catch its second wind. And Tintin arrived!” (24 January 1977).

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Fig. 5.6 Hergé exhibition poster, Angoulême, 1977

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projects. In 1973 Casterman published the first volume of the Archives Hergé (followed by three further volumes, the last of which came out in 1980), imposing collections in black and white of the “original” versions. This type of publication was unprecedented. Up until then, the heritage had been explored by fans and their associated publications, such as Phénix, launched in 1966, and Charlie, in 1969, which specialised in digging up bande dessinée documents from the past. Subsequently a certain number of small publishers and bookstores moved into this niche. Casterman was the first mainstream publishing house to capitalise on its back catalogue, bringing out Tintin au pays des Soviets, which was no longer available in bookstores. While other stories were added to the thick, costly black-and-white volumes—the stylistic marker of artification—it was the Soviets which justified this undertaking. This seminal text holds a highly ambiguous place in Hergé’s oeuvre (Peeters 2003). Not only are the drawings somewhat sketchy, as is only normal of an illustrator learning his trade on the job, the story is deeply imbued with the reactionary morality weighing on Le Petit Vingtième, the Catholic weekly supplement which commissioned the tale from the young Hergé. Over the course of each weekly instalment, in a disjointed and convoluted storyline, Hergé recounts the tribulations of a reporter in post-revolutionary Russia. He transposes an imaginary derived primarily from an account by the former Belgian consul to Rostov-onDon (Douillet 1928). The tale is ferociously anti-communist—to the point of caricature even—and was never republished by Casterman, even though the Belgian Catholic publisher was hardly a bastion of Bolshevism. The work thus remained wholly unfindable until the 1960s. Consequently, the album started appearing in pirate editions, a matter that cropped up repeatedly throughout the 1960s in relations between Hergé and his publisher. Casterman feared hostile reactions, to which Hergé retorted that the rivalry of pirate editions was unacceptable. Deep down, Hergé had never repudiated his first album. During the 1960 interview for Cinq colonnes à la une, he referred affectionately to Les Aventures de Tintin au pays des Soviets. The unity of his series mattered deeply to Hergé, but he had run up against Casterman’s faint-heartedness, despite its absence of qualms over the unbridled racism and colonialism of Tintin au Congo. The ploy Casterman gradually put in place was to camouflage Tintin au pays des Soviets by grouping it with other texts and thus circumventing the difficulty. It was not a matter of republishing a sulphurous work, but

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of digging up the “archives”, that is, old works of purely documentary— as opposed to intrinsic—interest. Writing in Le Monde, Jacques Goimard referred to this volume as Juvenilia. But in exhuming works of youth in a thick black-and-white volume (running to over 400 pages), Casterman was clearly targeting collectors. Casterman thus focused on two simultaneous targets to sell Tintin: on the one hand, wealthy adult bande dessinée fans for its archive volumes, and, on the other, a youth readership who were (re)discovering Tintin at the cinema. This introduced a distinction and hierarchy which may be detected, for example, on the back cover of Tintin et les Picaros (1976) (Fig. XX). The main series of twenty-two albums is presented alongside other categories: “Les Aventures de Tintin au cinéma”, “Albums-jeux”, the Jo, Zette et Jocko series, Popol et Virginie, and lastly the exploits of Quick et Flupke. But let us return to Tintin et le lac aux requins. The mediocre quality of the album, the result of a deliberate choice by Hergé, paradoxically gave rise to further pirate versions. These were, by their nature, difficult to detect, especially as, after Hergé’s death, Moulinsart kept a very sharp eye on his legacy.13 However, a first pirate edition may be dated to 1988, followed by several others in the twenty-first century. All these pirate editions revert to the version published in Dutch newspapers. Thus unlike the Belvision celluloids, these drawings were made directly by the Hergé studio, that is, his closest associates. When Hergé’s works were being converted to colour, he had been compelled to put together a group of assistants and colourists. Gradually, this took on the structure of a fully-fledged studio, a still relatively little-known fact. The predominant perception of the studio views it as firmly structured around attribution of authorship. Hergé is viewed as having drawn the characters. His assistants might stand in for him on ancillary tasks, but only the master was allowed to bring Tintin to life in the bandes dessinées. At most, his assistants were allowed to draw Tintin for subaltern products, such as the countless ads portraying the character. This refusal to credit Hergé’s associates was a source of recurrent tension. For instance, it was after a refusal to credit

13 Consequently, this section is not based on first-hand analysis of the albums, which I have never been able to consult directly. I have had to make do with digital, and at times incomplete versions, and so my comments obviously advance on weaker ground.

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his work that Jacobs left the studio and set to work on creating Blake et Mortimer.14 Despite its secondary status in the symbolic hierarchy of bande dessinée, the case of Tintin et le Lac aux requins is far from being anecdotal given the extent to which it nuances the artistic myth which has built up around Hergé. To all appearances, the version which was redrawn for publication in black-and-white strips, and colour strips in the Dutch newspapers, was not produced by Hergé—for the simple reason that otherwise Hergé would have published this version. This helps explain the strange choice to reuse the celluloids from the film: if Tintin was to be heterograph, then it would be better were nobody to think Tintin et le lac aux requins had been drawn by Hergé. The formal mediocrity of Tintin et le lac aux requins, the clashing of several juxtaposed semiotic codes (a mechanical typeface, overly painted decors, characters drawn in accordance with the aesthetic of the clear line) is in fact wholly deliberate, justifying its heterographic relegation. Or, to put it differently, the overlapping codes signal the negotiation between various authorship authorities: Hergé, his studio, and his publisher. ∗ ∗ ∗ 1973 was not just the year of publication of these two new products, lying at either end of the spectrum in the legitimisation of bande dessinée. It was also the year when Hergé worked on his most experimental scenario, which was finally never worked up into an album: Un jour d’hiver, dans l’aéroport, which it was meant to be possible to read starting at any page. This marked a radical banking turn, a flight towards an avantgarde that the Picaros clearly repudiated. Picking up where the Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963) had left off, the album was meant to be based on unity of place, and an adventure which never got under way. In other words, in 1973 three different Tintins coexisted: the multimedia Tintin, a product range across different platforms, and with shared authorship; the historical Tintin, an archive product that the publisher

14 One could take this analysis further. As is known, Hergé was sterile and the only family he founded was on paper. Should this refusal to share authorship be seen as a way of protecting his paternity? In the absence of sources, this can only remain a hypothesis (See, Peeters 2003; Tisseron 1985; Apostolidès 2003).

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was working to exhume and fetishise; and, lastly, the experimental Tintin, which though partly realised (in Bijoux de la Castafiore), remained mostly confined to the sketchy thoughts of its creator, wearying of his oeuvre.

References Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. 2003. Tintin et le mythe du surenfant : Essai. Bruxelles: Moulinsart. Assouline, Pierre. 1996. Hergé: Biographie. Paris: Plon. Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. 2016. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books. Palgrave Pivot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Boltanski, Luc. 1975. “La Constitution du champ de la bande dessinée.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1 (1): 37–59. https://doi.org/10.3406/ arss.1975.2448. Couvreur, Daniel. 2013. Belvision : le Hollywood européen du dessin animé. Bruxelles: Le Lombard. Dayez, Hugues. 1999. Tintin et les Héritiers : Chronique de l’après-Hergé. Paris/Bruxelles: Félin/Pire. Douillet, Joseph. 1928. Moscou sans voiles: neuf ans de travail au pays des Soviets. Paris: Spes. Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. 2017. Les rêves de Tintin: entre métaphores et métamorphoses. Chêne-Bourg: Georg. Gaillard, Isabelle. 2012. La Télévision : histoire d’un objet de consommation. Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques - CTHS. Glaude, Benoît. 2018. “Tintin dans le roman : un corpus entre littérature et bande dessinée.” Les Lettres Romanes 72 (1–2): 75–94. https://doi.org/10. 1484/J.LLR.5.116232. Goddin, Philippe. 2003. Hergé : chronologie d’une œuvre. Tome 4, 1939–1943. Bruxelles: Moulinsart. Heinich, Nathalie, and Roberta Shapiro, eds. 2012. De l’artification: enquêtes sur le passage à l’art. Paris: EHESS. Kohn, Jessica. 2018. “Travailler dans les Petits Mickeys. Les dessinateursillustrateurs en France et en Belgique (1945–1968).” Thèse de doctorat en histoire, Paris III. This work was published in 2022 as Dessiner des Petits Mickeys. Une histoire sociale de la BD en France et en Belgique (1945-1968). Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. Moine, Florian. 2020a. “Casterman (1919–1999). Une entreprise du livre, entre Belgique et France.” Thèse de doctorat en histoire, Paris: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

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———. 2020b. “La novellisation dans la stratégie transmédiale de Casterman (années 1960 - années 1980).” In Les novellisations pour la jeunesse. Nouvelles perspectives transmédiatiques sur le roman pour la jeunesse, edited by Benoît Glaude and Laurent Déom, 123–41. Louvain-la-neuve: AcadémiaL’Harmattan. Peeters, Benoît. 2003. Hergé : Fils de Tintin. Paris: Flammarion. Pollet, Étienne. 2005. L’Île noire. Dossier Tintin. Bruxelles: Casterman. Roche, Olivier, and Dominique Cerbelaud. 2014. Tintin, bibliographie d’un mythe. Bruxelles: les Impressions nouvelles. Sadoul, Numa. 1975. Tintin et moi. Tournai: Casterman. Sarrazin, James. 1977. “Tintin et la police.” Le Monde, April 1, 1977. https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1977/04/01/tintin-et-lapolice_2858549_1819218.html. Screech, Matthew. 2005. Masters of the Ninth Art : Bandes Dessinées and FrancoBelgian Identity. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Serres, Michel. 1970. “Les Bijoux distraits ou la cantatrice sauve.” Critique, (277) (June). Tisseron, Serge. 1985. Tintin chez le psychanalyste : Essai sur la création graphique et la mise en scène de ses enjeux dans l’œuvre d’Hergé. Paris: Aubier; Archimbaud. Zennaro, Franck. 2014. “2,5 millions d’euros pour une planche de Tintin !” Connaissance des Arts, May 26, 2014. https://www.connaissancedesarts. com/arts-expositions/25-millions-deuros-pour-une-planche-de-tintin-113 449/.

CHAPTER 6

Futuropolis: A Hub for Independent Bande Dessinée and a Crucible for New Formats

Abstract This chapter looks at three books published simultaneously by the Futuropolis bookstore in 1974: Calvo, Gir, and Tardi. The store, which had recently opened, had become one of the key forums for the heritage of the ninth art. It had been bought by a couple of young designers, Étienne Robial and Florence Cestac, who moved into publishing. From this point of view, 1974 marked a watershed in the history of fandom: the market was maturing enough for expensive arty books to go on sale in generalist bookstores, as opposed to reprints circulating among crusading enthusiasts as had previously been the case. The first three titles clearly signalled Futuropolis’ cultural ambitions: first the republication of a “forgotten” master, Calvo, followed by the publication of works by two young authors: Tardi and Gir who were mutating from his identity as Jean Giraud to that of Moebius, his alter ego. The outsize formats reveal the publishing house’s singular vision of the future of comics: Futuropolis’ books were radically different from the forms inherited from children’s albums, seeking both to promote the authorial identity of the artists and to impose a unique visual identity. Keywords Bookshops · Alternative comics · Heritage · Graphic design · Authorship

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_6

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In 1974, a team of young booksellers of old bandes dessinées moved into publishing. Within the space of a few months, they brought out three large format paperback albums: first a compilation of episodes from the series created by the author Edmond-François Calvo, who had died over fifteen years earlier, then a story by Gir, and lastly a recent work by Jacques Tardi. These three albums, Calvo, Gir, and Tardi, published under the Futuropolis imprint, were not just the opening steps in a publishing venture which changed the course of bande dessinée. They also represent the change taking place in French publishing in the mid-1970s. Coming just a few years after foundational texts by Barthes and Foucault revisiting traditional ideas about the author, these albums illustrate the role played by editors in redefining authorship (Licari-Guillaume 2017; Gray and Wilkins 2016). Very few publishing houses have conserved archives allowing scholars to retrace their history. The archives conserved by Étienne Robial, now held by the Cité de la bande dessinée in Angoulême,1 though not exhaustive, are coherent and correctly tagged. And working on archives, backed up by interviews with those involved in the period, makes it possible to move beyond conventional ideas and retrospective reconstructions. But in addition to this purely practical aspect, it is above all its position as a hub for alternative bande dessinée publishing which makes Futuropolis interesting. Through its capacity to combine the promotion of legacy works, the consecration of new masters, and the discovery of young authors, while proposing works of unprecedented formal quality, Futuropolis embodied a new idea of alternative publishing. The success of the company may partly be measured by its catalogue (with a little under 300 titles published in the space of fifteen or so years), but also by Futuropolis’s capacity to establish itself as a benchmark publisher for an entire swathe of alternative authors and publishers, particularly, for the generation of publishers emerging in the 1990s, when Futuropolis was going under (Beaty 2007). No doubt more than any other publishing house, Futuropolis played an active role in socially and graphically constructing the sphere of the alternative bande dessinée. Its very refusal of the term “album” to refer to its works formalises the dichotomy between a “commercial” or mainstream publishing world and one which was different (Durand and 1 At the time when I was conducting my archival research, these were still held by Etienne Robial in the basement of his workshop.

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Habrand 2018). Robial’s repeated disdain of belgeries (all things Belgian) exerted a strong influence on how the history of Franco-Belgian comics was written, with Belgian production being equated to moral archaism, while France lauded as the home of innovation and counterculture. Futuropolis’ publishing material (public statements, blurbs, catalogues, and so on) also helped assert the symbolic structuring of bande dessinée into distinct spheres. Additionally, its activity as a distributing agent reinforced the central place it held in the publishing sphere: by accepting to distribute many independent publishers and young publications, Futuropolis enabled a generation of alternative publishers and authors to find their way into traditional bookstores.

From the Bookstore to Republications from the Back Catalogue In 1974, a key year in the history of the French Bande dessinée, a group of young designers-turned-booksellers brought out their first works. To understand their origins, we need to go back a few years (Rosset 2008; Bahans 2015; Cestac 2007). Futuropolis was one of the first specialist bande dessinée bookstores. It was run by Robert Roquemartine, a lettering artist, and his wife, Evelyne Penhoud. The store’s name was taken from a science-fiction adventure drawn by René Pellos, to a script by Martial Cendres and published by the Junior magazine in weekly instalments from 7 April 1937 to 4 May 1938. It was a rare example of an Americanised French pre-war science-fiction story—an important feature, since American space-opera strips and Sunday pages were key to the birth of French comics fandom in the 1960s.2 At first the store was located at 122, rue du Théâtre, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, before moving a few doors down in early 1970, to number 130 in the same street. Headed by Robert Roquemartine and Evelyne Penhoud, the bookstore produced a fanzine, Comics 130, which republished several American series from the 1930s which nostalgic readers could not be found anywhere else at the time. Two special issues made up the embryo of the publishing catalogue, one dedicated to Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye, the other to Nikita Mandryka’s Concombre masqué.

2 Oddly, this series was not republished by Futuropolis, and it was Glénat which reprinted it in 1977.

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But these special issues had limited circulation and limited material ambitions. In 1972, the Futuropolis business was bought by four associates: Florence Cestac, Jean-Claude de Repper, Denis Ozanne, and Étienne Robial. Of these four partners, two were the driving force: Florence Cestac, an author of humorous bandes dessinées, and her companion, Étienne Robial. They were both young Paris-based graphic designers, who hooked up with an old friend, Denis Ozanne, and Jean-Claude de Repper, a science-fiction fan they had met at a flea market.3 De Repper, a cash-strapped second-hand bookseller, knew Robert Roquemartine, who wanted to sell his bookstore business (Cestac 2007, 6). The four associates soon bought the store, in 1972. The history of the bookstore itself was brief (see Fig. 6.1): Jean-Claude de Repper left in 1975, followed by Denis Ozanne in 1976. In 1977, Florence Cestac and Étienne Robial decided to devote themselves solely to publishing. However, the bookstore played a decisive role, as they acknowledged, for it was through their contact with the book trade that Cestac and Robial refined their comics culture, met authors in the small circle of the ninth art and discovered the business potential of a booming market (Cestac 2007). The first title Futuropolis published was a prolongation of its bookselling business. It was a compilation of adventures created by Edmond-François Calvo. Calvo (1892–1958), an illustrator, sculptor, and innkeeper, started publishing drawings in the satirical press in the 1920s, before working for several Offenstadt publications (Fillette, L’Epatant, and Junior) as well as for Femmes d’aujourd’hui (Amram and Beaujean 2020). Master of the funny animal, Calvo is said to have influenced Walt Disney due to his curving, dynamic lines, lending animals incomparable vivacity—and Walt Disney reportedly invited him to join his studio after the war, an offer Calvo turned down. Calvo was also a major influence on Albert Uderzo, who went to the master’s home to benefit from his advice. His most famous work, La Bête est morte, recounts the Second World War through animal characters and was published in 1944 (DoréRivé and Krivopissko 2011). Although it struggles, in the heat of the moment, to portray the scale of the Nazi atrocities, it offers a stark vision of the conflict in Europe through skirmishes between German wolves, American bison, British bulldogs, and French rabbits, frogs, and storks.

3 Interview with Denis Ozanne on 15 March 2013.

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Fig. 6.1 Etienne Robial (right, in overalls) in the Futuropolis bookshop, ca 1974, Futuropolis archives. Looking at the shelves, one may observe that Robial’s refusal of belgeries was more of a posture than an actual practice

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The book was republished by Futuropolis on several occasions, in 1977, 1983, and 1985. It is a voluminous work, running to 95 pages and was printed in colour, and thus expensive to produce; it was thus only made at a later date. The first book Futuropolis brought out was Patamousse: Roquemartine had introduced Cestac and Robial to Calvo’s widow, in whose cellar they unearthed a stock of original art. This large format book has CALVO running across the cover in flat red capitals, with the title Patamousse— Tagada Détective—Tromblon le Brigand figuring more discreetly. The author, series name (in capitals), and episode titles are laid out in a somewhat confusing manner. The work is a black-and-white reprint of the adventures published in colour by the Société Parisienne d’Édition in the “Patamousse” series. The act of publishing the book was indissociable from the bookselling business, as Étienne Robial explained: We published the Calvo to make a handsome book […]. The magazines we had picked up for 2, 3, or 5 francs because no-one was interested in them were now worth 20, 50, 100, or 500 francs... Rosalie and La Bête est morte, which we had bought because we thought them good, which had cost us next to nothing and were now filling up our cellar, were selling at around 1,000 or 2,000 francs.4

Publishing the book was thus part of the core business of a seller of old books, namely creating value, in which a reappraisal of the contribution of little-known authors adds value to the stock held. The book put on sale by Futuropolis could hardly be more different from the Société Parisienne d’Edition’s classic-sized colour albums. In opting for black and white, Futuropolis of course made a saving, but also shifted the focus to the author, who was promoted as an artist by the cover design, by the choice of thick paper (contrasting with the mediocre paper used by the SPE), and above all by the format. The imposing size (30 × 40 cm) was selected to approximate the dimensions of the artist’s original pages and to bring out the nuances of the original illustrations. Additionally, the decision to reproduce Calvo’s stories in black-and-white distanced the publication from children’s books and emphasised the artist’s draughtsmanship and extraordinarily lively

4 Interview with Étienne Robial on 11 April 1994, quoted in Baudéan (1994, 12).

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Fig. 6.2 The early days of a publishing venture, Futuropolis, 1974

style, characterised by a taste for busy compositions. At the time, children’s literature was characterised by the sophistication of colour-printing (Boulaire 2016): going back to black and white was thus a very strong statement. The fact that is what not a hardback, the choice of black and white, and especially its format (nearly twice the size of a standard album, making it impossible to house on the shelves of an ordinary bookcase), as well as its high price “all contributed to the singular combination of [the book being] an economic failure yet a remarkable success”5 (see Fig. 6.2).

´ Past and Present Bande Dessinee This first book was followed by two other publications in the same 30 × 40 format: Gir and Tardi,6 likewise a classic instance of recuperating titles neglected by established publishing houses. These two volumes further radicalise the choice of layout used for Calvo, with covers of a single colour. Whereas the first “30/40” seemed almost reluctant to indicate

5 (Rosset 2008, 78). 6 Gir and Tardi are the names of the authors. The titles of the works are deliberately

relegated to the title page. For simplicity’s sake, we will take the author name to also be the title of the work. This presents the advantage of referring to the works using a title visible on the cover, as well as being fundamentally aligned with Futuropolis’s policy.

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the title,7 the next two remove the title entirely, and instead present solely the name of the author—which is both ambiguous and interesting in the case of Jean Giraud/Gir/Mœbius.8 While the artist was known abroad (especially in the US and Japan) as “Moebius”, he only adopted this pseudonym fairly late in his career. Born in 1938, Jean Giraud started working on westerns and was assistant to veteran artist Joseph Gillain/Jijé for whom he inked the Jerry Spring series. In 1963, Jijé was approached to launch a new series for Pilote, which he entrusted to his assistant: this was the beginning of his Blueberry series, set in the dying days of the American Old West, based on a script by Jean-Michel Charlier, the co-editor of Pilote. Giraud signed his pages Gir, but it was under the name “Jean Giraud” that the albums started to be published by Dargaud (Fort Navajo, 1965). At the same time, Giraud adopted the pseudonym Moebius to sign ten complete short stories published in the humorous monthly magazine Hara-Kiri, from May 1963 to June 1964. He opted to concentrate on his Blueberry series, and it was only in the mid-1970s that he resurrected his science fiction alter ago Moebius, for contributions to two post-Pilote publications: L’Echo des Savanes, founded in 1972 by Gotlib, Bretécher, and Mandryka, and especially Métal hurlant . L’Echo des savanes published his “Cauchemar blanc”, and its imprint, Éditions du Fromage, brought out his Bandard fou in 1974, an improvised and delirious tale of playful priapism. The following year he left to found Métal hurlant with Philippe Druillet, Jean-Pïerre Dionnet, and Bernard Farkas, a decisive publication in the history of sciencefiction bandes dessinées, and in the acceleration of transatlantic graphic circulations (Labarre 2017). Futuropolis’s 1974 Gir was thus a transition. Moebius, an underground figure since the 1960s, burst onto the public stage in Pilote and L’Écho des Savanes , when “stupefied readers discovered that Moebius was the other face of Jean Giraud, the notable author of the Blueberry series” (Cité de la bande dessinée et de l’image d’Angoulême, undated). The volume published by Futuropolis was a compilation of scattered stories 7 The 1978 colour republication inverts the hierarchy between title and author, significantly reverting to the classical bande dessinée hierarchy emphasising its belonging to a series. 8 On the multiple identities of Jean Giraud/Mœbius, see especially Jean Giraud, Moebius -Giraud: histoire de mon double, Paris, Éd. 1, 1999 (Coucke 1992) and (Martin 2022).

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and various illustrations published here and there under the name “Moebius”. The name GIR, splashed in capitals across the top of the cover, was thus not without paradox: it signalled an intermediary contraction between Giraud and Moebius, and spoke of how the author was mutating into an artist via this paper monument. The volume devoted to Tardi was more of a landmark than the others, due to the coherence of its content and the fact that it acted as a matrix condensing all Tardi’s oeuvre, whose career was about to take a different turn. Born in the south of France in 1946, the single son of a professional soldier marked by his experience of the Second World War, Jacques Tardi confronted the First World War through his grandparents: his maternal grandfather lost his life in the fighting, and his paternal grandfather died when Jacques Tardi was only five years old, though his widow perpetuated his memory. Tardi’s work is deeply, viscerally linked to memories of the First World War (Marie et Historial de la Grande guerre 2009; Branland 2010). As the central moment in the country’s recent past, France commemorated the First World War in ways unparalleled by other belligerents, with not only the tomb of the unknown solider installed under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (even though this had been built by Napoleon), but also memorials to the fallen in all the towns and villages of France (Becker 1988; Nichol 2004). In 1966 Tardi went to Paris where he enrolled the next year to study decorative arts. While studying he became passionately interested in the albums “for adults” published by Éric Losfeld, apparently sending him an album called Stranger in the night (Ratier 2010), which Losfeld turned down. In 1970 Jacques Tardi started drawing short stories for Pilote; he first suggested to Goscinny a story about the First World War, but his proposal was rejected on the grounds that “you cannot joke about that”.9 After being entrusted with several stories in various genres for Pilote (“Humperdick Clabottford”, to a script by Serge de Beketch, published in September 1971) and for Record (“Blue Jackett”, to a script by Claude Verrien, published early 1973), Tardi received a proposal to work with Pierre Christin to make the first “Légende d’aujourd’hui”, Rumeurs sur le Rouergue. Tardi then published “Adieu Brindavoine” in instalments in Pilote, from November 1972 to April 1973, which Dargaud brought out as an 9 Jacques Tardi, interview by Alain Foulet and Olivier Maltret, in Foulet et al. (1996, 98).

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album in early 1974. Although it won a “prix Phénix”, Dargaud soon marked its price down and cancelled the contract for a second album. It was Casterman which acquired the rights to the album and republished it with additional material in 1979. Dargaud also published Le Démon des glaces, in 1974, in which Tardi explores the Hetzel publishing house’s tradition of engravings and the world of Jules Verne. But Dargaud continued to offer little support, and it was against the backdrop of doubt and uncertainty that Jacques Tardi met Étienne Robial and Florence Cestac, with whom Tardi and his then girlfriend, colourist Anne Delobel, became friends. The Futuropolis publication is a paper monument glorifying a name, TARDI (Rigney 2004). As such, it presents striking similarities to the monument of remembrance to which Tardi was making his own contribution by commemorating the “sacrificed” soldiers of the First World War. Tardi embodied a historical current in favour of interpreting the First World War as a formidable and repressive war machine. Far from any ideas of “heroic butchery”, Tardi depicts an industrial war which annihilates individuals, heralding a wave of scholarship questioning the idea of patriotic consent.10 Like Calvo, Tardi is a key Futuropolis author. Although he published many other works with other houses—Casterman and Dargaud in particular—it was Futuropolis that was the most welcoming to outsized projects: La Véritable histoire du soldat inconnu is but one example, followed by others, such as the 1976 publication of the very leftwing Rumeurs sur le Rouergue, a militant eco-fiction to a script by Pierre Christin. The story had appeared in Pilote in 1972, but Dargaud did not publish the story as an album, and it was Futuropolis which later published it under its imprint. In 1985, the diptych Mines de plomb/Mines de gomme provided an inventory of Tardi’s imaginary world, with sketches, drawings, and illustrations of specific urban locations. But the most oversized and ambitious of Tardi’s projects for Futuropolis

10 The new historical approaches to the First World War, embracing the insights

afforded by cultural history to examine the experience of combatants, drawing, for example, on work by John Keegan (1976), date from the 1980s. Among the pioneering works that helped redefine our understanding of soldiers’ experiences, see Prost (1977) and Becker (1977). For an actualised presentation of the debate (see Cornelissen and Weinrich 2021).

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was Voyage au bout de la nuit, a controversial monument of French contemporary literature. Tardi had long nurtured plans for this, but had been held back by the reticence of publishers and copyright holders. The book takes on one of the most important contemporary literary classics, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit. In this novel, Céline narrates his experience of the First World War, of colonialism, and of the industrialisation of the United States, in a language drawing extensively on spoken styles (Bertine 2021). Tardi’s initial project consisted in a complete adaptation of Céline’s novel to bande dessinée, in the wake of his adaptations of Léo Malet’s detective stories, Brouillard au pont de Tolbiac and 120, rue de la Gare. But over and above the technical difficulty, the reticence of Céline’s widow, Lucette Destouches, ruled this solution out. In 1985 Tardi came up with an alternative, radical solution: doing away with the text, in favour of a series of images, forming an autonomous (and seemingly mute) Voyage au bout de la nuit. The solution finally selected by Tardi and his publisher in fact took a third path, associating the entire text with over five hundred drawings by Tardi, who observed: “For me, it is simply a matter of rereading Céline with my drawings as annotations, without adding anything to the text”.11 Rather than combing through the text for pretexts for fine drawings, Tardi was careful to retain the novel’s rhythm, to seek a graphic equivalent to the sentence. He thus drew on a great variety of formats to rhythm the text in many different ways: full pages, double pages, quarter pages, tailpieces, and so on. The book was an unexpected commercial success and redefined how bandes dessinées could relate to novels, offering a new genre of iconotext that contributed to the rise of graphic novels (Baetens and Frey, 2015).

A Publishing House Run by a Graphic Designer From the very first titles it published, Futuropolis stood out for its strong visual identity, which was replicated in the hundreds of books it published over the course of fifteen or so years (20 ans, Futuropolis: 1972–1992 1992). The attention lavished on the layout lent its catalogue a visual

11 Interview by Catherine Ojalvo in La Mise en images du roman. Analyse de la collection Futuropolis /Gallimard. Master’s dissertation, Université Paris-XIII, undated, no page numbers, Étienne Robial archives.

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coherence which was, at the time, unparalleled for bandes dessinées (Insergueix 2018). The formats of its books all issue from the same 70 × 100 cm sheet of paper which, depending on how it is folded, gives different sizes. Most of its books are printed on 120 g ivory centaure paper.12 While the cover layout differs from one collection to the next, the basic principle is unchanged (Ghielmetti 2008), with the different titles offering different variants: an enlarged detail is placed on a flat block of colour. This immediately identifiable graphic style is found across a whole range of different substrates: each paper, each invitation card, each sheet of writing paper, each business card, and each order slip partook in the coherence of the publishing house. Étienne Robial, as a meticulous graphic designer, made sure that the graphic identity was equally visible on boxes of books as it was on annual catalogues (“On fait des livres, pas des albums!” 2018). This in-depth work fashioned the meta-work of the publisher’s catalogue, where all the published books appear side-by-side (Fig. 6.3). This meta-work was also built up over the course of the catalogues in grandiloquent editorials penned by Étienne Robial, asserting the coherence of all the books published by Futuropolis. From an early date, the publisher set about building its own legend, that of a Gallimard for bandes dessinées (Lesage 2015)—an ambition also harboured by the Belgian publisher Casterman. The romantic publishing figure of Gaston Gallimard was ritually invoked in Futuropolis paratexts. Thus in its 1981 catalogue, Robial announced the launch of the “Copyright” collection, republications of US comics greats, in reference to the “La Pléiade”, a monument of French literary consecration that had been founded by André Schiffrin before being bought by Gallimard: The “La Pléiade” of bandes dessinées is finally born after years of gestation, hesitations, and about-turns. In these troubled times, it’s quite a challenge [...] to publish a luxurious collection paying tribute to the great US comics authors. Essential works that no collector, booklover, or bookseller can do without. (Futuropolis Catalogue, 1981, Robial Archives)

12 Interview with Étienne Robial on 22 February 2013. Étienne Robial mentioned only two exceptions: Dittyvon, and Picotto, printed on surface-sized paper, and which were failures from a formal point of view. Other works (some of them great successes) were, however, made without using 120 g ivory centaure, though this paper has acquired a unique status in the legend built up by the publisher.

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Fig. 6.3 Graphic coherence even ran as far as the book boxes. Shipping slip designed by Florence Cestac, undated [1978] (Futuropolis archives, © Florence Cestac)

Though no doubt excessive, the “Pléiade” label says a lot about Futuropolis’s literary ambitions, and its wish to position itself as the Gallimard of bandes dessinées. Throughout Futuropolis’s history, Gallimard acted as a model for publishing legitimacy, driving the machine the publishing house devised to generate its own legitimacy. No doubt the field in which this parallel with Gallimard applied best was in promoting authors. Futuropolis took from Gallimard an approach that canonised the name of the author, which replaced any reference on the cover to a series, story, or adventure. All that counted were the author and publisher. While this was a matter of going counter to mainstream standardised publishing of stories originally released in instalments in children’s magazines, it may also be seen as a way of staving off the death of the author. In his analysis of how the bande dessinée field was constituted—the first application of Bourdieu’s field theory—Luc Boltanski identified several factors transforming the sector:

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The emergence of a field displaying certain of the properties of fields of learned culture results from a set of changes, which are relatively independent and structurally homogenous, affecting the public, bande dessinée producers, and intellectual fields, and which are no doubt mostly linked, though in differing ways, to the rise in school enrolment rates and how this translates into chances of accessing the education system. (Boltanski 1975)

For Boltanski, the main change was the emergence of a new generation of illustrators with different social characteristics. His broad model has been much discussed and altered since (Maigret 2012; Lesage 2019; Kohn 2022). But one undeniable difference remains: authors were viewed with new consideration. Long viewed as mere agents in a publisher’s service, bande dessinée authors saw their status undergo considerable transformations between 1964 and 1974. The 1964 law on welfare coverage for artistes applied only to painters, engravers, and sculptors, thereby excluding illustrators.13 Illustrators thus had to enrol in the welfare scheme for the professions, leading to significantly higher contributions, on top of which they also had to pay in to two official pension schemes. The various trade unions for illustrators lobbied intensely to be included as artists under the 1964 law. State authorities were perplexed by this demand: “are bandes dessinées authors writers or illustrators, and how are they to be viewed?”.14 The unions finally managed to get illustrators included in a new scheme, inspired by that for authors, namely the regime for artists-authors established by a 1975 law. The fact that authors were now fully part of the tax regime is metonymically linked to Futuropolis’ books. In addition to the ambitious catalogue, it built up over the years, this is no doubt one of the reasons why Futuropolis holds such a prominent place in artists’ memories, together with its having played a key role in fostering the next wave

13 This is based on core work by Pierre Nocerino (2020). 14 Gérald Montassier (principal secretary to the State Secretariat for Culture), “Note

pour Monsieur le directeur du Cabinet [du Premier ministre], à l’attention de Monsieur Michel Roux, conseiller technique”, 14 November 1972, p. 7 (Archives nationales, Bureau des professions artistiques [Ministère de la Culture/daP], versement n°19,880,555, article 29, dossier “Dossier sur la Cavar—Comité anti-Cavar”). Quoted in Nocerino (2020, 455).

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of independent comics artists, namely the generation of l’Association and Cornélius in the 1990s (Beaty 2007; Caraco 2017).15 Thus pace Roland Barthes, the mid-1970s did not see the death of the author. For bandes dessinées, it was when the author was born. The adoption of a new legal status for authors followed on from lengthy changes, resulting from new perceptions of bande dessinée reading, and intense lobbying by organisations representing those who worked in illustration. But it also resulted from repeated efforts by businesspeople who helped shape new ways of perceiving these illustration workers. Publishers such as Futuropolis played a decisive role here: by appropriating the codes for art books and by glorifying the artist’s name through material choices, they helped change how bande dessinée authors were seen. By refusing the codes of serial bandes dessinées, by placing the name of the author in capital letters on a paper frontispiece, Futuropolis—alongside other actors in the field— precipitated the advent of a new regime of authorship.

References 20 ans, Futuropolis: 1972–1992. 1992. Paris: Futuropolis. Amram, David and Stéphane Beaujean. 2020. Calvo: un maître de la fable. Angoulême: 9eArt+ FIBD. Bahans, Inès. 2015. La maison d’édition Futuropolis (1972–2015) Un espace éditorial de recherche: sa création, ses évolutions et ses influences. Mémoire de M2 en Histoire culturelle et sociale, Université Versailles Saint-Quentin. Baetens, Jan and Frey Hugo. 2015. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 286 p. Baudéan, Claire. 1994. Futuropolis. Éditeur paradoxal, paradoxe éditorial. DESS édition, sous la direction de Paul Fournel, Paris III. Beaty, Bart. 2007. Unpopular culture: Transforming the European comic book in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Becker, Annette. 1988. Les Monuments aux morts: patrimoine et mémoire de la Grande guerre. Paris: Errance. Bertine, Bastien. 2021. Céline comix: Louis-Ferdinand Céline et la bande dessinée. Iconotextes. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais.

15 The later history of Futuropolis is the subject of a Master’s thesis extensively investigating Robial’s archives, providing a really helpful introduction to the question: (Bahans 2015).

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Boltanski, Luc. 1975. La constitution du champ de la bande dessinée. Actes De La Recherche En Sciences Sociales 1 (1): 37–59. https://doi.org/10.3406/ arss.1975.2448. Boulaire, Cécile. 2016. Les petits livres d’or: des albums pour enfants dans la France de la guerre froide. Iconotextes. Tours: Presses Universitaires FrançoisRabelais. Branland, Marine. 2010. La guerre lancinante dans l’œuvre de Jacques Tardi. Sociétés & Représentations, no 29 (juin): 65–78. https://doi.org/10.3917/ sr.029.0065. Caraco, Benjamin. 2017. Renouvellement et légitimation de la bande dessinee en France de 1990 à 2010: le cas du réseau des auteurs de l’Association. Thèse de doctorat en histoire sous la direction de Pascal Ory. Paris: Panthéon Sorbonne. Cestac, Florence. 2007. La véritable histoire de Futuropolis. Paris. Cité de la bande dessinée et de l’image d’Angoulême. s. d. le bandard fou Moebius (1938–2012). Cité de la BD. Consulté le 27 avril 2021. http:// collections.citebd.org/in/faces/details.xhtml?id=h%3A%3ADD_7246. Cornelissen, Christoph, and Arndt Weinrich, éd. 2021. Writing the Great War: The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present. Vol. 1. New York: Berghahn Books. Coucke, Nathalie. 1992. Un singulier pluriel: Jean Giraud-Moebius. Tracés 3. Paris: Vertige graphic. Doré-Rivé, Isabelle, and Guy Krivopissko. 2011. Traits résistants: La résistance dans la bande dessinée de 1944 à nos jours. Lyon: LIBEL. Durand, Pascal, and Tanguy Habrand. 2018. Histoire de l’édition en Belgique: XVe-XXIe siècle. Bruxelles: les Impressions nouvelles. Foulet, Alain, Olivier Maltret, and Jacques Tardi. 1996. Presque tout Tardi. Dieppe: Sapristi. Ghielmetti, Philippe. 2008. Une façon de vivre. Neuvième Art, no 14: 96–97. Giraud, Jean. 1999. Moebius-Giraud: histoire de mon double. Paris: Éd. 1. Gray, Brenna Clarke, and Peter Wilkins. 2016. The Case of the Missing Author: Toward an Anatomy of Collaboration in Comics. In Cultures of Comics Work, eds. Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston, 115–129. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10. 1057/978-1-137-55090-3_8. Insergueix, Sylvain. 2018. La légende de Futuropolis. Bananas, no 10: 54–71. Keegan, John. 1976. The face of battle. London: Jonathan Cape. Kohn, Jessica. 2022. Dessiner des petits Mickeys. Une histoire sociale de la BD en France et en Belgique (1945–1968). Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. Labarre, Nicolas. 2017. Heavy Metal: l’autre Métal hurlant. SF Incognita. Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux.

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Lesage, Sylvain. 2015. Futuropolis à l’heure de Gallimard. Neuvième Art 2.0 Gallimard et la bande dessinée (juillet). http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/spip. php?article976. ———. 2019. Une bande dessinée adulte? Usages et mésusages de la légitimation. Belphégor. Littérature populaire et culture médiatique, no 17, 1 (mars). https://doi.org/10.4000/belphegor.1607. Licari-Guillaume, Isabelle. 2017. Ambiguous Authorities: Vertigo and the Auteur Figure. Authorship 6(2). https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v6i2.7700. Maigret, Éric. 2012. Bande dessinée et postlégitimité. In La bande dessinée: une médiaculture, par Éric Maigret et Matteo Stefanelli, 130–148. Paris: Armand Colin/INA. Marie, Vincent, and Historial de la Grande guerre, éd. 2009. La Grande Guerre dans la bande dessinée: de 1914 à aujourd’hui. Péronne/Milan: Historial de la Grande Guerre/5 Continents. Martin, Jean-Clet. 2022. De Blueberry à L’Incal: lire Giraud-Moebius. Réflexions faites. Bruxelles: les Impressions nouvelles. Nichol, Saunders. 2004. Matters of conflict: Material culture, memory and the First World War. Psychology Press. Nocerino, Pierre. 2020. Les auteurs et autrices de bande dessinée: la formation contrariée d’un groupe social. Thèse de doctorat, Paris, EHESS. http://the ses.fr/2020EHES0127. “On fait des livres, pas des albums!” 2018. A voix nue. https://www.rad iofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/a-voix-nue/on-fait-des-livres-pas-des-alb ums-3743540. Prost, Antoine. 1977. Les anciens combattants et la société française 1914–1939. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Ratier, Gilles. 2010. Jacques Tardi avant ‘Adèle Blanc-Sec’. BDZoom, 20 avril 2010. http://bdzoom.com/6705/patrimoine/le-coin-du-patrimoine-bd-jac ques-tardi-avant-«-adele-blanc-sec-»/. Rigney, Ann. 2004. Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans. Poetics Today 25 (2): 361–396. https://doi.org/10. 1215/03335372-25-2-361. Rosset, Christian. 2008. Histoire(s) de Futuropolis. Neuvième Art, no 14: 76– 83.

CHAPTER 7

Author, Artist, Publisher: Claire Bretécher, Les Frustrés, 1975

This chapter considers the work of Claire Bretécher, and especially the self-publication of Les Frustrés in 1975. After working for Spirou, Record, and Tintin, Bretécher came to the fore in the 1970s in the pages of Pilote. Alongside Gotlib, Mandryka, Moebius, Druillet, and a few others, she was part of a generation of artists who, on leaving Pilote, sought to revolutionise comics. One key facet of this post-Pilote revolution was the invention of new publishing structures, capable of giving room to original voices. This quest for editorial and creative independence culminated in 1975 with the publication of Les Frustrés, a mocking chronicle of the transformations to French society. Week after week in the pages of L’Obs, Bretécher depicted the left-wing intelligentsia’s commitments and contradictions. By deciding to self-publish the numerous one-page stories that she had drawn for L’Obs, Bretécher took a bold step towards independence, showing just how much the market had changed over the course of the previous decade. Artists could now shake off their reliance on publishers to become the actors of their own artistic destiny. Keywords Self-publishing · Alternative comics · Satire · Women’s comics · Comics historiography

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_7

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It may seem paradoxical to write in English about a work largely unavailable to English readers. Claire Bretécher’s work has apparently circulated but little outside the French, German, and Dutch cultural areas. According to the Grand Comics Database, some of her works have circulated in Spain and Scandinavia, but it is only in France and Germany that her work is republished and remains a living feature of the bande dessinée landscape—and her death received extensive coverage in the French news (see for instance Potet 2020). Bretécher’s Frustrés were published in 1978 as a luxurious softbound book called The National Lampoon Presents Claire Bretécher, that reprinted two thirds of the first two Frustrés volumes. This publication was celebrated by Kim Thompson: “at $5.95, [it] is the single best comics buy of the year, and […] each of the 80-plus strips therein contains more chuckles than an average month’s worth of Sunday comics sections from any major American newspaper” (Thompson, 1978). In 1987, Grove Press published a 69-page Frustration volume, but no reprint of Bretécher’s condisderable work has been released ever since. This subtly written humorous series, based on highprecision sarcasm and antiphrasis is thus difficult to access in English. It would be hard, however, not to discuss Bretécher’s work, for several reasons. From 1964 to 1975, she played a central role in some key changes affecting bande dessinée. Bretécher is first and foremost one of the great figures of French graphic humour of the second half of the twentieth century. She is also the sole major female author associated with this ten-year timespan. How could one write a history of bande dessinée looking solely at men? Yet, focusing on Bretécher as the only female artist of bande dessinée world is, of course, problematic. It is precisely the fact that the literature focuses solely on Bretécher that needs examining, given that Bretécher’s elevation as an authoress is used as a token example to dodge the issue of women’s place in bandes dessinées.

´ Claire Bretécher, A Woman in bandes dessinees In January 2016, the Angoulême International Comics Festival announced a list of authors preselected for the Grand Prix de la Ville d’Angoulême. But to general stupefaction, not a single woman figured among the thirty names. The festival, first held in 1974, had become a major international event in the bande dessinée world, awarding a series of prizes whose precise name (Alfred, Alph’art, Fauve) and scope had substantially shifted over the course of its fifty-odd years (Lesage 2020).

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But from the outset, the Grand Prix de la Ville d’Angoulême had stood out. Unlike all the other prizes, it was not awarded in recognition of a work, but of a whole career. Three ways of deciding on the winner have been used over the festival’s history. Initially (1974–1988), the grand prix was selected by the festival’s jury—in which they were advised, as of 1981, by the previous year’s recipient. From 1989 to 2013, the prize was awarded by all the winners of previous years, sitting as an “academy”. Finally, since 2013, the festival organisers propose a list of names on which all the authors accredited by the festival then vote.1 This particularly complex system was designed to remedy the academy’s conservatism, which tended to co-opt like-minded authors and so failed to reflect a bande dessinée open to the world. The only non-French-speaking prizewinners under that system have been Robert Crumb (1999) and Art Spiegelman (2011) (I could add the 2007 winner, Argentinian author José Muñoz, but he was rewarded for an oeuvre produced mainly in Europe). This change in procedure certainly produced a notable opening up, with the prize going to Akira Toriyama (2013, in the Grand Prix’s fortieth year), Bill Watterson (2014), and Katsuhiro Otomo (2015). But in each case, the winner was still a man. Thus when in 2016, the festival announced a list of thirty preselected authors on which there was not a single woman, the controversy soon escalated. The defence put forward by the festival was particularly clumsy (Potet 2016). It was based on two points: first, the festival could not be sexist since it had awarded prizes to women, Claire Bretécher in 1982, and Florence Cestac in 2000. Second, it could not do more, for there were no other women in the history of bande dessinée, as its director Franck Bondoux observed: “This Grand Prix is awarded to an author for all of their oeuvre and career. Yet the history of bande dessinée through to the 1980s is primarily of masculine persuasion. We are not going to introduce quotas. Should the criterion be to absolutely have women? The festival reflects the reality of this world” (Girard et al. 2016).2 1 This obviously raises many questions about the process of accreditation, about who is considered a “professional author” by the Festival and who is not, and why. On these aspects of comics artists’ (self-)definition, see Nocerino (2020). 2 See also the analysis and drawing by comics artists involved on the Artemisia webpage: http://www.assoartemisia.fr/femmes-dans-la-bande-dessinee-angouleme-acte-2nhomminations-grand-prix/.

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But brandishing Claire Bretécher as a totem bestowing immunity is doubly problematic, first, she was not awarded a “classic” grand prix, but a special prize for the tenth anniversary (Cannet and Ratier 1993). The 1982 Grand Prix had in fact been awarded to a man, Paul Gillon, whose lengthy career had encompassed Métal hurlant and the communist weekly magazine Vaillant . Like Albert Uderzo, the illustrator of Astérix, who had strained relations with the closed bande dessinée world, Claire Bretécher had thus been awarded a second-rank prize, months after the festival (Albert 2012). Awarding the prize to a woman only when there were two to hand out was indeed a surprising symbol… But the key point lay elsewhere. For there was no shortage of women bande dessinée authors either prior to or contemporary with Claire Bretécher. There have been many female authors in the history of bande dessinée— provided of course one looks for them (Kohn, Forthcoming). Suzanne André, Madeleine Berthélémy, Marie-Madeleine Bourdin, Germaine Bouret, Geneviève de Corbie, Rose Dardennes, Jacqueline Dargier, Jacqueline Duhême, Nadine Forster, Maud Frère, Liliane Funcken, Isabelle Gendron, Camille Hallé, Madeleine Hermet, Bernadette Hiéris, Janine Lay, Jacqueline Lhérisson, Henriette Robitaillie, Solange Voisin, and many more. These names have only come to light because Jessica Kohn patiently and systematically combed through the illustrated magazines of the 1950s and 1960s for her PhD thesis (Kohn 2018). Although this has not yet been extended to cover other periods, there is no doubt one would find an equal quantity of female authors. But as Jessica Kohn shows, these women working in bandes dessinées did not follow the same career path as men. Thus many of these female authors worked for magazines for girls, particularly Catholic magazines (Kohn 2016). And these publications are particularly neglected, being viewed as less legitimate, with few or no copies conserved; they are rarely mentioned in histories of bande dessinée, and even more rarely examined by researchers. And so, the role played by women in the history of bande dessinée continues to be ill recognised, fossilised into a belief that Claire Bretécher was the first woman to start working in bandes dessinées. In other words, the prize awarded to Bretécher was a useful pretext not to ponder the issue at any greater length. To put it differently: while Claire Bretécher was by no means the first female comics artist in France, she probably was the first important figure in the ninth art, the legitimised, respectable segment of the comics world.

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It is thus very important to understand the mechanisms by which Bretécher was consecrated (Fig. 7.1). This provides a way of deciphering the production of a patriarchal graphic order. The history of bande dessinée continues to be largely “a history in the masculine singular”, as Geneviève Sellier described the Nouvelle Vague (Sellier 2005). A reappraisal has been launched, particularly by the collective of female bande dessinée authors against sexism,3 and that of the Bréchoises.4 Examining Les Frustrés, the crucial album in the career of the best-known female bande dessinée author, adds another building block to this undertaking. What sets Claire Bretécher’s career apart from those of her fellow female authors is primarily where she worked. Until the 1980s, women working in bandes dessinées were largely limited to secondary tasks (scriptwriting, colouring) or second-rank publications (Kohn, Forthcoming; Lesage, Forthcoming), but Claire Bretécher started her career in publications for boys (Tintin, Spirou, Pilote) and, especially, she published books. Looking at the career paths of female authors shows the extent to which the system to consecrate authors involves publishing albums; and, in return, the extent to which the order of books constructing the ninth art is a masculine one.

Pilote, The Crucible ´ for the Modern bande dessinee Understanding what is exceptional about Claire Bretécher’s career entails looking at the singular context in which it unfolded (Rose 2020), and particularly the decisive time she spent at Pilote. Bretécher’s early career was meteoric (Fig. 7.2). She started off working for L’Os à Moelle in 1963; ten years later she was a lead cartoonist for the weekly magazine Le Nouvel observateur. Within the space of five years, she had gone from the children’s magazine Spirou (1967–1971) to the crucible of adult bandes dessinées, Pilote (1969–1973), founded L’Écho des savanes (1972), and

3 https://bdegalite.org/. 4 https://labrechebd.com/les-brechoises/. It’s worth mentioning the work in progress

initiated, among others, by Maëlys Tirehote Corbin (2019) and Marys Renné Hertiman (2021).

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Fig. 7.1 The early consecration of Claire Bretécher: Schtroumpf. Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée #24, 1974

joined one of the main French weekly news magazines where she sharpened her caustic vision of the neuroses of contemporary society.5 The publication of Les Frustrés, from the first pages in Le Nouvel observateur in 1973 to their going on sale as an album in 1975, coincided with a pivotal

5 This is only a glimpse of her career. Also important for the beginning of her career were her contributions to Tintin (1965–1966) and to the Catholic monthly Record (1964–1970). She also continued to work for Pilote after 1973, although more sporadically; she contributed to Spirou again in the late 1970s.

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moment in the history of bande dessinée, with the progressive disappearance of magazines as a viable publishing form. Claire Bretécher’s career followed on from the wind of revolt spreading through French society around May 1968, at a time when second-wave feminism was taking shape (Greenwald 2019). In many ways, Bretécher’s career prolonged the Astérix moment in redefining the satirical ambitions of bande dessinée. Pilote, which published Astérix, was the most visible face of a deeper movement transforming French graphic humour, (Mazur and Danner 2014) influenced particularly by publications such as Mad and cartoonists like Saul Steinberg. In publications ranging from L’Os à Moelle to Hara-Kiri (Mazurier 2009), these new forms of graphic humour accompanied slower transformations in the bande dessinée sector. Pilote, where Goscinny wielded a controlling influence, acted as a catalyst (Michallat 2018). More specifically, it acted as a crucible in which markedly classical series (great epic sagas with classical gags) rubbed shoulders with a far more offbeat and

Fig. 7.2 The old guard, and the new. Claire Bretécher on national television for Tac au Tac, alongside Jean-Claude Fournier, Albert Uderzo, and André Franquin

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irreverent humour based on collusion, the subverting of clichés, and pastiche. In that regard, Goscinny opened the floodgates to new forms of bande dessinée: as his biographer Pascal Ory observes: “the true mark of Goscinny was indirect. It may be seen, in invisible ink, behind his choosing the stars not of the present day, but of tomorrow” (Ory 2007, 181). From Cabu to Moebius, Reiser to Pétillon, Giraud to Mandryka, and Gotlib to Tardi and Bilal, Goscinny ushered in a generation and more of authors. Claire Bretécher was one of them, and one of the few women to have worked at Pilote—along with Annie Goetzinger who arrived in the 1970s. Claire Bretécher started her career placing single drawings in magazines, advertising, and children’s publications. In 1963, she started in bandes dessinées, illustrating a story by René Goscinny, Facteur Rhésus, for the satirical magazine L’Os à Moelle; the partnership soon ended and Claire started working for other magazines: Record, Tintin, and Spirou, where in 1967, she created Les Gnagnan, a humorous series about babies with very adult dialogues. In 1969, she joined Pilote, where she created the character for Cellulite, a physically unprepossessing princess who chases any man she comes across. When Bretécher started publishing in Pilote, it was a critical period for the magazine, which had just confronted the turbulence of May 1968 (Michallat 2018). Pilote was not spared by the intense politicisation of French society and the questioning of traditional powers and constituted hierarchies (Bantigny 2018). The tension between an illustrated children’s magazine and the emergence of youth culture transpired in accusations made against René Goscinny (Aeschimann and Nicoby 2015). Amidst the crisis of May 1968, with the magazine at a halt due to mass strikes, an illustrators’ assembly sought to question the boss’s power. The atmosphere was electric, due to uncertainty over the legal status of illustrators and their very limited level of social protection. Illustrators’ unions had relaunched a protest campaign to obtain press cards giving social protection and tax advantages (Kohn 2022). In parallel to this, the surge of antiauthoritarian demands led certain working on the magazine to call for co-management and even self-management. All these tensions crystallised

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around the figure of Goscinny, primarily for circumstantial reasons.6 The cruel irony of the situation was that due to his success, (recent) wealth, and old-fashioned middle-class manners, Goscinny ended up embodying the figure of the boss, even though he had lost so much in union struggles of the 1950s, and worked so hard to win recognition for authors, first and foremost writers. So when she started working for Pilote in 1969, Claire Bretécher joined a magazine which was very different from that in which the first episodes of Astérix had been published a decade earlier. The magazine had opened up to some extent, and having revised its editorial policy now included pages about current affairs. Like other illustrators, Claire Bretécher was thus entrusted with “topical subjects”, in which current affairs were treated in one or two pages, with an emphasis on social phenomena rather than hot-button issues—topics such as long coats (Pilote 533), opinion polls (Pilote 538), cryonics (“les surgelés” [literally, frozen products], Pilote 571), and so on. She also tackled feminist issues head-on, without holding back on her own doubts and criticisms, and the injunctions weighing on her as the only woman in a team of illustrators. Thus in a double page on feminism (Pïlote 568), Bretécher observes in an aside: “I would quite like to know why it’s always me who is tasked with treating this type of subject. I’m going to end up attracting the disapproval of this editorial team where they are all equally anti-feminist”. In fact, her piece is built around a double narrative: at one level, she accepts the commission to produce a double page on the topic of feminism. But at the same time, as a counterpoint, she sets out the ambiguities of her position in a male publication, and with regard to her own stance. This staging of her self and of the life of the magazine is not specific to Bretécher’s pages, the current affairs pages being full of such knowing asides. More broadly, from Gotlib’s Rubrique-à-brac to Greg’s Achille Talon, the main identity of Pilote was built around collusion with readers and irreverential self-staging. But while Gotlib’s self-staging was primarily a childish wink, farcical buffoonery, with Bretécher, it was an instrument for self-analysis, a scalpel to explore internal contradictions. In comparison to the traditional magazines for children in which she had started, Pilote no doubt enabled Bretécher to expand her scope. 6 Details about the event were reported at length in a bande dessinée based on statements by authors present at the meeting, which Goscinny experienced as an act of accusation: (Aeschimann and Nicoby 2015).

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With Cellulite, she portrayed the contradictory injunctions weighing on women, in a style borrowing partly from Johnny Hart and Brant Parker. In her topical pages, she developed a freer style, closer to illustrated social commentary, drawing on ideas about journalistic forms of illustrated writing as also explored by Cabu, Gébé, Willem, Reiser, and many others (Lévrier and Pinson 2021). Above and beyond the great creativity characterising its pages, when Bretécher joined Pilote, it was going through a deep crisis, and shortly after, on 30 October 1969 (#521), launched a new formula according greater place to an adult readership: the current affairs pages reflected this shift, with alcohol, violence, and sexuality starting to occupy an unprecedented place in a magazine still subject to the 1949 law on publications for minors. Less than a year later (#571), Pilote changed formula once again, and sought to redefine itself as “the magazine which has fun thinking”, embracing the daily realities of the environment, the police, and the nuclear threat. Between these two formulas, Pilote dropped its shortlived Super Pocket Pilote, a quarterly pocket-format publication intended to make up for declining sales. As Wendy Michallat has shown, the sales of Pilote were on a continuous downward trend: from December 1967 to January 1970, per-issue sales dropped from 116,668 to 86,376, down 26% (Michallat 2018, 218). This situation was admittedly not specific to Pilote: over the same time frame, sales of Le Journal de Spirou fell from 167,129 to 145,584 (down 13%), and those of Le Journal de Tintin from 226,776 to 183,012 (down 19%) (Lesage 2014). The entire bande dessinée press suffered, hit by competition from albums, as well as from other youth media, including television of course (Poels 2015), but especially radio—this was the period when portable transistor radios were becoming commonplace, enabling individualised listening and doing much to autonomise youth cultural practices (Fesneau 2011). But the crisis affecting Pilote was not solely a matter of declining per-issue sales. These could, for that matter, have been compensated by the sale of albums—as Casterman wagered ten years later (this chapter). Dargaud likewise saw a drop in attractiveness. Up until the tail end of the 1960s, magazines were still the crucible of the modern bande dessinée. But in the early 1970s, the dynamic was reversed, and Pilote was unable to retain and build up a loyal group of young authors. Despite the arrival of particularly talented new authors such as Touïs and Frydman, who created the fiercely anti-militarist series Sergent Laterreur in 1971,

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the magazine saw its most dynamic authors drift away—such as Philippe Druillet who left Pilote to found Métal hurlant . Of the authors who had left Hara-Kiri when it was banned in 1966 and again in 1970 and taken refuge in the pages of Pilote, Reiser and Gébé left in 1972 to participate in Hara-Kiri Charlie Hebdo (the newspaper had taken over after L’hebdo Hara-Kiri, created in 1969, was banned by the Interior Ministry after 94 issues in 1970). Although in the context of the conservative clampdown of the late 1960s, the apparently innocuous Pilote had acted as a perfect shelter for testing the limits of alternative discourse, a few years later the shelter had become a straitjacket. In other words, Pilote had lost its capacity to be a vehicle for a transgressive bande dessinée: the fact that it was a youth magazine (thus subject to the 1949 law on publications for minors) had become a burden.

Towards Self-Publication With this crisis unfolding at Pilote, Bretécher left the magazine, going on to perform two switches of major importance: leaving Pilote to found L’Écho des Savanes , then leaving L’Écho to join the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur. L’Écho was a direct repercussion of the crisis affecting Pilote in 1968. Nikita Mandryka had been one of Pilote’s leading lights, but in 1972 had left the magazine acrimoniously, luring away his colleagues Gotlib and Bretécher to launch an independent venture. Wendy Michallat has shown how the founding of L’Écho des Savanes was a dual crisis for Pilote: the business crisis was compounded by a cultural, or more exactly, a countercultural crisis. On the one hand, the commercial pressure exerted by the success of albums was challenging the model of a magazine based on instalments: “the bande dessinée album boom continued to squeeze the weekly comics market. The album compared favourably in terms of price. It was produced en masse and cheaply and magazines struggled to compete. Quite simply, the modestly priced album book was a more attractive product than the ephemeral and increasingly expensive ‘hebdomadaire’” (Michallat 2018, 217). Borne along by the colossal success of Astérix, Dargaud was seeking to replicate the recipe, publishing ever more series from its catalogue as albums. By generalising the 48-page colour hardback album, Dargaud fundamentally transformed the bande dessinée market (as seen in Chapter 4). This established both a new commercial standard and a new narrative norm; it further transformed the equilibria in the sector by fundamentally altering working conditions.

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But it also fed the artistic ambitions of a generation of illustrators who, through books, were increasingly treated as authors. In the wake of intense union protests in the second half of the 1960s, many illustrators, particularly those working for newspapers, managed to obtain a press card and the associated tax and welfare advantages. But not all authors managed to comply with the criteria granting access to this advantageous legal status. Thus some illustrators had to make do with a different status, that of artist (Nocérino 2020). But this too was difficult to obtain. As Pierre Nocérino points out, the 1964 law on social protection for artists concerns solely painters, engravers, and sculptors. Illustrators were thus obliged to work under the regime governing the professions, leading to considerably higher social welfare contributions. Illustrators working mainly for album publication had to opt for this status. It was only after several years of negotiation that, in 1975, they were offered the new status of artist-author, a legal regime based on that of authors and providing significant tax advantages (Nocérino 2020). It is within the context of this intense movement by the profession that we need to view the founding of L’Écho des Savanes and Claire Bretécher’s subsequent departure. The crisis brewing at Pilote culminated in 1974, when Goscinny handed over the reins as editor of the magazine, which became a monthly publication, thereby abandoning a fundamental element of its initial identity as a children’s illustrated bande dessinée magazine, for which the weekly publication of instalments was a distinctive characteristic. It is also in 1974 that Astérix—so closely bound up with the magazine’s identity that from 1965 to 1970, it had even adopted the subtitle “Astérix and Obélix’s magazine”—left Pilote to join the pages of Le Monde (Le Cadeau de César, 1974, Asterix and Caesar’s Gift ), of Sud-Ouest, a leading regional newspaper (La Grande Traversée, 1975, Asterix and the Great Crossing ), then those of Le Nouvel Observateur (Obélix et Compagnie, 1976, Obelix and Co.). The first tremors had been felt two years before the defection of the tutelary figure of the magazine, when Bretécher, Gotlib, and Mandryka had left in 1972 and founded L’Écho des Savanes . This quarterly publication was of an unprecedented kind: a bande dessinée magazine exclusively “reserved for adults”, as indicated by a label on the magazine’s cover. This assertion of complete thematic and formal freedom arose from the wish of these authors, who had worked for several publications and publishing houses, to shake off constraints and publish their own work. To this end, they set up the Éditions du Fromage to publish works

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from L’Écho des Savanes and ensure they enjoyed full editorial autonomy. L’Écho des Savanes was indeed self-published, with Bretécher, Gotlib, and Mandryka doing everything themselves. The magazine only included works produced by the three partners, who were thus rid of the moral and formal constraints weighing on Pilote. Bretécher, Gotlib, and Mandryka were thus precursors in the quest for collective autonomisation driving bande dessinée authors in the early 1970s (Fig. 7.3). They picked up on the initial impetus given by the publication of Actuel , which as of 1970 introduced countercultural works from the US West Coast alternative scene, publishing Robert Crumb, followed by Gilbert Shelton and S. Clay Wilson. The magazine then opened its doors to French illustrators, including Mandryka and Gotlib. Actuel provided a matrix for this alternative bande dessinée freed of thematic and aesthetic constraints, as well as for alternative creations by the authors themselves, via articles about the countercultural scene which were read attentively by the young generation of authors (Groensteen 2018). This model of a self-published magazine soon faded, however: in late 1974, Bretécher and Gotlib left L’Écho des savanes , and Mandryka opened its pages to new partners, transforming L’Écho into just another magazine, despite a more transgressive tone. Bretécher left L’Echo go and work at Le Nouvel Observateur, a bourgeois intellectual magazine, thereby returning to the ranks after a spell as an emblematic author of the countercultural parenthesis of the early 1970s.

Bretécher at Le Nouvel Observateur When Claire Bretécher started drawing Les Frustrés in 1973, Le Nouvel Observateur had already made forays into bande dessinée, opening its doors in 1964 to the Argentinian illustrator Raúl Damonte Botana, who had settled in Paris in 1963, and it was while at this magazine that he had started working on his Femme assise, which moved to Charlie Mensuel in 1972. Le Nouvel Observateur was sufficiently interested in alternative bande dessinée to sing the praises of Crumb’s Head Comix published in Actuel in 1971. Jean Daniel, the charismatic founder and director of the news magazine, recounted on many occasions, notably in the preface to the second album of Les Frustrés, how he came to recruit Claire Bretécher. As a leading figure of the left-wing media intelligentsia, Jean Daniel suggested that Claire Bretécher laugh at the readers, as he recounted when reminiscing about his first meeting with Bretécher: “I

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Fig. 7.3 Creative autonomy and editorial emancipation: L’Écho des Savanes #4, 1973. Cover art by Claire Bretécher. Note the ironic subtitle: “Picture book for adults”

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don’t see what I can do here/Make fun of us/ Every week?/Yes, every week” (Daniel 1978). Les Frustrés is an anthological series, without any recurrent characters, which stages the Nouvel Observateur readership, holding up a sarcastic mirror to them. In covering such varied topics as maternity (“Clair foyer”, 53) divorce (“Divorce”, 51), contraception (“1920 année des lumières”, 24), abortion (“Pour Aïcha”, 48), children’s education (‘Corinne”, 61, “J’élève mon enfant”, 7, a clear reference to the bestselling educational book of the period, the French equivalent of Dr Spock’s What to expect when you’re expecting ), the Palestinian question (“Bethleem 74'' , 19), political action and boycotts (“L’homme à principes”, 57), club holidays (“Le thé à la menthe”, 62–63), psychoanalysis (“Jeux et ris”, 31), and marital therapy (“le magazine du couple”, 29), Claire Bretécher encompassed the cultural landscape of the left-wing intelligentsia (Caute 2016), which identified with and came together as a group in the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur. Bretécher’s weekly pieces held up a magnifying mirror to the liberal bourgeoisie: “doublespeak, pro-worker’s modernism, Paris-centric jargon, armchair revolutionaries—nothing escaped Claire Bretécher. The modern and at times grotesque difficultly we all have to follow through on our ideas—that is the implicit meaning of all her drawings” (Daniel 1978). Bretécher soon acquired star status in the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur, as noted in Jean Daniel’s foreword: On being asked by a foreign TV channel which political column could best represent Le Nouvel Observateur, I replied without hesitation: the page filled each week by Claire Bretécher’s drawings … They thought I was joking. And to a certain extent, then at least [in 1976], it was indeed a joke. But nowadays, I think it wouldn’t be pushing things too far to say that the Les Frustrés page is definitely, deep down though not literally speaking, one of these most effectively politicised regular features of our magazine. […] For me, for us, politics means living in society. The relations between beings, but also the comedies these beings play within these relations. And Claire Bretécher has something irreplaceable when it comes to denouncing these comedies: derision.

In addition to being named the best political journalist working for Le Nouvel Observateur, Bretécher was also described as the “best sociologist of the year”, by no less a figure than Roland Barthes. In 1978, she appeared on the cover of the first issue of F Magazine, a feminist monthly launched by Claude Servan-Schreiber and Benoîte Groult.

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Bretécher was a star, the subject even of a learned exposé in the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur by Michel de Certeau, a philosopher, theologian, Jesuit historian, and sharp observer of the intellectual currents of his time, who worked to disseminate cultural studies (Buchanan 2000) (Fig. 7.4). Bretécher met with spectacular critical success in just a few years. However, this unique status in the bande dessinée landscape was not due solely to the qualities of her humour, or the political scope of her satire

Fig. 7.4 Le Nouvel Observateur, August 1979

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(Pezzullo 2020). It was also linked to her shaking off the traditional structures of the classical bande dessinée. For another particularity of Les Frustrés is that it is a self-published album. After having worked with Bayard, Dupuis, and Dargaud, and with a background in the illustrated press, Bretécher made the leap to selfpublication, following the example of L’Écho des Savanes . The cover of the Les Frustrés album is a fairly minimalist affair: the author’s name, a title, and a drawing. There is no publisher’s name, no collection, no series, no logo. The layout is particularly pared back, indicating the reduced financial backing for this production. From 1975 to 2006—when she returned to the bosom of Dargaud—Claire Brétecher published her own works. It must be said that the context encouraged such risk-taking: with the album sector exploding, a new distribution agency B.Diffusion, was set up. The role of a distribution agency is to manage the distribution of publishers’ stock to bookstores, and adapt a bookseller’s offering to its customers. These agencies (which sometimes also look after shipping) thus play a key role, though one often ignored by the general public, in structuring the bande dessinée market. The appearance and disappearance of distribution agencies adapted to small and medium publishers is a key factor consolidating or endangering the independent creation sector. On launch, B.Diffusion placed a firm order of 30,000 copies from Claire Bretécher. In other words, it financed the entire production of the book—in its own interest of course. By hitching its wagon to the Bretécher media powerhouse, B.Diffusion was able to punch above its weight and adopt a hard line in negotiating reductions with bookstores and publishers. By turning to self-publication, Claire Bretécher acts as an alternative model for bande dessinée albums (Dony et al. 2014). The complex chain of interdependencies tying author to publishing house, and its various interlocutors, was cut back to the work of a single person deciding all the aspects of the work’s life. The 1975 publication of Les Frustrés thus marked a dual break. First, in terms of quantities, with print runs of tens or hundreds of thousands of copies; but above all in terms of quality, since in the wake of Bretécher, a whole series of projects were launched probing tensions in the publishing industry undergoing concentration and rationalisation. What with Philippe Druillet, Fred, Régis Franc, Jean Graton, Jean Tabary, and Albert Uderzo, a long list of bande dessinée authors followed in Bretécher’s footsteps and turned to self-publication. What these projects have in common is that they all sought to challenge industrial publishing, and to question its modes of operation.

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The shift to self-publication often arose from a demand for good editorial practice, and thus stemmed from authors’ frustration with the lackadaisical approach of their publishers. Self-publication also stemmed from the arrival of a new generation of authors on the bande dessinée market, who were less docile towards publishers, who were in turn subject to increasing competition and the temptation to adopt what were viewed as harsher management methods. This demand for healthier professional relations was accompanied, in some cases, by financial motives. It is no doubt Régis Franc, with his taste for provocation, who best summed up the financial motive steering famous authors towards self-publication. In an interview, he thus stated: On an album, a publisher has a 40% profit margin. If the publisher is generous, he gives 12% to the author. In other words, he rakes in 28%. With that sum he may or may not do advertising. He will have expenses, he will have to pay a whole load of people hanging around in corridors who go out for lunch until five in the afternoon. After a while, you say to yourself that you just need to be friends with journalists working on five main newspapers for people to hear about you. It’s thanks to that the people go and buy your album, not thanks to advertisements. If you exclude that expenditure from the publisher’s 28%, there is really no reason for him to earn so much money. Once you’ve understood that, you’ve understood that if you publish yourself, you’re going to get 40% instead of 12%. So after five seconds’ thought you realise it’s worth it. (Van Belle and Mandy 1985)

However, many authors only dipped a brief toe into self-publication, and after one or two books went back to conventional forms of publishing. This was the case of Fred with Magic-Palace Hôtel (1980) and Parade (1982), of Druillet with Gail (1978), and of Régis France with two volumes of Café de la plage (1981–1982). These authors soon gave up on being confronted with the difficulties of a trade which was not theirs. Talking about his failed stab at self-publication, Fred stated: it was a disappointing experience for the good reason that I am not a manager. If it had worked of its own accord record I would have taken someone on to look after it, but everything went wrong, especially because of the distributor, BDiffusion, which went bankrupt almost straightaway. (Mellot 2013)

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Conversely, other author-publishers such as Bretécher, Uderzo, Tabary, and Graton stood out for the professionalism of their publishing undertakings. Their businesses were more of a going concern, and so survived, became more structured, and devoted themselves entirely to the catalogue of a single author, to the point that one could in fact talk of mono-publishers.7 The bande dessinée sector is thus highly specific in relation to other publishing segments, in which self-publication is a residual phenomenon—in poetry, for example, where this practice is part of a niche economy. While the period opening in the 1970s and 1980s marked a relative peak for self-publication, with the emergence of several flourishing businesses, the end of the 2000s saw another turn. With Claire Bretécher’s return to Dargaud in 2006, and Hachette’s takeover of Albert-René in 2008, an entire generation of author-publishers returned to the ranks and handed over control. This marked the end of a cycle, directly raising the central problem of self-publication, which is that of how to enable a self-published work to survive once the author has passed away. It seems an impossible challenge on the face of it, explaining why Claire Bretécher decided to return at a later stage to the bosom of conventional publishing. One of the various paradoxes surrounding independent creation is that industrial groups may come to its rescue. The self-publishing of the 1970s and 1980s thus acts as a magnifying mirror for tensions within bande dessinée publishing. With the rules of the game becoming harsher for authors, certain tried their hand at selfpublication, following two radically different projects: on the one hand, highly successful authors who wielded their fame as an instrument to establish their publishing independence, and on the other hand, marginal authors who saw self-publication as an alternative to oblivion. And though the term self-publication encompasses heterogenous aesthetic approaches, it may nevertheless be stated that the selfpublication of the 1970s and 1980s, while partly playing along with industrial publishing, helped to redefine the contours and practices of bande dessinée. Although the independence snatched at the cost of many disappointments was related primarily to economic matters, these authorpublishers asserted it was possible to relate differently to publishing. 7 The term is used in a different context by Jean-Yves Mollier to designate, on the contrary, the way nineteenth-century literature authors were enclosed within exclusive publishing stables (Mollier 2002).

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It was not solely due to her undeniable qualities as an author that Claire Bretécher rapidly became established as a major figure. It was also due to her exceptional publishing career, her capacity to break free from the contingences of the period seeking to limit female artists to a secondary role, and her visionary reading of the balance of power in the bande dessinée album market which was taking shape.

References Aeschimann, Éric, and Nicoby. 2015. La Révolution Pilote. Paris: Dargaud. Albert, Nicolas. 2012. Case Départ raconte Angoulême: 1982, premières visites ministérielles. Case Départ (blog). June 20, 2012. http://www.nrblog.fr/ casedepart/2012/06/21/case-depart-raconte-angouleme-1982-premieres-vis ites-ministerielles/. Bantigny, Ludivine. 2018. 1968: de grands soirs en petits matins. L’univers historique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Buchanan, Ian. 2000. Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist. Theory, Culture & Society. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cannet, Hervé, and Gilles Ratier. 1993. Angoulême, le grand 20 e . Angoulême: La Charente libre. Caute, Adeline Geneviève. 2016. Féminin, féminité et diversité dans les albums Agrippine de Claire Bretécher depuis 1995. Alternative francophone 1 (9): 5–18. https://doi.org/10.29173/af27194. Daniel, Jean. 1978. Préface. In Les frustrés, t. 2, by Claire Bretécher. Les frustrés. Paris: Claire Bretécher. Dony, Christophe, Tanguy Habrand, and Gert Meesters, eds. 2014. La Bande dessinée en dissidence : alternative, indépendance, auto-édition/Comics in Dissent. Alternative, Independance, Self-Publishing. ACME. Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège. Fesneau, Elvina. 2011. Le poste à transistors à la conquête de la France: la radio nomade, 1954–1970. Bry-sur-Marne: INA Éditions. Girard, Quentin, Johanna Luyssen, and Clémentine Gallot. 2016. Festival d’Angoulême, la parité malgré eux. Libération, January 6, 2016, sec. Livres. https://www.liberation.fr/livres/2016/01/06/festival-d-angoulemela-parite-malgre-eux_1424751/. Greenwald, Lisa. 2019. Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Groensteen, Thierry. 2018. Conversation avec Nikita Mandryka. Neuvième Art 2.0, June 2018. http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/spip.php?article1206.

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Hertiman, Marys Renné. 2021. Provoquer des archives et invoquer la mémoire. GLAD! Revue sur le langage, le genre, les sexualités, no. 11 (December). http://journals.openedition.org/glad/3272. Kohn, Jessica. 2016. Women Comics Authors in France and Belgium Before the 1970s: Making Them Invisible. Revue de Recherche En Civilisation Américaine, no. 6. http://rrca.revues.org/725. ———. 2018. Travailler Dans Les Petits Mickeys. Les Dessinateurs-Illustrateurs En France et En Belgique (1945–1968). Thèse de doctorat en histoire, Paris III. ———. 2022. Dessiner Des Petits Mickeys. Une Histoire Sociale de La BD En France et En Belgique (1945–1968). Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. ———. Forthcoming. Women Cartoonists, a New Avenue for Understanding a Little-Known Profession. In Drawing (in) the Feminine: Women and Bande Dessinée, ed. Margaret C. Flinn. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Lesage, Sylvain. 2014. L’Effet codex: quand la bande dessinée gagne le livre. L’album de bande dessinée en France de 1950 à 1990. Thèse de doctorat en histoire, Université Versailles Saint-Quentin. https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/ tel-01612614. ———. 2020. Angoulême and the Ninth Art: From Comics Fandom to Cultural Policies. The Journal of Comics and Culture 5: 69–90. ———. Forthcoming. Women in Color: Comics Color Artists and the Ninth Art in France. In Drawing (in) the Feminine: Women and Bande Dessinée, ed. Margaret C. Flinn. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Lévrier, Alexis, and Guillaume Pinson, eds. 2021. Presse et bande dessinée: Une aventure sans fin. Bruxelles: Les Impressions nouvelles. Mazur, Dan, and Alexander Danner. 2014. Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson. Mazurier, Stéphane. 2009. Bête, méchant et hebdomadaire: une histoire de “Charlie Hebdo” (1969–1982). Les Cahiers dessinés. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. Mellot, Philippe. 2013. Fred, le prince poète saltimbanque. BDZoom (blog). April 3, 2013. http://bdzoom.com/1415/interviews/les-grands-classiques-de-bdz oom-2/. Michallat, Wendy. 2018. French Cartoon Art in the 1960s and 1970s: Pilote Hebdomadaire and the Teenager Bande Dessinée. Studies in European Comics and Graphic Novels 6. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Mollier, Jean-Yves. 2002. Ecrivain-Éditeur: Un Face-à-Face Déroutant. Travaux de Littérature XV. L’écrivain éditeur (September). Nocerino, Pierre. 2020. Les Auteurs et Autrices de Bande Dessinée: La Formation Contrariée d’un Groupe Social. Thèse de doctorat en sociologie. Paris: EHESS. http://theses.fr/2020EHES0127. Ory, Pascal. 2007. Goscinny, 1926–1977: La Liberté d’en Rire. Paris: Perrin.

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Pezzullo, Viviana. 2020. Claire Bretécher: Female Humor and the Myths of Consumer Society. The French Review 94 (1): 67–81. https://doi.org/10. 1353/tfr.2020.0001. Poels, Géraldine. 2015. Les Trente Glorieuses du téléspectateur: une histoire de la réception télévisuelle des années 1950 aux années 1980. Bry-sur-Marne: INA. Potet, Frédéric. 2016. Le festival de BD d’Angoulême accusé de sexisme après une sélection 100% masculine. Le Monde, January 5, 2016. https://www. lemonde.fr/bande-dessinee/article/2016/01/05/le-festival-de-bd-d-angoul eme-accuse-de-sexisme-apres-une-selection-100-masculine_4842193_4420 272.html. ———. 2020. La mort de la dessinatrice Claire Bretécher, chroniqueuse au vitriol de la France de l’après Mai 68. Le Monde, February 12, 2020. https:// www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2020/02/12/la-mort-de-la-dessinatr ice-claire-bretecher-chroniqueuse-au-vitriol-de-la-france-de-l-apres-68_602 9239_3382.html. Rose, Cynthia. 2020. Claire Bretécher (1940–2020). The Comics Journal (blog). February 14, 2020. http://www.tcj.com/claire-bretecher-1940-2020/. Sellier, Geneviève. 2005. La Nouvelle vague: un cinéma au masculin singulier. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Thompson, Kim. 1978. Claire Bretécher: Triumphant Despite Traitorous Translation. The Comics Journal 42. https://www.tcj.com/claire-bretecher-triump hant-despite-traitorous-translation/ Tirehote Corbin, Maëlys. 2019. Enquête en école de bande dessinée. La Fabrique des créateurices, un apprentissage genré? Mémoire de Master. Paris: EHESS. Van Belle, Anita, and Marie Mandy. 1985. Ah, vous éditez? Cahiers de la bande dessinée, January 1985.

CHAPTER 8

La Ballade de la mer salée and the Emergence of the European Graphic Novel

Abstract Hugo Pratt’s La Ballade de la mer salée marks a turning point in the history of bande dessinée. In publishing these contemplative meanderings stretching over 161 pages as a single book, Casterman brought to a close the cycle opened by Losfeld in 1964—and opened a new one. Like Losfeld a decade earlier, Casterman was simply compiling a strip which had been published as episodes in the Italian and French press. Like Losfeld, Casterman was offering a new apprehension of these disparate episodes, now gathered as a continuous long story in a black-and-white publication which helped to give birth to the graphic novel in France. Except now, it was a top publisher entering the field of mainstream adult comics, providing both commercial muscle and unprecedented respectability. La Ballade came to be the model for the literary aspirations of comics, and the model for the adult bande dessinée as recognised and celebrated in festivals. Keywords Graphic novel · Literature · Circulation · Festivals · Black and white · Editorial authorship

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_8

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La Ballade de la mer salée (published in English as The Ballad of the Salty Sea) is a turning point in the history of the European bande dessinée (Groensteen 2017). In 1975, Casterman published Pratt’s story: 161 black-and-white pages telling the story of Rasputin, the Groovesnore cousins, and a phlegmatic adventurer, Corto Maltese, wandering around Melanesia in the mid-1910s, against a backdrop of piracy. The publication was a great success, winning the prize for best realist album at Angoulême the following year, and marking the shift towards more “literary” bandes dessinées (Dürrenmatt 2013). La Ballade de la mer salée acted as a central reference for one or two generations of bande dessinée authors and readers, and played a decisive role in the adoption of certain forms characterising graphic novels (Baetens and Frey 2015): a story with a large number of pages, in black and white, divided up into chapters, shot through with literary references. When the alternative bande dessinée acquired new impetus in the 1990s, it presented itself as the direct heir to this first generation of “comic strip novels” (Renouil 2012). In many ways, La Ballade de la mer salée played a similar role to Will Eisner’s A Contract With God in the United States (Tabachnick 2017). While Will Eisner’s work was not the first to lay claim to the title of graphic novel, it became a reference thanks to this powerful label and the impact of its reception. Like A Contract with God in the States, La Ballade de la mer salée redefined the surrounding publishing landscape. Its critical reception led the publisher, Casterman, to launch a magazine seeking to build on Pratt’s model of a literary bande dessinée, a hybrid combining literary and graphic forms of writing (Leroy 2018). This magazine, (À Suivre), launched three years later in 1978, did much to win recognition for bande dessinée as an artistic form of writing (Lesage and Meesters 2018). But behind the thick 161-page volume for which La Ballade is famed, lies a rich and complex publishing history. When it won the prize for best foreign realist work at the 3rd Angoulême festival, the story had already been around for ten or so years. The publishing route taken provides a spectacular illustration of how a form of publication may transform a work, or, in other words, of how input from publishers may be fully part of authorship. La Ballade de la mer salée is not only an emblematic, canonical work of drawn literature, it also offers an ideal observatory of how editorial enunciation works (Souchier 2007). Going over how the work was produced and its various versions thus provides a way of

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exploring how the “graphic novel” label was adopted, and, thereby, the ambiguities and implications of adopting a literary model to express the bande dessinée’s artistic ambitions.

From Serial Instalments to the Novel The extent to which the novel, which became established as a major literary form in the nineteenth century, was indebted to serial instalments published in the press is well-known (Law 2000; Hughes and Lund 1991). In the nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines played a decisive role as a literary matrix and, in its motifs and forms, the novel owes much to the division into daily or weekly episodes published beneath current affairs articles. The fact that literature was a form of journalistic writing was long overlooked, but has recently been emphasized by literary historians (Kalifa et al. 2011). Likewise, the origins of La Ballade de la mer salée lie in serialised narration, of the most classic kind (Pratt and Petitfaux 2012). The story was first published in Italy (under the title “Una ballata del mare salato”), in Sergente Kirk, a monthly publication, from July 1967 to February 1969, then republished in instalments in the Corriere dei Piccoli in 1972, before being brought out as an album by Mondadori, at which stage the indefinite article was swapped for the definite article, La Ballata del mare salato. In the meantime, Pratt’s stories had started appearing in the French press, first in Pif , a communist weekly, between 1970 and 1973 (see Fig. 8.1), then in France-Soir, a daily newspaper, between July 1973 and January 1974 (Beyrand 1995). Additionally, fifty or so pages were published in smaller print runs in supplements to Phénix, a magazine for comics fans, until the magazine folded. Over this period, Publicness published four Corto Maltese albums, the series Hugo Pratt developed from the original Melanesian adventure. These albums adopted original formats, particularly the first of title, Corto Maltese, which was published as a thick, Italian-style volume compiling the six episodes which had appeared in Pif Gadget in 1970, with a hardback casing and dust jacket decorated with a close-up of the hero’s head, accompanied by the words “1er prix Phénix de la meilleure bande dessinée d’aventure” (a tribute paid in 1971). The third title, La Lagune des beaux songes, published in 1973, adopted the French 30 × 40 cm format, enhancing the elegance of Hugo Pratt’s black-and-white

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Fig. 8.1 Pif Gadget #66, 25.05.1970, editorial

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drawings, in a formula anticipating the format used by Futuropolis for its “30/40” collection (see Chapter 7). Thus when Casterman published La Ballade de la mer salée in 1975, it was just another iteration of a story already tried and tested in several formats. Indeed, the writing bore the traces of these formats, particularly its publication in instalments. Pif had a print run of about 500,000. Although France-Soir had dropped the banner “the only newspaper with a print-run of over 1 million” shortly before publishing Hugo Pratt, it remained one of the largest circulation French newspapers. So while Casterman was in no position to grant work Pratt’s an audience on the same scale as that of France-Soir, it was in fact the status of the work which was brought into play by this singular book. Initially, from 1973 to 1975, Casterman published a first series of five volumes of the stories already published in the pages of Pif Gadget, in a reformatted version corresponding to the standards used for French bandes dessinées: hardback forty-page albums, in colour as of the third volume (Vaudou pour monsieur le président ) (see Fig. 8.2). This hybrid format thus yoked together the album form, inherited particularly from Astérix, with the narratives published in press instalments. These albums were designed to resemble Casterman’s habitual formats as closely as possible, inflicting peculiar distortions on Pratt’s stories, particularly the use of colouring which not only concealed the lines devised for black-and-white publication, but also ran into problems with the non-delineated speech bubbles: whereas the dialogues figured on a blank background in black and white, in the Casterman publication the colourists had to define the limits between decors and speech, fracturing the subtle interweaving of landscape meditation and finely turned dialogues. This first salvo of publications was short-lived, and by 1976 the first Corto Maltese albums were no longer available.1 It was thus Casterman’s second edition which effected a radical departure from its three decades’ experience in publishing bandes dessinées, and, more generally, from the prevalent codes in the sector (see Fig. 8.3). With its 161 pages in black and white, the album was ultimately closer to the popular cheap “small format” booklets sold at press stands than to

1 Casterman archives, order slips for 1976.

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Fig. 8.2 Hugo Pratt, Rendez-vous à Bahia, Tournai, Casterman, 1973

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Tintin or to Petzi 2 (at the time one of the jewels in Casterman’s crown). The format was new, even for the alternative adult bande dessinée market in a state of turmoil. Apart from Guido Crepax’s Valentina, the albums published by Éric Losfeld had sixty or so colour pages in a hard binding; and though a new generation of publishers were turning to black and white, this was for reasons of economy. But it was unheard of for a heavyweight printer-publisher like Casterman, with financial resources and technical experience in colour printing, to turn its back on four-colour printing in favour of black and white. Hugo Pratt’s story, compiled as a single volume, acquired a new level of coherence: the slow rhythm of the tale, the fragmented narration, the many characters whose paths cross without any clearly assuming the status of hero (a figure closely associated with adventure bandes dessinées ), the rising and falling graphic and diegetic pace, the pages of melancholic meditation, are all packed into the pages of one book. The references to Stevenson, Conrad, and Melville, not to say Coleridge and Baudelaire, are magnified by the meticulous black-and-white printing which, far from being an economy measure, comes across as a deliberate choice to enhance the draughtsmanship. In this, it resembles the aesthetic choices made by the fans of SOCERLID, for example, in their defence and illustration of the art of bandes dessinées. But it would be wrong to see this publication of the story in a single black-and-white volume as marking the victory of the author over the straightjacket of industrial publishing. Casterman’s archives show, on the contrary, Hugo Pratt pleading with his publisher at Casterman, Pierre Servais, for Corto Maltese to be published in colour: Dargaud are currently making a real effort and launching a large number of quality albums, at prices similar to yours, but in colour. For me, seeing my albums published in black and white is a very serious handicap. […] I personally conducted a survey with many booksellers, who told me that Corto Maltese albums would sell a lot more in colour. It is thus harmful to your and my interests to stick with black and white.3

2 Rasmus Klump, by Carla and Wilhelm Hansen, a very popular series for young children depicting the peaceful adventures of a bear cub and his friends. 3 Hugo Pratt, letter to Pierre Servais, 6 August 1973, Casterman archives, authors files.

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Fig. 8.3 Corto Maltese, La Ballade de la mer salée, Tournai, Casterman, 1975, cover

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Fig. 8.4 Back cover of the reprint of Hugo Pratt’s La Ballade de la mer sale, Casterman, 1978 (detail)

So it was the publisher who devised a novel format: a story in black and white, with a large number of pages, narrative closure, and literary references—what was later called the graphic novel. Even before publishing a second title and thus really initiating its “Les grands romans de la bande dessinée” collection, Casterman was playing insidiously on the logic behind a series, for though the work was not retitled or included explicitly within a series, the choice of cover clearly guides the reading, for it places the figure of Corto Maltese at the heart of the story, with his head appearing in five places on the cover illustration. In fact, he is only one character among others, whom the Pif editors had decided to place in the spotlight so as to re-centre the work on the heroic figure, which, to their minds, was indispensable for a bande dessinée adventure. Although Corto Maltese only assumed a central place after la Ballata del mare salato, the publishing history of Hugo Pratt’s stories (in Pif , then as Publicness albums, before being published as Casterman albums) retrospectively established him as a central character. This recentring on a heroic figure, which does not transpire as clearly in the story, was taken to its logical conclusion by Casterman in presenting the character on the cover flaps. The book thus initiated a collection called “Les grands romans de la bande dessinée”, being followed in 1976 by another work by Pratt, Fort Wheeling (107 pages in black and white, once again, in a paperback with cover flaps decorated with watercolours by the author). This embryo collection was torn between its literary ambitions and the pull towards a series, which predominated on the bande dessinée market and within Hugo Pratt’s creative approach, who had learnt his craft working on press instalments and genre-based stories. In fact, the collection remain centred on Hugo Pratt’s work: only one title by Dutch artist, Hans Kresse, was published, an illustrated biography of Vidocq which came out in late 1977 but which had been dropped from the catalogue by late 1982.4 Yet, as 4 Casterman archives, Casterman BD 1983 catalogue, no page numbers.

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Laurent Gerbier points out, Casterman’s presentation of La Ballade de la mer salée as a graphic novel came about almost inadvertently: [see Fig. 8.4]. Louis Gérard and Didier Platteau, far from having “programmed” with Pratt the publication of the first French graphic novel, seemed only to fully understand what they had done after the event. Thus the first print run of La Ballade, in January 1975, had no mention of any collection, while the reprint in October of the same year had a new logo on the back cover, “Les grands romans de la bande dessinée”. This book of literally unheard of proportions, arising from the publisher’s attempt to find an adult form of bande dessinée, with its openly assumed literary references, was thus only retrospectively baptised a “novel”. However, three years before the launch of (À Suivre), this type of bande dessinée, not yet called “graphic novels”, resulted from a hesitant, serendipitous, post-hoc realisation. (Gerbier 2018)

´ for Adults Devising bande dessinee The publication of La Ballade de la mer salée also needs to be understood as a response to the crisis affecting Casterman, which was emblematic of transformations in the bande dessinée landscape. Headquartered almost on the Franco-Belgian border, though with a long-established Paris branch, Casterman was a venerable publisher, with a history stretching back to the eighteenth century, which had specialised in religious publishing since the nineteenth century (Moine 2020; Durand and Habrand 2018). One of the company’s particularities was that it was both a printer and a publisher. In the early twentieth century, it invested in its production facilities, enabling it to obtain major printing markets for phone directories, railway timetables, and Michelin guides. But its undoubted technical prowess should not conceal the fact that Casterman was a doubly provincial company, in a publishing market very heavily centred on France and Paris. In addition to Belgian publishing being peripheral to the French literary field—Belgian authors generally had to “go up” to Paris to meet with success—Tournai, where Casterman was headquartered, was peripheral even to Belgium. When Casterman did move into comics, it resulted from a chance encounter. But since the mid-1930s, the situation had changed extensively. In the space of three decades, on the strength of Tintin, the company had scaled up, building up a solid catalogue of children’s books, notably the very popular Martine series, a sort of local

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variant on the Little Golden Books. But its situation was highly unusual, for the dynamism of bande dessinée was rooted in the press, and Casterman, as an old printer-publisher, kept its distance from the press and the related constraints and distribution circuits. But come the late 1960s, Casterman was hit by the crisis in religious publishing and the dwindling of Hergé’s output, whose Tintin albums accounted for a sizeable chunk of the company’s turnover (see Chapter 5). Adult bande dessinée struck Casterman as a sector with potential, and it made a first mind-blowing foray into the sector with Les Dossiers du B.I.D.E.5 (see Fig. 8.5). The series, a little-known incursion into psychedelic bandes dessinées, had been commissioned by Casterman in the wake of the third Lucca festival, in 1967. While there, the business manager of Casterman France attended a talk about the shift towards bandes dessinées for adults, following the lead given by Forest’s Barbarella (1964) and Guy Pellaert’s Jodelle (1966). The emergence of “youth” culture was affecting all media, and the decade saw countless experiments to address this young public, with Pilote being the most famous comics magazine. Louis Gérard approached two authors from this world of “youth” media: a young radio presenter with Radio-Luxembourg, Jean Yanne, and Tito Topin, an illustrator who after having created psychedelic posters had gone on to produce a series for a Catholic monthly, Formidable. As Topin explained, their recruitment was based on a misunderstanding: They thought we were two very respectable people, since we worked for very respectable press organisations, and that we were therefore going to do something very respectable. That is how I met Jean Yanne, on the basis of a misunderstanding.6

Louis Gérard asked the pair to create a bande dessinée exploiting the yé-yé aesthetic, so as to attract youth readers.7 They came up with La 5 The following discussion of the Dossiers du B.I.D.E. is based entirely on work by Laurent Gerbier, from whom I borrow some of the analysis he devotes to the series in “La Langouste fait un bide”, in Sylvain Lesage & Gert Meesters (eds.), (À Suivre). Archives d’une revue culte, Tours, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, “Iconotextes”, 2018. 6 Tito Topin, quoted in (Dicale 2012). 7 Yé-yé, the French transcription of “yeah”, is associated with the introduction of

English-language rock-’n’-roll to France in the early 1960s. It was both a musical current

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Fig. 8.5 Jean Yanne, Tito Topin, La Langouste ne passera pas !, Tournai, Casterman, 1969

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langouste ne passera pas (Casterman 1969), a satirical bande dessinée in the vibrant colours of the pop aesthetic, with puns referring directly to political current affairs. The result of this unexpected collaboration was a bolt out of the blue. La Langouste ne passera pas used the graphic codes of psychedelia (with liquid forms, anamorphosis, an aggressive colour palette, and stylised silhouettes) in a radically impudent and delirious tale. Jean Yanne’s script delivers large doses of absurdity, with a supersophisticated computer in the form of a pinball machine informing the UN secretary general that crayfish contain a vitamin capable of delivering universal peace. But crayfish then suddenly disappears from the earth. The subsequent investigation by the Bureau of Investigation for the Defence of the Species (Bureau d’Investigation pour la Défense des Espèce (B.I.D.E.), the French word bide (meaning a flop) shows they have been rescued by extra-terrestrial crayfish. The latter are finally hunted using mayonnaise-filled missiles. Topin and Jean Yanne—who went on to become a leading humourist, actor, and filmmaker—used visual psychedelic codes, as commissioned by Casterman. But rather than dutifully following the commission from the old conservative publisher of the very well-behaved Tintin, Yanne and Topin piled transgression on top of transgression, mocking the state, the church, the justice system, and the army. Their subversive text would have been more in place in the pages of the underground magazine Actuel , which had imported Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton to France (Kervran and Kien 2010; Warne 2007; Gabilliet 2019). But Casterman had planned not only to publish the albums, it had also signed a contract with the largest-selling weekly magazine in France, a TV Guide called Télé 7 Jours. However angry Louis Gérard was, there was no going back: Télé 7 Jours distributed 2 million copies of Yanne and Topin’s sketch. Given this media coverage, Casterman set its sights high and did a first print run of 100,000 copies—the first in its history, despite publishing Tintin. This initial print run soon sold out, and a few months later Casterman had to print another 25,000 copies. But Casterman then pulled the plug on the experiment, and though it had signed a contract for four works, it only

and a marketing device, promoted by the magazine Salut les Copains, restructuring youth cultures around the world of rock-’n’-roll. This culminated in a free concert in Paris on 22 June 1963, attended by 150,000–200,000 young people. For all its ambiguity, yé-yé represents the affirmation of a youth public who were more transgressive than the traditionally sober readership of bande dessinée magazines. See Briggs (2015).

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brought out the second, Voyage au centre de la c…ulture. This was even more provocative than La Langouste, and only a limited print run was produced. In 1972, the publisher expunged the series from its catalogue. The whole story could have been no more than a joke, another episode in the long list of provocations by Jean Yanne. However, La Langouste and Le Voyage have their rightful place in Casterman’s attempts to recalibrate its policy towards its bandes dessinées. Yanne and Topin, aware that they no longer had the publisher’s backing, seized on the publication of Le Voyage au centre de la c…ulture, in October 1969, to submit it for all the literary prizes that autumn, and in November crashed the cocktail party held to announce the winner of the Goncourt, at Drouant, declaring to all and sundry that there was no way the prize could elude them. The following day, invited by Jacques Chancel to talk on France-Inter radio, Jean Yanne declared: We submitted this work for the Goncourt solely to see if they were capable of acknowledging the merits of bandes dessinées. Because bande dessinée is, ultimately, just as honourable a literary and graphic genre as the novel or theatre.8

In other words, even it was just a provocative prank, Jean Yanne and Tito Topin positioned Les Dossiers du B.I.D.E. within the field of literature, and explicitly laid claim to literary dignity and respectability for bande dessinée as a form. Through its parodic perspective, and by being ahead of the curve, Les Dossiers du B.I.D.E. has a place in the history of attempts to devise an “adult” bande dessinée, a process in which La Ballade de la mer salée marked a decisive step, six years later.

´ ” “A novel may also be written as a bande dessinee After Casterman’s unfortunate (and no doubt precocious) foray into adult bande dessinée in the mid-1960s, taking on Hugo Pratt in their catalogue gave a decisive push towards a form of bande dessinée grappling with modernity. During the mid-1970s, it became increasingly urgent for Casterman to renew its catalogue, for Hergé was no longer devoting much energy to Tintin. Additionally, the arrival of a new generation of managers 8 France-Inter, “Radioscopie”, 18 November 1969, quoted in B. Dicale, ibid.

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at the head of the company enabled Casterman to seize the transformation shaking up the bande dessinée world and move away from its traditional moral stance. The addition of Hugo Pratt to the catalogue in 1973, and the publication of La Ballade de la mer salée in 1975, stemmed from this transformation to the company. The subsequent commercial and critical success of La Ballade fully convinced the publisher to pivot towards literary bandes dessinées via the launch of its monthly publication, (À Suivre) (Finet 2017). The prizes awarded to Hugo Pratt for La Ballade de la mer salée, together with the particularly favourable critical reception, encouraged Casterman to push its advantage, even though the identity of this venerable provincial publisher sat uneasily with the turmoil of the Parisian countercultural press (L’Écho des savanes , Métal hurlant , Ah! Nana, Falatoff , etc.). The dominant economic model of the period militated against relying solely on booksellers as an outlet, with the complementary pairing of magazines and albums still being the main model to launch stories and, crucially, pay authors. But by guaranteeing authors, a dual income (piecework rates for the instalment plus the copyright on the albums), Casterman offered a degree of material comfort which was the crux of its ambitious publishing policy (Barbier 2013; Lesage and Meesters 2018). It may indeed have seemed an odd time to launch a bande dessinée magazine, just as Pilote was switching from weekly to monthly publication, a telling example of the growing difficulties facing the bande dessinée press. To regenerate its catalogue, Casterman decided that the adult back catalogue it was assembling was to be backed up by a magazine, (À Suivre), which launched in February 1978. The history of this publication, whose print run never topped 50,000 monthly copies, may seem a relative failure. But the magazine’s losses were in fact an investment in the publisher’s catalogue. The plan was thus clear: to publish books, with the magazine being used primarily to bolster its catalogue. This was illustrated, prior even to the launch of the magazine, by the terms of the contract between Casterman, Tardi, and Forest for the publication of Ici Même: The bande dessinée novel called Ici Même will come out monthly in prepublication in the magazine Saga (provisional title), in both the Frenchlanguage and Dutch-language edition of said magazine, in the form of

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chapters of variable length. It is nevertheless stipulated that the work to which the copyright is thus transferred shall include at least 110 pages, and that it will be divided into chapters.9

This refers very explicitly to a type of “graphic novel”. It also shows the role played by the publisher in shaping a new form of writing for bandes dessinées, in reference to literature, as a novel divided into chapters. The role Casterman played in the evolution of illustrated writing is not just a matter of a label attached to a given story (Méon 2017). The archives contain cases of letters sent in the months leading up to the launch of (À Suivre) to potential authors, with a copy of La Ballade de la mer salée enclosed as an example to follow. Pratt’s story was thus used as a paradigm for this new literary impetus Casterman was seeking to give to bande dessinée. The magazine was very much part of these plans, and in fact played a decisive role in consecrating bande dessinée as the ninth art. However, sifting through the 239 issues, one is hard pushed to identify any authors the magazine actually discovered. Its historical importance lies elsewhere, for the magazine effectively identified many talents and provided them with the conditions needed to flourish as authors. It is in this respect that Casterman may ultimately be said to resemble a Gallimard for bande dessinée—a title to which it repeatedly laid claim: as a skilful operator able to identify and attract upcoming authors, and to provide them with the working conditions and manufacturing quality capable of supporting them in their career. Admittedly, the magazine enabled virtually no authors to break through, instead privileging the publication of recognised authors (veterans Pratt and Forest, and authors from the following generation, such as Tardi, discovered elsewhere). Yet its longevity (19 years), explicit slant towards a more literary form, and critical recognition meant it was a significant player in renewing bande dessinée. The editorial published in the first issue sets out a new ambition for bande dessinée, its editor, Jean-Paul Mougin, proclaiming: “With its extraordinary novelistic density, (À Suivre) will mark the untrammelled

9 Amendment to contract no. 2214 of 6 June 1977 for the publication of Ici Même; Casterman archives, Tardi author file.

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irruption of bande dessinée into literature” (Mougin 1977). The formulation has lost none of its strength, and seems to capture this ambition for a hybridised literary bande dessinée, offering stories of greater scope and respiration, thus transposing the model of La Ballade de la mer salée, which Casterman had turned into a surprise bestseller three years earlier. In fact Mougin’s formulation hit the nail on the head, offering an effective summary of shifts in how a generation of authors and readers were relating to new narrative horizons. And in fact the magazine published lengthy stories divided into instalments of thirty or so pages, insistently referred to as “chapters”: I wish to insist on this word “chapter”, for we want to put an end to the old structure of episodic stories. Where is the creative freedom when the author knows in advance that he will have to put the word “end” at the bottom of page 15? Where is the pleasure in reading when one knows that the “story” one is starting will necessarily end after 42 or 64 pages, to enable a publisher to produce a fine hardback colour album? (Mougin 1978)

The stories published in the magazine’s pages fed a collection of “(À Suivre) novels” embodying this literary ambition. These large paperback volumes in black and white, divided into chapters, opened up new narrative perspectives. Ici même by Forest (see Chapter 2) and Tardi (see Chapter 7) is a good example of this new literary ambition. The story was used to illustrate the cover of the first issue in 1978, and indeed of the last issue in 1997, signalling that it perfectly resumes the spirit behind the magazine. The album follows Arthur Même, a gangly young man who lives on walls: having been dispossessed of his family’s lands, he lives only on the walls that divide up the property, and on gates which he opens for a toll. Over the course of its 180 pages, this madcap story symbolically marks the passing of the torch from one generation of authors for adults to another: Jean-Claude Forest, the author of Barbarella, produced the script, while the illustrations were by Jacques Tardi, a promising young talent in whom Casterman placed many hopes. Tardi’s black-and-white drawings generate the grubby, nightmarish atmosphere. Twenty-first-century readers, used to the graphic novel, can find it difficult to imagine how radical a black-and-white bande dessinée magazine seemed in 1978. Since the early years of the twentieth century,

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bande dessinée had been indissociable from children’s illustrated magazines, with colour playing a key role. Spirou, Tintin, and even Pilote had not deviated from this rule, with colour being a selling point. Many of the “adult” magazines of the 1970s, such as Métal hurlant and L’Écho des savanes , also used colour. However, colouring had remained a subaltern and anonymous task until the 1970s, sometimes even carried out at the printers. Black and white was thus the preserve of the avant-garde, of Futuropolis and underground magazines issuing from the 1960s counterculture. Here, black and white was justified, for, as Étienne Robial observes, it was more profitable: “from a publisher’s point of view, printing in black and white is cheap. You can tell a story for 1,000 people, whereas in colour, you immediately have to target 20,000 people. And that was the line taken by Pauvert-Losfeld”.10 For an industrial publisher like Casterman, which had built its catalogue on the technical quality of its colour presses (Tintin, Martine), opting for black and white was a more surprising decision. The influence of La Ballade de la mer salée is undeniable. More generally, the use of black and white occurred at a time when it was being reappraised by fans. Though long used due to economic constraints, in the late 1960s black and white started to be presented as the best means to emphasise the author’s draughtsmanship. Thus a 1967 exhibition, “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative”, presented enlargements of pages and panels in black and white. At the time, the artification of bande dessinée involved asserting visual artistry, and black and white was a way of wrenching bande dessinée free from the grasp of the children’s culture industry. (À Suivre) thus lay at the intersection between economic constraints and promoting craftsmanship, as retrospectively stated by Didier Platteau in speaking of a “return to the roots, but while seeking a literary identity, by associating the image of the novelist with that of bande dessinée, with the simple, modest means of ink and paper” (Barbier 2013).

10 Étienne Robial, unpublished interview with the author on 4 March 2013. While

Robial presents himself as following in the footsteps of Éric Losfeld, the publisher of Epoxy and of the Saga de Xam, it may be noted that the magazine’s prototypical story was the work of Jean-Claude Forest, who had produced Barbarella for Losfeld, a major turning point in the emergence of adult bande dessinée, before going on to take the reins of the short-lived Chouchou. On this point see Lesage (2019).

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Black and white was thus thought of as a way of returning to a form of illustrated writing, as expressed by François Schuiten: “black and white is prototypical writing. You are completely exposed. You have to bare everything […]. You are at the very heart of writing. Pared back to the bone” (Barbier 2013).11 The first issues of the magazine seem to illustrate this “bande dessinée pared back to the bone”. With Ici Même, which opens the first issue, Forest and Tardi offer a story in a completely original genre, a hallucinatory reverie of daily life, “a pitiless confrontation between the derisory and the marvellous in daily life”.12 In Bran Ruzh, Deschamps and Auclair drew on the Celtic legend of the City of Ys, in a lengthy saga giving voice to the Breton people, partly in Breton, at a time of renewed Breton activism (Blin-Rolland 2017). Cabanes and, once again Forest (decidedly an omnipresent figure in the history of the modernisation of bande dessinée), adapted the Roman de Renart, a medieval story cycle, conveying with great virtuosity the astounding truculence of the central character. Even more decisively than the use of black and white, which became less systematic in the 1980s, the division into chapters best illustrated the hybridisation with literature, and the ambition to offer different types of stories. When in 1964, Losfeld gathered the instalments of “Barbarella” published in V Magazine to turn them into chapters, it was a brilliant and unprecedented idea. By placing chapters at the heart of its magazine’s identity, Casterman gave authors control over their stories. From this point of view, the second half of the 1970s saw two different models for reinventing bande dessinée narratives. In Métal hurlant , Moebius called for an emancipated bande dessinée (Moebius 1975). Moebius, and, through him, Métal hurlant , embodied one facet of this reinvention of illustrated stories: liberation through improvisation, through abandoning the bourgeois narrative codes issuing from instalments. Three years later (À Suivre) sketched out a different, more classical model with its stories divided into chapters, more clearly inserted within the formal space of the book: a story which, through the book, added

11 François Schuiten, in Jean-Christophe Barbier (ed.), Métal hurlant , (À Suivre). La bande dessinée fait sa révolution, p. 151. 12 Presentation of the first episode in (À Suivre) no. 1, p. 5.

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density to the narrative experience. La Ballade de la mer salée was thus the matrix of what went on to become the “graphic novel”, one of the new standards of alternative creation. * ** Issuing directly from the success of Hugo Pratt’s La Ballade de la mer salée, (À Suivre) was part of a key movement in the history of the ninth art. hroughout its history, (À Suivre) played its part in this legitimisation of bande dessinée analysed by Luc Boltanski (Boltanski 1975). The birth of the magazine seems to illustrate the “adult” turn taken by bande dessinée, with calls for its literary scope being a central argument in Casterman’s positioning itself as the “Gallimard of bande dessinée”. Via (À Suivre), it managed to embody a noble facet of the bande dessinée landscape, and the prizes it scooped in at Angoulême—the Grand Prix for Forest (1983), for Tardi (1985) [see Fig. 8.6], and for Juillard (1996), the Alfred prize for best album for Silence (1981), the Alph’art prize for best French-language album for Léon la came: Laid, pauvre et malade (1998)—enhanced Casterman’s contribution to building this legitimising identity, championed by the Angoulême festival with which the publisher maintained close links. As argued by Florian Moine, (À Suivre) epitomises how a 200-year-old Catholic publishing house looking for new markets successfully repositioned itself (Moine 2018). While many Belgian publishers had difficulty with the shift to “adult” bandes dessinées, sticking with their highly traditional products, Casterman knew how to turn changing times to its advantage. This is what is paradoxical about Casterman: while it may be perceived as the archetypal conservative publisher, with a centurieslong history and dusty catalogue, it managed to appropriate a part of the avant-garde dynamic. The resulting transformation was radical, and Casterman was not alone in feeling its effects. It helped to make Belgium the place where graphic modernity was devised, particularly by recruiting several authors who had worked on Neuvième Rêve, the magazine set up by Claude Renard to present the works of his students: François Schuiten, Benoît Sokal, and Yves Swolfs. Nevertheless, the modernity embodied and advocated by (À Suivre) was only relative. The magazine struggled to open its pages to the rising generation, and was in fact unable to renew its stable of authors. Additionally, despite its explicit literary ambitions, (À Suivre) was wholly unable

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Fig. 8.6 Jacques Tardi, promo shoot for Casterman after winning the Angoulême Grand Prix. On the shelves behind him, his series (Adèle Blanc-Sec), his (A Suivre) novels—especially Ici Même, and the large 30 × 40 published by Futuropolis more than a decade earlier

to seize upon the graphic novel. For a while, (À Suivre) set itself the ambition of opening up novelistic horizons, the editorial board was blind to the rejuvenation of graphic narratives occurring in the United States under the highly ambiguous label of the graphic novel. In 1978, Will Eisner published A Contract with God, whose success popularised the term graphic novel. Despite seeing the light of day the same year, (À Suivre) was unable to grasp this impetus. The term “graphic novel” and its associated format gradually spread, and gained momentum in 1986–1987 with the omnibus publication of The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller), of Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons), and of the first volume of Maus. Despite Jacques Tardi arguing in favour of Maus with Casterman, Art Spiegelman’s story ended up being published by Flammarion, a literary publisher with no experience in bandes dessinées. Jean-Paul Mougin’s inability to seize the scale of what Spiegelman was undertaking in Maus (apparently writing it off as “storyboard”) casts

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a harsh light on the magazine’s inability to open up to the new winds blowing in from the Atlantic and elsewhere.13 Nevertheless, by publishing La Ballade de la mer salée and launching (A Suivre), Casterman opened a breach for alternative ways of creating bandes dessinées and expanding the range of visual narratives, even in the heart of mainstream publishing, thereby paving the way for the normalisation of the ninth art.

References Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. 2015. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Barbier, Jean-Baptiste. 2013. Métal hurlant - (À Suivre). La bande dessinée fait sa révolution. Landerneau: Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc. Beyrand, Alain. 1995. Catalogue Encyclopédique Des Bandes Horizontales Françaises Dans La Presse Adulte de 1946 à 1975 de Lariflette à Janique Aimée. Tours: Pressibus. Blin-Rolland, Armelle. 2017. Adapting Brittany: The Ker-Is Legend in Bande Dessinée. European Comic Art 10, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 58–73. https:// doi.org/10.3167/eca.2017.100106. Boltanski, Luc. 1975. La Constitution Du Champ de La Bande Dessinée. Actes De La Recherche En Sciences Sociales 1 (1): 37–59. https://doi.org/10.3406/ arss.1975.2448. Briggs, Jonathyne. 2015. Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958–1980. New York: Oxford University Press. Crucifix, Benoît, and Sylvain Lesage. 2020. (À Suivre) Overseas: The Transatlantic Circulation of the French Graphic Novel. Journal of Comics and Culture 5 (US Comics in France / Bande dessinée in America): 131–151. Dicale, Bertrand. 2012. Jean Yanne: à rebrousse-poil (1 vols.). First document. Paris: First éd. Durand, Pascal, and Tanguy Habrand. 2018. Histoire de l’édition En Belgique. XVe-XXIe Siècle. Réflexions Faites. Bruxelles: Les Impressions nouvelles. Dürrenmatt, Jacques. 2013. Bande dessinée et littérature. Études de littérature des XXe et XXIe siècles 39. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Finet, Nicolas. 2017. L’aventure “(À suivre)”: 1978–1997 . Mémoire vive 22. Montrouge: PLG. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2019. Actuel and the Acclimation of US Comix in France in the 1970s. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02275648. 13 On this failure, see Crucifix and Lesage, “(À Suivre) Overseas: The Transatlantic Circulation of the French Graphic Novel”.

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Gerbier, Laurent. 2018. Le roman en ballade. In (À Suivre): archives d’une revue culte, ed. Sylvain Lesage and Gert Meesters. Iconotextes. Tours: Presses universitaires François Rabelais. Groensteen, Thierry. 2017. The Expanding Art of Comics: Ten Modern Masterpieces. University Press of Mississippi. Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. 1991. The Victorian Serial. Victorian Literature and Culture Series. Charlottesville: University press of Virginia. Kalifa, Dominique, Philippe Régnier, and Marie-Ève Thérenty. 2011. La civilisation du journal : histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle (1 vols.). Opus magnum (Paris). Paris: Nouveau Monde. http://www. sudoc.fr/158096851. ISSN 2111-7179. Kervran, Perrine, and Anaïs Kien. 2010. Les années “Actuel”: contestations rigolardes et aventures modernes. Attitudes. Marseille: le Mot et le reste. Law, Graham. 2000. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Leroy, Fabrice. 2018. European Literary and Genre Fiction: The (À Suivre) Magazine and the ‘Adventure’ and ‘Science Fiction’ Traditions (Pratt, Tardi, Moebius). In The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, ed. Hugo Frey, Jan Baetens, and Stephen E. Tabachnick, 251–268. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316759981.016. Lesage, Sylvain. 2019. L’effet livre. Métamorphoses de la bande dessinée. Iconotextes. Tours: Presses universitaires François Rabelais. Lesage, Sylvain, and Gert Meesters. 2018. (À Suivre): archives d’une revue culte. Iconotextes. Tours: Presses universitaires François Rabelais. Méon, Jean-Matthieu. 2017. Introduire le graphic novel, une ambition circonscrite: Les premiers usages nord-américains de l’étiquette et leur péritexte. Revue Française D’études Américaines 151: 176–193. https://doi.org/10. 3917/rfea.151.0176. Moebius. 1975. Editorial. Métal Hurlant, 1975. Moine, Florian. 2018. Le Tournant (À Suivre) de Casterman. Histoire d’une Métamorphose Éditoriale. In (À Suivre). Archives d’une Revue Culte, ed. Sylvain Lesage and Gert Meesters, 55–74. Iconotextes. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais. ———. 2020. Casterman (1919–1999). Une entreprise du livre, entre Belgique et France. Thèse de doctorat en histoire, Paris I. The thesis was published in 2022, under the title Casterman: de Tintin à Tardi: 1919–1999. Bruxelles: Les Impressions Nouvelles. Mougin, Jean-Paul. 1977. Editorial. (A Suivre), 1977. ———. 1978. Editorial. (A Suivre), 1978. Pratt, Hugo, and Dominique Petitfaux. 2012. De l’autre côté de Corto. Bruxelles: Casterman.

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Renouil, Elisa. 2012. Définir le roman graphique, du genre au format. Master’s Thesis in Book Studies, Paris: Paris XIII. Souchier, Emmanuël. 2007. Formes et pouvoirs de l’énonciation éditoriale. Communication & Langages 154 (1): 23–38. https://doi.org/10.3406/ colan.2007.4688. Tabachnick, Stephen E. 2017. From Comics to the Graphic Novel: William Hogarth to Will Eisner. In The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick, 26–40. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/978131 6258316.004. Warne, Chris. 2007. Bringing Counterculture to France: Actuel Magazine and the Legacy of May ’68. Modern & Contemporary France 15 (3): 309–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639480701461059.

CHAPTER 9

And Afterwards? bande dessinée: Part Art, Part Industry

Abstract The transformation of comics into art was far from complete in 1975. Yet while many facets were still to come, the foundations had been laid. The critical gaze had changed, as had that of the public authorities, who had until then confined comics to the status of a cultural product for children, and in need of monitoring. Comics were no longer assigned to the sphere of childhood and had acquired respectability. During the 1960s, a new consensus emerged in France: comics were of cultural, intellectual, and artistic value for an educated adult readership—on top of the more traditional child readership. The 1980s saw the emergence of a real cultural policy to support comics, both their history and their creation. With the disappearance of nearly all the last comics periodicals, the 1990s were a time of great creative and editorial dynamism in the alternative comic strip sector. But the transformation of comics into art has a bitter counterpart today for creators: assigning comics to the world of art has made it harder to properly address the socio-economic conditions and precarity which undermine the sector, threatening the dynamism of a type of production unique to France. Keywords Legitimisation · Art · Social conditions · Cultural policies

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_9

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1975: The Birth of the “ninth art” There is always something arbitrary about selecting starting points, defining clear origins, and assigning a date for when a phenomenon first appeared. It is a classic issue in the history of science and innovation. “Invention” is always just a string of initiatives, discoveries, and abortive trials suddenly falling into place (Allen 1983). More specifically, it is a central matter in studying cultural products and phenomena: May we date the appearance of bande dessinée to the publication of M. Crépin (Smolderen 2014)? What did the Lumière brothers “invent” with the screening of their first film in 1895 (Gaudreault and Marion 2000)? When did television go from being a technical project to become a medium in its own right (Weber 2022)? Nevertheless, however, arbitrary and problematic chronological watersheds may be, they do provide useful landmarks. A series of dates provides a framework that is essential for understanding. It is an act which lies at the very heart of doing history, as defined by the ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss: If dates do not constitute all of history, nor its most interesting part, history itself would vanish without them, since its whole originality and specificity lie in the apprehension of the relationship between before and after, which would be doomed to dissolve if its terms could not be dated, at least virtually. (Lévi-Strauss 1962)

So if we had to choose a date when the “ninth art” first appeared, it would no doubt be in 1975. This year saw a whole series of transformations upending the bande dessinée landscape, ranging from the changing socio-economic conditions in which authors worked, to the symbolic status they enjoyed. For the ninth art corresponds to the version of bande dessinée with “adult” themes and “adult” readerships, enabling it to accede to a symbolic recognition which was not in fact without its downsides. For sure, not everything happened in the space of one year. Historical evolution is never that simple. But many major mutations crystallised in 1975, which eventually coalesced and fully came to light. The fact that Pilote went from being a weekly to a monthly magazine in 1974

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was already an indication of the declining role played by the traditional illustrated magazines. For although bande dessinée had been structured around children’s magazines since the early twentieth century, this segment was in its death throes by the mid-1970s. In 1974, the fact that the new Astérix episode was not published in Pilote, where the series had first appeared, clearly signalled this change in model. With the series regularly topping the sales charts, Dargaud decided to look for new readers in the mainstream press (in this instance, Le Monde). Equally, the publication of Les Frustrés as an album in 1975 was further indication of this deep-seated shift affecting the bande dessinée publishing system and symbolic economy. Les Frustrés had started out in a weekly news magazine for the new left-wing intelligentsia. Bretécher’s decision to self-publish the album epitomises the upheaval to the system, now centred on the author. What with the colossal sales of Astérix and the independence staked out by Bretécher, this amounted not just to the consecration of the author (Bénichou 1973), but also to the weakening of the bande dessinée press, which was shorn of its central position in young people’s cultural practices. Mass ownership of devices in the 1960s and 1970s reconfigured adolescent culture around music consumption, with the shift to individual listening on record players leading to the emergence of generation-based musical cultures (Stilwell 2004). The subsequent mass acquisition of TVs gave rise to youth cultures structured around the consumption of TV programmes targeting their age group (Gaillard 2006; Poels 2015). In 1975, the town of Angoulême staged the second bande dessinée festival. The event was still called a “salon”, indicating the predominant influence of the fine arts model in the symbolic revalorisation of the ninth art. The first Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême had gone to Franquin, but this time round the prize was awarded to the American Will Eisner, who was little known in France at the time. The fans running the event thereby clearly signalled their ambition to open the French scene to the rest of the world, and to make the festival into one of the key hubs for the circulation of works (Lesage 2020). Indeed, Will Eisner, whose work was undergoing reappraisal, was able to discover works that were strikingly distant from the strips in which he had worked up till then. In particular, he could have come across La Ballade de la mer salée, which the Belgian publisher Casterman had just brought out in a new edition. It had already appeared in instalments in the press, before being assembled into episodes in magazines or colour albums, but Casterman

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was now trying to pull off the coup of publishing the tale in its entirety, in a sleek edition of 161 pages in black and white. The object had nothing in common with the children’s albums which had long been on sale in bookstores, nor with the small-format adult bandes dessinées sold under the counter. This daring move was especially surprising given that the author in person voiced severe reservations about this initiative. Nevertheless, La Ballade is nowadays acknowledged as one of the works which gave birth to the European graphic novel. It is hard to say with certainty whether Will Eisner drew inspiration from La Ballade in launching his first graphic novels three years later. However, on either side of the Atlantic, there was a quest for new narrative paths allowing the scope characterising novel writing. When Casterman, once again, launched the magazine (A Suivre) as a seedbed for a generation of authors of graphic novels, it was La Ballade that the publisher sent out to the authors it had preselected to give them a better idea of what it was looking for, and to enable them to shake off the constraints on their writing and so carry dessinée towards horizons new (Lesage and Meesters 2018). By additionally awarding prizes to Jacques Tardi (best illustrator) and Claire Bretécher (best scriptwriter), the 1975 festival confirmed the emergence of a new generation of ambitious authors who were fiercely independent of the requisites of children’s magazines. For this generation, Fluide glacial and Métal hurlant (which was launched to coincide with the 1975 Angoulême festival) provided an unprecedented arena for exploring the frontiers of bande dessinée and pushing back its limits. Among many other authors, Gotlib and Moebius emerged as major figures in the new bande dessinée, a phenomenon analysed by Luc Boltanski through the lens of the sociology of cultural distinction he was devising with Pierre Bourdieu (Boltanski 1975; Bourdieu 1979). This new generation of authors had new artistic ambitions, depicted by Gotlib with consummate self-mockery in Rubrique-à-brac (Gotlib 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974). Of course, the process by which bande dessinée obtained cultural recognition was far from over in 1975. For sure, educators were shifting towards bande dessinée, no longer viewing it with anything like the outright hostility they had displayed in the previous decade (Roux 1970). For sure, the first generation of fans who had spent a decade or more dismantling preconceptions about bande dessinée had partly succeeded in transforming its image. Long viewed solely suspiciously, as a subculture

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threatening to addle children’s minds, bande dessinée had now gained a form of respectability. But there was still a long way to go from calls for “a ninth art” to its actually obtaining a tangible place in the concert of the arts. Cultural recognition for bande dessinée picked up pace after 1981 with the victory of the left in the presidential elections, leading to a radical shift in French cultural policy (Poirrier 2009). Jack Lang’s appointment as minister of culture signalled a sizeable ambition, with the doubling of the ministry’s budget and the passing of a law establishing a fixed price for the sale of books, something publishers and authors had long been calling for, and which still underpins the French cultural exception (Martin 2006). Jack Lang and his teams sought to convey a more inclusive approach to shared cultural practices: a form of democracy, far from the credo of the preceding teams who had championed “cultural democratisation”, aspiring to introduce the marvels of legitimate culture to all and sundry. TBande dessinée was earmarked to play a leading role in this shift in French cultural policy. In January 1983, Jack Lang attended the tenth Angoulême festival, where he announced “15 measures in favour of bande dessinée”. These measures taken by the ministry of culture included making bande dessinées eligible as of right for funding from the Centre National des Lettres (CNL). The CNL, a public body in charge of promoting literary creativity, was expanding rapidly mainly thanks to revenue from a tax on reprography introduced in 1976; CNL funding was used to support the creation, publication, and translation of difficult works. The fact that the CNL opened these support schemes to bandes dessinées indicates the extent to which bande dessinée had become a bookbased art form, a separate segment in the book market. In parallel to this, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain started acquiring original pages as of 1983, in further evidence of the very concrete recognition of such pages as art objects. But the main measure was the proposal to open a Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image (CNBDI) in Angoulême. This amounted to official recognition for the ninth art and enabled the ministry of culture to draw up a cultural policy for bande dessinée. This centre—including a bande dessinée museum and a specialised library (fed by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France handing over one of the copyright copies it received for each work published in France), and a department for the creation

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of digital images—built on and institutionalised the local cultural policy built up around the festival (Lesage 2020). It was the CNBDI which spearheaded cultural action in favour of bande dessinée. The Centre opened in 1990 and has since been renamed the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image (in 2008); the CIBDI became established as one of the main bande dessinée institutions in the world, alongside the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus (Ohio) and the Kyoto Manga Museum. Building on the effects of the festival (which only ran for the final week of January each year), the centre became established as the hub for devising policy for the ninth art; its journal, launched in 1996, even took Neuvième Art as its name.1 The ninth art’s status was henceforth not just a discursive object, but embodied in institutions and ambitious public policies.

´ as Part Art, Part Book The bande dessinee The recognition of bande dessinée as the ninth art played out in a state of tension, leading to a hybrid status part way between an artwork, on the one hand, with the creation of a museum and the acquisition of original art, and a segment of the book market, on the other. There is surely something paradoxical about this. On the one hand, observers, critics, and fans called for bande dessinée to be included within the fine arts system. The initial exhibitions and critical works underscored its inclusion within the art system: this is the context within which we need to perceive statements about Burne Hogarth being “the Michelangelo of comics”, a commonplace in 1960s discourse. This notwithstanding, recognition of the cultural value of bande dessinée also passed via literature. The rapprochement between literature and bande dessinée drew mainly on the latter’s circulation between different media in France. Whereas the dominant forms in the United States were comic strips and comic books, bande dessinée had been structured around children’s illustrated magazines ever since the early twentieth century. Thus over several decades its predominant narrative form had been that of a story divided into episodes, in instalments of one or two pages. In other words, in comparison with the daily fragment provided by the strip or the complete story (admittedly

1 The journal’s editor-in-chief was Thierry Groensteen for several decades. Since September 2021, Irène Le Roy Ladurie and I are the new editors-in-chief.

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repeatedly relaunched) of the comic book, magazines drew on the mechanisms, codes, and generic worlds of the serial novel. And so the movement to reappraise para-literature in general in the 1950s and 1960s automatically led to a reappraisal of the status of bande dessinée (Letourneux 2017; Besson et al. 2019). There was, however, another and far more decisive factor at work in the bande dessinée’s alignment on literature: at the exact time when bande dessinée was starting to be considered as an art form, it started moving increasingly towards the world of books. Much of the creative dynamism shifted over to book form: Futuropolis started unearthing heritage works and publishing new talents in books whose quality of manufacture was indicative of a new focus on material presentation. The publishing world more broadly saw a blossoming of new publishers, with bande dessinée being part of this movement (Bouvaist and Boin 1989). This creative dynamism profoundly transformed bande dessinée sector and its publishing forms. By the late 1980s, bande dessinée magazines were either moribund or already dead. Métal hurlant folded in 1987, while the curtains went down on Pilote et Charlie in 1989, at the same time as Tintin Reporter (the final incarnation of the Journal de Tintin) took its final bow, and Circus, the Glénat publishing house’s monthly magazine, shuffled off the stage. Although (À Suivre) kept the show on the road until 1997, it was only a shadow of its former self, whose sole purpose was to feed Casterman’s catalogue (Moine 2018). Of all the long-standing illustrated magazines, the only ones to survive, such as Spirou, were used to showcase their publisher’s wares, or else, like Le Journal de Mickey, were produced by publishers who had decided not to develop an album policy. At the same time, about 500 new albums per year went on sale in booksellers’ stores. The bande dessinée market shifted over to books; the time of magazines was now a thing of the past. From this point of view, the early 1990s saw the emergence of a new generation of independent publishers with the launch of such ventures as l’Association in 1990, Cornélius and 6 pieds sous terre in 1991, Ego comme X in 1993, and Fréon and Amok in 1994 (Beaty 2007). These publishers were consecrated in the early 2000s when works from this alternative fringe—particularly Marjane Satrapi’s Persépolis (2000–2003) and David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut mal [Epileptic] (1996–2003)—racked up strong bookstore sales. The book market, around which the bande dessinée market was recomposed, was notable for its dynamism: starting from about 500 new titles per year in the 1970s, this figure rose swiftly

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to 1000 or so in the 1980s, then 2000-odd in the early 2000s, before reaching about 4000 new titles nowadays, raising the recurrent spectre of overproduction (Guilbert 2013). Albums have acquired a central place in cultural practices, being the principal form in which bandes dessinées are consumed: with the collapse of the press and the prospect of a digital market perpetually over the horizon, bande dessinée is now firmly implanted in the world of books (Lesage 2019). This context helps explain why the graphic novel did not have such an explosive effect in France as it did in the United States (Baetens 2010). First, bande dessinée enjoyed an incommensurably better status in France, where there is nothing surprising about bande dessinée being discussed in the pages of a newspaper or in academia. It is often noted that the publication of Maus, The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen in 1986– 1987 represented a turning point in the United States. From this point of view, the chronology is telling, with bande dessinée having become part of the French ministry of culture’s remit several years earlier. The need to counter the bande dessinée’s assignation to “popular” culture did not, therefore, have the same salience in France as it did in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Above and beyond this, the shift to book form and the dialogue with literature was already well underway. By the 1980s bande dessinée was already firmly established as a type of book, a “literature of graphic expression” as CELEG termed it in an effort to counter the stigmatising image of “kids’ comics”. While this—admittedly inelegant—expression did not take hold, it revisited a truth already formulated by Rodolphe Töpffer in the early nineteenth century: “one can write stories with chapters, lines, and words: that is literature proper. One can write stories with a series of scenes represented graphically: that is etched literature” (Töpffer, in Groensteen 2014). The keystone in this recognition of bande dessinée as part art, part book was the recognition of those working on the illustrations as authors. In French, a “bande dessinée artist” is systematically categorised as an “author”. This label stems partly from the bande dessinée media ecosystem, whose centre of gravity is nowadays the album, that is, a book. Thus bande dessinée artists are covered by the legal and tax regime for authors, are paid copyright, and belong more clearly to the world of books than to that of art. This affiliation also pertains to the construction of authorship, based on the model of literature. Fans, critics, and researchers have strategically

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transposed the mythological figure of the author, whose mythological power is particularly pronounced in France. In noting that “the bande dessinée world has been particularly fascinated by the question of authorship” (Beaty 2012), Bart Beaty is referring far more to critics than to illustrators themselves. As Julie Demange observes, these fans have a “romantic vision” of bande dessinée, “in which authors are judged for their stylistic singularities and originality” (Demange 2017). Thus constructing bande dessinée as the ninth art involved disregarding the contribution of a whole series of professionals—letterers, assistants, colourists, and so on. And so by drawing on literature as its model for requiring respectability, bande dessinée delayed awareness of the profoundly collective and cooperative nature of the trade. In this context, the status of the ninth art is an integral part of the problem. Its status as art prevents the issue of working conditions—and, more broadly, the socio-economic conditions enabling creation—being tackled head on. In the traditional tension between art and the cultural industry, art is held to be a disinterested practice driven by passion, far removed from material contingences and mere financial considerations. This tension between art and the constraints of the cultural industry is of course not specific to bande dessinée. However, it is no doubt particularly acute, due to the atomisation of its creators, closely studied by Pierre Nocerino (Nocerino 2020), and the prolonged effects of the stigmata weighing down on bande dessinée.

Where Does the Ninth Art Stand Today? So four decades after being taken up as an object of cultural policy, the situation of bande dessinée might appear enviable. And indeed, the ninth art has conquered all cultural institutions, from the Louvre to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, from the Villa Médicis to the Grand Palais and the Collège de France. Yet on looking more closely, the situation becomes less clear-cut. The cultural policy to support bande dessinée is no doubt unique to France and has resulted in various support mechanisms: support for creating, publishing, republishing, translating, artist residencies, and so forth. This support for the bande dessinée sector is backed up by major relays in many cultural institutions, including libraries, schools, and universities. The “BD 2020” initiative typifies these ambiguities. On the face of it, this initiative exemplifies the exceptional recognition for bande dessinée

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as a lever for cultural policy: all French cultural institutions dependent on the ministry of culture (museums, libraries, the network of Alliances Françaises, etc.) were tasked with suggesting steps to promote bande dessinée. The initiative collided with the health crisis occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic, but this was not the sole limit on its ambition. For the Ministry of culture, it was a way of responding to the increasing protests by authors who, since the setting up of the États généraux de la BD in 2014,2 have been vociferating about their increasingly precarious working conditions. With one third of authors living below the poverty line, the sector seems especially fragile, raising serious questions about the future for creation in such a depressed context (États généraux de la bande dessinée 2016). Various authors associations have called for the public authorities to step in and protect authors in the face of publishers unwilling to listen to their demands, but such calls have largely fallen on deaf ears (Nocerino 2020). In this respect, the year of bande dessinée was a convenient way for the ministry of culture to act without having to confront the major publishers in the French publishers’ trade union, the Syndicat National de l’Édition. Although the preponderance of books in the bande dessinée economy has contributed to the bande dessinée’s symbolic recognition, it has also been a central weakness, compounding the dramatic precarity affecting authors in a system of production which has become grossly unfair. The complementarity between the press and albums in the 1960s and 1970s meant that authors could draw on a dual revenue. While mobilisation by the profession enabled illustrators to win the status of journalists (Kohn 2022), the market shift towards books made them into authors, with all the symbolism this term carries in its wake. With the explosion in production and shrinking readerships, these authors have been caught in a pincer movement and seen their revenue melt rapidly away, while publishers’ retainers become ever more meagre. And so the status of the ninth art may have a bitter taste for authors: that of a valorisation which has been largely limited to the domain of symbolism, and which threatens to sap the vitality of a particularly dynamic creative space.

2 The États généraux de la BD is an association of bande dessinée authors which works to map the problems they face and conducts negotiations with publishers.

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Author Index

B Boltanski, Luc, 9, 10, 88, 90, 109, 110, 131, 132, 178, 186 Boullet, Jean, 60 Bradford, Brick, 53, 54, 60, 61 Bretécher, Claire, 14, 126, 138–153, 155, 156, 185, 186

C Cabu (Jean Cabut, aka), 110, 144, 146 Calvo (Edmond-François), 13, 120, 122, 124, 125, 128 Caniff, Milton, 9, 68 Cestac, Florence, 13, 121, 122, 124, 128, 139 Charlier, Jean-Michel, 77, 84, 126 Christin, Pierre, 127 Clauteaux, François, 77, 84 Couperie, Pierre, 36, 57, 63, 66, 69, 90, 91 Crumb, Robert, 139, 149, 171

D Dargaud, Georges, 12, 43, 73, 79–82, 84, 85–87, 103, 109, 126–128, 146, 147, 153, 155, 165, 185 De Gaulle, Charles, 3, 74, 78 Delobel, Anne, 128 de Repper, Jean-Claude, 122 Druillet, Philippe, 14, 42, 50, 126, 147, 153, 154

E Eisner, Will, 160, 179, 185, 186

F Filipacchi, Daniel, 21 Forest, Jean-Claude, 4, 7, 11, 20–24, 26–36, 38–44, 56, 66, 169, 173–178 Fred (Frédéric Othon Aristidès, aka), 66, 110, 153, 154

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0

195

196

AUTHOR INDEX

G Gelman, Woody, 66, 69 Giraud, Jean, 13, 126, 127, 144 Goetzinger, Annie, 144 Goscinny, René, 12, 21, 22, 56, 74, 76–79, 82, 84–87, 102, 110, 127, 143–145, 148 Gotlib, Marcel, 14, 110, 126, 144, 145, 147–149, 186 Greg, Michel, 96, 99, 101, 145 H Hébrard, Jean, 77, 84 Hergé (Georges Remi, aka), 13, 24, 53, 54, 94–96, 98–104, 106, 107, 109–115, 169, 172 Hogarth, Burne, 66, 68, 188 J Jacobs, Edgar P., 53, 54, 96, 115 L Lacassin, Francis, 7, 30, 36, 56 Leblanc, Raymond, 79, 85, 87, 96 Lichtenstein, Roy, 39 Lob, Jacques, 56, 66 Losfeld, éric, 4, 7, 11, 14, 20, 23–25, 29, 30, 32–34, 37–42, 44, 127, 165, 176, 177 M Mandryka, Nikita, 14, 50, 51, 121, 126, 144, 147–149 Moebius (Jean Giraud, aka), 7, 13, 14, 50, 110, 126, 127, 144, 177, 186 Moliterni, Claude, 57, 66 Morin, Edgar, 3, 30, 56 Morris (Maurice de Bevère, aka), 5, 8, 110

Mougin, Jean-Paul, 174, 175, 179

O Ozanne, Denis, 122

P Pellos, René, 121 Pratt, Hugo, 9, 14, 66, 160, 161, 163–165, 167, 172–174, 178

R Raymond, Alex, 12, 22, 27, 35, 50, 53, 58, 59, 64, 66–68 Reiser (Jean-Marc), 144, 146, 147 Resnais, Alain, 30, 56, 58 Robial, Etienne, 13, 67, 120–124, 128–130, 133, 176

S Segar, Elzie Crisler, 121 Spiegelman, Art, 139, 179

T Tardi, Jacques, 13, 34, 43, 120, 125, 127–129, 144, 173–175, 177–179, 186 Troisfontaines, Georges, 84

U Uderzo, Albert, 12, 21, 22, 74, 76–79, 82, 84–87, 102, 110, 122, 140, 143, 153, 155

V Vadim, Roger, 4, 20, 38, 39, 42 Vankeer, Pierre, 5, 8, 65

Subject Index

A adaptation, 4, 12, 41, 42, 66, 84, 85, 87, 94–96, 98, 99, 104, 129 adult, 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 21–23, 29, 34–38, 42, 44, 62, 66, 74, 75, 78, 88–91, 114, 141, 144, 146, 165, 168, 169, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 184, 186 advertising, 12, 25, 26, 79, 81, 84, 87, 144, 154 Algeria, 74 Algerian War, 3, 78 America, 50, 76 American, 2, 9, 27, 36, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57–60, 62, 67, 87, 110, 121, 122 Americanisation, 3, 50, 52, 53, 61 Angoulême Bande dessinée Museum, 22, 23 Angoulême Comics Festival, 9 animated film, 13, 85, 87, 95, 96, 99, 104, 109, 110

archives, 69, 81, 83, 94, 97, 107, 114, 115, 120, 129, 130, 133, 163, 165, 167, 174 assistant, 36, 54, 95, 107, 114, 126, 191 author, 5, 7, 9, 13, 14, 23, 26, 34, 41, 42, 52, 54, 62, 66, 69, 76, 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 89–91, 99, 103, 107, 109–111, 120–122, 124–128, 130–133, 138–141, 144–149, 153–156, 160, 165, 167–169, 173–178, 184–187, 190–192 auteur, 43, 44, 61 authorship, 94, 107, 109, 111, 114, 115, 120, 133, 160, 190, 191

B Bande dessinée et figuration narrative, 5, 6, 66, 67, 176 bédéphilie, 49 Belvision, 85, 96, 98, 99, 114

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Lesage, Ninth Art. Bande dessinèe, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964–1975, Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0

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198

SUBJECT INDEX

black and white, 14, 65, 69, 113, 115, 124, 125, 160, 163, 165, 167, 175–177, 186 bookstore, 2, 13, 24, 30, 58, 60, 81, 113, 121, 122, 153, 186, 189 bookseller, 7, 120–122, 130, 153, 165, 173, 189 bookshop, 7, 123 bourgeois, 11, 74, 149, 177 bourgeoisie, 151

C canon, 10, 13, 22, 27, 43, 55, 69, 94 Catholic, 52, 99, 113, 140, 142, 169, 178 Catholicism, 52 censorship, 2, 11, 23, 37, 38, 58 Centre d’étude des littératures d’expression graphique (CELEG), 5, 12, 56, 57, 60, 65, 190 children, 2, 4, 9, 13, 14, 23, 25, 26, 32, 35–37, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 62, 69, 75, 78, 79, 81, 87, 89–91, 97, 98, 102, 104, 109, 124, 125, 131, 141, 144, 145, 148, 151, 168, 176, 185–188 clear line, 53, 107, 115 Club des bandes dessinées (CBD), 5, 27, 30, 36, 56, 64, 90 collectors, 5, 15, 24, 37, 58, 60, 65, 95, 98, 106, 114, 130 colours, 12, 32, 41, 54, 58, 63–65, 67, 69, 80, 95, 102, 106, 107, 114, 115, 124, 125, 130, 147, 163, 165, 171, 175, 176, 185 comics fandom, 5, 12, 27, 30, 55, 88, 121 consumer, 13, 84 counterculture, 121, 176 Creations

Astérix, 12, 22, 74–89, 91, 102, 111, 140, 143, 145, 147, 148, 163, 185 Barbarella, 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 20–27, 29, 30, 32–34, 36–44, 66, 74, 169, 175–177 Blake et Mortimer, 54, 115 Blueberry, 126 Corto Maltese, 24, 160, 161, 163, 165–167 Flash Gordon, 5, 12, 27, 49, 50, 53–55, 57–62, 65–69 La Bête est morte, 122, 124 Les Pionniers de l’Espérance, 54, 55 Lucky Luke, 5, 79 Mandrake, 54, 59, 62 Popeye, 60, 65, 121 Superman, 61, 84 Tintin, 13, 14, 24, 32, 43, 54, 62, 79, 81, 94–99, 102–104, 106, 107, 109–111, 114–116, 141, 142, 144, 165, 168, 169, 171, 172, 176, 189 critical reception, 160, 173 cultural industries, 2, 13, 32, 191 cultural practices, 3, 9, 15, 146, 185, 187, 190 cultural reappraisal, 2 cultural resistance, 83 culture, 3, 4, 11, 21, 25, 63, 84, 89, 104, 109, 122, 132, 144, 169, 171, 176, 185, 187, 190

D distribution, 10, 62, 153, 169

E education, 88, 132, 151 school, 2, 132, 191 eroticism, 4, 23, 34, 37, 41, 66

SUBJECT INDEX

exhibition, 5, 6, 36, 63, 66, 67, 90, 96, 111, 112, 176, 188

F fandom, 13, 24, 36, 49, 50, 55, 56, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66 feminism, 143, 145 festival, 7, 9, 15, 85, 88, 111, 138–140, 160, 169, 178, 185–188 Fiction magazine, 5, 27, 30 film, 4, 13, 29, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 53, 56, 60–62, 85–87, 90, 95, 96, 98, 99, 103, 104, 107, 109, 115, 184 format, 10–13, 22, 32, 34, 36, 37, 42, 43, 50, 58–60, 64, 79, 80, 89, 91, 95, 103, 120, 124, 125, 129, 130, 161, 163, 165, 167, 179

G games, 2, 13, 87, 96 golden age, 57, 58, 60, 62 graphic novel, 14, 23, 43, 160, 161, 167, 168, 174, 175, 178, 179, 186, 190

H hardback, 12, 32, 80, 125, 147, 161, 163, 175 heritage, 5, 12, 13, 43, 55, 58, 60, 63, 65, 69, 77, 113, 189 heritagisation, 9, 69, 89 history, 4, 5, 10, 13, 14, 22–26, 44, 55, 61, 63, 65, 77, 88, 98, 120–122, 126, 128, 131, 133, 138–141, 143, 160, 167, 168, 171–173, 177, 178, 184

199

I industrial publishing, 153, 155, 165 industrialisation, 75, 84, 129 intellectuals, 14, 56, 75, 91, 111, 132, 149, 152 international, 14, 20, 42, 138 Italy, 50, 58, 60, 161 Italian, 9, 14, 58, 60, 77, 83, 161

L 1949 law on youth publications, 4, 11, 25, 52 legislation, 20, 25 legitimisation, 12, 15, 22, 36, 39, 44, 56, 57, 89–91, 110, 115, 140, 178 letters, 56–58, 62, 133, 174 literature, 4, 5, 9, 30, 33, 36, 43, 55, 75, 89, 90, 99, 125, 129, 138, 155, 160, 161, 172, 174, 175, 177, 188–191

M magazine, 2–4, 7, 11–13, 21, 24–27, 29, 30, 32, 36, 43, 44, 50, 52–56, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 74, 77–80, 84, 85, 89, 91, 107, 111, 121, 124, 126, 131, 140, 141, 143–149, 151, 160, 161, 169, 171, 173–178, 180, 184–186, 188, 189 mainstream, 10, 12, 14, 37, 69, 113, 120, 131, 180, 185 market, 2, 3, 7, 11–15, 22, 24, 34, 36, 69, 85, 87, 91, 94, 110, 122, 147, 153, 154, 156, 165, 167, 168, 171, 178, 187–190, 192 mass culture, 3, 84 mass-market, 13 May 1968, 3, 143, 144

200

SUBJECT INDEX

Ministry of culture, 2, 9, 187, 190, 192 multimedia, 13, 75, 84, 99, 103, 109, 115 Museum, 2, 20, 22, 97, 98, 111, 187, 188, 192

N New Wave, 61 Nostalgia, 12, 57–59, 65 novel, 9, 23, 26, 32, 34, 41, 56, 99, 129, 161, 167, 168, 172–174, 179, 186, 189 novelisation, 94, 103, 104, 106

P paper, 4, 27, 32, 37, 64, 65, 67, 69, 95, 99, 104, 124, 127, 128, 130, 133, 176 paperback, 32, 43, 120, 167, 175 paratext, 44, 130 paratextual, 34 pirate, 22, 85, 113, 114 pocket, 3, 43, 54, 146 popular, 11, 12, 22, 34, 50, 78, 84, 88, 163, 168, 190 popular press, 79 pornography, 29, 37 price, 32, 37, 39, 63, 79, 106, 107, 125, 128, 147, 165, 187 printer, 55, 65, 66, 165, 168, 169, 176 psychedelic, 42, 169, 171 Publications & publishers Actuel , 7, 149, 171 Ah! Nana, 7, 173 (À Suivre), 9, 34, 43, 160, 168, 173–180, 186, 189 Casterman, 9, 13, 14, 24, 32–34, 43, 79, 81, 93–97, 99–109,

113, 114, 128, 130, 146, 159, 160, 163–180, 185, 186, 189 Charlie, 113, 147, 149, 189 Charlie hebdo, 21 Chouchou, 21, 27, 88, 176 Fluide glacial , 2, 7, 186 France-Soir, 26, 27, 34, 35, 161, 163 Futuropolis, 7, 13, 14, 60, 69, 120–126, 128–133, 163, 176, 179, 189 Gallimard, 43, 130, 131, 174, 178 Giff-Wiff , 30, 56–58, 63 Glénat, 69, 121, 189 Hachette, 83, 155 Hara-Kiri, 21, 126, 143, 147 Heroïc-Albums , 89 Journal de Mickey, 50, 57, 61, 62, 78, 189 Journal de Spirou, 2, 5, 62, 78, 79, 89, 146 Journal de Tintin, 2, 24, 53, 79, 96, 106, 146, 189 L’Association, 43, 133, 189 L’Écho des Savanes , 7, 126, 141, 147–150, 153, 173, 176 Le Lombard, 79–81, 87 Linus , 60 Métal hurlant , 7, 50, 51, 126, 140, 147, 173, 176, 177, 186, 189 Nouvel Observateur, 141, 142, 147–149, 151, 152 Offenstadt, 122 Phénix, 5, 57, 66, 113, 128, 161 Pif , 11, 54, 161, 163, 167 Pilote, 2, 7, 12, 14, 75, 77–81, 84, 85, 89, 126, 127, 141–149, 169, 173, 176, 184, 185 Vaillant , 26, 54, 77, 106, 140 V Magazine, 23–27, 29, 30, 32, 36, 38, 43, 44, 66, 177

SUBJECT INDEX

R radio, 12, 84, 85, 96, 103, 146, 169, 172 reader, 5, 29, 30, 34, 36, 44, 55–58, 60–62, 88–91, 104, 107, 109, 110, 121, 126, 138, 145, 149, 160, 169, 175, 185 readership, 12, 21, 37, 66, 74, 79, 88–91, 114, 146, 151, 171, 184, 192 reading experience, 41 record (audio), 2, 3, 12, 84, 85, 87, 96, 107, 154, 185 LPs, 103 reprint, 38, 50, 58, 65, 69, 81, 95, 124, 167, 168 reprinting, 58 researchers, 24, 140, 190 S sales, 2, 12, 81, 83, 102, 103, 146, 185, 189 print runs, 12, 32, 62, 78, 80–83, 153, 161, 168, 171–173 science fiction, 50, 52, 54, 55, 121, 122, 126 screen, 21, 38, 63, 65, 99, 104, 110, 184 self-publishing, 155 self-publication, 14, 65, 82, 102, 153–155 self-publisher, 14, 185 serialization, 39 serial instalments, 161 series, 5, 12, 21, 27, 33, 34, 41–43, 50, 52–55, 58–60, 62, 63, 66–69, 74, 76–85, 87–89, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 120, 121, 124, 126, 129, 131, 138, 143, 144, 146, 147, 151, 153, 161, 163, 167–169, 172, 179, 184, 185, 190, 191

201

sex, 20, 42 slides, 63–65 Société civile d’étude et de recherche de la littérature dessinée (SOCERLID), 5, 12, 57, 63, 65, 66, 69, 165 space opera, 27, 53 stencil, 65 studio, 13, 62, 86, 87, 95, 96, 104, 110, 114, 115, 122 symbolic hierarchies, 115 T taboos, 4, 74 television, 41, 104, 110, 143, 146, 184 TV, 103, 104, 151, 185 transatlantic, 12, 55, 61, 126 transmedia, 39, 55, 75, 84, 87, 107 U union, 4, 7, 77, 145, 148, 192 V virility, 76 W weekly, 21, 77–79, 81, 113, 121, 140–142, 147, 148, 151, 161, 171, 173, 184, 185 women, 7, 21, 26, 29, 38, 138–141, 144, 146 female, 14, 20, 27, 138, 140, 141, 156 Y youth, 3–5, 21, 25, 27, 43, 52, 84, 114, 144, 146, 147, 169, 171, 185 young people, 3, 185