Known as France’s Ninth Art, the bande dessinée has a status far surpassing that of the equivalent English-language comic strip. This publication, one of the first predominantly in English on the subject, provides a thorough introduction to questions of BD history, context and bibliography. Theoretical issues – including the reception of the early proto-BD prior to its modern definition, approaches to the construction of a BD (presented here in BD form by leading artist Tanitoc), semiology and the reading of the current form, or the specificity of the French/US (non)overlap – complement historical approaches, such as Bécassine read in the light of postcolonialism, Le Corbusier and BD techniques in architecture, post-war BD and nostalgia for the Resistance, or Pilote and the 1960s revolution. And whilst broaching issues such as feminism or masculinity, social class, AIDS, exoticism or futurism, the volume presents chapters on some of the cutting-edge artists in the field today: Baru, Moebius, Juillard, Binet, Bilal... This book supplies an introduction to the BD that will be of use to students and researchers at all levels. In addition, the format of the individual case studies provides in-depth analysis allowing the reader to grasp specific examples in terms both of their place vis-a-vis the evolution of the BD and, more generally, of the wider role they play within French and Francophone cultural studies.

"Known as France's Ninth Art, the bande dessinee has a status far surpassing that of the equivalent English-language comic strip. This publication, one of the first predominantly in English on the subject, provides a thorough introduction to questions of BD history, context and bibliography. This book supplies an introduction to the BD that will be of use to students and researchers at all levels. In addition, the format of the individual case studies provides in-depth analysis allowing the reader to grasp specific examples in terms both of their place vis-a-vis the evolution of the BD and, more generally, of the wider role they play within French and Francophone cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.

Whereas in English-speaking countries comics are for children or adults 'who should know better', in France and Belgium the form is recognized as the 'Ninth Art' and follows in the path of poetry, architecture, painting and cinema. The bande dessinée [comic strip] has its own national institutions, regularly obtains front-page coverage and has received the accolades of statesmen from De Gaulle onwards. On the way to providing a comprehensive introduction to the most francophone of cultural phenomena, this book considers national specificity as relevant to an anglophone reader, whilst exploring related issues such as text/image expression, historical precedents and sociological implication. To do so it presents and analyses priceless manuscripts, a Franco- American rodent, Nazi propaganda, a museum-piece urinal, intellectual gay porn and a prehistoric warrior who's really Zinedine Zidane. Laurence Grove is Senior Lecturer and Head of French at the University of Glasgow. His previous affiliations include the University of Pittsburgh, the Newberry Library (Chicago), Middlebury College (Vermont) and the Université Rennes 2. He works on text/image phenomena from the sixteenth century to the present day and has authored a number of works on the subject. Laurence Grove is President of the IBDS, an international society for the study of the bande dessinée.

In English-speaking countries, Francophone comic strips like Hergés's Les Aventures de Tin Tin and Goscinny and Uderzo's Les Aventures d'Asterix are viewed—and marketed—as children's literature. But in Belgium and France, their respective countries of origin, such strips—known as bandes dessinées—are considered a genuine art form, or, more specifically, "the ninth art." But what accounts for the drastic difference in the way such comics are received? In Masters of the Ninth Art, Matthew Screech explores that difference in the reception and reputation of bandes dessinées. Along with in-depth looks at Tin Tin and Asterix, Screech considers other major comics artists such as Jacque Tardi, Jean Giraud, and Moebius, assessing in the process their role in Francophone literary and artistic culture. Illustrated with images from the artists discussed, Masters of the Ninth Art will appeal to students of European popular culture, literature, and graphic art.

The latest installment of Yale French Studies explores the history and development of bande dessinée, Franco-Belgian comics This special issue of Yale French Studies on bande dessinée is a multifaceted reflection on its newfound academic status. It goes beyond the question, settled long ago, of its artistic legitimacy but aims to think "outside the boxes," or cases, themselves in order to explore the mutually enriching relationship between BD and the wider francophone cultural and intellectual world. Contributions thus intersect with art history, literary theory, cinema studies, postcolonialism, semiotics, and political sociology. Articles are by mainstream interdisciplinary scholars applying themselves to BD, leading authorities on bande dessinée itself, BD artists, and key figures in contemporary French thought whose texts appear in English for the first time.

Publisher Description

Although France has changed much in recent decades, colonial-era imagery continues to circulate widely in comics, in part because the colonial archives are easily accessible, and through the republication of colonial-era comics that are viewed as classics. The latter include the Tintin series of comic books, by the Belgian artist Herg , and the "Zig and Puce" series by Alain Saint-Ogan, a Frenchman. In this important new study Mark McKinney situates comics in debates about French colonialism, arguing that cartoonists still use representations of colonial history in their comics as a way of intervening in debates about contemporary France and its current relationships to its former colonies. McKinney argues that comics offer unique opportunities to both reproduce and thereby perpetuate colonial ideologies, images and discourses, as well as to deconstruct and contest them. The ways, and the degree to which, they do one or the other tell us a great deal about the heritage of imperialism and colonialism

This collection examines new comic-book cultures, graphic writing, and bande dessinée texts as they relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone settings. The individual chapters are framed within a larger enquiry that considers definitive aspects of the postcolonial condition in twenty-first-century (con)texts. The authors demonstrate that the fields of comic-book production and circulation in various regional histories introduce new postcolonial vocabularies, reconstitute conventional "image-functions" in established social texts and political systems, and present competing narratives of resistance and rights. In this sense, postcolonial comic cultures are of particular significance in the context of a newly global and politically recomposed landscape. This volume introduces a timely intervention within current comic-book-area studies that remain firmly situated within the "U.S.-European and Japanese manga paradigms" and their reading publics. It will be of great interest to a wide variety of disciplines including postcolonial studies, comics-area studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.