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Reading Bande Dessinée
Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip
By Ann Miller Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-996-9
CHAPTER 1
From the Nineteenth Century to the 1960s: Bande Dessinée Becomes a Children's Medium, and then Starts to Grow Up
1.1 The origins of bande dessinée
It is not easy to identify the first bande dessinée (literally 'drawn strip') in history, particularly since the term did not take over from the rather vague word 'illustrés' until the 1950s. Indeed, in 1996, the CNBDI, the French national bande dessinée centre, became involved in a spat with the CBBD, its Belgian equivalent, on this very issue, and a few American scholars joined the fray, on both sides of the argument. The CBBD chose that year to celebrate the centenary of the medium, declaring it to have been invented by the American Richard Outcault in 1896, when his strip The Yellow Kid and his New Phonograph appeared in the New York Journal. The CNBDI riposted by mounting an exhibition in honour of the 150th anniversary of the death of the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer, whose L'Histoire de Monsieur Vieux Bois had been written in 1827. What was at stake was a definition of the medium and, behind it, the larger question of the position of bande dessinée within the field of cultural production, an issue with which the first part of this book will be much preoccupied.
The fixing of a date for the origin of the medium necessarily involves a specification of its defining features. The Töpffer faction argued that not only had their man combined images and words in a novel way, but he had also employed a type of sequentiality which broke with that used by eighteenth-century caricaturists. Rather than representing his hero's progress as a series of separate tableaux, he decomposed movements, allowing the reader to reconstruct a continuous narrative across the frame boundaries (Groensteen 1996a: 9). The Outcault supporters, on the other hand, insisted that only when text was integrated into the frame in the form of speech balloons, their man's innovation, could the claim be made that a new medium had been born (Blackbeard 1995: 70).
These technical questions were, though, less important than the strategic moves that underlay them. In fact, most definitions of the medium will come up against exceptions (that of the Outcault faction would exclude silent bande dessinée, for example), but the debate around specificity was in itself a way of raising the status of the medium. In addition, the CNBDI had a further motive in their promotion of Töpffer over Outcault. If bande dessinée's history begins with the American comic strip, then it has its roots in mass culture, even if some comic strips can be deemed to have artistic merit. If, on the other hand, it can be traced back to Töpffer's work, then it can lay claim to some illustrious European successors later in the nineteenth century, including Félix Nadar, Gustave Doré, Wilhelm Busch, Théophile Steinlen and Caran d'Ache, whose status as artists is uncontested. Its subsequent disappearance into the ghetto of children's magazines and mass culture can, in consequence, be seen as contingent and transitory, until a new conjuncture emerges in which it can flourish as an art form. It will be seen from the following chapters that the history of bande dessinée is not only the story of the evolution of form and subject matter, but also the story of strategic bids, like this example by the CBNDI, in the struggle for legitimization.
1.2 Children's magazines
By the end of the nineteenth century, francophone bande dessinée (or its precursors, according to your position in the above debate) had moved out of the press for adults and into the restricted sphere of magazines for children, from which it would scarcely emerge until the 1960s. 'They sheltered it', says Pierre Couperie, 'by imprisoning it' (Couperie 1967a: 139). This tendency was encouraged by the success of the work of Christophe, a science teacher whose strips were intended to be educative. They included La Famille Fenouillard (1889–1893), a parody of bourgeois tourism, and Les Facéties du Sapeur Camember (1890–1896), featuring a soldier whose stupidity is mocked. After first appearing in Le Petit Français illustré, they were subsequently published in the form of luxury albums, a procedure which would become standard in francophone bande dessinée for most of the twentieth century: prepublication in the press, followed by an album when a series was deemed to be successful.
Among the many magazines for children which appeared at the turn of the century was La Semaine de Suzette, founded in 1905 for well-brought-up girls. Bécassine, the naïve Breton maid in the service of the Marquise de Grand Air, began to appear sporadically in this magazine as from 1905, drawn by Pinchon, with scripts by Jacqueline Rivière, and was given a regular slot in 1913 with scripts by Caumery. The longevity of the series, which continued until the 1950s, gives it considerable historical interest. It takes Bécassine through the First World War and the decline of the aristocracy: Francis Lacassin has called it a 'Proustian panorama' (Lacassin 1971: 123).
Louis Forton's Les Pieds Nickelés, who first appeared in L'Epatant in 1908, were considerably more disreputable. In the first episode Ribouldingue emerges from Fresnes prison and meets up with Filochard and Croquignol before all three are thrown back in prison for getting drunk and insulting the customers in a bistro. Forton was the first francophone bande dessinée artist to introduce speech balloons with any regularity, although the drawings were accompanied by lengthy texts beneath the frame, and the content of the balloons was most often redundant, since they simply repeated a fragment of the text. L'Epatant (launched 1908), Fillette (1909) and Cri-Cri (1911) were among a number of children's titles published by the Offenstadt brothers, whose readership came from a more popular milieu than that of La Semaine de Suzette.
Alain Saint-Ogan's 1925 Zig et Puce, which appeared in the Dimanche Illustré, the children's weekly supplement of the French daily newspaper Excelsior, is usually taken to be the first francophone (and indeed European) bande dessinée to replace texts beneath the frames by speech balloons, although Saint-Ogan was technically preceded in 1908 by the little-known strip Sam et Sap, by Rose Candide, and by Pierre Mac Orlan's Frip et Bob in 1912. Zig et Puce achieved massive popular success, engendering a great deal of associated merchandising, particularly once the two children Zig and Puce were joined on their frenetic travels by the penguin Alfred. Saint-Ogan's graphic style, 'a comic arabesque and a legible outline' (Sterckx 2000a: 48), betrays the influence of art deco whilst prefiguring the ligne claire that would be developed to perfection by Hergé.
The 1930s have been described as the 'golden age' of bande dessinée. This is partly because it was the decade in which classic American strips began to be massively imported into France. In 1928 Paul Winckler had founded the agency Opera Mundi, on the model of the American Randolph Hearst's King Features Syndicate which had existed since 1914. In 1934 Winckler launched Le Journal de Mickey, followed up by Robinson in 1936 and Hop-là in 1937. All these magazines contained translated versions of American material. Other publishers followed suit. The American strips offered spectacular excitement, from the exoticism of Tarzan, drawn by Hal Foster and then Burne Hogarth, to the science-fiction scenarios of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and William Ritt and Clarence Gray's Brick Bradford, 'mythical figures of the American male' (Gauthier 1989: 106), more virile than their French counterparts.
In the face of this onslaught, some long-standing French titles, such as L'Épatant and Cri-Cri, disappeared, and French bande dessinée was eclipsed for most of the decade, with the exception of the odd outstanding series such as René Pellos's expressionist science-fiction strip Futuropolis, which was influenced by Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1926), and which first appeared in Junior in 1937. The revival of francophone bande dessinée was, though, to come from Belgium.
1.3 Hergé and the ligne claire
Hergé's Tintin series began in 1929 in Le Petit Vingtième, a children's supplement to the Catholic Brussels newspaper XXe siècle. It was published in France in Coeurs Vaillants in 1930. The first adventure of the boy reporter and his dog, Tintin au pays des Soviets, was a catalogue of the evils of Communism, and Tintin au Congo, which appeared in 1930–31, presented the colonial ideology of the 'civilizing mission' in its purest form. The character and the series evolved considerably, however, and may be taken as a barometer of ideological consensus over the century as a whole.
Famously, after his meeting with Tchang Tchong-Jen, a Chinese student of the Brussels Académie des Beaux Arts, who initiated him both into Chinese art and calligraphy and into the contemporary political scene in China, Hergé began an almost obsessive concern with documentary accuracy in his depiction of the locations into which he sent his heroes, and political reality began to impinge on Tintin. In Le Lotus bleu (1936), for example, he witnesses Japanese agents provocateurs blowing up a railway line, and in Le Sceptre d'Ottokar (1939) Tintin defeats the attempt by the totalitarian Bordurie, of which the head of state is called Müsstler, to seize power in the neighbouring state of Syldavie.
By now, the crude drawing style of the early albums had given way to the elegance of the ligne claire, or 'clear line', the graphic style which eschews shading, gradation of colours and hatching in favour of clear outlines, flat colours and geometrical precision. It also implies narrative legibility. Hergé defines it as follows: 'you try to eliminate everything that is graphically incidental, to stylize as much as possible [...] In fact, the ligne claire isn't just a matter of drawing, it also refers to the script and the narrative technique' (Peeters 1990: 204). Bruno Lecigne has argued that the ideological efficacy of the ligne claire lies not in what is chosen for depiction, but in the idea that the world is legible (Lecigne 1983: 40).
The German occupation of Brussels put an end to the Petit Vingtième, but Hergé continued to produce Tintin adventures, in the form of daily strips, in the children's supplement of the newspaper Le Soir. Current political events had to be avoided, and it was during this period that Hergé recounted the exploits of Haddock's illustrious ancestor, the Chevalier de Hadoque, in Le Secret de la Licorne (1943) and Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge (1944). Like other journalists who had worked for newspapers tolerated by the Germans during the Occupation, Hergé would be debarred from working at the Liberation.
1.4 The aftermath of war: censorship
American magazines were banned during the Occupation, as were American strips in Belgian or French bande dessinée magazines, most of which also disappeared. Spirou, which had been launched in Brussels by Dupuis in 1938, continued to appear until 1943, when it was closed down after the publisher refused to accept a German administrator. In France, magazines that appeared in the occupied zone ceased publication in 1942, with the exception of the Pétainist Le Téméraire, or, as Ory has called it, 'The Nazi Boys' Own' (Ory 1979), which appeared from 1943 until the Germans left Paris the following year.
After the war, illustrés gradually began to reappear, with some new ones being launched such as the Communist Party's Vaillant in 1945, which included Poïvet and Lécureux's Les Pionniers de l'espérance set in space and based on the adventures of a multi-ethnic group of men and women who set out to spread a message of tolerance. The most famous of Vaillant's strips was Arnal's Pif le Chien, which it took over from L'Humanité in 1952 and which would eventually give its name to the magazine itself: in 1965 Vaillant became Le Journal de Pif. In 1969 the magazine was renamed Pif Gadget, and inaugurated a highly successful new series, Rahan, by Chéret and Lécureux, featuring a prehistoric hero who nonetheless defended an unobjectionably humanist set of values.
The end of the Occupation also saw the return of American strips. Their reappearance reactivated the moral panic which had greeted their first arrival in the 1930s: children were being exposed to the seductive effects of mass culture by a type of strip which abdicated any educational purpose in favour of pure entertainment. The resurfacing of these concerns in the post-war period coincided with protectionist arguments based on the threat to French artists represented by their American competitors, a conjuncture which incited the Communist Party to form a temporary alliance with Catholic pressure groups in order to draft a law aiming at the 'protection' of young people. The Loi du 16 juillet 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse is still on the statute book. It prohibits the publication of material destined for young people which presents immoral or criminal behaviour in a positive light, or which might otherwise demoralize young people. It also prohibits the display of violent or licentious material, whether or not it is intended for young people, in places where minors might be exposed to it, thereby allowing for censorship to be exercised over adult publications.
1.5 The École de Bruxelles and the École de Charleroi
If the late 1940s and 1950s are described as a second golden age of bande dessinée, that is above all because of the work produced by mainly Belgian artists in two magazines. In 1946, Raymond Leblanc set up the Éditions du Lombard and launched Tintin magazine, with a French edition published by Dargaud appearing in 1948. Leblanc's impeccable credentials as a resistance fighter during the Occupation were able to overcome the decree under which Hergé was banned. Spirou reappeared in 1944 and was distributed in France from 1946. Out of these two publications were born, respectively, the École de Bruxelles, which was characterized by an aesthetic influenced by the ligne claire, and the École de Charleroi whose more exuberant graphic line has been called the 'style Atome'.
In the 1950s, adventure in exotic countries gave way in Hergé's work to a more contemporary mythology, that of belief in scientific progress, as he sent his heroes to the moon in Objectif lune (1953) and On a marché sur la lune (1954). Subsequently, the heroes aspire only to stay at home, and the journeys that they undertake are forced upon them when their home life is itself disturbed by, for example, the kidnapping of Tournesol in L'Affaire Tournesol (1956). In Tintin au Tibet (1960), Tintin's search for his missing friend represents what is fundamentally an inner quest for Hergé, who was deeply troubled in his personal life at the time (Peeters 1990: 212). The ultimate degree of negation of the adventure story would be reached in Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963), in which the heroes never leave home, and the drama is that of Haddock's terror of the eponymous and castratory diva.
Apart from Hergé himself, the École de Bruxelles included, among others, Paul Cuvelier, Jacques Martin and Willy Vandersteen. Cuvelier's exquisitely drawn Corentin series (from 1946) recounted the adventures of a young Breton orphan in the eighteenth century. Martin's Alix series (from 1948) features the eponymous hero, a young Gaulois slave of the Romans, and his younger companion, Enak, in a variety of carefully documented ancient historical settings. The prolific Vandersteen produced, among many other series, the hugely successful Bob et Bobette, which first appeared in a Flemish version in 1945 and teemed with realist detail in spite of its far-fetched scenarios.
The most illustrious member of the group, after Hergé, is undoubtedly Edgar P. Jacobs, whose series Blake et Mortimer began in Tintin in 1946, with Le Secret de l'Espadon, and continued until the unfinished Les Trois formules du professeur Sato in 1977. The phlegmatic Eton-educated Captain Blake, who works for MI5, and his friend, the more volatile physics professor Mortimer, come up against their implacable enemy, the suave but ruthless Olrik, in each episode. Underneath the precision and elegance of Jacobs's style there is a disturbing climate which evokes Wells, Verne and Conan Doyle. In La Marque jaune (1956), for example, the evil scientist Septimus has invented a machine which will turn people into robots and control their behaviour. L'Énigme de l'Atlantide (1957) and Le Piège diabolique (1962) are both based on time travel, and in S.O.S. Météores (1959) Blake and Mortimer defeat an attempt by the sinister professor Miloch to prepare a Soviet invasion by taking control of the weather.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reading Bande Dessinée by Ann Miller. Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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