Bande dessinée
Bandes dessinées, abbreviated BDs and also referred to as Franco-Belgian comics, are comics that are usually originally in French and created for readership in France and Belgium. These countries have a long tradition in comics, separate from that of English-language comics. Belgium is a mostly bilingual country, and comics originally in Dutch are culturally a part of the world of bandes dessinées, even if the translation from French to Dutch far outweighs the other direction.
Among the most popular bandes dessinées are The Adventures of Tintin, Spirou and Fantasio, Gaston, Asterix, Lucky Luke, The Smurfs and Spike and Suzy. Some highly-regarded realistically drawn and plotted bandes dessinées include Blueberry, Thorgal, XIII, and the creations of Hermann.
Reach
In Europe, French is spoken natively not only in France and the city state of Monaco, but also by significant portions of the population of Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. The shared language creates an artistic and commercial market where national identity is often blurred, and one of the main rationales for the concept of the "Franco-Belgian comics" expression. The potential appeal of the French-language BDs extends beyond Francophone Europe, as France in particular has strong historical and cultural ties with several Francophone overseas territories. Of these territories it is Quebec, Canada, where Franco-Belgian BDs are doing best, due – aside from the fact that it has the largest BD reading Francophone population outside Europe – to that province's close historical and cultural ties with France from colonization, in the process heavily influencing its own native Quebec comics scene. This is in stark contrast to the English-speaking part of the country, which is culturally American comics oriented.While the originally in Dutch written Flemish Belgian comic books, or rather comic/BD albums are influenced by Francophone BDs, especially in the early years, they evolved into a distinctly different style, both in art and in spirit, which is why they are nowadays sub-categorized as Flemish comics, as their evolution started to take a different path from the late 1940s onward, due to cultural differences stemming from the increasing cultural self-awareness of the Flemish people. And while French-language publications are habitually translated into Dutch, Flemish publications are less commonly translated into French, for cultural reasons. Likewise, despite the shared language, Flemish BDs do not do that well in the Netherlands and vice versa, save for some notable exceptions, such as the Willy Vandersteen creation Suske en Wiske which is popular across the border. Concurrently, the socio-cultural idiosyncrasies contained within many Flemish BDs also means that these comics have seen far less translations into other languages than their French-language counterparts have due to their more universal appeal, and the French language's cultural status.
Belgium is officially a trilingual country as there is a German-speaking Community of Belgium. Belgian BD home market first print releases, be it in Dutch or in French, are rarely translated into that language with German-speaking Belgians having to wait for internationally released editions for reading in their native tongue, typically those from licensed publishers stemming from neighboring Germany. Though Dutch and German both are Germanic languages, the German-speaking Community of Belgium lies within the territory of the Walloon Region, so that French is the most utilized language in that area and has caused the handful of BD artists originating from there, such as Hermann and Didier Comès, to create their BDs in French. Born Dieter Hermann Comès, Comès actually "Frenchified" his given name to this end, whereas Hermann has dispensed with his family name "Huppen" for his BD credits, though he maintained the Germanic spelling for his first name. Due to its relative modesty, both in size and in scope, and despite the close historical and cultural ties, no German-Belgian artists are as of 2018 known to have created BDs specifically for the German comics world, when discounting commercial translations of their original Francophone creations.
A similar situation exists in France, which has several regional languages, of which Breton and Occitan are two of the more substantial ones. But while these languages are culturally recognized as regional languages, they are not official national languages, contrary to Belgium in regard to German, with similar consequences as in Belgium for BDs and their artists. Native BDs are rarely, if at all, released in these languages by the main BD publishers, whereas artists stemming from these regions, invariably create their BDs in French – like their German-Belgian counterparts forced to do so in order to gain commercial access to the main market. The situation for France's German-speaking minority is therefore identical to its more sizable counterpart in northern neighbor Belgium in regard to BD-related matters.
Vocabulary
The term bandes dessinées is derived from the original description of the art form as "drawn strips". It was first introduced in the 1930s, but only became popular in the 1960s, by which time the "BD" abbreviation was also in use for its book, or album, publications.Bandes dessinées were described as the "ninth art" in Francophone scholarship on the medium. The "ninth art" designation stems from a 1964 article by in the magazine Lettres et Médecins, and was subsequently popularized in an article series about the history of comics, which appeared in weekly installments in Spirou magazine from 1964 to 1967. Written by Belgian Morris with editorial input from the [|below-mentioned] Frenchman, the article series was in itself an example of a Franco-Belgian BD project. The publication of Francis Lacassin's book Pour un neuvième art : la bande dessinée in 1971 further established the term.
In North America, Franco-Belgian BDs are often seen as equivalent to what are known as graphic novels — most likely a result of their deviating from the American 32-page comic book standard. In recent decades the English "graphic novel" expression has increasingly been adopted in Europe as well in the wake of the works of Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman, but with the specific intent to discriminate between comics intended for a younger and/or general readership, and publications which are more likely to feature mature content, literary subject matter or experimental styles. As a result, European BD scholars have retroactively identified the 1962 Barbarella comic by Jean-Claude Forest and the first 1967 Corto Maltese adventure Una ballata del mare salato by Hugo Pratt in particular, as the comics up for consideration as the first European "graphic novels".
History
During the 19th century, there were many artists in Europe drawing cartoons, occasionally even utilizing sequential multi-panel narration, albeit mostly with clarifying captions and dialogue placed under the panels rather than the speech balloons commonly used today. These were humorous short works rarely longer than a single page. In the Francophonie, artists such as Gustave Doré, Nadar, Christophe and Caran d'Ache began to be involved with the medium.Early 1900s – 1929: Precursors
In the early decades of the 20th century, comics were not stand-alone publications, but were published in newspapers and weekly or monthly magazines as episodes or gags. Aside from these magazines, the Catholic Church, in the form of its then powerful and influential, was creating and distributing "healthy and correct" magazines for children. In the early 1900s, the first popular French comics appeared. Two of the most prominent comics include Bécassine and Les Pieds Nickelés.In the 1920s, after the end of the first world war, the French artist Alain Saint-Ogan started out as a professional cartoonist, creating the successful series Zig et Puce in 1925. Saint-Ogan was one of the first French-speaking artists to fully utilize techniques popularized and formularized in the United States, such as Speech balloons, even though the text comic format would remain the predominant native format for the next two to three decades in France, propagated as such by France's educators. In 1920, the Abbot of Averbode in Belgium started publishing Zonneland, a magazine consisting largely of text with few illustrations, which started printing comics more often in the following years.
Even though Les Pieds Nickelés, Bécassine and Zig et Puce managed to survive the war for a little while longer, modernized in all three cases and all of them continued by artists other than the original creators, none of them succeeded to find a readership outside France itself and are consequently remembered in their native country only.
1929–1940: Birth of the modern Franco-Belgian comic
One of the earliest proper Belgian comics was Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, with the story Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which was published in Le Petit Vingtième in 1929. It was quite different from future versions of Tintin, the style being very naïve and simple, even childish, compared to the later stories. The early Tintin stories often featured racist and political stereotypes, which caused controversies after the war, and which Hergé later regretted. After TintinThe criticisms regarding the early stories notwithstanding and even though the format still had a long way to go, Tintin is widely considered the starting point and archetype of the modern Franco-Belgian comic as currently understood, and as amply demonstrated in the vast majority of treatises and reference works written on the subject since the 1960s, and the first to find a readership outside its originating country. As such the Tintin series went on to become one of the greatest post-war successes of the Franco-Belgian comic world, having seen translations in dozens of languages, including English, as well as becoming one of the relatively few European comics to have seen a major, successful, Hollywood movie adaptation as late as 2011, nearly thirty years after the death of its creator.
A further step towards modern comic books happened in 1934 when Hungarian Paul Winkler, who had previously been distributing comics to the monthly magazines via his Opera Mundi bureau, made a deal with King Features Syndicate to create the Journal de Mickey, a weekly 8-page early "comic-book". The success was immediate, and soon other publishers started publishing periodicals with American series, which enjoyed considerable popularity in both France and Belgium. This continued during the remainder of the decade, with hundreds of magazines publishing mostly imported material. The most important ones in France were Robinson, Hurrah, and the publications Cœurs Vaillants, ' and ', while Belgian examples included Wrill and Bravo.
Coeurs Vaillants started to publish The Adventures of Tintin in syndication from 1930 onward, constituting one of the earliest known French-Belgian comic world cross-fertilizations, only reinforced when Abbot Courtois, editor-in-chief of Coeurs Vaillants, asked Hergé to create a series about real children with a real family as opposed to Tintins ambiguous age and family, which resulted in the 1936 comic The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko. Incidentally, as Hergé created his comics in the increasingly popular speech balloon format, it initially led to a conflict with Cœurs Vaillants, which utilized the text comic format its editors considered more appropriate from an educational point-of-view. Hergé won the argument, and speech balloon comics were henceforth featured alongside text comics in the magazine until the mid-1960s, when speech balloon comics were all but abandoned by the magazine, the general trend notwithstanding.
In 1938, the Belgian Spirou magazine was launched. Conceived in response to the immense popularity of Journal de Mickey and the success of Tintin in Le Petit Vingtième, the black and white/color hybrid magazine featured predominantly comics from an American origin at the time of its launch until the war years, but there were also native comics included. These concerned Spirou, created by the Frenchman Rob-Vel and who served as the mascot and namesake for the new magazine, and Tif et Tondu created by Belgian artist Fernand Dineur. Both series would survive the war and achieve considerable popularity after the war, albeit under the aegis of other artists. Published in a bi-lingual country, Spirou simultaneously appeared in a Dutch-language version as well under the name Robbedoes for the Flemish market. Export to the Netherlands followed a few years later shortly after the war. The magazine was conceived and published by publisher Éditions Dupuis S.A., which was established by its founding namesake as a printing business in 1898, but changed to being a publishing house in 1922, publishing non-comic books and magazines. Since the launch of Spirou however, Dupuis has increasingly focused on comic productions and is currently, as of 2017, a comics publisher exclusively and one of the two great Belgian Franco-Belgian comic publishing houses still in existence.
As post-war exports to France, Spirou – featuring the creations of Belgian greats like Morris, Franquin and Jijé – became a significant inspiration for future French bande dessinée greats such as Jean "Mœbius" Giraud and Jean-Claude Mézières, eventually setting them off on their comic careers, but who were schoolboys at the time they became acquainted with the magazine.