European Comic Art

This edition of European Comic Art begins by adopting a retrospective viewpoint and ends with a look to the future, not entirely rosy but not wholly bleak. Our first article offers a reassessment of the relationship between Hergé's Tintin and conservative Catholic discourses of the 1930s. We then move on to a personal recollection of a landmark moment in the legitimisation of comics in France: the Cerisy conference of 1987. In our third article, two virtuoso comics autobiographers reflect (in an email discussion that took place in 2006, here translated into English for the first time) on the loss of the searching, edgy tonality of early comics life writing in favour of something more crowd-pleasing. Finally, a young Brighton-based comics artist shares her love of the medium and her experience of solidarity among her fellow artists but has a cooler appraisal of the current political scene and the health of the comics culture in the United Kingdom.

The Tintin albums that were first printed in black and white offer a revealing picture of the conservative, Catholic, nationalist climate in which the young Hergé was immersed in the 1920s and 1930s. Taken together, they offer a coherent vision of the world. Tintin sometimes takes on the role of a pious young hero, and a character such as Rastapopoulos may seem like a perfect illustration of the enemy as defined by a writer like Charles Maurras. But Belgian conservative Catholics also had a powerful social mission. From the Congolese escapade up to L'Oreille cassée [Tintin and the Broken Ear], Tintin is combating the same proponents of Anglo-American cosmopolitan capitalism. Conversely, he comes to the help of the poor and needy, reactivating a whole Christian iconography of charity, as, for example, when he rescues Tchang from drowning in Le Lotus bleu [The Blue Lotus].

Thierry Groensteen's memoir recalls the intellectual ferment of colloquia held at Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, subsequently the venue for two conferences organised by Groensteen himself. The first, the ground-breaking Bande dessinée, récit et modernité [Comics, Narrative and Modernity] in 1987, was a key moment in the history of the theorisation of comics as art form. Groensteen's own presentation explored the threshold of narrativity in comics, and other noteworthy contributions included those of the philosopher Henri Van Lier and Marc Avelot, whose reading of Martin Vaughn-James's La Cage rescued this masterpiece from obscurity. This conference also laid the foundations for the Oubapo movement, the production of comics under constraint, whose later development Groensteen chronicles. The second, ‘La Transécriture’, in 1993, was an early exploration of comics as part of a cross-media environment.

In this email exchange, Jean-Christophe Menu inveighs against the deterioration of comics autobiography into a formulaic ‘genre’. Fabrice Neaud maintains that the autobiographical enterprise is necessarily a dangerous undertaking in which a precarious subject comes into being, unlike the ‘proximate’ autobiography featuring a ready-made persona in search of peer approval. He employs a Darwinist evolutionary metaphor to demonstrate the colonisation of the ecological niche that houses comics autobiography by an ‘autobiography-lite’ better adapted to the market. He details the criticisms that have been made of his work (‘egotistical’, or formally over-conservative) and laments the tendency to equate artless scribbles with ‘sincerity’. Menu regrets that a distanced and selective portrayal of family life can be read as invasive of privacy, with devastating legal consequences.

In this interview, the Brighton-based comics artist Hannah Berry discuses her current role as Comics Laureate, which has included the commissioning of a survey into the conditions of work of comics artists in the United Kingdom and has demonstrated the financial hardship that most of them endure. She also talks about the importance of mentoring, organising work around childcare, and how she came to produce a weekly strip for the New Statesman. The interview then focuses on Berry's three published graphic novels, touching on the influence of films, the tension between storytelling and play with the codes of the medium, the use of gutters and text as elements in a horror story, comics as a corrective to fake news, and the political research that underlies satire.

Ewa Stańczyk, ed., Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust: Beyond Maus. (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020). 142 pp. ISBN: 9780367585921 (£29.59)

Vittorio Frigerio, Bande dessinée et littérature: Intersections, fascinations, divergences (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2018). 96 pp. ISBN: 9788822902573 (€10.00)