European Comic Art

This thematic issue arises from the symposium ‘Tradition and Innovation in Franco-Belgian Bande dessinée’, held at the University of Leicester on 13 March 2020. Over three panels with a respective focus on ‘Revisiting the Classics’, ‘Contemporary Perspectives’, and ‘Reshaping Franco-Belgian Bande dessinée’, the symposium brought out a variety of perspectives on contemporary bande dessinée and its links to the Franco-Belgian tradition. The symposium saw the participation of a range of international contributors, including early career scholars, faculty, and artist contributors, based in Greece, Switzerland, Portugal, Canada, Panama, Israel, and the UK. We would like to thank our speakers for their contributions as well as for their flexibility in revising travel arrangements and, in some cases, arranging online delivery at short notice, as the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding in their respective countries at the time of the event. Our particular thanks go to Laurence Grove from the University of Glasgow for his keynote intervention entitled ‘The Relevance of Tintin’, and to graphic novelist Michel Kichka, who gave a keynote talk about the Franco-Belgian influences in his own work as well as a public seminar on his graphic novel Deuxième Génération. We are grateful to Wallonia-Brussels International (WBI), the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF), the Society for French Studies (SFS), and the School of Arts at the University of Leicester for their sponsorship of the keynote sessions, the conference participation of comics artist Ilan Manouach, and travel and registration bursaries for early career researchers. For this follow-up publication, we express our particular thanks to all contributors and peer-reviewers, to Wallonia-Brussels International for support to the translation, and to the editors of European Comic Art, for their kind and patient assistance.

Émile Bravo's Le Journal d'un ingénu inaugurated a growing trend of setting Spirou, Fantasio, and friends in WWII times. Bravo's acclaimed work was followed by the first instalment of a history of Spirou that also contributed to fuelling the interest in retro settings for new albums related to Spirou's universe. In this article I consider such retro albums as a whole and argue that WWII is only one of the many anchors used by authors to fill a gap in the publication history of Spirou, that as time passes, authors rely increasingly on Spirou's recovered history and on new content from retro Spirou albums to anchor their work, and that, ultimately, such works are more interested in Spirou itself rather than in history per se.¹

This article focuses on the narratives of Spirou's origins and backstory from Rob-Vel to Feroumont and Bravo, examining his progressive departure from the Tintinesque adventure paradigm. The Freudian notion of family romance, developed by Marthe Robert into the figures of the foundling and the bastard, is key, as it thematises the hero's origins and early life in a domestic sphere. This motif, absent in Tintin, occurs in Spirou as Rob-Vel's artistic creation becomes origin myth, and post-Franquin ‘naturalised’ conceptions give the character a family, a childhood, and related memories. The article examines how Spirou's family romances, however small and allusive, create a connection between adventure and the domestic sphere and how this contributes to reinventing the Tintinesque model of adventure in contemporary bande dessinée.

This interview with Belgian-Israeli graphic novelist and political cartoonist Michel Kichka covers his growing up in Belgium during the Golden Age of bande dessinée. The author discusses his early readings and influences, as well as the development of his own career in teaching and drawing. The discussion focuses in particular on the creation and publication of his graphic novels Deuxième Génération [Second Generation] and Falafel sauce piquante [Falafel with Spicy Sauce], published in 2012 and 2018. These works foreground essential questions about Kichka's experience as a second-generation Holocaust survivor and about his relationship with Israel. Taking an international perspective, the interview sheds further light on the emergence of the comics medium in Israel and the transnational reception of Franco-Belgian bande dessinée. It also considers Kichka's work and engagement as a political cartoonist. Interview conducted via email, following Michel Kichka's keynote at the “Tradition and Innovation in Franco-Belgian bande dessinée” conference.

In European Francophone Western comics, intermediality goes beyond the widely acknowledged visual influences from Western films. The different sections of this article outline in several case studies how Western bande dessinée often translates an intermedial web of pictorial and photographic hypotexts that have been researched to different extents. Finally, this paper explores a neglected perspective on the visual representations of the American frontier in comics: the artistic production of Native Americans, which is very much present in Western bande dessinée. Building on this analysis and following the lead of researchers that have surveyed some of the main historical developments of graphic narratives, this article posits that the critical and historical study of marginalised visual narratives such as Native American ledger art could feature more prominently in comics scholarship.

This article examines how the shortcomings of institutional representation in comics, and the shifting role of existing institutions in the industry, can engender a new comics practice. ‘Conceptual Comics’ mobilise the historical legacy of conceptual art in its capacity for institutional critique, self-reflexivity, alternative forms of skilling, and the prioritisation of context over content, to renew comics making and reading. My case study, Noirs [Blacks] (2015), a facsimile détournement of Les Schtroumpfs noirs [The Black Smurfs], closely approximates the original, with the same cover, number of pages, and format, but replaces four different composite colour plates by four uniform plates of cyan, resulting in a monochromatic deviation. Noirs demonstrates how a form, when no longer conventionally operational, can foreground industrial fabrication normally intuited as a transparent and mechanic process.

Jan Baetens, Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020). 198 pp. ISBN: 978-1-97880-847-8 ($29.95)

Philippe Delisle, La BD au prisme de l'Histoire: Hergé, Maurras, les Jésuites et quelques autres… (Paris: Karthala, 2019). 206 pp. ISBN: 978-2-8111-2608-7 (€18.00)

Kim A. Munson, ed., Comic Art in Museums (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020). 386 + xii pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2807-1 ($30)

Paul Fisher Davies, Comics as Communication: A Functional Approach (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 338 pp. ISBN: 978-3-030-29722-0 (eBook: €50.28)

Sean Eedy, Four-Color Communism: Comics Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021). 218 pp. ISBN: 978-1-80073-000-7 ($120)