European Comic Art

If comic art were to have its equivalent of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes [‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’], it would be the polemic that developed in 1996 as an ‘add-on’ to the centenary celebrations of the invention of cinema of a year earlier. Following the assertion that the first comic strip was R. F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid of 1896, French reaction was indignant. Speaking at a high-profile conference in Angoulême, Yves Frémion, media personality and Euro-politician, made a lengthy tongue-in-cheek attack on perceived American usurping of credit for key cultural creations (cinema, science-fiction, bluejeans, AIDS, the Olympics…) before arriving at the following conclusion: Il me revient l’honneur, en commençant ce colloque, d’orienter le débat clairement pour éviter qu’il ne dévie vers un résultat mitigé, et pour que cette imposture soit démasquée sans ambiguïté. En réalité, tout ce que nous pouvons fêter cette année, c’est le cent-cinquantenaire de la mort de l’inventeur de la BD, Rodolphe Töpffer. (6) [In opening this conference I have the honour of setting the debate clearly in the right direction so as to avoid it going off on a dubious tangent, and in order for such impostures to be well and truly outed. In truth, all that is to be celebrated this year is the 150th anniversary of the death of the inventor of the BD, Rodolphe Töpffer.]

The purpose of this essay is dual and makes for a two-part division: the first, after a physical description, argues for the authenticity, genesis and dating of the Gourary manuscript album of drawings for Monsieur Jabot. The existence of this manuscript, which I believe to be by the hand of Rodolphe Töpffer, is scarcely known, and its authenticity has been questioned. This first part describes the circumstances and rationale of its making, the intricacies of dating, the delay in distribution, and the very slight (with one or two more significant) improvements made in the printed version of 1833-1835. This latter represents Töpffer's first essay in autolithography of a sequence of humorous drawings, an histoire en images, Töpffer's invention within the controversial genre of caricature. The second part, in a connected account, uses the newly published correspondence to establish and confirm the chronology of the various stages of production of Jabot:1 redrawing (in the Gourary manuscript), transfer to lithographic paper, printing (1833-1834), and, finally, a long-delayed distribution through the author's peculiar private system de proche en proche ['gradually, by degrees']. I explain the delay and the changes made during production, and document the private distribution through friends from October 1835. The whole story has to be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle in which some pieces are inevitably missing.

The article argues that the significance of the nineteenth-century comics character Ally Sloper cannot be understood without reference to the parallel career that this fictional celebrity developed across other media, most notably music hall. The history and evolution of the textual character, and of his various incarnations on stage and screen, are chronicled, with the aim both of documenting the expansion of working-class leisure culture and of demonstrating the centrality of Sloper to the development of a specifically British theatrical tradition that moved away from earlier continental models. Contemporary responses to Sloper, including moral outrage, are discussed, and the article concludes by analysing the skilled commercial exploitation of the character which would influence later practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This article focuses on panel arrangements and page layouts of early comics published in Belgium in the five decades before the start of Tintin in 1929. It investigates the degree of standardisation in this pivotal period, in which the old system of graphic narratives with captions evolved to comics with balloons. The years between 1880 and 1929 boasted a variety of publication formats (broadsheets, illustrated magazines for adults and for children, comic strips, artists' books), within which one can see both similar and different conventions at work.

It seems difficult to speak about comic art in Spain without considering what tebeos mean to Spaniards. This term is not simply a Spanish translation of bande dessinée. It refers to a special kind of comic strip aimed at children, which appeared in the late 1920s. Tebeos were the only available mass medium in Spain after the Civil War (1936-1939). In this contribution we want to analyse tebeos as an editorial, social and cultural phenomenon, with the aim of demonstrating that 'tebeo-culture' survived even after the collapse of the 'tebeo-industry' in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, we will examine the question of the cultural legitimacy of comic art in Spanish society.

Michel Porret, ed., Objectif bulles: Bande dessinée et histoire [‘Destination Balloons: Comics and History’]

Philippe Delisle, Bande dessinée franco-belge et imaginaire colonial: Des Années 1930 aux années 1980 [‘Franco-Belgian bande dessinée and the Colonial Imaginary: From 1930 to the 1980s’]

Notes on contributors

Index to Volume 2