European Comic Art

The treatment of cultural difference and diversity by French-speaking cartoonists has changed radically over the last few decades, as four articles in this special issue demonstrate. What has not changed since the nineteenth century is the centrality of these themes to comics, which have been a globalizing medium in a shrinking world throughout the period. French-language comics are exemplary of these transformations, insofar as France was a major imperialist power during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, France has long been home to ethnic and religious minorities, and was a major center of immigration during the twentieth century. These socio-historical trends have left a huge imprint on comics within France itself, but the French also exported the form along with their language to most of their colonies, which has given rise to (post-)colonial traditions of cartooning in French-speaking regions across the globe.

French cartoonist and filmmaker Joann Sfar has often used the comics medium to reflect on visual representation. His latest bande dessinée, Chagall en Russie ['Chagall in Russia'] (2010-2011), continues some of the meta-pictural elements previously found in his Pascin (2000-2002), which already featured Chagall in several episodes, as well as his acclaimed series, The Rabbi's Cat, where Sfar introduced the character of an anonymous Russian painter, whose biography and artistic stance seemingly referred to that of Marc Chagall. Although Chagall en Russie explicitly refers to the real-life Franco-Russian modernist painter, it is certainly not a standard biographical exercise. By offering a synthetic and often symbolic version of personal and historical events experienced by Chagall, Sfar takes certain liberties with the painter's life story as it was outlined by the artist (in My Life, his 1922 autobiography) and by many biographers and art historians. Sfar does not seek an authentic depiction of his subject's verifiable life journey, but rather views it through a metaphorical narrative, which is itself inspired by Chagall's artistic universe and raises questions about the figurative possibilities of comics.

This essay analyzes a three-volume graphic novel series titled Kia Ora that was published by Vents d'Ouest between 2007 and 2009. The essay is divided in two parts. In the first part, I show how the series' authors retrace the episode of human zoos in the West through a rigorous historical documentation that allows them to examine the mechanisms of 'monstrification' of the colonized subject. The graphic novel series shows how the shaping of a collective and national identity takes place through the exposition/exhibition of the 'abnormality' or (so-called) monstrosity of the Colonized. The second part of the article discusses the series as a contemporary French popular cultural product. It examines questions such as the extent to which Kia Ora explores the (problematic) colonial past of France, how it represents it, and whether it avoids delving in uncomfortable (forgotten) zones.

This article explores the strategies Gabonese cartoonist Pahé deploys to disrupt media-driven images of Africa in both his autobiographical series La vie de Pahé ['The Life of Pahé'] and the fictional series Dipoula, co-created with French cartoonist Sti. It focuses on the role of humor as a way to mock Western hegemony while exposing how sustained colonial logic informs Western representations of Africa. Using humor that thrives on misrecognition, Pahé thwarts readers' expectations and facilitates new possibilities for thinking through the relationship between Europe and Africa, while also drawing attention to the attendant relationship between Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées and other Francophone comics.

This is the second portion of an interview with Hervé Barulea, or Baru, one of the most accomplished French cartoonists living today, conducted at his home in France on 15 July 2011. The first part of the interview was published in European Comic Art 4.1 (fall 2011), 213-237. Baru talks here about a broad range of important topics, including autobiography, the roles of work and leisure in his comics, boxing (his focus in two comics), the society of the spectacle, representations of women and minorities in comics, the heritage of classic French and Belgian comics (series such as Tintin, Yves-le-Loup ['Ivan-the-Wolf'] and Spirou) and the clear-line drawing style, experimentation by Oubapo, space, his drawing style and techniques for making comics, his current and future projects, his former teaching position in the Ecole des beaux-arts in Nancy, and the relationship of comics to fine art.

For Saint Augustine, time was a distentio animi, an extension of the mind. This opinion strongly differs from our modern understanding of time as a measurable parameter of the physical world. Nonetheless, subjectifying approaches still coexist alongside objectifying conceptions of time. They necessarily alternate in our daily lives: though we all keep years, seasons and hours in mind, we live through many moments very personally. Hence, it is indispensable that we pay attention to subjective time experience in the humanities and the arts. In this article, we introduce the concept of duration, as developed by Bergson and Deleuze, into the field of comics studies. We analyse the creation of an experience of time in the work of Chris Ware and Kevin Huizenga, focusing particularly on their deployment of repetition, but we also note how artists such as André Franquin and Willy Vandersteen transgressed classical reading time by invoking a feeling of duration. We go on to consider abstract comics, and the concrete awareness of the actual moment they offer to the reader, which generates direct experience of duration. However, taking Martin Vaughn-James' The Cage as an example, we point out that such a temporal sensation is not dependent on formal abstraction but can occur within the boundaries of pictorial figuration.

Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Dans la Peau de Tintin [‘In Tintin’s Skin’]

Alain Boillat, ed., Les Cases à l’écran: Bande dessinée et cinéma en dialogue [‘Panels on the Screen: Comics and Cinema in Dialogue’]

Viviane Alary and Benoît Mitaine, eds., Lignes de front: bande dessinée et totalitarisme [Frontlines: Comics and Totalitarianism]

Thomas Becker, ed., Comic: Intermedialität und Legitimität eines popkulturellen Mediums [‘Comics: Intermediality and Legitimacy of a Popular Medium’]

Notes on contributors