What Is Bande Dessinée?

Franco-Belgian Comics: Bande Dessinée

Course 1 · Chapter 1 · What Is Bande Dessinée? Scope & Sources

In Britain a comic is usually something for children, a weekly such as The Beano or a superhero magazine. In France and Belgium the equivalent form, bande dessinée, fills whole sections of bookshops, wins prizes, is taught, exhibited and collected, and is read by adults as well as children. This first chapter explains the term, why the form is taken so seriously, how a typical album is built, the vocabulary needed to read about it, and how the course will work. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Term

"Drawn strip"

Bande dessinée means literally "drawn strip", and is usually shortened to BD (spoken "bay-day", often written bédé). The wording describes a strip of pictures, not anything comic, which is why the French term never carried the idea of "funny" that the English word "comic" does (check).

The "ninth art"

French writers call comics the neuvième art, "the ninth art", in a numbering that puts it after cinema and television in a list of arts. The phrase became popular in the 1960s as critics and fans argued that comics deserved the same respect as film (check the origin).

Franco-Belgian

The label covers French-language comics made in France and Belgium. The two countries share publishers, magazines and readers, and some of the best-known creators, such as Hergé, were Belgian. The course keeps the shared name and notes where the countries differ.

A form, not a genre Bande dessinée is a way of telling stories with pictures in sequence, and it holds adventure, humour, history, science fiction, crime, memoir and reportage. Calling it "a children's genre" is the same kind of mistake as calling film a children's genre. The course treats it as a form with a history, a business and an audience.

Why Is It Taken So Seriously?

Early recognition. French and Belgian critics and fans began to write about comics as art in the 1960s, founding clubs and journals, and the form moved into museums and universities during the following decades (check).
Public institutions. There is an annual international festival at Angoulême, founded in 1974, a comics museum in Brussels and a national centre for comics and images at Angoulême (check the dates and names), and the state has supported the form through prizes and libraries.
A large market. Comics are among the biggest sectors of the French book trade, with a very large number of new titles each year, including translated manga (check the figures).
A mixed readership. Adults read BD for pleasure, and the shelves at a large bookshop run from picture books for the under-fives to historical biography and war reportage.

The Album and the Page

Term (check each)	Meaning
Album	The standard book format: a hardback, usually in colour, traditionally of 48 pages (the number varies). A series is a run of albums, and a hero's adventures are collected in this form after serialisation in a magazine.
Planche	A page of the comic, thought of as a designed unit as much as a sheet of paper.
Case or vignette	A single panel (frame) of a page.
Bulle or phylactère	The speech balloon. The second word is the more technical.
Scénariste, dessinateur, coloriste	The writer, the artist who draws the pages and the colourist. Many series are made by a team, so credits matter. Some creators do all of these jobs (the French term for a complete author is auteur complet).
Strip or gag en une page	A short comic form: a few panels, or a single-page gag. Many humorous series work in this way.
Roman graphique	"Graphic novel": a long self-contained story, usually for adults, a term that became common in France from the 1990s (check).

Shaped by Magazines

For much of the 20th century most stories first appeared in weekly or monthly magazines, one page at a time, and were gathered into albums later. This explains much about the form: stories built from short, cliffhanger-driven episodes, heroes who return for dozens of volumes, and a "house style" in which artists worked in the manner of a magazine's editors. Later chapters follow the main magazines in turn, Tintin, Spirou, Pilote and Métal hurlant, and then the move from the magazine to the album and the bookshop.

Scope of the Course

Part (check)	Chapters	Topics
Roots	2	Töpffer and the earliest picture stories, the first strips and children's weeklies
The magazine heroes	3, 4, 5	Tintin and the Brussels school, Spirou and Franquin, Pilote and Astérix
Adults and auteurs	6, 7	Moebius and the 1970s, Tardi, Persepolis and the independent scene
The business and the world	8, 9	Publishers and albums, festivals, museums, translation
The method	10	Reading a page and testing a "best of" list

The course discusses comics and their makers but does not reproduce pages, and it uses only brief attributed quotations. It is a survey of the French-language tradition, not a complete catalogue, and it leaves out many fine creators for reasons of space.

Myths to Test

Common claim	The question a careful reader asks (check each)
Comics are for children.	Who reads BD, and what do the shelves contain? (Chapters 6 to 9)
Tintin and Astérix are the whole of BD.	What else is there, and who reads it? (Chapters 4 to 9)
BD was invented by Hergé.	What came before? (Chapter 2)
Franco-Belgian comics are one tradition.	Where do Belgian and French practice differ? (Chapters 3 to 5)
The French have always respected comics.	When and how did the change come? (Chapters 6 to 9)
The "greatest" comics are an objective list.	Who makes the lists, and why? (Chapter 10)

Sources to Use

The albums themselves, in French or in the English translations that exist for the best-known series (check which are available).
Museums and festivals, including the Angoulême festival and its national comics centre, and the comics museum in Brussels, each of which has an exhibition programme and a library (check current details).
Libraries. French municipal libraries (médiathèques) stock BD heavily, and many British libraries now have graphic-novel shelves, including translated Franco-Belgian titles (check locally).
Histories and criticism, by comics scholars and journalists, which place the works in their time (check which are available in English).
Interviews and memoirs, read with care, because creators' accounts of their careers are often polished.

A British comparison Britain has a strong comics tradition of its own, and a Scottish one in particular: the Dundee publisher D. C. Thomson launched The Dandy (1937) and The Beano (1938), and Scottish writers and artists have been prominent in 2000 AD and in American superhero comics (check). The difference is largely one of status and format. British comics were mainly weekly papers for children, thrown away or kept in boxes, while the French-language tradition built the hardback album and a literary reputation, and the two traditions are worth comparing throughout the course.

Check the details Dates, titles, print figures and the names of institutions come from general knowledge and are marked "check" where uncertain. Many stories about comics and their creators are retold without sources, so verify them against the publishers' and museums' own pages and against reference works.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain in your own words why the English word "comic" and the French "bande dessinée" suggest different things, and what that might mean for how each is regarded.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

Choose a comic or graphic novel you know, and describe it using at least five terms from the vocabulary table (album, planche, case, bulle, scénariste and so on).

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Pick two claims from the "Myths to Test" table and for each say what evidence you would look for and where you would find it.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Term: bande dessinée = "drawn strip"; BD or bédé; "the ninth art"
Format: the album (traditionally 48 pages); planche, case, bulle
Roles: scénariste, dessinateur, coloriste, auteur complet
Institutions: Angoulême festival (1974), Brussels comics museum
Method: describe the works, check the dates, test the claims