Roots
Franco-Belgian Comics: Bande Dessinée
Course 1 · Chapter 2 · Roots: Töpffer to the Early Strips
Chapter 1 asked whether Hergé invented bande dessinée. He did not, and this chapter shows what came first: a Swiss schoolmaster who drew picture stories in the 1830s and wrote about how they worked, the popular prints of Épinal, the first serial strips in French children's magazines, and the early weeklies that built a young readership. It ends in 1929, when Tintin begins (Chapter 3). Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".
Rodolphe Töpffer
Who he was
Rodolphe Töpffer (1799 to 1846) taught at a school in Geneva and wrote and drew humorous picture stories for friends, first as a private amusement (check). Switzerland was French-speaking in Geneva, so he belongs to the French-language tradition even though he was not French or Belgian.
His stories
Titles include Histoire de M. Jabot, M. Vieux Bois, M. Crépin and Docteur Festus, published in the 1830s and 1840s (check the dates and the order of writing and publication). Each tells a comic tale, usually of a vain or foolish man, in a series of drawings with a line or two of handwritten text under each.
His theory
Töpffer wrote an essay on the physiognomy of his drawings (1845, check) in which he explained that the combination of drawing and text makes a kind of reading that neither can achieve alone, and that a quick, simple line works better than a finished picture. Many later critics treat him as the first theorist of comics.
Prints, Caricature and Popular Pictures
- Épinal prints. From the late 18th century the town of Épinal in the Vosges produced cheap coloured sheets of pictures with captions, on saints, soldiers, fairy tales and fables (check). Their name gave French the phrase image d'Épinal, for a simple, idealised picture. They show an appetite for sequences of pictures for ordinary readers.
- The satirical press. Caricaturists such as Honoré Daumier, Cham and Nadar made drawings for newspapers in the 1830s to 1860s, and some published longer sequences of pictures for comic effect (check names and dates). Satire and the picture sequence grew up together.
- Gustave Doré. The illustrator Gustave Doré produced an illustrated history of Russia in cartoon form in 1854, a work often cited as an early long comic (check).
The First French Strips
| Work (check each) | Note |
|---|---|
| La Famille Fenouillard (1889) | By Georges Colomb, who signed as "Christophe", serialised in the children's magazine Le Petit Français illustré. A comic family's misadventures on holiday and abroad, with the text set under each picture and full-page drawings. Often called the first French strip in the modern sense. |
| Le Sapeur Camember (1890s) | By the same author, a comic soldier whose logic goes wrong in a series of gags. |
| Le Savant Cosinus (1890s) | Again Christophe, an absent-minded scientist: one of the first of many comic professors in the tradition. |
| Bécassine (1905) | Launched in the weekly La Semaine de Suzette, written under the pseudonym "Caumery" and drawn by Joseph Pinchon (check the credits). A young Breton housemaid whose literal-mindedness drives the humour; over the next decades she became one of the most popular French heroines of children's comics, with albums from 1913 (check). |
| Les Pieds Nickelés (1908) | By Louis Forton in the weekly L'Épatant: three crooks whose schemes and slang made them popular in France for decades (check). |
| Zig et Puce (1925) | By Alain Saint-Ogan, two boys and a penguin on adventures, in Dimanche-Illustré. Often credited with bringing the speech balloon into French strips, where earlier stories had put the words below the picture (check). |
Weeklies for the Young
Most of the early strips appeared in magazines for children, many of them with Catholic or family-minded publishers and a mixture of stories, serials, puzzles and moral tales. These magazines trained a generation of young readers to expect a regular weekly page, and gave the artists a regular income. In the late 1920s and 1930s the market widened with imports of American newspaper strips and with new Franco-Belgian magazines (check, for example Le Journal de Mickey in 1934). The weekly was the home of the form until the album took over in the postwar years (Chapter 8).
Exercises
Explain two ideas of Töpffer that remain central to comics and give a modern example of each.
Why is it hard to name a "first comic"? List three different definitions and the work each would pick.
Discuss Bécassine as a commercial success and as a stereotype, giving the view of an admirer and of a critic without taking a side.
Quick Reference
- Töpffer (1799 to 1846): picture stories, the sequence as story, a theory of the line
- Before comics: Épinal prints, caricature, Doré
- First strips: Christophe (1889), Bécassine (1905), Les Pieds Nickelés (1908), Zig et Puce (1925)
- Speech balloon: arrives in French strips in the 1920s (check)
- Home of the form: the children's weekly, until the postwar album