The Graphic Novel

Franco-Belgian Comics: Bande Dessinée

Course 1 · Chapter 7 · The Graphic-Novel Turn: Tardi, Bilal, Persepolis and L'Association

By the 1980s adults read comics in France and Belgium as a matter of course, but most of what they read was still series in the classic mould. In the 1990s a new generation made a different kind of book: single, personal and often drawn and written by one person, on subjects that had rarely been treated in comics, from the trenches of 1914 to growing up in revolutionary Iran. This chapter follows two established "auteurs" (Tardi and Bilal), the small publisher L'Association that gave the independent scene a home, and the books that took the graphic novel to a world audience. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

Two Established Auteurs

Jacques Tardi

Born in 1946, Tardi made his name with Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (from 1976, check), a comic adventure in a vividly drawn Paris of the early 1900s. He is best known for his work on the First World War, including C'était la guerre des tranchées (1993, check), and for his adaptations of Léo Malet's detective novels about Nestor Burma. In Moi, René Tardi, prisonnier de guerre (from 2012, check) he drew his father's Second World War memoir. His anti-war stance and dense, bleak linework are unmistakable.

Enki Bilal

Born in 1951 in Belgrade, Bilal moved to France as a child. His Nikopol trilogy (from 1980, check) is a political science fiction of a future Paris with an Egyptian god above it. He moved from collaborations with the writer Pierre Christin to solo works with painterly colour, and made films based on his own comics (check). A dark, politically aware strand of French science fiction.

What they show

Both treat the comic as a form for history, politics and anxiety about the future. They had been working for adult magazines in the 1970s and carried the "author" idea (Chapter 6) into the bookshop, with a single-volume or short-series format.

L'Association

A publisher of artists L'Association was founded in Paris in 1990 by a group of young artists including Jean-Christophe Menu, Lewis Trondheim, David B., Killoffer and Mokeït (check the founders). They wanted to publish personal, formally inventive comics free of the series, album and genre rules of the big houses, and to put the author in control. Their books were small-press and often experimental, with irregular formats, black and white and autobiography. They are often credited with starting the French "independent" or "alternative" comics scene (check).
  • David B., L'Ascension du Haut Mal (from 1996, check): an autobiographical account of growing up with a brother's epilepsy, in a black-and-white style full of symbols.
  • Lewis Trondheim: a prolific writer and artist, creator of the animal-hero series Lapinot and, with Joann Sfar, the fantasy series Donjon (check).
  • Jean-Christophe Menu: the group's critic and theorist, whose book Plates-bandes (2005, check) attacked the mass market for comics.
  • Influences. American underground and alternative comics, and especially Art Spiegelman's Maus, the story of his father's survival of the Holocaust, which showed the form could treat the gravest subject (check).

Persepolis and the World Audience

Work (check each)Note
Persepolis (2000 to 2003)By Marjane Satrapi, born in Iran in 1969: a black-and-white memoir of a girl growing up in revolutionary Iran and in exile in Europe. Published in four volumes by L'Association, translated worldwide, and made into an animated film (2007) that she co-directed (check). The book is often named as the work that took French comics to a general adult readership.
Joann Sfar, Le Chat du rabbin (from 2002)A talking cat in 1930s Algeria, living with a rabbi and facing questions about religion, identity and colonialism.
Emmanuel Guibert, La Guerre d'Alan (from 2000)A biography of an American soldier in Europe in the Second World War, drawn from interviews (check).
Guy Delisle, Pyongyang (2003)A cartoonist's travel diary from North Korea, one of the first successful comic "reportage" books (check).
Riad Sattouf, L'Arabe du futur (from 2014)A memoir of childhood in Libya and Syria with a French mother and a Syrian father, a widely read example of the autobiographical turn (check).

What Changed

  • The format. The 48-page colour album remained the commercial standard, but large black-and-white volumes of 150 or more pages became common for personal stories.
  • The subjects. Memoir, reportage, history, politics and everyday life, in addition to adventure and humour.
  • The readership. More adults, more women readers and creators, and bookshops that put comics beside novels (check).
  • The big houses responded. Publishers such as Dargaud, Casterman and Delcourt began lines of "graphic novels" and signed independent authors (check; see Chapter 8).
A British comparison Britain has its own graphic-novel turn: Raymond Briggs's When the Wind Blows (1982) and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1986 to 1987) are the usual landmarks, with Bryan Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat (1994) and Posy Simmonds's newspaper serials Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe, both reworkings of French and English literary classics (check). The French-language scene differs in having a dedicated small-press publisher (L'Association) and public institutions to support it, while British graphic novels reached the bookshop mostly through mainstream publishers. A Scottish reader might look for the Edinburgh and Glasgow small-press tradition and the festival programmes (check).
Check the details Dates, founders and titles come from general knowledge. The history of the independent scene is also told in competing versions by the people who made it, and "the first graphic novel" is a contested label in every language. Verify with publisher catalogues and with the creators' own accounts.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Compare Tardi's war comics with a war novel or film you know, saying what the comic form adds and what it cannot do.

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Exercise 2

What did L'Association do differently from the big publishers, and what effects did it have on the market?

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Exercise 3

Why might a black-and-white memoir like Persepolis reach a wider audience than a colour adventure series? Give three reasons and one reason against.

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Quick Reference

  • Auteurs: Tardi (war, Paris, noir), Bilal (political science fiction)
  • L'Association (1990): Menu, Trondheim, David B., Killoffer, Mokeït
  • Landmarks: Persepolis, L'Ascension du Haut Mal, Pyongyang, L'Arabe du futur
  • New subjects: memoir, reportage, history, politics
  • Influence: Maus and American alternative comics