Bande dessinée Studies

In 1996 the Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême piggybacked on to the centenary of the (French) invention of cinema so as to discuss ‘les origines de la bande dessinée’. During his opening speech, one-time MEP and highprofile bande dessinée expert Yves Frémion summed up as follows:

C’est bien connu, les Américains ont tout inventé: l’aviation (qui est germano-française), la fusée (qui est russo-allemande), l’homme dans l’espace (ce fut un russe [sic]), le cinéma (qui est français), le sida (qui est zaïrois), la science-fiction (qui est anglaise), les Jeux Olympiques (qui sont grecs), le blue-jean (qui vient de Nîmes) et les Grottes de Lascaux. Quelques-uns tentent également de fêter cette année le centenaire de la BD, qui en a bientôt deux. Pour des Américains incultes ne sachant même pas où placer l’Europe sur la carte entre le Japon et la Russie, rien d’étonnant à ce qu’ils prennent pour base ce qu’ils ont choisi: l’anniversaire du Yellow Kid de Outcault, puisque c’est une BD américaine comme eux. […]

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.¹

Nearly two decades later, the effect of rereading Frémion’s words, however tongue-in-cheek, might be compared with the emotions provoked by a return to dated and now unacceptable icons of popular culture, in what one might call a ‘Benny Hill effect’: nostalgic amusement is overshadowed by the happy awareness that times and norms have changed, alongside bewilderment at values that apparently passed unchallenged. Bewilderment here, from a bande dessinée (hereafter BD) point of view, at an almost jingoistic appropriation of a cultural form, but also at the canonical notion of history and its artistic expression that depended on the need for a founding ‘great man’ to validate a genre.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel and in North America, by the mid-1990s the spread of Cultural Studies meant that BD was an appropriate object of scholarly attention, alongside bawdy Renaissance jokes, photojournalism, and chansonniers. At least, that was the theory. In practice most bachelor’s degrees in French still attempted full coverage of the literary canon, with no room for graphic novels. Comprehensive exams in the USA might mention Astérix alongside Poujade or L’Affaire du collier in the snippets sections, but no more than that.

These examples suggest that an état présent of BD studies is potentially a casespecific microcosm of key issues within French studies as a discipline, and thus of the values of that discipline as represented by a journal such as French Studies itself, with two main axes that can be explored from an evolving reception-history point of view: first, the value we give or do not give to an author-based canon; second, the methodological divergences that exist between criticism in French and criticism in English, and the possible contributing factors.

BD studies in English: some milestones

As physical phenomena that render visible a mental turning point, milestones and frontier markers are favoured topoi in BD, for example Astérix et les Goths.² What follows is a far from exhaustive overview of indicative moments in the development of BD as a subject of critical attention in English.

The first article published by a major scholarly journal in English with BD as a genre its central subject appears to be Hugh Starkey’s ‘Is the BD “à bout de souffle”?’ of 1990.³ Starkey’s initial état présent was to be followed by academic writings that (perhaps unwittingly) countered any notion of a form on its way out; on the contrary, they now underlined...