by Fransiska Louwagie and Simon Lambert
On 13 March 2020 the University of Leicester hosted an International Symposium titled “Tradition and Innovation in Franco-Belgian bande dessinée” organised in collaboration with Wallonia-Brussels International. This one-day symposium – for which the progamme can be found here – was organised with generous support from the ASMCF, the Society for French Studies and the School of Arts at the University of Leicester.
The day was opened by Simon Lambert as Academic and Cultural Liaison Officer for Wallonia-Brussels in the UK, in conjunction with Fransiska Louwagie (University of Leicester). Keynote speakers were Professor Laurence Grove from the University of Glasgow and graphic novelist Michel Kichka, who also delivered a public seminar on his work. Across three panels, the day focussed on various forms of tradition and innovation in Franco-Belgian bande dessinée: the first panel was dedicated to “Revisiting the classics”, the second panel to “Contemporary perspectives”, and the final ASMCF panel to “Reshaping Franco-Belgian bande dessinée”. The closing remarks were organised as a roundtable session on collaborative international research projects.
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Tags: Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge, Émile Bravo, bande dessinée, Belgium, Deuxième génération, digital comics, education, France, Franco-Belgian Comics, Gaston Lagaffe, Gender, Hergé, History, Holocaust, Ilan Manouach, Mad, MAD Magazine, memory, Michel Kichka, Pilote, racism, Spirou, The Adventures of Tintin, Tintin, Transnational Comics, UK, University of Leicester, violence
by Jakob F. Dittmar
Summary
This paper discusses comics for the blind, based on the example of the tactile comic life by Philipp Meyer and Astérix par Touchtatis ! by Olivier Poncer. It looks into the potential and the restrictions of sequential pictorial storytelling that is accessible to blind readers. Special attention is given to the elements of comics narratives and the technical background of tactile text and image representation. Due to the process of giving information in tactile comics, these present an extreme challenge for readers who have been born blind, while readers who have become blind later in life seem to be able to refer the elements of spatially dispersed tactile information representing the visual appearance of environments (images) to their memory of visual information.
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Tags: Asterix, bande dessinée, blind readers, braille, Franco-Belgian Comics, haptic, Olivier Poncer, Philipp Meyer, representation of realities, special needs, tactile comics, tactile images, visually impaired readers
by Philippe Capart
Translated by Annick Pellegrin
Edited by Lise Tannahill
Original publication: Capart, Philippe. “La Culture de la bande dessinée, une culture physique ? MUSCUDERZO !” TONIQUE avril 2017. Print.[1]
A School for Unlearning
Bande dessinée gives one the impression of reading without thinking. Like a laxative that transforms the literate person into a savage and the illiterate person into a criminal. After the industrial and methodical pulverisation of millions of people—World War II—Western educators, be they Communist, secular or Christian, agreed on the source of juvenile delinquency: THE ILLUSTRATED PRESS FOR CHILDREN.[2] They worked hand in hand, fighting to control, restrain or ban the series of little figures on paper. For many of those literate men and women, only single-panel illustrations, the statue-like figure firmly attached to its textual pedestal allowed one to preserve the model, the exemplary and the ideal. But a sequence of images was the victory of the trivial over the sacred. Thus, in their eyes, bande dessinée became a manual leading the pseudo-reader to mimic a series of figures. When they were noble actions, no problem, but when they were burlesque exaggerations, violent actions, sex, they were veritable manuals for troublemaking, guides to lust and crime.
“En ce temps, la bédé était un divertissement pour minus !” [At the time, comics were a form of entertainment for wimps!] Morris[3]
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Tags: Albert Uderzo, Asterix, bande dessinée, Body-building, Franco-Belgian Comics, Goscinny, Negative Perceptions of Comics, Physical Culture, Translations, WWII
(Geste hypergraphique by Roberto Altmann, 1967)
by Antoine Sausverd
Translated by Annick Pellegrin
Edited by Lise Tannahill
Original publication: Sausverd, Antoine. “« À mort les bandes dessinées ! Vive l’hypergraphie ! » (Geste hypergraphique de Roberto Altmann, 1967)” TONIQUE avril 2017. Print.
For bande dessinée, the year 1967 seemed to favour formal and aesthetic experiments. After Les Aventures de Jodelle (1966), Pravda la survireuse appeared in the pages of the monthly Hara-Kiri from January to December, before being published in album format in 1968. The stylisation of shapes and the uniform solid colours were openly inspired from the pop art aesthetic. Similar to the exquisite corpse,[1] Saga de Xam by Nicolas Devil was an epic work that bore the marks of the counter cultures of its time: from chapter to chapter, the work alternated between various graphic styles, challenging established page layout norms.[2] The texts were written in three alphabets, two of which were invented and undecipherable, unless one consulted a correspondence table at the end of the work. Finally, the same year saw the release of the first situationist comics: posters and tracts reproduced bandes dessinées and replaced the content of the speech bubbles with excerpts of revolutionary political theories advocated by the Situationist International, that would play a significant role in triggering May 1968. It was also in 1967 that Geste hypergraphique, a strange album just as original as the previous ones, was published in Liechtenstein. Completely unnoticed at the time and still largely unknown to date, this “hypergraphique narration en 15 chants” [hypergraphic narration in 15 songs] was the work of a young Cuban aged 25, Roberto Altmann, who was at that point part of the lettrist group.
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Tags: bande dessinée, Charlier, Cuba, Franco-Belgian Comics, Goscinny, Guy Peellaert, Hara-Kiri, Hypergraphics, Hypergraphy, Isidore Isou, Jacques Spacagna, Lettrism, Lettrist Movement, Liechtenstein, Maurice Lemaître, Maurice Rosy, May 68, Metagraphics, Morris, Nicolas Devil, Pascal Thomas, Pierre Bartier, Pop Art, Roberto Altmann, Saul Steinberg, Situationism, Spirou, Translations, Yvan Delporte
by Philippe Capart
Translated by Annick Pellegrin
Edited by Lise Tannahill
Original publication: Capart, Philippe. “Natacha : Groom de l’air.” La Crypte tonique nov/déc 2012: 28-34. Print.[1]
Peyo’s Gang
Peyo, Franquin, Will, Tillieux and Roba, the creative nucleus of the magazine Spirou, were buddies. Stuck at their drawing tables for long days, they occasionally needed to get together and often went out as a gang. However, Gos specifies: “But it was their… they were friends amongst themselves, as for us, we were a generation below, hey!”. There were drinking parties that sometimes made Mondays a difficult day for the team. According to Gos,
François [Walthéry] understood psychology better than I did, he had said to me “For God’s sake! Don’t come and show your drawings on Mondays, he may have partied hard on the Saturday and still be headachy, it’s not the right time to show him what we’ve done! I never show him anything on Mondays, I show him on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.” François, he’s a “clever peasant” as Peyo used to say.
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Tags: Étienne Borgers, bande dessinée, Belgium, Bernard Hislaire, Darasse, Dino Attanasio, Franco-Belgian Comics, Frank Pé, Franquin, Gender, Gos, MAD Magazine, Mittéï, Natacha, Peyo, Renoy, Roba, Spirou, Thierry Martens, Tillieux, Translations, Vicq, Walthéry, Wasterlain, Will, Women, Yvan Delporte
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