The International Bande Dessinée Society (IBDS) was founded in 1999, aiming to encourage scholarly discussion of the French-language comic or bande dessinée, in all its forms. Their journal, European Comic Art, (ECA), is published twice-yearly, with previous issues focusing on national identity, caricature, narration, 19th-century comic art, adaptation and other diverse themes in the European comic medium. IBDS conferences have taken place bi-annually since 1999; the most recent conference was held at the Universities of Glasgow and Dundee in June 2013.
However, English-language bande dessinée scholarship is still in relative infancy, and French-language works are seldom translated. The purpose of this new, twice-yearly column is to draw attention to both recent English-language work on bande dessinée and francophone scholarship which may otherwise go unnoticed in anglophone countries. We do not aim to cover all relevant work; the popularity of bande dessinée in the francophone world means many books on the subject are published every year. Instead we will highlight a selection of the most notable or interesting works which appear throughout the year. In this first edition we will look back at books published in 2013.
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Tags: Albert Uderzo, Algeria, Algerian war, Angouleme, Anne Goscinny, Anthea Bell, Asterix, Asterix and the Picts, bande dessinée, Belgium, Bertrand Pissavy-Yvernault, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Caroline Picaud, Christelle Pissavy-Yvernault, colonialism, Danielle Thom, Dominique Maricq, Dupuis, Elisa Renouil, European Comic Art, Fanny Rodwell, France, Franco-Belgian Comics, Franquin, Frans Lambeau, French colonial experience, Gaston Lagaffe, Gilles Ciment, Hergé, Indochina, International Bande Dessinée Society, Jean-Pierre Mercier, Jewish ancestry, Jijé, Joann Sfar, L'Association, La Crypte Tonique, La Véritable Histoire de Spirou, Laurence Grove, Le Petit Vingtième, Lewis Trondheim, Margaret C. Flinn, Mark McKinney, Michael D. Picone, Michael Gott, Michel Daubert, Moulinsart, Musée Hergé, Nicolas Rouvière, pre-war Belgium, Rob-Vel, Serge Gainsbourg, Spirou, The Adventures of Tintin, The Black Island, Thierry Groensteen, Tintin, Vehlmann, WWI, WWII, Yoann
Vertigo, DC’s adult-oriented imprint, has been repeatedly praised for having ‘fully joined the fight for adult readers’ in the early 1990s (Weiner 2010: 10). It has been noted that this “fight” coincided with the imprint’s ‘adoption of the graphic novel format’ as well as ‘a new self-awareness and literary style’ which ‘brought the scope and structure of the Vertigo comics closer to the notion of literary text’ (Round 2010: 22). However, little attention has been devoted to the very cultural identity of the imprint, even if Vertigo has since its early days engaged in an intro- and retrospective discourse on the American comics form, its history, and the power relations inherent to its industry. This short essay intends to start filling that gap by investigating Vertigo’s archival impulse. It argues that in deploying various rewriting strategies which engage with specific past (comics) traditions, the label has activated a unique memorious discourse that provides a self-reflexive and critical commentary on the structuring forces of the American comics field, its politics of domination and exclusion, and hence its canons.
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Tags: Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, DC, memory, Thierry Groensteen, USA, Vertigo
The most recent issue of Cinema Journal (50:3) features a special section edited by Bart Beaty and devoted to “Comics Studies: Fifty Years after Film Studies.” Therein Beaty notes “the current state of the scholarly study of comics is strikingly akin to that of film in the 1960s” (106). That article punctuated ruminations that the two of us have had since we began collaborating with one another, first in authoring a textbook for the comics studies classroom and now in producing an anthology presenting a host of critical methods utilized in the field.
As the Cinema Journal contributors point out, we in American Comics Studies seem to be making up for lost time. Of course, comics studies have marched on apace elsewhere, particularly in Europe. High profile events like the Angoulême International Comics Festival and a healthy slate of regular publications contribute to a profile of legitimacy that those of us practicing American comics scholarship long for. Meanwhile, our colleagues in Film Studies have enjoyed a largely recombinant international relationship, with American and European scholars regularly and vigorously exchanging ideas with one another, offering a model of dialogue for America’s comics studies to emulate. And yet a major stumbling block to our own development is, alas, a lack of multilingual scholars on this side of the pond, which leaves us largely ignorant of the fields progress abroad and “reinventing” concepts that have already been expressed in French or German. The situation is improving. Recent translations by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen have already enlivened the scholarly dialogue at American comics conferences with the ideas of Thierry Groensteen and Jean-Paul Gabilliet.
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Tags: comics studies, Thierry Groensteen, USA
Comics Forum 