1. “Ninth Art”, and the Gentrification of Mass Culture

In France, comics are commonly referred to as the “ninth art”. What does this expression mean? Where does their specific status come from? This introductory chapter looks at the singular status of comics in the French cultural landscape, and at some of the signs of their artistic reappraisal. In the 1960s, fans started reappraising comics as an art form, linking the comic strip to the fine arts system, just as the latter was fracturing. Then, from the 1970s onwards, cultural policies offering unique support mechanisms validated this status as the “ninth art”. The hypothesis guiding this chapter is that comics’ elevation to the status of an art owes a great deal to another specificity of the French comics market, namely the large-scale switch to books at a very early stage. Albums ushered in another way of relating to comics, giving rise to new ways of creating, distributing, and reading bandes dessinées. In focusing on seven different albums and their formal print qualities, this book sets out to reconstruct transformations to comics in the years 1964–1975, as they shifted from mass entertainment to the art world.