Ninth Art. Bande dessinée, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964-1975

In the history of French comics, Barbarella is usually perceived as a turning point towards the “adult” bande dessinée. Released as an album by avant-garde publisher Eric Losfeld in 1964, Barbarella is key to the Bildungsroman narrative structuring the history of the ninth art. Whereas Astérix plays on the ambiguities and multi-layered readings of both children and their parents, Barbarella—a sexualized space opera created by veteran comics artist Jean-Claude Forest—unquestionably targets a male adult audience. A closer reading of Barbarella allows us to nuance this simplistic interpretation of French comics history. The 1964 album was a reprint of a story previously released in serial instalments in the pornographic V magazine. When published as a book, Barbarella was thoroughly transformed by the materiality of the format, allowing for a new narrative rhythm, structured in chapters. The monumentality of the book engendered an auteur-driven approach to comics. Barbarella, then, represents a key moment in comics publishing, and a crucial model for the literary turn in comics. Its reception, both by the then-emerging fan culture and by the Commission de surveillance et de contrôle in charge of comics censorship, throws light on the difficulties facing the emerging “adult” comics scene. Roger Vadim’s problematic adaptation (and the new version of the book released alongside the movie) played a major role in the canonisation of Barbarella as a pop icon.

The 1968 republication of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon has a lot to tell us about French comics fandom and how a comics heritage was assembled. This chapter explores this reappraisal, and the ways in which comics came to be acknowledged as cultural heritage via initiatives to republish works. Comics fandom in the French-speaking world (bédéphilie) was deeply linked to nostalgia, focusing particularly on the United States, whose comic strips of the 1930s were a lost paradise for 1960s adults. Flash Gordon played a central role in raising the cultural status of bande dessinée, a process driven by rivalry between CELEG and SOCERLID, between France and the United States: Alex Raymond’s series triggered virtually unanimous fascination and went through various republications, casting light on the contours of their communities. Based on the Nostalgia Press republication, Socerlid’s Flash Gordan (1968) illustrates how an awareness of comics heritage came to the fore, together with an ambition to legitimise the form by upmarket republications of masterworks of the past.

Published in 1966, Astérix et les Normands is a good vantage point from which to observe the publishing and cultural phenomenon that the series represents. Often celebrated for its remarkable capacity for satirising French society of the Trente glorieuses, I argue here that Astérix is first and foremost a genuine publishing phenomenon in that one of the reasons it resonated so widely in French society was precisely because of its success. Like his predecessors and rivals, Dargaud, the publisher of Pilote, printed four-colour albums taken from this magazine’s pages in print runs of several thousand copies. But the runaway success of the Astérix albums definitively upended the French comics market. With Astérix et les Normands, the series became one of the most important publishing phenomena in twentieth-century France, with sales topping 1 million copies. Astérix provides a way of understanding how the 48-page colour hardback became the standard format for mainstream publishing, triggering lasting change to the sector. Astérix accelerated the shift from magazine to book form, but also to other media, for the success of Astérix was also built on its many adaptations (e.g. radio, records, and cinema) and countless advertising iterations. In other words, Astérix et les Normands enables us to understand the mechanisms by which comics were built up as a mass consumer product, turning children into new consumers of cultural goods.

Although Tintin sits atop the summit of the comics canon, my choice in this chapter is to approach the matter from an oblique angle by studying Tintin et le lac aux requins, published in 1973. It may seem counterintuitive to select one of the few Tintin albums not drawn by Hergé, but instead an album which reworked the content of an animated film released in cinemas. The period 1964–1975 saw Hergé enter creative decline, having no doubt peaked in Tintin au Tibet (1960) and Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963). Ten years after the latter, only one new Tintin adventure had been published, Vol 714 pour Sydney (1968).

Le Lac aux requins typifies the growing permeability between the media used by the cultural industries (magazines, books, films, and games), and the increasingly paradoxical situation in which Hergé and his publisher, Casterman, found themselves: on the one hand, Hergé was being crowned grand master of the ninth art. On the other hand, his infrequent productions obliged his publisher and studio to dream up ever more inventive ways of bringing the character to life. Tintin et le lac aux requins casts a particularly bright light on the tensions in the bande dessinée market, where the aspiration for recognition got caught up in the shift in children’s cultural practices and the need to tackle competition from audio-visual media. This tale of pirates and counterfeits is thus, paradoxically, an ideal vantage point for examining the challenges of authorship in the advent of the ninth art.

This chapter looks at three books published simultaneously by the Futuropolis bookstore in 1974: Calvo, Gir, and Tardi. The store, which had recently opened, had become one of the key forums for the heritage of the ninth art. It had been bought by a couple of young designers, Étienne Robial and Florence Cestac, who moved into publishing. From this point of view, 1974 marked a watershed in the history of fandom: the market was maturing enough for expensive arty books to go on sale in generalist bookstores, as opposed to reprints circulating among crusading enthusiasts as had previously been the case. The first three titles clearly signalled Futuropolis’ cultural ambitions: first the republication of a “forgotten” master, Calvo, followed by the publication of works by two young authors: Tardi and Gir who were mutating from his identity as Jean Giraud to that of Moebius, his alter ego. The outsize formats reveal the publishing house’s singular vision of the future of comics: Futuropolis’ books were radically different from the forms inherited from children’s albums, seeking both to promote the authorial identity of the artists and to impose a unique visual identity.

This chapter considers the work of Claire Bretécher, and especially the self-publication of Les Frustrés in 1975. After working for Spirou, Record, and Tintin, Bretécher came to the fore in the 1970s in the pages of Pilote. Alongside Gotlib, Mandryka, Moebius, Druillet, and a few others, she was part of a generation of artists who, on leaving Pilote, sought to revolutionise comics. One key facet of this post-Pilote revolution was the invention of new publishing structures, capable of giving room to original voices. This quest for editorial and creative independence culminated in 1975 with the publication of Les Frustrés, a mocking chronicle of the transformations to French society. Week after week in the pages of L’Obs, Bretécher depicted the left-wing intelligentsia’s commitments and contradictions. By deciding to self-publish the numerous one-page stories that she had drawn for L’Obs, Bretécher took a bold step towards independence, showing just how much the market had changed over the course of the previous decade. Artists could now shake off their reliance on publishers to become the actors of their own artistic destiny.

Hugo Pratt’s La Ballade de la mer salée marks a turning point in the history of bande dessinée. In publishing these contemplative meanderings stretching over 161 pages as a single book, Casterman brought to a close the cycle opened by Losfeld in 1964—and opened a new one. Like Losfeld a decade earlier, Casterman was simply compiling a strip which had been published as episodes in the Italian and French press. Like Losfeld, Casterman was offering a new apprehension of these disparate episodes, now gathered as a continuous long story in a black-and-white publication which helped to give birth to the graphic novel in France. Except now, it was a top publisher entering the field of mainstream adult comics, providing both commercial muscle and unprecedented respectability. La Ballade came to be the model for the literary aspirations of comics, and the model for the adult bande dessinée as recognised and celebrated in festivals.

The transformation of comics into art was far from complete in 1975. Yet while many facets were still to come, the foundations had been laid. The critical gaze had changed, as had that of the public authorities, who had until then confined comics to the status of a cultural product for children, and in need of monitoring. Comics were no longer assigned to the sphere of childhood and had acquired respectability. During the 1960s, a new consensus emerged in France: comics were of cultural, intellectual, and artistic value for an educated adult readership—on top of the more traditional child readership. The 1980s saw the emergence of a real cultural policy to support comics, both their history and their creation. With the disappearance of nearly all the last comics periodicals, the 1990s were a time of great creative and editorial dynamism in the alternative comic strip sector. But the transformation of comics into art has a bitter counterpart today for creators: assigning comics to the world of art has made it harder to properly address the socio-economic conditions and precarity which undermine the sector, threatening the dynamism of a type of production unique to France.