How Urbanization in US shape Comic Culture

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Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?

Thierry GroensTeen

Although comics have been in existence for over a century and a half, they suffer from a considerable lack of legitimacy.

To those who know and love it, the art that has given us Rodolphe Töpffer and Wilhelm Busch, Hergé and Tardi, Winsor McCay and George Herriman, Barks and Gottfredson, Franquin and Moebius, Segar and Spiegelman, Gotlib and Bretécher, Crumb and Mattotti, Hugo Pratt and Alberto Breccia, not to mention The Spirit, Peanuts or Asterix . . . in short, comic art, has nothing left to prove. If its validity as an art form appears self-evident, it is curious that the legitimizing authorities (universities, museums, the media) still regularly charge it with being infantile, vulgar, or insignificant. This as if the whole of the genre were to be lowered to the level of its most mediocre products—and its most remarkable incarnations ignored. Comic art suffers from an extraordinarily narrow image, given the richness and diversity of its manifestations. Furthermore, its globally bad reputation jeopardizes the acknowledgment of its most talented creators. Comic art’s continuing inability to reap the symbolic benefits of its most accomplished achievements is particularly striking and merits elucidation. This is the subject I would like to reflect upon today. Some of the points I will make concern the specific history and situation of French comics and cannot be applied to other national situations without some adaptation.

I will start by evoking some of the paradoxes of the history of the 9th art. Modern (printed) comics appeared in the 1830s—in the form of Rodolphe Töpffer’s

pioneering work1—which makes them more or less contemporary with the invention of photography. And yet, it was not until the 1960s that the French language found a permanent name for this mode of expression—that was, by then, over a hundred years old. During this long period, comics were known, not as bandes dessinées (literally strips that have been drawn) but, successively or indiscriminately, as histoires en estampes, which is Töpffer’s own term (stories told in prints), histoires en images (picture stories), récits illustrés (illustrated tales), films dessinés (films made of drawings) and of course, comics.

Translated by Shirley Smolderen. Reprinted by permission from Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds.,

Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 29–41.

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Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai r us es p er mi tt ed u nd er U .S . or a pp li ca bl e co py ri gh t la w.

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Thierry GroensTeen

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Since coming into existence, comics have twice changed their readership and their form. Readership first. During the nineteenth century comics were intended for adults, only to be relegated, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the pages of the children’s press. So it is in the illustrated youth magazines that France first discovered the great American series (Brick Bradford, Flash Gordon, Mandrake, Popeye, and so many others), whereas on the other side of the Atlantic, they were originally published in the daily newspapers. The re-conquest of the adult readership—begun in the 1960s by France Soir, Pilote, Hara-Kiri, Charlie hebdo, Chouchou, and Charlie mensuel, as well as by the innovating publisher Eric Losfeld—is finally accomplished in 1972 when Gotlib, Bretécher and Mandryka launch L’Echo des Savanes, the first “adults only” comics magazine, so putting an end to an historical parenthesis of almost three quarters of a century.

Concerning the form given to comics, after having originally appeared in book form (Töpffer’s, Cham’s, Doré’s and other founders’ albums), comics in the 1870s had become a press phenomenon. For more or less a century, only the most popular works were given the honor of being released as albums after pre-publication in the press. Tens of thousands of other pages (often mediocre, but sometimes by undeniably talented artists) were to fall into oblivion after having been “consumed” in the press. But in the 1970s, the production of albums suddenly increases exponentially and in the next decade stabilizes at a very high level: around six hundred new albums are printed in French every year. At the same time, the illustrated press goes into decline, many “historic” magazines cease to exist (Tintin, Pif, Pilote, Charlie, Metal Hurlant . . .). In this way, a second loop is formed: after having won back its adult readership, comic art operates a return to its original form, the book.

The history of comics that I have just roughly sketched needs to be written in more detail and is still widely misunderstood, even, in my opinion, by self-proclaimed “specialists.” By celebrating the so-called Centenary of Comics in 1996, some of these have simply chosen to ignore everything that was published between 1833—when Töpffer printed Monsieur Jabot—and the release of the Yellow Kid. Over half a century of French, English, German, Dutch, Spanish, and even American comics denied existence because they weren’t mass-produced!

The fact that the birth of comics is still a subject of discussion and disagreement shows just how retarded the study of the 9th art is. As a cultural phenomenon and art form, comics (until the 1960s) were surrounded by a quite deafening silence. They simply were not regarded as such; there was a complete absence of critical, archivistic, and academic attention. After the Essai de Physiognomonie in 1845, in which Töpffer proposes the foundations for a theory of comics, a hundred and ten years passed before another book in French appeared on the subject—Le Petit Monde de Pif le chien by Barthélémy Amengual, in 1955. In this long interval books on cinema and photography were published by the dozen!

However, when comics turned to a readership of teenagers and children, they began to draw attention from one particular sector of society, the educators. For decades, they held the monopoly of discourse on the subject—a genre suspected of having a great influence on the morality of young people. Because they were the first to comment on comics, their ideas, of course, pervaded future thought on the matter. As late as 1964, the most widely read French dictionary, the Petit Larousse illustré, gave the following

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phrase as an example of the use of the verb salir (to dirty, to soil): ces illustrés salissent l’imagination de nos enfants . . . (“these comics soil the imagination of our children”).

You might say all this was a sort of double punishment for comics: deprived of their adult audience, comics were confined to the ghetto of youth magazines and reserved for children, but comics’ massive introduction into these magazines provoked the hostility of educators, who untiringly denounced them as “bad for children.” Comics are thus blacklisted for corrupting their already restricted audience.

In her study of the years 1919 to 1931, the art historian Annie Renonciat declares that “as soon as they appeared, these publications alarmed educationalists”2 and prints various quotes to illustrate this prompt mobilization. As early as 1907, Marcel Braunschwig, author of an essay on esthetic education, wrote: “At the present time, we are engulfed by popular magazines for the use of children, against which it is high time to undertake a vigorous campaign in the name of the common sense and good taste they offend with impunity.”3

Paul Winskler, who published the Journal de Mickey, Robinson, and Hop-là, was to become the main target of these attacks in the second half of the 1930s, but before that the Offenstadt brothers’ publications were in the line of fire: L’Epatant (where the adventures of the famous trio “les Pieds Nickelés” were printed), Fillette, L’Intrépide, Cri-Cri, and Lili. The general “vulgarity” and “insanity” of these popular and cheap publications was constantly denounced and the characters that appeared in them presented as bad examples. For Alphonse de Parvillez (working for l’Union Morale, the Revue des Lectures, and the Revue des Jeunes), L’Espiègle Lili (Lili the Imp) is “the perfect handbook for rotten kids,” and Abbé Bethléem, a sort of conscience for the Revue des lectures ( Journal of Reading), denounces the use of “excessive caricature, filthy slang, the language of prisons and sleazy bars . . .”4 in L’Epatant.

The vague fears inspired by comics can be explained in part, by the fact that they belong to a new culture that is on the rise. The sociologist Irene Pennacchioni explains: “In France, a cultural ‘resistance’ is growing up against the barbarous invasion of nickelodeons, cinema, tabloids (Paris Soir), radio (Radio-Cite), American funny characters. This new . . . mass culture reaches France in the thirties.”5

Opinions on upbringing and education and society’s understanding of children were not the same between the two wars as they are today. There was no talk of the rights of children but only of their protection. There was an absence of teenage culture; even the age group was hardly recognized in its specificity. Lastly, a concept inherited from the nineteenth century meant that children were usually assimilated to the least educated strata of society—the lower classes, “people of primitive intelligence, whose knowledge is sparse if not inexistant, in whom imagination is stronger than reason.”6 For the educators of the first half of the twentieth century, that which is popular is necessarily vulgar. Comics are seen as intrinsically bad because they tend to take the place of “real books,” an attitude which crystalizes a double confrontation: between the written word and the world of images, on the one hand; between educational literature and pure entertainment on the other.

Children’s books and magazines had always been intended to educate and moralize; to support and complete the work of parents and teachers. But the illustrated press, comic albums, and popular serialized novels turn their backs on this mission; their

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Thierry GroensTeen

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sole aim is to amuse and entertain. This was, not surprisingly, disturbing for specialists in education. Their conviction was that children have feeble minds and naturally bad instincts that need rectifying. These specialists aimed their attacks at the image. The more attractive it was, the more harmful it would be to children.

The following quote is representative of many others and is taken from a special issue of the Communist Party magazine Enfance (childhood) printed in 1954: “All the effects (of comics) are extremely excessive, in verbal expression as in graphic representation. These flashy colors, wry faces, twisted in hate or terror, this sensuality, these longing embraces, everything speaks to the imagination in the most brutal manner, all is suggestive and evocative . . .”7

An anthology of what was written about comics between the beginning of the century and the sixties would be extremely boring. From the thirties on, the arguments are always the same, and are often singularly lacking in perspicacity. It is rather surprising, for example, that the aesthetics of comic art should be systematically condemned as a whole, as if they were a single entity! From the point of view of morality, magazines were frequently labeled either “good” or “bad,” whereas no distinctions were made on the artistic level between the different authors. Among the American comics that were most popular in France were works such as Flash Gordon, Terry and the Pirates, Popeye, Bringing up Father, Tarzan, and Dick Tracy, whose artists—who are all very different from one another—are now placed among the most respected masters of the 9th art. Blinded, no doubt by the urgency of their mission, the censors of the period did not differentiate between these masters and the more obscure drudges who worked for the same sort of magazines. Comics as a whole were indiscriminately written off as aggressively ugly.

From the thirties on, the speech balloon, which gradually replaced text located under the image, was a central target for educators and for those taking sides with the written word. The procedure was thought to be of American origin, which would have sufficed, if not to disqualify it, at least to make it an object of suspicion. Apparently, no one remembered that the balloon had been used in medieval times, and, more recently, in eighteenth-century European caricatures. It is true that, at that time, balloons were particularly popular in England, and already held in low esteem by the French.

As Annie Renonciat points out, “for the French, the balloon presents . . . various disadvantages: first, they place the text inside the image, thus imprisoning the verbal content within the visual system; then—most importantly—they limit the text to simple dialogues and direct enunciation, drastically reducing the amount of description and ‘literary’ expression.” The same author goes on to say: “It also appears that publishers— and even some authors—thought a child could not properly understand a story in pictures without the help of words. This is confirmed by the presence of numerous redundancies in the captions to their pictures. . . .”8

A work whose verbal content is confined to “simple” dialogues is nothing scandalous in itself: it is the case of movies and the theatre. But films and live shows present them aurally, whereas in comics they must be read. Because they are printed, comics seem to be more closely related to literature; furthermore, in addressing children, they are expected to make a contribution to their education by helping them learn to read, encouraging them to love “beautiful texts” and “great authors.” The imprisonment of verbal expression in

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the visual system—to use Annie Renonciat’s words—constitutes a symbolic revolution, a complete reversal of the commonly accepted hierarchy between semiotic systems. The champions of a culture which postulates the supremacy of the written word over all other forms of expression could only take this inversion as an attack.

The two last complaints most frequently made against comics by educators concern their violence and escapism. This quote is from the communist critic Georges Sadoul: “Everywhere, at every page, we found exaltation of brute force, assassination, violence, war, spying, banditism, and, at the same time, escape into the most stupid irreality.”9

I will not talk in length about violence, which is not specific to comics. The violence inherent in adventure stories has always been condemned in the name of the protection of children—wherever it is found. The arguments used against comics in the twenties, thirties, and forties hardly differ from those brandished against television, video games and manga in more recent times. What has been, and still is, targeted by these critics is the corrupting power of the image, always capable of “striking the imagination.” An image, they believe, invites the spectator to project onto the characters represented and identify with them.

More interesting—to me—is the fact that the “irreality” of comics was for a long time considered intrinsically stupid. Animals that speak, imaginary machines, time travel, supermen, and other fantasies have been blamed for cutting a child off from reality and making him or her lose all notion of it. Once again it is the power of the image that is feared, especially its capacity to abuse the credulity of young readers. La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, and Jules Verne had not been victims of such censorship of the imagination. But Tarzan, king of the jungle, living half-naked among the animals was often singled out as one of the most harmful incarnations of this irrealism.

Previously blamed for all the sins of the world, comics would finally gain acceptance by educators. A book by Antoine Roux, for example, was published by Editions de l’Ecole in 1970 under the “slogan”: “Comics can be educational.” In time, some child specialists came to rely on comics as the last stand against illiteracy and a teacher’s best aid in the teaching of reading (now threatened mainly by television).

From then on, the debate could focus on aesthetic and cultural questions. Comics were no longer accused of harmfulness, but the stigma of artistic mediocrity would stick—and has been reactivated in the context of the debate on the “confusion of artistic values” supposedly characteristic of the end of this century. To illustrate this, it will suffice to mention the title of a French television program presented in 1984 by Michel Polac in the series Droit de réponse (Right to reply): “Asterix versus the Mona Lisa.”

Rather than entering into the details of this conventional debate over “high” and “low” art, I would like to propose a more general explanation of the fact that comics appear to be condemned to artistic insignificance. It seems to me that comic art suffers from a four-fold symbolic handicap. 1) It is a hybrid, the result of crossbreeding between text and image; 2) Its storytelling ambitions seem to remain on the level of a sub- literature; 3) It has connections to a common and inferior branch of visual art, that of caricature; 4) Even though they are now frequently intended for adults, comics propose nothing other than a return to childhood.

No doubt prejudice against comics cannot be reduced to these four charges. But it seems to me that these four form a basis for all the others. Even though they may not

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always be spelt out as such, they inform and guide the opinions of the cultural referees who are invested with the power to judge artistic merit.

However, when examined one by one, the 9th art’s four original sins quickly reveal the academic preconceptions they are based on. Let us look at each one in turn.

Almost eight hundred years after the golden age of illuminated manuscripts, the juxtaposition of text and image on a printed page continues to be seen by some as an unnatural alliance. I will not go back to the subject of the balloon and the fact that the image appears to “swallow” the text. The origins of the scandal go deeper, to the mix of text and image itself.

Here is the opinion of one of our “great French writers,” Monsieur Pascal Quignard: “Literature and the image are incompatible. . . . The two forms of expression cannot be juxtaposed. They are never apprehended together. . . . When one is readable, the other is not seen. When one is visible the other is not read. Whatever the proximity imposed upon them, the two media remain parallel, and it must be said, that these two worlds are, for eternity, impenetrable to one another. . . . The reader and the spectator will never be the same man at the same moment, leaning forward in the same light to discover the same page.”10

This objection, which comics readers’ experience apparently refutes, must be taken into consideration, as it is an integral part of occidental culture. “To show and to name; to represent and to describe; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look at and to read”: such, according to Michel Foucault, are “the oldest oppositions in our alphabetical civilization.”11 Forgetting that for the ancient Greeks a single word, graphein, meant “to write” and “to paint,” our alphabetical culture quickly became logocentric, subordinating visual forms of expression to language. Philosophers continually repeat that the image tricks and troubles us, acting on our senses and exciting our emotions, and that reason is on the side of the word.

Yet, our culture is the only one that harbors this opposition and hierarchy. They must therefore be relativized. They do not exist, for example, in China and Japan, where the stroke of the brush unites writing and drawing: calligraphic signs and representative lines are executed by the same hand with the same instrument. East Asian painters often insert whole poems in their images.

Moreover, it is virtually certain that western civilization itself is in the process of changing its conception of the relation between text and image. In the day of multi- media, the age-old opposition is somewhat obsolete. Modern humans, to whom the computer transmits text, sound, still and animated images, are subjected to an unprece- dented range of sensory stimulations, and learn—from a very early age—to coordinate them.

But this theoretical objection is often accompanied by an aesthetic condemnation. If the marriage of text and image is not impossible, it would at least inevitably distort and weaken both of them. To illustrate this attitude, I will quote the former curator of the Prints department of the National Library of France. According to Michel Melot, the comics artist “produces illustrated literature more than narrative images. Current output is distressing poor, and so monotonous, that I doubt a solution exists. There is nothing in it for either literature or images, and no new, original genre emerges.”12 The same author points out, further on, that the sin of comic art is that of schematization:

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“For the sake of readability, comics artists are drawn into an involuntary regression which explains the mediocrity of most of their work.”

It is difficult to refute the aesthetic argument without showing that the criteria for appreciation of drawing in comics are not quite the same as those used for art drawings. They are, unlike other drawings, narrative and not illustrative, executed on a very small surface and destined to be reproduced. Are Hergé, Crumb, and Moebius mediocre artists? Most certainly not, but artists whose excellence in their domain cannot be compared to that of Da Vinci, Rembrandt, or Picasso in theirs.

The question is: why should two of the most respected forms of human expression, literature (the model for all narrative arts) and drawing (the foundation of all fine arts), be dethroned and debased as soon as they are side by side in a mixed media. . . ? Some will answer that comics have taken from literature and drawing their least noble parts: from the former stereotyped plots and over-referenced genres, and from the latter caricature and schematization. Founded or not, these complaints seem to be secondary to the fundamental aesthetic question: is it not the very fact of using text and image together that reputedly taints and discredits both of them?

In effect, comic art, just like the cinema, which is also a hybrid genre, goes against the “ideology of purity” that has dominated the West’s approach to aesthetics since Lessing. In art, our modernity has never ceased preaching the deepening, by each discipline, of its own specificity. Music, literature, painting have turned inwards to their own domains. This means that they have eliminated or marginalized melody, subject, representation, narration, and signification, in favor of working on form and basic materials (sound, color . . . etc.) in their search for pure music, pure poetry, pure painting. It is conceivable that this ideology of purification has led contemporary art to a dead end. That however, is another story. I only wish to show the extent to which comics (where text and drawings contribute to the same narrative project) dispute the validity of the dominant trend of thought and therefore could not do otherwise than to provoke the disdain and contempt of the defenders of official culture. Moreover, the ideology of purity has given rise to an ever-increasing gulf between erudite culture and popular culture, the latter being naturally dedicated to fiction and entertainment.

In fact, the second sin attributed to comics is, precisely, their lack of narrative ambition. Comics are supposed to be easy literature because they are based on repetitions, and therefore more readable. They are also constantly being assimilated with what is known as paraliterature, a badly defined set of popular genres that includes adventure stories, historical novels, fantasy and science-fiction, detective novels, erotica, and so on.

The first important French seminar on paraliterature took place in Cerisy, in September 1967. The attendees (among whom were Francis Lacassin and Evelyne Sullerot) treated comics as a “category” of paraliterature on the same footing as spy novels or science fiction.13 Thirty years later, this conception is still active. There exists in Belgium, for instance, a “Centre for Paraliterature, Comics and Cinema” (in Chaudfontaine). The radio program Mauvais genres on France Culture looks at detective novels, fantasy, and . . . comics. The Monde des Livres (literary supplement of the daily newspaper Le Monde) has a column which treats comics, science fiction, and detective novels in turn.

This placing of comics on the same plane as the various genres of paraliterature needs examining. It is evident that comics cannot be considered a genre in that sense,

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as they englobe and traverse many different genres: there are science-fiction comics, sentimental, erotic or autobiographical comics, detective stories, and westerns in the form of comics. . . . Comic art is an autonomous and original medium. The only things it has in common with literature are: that it is printed and sold in bookshops, and that it contains linguistic statements. But why should it be systematically lowered to the level of para- or sub-literature?

That it is, is mainly due to the fact that the comics market obeys the rules of commerce. The saleability of the product seems to be more important than the intrinsic worth of the art. Comics, like paraliterature, operate on a system of series, that orchestrates the constant revival of the same characters, who accumulate adventures ad libitum. The interchangeability of artists, who, one after the other, perpetuate the career of the most popular heroes reinforces the sentiment that comic art is an industrial form of literature.

How can we defend comic art against this accusation which disqualifies it as an art? Remind the accusers that serialization has its nobility? Evoke Little Nemo or Tintin— fine examples of how tremendous a series can be when handled by a creative genius? Encourage a wider diffusion of works by true authors, of comics free of commercial constraints, and of avant-garde comic art? My opinion is, that here, once again, defense of comics depends on recognition of the fact that they cannot be judged by the same criteria as are generally applied to literature.

In his diary, the writer Renaud Camus made this comment: “Certain films would make poor books, even though they are good, or even excellent films. This superiority is due to the actors—that by definition, we wouldn’t have in the books.”14 In the same vein, many comics would make poor novels, though they are acceptable comics, and in this case, the difference is due to the drawings. The reader of comics not only enjoys a story-related pleasure but also an art-related pleasure, an aesthetic emotion founded on the appreciation of the exactness and expressivity of a composition, pose, or line. There also exists, in my opinion, a medium-related pleasure. It cannot be reduced to the sum of the other two, but is related to the rhythmic organization in space and time of a multiplicity of small images. Comic art is the art of details, and as such encourages a fetishistic relationship.15

Comics’ third symbolic handicap is their relationship with humor, caricature, and satire. Since Ancient Greece, humor has been regarded as the opposite of harmony and of the sublime. It is not compatible with beauty and constitutes an inferior genre, barely legitimate. Humor is negative, it depreciates, renders ugly; satire belittles instead of glorifying. The French Romanticists, mainly in the shape of Jules Champfieury, attempted to rehabilitate caricature, but academic prejudice was never totally dispelled. Without going so far as to recall that for the Nazis, “degenerate art” was the art that put caricature in the place of ideals, it will suffice to note the rarity of studies on humor and comical effects—at least in France—in order to verify that the seriousness of critics and teachers excludes any playful or funny contribution to artistic creation.

Lastly, the fourth symbolic handicap is the link between comics and childhood. Far from trying to combat or contradict this objection, I am inclined to lay claim to it. I recalled earlier that between the start of the twentieth century and the sixties, comics had been captured by the children’s press. Most modern commentators were not aware of the earlier history of picture stories (in the nineteenth century) and genuinely thought they

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were originally intended for children. They took them for a variety of illustrated children’s books which was belatedly trying to gain its autonomy by taking advantage of a promising trend: pop-culture—or of what we call, in France, contre-culture (counter culture).

But these considerations on the birth and growth of the medium are hardly relevant today. Comics still have a privileged relationship with childhood because it is in child- hood that each of us discovered them and learnt to love them. In a certain sense, we can agree with the sociologist Irene Pennacchioni when she says that “pictures are for the illiterate, as they correspond to ‘naive’ pleasures from before learning to read, before culture.”16 Many adults, in particular those who occupy a dominant position in the world of culture, take themselves very seriously . . . many adults have forgotten or rejected childhood pleasures in favor of more sophisticated, supposedly more noble, pleasures. Now, comics have a way of giving rise to some strongly nostalgic emotions. Psychoanalysts have shown that our attitude to drawings has a certain similarity to our relationship with our mother. Roland Barthes spoke somewhere of the “childhood passion for huts and tents: shut yourself in and settle down.”17 It is a reminiscence of this “existential dream” that a reader experiences when he plunges into the world of small pictures. One cannot avoid seeing that so many of our paper heroes prolong the little boy’s fantasies of freedom and omnipotence, and offer us the chance to act them out . . . vicariously.

Yes, why not admit it? All of us here in Copenhagen, delivering our clever papers, are probably doing nothing more than holding out our hands to the kids we used to be.

N ot e s

1. For further details, see Thierry Groensteen and Benoit Peters, Töpffer: l’invention de la bande dessinee (Paris: Hermann, 1994). 2. Annie Renonciat, Les livres d’enfance et de jeunesse en France dans les années vingt, thesis [History and Semiology of Text and Image] (University of Paris 7–Denis Diderot, 1997. 3. Marcel Braunschwig, L’art et l’enfant (Toulouse: Edouard Privat; Paris: Henri Dither, 1907): 327. 4. Quoted in Annie Renonciat, op. cit., supplement 16. 5. Irene Pennacchioni, La nostalgic en images (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1982): 121. 6. André Balsen, Les illustris pour enfants (Tourcoing: J. Duvivier, 1920). Quoted in Annie Renonciat, op. cit., supplement 16. 7. Enfance, 5: Les journaux pour enfants (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954): 403. 8. Les livres d’enfance et dejeunesse en France dans les années vingt, op. cit., 484. 9. George Sadoul, Ce que lisent vos enfants. La presse enfantine, son evolution, son influence (Paris: Bureau d’Edition, 1938. 10. Pascal Quignard, VIle Traiti: sur los rapports quo le texte et l’image n’entretiennentpas (Maeght, 1990). Reprinted in Petits traités I, “Folio” 2976: cf. 134–35. 11. Michel Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Fata Morgana, 1973): 22. 12. Michel Melot, L’ceil qui nt. Le pouvoir comique des images (Fribourg: Office du Livre, 1975): 146. 13. Cf. Entretiens sur la paralittérature (Paris: Plon, 1970): 106 and 253. 14. Renaud Camus, Laguerre de Transylvanie (Paris: POL, 1996): 45–46. 15. For further details, see Thierry Groensteen, “Plaisir de la bande dessinée,” 9e Art 2 (Angoulême: CNBD, 1997): 14–21. 16. Irene Pennacchioni, La nostalgic en images. op. cit., 122. 17. Ronald Barthes, “Nautilus et bateau ivre,” Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957).

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EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 10/6/2019 8:47 PM via MICHIGAN STATE UNIV AN: 458766 ; Heer, Jeet, Worcester, Kent.; A Comics Studies Reader Account: s8364774.main.bsi