European Comic Art

European Comic Art has moved from Liverpool to Oxford, and we are happy to be working with Mark Stanton and his colleagues at Berghahn Books, whose headquarters are within sight of a dreaming spire or two but just as close to East Oxford, where the longest-standing continuous annual comics festival in Britain, ‘Caption’, has been held every summer since 1992.

The welcome attention paid to Quebec in this issue of European Comic Art immediately points to a cluster of intellectual questions concerning identity, territory and academic discipline(s). What need was there for grouping a corpus, and analysis of it, according to this category, and what meanings are implied in that selection? And what problems are evoked by the adjective ‘European’? These are familiar questions to all those Quebec specialists working in French (‘and Francophone’) Studies, as well as, in my case, Film Studies. On the one hand, Quebec culture in all its forms of expression possesses a relevance and richness, due to historical and spatial factors I shall outline below, but is largely off the radar of the disciplines and sub-disciplines it could enrich. This is no more true than in French Studies, where it is difficult, but also necessary, topical (witness the continuing debate, five years after the manifesto, around littérature-monde) and urgent, to challenge the hierarchy implied in the centre and periphery generated by ‘(and) Francophone’. The challenge is to place Quebec in an endlessly comparative relationship with other French-speaking cultures, with other Atlantic spaces, in order to break down the barriers implied in an often ghettoised ‘specialisation’. Here bande dessinée scholarship has an interesting advantage, in that, despite the phenomenal cultural weight of the art form within metropolitan French life, a decidedly non-metropolitan space, namely Belgium, offers a central position. The opportunity is there to emphasise lateral connections that bypass as well as include metropolitan France, hence the work here on Tintin in Quebec. To an extent, bande-dessinée-monde, to coin a phrase, is already a reality.

What follows is an attempt to contextualise the bandes dessinées produced in Quebec from their early beginnings in the late nineteenth century to their renewal and expansion during the years immediately following the Quiet Revolution. The intention, above all, is to give a sense of a changing intellectual, artistic and cultural landscape, and to situate the creators of comic strips within it. In fact, as will become evident, the history of Quebec's comic strips is closely linked to the history of the province and in many ways reflects it. (As we will see, the all-pervasive influence of the Catholic Church and the rise of Quebec nationalism can be traced in the development of the bande dessinée.) Necessarily, given the scope of the topic and the limited space available, the attempted coverage will be sketchy and incomplete. Moreover, it is only right to point out that its author is very much a novice in the field of the comic strip. Nevertheless, it is hoped that - to use an appropriate metaphor - a broader picture and different perspectives will emerge for those unfamiliar with the history of Quebec, and that new avenues of research will be prompted.

A brief historical overview considers a number of factors that were not propitious for the development of a home-grown comics culture in Quebec (notwithstanding the popularity of a few noteworthy artists) including the impossibility of competing with cheaper American production, and the ambient conservatism that dominated much of the twentieth century. Beaulieu goes on to describe the shock and excitement of his discovery in the mid-1990s of an alternative comics scene (more active in Montreal than in Quebec City), and his own involvement in it from the beginning of the twenty-first century as an artist, publisher and teacher. He offers a firsthand account of the realities of negotiating the pressures of alternative comics publishing within the two structures that he set up: Mécanique Générale and the smaller and (still) more radical Colosse. There are pleasures: the ethos of collective work, the opportunity to support up-and-coming young authors and to ensure the survival of work by an illustrious predecessor, invitations to take part in productive exchanges on a local, national and international level, and the sheer obsessive pursuit of perfectionism. But there are also frustrations: the never-ending grind of getting manuscripts ready for the printer, wearying battles with publishers' reps, the constant need to manage the expectations of authors and the skewing of the market by competitors prepared to outsource printing to Asia. The author explains his decision finally to withdraw from his publishing commitments and to focus on his own work. His conclusion, about the future of comic production in Quebec, is, however, optimistic and devoid of cynicism.

In comparison to the U.S. market, the trend for autobiographical sequential art arrived late within the history of the francophone bande dessinée. Its rising popularity throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium coincided, and to an extent connected, with another belated development in the French-language industry however: that of the growing presence of the female artist. This article considers the strong presence of life narratives in bandes dessinées created by women, before presenting a case-study examining the manipulation of the medium to an autobiographical end in Québécoise artist Julie Doucet's 1998 Changements d'adresses ['Changes of Addresses']. It considers how, in this coming-of-age narrative set first in Montreal and then New York, Doucet utilises the formal specificity of the bande dessinée to emphasise both the fragmentation and then reintegration of her hybrid enunciating instances. It further examines Doucet's usage of the life-narrative bande dessinée to oppose her representation from that of the disruptive male figures in her life, whose sexual presence in her personal evolution is often connected to images of dysfunction and death, finally suggesting via this examination of Julie Doucet and Changements d'adresses the particular suitability of female-created life narratives to feminist reappropriations of the francophone bande dessinée.

This reading of Hergé's Tintin au Tibet uses the notions of 'the daydream' and 'the haunting idea' in order to approach the text not at the level of its plot, but at that of the imaginary that underlies it, whose presence is betrayed through two series of obsessive reiterations and wordplays around the name of Tchang, the lost object of Tintin's quest. A digression via Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass establishes it as an important intertext, prefiguring Hergé's album in a number of ways: the metaphorical function of the chess game and its close association with the state of dreaming or daydreaming, and the way in which the use of language, particularly the proper name, becomes analogous to dreamwork as words exceed their literal meaning and slide along the signifying chain, destabilising meaning and identity. The article then focuses on Tintin au Tibet, demonstrating the key importance of the famous large panel on the second page, in which the word 'Tchang', cried out by Tintin on waking, is substituted by Hergé for any images of the dream itself. The reverberation of the word, and of words resembling it, is tracked through the remainder of the text, along with a more generalised problematic around proper names and a compulsive tendency to repetition, symptoms of an unconscious grappling with the elusiveness and fluctuating nature of self and other, ontological questions that linger after narrative resolution has been achieved.

FILM REVIEWS

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (20ıı), directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Peter Jackson, screenplay by Stephen Moffat, Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright. Based on Hergé’s Aventures de Tintin

BOOK REVIEWS

Harry Morgan and Manuel Hirtz, Les Apocalypses de Jack Kirby

Jacques Samson and Benoît Peeters, Chris Ware: La Bande dessinée réinventée

Renaud Chavanne, Composition de la bande dessinée

Notes on contributors