Franco-Belgian comics

Franco-Belgian comics, known in French as bande dessinée (plural bandes dessinées, abbreviated BD), are the comics tradition of France and French-speaking Belgium — a tradition built around the hardcover comic album rather than the newspaper strip or the American-style pamphlet comic book, and sometimes called le neuvième art, "the ninth art," in recognition of the cultural standing it has acquired in France. It is one of the three largest comics markets in the world, alongside American comics and Japanese manga. For the medium's broader international development, see History of comics.

Origins

French- and Belgian-language comics grew out of the same 19th-century European tradition of satirical and humor illustration as British and German cartooning, but the format that would come to define the tradition — bound, full-color hardcover albums rather than disposable newsprint — took shape in the first half of the 20th century. Le Journal de Mickey (1934), licensing Disney material through King Features Syndicate, was an early and commercially significant French example of a dedicated children's comics periodical, helping establish a market for regularly published, book-like comics aimed specifically at young readers.

The Belgian weekly Spirou (launched 1938 by the publisher Dupuis) mixed homegrown comics with reprinted American strips, and over the following decades became one of the two magazines — alongside Tintin magazine, below — most responsible for developing Franco-Belgian talent and defining the tradition's house style.

Hergé, Tintin, and ligne claire

Georges Remi, working under the pen name "Hergé," began The Adventures of Tintin in the Belgian newspaper youth supplement Le Petit Vingtième in 1929. Tintin's subsequent republication in hardcover albums is widely treated as the starting point of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition in its modern, recognizable form, and Hergé's visual approach — flat, even linework, minimal use of shadow or cross-hatching, clearly delineated shapes and figures — became known as ligne claire ("clear line"), a style that shaped the visual grammar of Franco-Belgian comics for decades afterward.

Hergé's own magazine, Tintin (founded 1946 and published by Les Éditions du Lombard), quickly rivaled Spirou in popularity and influence, and the two weeklies' rivalry through the 1940s–1960s is generally credited with driving much of the tradition's creative output during its postwar growth.

Postwar expansion

World War II had a paradoxical effect on the tradition: the wartime ban on importing American comics into occupied France and Belgium removed homegrown cartoonists' main commercial competition, and several artists — including Edgar P. Jacobs, who continued other creators' unfinished strips during the war — used the opening to develop distinctively European material and styles that outlasted the occupation itself.

The postwar decades produced many of the characters now most associated with the tradition internationally. André Franquin took over Spirou et Fantasio and later created the humor strip Gaston (1957); Belgian artist Morris, working with French writer René Goscinny, created the western-parody series Lucky Luke (1946); and Peyo introduced The Smurfs (1957) as supporting characters in another strip before they grew into a franchise of their own. The French weekly Pilote (launched 1959) introduced Goscinny and artist Albert Uderzo's Asterix (1961), which became one of the best-selling comics series in the world and, alongside Tintin, remains one of the two Franco-Belgian properties most widely translated outside France and Belgium.

Recognition as "the Ninth Art"

The description of comics as le neuvième art was coined by critic Claude Beylie in 1964, popularized through a series of articles by Morris and Claude Moliterni published in Spirou between 1964 and 1967, and given a fuller critical foundation in Francis Lacassin's 1971 book Pour un neuvième art, la bande dessinée. French state recognition followed in the 1980s and 1990s under culture minister Jack Lang, whose initiatives supported comics museums and extended formal cultural honors to cartoonists on a similar footing to other recognized art forms — an institutional legitimacy that comics in most other countries did not receive to the same degree in the 20th century.

Contemporary status

Franco-Belgian comics remain a major publishing category across the Francophone world, supported by dedicated specialty bookshops, an annual awards and festival circuit — most prominently the Angoulême International Comics Festival — and a continuing stream of new album series published alongside the tradition's long-running classics. It is frequently cited as the third-largest comics market globally after the American and Japanese industries.

See also

• History of comics
• European comics
• History of manga