( , BDs; ), also referred to as Franco-Belgian comics (), are comics that are usually originally in French and created for readership in France and Belgium. These countries have a long tradition in comics, separate from that of English-language comics. Belgium is a mostly bilingual country, and comics originally in Dutch (, , or simply "strips") are culturally a part of the world of bandes dessinées, even if the translation from French to Dutch far outweighs the other direction.
Among the most popular bandes dessinées are The Adventures of Tintin (by Hergé), Spirou and Fantasio (Franquin et al.), Gaston (Franquin), Asterix (Goscinny & Uderzo), Lucky Luke (Morris & Goscinny), The Smurfs (Peyo) and Spike and Suzy (Willy Vandersteen). Some highly regarded realistically drawn and plotted bandes dessinées include Blueberry (Charlier & Giraud, a.k.a. "Mœbius"), Thorgal (Van Hamme & Rosiński), XIII (Van Hamme & Vance), and the creations of Hermann Huppen.
Reach In Europe, French is spoken natively not only in France and the city state of Monaco, but also by significant portions of the population of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. The shared language creates an artistic and commercial market where national identity is often blurred, and one of the main rationales for the concept of the (English) "Franco-Belgian comics" expression. The potential appeal of the French-language BDs extends beyond Francophone Europe, as France in particular has strong historical and cultural ties with several Francophone overseas territories. Of these territories it is Quebec, Canada, where Franco-Belgian BDs are doing best, due – aside from the fact that it has the largest BD reading Francophone population outside Europe – to that province's close historical and cultural ties with France from colonisation, in the process heavily influencing its own native Quebec comics scene. This is in stark contrast to the English-speaking part of the country, which is culturally US comics oriented.
While the originally in Dutch written Flemish Belgian comic books, or rather BD albums are influenced by Francophone BDs, especially in the early years, they evolved into a distinctly different style, both in art and in spirit, which is why they are nowadays sub-categorised as Flemish comics, as their evolution started to take a different path from the late 1940s onward, due to cultural differences stemming from the increasing cultural self-awareness of the Flemish people. And while French-language publications are habitually translated into Dutch, Flemish publications are less commonly translated into French, for cultural reasons. Likewise, despite the shared language, Flemish BDs do not do that well in the Netherlands and vice versa, save for some notable exceptions, such as the Willy Vandersteen creation Spike and Suzy () which is popular across the border. Concurrently, the socio-cultural idiosyncrasies contained within many Flemish BDs also means that these comics have seen far less translations into other languages than their French-language counterparts have due to their more universal appeal, and the French language's cultural status.
Belgium is officially a trilingual country as there is a German-speaking Community of Belgium. Belgian BD home market first print releases, be it in Dutch or in French, are rarely translated into that language with German-speaking Belgians having to wait for internationally released editions for reading in their native tongue, typically those from licensed publishers stemming from neighbouring Germany. Though Dutch and German both are Germanic languages, the German-speaking Community lies within the territory of the Walloon Region, so that French is the most utilised (second) language in that area and has caused the handful of BD artists originating from there, such as Hermann and Didier Comès, to create their BDs in French. Born Dieter Hermann Comès, Comès actually "Frenchified" his given name to this end, whereas Hermann Huppen has dispensed with his (Germanic) family name "Huppen" for his BD credits as "Hermann", though he maintained the Germanic spelling for his first name. Due to its relative modesty, both in size and in scope, and despite the close historical and cultural ties, no German-Belgian artists are as of 2018 known to have created BDs specifically for the German comics world, when discounting commercial translations of their original Francophone creations.
A similar situation exists in France, which has several regional languages, of which Breton and Occitan are two of the more substantial ones. But while these languages are culturally recognised as regional languages, they are not official national languages, contrary to Belgium in regard to German, with similar consequences as in Belgium for BDs and their artists. Native BDs are rarely, if at all, released in these languages by the main BD publishers, whereas artists stemming from these regions, invariably create their BDs in French – like their German-Belgian counterparts forced to do so in order to gain commercial access to the main market. The situation for France's German-speaking minority is therefore identical to its more sizeable counterpart in northern neighbour Belgium in regard to BD-related matters.
Vocabulary The term bandes dessinées is derived from the original description of the art form as "drawn strips". It was first introduced in the 1930s, but only became popular in the 1960s, by which time the "BD" abbreviation was also in use for its book, or album, publications formats.
Bandes dessinées were described as the "ninth art" in Francophone scholarship on the medium (le neuvième art). The "ninth art" designation stems from a 1964 article by in the magazine Lettres et Médecins,Claude Beylie, « La bande dessinée est-elle un art ? », Lettres et Médecins, literary supplement La Vie médicale, March 1964. and was subsequently popularised in an article series about the history of comics, which appeared in weekly instalments in Spirou magazine from 1964 to 1967. Written by Belgian Morris with editorial input from the below-mentioned Frenchman Claude Moliterni, the article series was in itself an example of a Franco-Belgian BD project.Morris and Pierre Vanker, « Neuvième Art, musée de la bande dessinée » in: Spirou no. 1392 (17 December 1964): "Les bandes dessinées sont nées avant le cinématographe de MM. Lumière. Mais on ne les a guère prises au sérieux pendant les premières décennies de leur existence, et c'est pourquoi la série d'articles qui débute aujourd'hui s'appellera 9e Art." (Cf. ) The publication of Francis Lacassin's book Pour un neuvième art: la bande dessinée in 1971 further established the term.
In North America, Franco-Belgian BDs are often seen as equivalent to what are known as graphic novels — most likely a result of their deviating from the US 32-page comic book standard.; Kurt Geeraerts teaches philosophy at high-school level in Halle, Belgium, and holds University of Brussels degrees in the moral, and cultural sciences. In recent decades the English "graphic novel" expression has increasingly been adopted in Europe as well in the wake of the works of Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman, but with the specific intent to discriminate between comics intended for a younger and/or general readership, and publications which are more likely to feature mature content, literary subject matter or experimental styles. As a result, European BD scholars have retroactively identified the 1962 Barbarella comic by Jean-Claude Forest (for its theme) and the first 1967 Corto Maltese adventure The Ballad of the Salty Sea by Hugo Pratt (for both art, and story style) in particular, as the comics up for consideration as the first European "graphic novels".
History
During the 19th century, there were many artists in Europe drawing cartoons, occasionally even utilising sequential multi-panel narration, albeit mostly with clarifying captions and dialogue placed under the panels rather than the speech balloons commonly used today. These were humorous short works rarely longer than a single page. In the Francophonie, artists such as Gustave Doré, Nadar, Christophe and Caran d'Ache began to be involved with the medium.
Early 1900s – 1929: Precursors In the early decades of the 20th century, comics were not stand-alone publications, but were published in newspapers and weekly or monthly magazines as episodes or gags. Aside from these magazines, the Catholic Church, in the form of its then powerful and influential , was creating and distributing "healthy and correct" magazines for children. In the early 1900s, the first popular French comics appeared. Two of the most prominent comics include Bécassine and Les Pieds Nickelés.Anne Martin-Fugier, La Place des bonnes : la domesticité féminine à Paris en 1900, Grasset, 1979 (reprinted 1985, 1998, 2004).Bernard Lehambre, Bécassine, une légende du siècle, Gautier-Languereau/Hachette Jeunesse, 2005.Yves-Marie Labé, « Bécassine débarque », in Le Monde, August 28, 2005.Yann Le Meur, « Bécassine, le racisme ordinaire du bien-pensant », in Hopla, #21 (November 2005- February 2006).
In the 1920s, after the end of the first world war, the French artist Alain Saint-Ogan started out as a professional cartoonist, creating the successful series Zig et Puce in 1925. Saint-Ogan was one of the first French-speaking artists to fully utilise techniques popularised and formularised in the United States, such as Speech balloons, even though the text comic format would remain the predominant native format for the next two to three decades in France, propagated as such by France's educators. In 1920, the Abbot of Averbode in Belgium started publishing Zonneland, a magazine consisting largely of text with few illustrations, which started printing comics more often in the following years.
Even though Les Pieds Nickelés, Bécassine and Zig et Puce managed to survive the war for a little while longer, modernised in all three cases and all of them continued by artists (the most notable one being Belgian Greg for the latter in the 1960s)Zig et Puce (1960s), Bedeteque.com other than the original creators, none of them succeeded to find a readership outside France itself and are consequently remembered in their native country only.
1929–1940: Birth of the modern Franco-Belgian comic One of the earliest proper Belgian comics was Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, with the story Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which was published in Le Petit Vingtième in 1929. It was quite different from future versions of Tintin, the style being very naïve and simple, even childish, compared to the later stories. The early Tintin stories often featured racist and political stereotypes, which caused controversies after the war, and which Hergé later regretted. After Tintins early massive success, the magazine decided to release the stories in hardcover book format as well, directly after they had run their respective courses in the magazine — in the process introducing something new in the Belgian comic world: the comic album. The 1930 Tintin au pays des Soviets title is generally considered the first of its kind – even though there are three similar Zig et Puce titles from French publisher Hachette, known to predate the Tintin title by one to two years, but which failed to find an audience outside France.Zig et Puce (original), Bedeteque.com The magazine continued to do so for the subsequent three stories until 1934 when the magazine, as such not particularly well-suited as book publisher, turned album publication over to Belgian specialised book publisher Casterman, who has been the Tintin album publisher ever since.