by Like thousands of French people, Sylvie Pinault discovered comic books during the pandemic. even though bandes dessinées – which literally means “drawn strips” and is often called BD or bédé – regarded in France as the “ninth art”, the 52-year-old had preconceived notions that they were children. That changed at the beginning of 2020, when her partner suggested they go to the great comic book festival in Angoulême. The following year, with the country under lockdown, the limpid cover of Léonie Bischoff’s graphic novel Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies caught the eye of an exhibition that canceled the festival in the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris. “He had a different style – maybe that lowered some of my inhibitions,” says Pinault. It was her first comic purchase, and she took her maiden voyage on France’s boundless ocean of hand-drawn possibilities.
Three years later, we’re pausing for breath in the main exhibitors’ hall, Le Monde des Bulles (World of Bubbles), at Angoulême. Pinault clutches her copy of the Nin book, recently signed by Bischoff. “She never knows what color she’ll start a line with,” Pinault marvels of the exchange. “That leaves room for spontaneity.” The thin floor beneath us vibrates from hundreds of feet, milling around the stands for Dargaud, Casterman and other great publishers, jostling for drawings and autographs. Punters edge around a costumed Marsupilami at the Dupuis stand, in front of a concession dedicated to last year’s grand prix winner, Riad Sattouf.
It is a testament to the fresh energy that the pandemic has injected into the BD market: between 2019 and 2021, with measures such as the Culture Pass giving teenagers hundreds of euros to spend, it almost doubled in size from 48.4m sales in year to 87.2m. “We did not expect this phenomenon [to last] after removing the lock,” says Marie Parisot, marketing and commercial director of Dargaud, publishers of Asterix and Lucky Luke. “Everyone was worried that people would stay at home, that they would turn on themselves.” Now one in four books of any kind sold in France are comics.
But then we are talking about the reign of Asterix and Spirou, Tintin and Babar: the inviolable French-Belgian comic book tradition. It has deeper cultural roots than its counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom: while the latter appeared mainly in ephemeral newspaper strips in the 19th century, the Francophone version made an early play for bourgeois respectability, which was often published as books are bound to be given to well-behaved children. . And he benefited from government intervention designed to support bookstores, such as a 1981 law sponsored by the then culture minister, Jack Lang, that prohibits discounting practices that exceed 5% of the cover price of books.
With 3,500 independent bookshops (as many as the UK and US combined), France is fertile ground for comic creators to craft an unrivaled range of styles. “What’s incredible is that the tiniest little title has something interesting here,” says veteran BD journalist and editorial director of the website ActuaBD, Didier Pasamonik. “Independent comics with a circulation of 600 are just as high as those with a circulation of 100,000.”
On Saturday, Angoulême’s biggest day, people will stream up the hill from the train station towards the historic fort where most of the festival takes place. There is a thick fog but the punters are very visible. Many aesthetes are duffle-clad and tattooed. I saw two Marios cosplay. A group of Italians covered in insignias like a comic book pearl of kings files down.
As for why the festival – the third largest comic book festival in the world behind Italy’s Lucca and Japan’s Comiket – is held in this provincial city with pallid nobility 100km from the Atlantic coast, it comes down to the usual explanation of French: gastronomy. In the early 70s, local fanboys started inviting Belgian luminaries such as Hergé, Smurfs creator Peyo and Franquin Spirou to come down, drink the regional specialty cognac until the wee hours, and sign driver (autographs) for them. The first proper festival took place in 1974, when the government wanted to make the Charente département encourage the visual arts, which became rapidly professionalized in the 1980s. Now it brings in 200,000 visitors per issue.
Around the corner from the town hall is the other main venue, Le Nouveau Monde (The New World), where there is a tent a quarter of a kilometer long containing every variety of other comics imaginable: great US artists such as Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns in translation, Arabic memoirs, British anthropomorphic fables, Erotic, small Hellenic BD – press LGBTQ+. Looking over several items, visible with a shock of pink hair and a jacket covered in sequins, the American Erin Meyer-Charneux, 51, exudes creative energy: “I see it as a professional development.” She’s here partly to smear her humor about D-day, but so far her loose-limbed style has gone awry: “They said it didn’t follow French BD rules. Everything has to be in the panels.”
The tent is so crammed that a highway-like passage system has begun. Visual overload sets in early: after a few hours, your eyes feel like fried eggs on your face. The government also knows the power of the BD sector: in the middle of Saturday afternoon, the newly appointed minister of culture Rachida Dati released Le Nouveau Monde. Surrounded by a huge scrum of journalists and bodyguards, she stops spreading in the tent like a republican clot in this hipster artery. She asserts herself on the side of struggling authors: “Before the works, I am looking at the people who make them. I’m not just going to be Minister for private viewings, exhibitions and shows – I want to take action.”
The financial situation of comic book writers and illustrators is a hot topic. Titles on the market are growing so fast – 5,000 a year now, up from 700 in the 1990s – that authors are cannibalizing each other’s earnings. With the supply so high, the publishers have financial power. The Belgian group Média-Participations owns the acquisition of big brands such as Spirou through publishing houses that are often subsidiaries of monopoly corporations (Dargaud and Dupuis, along with several other BD outlets, belong to the Belgian group Média-Participations) .
“One of the hidden tensions in the market is publishers trying to create proprietary brands that are associated with them, not the authors,” says Pasamonik. “Then they give them to different authors to work on like Disney or DC do, which is always in the publisher’s favor.” Julie Durot, managing director of Dupuis, sees things differently: “It is important that we continue to promote these brands because it allows us to take risks with new and young authors. If we were just ‘mercantile’, we wouldn’t do that.”
But the fact remains that 53% of French comics authors, according to a 2014 study, are earning less than the minimum wage. Various groups, including the Ethos Généraux de la Bande Dessinée, Created to advocate for them, but Pasamonik says they carry “no weight”. The incredible thing is, for all the French comic fever and its guild-like classification of job categories, the status of a comic book author here still has no legal recognition. Pressed on the question of creating one, Dati agrees: “I don’t have a unanimous position or consensus on the matter at the moment.”
The other ostensible shadow on French comic book production is the dominance of Japanese manga, which is now responsible for more than half of the country’s comic book sales. (The likes of Dragon Ball and One Piece – the latter of which President Macron recently checked in a tweet – are cheaper than the Franco-Belgian albums.) But in reality there is no threat: French publishers usually license and sell manga themselves , the resulting coffer swelling helps fund local comics, many French creators work directly in the style, and the cross-fertilization has influenced a new wave of millennial artists who follow in the footsteps of Japanese such as Van Gogh and Moebius.
The influence of the east is affecting boardrooms too. Japan’s manga industry, soon divided into such shōnen (boys) and shōjo (girls), the French taught us how to segment the market into the multifaceted beast it is today, including the boom in non-fiction BD over the past 15 years. Now Japan is at the forefront of the digitization of comics: sales of digital manga were successful in print in 2017. Digital comics readers in France are still only 2%, but many believe that it is the inevitable future. At the forefront of the Angoulême manga pavilion – located behind the train station, as if it shows a great historical attitude here towards the Japanese form that only started to translate in the early 00s – it is a great exhibition for Mangas. io, Netflix style. platform for buying manga. CEO Romain Regnier is a natural believer: “The digital consumers are already here, but they have an illegal download culture. The challenge is to get people interested in a legal solution that respects the chain of rights.”
Digital looks set to play a part in whatever form: major publishers are rolling out their own reading platforms, experimenting with daily Instagram strips and investing in the uniquely formatted online “webtoon” medium. Despite the explosive pandemic growth, there are concerns – the BD market fell 11% last year in a predictable correction. “The big challenge is always that young people are reading less,” says Parisot. “What we’re trying to do is have them open the door of a bookstore through curiosity, because we showed them something cool in an Instagram post or on YouTube.”
Outside of Manga City, a group of 16-year-old schoolgirls going back home struggle to know what’s so special about manga vis-a-vis French comics: “They take place in a different Universe almost.” One – cosplaying as some sort of bobby-socked anime witch with an ice cream sundae hat – is halfway through the door. French, Japanese, print, digital, real life, fantasy, they seem unconcerned about the future of BD; just want to get to the next destination.
