In the face of the Franco-Belgian tradition, whose permanence has been assured by established characters such as Tintin, Spirou, Gaston and Lucky Luke, an alternative comic strip wave has developed, without for all that renouncing its origins. This artistic field has today become a pluralistic and varied domain, and one which is too large to be arbitrarily given the label ‘Franco-Belgian,’ a term which moreover today seems completely obsolete.

Can we today still talk with any relevance of Franco-Belgian comic strips? After reading ‘La Bande dessinée contemporaine’ (Contemporary Comic Strips), a copiously illustrated document jointly edited by Björn-Olav Dozo, a F.R.S-FNRS postdoctoral researcher at the ULg’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Fabrice Preyat, from the ULB, the idea of a community of authors flying under the same flag and offering homogenous comic strips, corresponding to the same codes, melts like a snowflake in the sun. In overall terms, the work approaches its subject from the perspective of the sociology of the culture industry. A culture industry which is well defined within the book by Benoît Berthou (Université de Paris 13) as answering to a contradictory balance between the vagaries inherent to artisanal production and the economic imperatives of a commercial industry. A balance based on compromise and the management of time and delays, which evolves and which swings over from one side to the other, depending on the historical period, the operational systems put in place and the ambition of the directors.

Comic strips burst through

The work, just like the contemporary comic strip field itself, offers an ensemble of varied contributions, which nevertheless allows the major contours of the current situation of comic strips in our regions to rapidly emerge. Over the years the field has built up both an internal and external history and legitimacy. It has diversified to become a fully fledged medium in its own right, following the example of cinema or literature. A medium within which jostled stylistic codes and frames whose only point in common was their emancipation from a vocation strictly dedicated to educating the young, certainly entertaining, but locked into conservative and religious imperatives. ‘This evolution dates back to the 1970s, with publishing houses such as Futuropolis and magazines like Pilote,’ points out Björn-Olav Dozo. ‘It was inscribed in the counter-cultural social and artistic movement, which fought against an institution which was either mercantile or self righteous. These publishers developed a literary ethos and published sharp and pointed comic strips. It is not moreover by chance that these comic strips emerged during these years. At the same time society was in the throes of creating a new social class, that of the teenager who was freed from the family structure, who received pocket money and towards whom the cultural productions of this counter culture were directed, from rock to independent cinema and passing through comic strips.’ This period was one of enormous passion and optimism. There was an autonomisation of and increasing recognition for this artistic field. These are concepts which are to be found in a 1975 foundational article by Luc Boltanski, ‘The constitution of the comic strip field.’ But in the 1980s everything collapsed. Even the most legitimate publishing houses such as Futuropolis were constrained to hand over their keys. Publishing houses withdrew to more academic works, which guaranteed strong and immediate success. A few years later, younger authors revived the hopes of the fans of an alternative comic strip scene. As Björn-Olav Dozo explains, ‘the 1990s brought forward a new generation of authors who contributed more to a renewal of the medium. You couldn’t compare their styles, but they resembled each other in the deliberate distance they took from mass production. New publishing houses thus emerged, such as L'Association or Ego comme X.’