Background

In 2001, Frédéric Paques was in the final year of his History of Art degree at the ULg when a new course appeared in the programme offered to students: a course on the history of comic strips, given by Erwin Dejasse.  This course, which he chose to take, pushed him to turn to the field of the ninth art as his choice of subject for his dissertation, at the expense of his first idea, a dissertation on the Middle Ages.

Once graduated he left for Angoulême to take a DES in museology.  There, for three months, he worked at the Angoulême museum of comic strips. ‘It is without a doubt this experience which pushed me to throw myself into researching comic strips,’ he confides. He nevertheless had to wait several years before receiving the necessary funding to launch his research. Between 2003 and 2007 he was thus a teacher in secondary education, in particular, but kept one foot in the world of comic strips by working for the Angoulême 9e art journal and participating in the organisation of various exhibitions.

At the end of 2006 he finally received a doctoral grant to carry through a thesis on the early days of Belgian comic strips: he took an interest on a period which is little explored, if not forgotten, the history of Belgian comic strips in the Walloon and Brussels region from 1830 to 1914. Whilst working on his thesis he was twice an academic curator for exhibitions which took up quarters at the ULg’s Art Collections, one on Gordinne publications, the other spotlighting a contemporary comic strip author, Dominique Goblet.