Comics in French The European Bande Dessin}}}}e in Context [Hardcover]

Whereas in English-speaking countries comics are for children or adults who should know better, in France and Belgium the form is recognized as the Ninth Art and follows in the path of poetry, architecture, painting and cinema. The bande dessin?e [comic strip] has its own national institutions, regularly obtains front-page coverage and has received the accolades of statesmen from De Gaulle onwards. On the way to providing a comprehensive introduction to the most francophone of cultural phenomena, this book considers national specificity as relevant to an anglophone reader, whilst exploring related issues such as text/image expression, historical precedents and sociological implication. To do so it presents and analyses priceless manuscripts, a Franco- American rodent, Nazi propaganda, a museum-piece urinal, intellectual gay porn and a prehistoric warrior who's really Zinedine Zidane.

Laurence Groveis Reader in French and Director of the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on historical aspects of text/image forms, and in particular bande dessin?e. He is President of theInternational Bande Dessin?e Society. As well as serving on the consultative committees of a number of journals, he is general editor ofGlasgow Emblem Studies, and co-editor ofEuropean Comic Art. Laurence Grove has authored (in full, jointly or as editor) nine books and approximately forty chapters or articles.

The [volume] is impressive and the reading rewarding: not only does the author situate most of the major works of thebande dessin?eduring the twentieth century, he mentions as well the main scholarly books devoted to the study of this genre...The sources are very well documented&There is nothing missing in this book, or maybe just the bandes dessin?es themselves, which are too numerous to be included even in a dolþ