Masters Of The Ninth Art

In English-speaking countries, Francophone comic strips like Hergés's Les Aventures de Tin Tin and Goscinny and Uderzo's Les Aventures d'Asterix are viewed—and marketed—as children's literature. But in Belgium and France, their respective countries of origin, such strips—known as bandes dessinées—are considered a genuine art form, or, more specifically, "the ninth art." But what accounts for the drastic difference in the way such comics are received? In Masters of the Ninth Art, Matthew Screech explores that difference in the reception and reputation of bandes dessinées. Along with in-depth looks at Tin Tin and Asterix, Screech considers other major comics artists such as Jacque Tardi, Jean Giraud, and Moebius, assessing in the process their role in Francophone literary and artistic culture. Illustrated with images from the artists discussed, Masters of the Ninth Art will appeal to students of European popular culture, literature, and graphic art.

In France, comics are commonly referred to as the "ninth art". What does it mean to see comics as art? This book looks at the singular status of comics in the French cultural landscape. Bandes dessinées have long been published in French newspapers and magazines. In the early 1960s, a new standard format emerged: large hardback books, called albums. Albums played a key role in the emergence of the ninth art and its acceptance among other forms of literary narrative. From Barbarella in 1964 to La Ballade de la mer salée in 1975, from Astérix and its million copies to Tintin and its screen versions, within the space of just a few years the comics landscape underwent a deep transformation. The album opened up new ways of creating, distributing, and reading bandes dessinées. This shift upended the market, transformed readership, initiated new transmedia adaptations, generated critical discourse, and gave birth to new kinds of comics fandom. These transformations are analysed through a series of case studies, each focusing on a noteworthy album. By retracing the publishing and critical history of these classic bandes dessinées, this book questions the blind spots of a canon based on the album format and uncovers the legitimisation processes that turned bande dessinée into the ninth art.

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 dessinée [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 Grove is Senior Lecturer and Head of French at the University of Glasgow. His previous affiliations include the University of Pittsburgh, the Newberry Library (Chicago), Middlebury College (Vermont) and the Université Rennes 2. He works on text/image phenomena from the sixteenth century to the present day and has authored a number of works on the subject. Laurence Grove is President of the IBDS, an international society for the study of the bande dessinée.

2023 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture One of the greatest untold stories about the globalization of the Western is the key role of comics. Few American cultural exports have been as successful globally as the Western, a phenomenon commonly attributed to the widespread circulation of fiction, film, and television. The Comic Book Western centers comics in the Western's international success. Even as readers consumed translations of American comic book Westerns, they fell in love with local ones that became national or international sensations. These essays reveal the unexpected cross-pollinations that allowed the Western to emerge from and speak to a wide range of historical and cultural contexts, including Spanish and Italian fascism, Polish historical memory, the ideology of shōjo manga from Japan, British post-apocalypticism and the gothic, race and identity in Canada, Mexican gender politics, French critiques of manifest destiny, and gaucho nationalism in Argentina. The vibrant themes uncovered in The Comic Book Western teach us that international comic book Westerns are not hollow imitations but complex and aesthetically powerful statements about identity, culture, and politics.

This two-volume critical history of French children’s literature from 1600 to the present helps bring awareness of the range, quality, and importance of French children’s literature to a wider audience. The works of a number of French writers, notably La Fontaine, Charles Perrault, Jules Verne, and Saint-Exupéry were, and continue to be, widely translated and adapted, and have influenced the development of the genre in other countries.

Pop art was essential to the Americanization of global art in the 1960s, yet it engendered resistance and adaptation abroad in equal measure, especially in Paris. From the end of the Algerian War of Independence and the opening of Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery for American Pop art in Paris in 1962, to the silkscreen poster workshops of May ’68, this book examines critical adaptations of Pop motifs and pictorial devices across French painting, graphic design, cinema and protest aesthetics. Liam Considine argues that the transatlantic dispersion of Pop art gave rise to a new politics of the image that challenged Americanization and prefigured the critiques and contradictions of May ’68.

"Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi" is a collection of writings by the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar. A thorough Introduction rigorously frames chapters and identifies in Dabashi’s writings a comprehensive approach, which forms the criteria for selecting the essays for the volume. The Introduction also teases out of these essays the overarching theme that holds them together, the manner they inform a particularly critical angle in them and the way they cohere. The Introduction dwells on the work of one scholar, public intellectual and theorist of modern and contemporary arts to extrapolate more universal issues of concern to art criticism in general. These scattered materials and their underlying theoretical and critical logic are a unique contribution to the field of modern and contemporary arts.