Cultural Difference and Diversity in French- Language Comics

The Editors

The treatment of cultural difference and diversity by French-speaking cartoonists has changed radically over the last few decades, as four articles in this special issue demonstrate. What has not changed since the nineteenth century is the centrality of these themes to comics, which have been a globalizing medium in a shrinking world throughout the period. French-language comics are exemplary of these transformations, insofar as France was a major imperialist power during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, France has long been home to ethnic and religious minorities, and was a major center of immigration during the twentieth century. These socio- historical trends have left a huge imprint on comics within France itself, but the French also exported the form along with their language to most of their colonies, which has given rise to (post-)colonial traditions of cartooning in French-speaking regions across the globe. Belgium too has a signifi cant history of colonial intervention in Africa and of immigration and ethnic diversity within its own borders, which has had a signifi cant impact on comics in both Belgium and its former African colonies. French-language comics therefore constitute a rich fi eld for studying representations of cultural difference and diversity, although one can certainly also fi nd related trends and examples in comics of other European languages and national traditions: for example, in Italian comics one fi nds the black character Bilbolbul and other stories related to the colonization of Africa.1 On the other hand, one of the most important early cartoonists and theoreticians of comics was Swiss, not French or Belgian. Rodolphe

ı For examples, see Fabio Gadducci and Matteo Stefanelli, eds., Il secolo del Corriere dei Piccoli: Un’Antologia del Più Amato Settimanale Illustrato [The Century of The Children’s Courrier: An Anthology of the Dearly Beloved Illustrated Weekly] (Milan: Rizzoli Libri Illustrati, 2008). European Comic Art Volume 5 Number 2, Winter 20ı2: ı–7 doi:ı0.3Y67/eca.20ı2.05020ı ISSN ı754–3797 (Print), ISSN ı754–3800 (Online) 2 THE EDITORS

Töpffer (Y799–Y846), who has been called the ‘father of the comic strip’,2 injected themes of ethnic, national and cultural difference into comics early in the nineteenth century (gender difference too, of course). Witness, for example, in Histoire de M. Cryptogame,3 ‘la belle Provençale’ [‘the beautiful woman from Provence’], the Norwegian whalers, the reference to Spanish auto-da-fés, but most memorably the Algerians: the Moorish pirates, the dey of Algiers, the Janissaries, Moustacha (father and sons), Tapesalé [Lustyblows], and so on. Moving closer in time we ﬁ nd cultural difference running rife throughout the oeuvre of two other cartoonists who have been anointed as fathers of Francophone comics, in festivals and by comics critics and theoreticians: the Frenchman Alain Saint-Ogan (Y895–Y974), who was a role model for the Belgian Hergé (Y907–Y983). Already from Y925, the adventures of Saint-Ogan’s boy duo Zig and Puce [Guy and Flea] take them on a whirlwind, around-the-world tour that articulates a wealth of cultural stereotypes deserving of study by historians and critics of comics, and Saint-Ogan continued to mine this vein throughout his lifetime.4 Similarly, Hergé famously represented and exoticized foreign others from the very beginning and throughout his comics series, Tintin: Russians, Congolese, North American whites and Native Americans, Latin Americans (mestizos, indigenous peoples), an Estonian, North Africans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Jews and Arabs in Palestine. … The list is very long, just as it is for the comics of Christophe (Georges Colomb; Y856–Y945), especially in his La famille Fenouillard (Y893). For all four of these key cartoonists, the representation of cultural difference and diversity hewed closely to the contours of European imperialist expansion: France’s conquest of Algiers and then its colonization of Algeria, the French colonization of sub-Saharan Africa, the Belgian conquest of the Congo, the European conquest and colonization of the United States, the Spanish conquest of Latin America, and so on. Although the artists did not always reproduce the dominant European ideologies of imperialism and colonization, they generally did. An oft-cited exception is Le Lotus bleu [‘The Blue Lotus’], with its strong critique of Japanese imperialism, but that was made possible by Hergé’s assistant Tchang Tchong-jen, then a Chinese student in Brussels, and

2 David Kunzle, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 3 First drafted in Y830 and published in Y845; David Kunzle, ed., Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 640–64Y. 4 Thierry Groensteen, ‘Hergé débiteur de Saint-Ogan’ [‘Hergé, debtor of Saint-Ogan’], 9e art [Ninth Art], Y (Y996), 9–Y7. Cultural Difference and Diversity in French-Language Comics 3

the fact that Belgian imperialism was not directly implicated in the story (as opposed to Tintin au Congo [‘Tintin in the Congo’]). Of course the production of imagery about cultural difference and diversity also always implies creating images of selves and the same, at least implicitly. Here too, however, we quickly realize that the cartoonists often viewed their European protagonists as different from themselves, but not always. For example, among our preceding examples, Cryptogame and his ﬁ ancée Elvire are no-doubt Genevan, or at least Swiss, like Töpffer, but neither is married, unlike their creator. With his Fenouillard family, Christophe satirizes middle-brow provincial French difference from his Parisian intellectual perspective: the protagonists are a bourgeois French family from Lille, where Christophe taught at the Lycée Faidherbe before he succeeded in returning to Paris, with a position at the Sorbonne. Zig and Puce are plucky Parisian street urchins who circumnavigate the globe, but their creator led a comfortable life as a bourgeois bon vivant, mostly in Paris. Like Zig and Puce, Hergé’s Quick and Flupke are an urban boy duo, but from Brussels, where their creator also was born and raised. His Tintin character was originally a Catholic Belgian boy scout named Totor, and remains so underneath his subsequent reporter’s guise – all of Hergé’s biographers underline the cartoonist’s strong Catholic upbringing and the inﬂ uence of the scouting movement on him. To complicate matters for us, Hergé had many of his cultural others speak a working-class Brussels dialect, decipherable only by cultural insiders of the artist, and now by professional linguists.5 Although these European characters are often the butt of humor and even satire, there is no simple equivalence between their treatment and that meted out to the exotic and sometimes dangerous cultural others they encounter on their picaresque travels around the world.6 The cartoonists usually draw clear lines between Europeans and their others. The ideology or implications of these narratives were often colonizing and imperialist, and sometimes genocidal, as in Hergé’s L’Etoile mystérieuse [‘The Shooting Star’], which is essentially an antisemitic conspiracy theory in comic-strip form. There, the threatening Jew is in North or South America (the rich and nefarious banker Blumenstein in New York becomes Bohlwinkel in São Rico, in post-war versions of the story), but he has ethnic kin in Brussels itself: the original, serialized strip features a hateful, racist

5 Daniel Justins and Alain Préaux, Tintin: Ketje de Bruxelles [‘Tintin: Kid from Brussels’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2004). 6 Thierry Groensteen, La bande dessinée en France [‘Comics in France’] (Paris: ADPF, Y998), Y6–Y9. 4 THE EDITORS

caricature of Jews as conniving European others – men with hooked noses and Yiddish accents who speculate about what they could dishonestly earn from the destruction of the world. Drawn by Hergé, it was published in the ‘stolen Le Soir’ by his pro-Nazi collaborators and friends as the tide of antisemitism rose throughout Europe and the Nazis prepared their fi nal solution for the ‘Jewish problem’, including in occupied Belgium.7 What a contrast, then, with the more recent comics featured in this issue. Three of our articles analyze works by artists from groups that previously fi gured almost exclusively as ethnic others, as specimens of racialized difference in grotesquely humorous or didactic tales for children, within European comics and cartoons: Jews, Africans and working-class immigrants. The fourth article focuses on comics by cartoonists of French ethnic majority background who retrain the colonizer’s gaze, refl ecting it back at Europeans and encouraging readers to reevaluate the lines between self and others that cartoonists such as Töpffer or Christophe, Saint-Ogan or Hergé drew in their now classic comics. Fabrice Leroy analyzes the representation by French cartoonist Joann Sfar of Marc Chagall and the Russian Jewish community in his two-volume Chagall en Russie [‘Chagall in Russia’]. An earlier issue of European Comic Art featured an article in which Leroy analyzed Le Chat du Rabbin [‘The Rabbi’s Cat’], a series that is better known worldwide, partly because it has been translated into English and was the basis for a fi lm.8 Here Leroy continues his investigation of the relationship between Judaism and representation in Sfar’s oeuvre. In both that article and this one, Leroy offers important insights into the meta- representational possibilities of comics as they are explored by Sfar, who is a prominent member of a new generation of cartoonists that has signifi cantly redefi ned the medium over the past two decades.9 Whereas the Catholic Hergé slurred Jews as typically dishonest, scheming and

7 Hugo Frey, ‘Trapped in the Past: Anti-Semitism in Hergé’s Flight 714’, History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Mark McKinney (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 27–43; Maxime Benoît-Jeannin, Le mythe Hergé [‘The Hergé Myth’] (Villeurbanne: Golias, 200Y). 8 Fabrice Leroy, ‘Joann Sfar Conjures Marc Chagall: The Politics of Visual Representation in The Rabbi’s Cat’, European Comic Art 4.Y (20YY), 39–57. 9 Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Ann Miller, Reading Bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect, 2007); Laurence Grove, Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée in Context (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 20Y0). Cultural Difference and Diversity in French-Language Comics 5

dangerous or grotesque, the Jewish Sfar depicts the Russian Jewish community as the victims of vicious pogroms by Christians. Leroy shows us how Sfar uses myth symbolically, here in the form of a golem, to help repair the historical wounds of Jews. In her article, Carla Calargé continues her focus on the representation of colonial difference in comics.10 She discusses Kia Ora, a three- volume comics series about Western representations of colonized groups during the early twentieth century. She shows how its authors rework the relationship between colonizers and colonized to give us privileged insight into the thoughts and aspirations of the latter, who were traditionally represented in European comics as funny, abject or dangerous objects, not as thoughtful subjects deserving of the reader’s empathy. The cartoonists also focus on the gaze of the colonizers: their scopic privilege to survey, examine, measure and classify the colonized, whose representative members were brought to European capitals to be displayed in cages, behind barriers or on stages, in venues that notably included botanical gardens and colonial exhibitions. Historians and others have described these as a kind of ‘human zoo’,11 which is the title of one of the volumes in the comics series. The cartoonists depict the unjust and dehumanizing features of this exhibitionary activity. They lay bare its economic, political and ideological underpinnings, and connect it to freak shows in places such as Coney Island, New York. There is a long history of representing colonial exhibitions in European comics, reaching back to the nineteenth century.12 The comics studied by Calargé respond to that colonial heritage of French comics, at least implicitly, and rework the picaresque element that has been so important to European comics, which have often featured white adventurers of various types and stripes who travelled the world and thereby brought Europe’s exotic others into the living rooms of young readers in the

ı0 Carla Calargé, ‘Images de femmes: Une H/histoire de la France en Algérie à travers les Carnets d’Orient de Jacques Ferrandez’ [‘Images of Women: A Hi/story of France in Algeria through the Oriental Sketchbooks of Jacques Ferrandez’], Présence francophone 74 (20Y0), Y06–Y25. ıı Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., Zoos humains: XIXe et XXe siècles [‘Human Zoos: Y9th and 20th Centuries’] (Paris: La Découverte, 2002); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire and Charles Forsdick, Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, trans. Teresa Bridgeman (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). ı2 Mark McKinney, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 20YY). 6 THE EDITORS

West.13 In this sense, many classic comics were a paper analogue of human zoos, in an uncritical mode. Michelle Bumatay studies comics by Pahé (Patrick Essono Nkouna), a Gabonese cartoonist who lived for several years in France, including in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, in the Lille metropolis, almost right around the corner from where Christophe lived and taught over a century before. We could see Pahé’s comics, although published in Europe by a Swiss publisher, as part of a trend in comics by which ‘the empire writes back’ to the imperial center, but as Bumatay shows us, they are also part of a delicate dialectic, which puts Africans and Europeans into dialogue with each other, and provides a powerful critique of situations in both Africa and Europe. Within his comics and in interviews, Pahé also comments on the unequal relations within the world of cartooning and comics, between wealthy European markets and impoverished African ones. In his comics, humor and satire undercut the pathos that themes of racial prejudice, economic disadvantage and cultural marginalization might otherwise produce. In this and in the use of a ﬁ ctionalized double of the author, these comics share much with the Aya de Yopougon [‘Aya of Yopougon’] series by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, which Bumatay analyzes elsewhere, in her larger project. In a previous issue of European Comic Art we published the ﬁ rst half of an interview with Baru (Hervé Barulea).14 In the second half of the interview published here, the French cartoonist of Italian and Breton heritage speaks about the representation of minorities in comics, as well as about several other issues related to his life’s work, including his exposure, or rather a lack thereof, to classic comics by Hergé while Baru was growing up in an ethnically diverse, immigrant, working-class area in what was then a heavily industrialized region of northeastern France. If Hergé’s comics were mostly missing from Baru’s reading material while he was a child, it is no doubt in part because of the often mentioned class division in comics readership during the period: whereas middle- class children often read Tintin, working-class children, especially ones in groups aligned with the political left, more likely read comics in magazines such as Vaillant, associated with the French Communist Party. Nonetheless, in his comics Baru pays homage to both Tintin and Yves-le-Loup, an Arthurian adventure series that was serialized in Vaillant and which Baru commends for its humanist values. Both of

ı3 Ann Miller, ‘Les héritiers d’Hergé: the ﬁ gure of the aventurier in a postcolonial context’, Shifting Frontiers of France and Francophonie, ed. Yvette Rocheron and Christopher Rolfe (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 307–323. ı4 ‘Interview with Baru: Part Y’, European Comic Art 4.2 (20YY), 2Y3–237. Cultural Difference and Diversity in French-Language Comics 7

these classic comics, Baru argues, helped to lay the ground for his own artistry, which he has devoted to telling stories featuring working-class protagonists from immigrant backgrounds, from Italy or North Africa, Poland or sub-Saharan Africa. With the ﬁ fth article in this issue, by Sébastien Conard and Tom Lambeens, we move away from our special theme and into a theoretical investigation of the formal properties of comics and their implications for readers. They grapple with the fascinating and tricky question of how to conceptualize time and duration in comics. Conard and Lambeens draw on the concepts and theoretical models of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen and others. They evaluate the usefulness of these models in their analysis of comics by artists such as Willy Vandersteen, André Franquin, Chris Ware and Lambeens himself. They argue for the importance of subjective time and the present in the experience of the comics reader, and against the usefulness of objective or clock time as a concept for analyzing the reading experience.