Comics in French:The European Bande Dessinee in Context

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 will consider 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 will present and analyse 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 lectures in French at the University of Glasgow, having previously studied and/or taught at the University of Pittsburgh, the Newberry Library (Chicago), and Middlebury College (Vermont). 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 dessinee.