Hello Book Lovers,

Oh yeah, it’s time to get your nerd on with this one because we’re talking comic books. Specifically, comic books from France and Belgium.

That sounds really specific, but these books — known as les bandes dessinées — gained popularity in the 1930s and have only gotten more popular over the decades…even though there was a little kerfuffle during the post-World War II period.

As for me, I was a huge fan of the Smurfs as a kid (I had a slight crush on Johan) and have now reignited my comic nerdom with the Asterix & Obelix books.

But, I ramble on about this in the episode, so I better stop here and let you get to listening.

Enjoy!

Links For You….

• The Comic Book Museum of Belgium: https://www.comicscenter.net/en/home


• Nab my latest release The Untangled Cassie Black at https://books2read.com/CassieBlack3


• Snag The Undead Mr Tenpenny for only 99c by selecting your preferred retailer at https://books2read.com/CassieBlack1


• Support the show by purchasing any of my books or stories. You’ll find the lot at https://books.bookfunnel.com/tammiepainterbooks


• Follow me (and The Book Owl on YouTube) at http://www.youtube.com/c/TammiePainter


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Episode Transcript (or roughly so)…

Hey everyone, this is Tammie Painter and you’re listening to the Book Owl Podcast, the podcast where I entertain your inner book nerd with tales of quirky books and literary lore.

Intro

And holy moly it seems like FOREVER since I’ve been in front of the microphone. I don’t even know what episode number we’re on. 27? Hope so. I also hope I remember how to do all the processing to get this thing out to you. Otherwise this would be a little pointless.

So, April was a weird month for me and I cover why that is in my writing update, and if you want more details there’ll be a link in the show notes (I know you missed me saying that, right?) but suffice it to say that things went a little wacky medically, personally, and with my writing stuff.

And because of all that weirdness I had a lot of trouble getting into a book. I don’t know how many novels I started and just gave up on. Even audiobooks weren’t capturing my attention. And who knows, maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe they were just crappy books.

Either way, what I did find myself gravitating toward were graphic novels. Specifically French graphic novels because my library’s online dohicky added a whole bunch of them to their system. So I thought, what a perfect topic for the podcast after its long spring break.

One Caveat

So just to let you know, this episode is going to specifically be about French comics, or les bandes dessinées, NOT about American comic books, although they do play a part in the story.

Joining the Bandes

Alright, if you’re wondering, the term Bandes Dessinées translates to drawn strips and if you’re cool you shorten it to BD, but that sounds like bidet, so I’m just going to call them BD from now on for the most part.

These are also known as Franco-Belgian comics because they mainly got their start in Belgium where they were known as Stripverhalen, or strip stories, both of which sound like names for a strip club newsletter.

These Belgian comics, if they were written in Flemish, would then be translated into French where they were crazy popular.

Early Strippers

The early versions of these comics, which began in the mid- to late 1800s were a little different from their American cousins because the American comics mainly were used in a political way to mock or criticize the government or people trying to push their weight around. France and Belgium took a more light-hearted approach and kept theirs mostly humorous.

Obviously you’d recognize these comics as comics if you saw them, but they were a little different than what we’re used to today. There was usually only one panel or a very short strip of panels and there were no word bubbles. It was like they hadn’t come up with that idea yet, so the comics would have captions like what people were used to seeing under photos in magazines.

Hubba-Bubba Bubble

So eventually someone flips the calendar page and it’s the 1900s. Comics start appearing in a more episodic nature in magazines or newspapers, meaning that each issue built on the story started in the previous issue. They were pretty popular amongst French readers, but none of these comics really took off outside of France.

And I can’t blame them, one of the more pervasive seres of comics was put out by the Catholic Church’s Union of French Catholic Workers. These comics were geared toward kids and covered that kid-favorite topic of health and correct behavior. Yeah, I know, gripping stuff, right?

But even though things were limping along on the popularity scale, in the 1920s we finally start to see word bubbles in France. Hoorah! Although they had been popping up (see what I did there) in the US, the first French artist to use them was Alain Saint-Ogan.

Unfortunately, the French can be stubborn about changing their ways, and the caption format still continued to dominate comics for at least another couple decades.

The Dark Side of Tintin

Moving along to 1930, we finally have a breakout hit and we also have the first true Belgian Bandes Dessinées. Or do we…? So, as I said, these comics were coming out in episodic form in periodicals.

One of these periodicals was Le Vingtieme Siecle and they eventually put the artist Hergé in charge of a new supplement for kids called Le Petit Vingtieme. And in this supplement Hergé began the story of an adventurous character named Tintin.

Well, Tintin was so popular the newspaper decided to put his first complete story into a hardcover book and claimed it was the first BD published.

Which was a total lie because the publisher Hachette had already published their own BD of the comic Zig et Puce a year or two earlier.

But that wasn’t Tintin’s only controversy. See, Le Vingtieme was a very conservative magazine that just loved to drive home its far-right, fascist views. And some of these views made their