Long disdained by cultural elites, comics made their debut this year at the Collège de France and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. A historic moment for the 9th Art.
On November 30, 2022, for the first time in the history of the Academy of Fine Arts, a venerable institution founded in 1816, the words “Hulk” and “Green Lantern” were spoken. A few minutes later, an excerpt from Wholesale disgustingschoolboy comic book by Reiser, was projected above the heads of very serious academicians.
An astonishing scene, which a hundred hand-picked guests attended. They were gathered that day in the enclosure of the Institut de France, quai de Conti, in Paris, for the installation of the designer Catherine Meurisse in the “engraving and drawing” section, created especially for the author of Lightness. A beautiful symbol for comics, the ninth art often despised by cultural elites.
This ceremony spectacularly confirms the institutionalization of comics. A form of recognition unprecedented in its history, at its peak in 2022 with Benoît Peeters’ “Poetics of comics” courses at the Collège de France and the selection of Alison Bechdel for the Prix Médicis – a first for a comic strip.
Pantheonized Goscinny?
The entry into the French Academy of Pascal Ory, a historian who has contributed for fifty years to the acceptance of comics as an academic subject, and whose academician’s sword was designed by Catherine Meurisse, completes this process, marked finally by the reopening of the Richelieu site of the BnF, which offers free access to more than 9,000 comics.
“I am very happy with this recognition of the comic strip, its authors and its works. It’s a bit unexpected”, comments Benoît Mouchart, editorial director of Casterman, who gave a seminar on Blake and Mortimer as part of of the Benoît Peeters cycle at the Collège de France.
“Catherine [Meurisse] opens the way”, adds the designer Blutch, who participated in its installation at the Academy of Fine Arts. “She clears the way. She’s an explorer. And I think it’s only the first.” The movement has only just begun: the family of René Goscinny is busy for his entry into the Pantheon.
“It’s an idea of Benoît Peeters, who during his inaugural lesson at the Collège de France proposed that René Goscinny be pantheonized in view of what he was able to bring to French culture”, confides the publisher Aymar du Chatenet , son-in-law of René Goscinny. “It’s a great idea. It’s in progress.”
“You still have to behave well”
All this splendor remains intimidating for the comic book author accustomed to the often schoolboy atmosphere of the Angoulême festival. “It’s as if we were invited to people we don’t know. We still have to behave ourselves”, commented Blutch in mid-November, a few days before Catherine Meurisse entered the Academy of Fine Arts. -arts.
This revolution has been underway since the 1970s. “Comics have become an institution”, wrote in 1974 The world, during the first edition of the Angoulême festival. Eleven years later, in 1985, François Mitterrand’s visit to the comic strip fair and the Legion of Honor awarded to Uderzo brought comic strips to consecration.
A coronation extended since by the great national museums which opened their doors to Enki Bilal (the Louvre in 2012), Hergé (the Grand Palais in 2016) and Hugo Pratt (the Confluences in 2018). And the Center Pompidou’s Bpi recently hosted retrospectives on major cartoonists (Bretécher, Franquin, Riad Sattouf).
Exhibitions obtained after a hard struggle: Benoît Mouchart recalls “a terrible meeting, 12 or 15 years ago, with a museum director who did not say he was yet ready to welcome the ‘subculture’.” Thus, finding in 2012 a place for the Parisian exhibition of Art Spielgelman (Maus) was no easy task either.
However, this recognition remains specific to France. In Italy, Spain, Japan or the United States, despite being great comic strip nations, the 9th Art is far from having reached this status. An unmissable media event, which has formed a partnership with the Bpi, the Angoulême festival has played a decisive role in this process.
The impact of “Charlie Hebdo”
The image of comic strips with the cultural intelligentsia has changed a great deal since the publication in January 2003 of a forum in which the critic Michel Bernière and Benoît Mouchart, then artistic director of the Angoulême festival, called in Release the ninth art “out of the ghetto” of culture.
“At that time, it was a bit complicated to do university subjects, theses or dissertations on comics”, remembers Benoît Mouchart. “It wasn’t necessarily taken seriously. There wasn’t that much of a review of comic book publications in the press outside of the Angoulême period.”
Nor should we overlook the impact of the attack on Charlie Hebdo January 7, 2015, insists Blutch: “We realized that there was a richness there, because it disappeared. Perhaps this entry on the same level, brutal, in the news, and also in the course of the world, played.”
Ambiguous object
It is no longer uncommon to see comic strip authors in newspaper front pages or on television. But this institutionalization of comics remains unfinished as the status of this art is ambiguous. Catherine Meurisse thus joined the Academy of Fine Arts in the painting section, before being transferred to engraving.
“We still don’t know where to place this art,” laughs Blutch, author of the recent Unrealizable (2024 editions). “Is it literature? plastic art? I myself couldn’t decide. And that’s good. This indecision is what I like about comics. It’s all the wealth. Is comics a drawing that can be read? A writing that looks at itself? It’s really an ambiguous object.”
With courses entitled “Space, time, narration”, “From one box to another” or even “Uses of the page” (all available on YouTube), Benoît Peeters provides the keys to answering these questions. “Benoît Peeters’ classes are extremely stimulating”, enthuses Benoît Mouchart. “I think it will make teachers want to take up comics.”
“Not yet gentrifying”
For this specialist, “it would not necessarily be serious for college students to study a comic strip rather than a play”: “We are in the same register: a play is dialogue, like a comics. There is no fear of an impoverishment of reading.” Scenarios by Goscinny (Asterix) or Greg (Achilles Talon), praised for their literary qualities, could be studied, according to him.
The entry of comics into this new era, however, prompted him to be cautious: “It may be the sign of a certain ageing. It’s a little less insolent, a little less subversive than it may have been. Today, we talk about graphic novels, but we shouldn’t forget that there is a more stirring side to comics.”
“Comics are not gentrifying yet,” Blutch moderates. “We are far from that. It is still considered by a form of intellectual aristocracy as being anecdotal. Catherine [Meurisse] and [Benoît] Peeters brush up, but we’re not done with the condescending stare. And ultimately, maybe so much the better. This outlaw status is fun.”
