There are three great comics traditions in the world - US, Japan, France(/Belgium). But for some reason, French comics (septieme arte) seem to have absolutely no traction, even on a nerd-board like this one. Asterix and Tintin were huge in their heyday, but the cinematic versions were either okay (Asterix) or bizarre (Tintin). I've read both at least five times, and they never get old.
I've read a literal ton of French comics, and I really loved some of them. But I would struggle to give a recommendation, because they tend to be smaller runs without any particular hype behind them.
On the other hand: the art in French stuff is often magnificent. A friend of mine writes 'Pico Bogue', which sells in the 100K - 1M range, and he's a bonafide artist, capable of recreating the likes of Velazquez (as a copyist -- meaning he has talent, but not necessarily genius). Pico Bogue itself (created by his mom, in order to stop him from just being a useless faggot) has artwork of amazing insouciance. The artwork puts Calvin and Hobbes to shame. (Just the artwork)
French comics are a bit like British TV shows. The Avengers (UK), for instance, is wonderful, and if you get into it, you really get into it. But you're not really going to sell John Steed dolls.
Anyway, I'm just wondering why a collection of nerds on the internet haven't tapped into this tradition.
Dude! Be a teacher. You found a field rarely touched. This is your opportunity to rep and step. We don't necessarily need specifics, give a general overview and what's big.
When the land has no hype. YOU are the hypeman.
I tried getting into them at some point. I don't speak French and I could barely find any scanlations. The small amount of stuff that has official English translations, I could not easily pirate. And you can sneer all you want, but I'm not gonna spend money up front on a medium I've had close to zero experience with. I buy things I know I'm going to enjoy.
That's a barrier of entry thick enough that I couldn't proceed, and I can't imagine a less motivated person even bothering. The truth is, even completely disregarding French comics, there's so much content out there and invariably some of it is very good. I'd love to give French comics a try if they were more accessible to me, but I don't see a reason to bend over backwards when I've got decades of carefully-curated content I could be reading/watching/listening to instead.
French fluency is at a low point among Americans. I don't know if I would call it a nadir, since it's possible Americans will never have enough good reasons to learn it. At points in the past, you'd almost be illiterate if you couldn't read it. But the language's common utility has gone down.
Part of the reasoning for that was the Government mandating English as the official language in some of the most heavy areas, meaning most public facilities didn't need a French speaker on hand so learn English or get fucked.
That's one of the major reasons why Cajun French is basically a novelty instead of a real language anymore. Suddenly you had to know English by law, while French required time/effort most families didn't have to teach.
If you want a real novelty, try Texas German! It's like they're speaking German with absolutely no effort on the accent. The same thing happened with certain pockets of Canadian French, like in Nova Scotia or Sudbury. They know all of the words/grammar, but the pronunciation is 100% English. It's... odd.
'Allo 'Allo
Asterix and tin tin were huge in my childhood. But tin tin is finished, author is dead and no one is making any new ones while the new asterixs are shit imo since both original author and artist died
Yeah, I like the new Asterixes... but in the same way that I'll swear that my 85 year old mom is still pretty.
Totally Spies! gave me an appreciation of skintight bodysuits.
And Cybersix, which gave me an appreciation of skintight bodysuits.
And Wakfu, which gave me an appreciation of skintight bodysuits.
You know what? French cartoons are pretty solid.
Oh right, it was South America, Quebec, and Japan communal effort. Nevermind then.
Code Lyoko was gas too.
The first obvious barrier is the language one. The thing might as well not exist unless it is presented in a way westerners can comprehend it.
The second depressing barrier is that its not outrageous. Good news don't piss you off into paying attention and wielding your keyboard like a sword.
Or to put it more simply: https://www.nerfnow.com/comic/571
And here I was thinking I was the only one who read Nerf Now.
As for the French comics, I agree the main issue is language. I was interested in some of the westerns, but it looks like most of them are in French. Which is unfortunate.
All for the better perhaps.
If their good stuff is not discovered by twitter then it cant be corroded by wokeness.
I bet most people didn't even know about them. I'm sure you saw it already but this video about Bandes Dessinees from Razorfist is worth a watch. He's currently translating one story and wants to officially import more, giving them the attention they deserve.
I'm not really a youtube guy, so I didn't know about that video. Thanks for the link!
Good question. I’ve been meaning to read some. Was gonna start with the one Valerian is based on. I heard Razorfist talking about them.
The truth is that comics of any kind just aren't as popular in the US compared to Japan and France on a per capita basis. For most of recent history, manga has sold better in France than it has in the US despite the US having 4.89 times the population. I've also seen niche manga get licensed in France that either never get licensed in the US or take significantly longer.
Marketing more BDs in the US market is likely a hard sell. There's the expense of giving them a translation. There's no audience who saw the anime and wants to read the manga, or that likes anime and likes manga by extension. And the audience just doesn't seem to be that into the medium in the first place.
Wow! Manga sells better in France in absolute terms? I guess that makes sense, since they have massive BD sections in all of their bookstores, and the French are more literary than most peoples, for what it's worth.
Your second paragraph is probably true. I read a lot of Manga, but only because I started with Anime, and then found that reading is usually better than watching... (except Hunter X Hunter)
I'd buy them all!
Yeah, I get what you're saying. But it's still (a) quite paltry; and (b) in keeping with what the French tradition deserves. A lot of French stuff is set in medieval times, for obvious reasons, and it's actually better suited to comics than to the big screen.
The casting was beyond eeh, somebody was sold into slavery to get those roles, I don't know how but it's the only way.
It was gorgeous though.
Oh yeah... the Tintin movie was awful. Absolutely awful. I even bought the DVD, because I was sure that Jackson/Spielberg would do a masterful job. Now I wear an eyepatch, and would never do such a thing.
Probably because few people speak French, let alone passionately enough to translate it for the English audience. So not only is it inaccessible, nobody even knows about it enough to start if they wanted to.
Another interesting one is the Spanish argentine comic Cybersix, it never had an official release in English despite the cartoon though scanlations are available.
What blows is that any comic accurate mature remake of the cartoon is going to suffer from severe regressive leftist meddling because the main antagonist is a Nazi war criminal.
Cybersix was a revelation when I used to watch it at midnight in Canada. Mafalda out of Argentina was also quite good.
No traction? everyone who reads comics in Europe knows Édika. Thing is that most comics in the continent never get translated outside their original language.
I think that's what I meant.
Katy Perry is more popular than Modest Mouse.
Quality finds an audience.
Get better.
Hey, Corto Maltese (Italian comic) is quite rightfully popular all across Europe as is (was?) Fantomas. I agree that the French didn't succeed in creating Icons outside of Asterix/Tintin/Lucky Luke -- which are amongst the top 100 best-selling comics of all time (intertwined with a massive amount of Manga).
Depends on where you mean. Asterix as an example is HUGE in Germany due to in part of the great animated movies(the non cgi ones) and the amazing comics. They're to this day being sold here, even talked about a bit here and there. Thankfully they are translated, I don't speak a lick of French.
From some American friends I know they don't even know about the movies, made an american friend watch one of them and he loved it.
I actually read Asterix in German, too, and I remember being very impressed by the translations. I think it's because a lot of the humour is very broad, and the stories are quite simple, so the translators have a wide range for creativity.
Und ja, ich meinte in den Vereinigten Staaten!
European comics are great! I call them European comics, as some of them are written by people from e.g. Spain or Italy. They often put in a lot of work into their comics. One favorite of mine is Eagles of Rome by Marini, and a classic from way back is Corto Maltese.
There's a fantasy series of French comics called "dwarves" that's 10/10 few others in the same universe too.
I was raised on Lucky Luke and Gaston as well as the weekly Donald
There's a torrent with like 1 TB of BDs (I shaved it down to 300 GB after checking everything). Great stuff.
Fuck me if I remember. Something like "Bande dessinée megapack" I think.
There were actually about 12 of them, each several GB, and organized in alphabetical order. I had them all until my computer crashed. Now I just have volume 6. The only problem with them is that the scanning was pretty old, so some of the lettering was hard to read.
I've found them now and then, but there aren't any seeders. Are the French not weebs? Just kidding -- the French like philosophy... they're ueber-Weebs.
I now remember it was like 700 GB, maybe really in several batches.
Not GB, like really around TB.
I often wondered myself. Even comics about the US (Blueberry, Jeremiah) aren't popular in the US.
Localpatriotic recommendation: Scourge of the Gods.
Because the French still thinks it's a world language and stick to it obstinately. Just like the Germans and the Spanish. Once they get over that, and realize they can still have their language and enjoy global communications too, they might get somewhere.
TIL there are no french feminists
Where is this USA, and how can I get there? Time machine?
I loved tin tin as a kid, and have a few Incals to get through. It is a lot of fun and well drawn, but the story telling is often disjointed.
The drawing in TinTin is, (for me), perfect, and inspired the odd-but-compelling Blake and Mortimer series. Tintin was (the) best way to get a window into the diversity of the world before 2000. The pictures of 'Peru' or China are extremely evocative. As for the storytelling... you might be right, but the characters are so compelling!
I've been meaning to get into Blake and Mortimer.
I think I preferred the cartoons about Tin Tin over the movie by Peter Jackson. The comics are of course perfect. I loved the one where he travels to the moon.
There were a lot of cool French comics in the Metal Hurlant magazine. Check them out.
I thought the Tintin movie was quite good. It never compelled me to seek out the comics.
The answer is merch, tv, movies and games.
In a post-star-wars, post he-man, post-ninja-turtles world, you have to have all of those things, all tied in to your comics, for your comic to go BIG.
You need a big investment into all those tie-ins, and unless there's an industry in your country (even if they outsource toy manufacturing to china, or animation to korea), that kind of investment gets unappealingly expensive.
French comics, as good as they are, are mostly only really known to nerds for the same reason British comics like Judge Dredd and Slaine are mostly only known to nerds; Not enough casual appeal tie-in merch and TV.
The US and Japan are fortuitous to have world class examples of all of the other tie-in industries in their own countries.
Tin tins artist died in the 80s that's why. Also not fond of the new asterix art. It's very different
Its not calarts level but it's very different, especially some char designs
The live-action of Asterix was... how could the French, known for their style, make such a mistake... I'll have to check out the new CGI films. The old ones were... good enough for the time, I guess.
As for TinTin... you're probably right. For me, TinTin was a window into the wonders of the rest of the world. The depictions of South America, India, China, Communist Europe were so engagingly evocative. Now I'm here in a 3rd world country and, since there's no mystery to be solved... it's not that wonderful. I go to Angkor Wat every morning... but I'd rather see a Herge picture of the temples.
No it isn't, it's like saying theres a "manga style". A whole lot of it is really cartoonish, if anything.
Just compare like Thorgal to TinTin to Valerian.
Belgian comics are also BDs.
The BDs are Franco-Belgian comics.