12
Mark McKinney
example, Baetens, a Belgian university professor and poet, curated an avant-
gardist comics exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2001, in a way that helped
define the field, according to Beaty (2007: 70–71). He published a theoretical
essay on comics in Frigobox, Fréon’s periodical, that he later reworked and
published in Formes et politique de la bande dessinée (1998: 119–33).
10
In the
field of French-language comics scholarship Peeters is perhaps best known
for his Lire la bande dessinée (2002b), previously published as Case, planche,
récit: Lire la bande dessinée (1991), but he is also the scriptwriter for a se-
ries of graphic novels drawn by cartoonist François Schuiten. Without being
didactic, the series offers an ongoing reflection on the medium of comics,
and on the possibilities and limits of representation in general (cf. chapter 6,
below). Smolderen too has curated comic art shows (as has Groensteen), for
example, the one in 2006 on Swiss cartoonist Cosey, held in the Belgian city
of Charleroi (cf. chapter 10, below). He also scripts comic books, including
some for (former) students from the Ecole européenne supérieure de l’image,
where he teaches. Most of the critics mentioned above contributed in vari-
ous ways to the Cahiers de la bande dessinée (1969–90), a French periodical
named after the Cahiers du cinéma, the journal of cinema studies, and which
facilitated interaction between scholars and producers of comics (Groensteen
was editor of the comics journal, 1984–88).
One could elaborate at great length on the many other connections be-
tween cartoonists and comics scholars in French-language Europe.
11
How-
ever, I have provided enough evidence to support a few simple but significant
points. First, French-language comics scholarship, which is now becoming
known to English readers—for example, via the translation of Groensteen’s
Système de la bande dessinée (1999b; The System of Comics [2007]) and Smol-
deren’s contributions to Comic Art Magazine (no. 8)—has a history stretching
back decades. Second, as I suggested above, the turn to experimentation in
French-language comics in the 1990s owes something to the development
of comics scholarship, and vice versa. A third and related point is that both
French-language comics and scholarship have roots in other cultural spheres
(e.g., prose literature, as with OuBaPo) and intellectual traditions, including
Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics, which have devel-
oped to a considerable extent in France. One of the most obvious examples
is Peeters, who was a student of Roland Barthes and modeled one of his first
analyses of comics on Barthes’s S/Z (it was Peeters’s master’s thesis, directed
by Barthes): in Les bijoux ravis, Peeters (1984) offered a barthesian reading of
Hergé’s Les bijoux de la Castafiore. In Système de la bande dessinée Groensteen
(1999b) proposes a semiotic approach to the medium, building on comics