McKinney M. History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels
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Part 2
Political Reportage and Globalism in Bandes dessinées
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97
Citizenship and City Spaces
Bande dessinée as RePoRtaGe
RepoRtage in ComiCs and Bande dessinée
Reportage has come to take a prominent place in contemporary bande
dessinée.
1
I begin here with a brief survey of the genre, to suggest the range
of work produced under this heading. The remainder of my chapter of-
fers a close textual analysis of a highly accomplished example of the genre,
“La Présidente” [The Woman President], drawn by Blutch (i.e., Christian
Hincker) with texts by Jean-Christophe Menu. “La Présidente” supports
my argument that the signifying practices of the medium make it particu-
larly compelling as a vehicle for reportage.
One of the most enduringly famous of all bande dessinée characters,
Tintin, was a reporter, even if, as has often been noted, he is never seen tak-
ing notes or filing a story. His adventures over the period from 1929, when
he exposes the evils of Bolshevism, to 1976, when he sides with guerrillas
in Latin America, amount to a chronicle of twentieth-century history, and
Hergé’s oeuvre is all the more fascinating for the evolution of the ideo-
logical consensus that underpins the hero’s mission in righting wrongs.
Reportage as a nonfictional genre has appeared more recently in bande
dessinée, and its emergence has coincided with the renaissance since the
1990s of small publishing houses specializing in comics and graphic novels
C
haPteR five
—ann milleR
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Ann Miller
in France and Belgium: L’Association, Ego comme X, Cornélius, and Vertige
Graphic (among others) are dedicated to the exploration of the potential of
the medium in relation to both form and content. The desire to break with
the genres which dominated mainstream bande dessinée led these publishing
houses to encourage experimentation with nonfictional material, including
autobiography, biography, and reportage, the latter influenced by the work
of the prize-winning Maltese American artist Joe Sacco, whose Palestine was
published in France in 1996 by Vertige Graphic, and whose subsequent re-
portages arising out of visits to Bosnia and Serbia were published by another
small press in France, Editions Rackham (Sacco 2001a, 2006). Mainstream
publishers, keen to target the new readership created by the independents,
moved quickly to occupy the same terrain.
The rapid growth and artistic impact of bande dessinée reportage is at-
tested by the decision of the Centre Pompidou to hold an exhibition called
“BD Reporters,” from December 2006 to April 2007, which brought together
the work of twenty-three artists, including Sacco himself. Not all of these
have the political ambition of Sacco’s work, some artists preferring instead
to portray atmosphere and subjective states of mind. This is the case for Ed-
mond Baudoin, whose Le chemin de Saint-Jean (2004) details the changing
appearance of a childhood haunt as it reflects his own mood, his graphic line
ranging from delicate to crude. The outer landscape seems less important
here than the inner landscape that it reveals. In contrast, Philippe Dupuy
and Charles Berberian deploy their elegant graphic style to convey the so-
phisticated glamour of their subject matter. The images in New-York carnets
(1996) have all the stylishness of The New Yorker, and Tanger carnets (2004)
has an orientalist allure. Both were published by Cornélius. The Carnets de
voyage 2000–3 (2003) by Jacques de Loustal, published by the well-respected
tradebook publisher Éditions du Seuil, offers a series of impressions of ex-
otic destinations from Ireland to Namibia, but whereas Dupuy and Berberian
maintain a certain ironic detachment, Loustal’s images are steeped in sensual-
ity and hint at erotic secrets.
Glamour is less in evidence in the work of a number of other artists
who, like Sacco, bring a political perspective to bear on the genre. Etienne
Davodeau’s Les mauvaises gens (2005), published by the mainstream bande
dessinée publisher Delcourt, falls midway between biography and reportage,
offering a painstakingly respectful record of his parents’ account of their
political education in the post–World War II period. Both manual workers,
brought up in a deeply conservative Catholic milieu, they gradually gain in
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Bande dessinée as Reportage
class consciousness and militancy. Neither is at first convinced that their story
is worth recounting, but Davodeau uses his sober, realist line to emphasize
the exemplarity of their transformation. The album
2
won the “best scenario”
prize at Angoulême in 2006.
In the three volumes of Le photographe (2003–6), published by the main-
stream bande dessinée publisher Dupuis, Emmanuel Guibert, like Davodeau,
brings careful realism to the service of someone else’s story. These three books,
classed among the select group of “essential” comic books at Angoulême in
2007, are composed from the contact prints taken by the photographer Didier
Lefèvre on a Doctors Without Borders mission into Afghanistan in 1986, at
the time of the Soviet occupation. The photographs have been rearranged
into a narrative account by Guibert and Frédéric Lemercier, with the gaps
where no photograph exists filled in by Guibert’s drawings. The juxtaposition
of drawings with photographs reinforces the documentary, almost diagram-
matic, effect of this record of the work that the doctors carried out in extreme
conditions, and, more particularly, of the lives of the mujahidine with whom
they traveled.
The Québécois artist Guy Delisle produced Shenzhen in 2000 and Pyong-
yang in 2003, both for L’Association, based on his experiences of supervis-
ing the production of animated cartoons outsourced to artists in China and
North Korea respectively. Delisle makes no pretense of objectivity, eschewing
both the reverential line of Davodeau and the referential line of Guibert, in
favor of a highly personal vision of his encounter with two cultures from
which he feels alienated. Delisle uses a deceptively naïve drawing style, and
makes formidable use of the resources of bande dessinée. In Pyongyang, for
example, the all-pervasive impression of ideological uniformity is rendered
by a vertiginous mise en abyme, as the Kim Il-Sung badge worn by his son
Kim Jong-Il is gradually enlarged to reveal that the great leader is wearing
a badge portraying his son, which in its turn is gradually enlarged, only to
reveal a portrait of the father wearing a badge portraying the son, and so on,
ad infinitum (Delisle 2003: 30).
“La Présidente” is similarly virtuoso in its exploitation of the potential of
the medium. It came out in 1996, the same year as the French translation of Sac-
co’s Palestine, and so predates all but one of the examples discussed above. As
well as providing an account of the daily routine of the female politician who
is its subject, it dramatizes the process of its own engendering, as the authors
abandon fiction for reportage. Before looking closely at the twenty-eight-page
strip itself, we will consider its publishing context.
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Ann Miller
RepoRtage in “La pRésidente”
The twenty-six-page comic strip appeared in a volume entitled Noire est la
terre [Black is the Earth] published in 1996 by Autrement, a publisher with an
alternative agenda and an intellectual readership. It was the fourth in a col-
lection called not bandes dessinées but histoires graphiques [graphic stories],
a choice of term presumably intended to reinforce the seriousness of the un-
dertaking. The volumes tackle heavyweight subject matter: the first three, all
published in 1994, cover L’argent roi [Money is King], Le retour de Dieu [God’s
Return], and Avoir 20 ans en l’an 2000 [To Be Twenty Years Old in the Year
2000]. The collection was edited by Thierry Groensteen, in a format which
clearly distinguishes it from mainstream bande dessinée. Like albums pro-
duced by independent publishers such as L’Association and Ego comme X, it
has soft covers and flaps, described by Genette as “une marque de prestige”
[a sign of prestige] (Genette 1987: 30). The series was not successful. In his
Internet journal, in an entry for 1995, Groensteen expresses his disappoint-
ment at the poor sales: the third volume had sold only twenty-five hundred
copies. He blames the failure of the first three volumes on the conservatism
of bande dessinée readership, on Autrement’s inefficient distribution, and on
himself, for being insufficiently interventionist in cases where the scenarios
were weak. He admits that he was reluctant to be too demanding, given the
paltriness of the fees on offer to the artists (Groensteen 1995).
The charge of weakness could certainly not be leveled against the Menu/
Blutch strip, or against the contributions of Lewis Trondheim or Chantal
Montellier. Trondheim’s strip is a witty observation of the rural fantasy of
city dwellers as it dissolves into anxieties and bickering, whereas the ever-
combative Montellier offers a futurist fable about a female ecologist militant
who becomes prime minister, thereby provoking misogynistic reactions. Not
all of the scenarios in the 1996 volume would be similarly exempted, however.
Hunt Emerson relies on a plot involving evil capitalists who want to build
a factory that will pollute the countryside, in a strip heavily sprinkled with
magic mushrooms and gloop. The impenetrability of a strip by Frédéric Bé-
zian may also be attributed to poor writing, although it could, alternatively,
be taken as evidence of the capacity of bande dessinée to require a disposition
esthétique [aesthetic disposition] beyond that of this reader at least (Bourdieu
1979: iii).
“La Présidente” is the most complex and interesting of the five strips.
It begins with a fiction based on an ecological disaster, in which the presi-
dent and his ministers and advisers attempt to manipulate public opinion
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Bande dessinée as Reportage
by claiming that the Green Party has deliberately sabotaged a nuclear power
station in order to gain votes.
3
A number of classic bande dessinée techniques
are in evidence in this part of the story. The Eiffel Tower appears in the first
frame as a metonym for Paris, the center of decision making, followed by the
gilded mirrors and the Aubusson carpet of the Elysée Palace,
4
which evoke
the milieu of a powerful and privileged elite. The interframe space is used to
convey speed of movement, as the stages of the hastily summoned minister’s
journey to the palace are elided, and the vehicles are drawn as having left the
ground, their élan emphasized by speed lines. Suspense is created by allu-
sions to time: a clock in the bottom right-hand frame of the first page ticks
away as the crisis deepens. The dramatic events are reframed on television
screens, recalling Hergé’s use of newspapers to inscribe the fictional world
into a preexisting reality (Fresnault-Deruelle 1972: 112), and the impact of the
news is heightened by the progressive increase in the size of the screen across
a sequence of three frames, giving the impression of a zoom. The reader’s
sense of being plunged right into the fictional world is intensified through the
absence of recitatives; instead, the president and his entourage are deployed
as second-level narrators, interpreting the televisual images with cynicism
and taking it for granted that political strategy involves deception and spin.
However, halfway through the third page, the boundaries of the fiction
are transgressed as Jean-Christophe Menu appears in the space between the
frames, the space of the enunciation, and a speech balloon in the adjacent
frame containing the word “merde” [shit] takes on an ambiguous status
(figure 1). It seems simultaneously to belong to the diegesis, emanating from
an out-of-frame speaker, and to represent a metaleptic intrusion by Menu
himself into the fiction, with which he expresses irritation. Prior to this page
some indications had in any case been offered that the artists were deliber-
ately undermining the credibility of their story. Writers of political fiction are
always faced with the question of how far to make the fictional world congru-
ent with the real world, and specifically, with the question of how far charac-
ters should be identifiable as real-life politicians. The president in this story is
not identified by name, and is clearly neither François Mitterrand nor Jacques
Chirac, although he looks a little like Charles de Gaulle, who perhaps stands as
a generic presidential figure. Similarly, the spokesperson for the Green Party
is not named, but bears a certain resemblance to Dominique Voynet. How-
ever, Blutch and Menu make it hard to believe in any of these figures by using
names of bande dessinée characters for some of the other politicians. One is
called Scramoustache, an allusion to an extraterrestrial (Scrameustache in the
original) drawn by Gos in Spirou, and another is called Cubitus, after the dog
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Ann Miller
Fig. 1. Jean-Christophe menu breaks the fictional illusion. from Blutch and menu (1996) “la
Présidente,” n.p.; © Blutch / JCmenu / l’association.
drawn by Dupa in Tintin magazine.
5
The story also seems to slip into parody
once the fictional illusion has been completely broken by the appearance of
Menu at his desk. The dialogue now takes on the redundancy of a discussion
between Dupont and Dupond:
6
“Pour être propres, nous sommes propres”
[As far as clean goes, we’re clean now]; “Vous l’avez dit” [You said it]. This is
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Bande dessinée as Reportage
not quite “Je dirai même plus . . . ” [And let me add to that . . .]
7
but it seems
to be veering in that direction. The president’s final words are “Passons à
côté, messieurs” [Let’s go next door, gentlemen], which suggests some meta-
narrative insight on his part into the demise of his own central role as he
heads out of the frame. The suspense at the end of this page is also meta-
narrative, as the reader wonders what will happen to the scenario.
The answer arrives on the next page, which is devoted to a discussion
between the two authors. They decide to abandon the fiction, on the grounds
that it recalls too closely the postatomic scenarios familiar from 1970s bande
dessinée: “J’ai peur qu’on s’embourbe dans une espèce d’histoire baba post-
atomique à la Auclair ou à la Cothias, tu vois” [I’m afraid that we’re going to
get stuck in a worn-out rut, a kind of hippy, post-nuclear story like Auclair
or Cothias would do];
8
“Un truc ‘Bédé’ ” [A “Bédé” thing]; “L’horreur” [Hor-
rific]. The danger no longer resides within the diegesis; it lies instead in the
temptation to fall into this type of plot, and the image of the nuclear power
station in flames may now be read as mise en abyme of bande dessinée in its
hippy period. This rejection of ancestors (which, however, excludes series
evocative of childhood reading
9
) is clearly part of the strategy of renewal of
the medium that has been led by artists from the independent publishing
houses. Blutch and Menu will now go on to demonstrate another plank of
the strategy: that of extending it beyond fiction.
They decide to produce a bande dessinée reportage that will document two
days in the working life of a real politician, Marie-Christine Blandin, the first
Green to hold elected office. Blandin had become president of the region of Nord-
Pas de Calais after the 1992 regional elections had resulted in a hung council.
10
Blutch and Menu’s visit to the region is arranged with Blandin’s public relations
adviser, and is deliberately timed to coincide with the arrival of a delegation from
Mali, including the president and his wife. The next section of this chapter will
discuss the representation given by the two artists to Blandin’s project, particu-
larly in relation to a spatialized conception of citizenship and regional identity,
before considering how the strip demonstrates the particular aptness of bande
dessinée as a vehicle for reportage. The final section will use the strip to exemplify
a more general discussion of what bande dessinée can bring to reportage.
”La pRésidente” and HeR pRojeCt
Referentiality is established from the outset by exact details of place and
time. It is stated that the authors set off from the Gare du Nord on Thursday,