22
Mark McKinney
to including comics in debates over history, politics, and memory that are
taking place in other fields, from which this area of cultural production is
usually left out (cf. Frey 2002). The essays assembled in this volume carefully
and thoughtfully analyze political and historical dimensions of representa-
tion in bandes dessinées.
By way of conclusion, I offer here a short overview of the structure of
the present volume and of its project. Part 1 focuses on the comics tradi-
tion, including comic books considered to be classics (e.g., La bête est morte),
early periodicals (Coeurs vaillants; Le journal de Mickey; Tintin; Vaillant) and
cartoonists—mostly, though not exclusively, French and Belgian—some of
whom are widely viewed as “masters of the ninth art” (i.e., comics; cf. Screech
2005). These include Hergé (chapter 2, by Hugo Frey); Calvo and Marijac
(chapter 3, by Clare Tufts); and Baudoin, Forest, and Tardi (chapter 4, by Bart
Beaty). Chapter 4 provides a bridge between parts 1 and 2: it analyzes the ways
in which a new generation of cartoonists views its predecessors. Part 2 contin-
ues the investigation into more recent works by cartoonists from France and
Belgium: Menu and Blutch (chapter 5, by Ann Miller); Peeters and Schuiten
(chapter 6, by Fabrice Leroy). In the bandes dessinées analyzed, an exploration
of the medium’s possibilities, a reevaluation of the comics heritage, and an
interrogation of regional, national, and European identities are closely con-
nected. The yoking together of politics and the artistic reevaluation of comics
history by cartoonists today is understandable, given the strong associations
between artistic style and political ideology in the work of earlier, influential
“masters of the ninth art,” for example, Hergé or E. P. Jacobs (cf. Miller 2006).
Part 3, the longest, brings together four chapters that analyze how colonial-
ism and imperialism of Belgium (in the Congo), France (in Algeria and the
Pacific), and the United States (in Vietnam) have been represented in comics.
The artists studied are from mainland France (chapter 7, which I wrote), Bel-
gium (chapter 8, by Pascal Lefèvre),
26
the French possession of New Caledonia
(chapter 9, by Amanda Macdonald), and Switzerland (chapter 10, by Cécile
Vernier Danehy). These chapters move the field of investigation toward what
some might view as the periphery of French-language comics and issues, and
contribute in this way to the volume’s general interrogation of the ways in
which bandes dessinées express themes of power and identity (national, Eu-
ropean, Western). However, as will be clear by that point in the volume, in
some ways the so-called Franco-Belgian center has always been fractured,
and built on discourses of otherness and exoticism. Moreover, part 3 is not
mainly about peripheral cartoonists or comics: many of the artists studied
there—Baru, Cosey, Hergé, and Jijé—are among the most celebrated Belgian,