07 January 2015

Still not funny




Slate has an article by Bart Beaty, the author of Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (his new book, Twelve-Cent Archie, will be published later this month), about a victim of the Paris attack:
The largest European gathering of comics professionals and fans, the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée, took place at the end of January of 2015 in the small southwestern French town of Angoulême, as it has for 42 years. In contrast to American comic book conventions like Comic Con International in San Diego, California, which are dominated by celebrity appearances and announcements of forthcoming Hollywood blockbusters, Angoulême still places its emphasis on the cartoonists who come to meet their public. The annual Sunday highlight is the announcement of the new Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême, the honorary president of the next Festival, whose career is fêted the following year with a major retrospective. This is the highest recognition that can be afforded a cartoonist in France. The 2005 winner of this prize, Georges Wolinski (photo), was one of four cartoonists killed in a recent terrorist attack in Paris that claimed at least twelve lives.
As Joshua Keating has noted already today, Charlie Hebdo was born out of controversy, and has long engaged with confrontational images of all times. The magazine (its name is from the French word for weekly newsmagazine) was resolutely satirical, attacking all comers in the name of humor. France, of course, has a strong tradition of political satire that dates back centuries. Honoré Daumier was imprisoned for six months in 1832 for his depiction of King Louis Philippe as Gargantua, and his later image of the King with the head of a pear is one of the most famous illustrations of the nineteenth century. Yet it is not only the tradition of satire that is revered in France; it is also cartooning.
Unlike in the United States, where comic strips, comic books, and editorial cartoons are generally regarded as only distantly related wings of the same art form, in France the integration of the three is much closer. Each of the four cartoonists killed worked not only for Charlie Hebdo, but for other newspapers, and for French comic book publishers. The publishing industry in France is both smaller and more central than it is in the United States. With so many cartoonists living in and around Paris, the overlap between different media are quickly eroded in a context where it can sometimes seem that every working cartoonist knows every other one and works across publishing platforms.
Wolinski’s career was symptomatic: He published comics in the daily newspaper Libération, the weeklies Charlie Hebdo and Paris-Match, and authored, with artist Georges Pichard, the comic book series Paulette. The other three cartoonists slain, Stephane Charbonnier (known as Charb), Bernard Verlhac (known as Tignous), and Jean Cabut (known as Cabu), had similarly broad profiles. Cabu, one of the founders of Hara-Kiri, the fore-runner of Charlie Hebdo, was the creator of dozens of comic books, including the long-running series Le grand Duduche. In 2006, he drew the cover illustration when Charlie Hebdo ran the Danish Mohammad cartoons. Tignous worked as an illustrator, and he was the author of eight comic books. Charb, who was the magazine’s editor since 2009, authored dozens of left-wing comic books and contributed to the well-known humor magazine Fluide Glacial and the communist daily newspaper, L’Humanité.
It’s a durable myth, especially among American cartoonists, that France is a place where comics are given the respect they rarely get on this side of the Atlantic. While the French comics industry is not without many of the same problems that have beset book publishing around the world, there is some truth to the idea that comics are more central to public life there than they are here; it’s notable that Wolinski was the recipient of the Legion of Honor, and he is not the only cartoonist to have received his country’s highest recognition. France integrated comics into the mainstream publishing industry much earlier than did the United States. Here, the distinction between comic strips and comic books was sharply drawn for most of the twentieth century, and comic books were widely regarded as a disposable form of culture for children. Comics in France and Belgium developed differently. Since the most popular newspaper comics like Hergé’s Tintin, were collected as hardcover children’s books as early as 1930, the medium was viewed as more reputable because it existed as a part of the regular book trade. In France, cartoonists can be genuine cultural celebrites. Cabu, for example, appeared regularly on television chat shows, where he drew cartoons while discussing the issues of the day.
The attack on Charlie Hebdo is shocking for its brutality and because it is an assault on the very idea of free expression. Yet the target was not just any newspaper. Today’s attackers seemed to understand the same thing that King Louis Philippe recognized in the 1830s: the visual form of the cartoon makes it viscerally powerful, and central to the French conception of caricature and critique.
Rico says that Charles Schultz is probably safe from Islamist attack...

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