Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...United States, for all our obsession with popular media, is remarkably behind its overseas neighbors in recognition and development of one art form some other nations consider to be as important as film or novels--the comic strip. Although Americans have started to cultivate taste for the work of artists and animators from Japan, where comics have been "taken seriously" for years, realization has yet to hit the U.S. that our Western European neighbors have been developing the graphic narrative into an adult, provocative art form for decades. The French, once again, are light-years ahead...
Still, the comics panels which are on display are well worth seeing. Many, though not all, of the panels have been translated into English; a reading knowledge of French will be helpful but not essential to figuring out what's going on. The exhibit, laid out in roughly chronological order, starts by giving the viewer background on the classic comic weeklies Spirou and Pilote--started up in Belgium in 1938 and in France in 1959, respectively--which gave shape to the gradually maturing aesthetic of French comics. The commentary will take you through the first appearance of the "clean line...
Also present, of course, is "Asterix," the second staunch pillar of French comics. The comic, a series of hilarious chronicles by Rene Goscinny and Albert Underzo, document the adventures of a village of plucky Gauls in an ancient France almost completely dominated by the Romans. Asterix's adventures have appeared as countless films and cartoons in French television and theaters, been translated into dozens of languages worldwide (including Latin) and garnered the indomitable warrior his own theme park, just a little north of Paris. (To gauge the difference in the cultural influence of comics in France and in America, consider...
Further displays guide you, via individually labeled subcategories, through several of the major genres of French and Franco-phone comics, past and present--the "naturalists," the "realists" and the "absurdists" (whose work may remind viewers of some of the more interesting and surreal experimentation done later by Robert Crumb and others in the psychedelic "head comix" of the American 1960s). In the category "Science Fiction and Fantasy," the visitor will find that a comic strip genre popular in nearly every country except, for whatever reason, the United States. Here you'll see the original incarnation of "Barbarella" in Jean-Claude...
...Superheroes," where visitors discover that, although the spandex-wearing ubermensches (and uberfraus) may be all the rage in the United States, in Europe they are used mostly for satirical purposes. Only in England does the serious superhero thrive, in incarnations like "Judge Dredd," found in the pages of adult comic weeklies like 2000 A.D. or Warriors. French and Belgian takes on the superhero yield either goofy results, like "Superdupont" by Gotlib and Jacques Lob, or satiric ones, as in the Italian "Ranxerox," a buffed-up, tank-top wearing, green-lipsticked, utterly psychotic superhero who bounces around on all fours with...