Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s

Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). ix+303 pp.; cloth: ISBN 978-0-8020-9133-9 (US $65, £42); paper: ISBN 978-0-8020-9412-4 (US $30.95; £20) As Bart Beaty notes in his acknowledgments (vii), 'inadequate library collections, a dearth of secondary sources, and a lack of institutional support' have long hampered the academic study of comics. Indeed, not only does the morose assessment of the state of bande dessinee (BD) research issued by Philippe Marion in 1993 still ring true, it can even be extended to the study of comics in general: 'When it comes to BD, one struggles to find twenty books offering a genuine analysis of the medium. One finds lots of monographs, lots of complacent and redundant compilations, but only a handful of essays worthy of the name'.3 Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s may not mark the definitive end of this deplorable trend, but it does signal a marked shift in the study of comics by replacing the literary or textual models that have long dominated the field, particularly in the case of francophone scholarship, with a cultural studies approach. An Associate Professor in Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary, Bart Beaty is the author of a review column on European comics in The Comics Reporter,4 and a translator of Thierry Groensteen's Systeme de la bande dessinee.5 In Unpopular Culture, he offers a comprehensive and probing analysis of the comic-book renaissance that has defined the European comics market since the 1990s, from developments in the more established Franco-Belgian sphere to the emergence of other national spheres, including those of Spain, Germany and Finland. Fifteen years or so ago, European comics started to experience what some have called a new golden age of comics, the first having come right after the Second World War, a period marked by the launching of path-breaking weeklies and the widespread dissemination of the works of such greats as Herge, Andre Franquin and Rene Goscinny. For Beaty the most notable feature of the new golden age is a visual turn espoused by avant-garde authors, who have privileged the aesthetic over the narrative and textual dimensions of comics and who came together in the 1990s to challenge the dominance of established publishing houses, which were churning out formulaic and uninspired comics. Unpopular Culture consists of seven case studies, in which Beaty investigates the conditions of production of the nouvelle bande dessinee [new bande dessinee] and samples some of its products. In the first three chapters, Beaty studies the rise of a number of cooperatives and small presses that have come to define 1990s comics. He traces the fortunes of the famed Paris-based L'Association, of the Swiss publishers BuLB and Drozophile, the Franco-Belgian Fremok publishing house, and of the OuBaPo group, the Ouvroir de Bande Dessinee Potentielle ['Workshop on Potential Bande Dessinee'], modelled after OuLiPo, the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle. In the fourth and central chapter, Beaty shifts his focus to the internationalisation of the small-press comics movement outside the francophone area. In the last three chapters, he concentrates on some of the works that have come out of the small-press movement. Chapter 5 is devoted to the study of autobiographical comic narratives, a genre that, Beaty argues, has come to dominate the nouvelle bande dessinee in spite of independent cartoonists' rejection of the very notion of genre. In chapter 6, Beaty addresses the ways in which three different artists have come to be associated with the small-press movement while also working with established publishing houses, which have been recruiting independent artists aggressively. In the seventh and final chapter, Beaty examines Lewis Trondheim's attempt to adopt the alternative models favoured by independent presses and to satisfy the demands of a mass media market at the same time. …

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