1. Translators’ note: Bande dessinée is technically “drawn strip” and is used generically to mean all forms of comics. Throughout this text we have substituted the generic “comics” for “bande dessinée.”
2. “Semiotic Approaches to Figurative Narration” in The Semiotic Web, ed. T. A. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok (1989; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990). My citations are taken from the French manuscript supplied by the author. It is noteworthy that the author has not retained the critical discourse on the ideology of comics, which inspired several works in the 1970s and 1980s.
3. Ibid. The author analyzes, as an example of this new approach, the proceedings of the Actes du colloque that I organized in Cerisy in August 1987, Bande dessinée, récit et modernité (Paris: Futuropolis, 1988).
4. Langage et cinéma (Paris: Larousse, 1971; new edition Albatross, 1977), p. 155.
5. “Les Peanuts: un graphisme idiomatique,” Communications, n. 24, Le Seuil, 1976, 108–139. Citation, p. 113.
6. Cf. “Comics lesen,” Untersuchungen zur Textualitität von Comics (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), pp. 15–35.
7. Cf. Groupe Mu. Traité du signe visuel. Pour une rhétorique de l’image (Paris: Le Seuil, “La coleur des idées,” 1992), pp. 149–152.
8. Cf. notably Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma, t. 1 (Paris: Klincksieck, “Esthétique,” 1968), pp. 67–72, 87–92. Henri Van Lier arrived at the same conclusions starting from a different approach to the notion of the sign which privileged the “effects of the field.” Cf. L’Animal signé (Rhode-Saint-Genèse: Albert De Visscher, 1980), pp. 37–75.
9. “Sémiologie de la langue,” Semiotica I/2, La Haye: Mouton & Co, 1969, p. 129.
10. Id., Semiotica I/1, p. 12, and I/2, p. 132.
11. Roger Odin, Cinéma et production de sens (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), p. 89.
12. Fênetre jaune cadmium, ou Les dessous de la peinture (Paris: Le Seuil, “Fiction & Cie,” 1984), p. 302.
13. The texts were collected in the volume Palettes (Gallimard, “L’infini,” 1998).
14. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit., p. 56
15. Art. cit., pp. 113–114. My italics.
16. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit., pp. 107–109.
17. Cf. Langage et cinéma, op. cit., notably chapter VI. 3.
18. Following Metz (Essais sur la signification au cinéma, t. 1, op. cit., p. 40), I borrow this word from Gilbert Cohen-Séat, for what he designates “not the effectiveness of a particular step or a precise act, but the possibility that belongs specifically to a means of expression.”
19. “Les lieux de la bande dessinée. Trois planches exemplaires d’Andreas Martens,” Protée, vol. 19, no. 1: Narratologie: état des lieux, Université du Québec, Chicoutimi, hiver 1991, p. 89.
20. Détournement d’écriture (Paris: Minuit, “Critique,” 1989), p. 72.
21. Preface to André Gaudreault, Du littéraire au filmique. Système du récit (Paris: Klincksieck, “Méridiens,” 1988), pp. ix–xiii. For Ricoeur, the “principle virtue” of this work “is to put film back on equal footing with the stage, at the same time that it puts the stage back on equal footing with writing, thus freeing the film critic from the guardianship—involuntary—of literary criticism that had the right of seniority.”
22. For more details, cf. Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters, Töpffer: l’invention de la bande dessinée (Paris: Hermann, “Savoir: sur l’art,” 1994), pp. 88–93.
23. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 132.
24. Moreover, this approach never ceased to provide grist for the mill to the adversaries of comics. Because of its “mixed” or “hybrid” character, its bastardization and impurity was adduced very early on, as if the collaboration of the image and text led inescapably to the degradation or the compromising of each other.
25. Cf. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Narration visuelle et interprétation,” a paper presented at the Colloque Narration et image fixe (London, 17–18 March 1995), unpublished at this time. This twelve-page manuscript was sent to me by Mireille Ribière, organizer of the conference.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid. To clarify this citation, it is undoubtedly useless to recall that, according to Schaeffer’s particular terms, “the monstration is an image given to see, whereas the representation is that which it returns, about what it is.”
28. Ibid.
29. Régis Debray has taken the opposite tack when he writes: “Logocentrism made us forget the body. We spontaneously believe that to symbolize, is to verbalize. And if it was to mimic? Not only joining the gesture to the parole, but signifying by the gesture,” cf. “Pourquoi le spectacle?,” Les Cahiers de médiologie, no. 1: La Querelle du spectacle, Paris: Gallimard, 1st quarter, 1996, p. 11.
30. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, op.cit. This opinion was also defended in its time by Tzvetan Todorov. Cf. notably Les Genres du discourse (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978).
31. Cf. François Dagognet, Écriture et iconographie (Paris: Vrin, 1973), p. 56.
32. Thierry Groensteen. “Plaisir de la bande dessinée,” 9e Art, no. 2, Angoulême: CNBDI, January 1997, pp. 14–21, cit. p. 20.
33. “Le fantasme de la parole,” Europe, no. 720: La bande dessinée, Paris, April 1989, pp. 54–65, cit. p. 54.
34. “Federico Fellini sage comme la lune,” interview in Le Soir, Bruxelles, 1 August 1990, p. 3 of MAD supplement.
35. Du littéraire au filmique, op. cit., p. 13.
36. Michel Marie et Marc Vernet, “Entretien avec Christian Metz,” Iris, no. 10: Christian Metz et la théorie du cinéma, Colloque de Cerisy, Paris: Klincksieck, “Méridiens,” April 1990, p. 290.
37. Ibid.
38. This title voluntarily echoes an article that I previously published in Cahiers de la bande dessinée under the title “L’introuvable spécificité” (no. 70, July–August 1986, pp. 43–47). Indeed, this text was the first to approach the questions that are discussed here, from presuppositions that have, admittedly, evolved considerably in the interval.
39. Paris: Minuit, “Critique,” 1978.
40. Cf. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 2. A second volume, entitled The Nineteenth Century, was published in 1990 by the same press. The first of the four conditions (“There must be a sequence of separate images”) closely corresponds, it seems to me, to the criteria of iconic solidarity that I will propose a bit further on. The other three conditions (preponderance of the image over the text, distribution by the mass media, telling a moral and topical story) are, as for the first, insufficiently precise, and, for the two others, easily refutable.
41. “Mislabeled Books,” Funny World, no. 16, Michigan, 1974, p. 41.
42. Casterman, “E3,” Tournai, 1983, p. 46. The third and fourth criteria advanced by Antoine Roux, “comics are a chain of images” and “comics are a rhythmic story,” have not lost their pertinence in my eyes.
43. “Antécédents et définition de la bande dessinée,” in Comics: l’art de la bande dessinée, ed. Walter Hergeg and David Pascal (Zürich, The Graphis Press, 1972), pp. 9–13, cit. p. 11.
44. I can only point to my “Histoire de la bande dessinée muette,” 9e Art, Angoulême: CNBDI, no. 2, January 1997, pp. 60–75, and no. 3, January 1998, pp. 92–105.
45. Cf. David Carrier, “Comics and the art of moving pictures: Piero della Francesca, Hergé and George Herriman,” Word & Image, London-Washington: Taylor and Francis, vol. 13, no. 4, October–December 1997, p. 317.
46. Cinéma et production de sens, op. cit., pp. 49–50.
47. I have intentionally mentioned only the forms where narration is a natural slope or a possible application. There exists other series of fixed interdependent images that obey the principles of specific correlation. Thus, architectural drawings represent the same building, for which it is important that the outline, section, and elevation are in agreement. The images of a comic are not subjugated to a referential solidarity of this order, except when the author makes this specific choice, with a concern for realism.
48. Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction (Paris: Le Seuil, “Poétique,” 1991), pp. 11–12.
49. Once again it must be seen that this is situated at the intersection of two distinct logics. Thus, to retain as a criterion of definition the fact that comics can be entrusted to printing creates the challenge of the original page, or its projection on a screen. It follows from this end, for me—but, as we have seen, not for David Kunzle—that an unprinted comic itself does not cease to be a comic. The system that I propose pays attention to the language of comics, not the institution.
50. This paragraph summarizes very schematically the first pages (pp. 7–21) of Fiction et diction, op. cit., where all the citations can be located.
51. “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,” in Bande dessinée, récit et modernité, ed. Thierry Groensteen (Colloque de Cerisy, Paris: Futuropolis-CNBDI, 1988), p. 5.
52. In the 1950s and 1960s there appeared in French daily newspapers a large number of vertical “strips,” intended for a readership that was essentially feminine. These contained “famous lovers,” “great judicial errors,” “unusual destinies,” and the life of “tragic queens.” Drawings accompanied these slabs of text. The genre became outdated, totally disappearing by the beginning of the 1980s. On this subject, see notably Guy Lehideux, “Un dessinateur de bandes verticales, Charles Popineau,” Les Cahiers Pressibus, no. 4, Tours, April 1994, pp. B2–B7.
53. Letter published in Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, Grenoble-Bruxelles, Glénat, no. 80, March 1988, p. 8.
54. Translators’ note: The situation that the author describes finds an analogue in the English language. The term “comics” originates in the early twentieth century as a description of daily or weekly strips in newspapers, the majority of which were humorous, and is akin to “funnies.” The term has outlived its original meaning and is now used to encompass the entire range of expression in the medium. A cognitive dissonance can occur in instances where the term “comics” is used to describe works that take part in a variety of genres, such as tragedy, romance, or the epic. Similarly, the term “comic book” seems to refer to a collection of funny stories, but in fact describes all types of publications containing comics, most often in magazine, rather than book, format.
55. Although the word came to me from La Textique by Jean Ricardou, I will not be employing it in the very precise and restrictive meaning that he has given it (in Ricardou, arthrology, which operates on the two modes of accretion and concretion, is opposed to isology, where the modalities are replication and representation). Cf. “Éléments de Textique, I, II, III, and IV,” Conséquences, no. 10, pp. 13–14, Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 1987–1990.
56. Cf. Cinéma 1 and 2 (Paris: Minuit, 1983 and 1985).
57. The spatio-topical parameters that I will distinguish adopt all of the geometry that is the science of spatial figures. It would therefore be possible to avoid spatio-topical neologism and to simply use the geometric term. However, the proposed terminology has the advantage of distinguishing, without completely separating, two orders of curiosity: the description of figures (panels) in itself, and the observation of their situated coordinates.
58. Cf. my article “La planche, un éspace narratif,” in L’Histoire . . . par la bande, ed. Gilles Ciment and Odette Mitterand (Paris: Syros, 1993), pp. 41–46.
59. On the adequacy between the fable and the medium, and the possibilities of the same story from one medium to another, permit me to recall my essay “Fictions sans frontière,” in La Transécriture, Pour une théorie de l’adaptation, ed. André Gaudreault and Thierry Groensteen (actes du Colloque de Cerisy, Montréal-Angoulême, Nota Bene-CNBDI, 1998), pp. 9–29.
60. Cf. La Méthode, t. 3: La connaissance de la connaissance (Paris: Le Seuil, 1986), pp. 98–101.
61. Claude Moliterni, in Bande dessinée et figuration narrative, Musée des Arts Décoratifs/Palais du Louvre, March 1967, p. 187.
1. La Structure absente (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), pp. 187–188.
2. On this subject see “Colle et ciseaux,” in L’Année de la bande dessinée 87/88, ed. Stan Barets and Thierry Groensteen (Glénat, 1988), pp. 94–95. Gilles Ciment interviewed the layout artists who produced these “adaptations” for Éditions J’ai Lu and Livre de Poche.
3. Christian Metz, Film language: a semiotics of the cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 109.
4. Ibid. p. 119.
5. André Gaudreault, Du Littéraire au filmique, op. cit., p. 49.
6. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (University of California Press, 1985), p. 57.
7. Id. Note on p. 60. The column entitled “Unforgettable Panels” (Cases mémorables), which, following a suggestion by Pierre Sterckx, ran during the glory days of Cahiers de la bande dessinée from February 1984 (no. 56) and May 1986 (no. 69), had as its mission testifying to the pregnancy of certain panels in the imagination of readers. Aside from the inaugural text by Sterckx in no. 56, for a theoretical balance sheet of this experience see also the debate transcribed in no. 70 (“Comment lit-on une bande dessinée?,” pp. 60–61) as well as pp. 12–13, 20–21, and 30 of Benoît Peeters’ book, Case, planche, récit. Comment lire une bande dessinée (Tournai-Paris, Casterman, 1991).
8. For an analysis of this “meta-comics” category and several others, cf. Thierry Groensteen, “Bandes désignées. De la réflexivité dans les bandes dessinées,” Conséquences, no. 13/14: Contrebandes, Paris, Les Impressions nouvelles, 2nd quarter, 1990, pp. 132–165.
9. “L’homme qui lit,” Conséquences, no. 13–14, Contrebandes, op. cit., pp. 64–104.
10. Ibid. pp. 68 and 72.
11. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 38, no. 6. According to Peeters, the hyperframe defines, for each book, “a constant page format.” But the author notes that “it is admittedly possible to conceptualize a comic that, at every instant, can be in the process of redefining the format of its pages. In order to escape aestheticism, it must be developed from a system of rules capable of reporting these incessant variations.” It appears to me that the experimental “visual novel” of Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage (Les Impressions nouvelles, 1986), manifests, among other remarkable virtues, that which satisfies this program.
12. “The margin frames the drawing in a page and infiltrates the same, overcoming its white space between panel and panel.” Paper at the Colloque de Montpellier on La marge dans la bande dessinée, June 1986. The manuscript was provided to me by the author; I do not believe that it has been published.
13. For more developments on this point, cf. Louis Marin, “Le cadre de la repésentation et quelques-unes de ses figures,” Les Cahiers du musée national d’Art moderne, no. 24, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, Summer 1988, pp. 62–81.
14. These “black spans” replace the thin lines of which they are ordinarily composed, the frame of the panels, and the interstitial gutters that separate these same panels. They suggest the existence of a homogeneous base—of the type: a black rectangle with the dimensions of the hyperframe—on which the panels have been superimposed.
15. As it has already been noted by Yves Frémion: “[A]t every moment, the reader will no more encounter a panel but a complexity of images, of icons bound between them, forming a moment of the narration. . . . Double-page by double-page, the reader advances in the story. . . . From narrative plates to narrative plates” (cf. “Case, icône et vignette: La case n’existe pas,” in Gilles Ciment and Odette Mitterand, L’Histoire . . . par la bande, op. cit.), p. 39.
16. To borrow a term that Raillon utilizes in its Ricardoulian meaning. According to Jean Ricardou: “By metarepresentation, one understands every maneuver that organically exalts certain of the parameters of writing that the representation cancels” (cited in Raillon, op. cit., p. 72).
17. Cf. Thierry Groensteen, “Conversations avec François Schuiten,” Les cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 69, Glénat, Grenoble-Bruxelles, May–June, 1986, p. 11. Schuiten immediately provides a new example attesting to the importance of the location: “It was imperative, in La Tour, that the color appears discretely, in the interior corner of a page on the right hand side” (my emphasis).
18. The extract dates from May 27, 1914. Cf. the edition in pocket book format “Biblio,” no. 3001, pp. 347–348. These two pages were created in January 1989 at the request of the Centre national de la bande dessinée et de l’image. Two other adaptations of the same text exist, by André Juillard and Jean-Louis Tripp. The three versions were published together in 9e Art, no. 1, Angoulême, CNBDI, January 1996, pp. 50–55.
19. Initially published in Madriz, no. 13, this brief story gave its title to the author’s first book, La Orilla (Madrid: Sombras, 1985).
20. Vingt leçons sur l’image et le sens (Paris: Edilig, “Médiatheque,” 1982), p. 11.
21. I make allusion here to nothing but the cinema with a realist perspective, while not ignoring the fact that it works differently in animated cinema.
22. The off-screen suggested by film (the filmic off-screen) cannot have any reality—thus when they have constructed nothing but the fragment of the decor that occupies the frame—the physical (profilmic) off-screen does not exist except the one that merges with the entire space of the studio or of the chosen place of filming.
23. On the concepts of “direction,” of “framing” and, corollorary, of “linking,” cf. André Gaudreault, op. cit., chap IX: “Système du récit filmique,” pp. 117–131. On the connections between comics and the techniques of storyboarding, see my text “Du cinéma dessiné à la bande dessinée,” in Benoît Peeters, Jacques Faton, Philippe de Pierpont, Storyboard: le cinéma dessiné (Crisnée, Yellow Now, 1992), pp. 172–183.
24. Cf., notably, L’Archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, “Bibliothèque des sciences humaines,” 1969, pp. 14–15.
25. I will recall simply that the dogma of the graphic homogeneity does not exist in Japanese comics, where the “the rule of the style of facets” reigns, cf. Thierry Groensteen, L’Univers des mangas (Tournai, Casterman, 1991), pp. 47–48.
26. Benoît Peeters suggests giving this surrounding space the name “péri-field,” cf. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 15.
27. Cf. Jan Baetens, “Pour une poétique de la gouttière,” Word & Image, vol. 7, no. 4, October–December 1991, pp. 365–376.
28. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit., chap. XI: “Sémiotique et rhétorique du cadre,” p. 378.
29. Lire la bande dessinée, op. cit., p. 21.
30. Gilles Deleuze, The movement-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota, 1986), p. 12.
31. Vingt leçons sur l’image et le sens, op. cit., p. 14.
32. Cf. Élements de textique, Jean Ricardou, op. cit.
33. Henri Van Lier, Les Cahiers de la photographie, hors série: Philosophie de la photographie (Laplume, ACCP, 1983), p. 17.
34. Cf. Bruno Lecigne, “Une esthétique de la jouissance,” Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 52, special Guido Crepax, Grenoble, Glénat, first quarter, 1982, p. 21.
35. The “suiveur de regard” is a high-tech device that, with the help of infrared cameras connected to a computer, can record and then, with a printer, reproduce the eye’s movement on a given object, in this case a comic book page. The research undertaken in this domain by Christian Alberelli at the end of the 1980s has not yet been published.
36. Numa Sadoul, Tintin et moi: Entretiens avec Hergé (Tournai: Casterman, 1975), p. 56.
37. “Une esthétique de la jouissance,” op. cit. p. 23. It is necessary, on this question, to make a particular reference to manga.
38. Cf. my criticism of Cromwell Stone and Cyrrus in Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 61, Grenoble-Bruxelles, Glénat, January–February, 1985, p. 55.
39. “Cadre, plan, lecture,” Communications, no. 24, La bande dessinée et sons discours, Paris: Le Seuil, 1976, p. 97.
40. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 8.
41. This story was published in Raw, vol. 1 no. 2, New York, 1980, and republished in the anthology Read Yourself Raw (New York, Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 36–37.
42. Workshop of Potential Literature. Since 1992 there has existed an Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle (OuBaPo) (Workshop of Potential Comics). One will not be surprised to find the story by Bill Griffith in my text “Un premier bouquet de contraintes,” OuBaPo, Oupus 1 (Paris: L’Association, 1996), pp. 13–59.
43. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit. p. 96.
44. De la représentation (Paris: Le Seuil/Gallimard, “Hautes Études,” 1994), p. 317.
45. This story was published in Madriz, no. 29, Madrid, July–August, 1986.
46. This book was written by Martine Van and illustrated by François Mutterer, published by Futuropolis in 1983. For more details on this work, cf. Thierry Groensteen, “Carpets’ bazaar, le rouleau sans visage,” Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 72, Grenoble-Bruxelles, Glénat, Nov.–Dec. 1986, pp. 87–90.
47. Louis Marin described Trajan’s Column as “the volume of images that the emperor and his architect Apollodore of Damas stretched vertically from its funereal base as far as the prince, to allow it to contemplate the city” (De la répresentation, op. cit., p. 220).
48. “La bande dessinée ou le picture déconstruit,” Conséquences, no. 13/14: Contrebandes, Paris, Les Impressions nouvelles, 2nd quarter, 1990, p. 41.
49. “Un inventeur du dimanche,” in Little Nemo au pays de Winsor McCay, ed. Thierry Groensteen (Toulouse, CNBDI-Milan, 1990), p. 33.
50. Ibid.
51. Although the first chapters were published in (À suivre) from 1982, the album published by Casterman only dates from 1993. Several stories from the book were translated in Drawn and Quarterly in 1994 under the title “It Was the War of the Trenches.”
52. “Le champ tardien,” op. cit., p. 31.
53. Jean-Claude Glasser, “Entre rire et délire: movies et funnies,” in CinémAction, hors série, Cinéma et bande dessinée, ed. Gilles Ciment, Courbevoie, Corlet-Télérama, Summer, 1990, p. 208.
54. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 57. The two following citations also come from the same page.
55. “Quand la bande desinée l’écrit,” M/I/S (Mots/Images/Sons), Colloque international de Rouen, pp. 14–17 March 1989, Collège international de philosophie/Centre international de recherches en esthétique musicale, p. 173.
56. In the Middle Ages the form and the position of the phylactery in the image indexed its signification, above all when these word balloons were left blank (empty of all verbal inscription). Presented by a majestic character, they signified the possession of truth and wisdom; in the form of a column, they represented doctrine; held and oriented, their meaning changed according to whether they were ascending or descending, etc. Cf. François Garnier, Le Langage de l’image au Moyen Age, II: Grammaire des gestes (Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1989).
57. “Le fantasme de la parole,” op. cit., p. 55.
58. Sometimes the balloons lightly overlap, in order to indicate an order in the reading, to materialize a rapid verbal exchange, or even to suggest a brouhaha that renders the messages inaudible. The “textual zone” appears then to lose a bit of its flatness, but these minor infringements on the rule reflect on the particular semiotic codes of comics, not the general laws of representation, which, as we shall see, are involved in this discussion. More frequently, the character that speaks encroaches upon the balloon and partially masks it; his speech appears then to serve as the background for the figure that he cuts. This encroachment does not produce an effect of concealment because the reader knows that, by convention, the text bypasses or enframes the character without ceding anything to him in terms of content.
59. La Perspective comme forme symbolique, trans. from the German by Guy Ballangé (Paris: Minuit, “Le Sens commun,” 1975), p. 39.
60. Fenêtre jaune cadmium, op. cit., p. 296.
61. On the qualities of lettering used in comics, see Bruno Lecigne, “L’esprit de la lettre,” Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, no. 64, Grenoble-Bruxelles, Glénat, July–August 1985, pp. 87–89. The author notes: “One cannot think to look or to evaluate a lettering according to plastic criteria, because its aesthetic or decorative components must be reduced so as not to trouble the function of readability. Yet it is necessary to base an iconology of the letter in comics. Perhaps also a graphology.” And to be precise: “Despite the code (grosso modo: the typographic simulation), the majority of letters are ‘signed,’ and certainly are beautiful.”
62. “L’expression du pouvoir dans “La Grande Menace”: essai d’étude quantitative,” A la rencontre de Jacques Martin (collectif) (Marseille, Bédésup, 1985), pp. 53–71.
63. We need to verify, with regard to the balloon, a more general law: that the topical parameter does not only apply to the panel but also to the units of the lower level; the same if it can be added to whatever other parameter and specify it.
64. Only The Shooting Star and The Secret of the Unicorn have preserved, in all their editions up to this day, balloons that are stuck to the frame. Published directly in color (in 1942 and 1944), these albums were never redrawn for republication, but were only subjected to localized retouching. I draw attention to this (certainly minor) part of the story because it appears to have escaped the interpreters of even the most trivial aspects of the Tintinian saga. Benoît Peeters, in the pages of Monde d’Hergé (Casterman, 1983), devoted to the “metamorphosis of the books,” makes no allusion to the fact that the balloons were redrawn. And Frédéric Soumois makes the same impasse on this point in Dossier Tintin (Jacques Antoine, 1987), for example, when he writes that, in the modernization of Lotus bleu in 1946, “the original frames were, essentially, simply traced, livened up with supplementary decor . . . and colored” (p. 91).
65. Traité de la ponctuation française, Paris: Gallimard, “Tel,” no. 177, 1991, pp. 131–134.
66. Vroom tchac zouvie, le ballon dans la bande dessinée (Paris: André Balland, 1968), pp. 32–33. One will note that the list established by Benayoun mixes several criteria; certain denominations make reference to the form of the balloon and others to the content of the enunciation.
67. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 20 and p. 34.
68. Victor I. Stoichita, L’Instauration du picture (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993), cf. pages 13, 102, and particularly pages 17–18.
69. Thus formulated, this last proposition is evidently too general and coarse to not be exposed to a quantity of denials. I will bring in the necessary nuances in the next chapter, which is dedicated to the sequence.
70. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 125–126.
71. Cinéma et production du sens, op. cit., p. 201.
72. Cf. my introduction to OuBaPo entitled “Un premier bouquet de contraintes,” op. cit., and the development of a constraint called the geometric ordering.
73. In CinémAction hors série: Cinéma et bande dessinée, Courbevoie, Corlet-Télérama, Summer 1990, pp. 16–28, cited passage: p. 28.
74. Case, planche, récit, p. 8.
75. On this consideration, Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre have justly remarked that, within the rhetorical option, the great majority of pages “integrate at least a conventional element of size, to know the height of the strips. . . . In practice, the elasticity of the framing is limited to the width of the panels,” cf. Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinée (Bruxelles, CBBD, 1993), p. 59.
76. “Le champ tardien,” op. cit., p. 32.
77. “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,” op. cit., p. 5.
78. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 38.
79. Conséquences, op. cit., p. 38.
80. Cf. Pour une lecture moderne, op. cit., p. 57.
81. Traité du signe visuel, op. cit., p. 319.
82. It is clear that, from the instant where it repeats itself all through a story, even a remarkable layout is subjected to a progressive process of naturalization that banalizes it. It is necessary then that particular effects punctually come to invest the paginal apparatus so as to rediscover its vigor.
83. I borrow these terms from Marie Mandy, La fiction dans le discours photographique, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, September 1985, p. 40.
84. Cf. “Un premier bouquet de contraintes,” op. cit., pp. 37–38.
85. The right to reproduce these two pages was refused to us; we can do nothing but refer the reader to the book.
86. Du roman-photo (Mannheim-Paris: Médusa-Médias and Les Impressions nouvelles, 1992), p. 80.
87. Cf. Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinée, op. cit., pp. 63–65.
1. “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” Communications, no. 4, Paris, Le Seuil, 1964, p. 63. Text reprised in Essais sur la signification au cinema, t. 1, 1968. This is a position that is similar enough to support, acting this time with regard to painting, Aron Kibedi Varga in Discours, récit, image (Pierre Mardaga, Liège, “Philosophie et langage”, 1989). According to Varga (p. 96 f.), a fixed image, a picture representing “living beings engaged in an action” can evoke a story (particularly if it is already known to the spectator) but could not tell it with strict accuracy. Only “the juxtaposition of images generate stories.”
2. Cinéma et production de sens, op. cit., p. 219. The book by Michel Colin that the author makes reference to is Langue, film, discours. Prolégomènes à une sémiologie generative du film (Paris, Klincksieck, 1985).
3. I summarize here the essence of chap. III (“A la recherche du premier récit filmique,” pp. 37–51) of Gaudreault’s work Du littéraire au filmique. Système du récit, op. cit. All the citations are taken from these pages.
4. Cf. Todorov, Les genres de discourse (Paris, Le Seuil, 1978), p. 66. Underlined in the text.
5. Cf. “La narration comme supplément,” Bande dessinée, récit et modernité, op. cit., pp. 45–69. In this text, I define a series as “a continuous or discontinuous succession of images linked by a system of iconic, plastic or semantic correspondences.” Note that the survey and decomposition can also produce series, without being based on a rapport of transformation.
6. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 29.
7. Ibid., p. 44.
8. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 154–188. Most notably this sentence: “The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (p. 164).
9. Seuil edition, “L’ordre philosophique,” 1996. What preceded was a summary of no. 87, p. 199.
10. Id., p. 17, emphasized in the text.
11. This retroactive effect should always be relativized, to the degree that, during the first glance at the entirety of the page it is likely that the contents of the fourth panel, which more or less occupies its center, had already been confusingly seen and registered.
12. “L’entr’images,” Europe, no. 720: La bande dessinée, Paris, Messidor, April 1989, pp. 37–46.
13. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 27. Scott McCloud also makes the ellipse (closure) a founding concept in his theory of comics, distinguishing six “types of linkage” between two panels. Cf. Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, 1993), chap. 3.
14. Thus, in the famous example chosen by Peeters in Tintin in Tibet, that of Captain Haddock’s fall in the New Delhi airport, it is remarkable that Hergé interpolates a third panel representing Tintin (which is not directly concerned with the gag) at the location where there would most likely be a “ghost panel,” and that within this supplementary image the link between the two other panels of the syntagm would have been much less happy.
15. “La bande dessinée, une cosmogonie dure,” op. cit., p. 8.
16. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. from German by David Henry Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 111.
17. Anne-Marie Christin, L’Image écrite (Paris, Flammarion “Idées et Recherches,” 1995), p. 18.
18. Cf. Lire la bande dessinée (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985), p. 72.
19. Color ordinarily renders the protagonist even more visible through repetition; Tintin’s blue sweater or the red costume of Spirou display their multiplied presence.
20. “Comics lesen,” op cit. Cf. notably p. 27.
21. “Comic strips and theories of communication,” Word & Image, vol. 5, no. 2: The picture and the text, Taylor & Francis, April–June 1989, pp. 173–180, cit. pp. 176–177.
22. Ibid., p. 176.
23. Iconographie et sémiogénèse (State thesis, Strasbourg, Louis-Pasteur University, 1976), pp. 510–511.
24. Life: A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (Boston: David R. Godine, 1987), pp. 31–32. The end of the passage is a malicious critique of the notion of resemblance: “It’s not just hard, Winckler added, above all it’s useless: if you leave the labels unsorted and take two at random, you can be sure they’ll have at least three things in common.”
25. See the albums Monolinguistes (Le Lézard 1992) and Le Dormeur (Cornélius 1993), or again, in association with Jean-Christophe Menu, Moins d’un quart de seconde pour vivre (L’Association 1991 and 1996).
26. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 266.
27. Ibid., p. 26.
28. André Gaudreault, François Jost, Cinéma et récit. II: Le récit cinématographique (Paris, Nathan, 1990), p. 82. The authors wrote: “all filmic image,” but it seems to me that their intention can be legitimately extended to other sorts of images, and notably to the drawn image.
29. Cf. Bernard Noël, Journal du regard (Paris, POL, 1988), p. 56: “We see less of the world itself than the meaning that the part of the world that we see has for us.”
30. The cinema learned to pass these verbal connections, in the silent period, in the form of intertitles. We remember most notably the celebrated “and suddenly” that, in The Battleship Potemkin, introduces the Odessa steps sequence.
31. The paragraphs that follow take, from a general perspective altogether modified, considerations already developed in my article “Between monstration and narration, an evanescent instance: description,” Actes du colloque international L’Image BD (Louvain, Open Ogen, 1991), pp. 41–55.
32. Phillipe Hamon, Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif (Paris, Hachette, 1981), p. 25.
33. Cf. Daniel Arasse, Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris, Flammarion, “Champs,” 1996), pp. 46–47. First edition in 1992 in the collection “Idées et Recherches.”
34. Cf. Phillipe Hamon, op. cit., pp. 43 and 76, notably.
35. If the image is descriptible, the description that can be made does not obey any given organization within the image. The notations do not follow a determined order, like in a literary description; they are extended to the interior of the image, where the eye wanders liberally. This essential difference favors the free sampling of any detail.
36. Le Détail, op. cit., p. 11.
37. La Lecture comme jeu (Minuit, “Critique,” 1986), p. 157.
38. Interview with Hergé at Radio-Bruxelles on March 4, 1942. Cited by Benoit Peeters in Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 82.
39. We know of several attempts to translate dialogue into sequences of pictogrammes or pseudo-hieroglyphics; they have given amusing results, notably by Avril and Petit-Roulet (Soirs de Paris) or Berardi and Milazzo (in an episode of Ken Parker). No one would dream of generalizing the procedure, which quickly encounters its limits.
40. For a detailed analysis of the usages adopted by the caption, cf. Régis Duque, Étude théorique et pratique du texte narratif et du récit enchassé dans la bande dessinnée, Université catholique de Louvain, memoire de licence en philology romane, September 1995.
41. Christian Metz noted that filmic sounds are real sounds, of the same perceptive nature as the sounds that we hear in everyday life, whereas the images are nothing but effigies, marking themselves from reality by the absence of a third dimension. He saw here the “phenomenological deficit” of the image in relation to the object (cf. “Réponses a Hors cadre sur Le Signifiant imaginaire,” hors cadre, no. 4, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, printemps 1986, p. 70). In comics, the image does not produce the same reality effect as the filmic image, and is presented straightaway as an artifact; it is, on the contrary, on the side of reproduction of speech that the phenomenological deficit appears more clearly.
42. Certain contemporary authors have the temptation to overtake the natural artifice that belonged to Charlier or Hergé. The Englishman Dave McKean, author of Cages (French translation: Éd. Delcourt, 1998), explains: “The conversational aspect; I wanted people to talk, and I observed people talking, full of pauses and you start saying one thing, you head off in another direction, and you say something and you know what you meant but it’s taken differently. You know, all that stuff I’ve never seen represented in comics, really. I mean, I see people who can write good dialogue. But it tends to very literary dialogue. People speak perfect sentences, beginning to end. I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. So I wanted that to be represented” (excerpt from an interview that appeared in The Comics Journal, Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, no. 196, June 1997).
43. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (Hill and Wang: New York. 1977), p. 33.
44. Ibid., p. 45.
45. Case, planche, récit, op. cit., p. 87.
46. “Rodolphe Töpffer scénariste,” in Töpffer, ed. Daniel Maggetti, Lausanne, Albert Skira, April 1996, pp. 279–292.
47. “Duane Michals Real Dreams: The Treatement of Narrative Time,” History of Photography, vol. 19 no. 4: Photo Narrative, Taylor & Francis, winter 1995, p. 278.
48. I have described the principle procedures used by Kuper in the second half of my Histoire de la BD muette, op. cit., p. 104.
49. Baetens and Lefèvre, Pour une lecture moderne, op. cit., p. 20.
50. Ibid.
51. This is one of the principal reproaches that I address to the book by Baetens and Lefèvre, Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinnée, already cited several times in these pages. The examples taken by these authors such as Régis Franc, Michel Duveaux or Martin Vaughn-James are too particular, of the sort that analysis only rarely opens up to lessons that are generally applicable.
52. In Jacqueline Aubenas, “Jean-Claude Carrière scénariste ou le voyage à Bruxelles,” Revue belge du cinéma, no. 18, Bruxelles, winter 1986, p. 48.
53. The written document, destined for the illustrator, in which the scriptwriter consigns his breakdown is traditionally (for example, with Goscinny or Charlier) divided into two columns, one for the description of images, one for the dialogues, and these columns are themselves cut up into segments corresponding to successive panels. This form of breakdown explicitly manifests, by intertwining the vertical axis with the horizontal axis, the conjoined and articulated organization of a linguistic sequence and an iconic sequence.
1. Cf. “Du 7e au 9e Art: l’inventaire des singularités,” op. cit., p. 28. In this first formulation, I had inopportunely limited the relations of braiding to panels of the same page.
2. Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinée, op. cit., p. 72.
3. Cf. “La narration comme supplément,” in Bande dessinée, récit et modernité, op. cit., p. 65.
4. Cf. L’Image fantôme (Paris, Minuit, 1981), p. 98.
5. Dominique Moncond’huy and François Noudelman (dir.), Suite/Série/Séquence (Poitiers, La Licorne, 1998).
6. “Contrainte, clinamen, antinôme. Quelque réflexions théoriques à propos d’un texte de Perec,” Giallu, Revue d’art et de sciences humaines, no. 3, Ajaccio, 3e trim. 1994, p. 46.
7. Cf. Iconographie et sémiogenèse, op. cit., pp. 556–558.
8. Luc and Francois Schuiten’s album Nogegon (Les Humanoïdes associés, 1990) constitutes a rare example of a comic where all the panels, without exception, are activated as places, since each panel of the first half of the book corresponds to another panel in the second half, according to a globally symmetrical arrangement.
9. José Calvelo studies this phenomenon of the rhyme in his article “Sous les grilles,” Conséquences, no 11, Paris, Les Impressions nouvelles, 4e trim. 1998, pp. 34–57. Cf. in particular pp. 40–41, where two examples are covered, respectively borrowed from Christophe and from Hergé.
10. “Structure, function, pertinence,” La Linguistique, Paris, no 10–11, 1974.
11. Cf. Hergé écrivain (Bruxelles, Labor, 1989), p. 93.
12. Cf. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”, The Fall or the House of Usher and Other Writings (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 206, 210.
13. “Macbeth, une naissance de la conscience,” Positif, no. 378, July–August 1992, p. 11.
14. “Semiotic Approaches to Figurative Narration,” op. cit., p. 596. I cite the French manuscript communicated by the author.
1. Cf., Régis Debray, Cours de médiologie générale and Vie et mort de l’image (Paris, Gallimard, “Bibliothèque des Idées,” 1991 and 1992), as well as, by the same editor, Les Cahiers de médiologie (no. 1, 1st sem. 1996).
2. Récit écrit, récit filmique (Paris, Nathan, “Nathan Université: Arts,” 1989), p. 20.
3. Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiv.
4. That is to say, so expressive that the illustrator’s own graphic code, and the cultural code that prevails in his area of creation, authorizes it. The paroxystic expressivity of certain Japanese manga do not have their equivalents in the Franco-Belgian tradition of comics—except perhaps with an illustrator of hysteria named Edika.
5. “La bande dessinée, image-texte exemplaire du monde 3,” in Anthropogénie, chap. 14: Les images détaillée, published on the internet at http:www.ping.be/anthopogenie, 1998.
6. Traité du signe visual, op. cit., p. 368.
7. Tôpffer, Essai de physiognomonie, chap. 4, reproduced in Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters, Tôpffer: l’invention de la bande dessinée, op. cit., cf. pp. 191 and 194.
8. La Peinture, masque et miroir (1st ed. 1984; Bordeaux, William Blake & Co., 1993), p. 151.
9. Benoît Peeters and Pierre Sterckx, Hergé dessinateur (Tournai, Casterman, 1988), p. 6.