Against the BD: The nouvelle bande dessinée and its escape from mass culture

Abstract

The present article addresses the political feuds and aesthetics in French comic books (bande dessinées) that have passed through and molded editorial models in the last thirty years in the country, influencing authors and capacitating a new base of readership around the world, even if it is the microscopic world of comic books. Many factors of aesthetic order and a new political and editorial desire caused the birth of a new way of comic book criticism. First, I present the debate about the editorial model that was set during the 1980s and the development of the criticism and theory about contemporary comic books to that model in order. Later, I present the way in which a generation of authors that grew up during the said period attempted to deviate from that model, founding a new way of making comic books, the so-called nouvelle bande dessinée. These authors deconstruct the criteria until then considered by tradition as essential in the making of a comic book: the fact that it is sequential art, purely narrative, a mass media.

Keywords: contemporaneous French comics, bande dessinée, critics, publishing, aesthetics of comics.