French Cartoon Art in the 1960s and 1970s
"Pilote hebdomadaire" and the Teenager "Bande Dessinée"
Wendy Michallat
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Monograph - paperback
The French comic magazine Pilote hebdomadaire arrived in a weakening comics market in 1959 largely dominated by syndicated translations of American comics and comics inspired by a Catholic ethos. It tailored its content and tone to an older adolescent reader far removed from that of France’s infant comic. Pilote’s profile set it on a turbulent course subject to the vicissitudes and fickleness of fashion which situated it within an emerging teenager press under pressure to renew and innovate to survive. When it made cartoons its defining characteristic in 1963, Pilote articulated its uniqueness by channelling teenager discourse through them whilst also trying to encourage a zest for education in a modernising and economically buoyant France of exciting new opportunities. Pilote’s cartoon art thus became a dynamic repository for the ideas and attitudes of France’s educated youth which evolved into the radical discourses of the lifestyle and political revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
This book tells how Pilote hebdomadaire’s unique positioning in a new and fast developing youth press market for teenagers provided the forum and catalyst for the bande dessinée’s stylistic evolution over the course of the 1960s and 1970s.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The French Bande Dessinée Market in 1959 and the Pilote Concept
2. Launch and Early Success
3. Pilote in Crisis, 1959-1963
4. The Bande Dessinée Re-launch
5. Prelude to 1968: Challenges and Changes
6. ‘Astérixisation’ and the Impact of the Album Market
7. Post 1968 and the End of Pilote ‘Hebdomadaire’
Final Word
Bibliography
Format: Monograph - paperback
Size: 230 × 170 × 15 mm
268 pages
4 b&w, 5 colour illustrations
ISBN: 9789462701229
Publication: July 25, 2018
Series: Studies in European Comics and Graphic Novels 6
Languages: English
Stock item number: 123229
The book is part of Leuven University Press’s Studies in European Comics
and Graphic Novels, an impressive series that offers important
contributions to this growing field of study. [...] Her scholarship embodies the best of academic writing in that it
satisfies the specialist’s need for documentation and deep analysis, while
remaining accessible for students and
non-specialist readers.
Stephanie Schechner, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 43: Iss. 2, Article 20. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2084
Edward Ousselin, The French Review, Volume 93, No. 1, October 2019
'Although there exist quite some studies on the journal, the study by Wendy Michallat is the very first one to rethink its history in a broader perspective, not just that of comics culture, but that of culture at large. And the result is absolutely breath-taking. First of all because Michallat gives a very detailed yet nuanced and well written overview of the various periods of the magazine, whose history is one of nearly permanent crisis and eternal attempts to relaunch new formats and formulas in a publication niche that was much less profitable than it was often thought. Second, and most importantly, because the author succeeds in doing what other studies fail to do, namely explaining the systematic changes in the magazine’s policy.'
Jan Baetens, Cultural Studies Leuven, 3 August 2018