French comix

Off the Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris there is a small side-street called Rue Gaillon.  Down this street there are two restaurants and little else.  Both of them are Japanese.  Further along on the Avenue itself, there is a shop with flowerings of Kanji in its window, and few Latin characters.

Perhaps there is a significant lacuna in my knowledge of French and Japanese history; I certainly feel at a loss in trying to offer an explanation for this tie-up between the two nations.  However there is one tiny but intriguing clue: both peoples have a curious appetite for comic strips.

These are none of the American Marvel hero types, though inevitably those provide a powerful influence.  What has developed in both countries is a totally idiosyncratic and to the outsider totally inexplicable art-form.  There is a basic rule in aesthetics that it is in the truly banal that a nation reveals itself most intimately; great works speak more of the maker than the background.  And so it proves with these comic strips.

The French versions are mostly fantastical and off-beat.  Often they are perverse and morbid.  If they are realistically drawn, they may represent weird counterfactual worlds, parallel to our own yet sharply divergent in some essential facet.  If the drawing style itself is surreal, this slight grip on reality may be lost altogether.  Instead we are sucked into nightmarish worlds of twisted creatures, supramundane visions of terror, strange disjunctive sequences of images and ideas.

In the leading journals like (A Suivre) and Metal Hurlant, the cartoons are drawn with a technical brilliance which is unmatched by anything on this side of the Channel.  It would appear that these miniatures provide a completely personal and liberated form of expression for otherwise frustrated artists. The resulting productions are therefore more true, more intimate, and more disturbing than conventional public art.

The Japanese case is slightly different.  Here the emphasis seems to be on quantity not quality. Vast numbers of these comic books are consumed daily.  Their appearance is crude, with individual cartoons reduced almost to woodcut simplicity.  The content is similarly coarsened.  Mostly it is an unsophisticated adventure story; often there is a sexual element with a strong sado-masochistic bias.

Both of these comic book traditions seem to offer their aficionados escape and unrestricted fantasy. Both eschew the quotidian.  In many ways they perform the same function as soap operas in anglophone society.  Perhaps the English-speaking world, through the dominating influence of America, is now fluently televisual, and as such has passed beyond the less technological pleasures of the comic. Perhaps France and Japan just lack good soaps, and are unable to warm to English-language classics of the genre. Whatever the reason, these bizarre and gaudy comics offer an interesting insight into the mentality of the French and Japanese nations.  Whether they explain the restaurants is another matter.

(21.5.86)

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