Comic Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Comic - Essay Example (2004) Hopefully this paper will meet the objective of demonstrating a growing understanding of what the reading, viewing and interpretation of comics and -more specific to our topic- bande dessine, really means, as well as some of the techniques that are involved in both the creation and appreciation of two francophone comics in particular: L'autoroute du Soleil by Baru and L'annee Derniere by Phillip Dupuy. Bande Dessine (BD) or francophone "drawn strips" -a term preferred by BD authors and scholars as opposed to "comic strips", which they sustain would imply limitation of subject-matter to the comical (Wikipedia, 2005)- is also known as the Ninth Art or le neuvime art. Two important, award-winning exponents of the ninth art are Baru (born Herv Barulea, 1947, France) and Phillipe Dupuy (born 1960, France). Baru works by himself, serving as both the writer and artist of his strips and albums (works over 60 pages in length). He began by drawing on his experiences from his teenage years and travels in the 1960's. His debut came in 1982, when he got published in Pilote, but it wasn't until 1995 that his 400+ page album, L'Autoroute du Soleil (The Highway of the Sun), considered his breakthrough work, allowed him to gain exposure to larger audiences (Comiclopedia, 2005). In contrast, almost from the start of his career, Dupuy has worked as part of the duo known as Berberian-Dupuy (often mistaken for a single person bearing a sophisticated, hyphenated surname but actually the simple combination of the surnames of Charles Berberian and Phillipe Dupuy). Dupuy had begun his career working for several different BD magazines over a three-year period, but when he met Berberian there was immediate synergy and from then on it has been a partnership, if not made in heaven, at least made for the delight of BD fans around the world. L'Autoroute du Soleil This lengthy album was a result of the experimental work of the Japanese-cartoon, or manga, publishing house, Kodansha, consisting of commissioning certain authors from the Occidental world to create comics for readers in Japan. It made its debut on the Japanese comics scene as a series of instalments in the weekly magazine entitled Morning, whose target audience was comprised of 20- to 30-year-old males. It is a black and white comic or "graphic novel"1, vibrant and stark at the same time, that is representative of the beginnings of la nouvelle manga, an ongoing project of some comics authors and publishers to mesh the Japanese manga with the French bande dessine.2 This groundbreaking work reunited the two worlds in a big way, while preserving some of the main traits of Baru's work: his inclusion of daily-life events, the protagonism of youthful characters, use of the anecdotal, and anti-racism statements (Serrano, 2003) often disguised in metaphor. The drawings are dynamic and the