90
Popular Culture Review
never replaced the proper continental terminology, probably because of its
connotations of seriousness, great length and small forniat, which was ill-suited to
the great diversity of European production).
The rise of a proper metadiscourse led to the canonisation of the medium.
The first fanzines were soon followed by a large collection of historic and/or
theoretical publications on the one hand, and the creation of specific institutions
on the other. O f notable distinction are the CNBDI (Centre national de la bande
dessinee et de fim age) in Angouleme, France, and the CBBD (Centre beige de la
bande dessinee) in Brussels, Belgium. The latter is a museum and conference centre,
however the first also hosts an art school, a research and training centre, a small
publishing unit and of course a festival, ironically baptised as the “Cannes of the
comics”).
Suddenly however, the vitalising effects of these factors diminished almost
simultaneously. The market then faced blatant overproduction, as the critical interest
for strips decreased and the necessary permanent renewal of the genre suffered a
considerable delay. The cause of this decline seemed to be merely economic.
However in reality, the public’s lack of interest was concerned only with some
very particular zones of comic production. First, the journals lost their attraction
because their role was slowly being reduced to that of a pre-publication instrument
(and of course the clients were no longer willing to pay double for the same).
Second, the more difficult adult strip lost a large part of its readership, mainly as it
was deprived of what had made possible the success of its ancestors, viz. the
combination of graphic experimentation with anarchizing and liberating (sexual
and political) content. Since both the Journals and the adult production are clearly
linked, the two crises reinforce each other, so that the withdrawal of the mythical
Journal, A suivre (1971-1996), was experienced by many (older) readers as the
death of a certain idea of comics.
The crisis was not quantitative in the first place, but qualitative, and the
quantitative measures rapidly taken (restriction of novelties, suppression of almost
all not self-supporting collections) only made this problem more acute. Today’s
comics are looking for a wide audience, but yet exclude the public of the sixties
and seventies and conserve only the infantile and Juvenile pulp reader of the very
beginnings of the European comic strip.
Since strips were thus under the menace of retuming to pure entertainment,
a second way of resisting the erosion of the genre was to insist upon the qualitative
dimension. But here also, the measures taken have turned against the comic strip
itself, as opposed to helping it find new inspiration.
But what exactly went wrong in the average comic strip production during
the eighties? When a summary is made of the different reproaches it received by
the creators themselves, four main weaknesses can be discovered^ The technical