Strenae (Oct 2022)
La construction d’un capital culturel et spatial : Dr Justice, une série-géographe
Abstract
« My name is Justice. Dr Benjamin Justice. WHO Doctor attaché. A sort of flying doctor. Subscribed to the international airlines »: this is how the French doctor introduces himself at each beginning of one of his adventures. The comics character was created by Jean Ollivier and Raffaele Marcello for Pif Gadget Magazine. This WHO doctor, practicing martial arts, guided by his shaolin master’s lessons, like the hero of the series Kung Fu at the begining of the 1970s, appears for the first time in the issue number 69 on June 1970. He is, according to Jean Ollivier, a « wandering doctor ». All along the 126 episodes of the series, he travels all over the world and goes on all the hotspots of the planet in 1970s-1980s. During 20 years, the series « Dr Justice » could speak to young teen readers and show them the warming actuality and giving them the pulse of the world in which they were going to live in and find their place. So the series participated to the construction of a cultural and spatial capital for the young readers of Pif Gadget. The series provides them with some spatial material, unmaterial and mental ressources that they will be able to mobilize so that to live in the world. Ollivier and Marcello conceived a series that we could qualify of « geographer » in so far as it is a geographer act. The iconotextual narrative gives some geographical informations that can modify the reader’s vision. With the analysis of the 126 stories and the relationship between text and image in the series, this article wants to show that this series is really a « geographer-series » and that Benjamin Justice is an « inhabitant of the World, a mobile and multi-resident inhabitant ».
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