Comicalités (Feb 2012)
La bande dessinée en Belgique francophone au XIXe siècle
Abstract
Belgium has a great tradition of production of comic strips and recognizes the 9th art as one of the jewels of its national culture. Nevertheless, most of the books dealing with history of the comic strip in this country ignore totally the time before Hergé. For a good reasons : the production of comic strip in Belgium is relatively rare and, largely, dependent on the foreign influence. Furthermore, comic strips presenting text under the image were completely ignored for a long time by the historians of the subject. What we suggested making in our work, is looking for the diverse appearances of sequences of images through time and contextualise them. Number of the examples which we found constitutes experiments without future, produced in contexts different from the one who will give rise to the Belgian comic strip of the « golden age » : finding a direct filiation was not our first purpose. Nevertheless, from Le Déluge à Bruxelles created in 1843 by Richard de Querelles to the popular images of Georges Ista, just before the first world war, the Belgian comic strip in the XIXth century shows itself of a wealth and an interest unsuspected up to here.
