Comics and bandes dessinées
Called the “9th Art”, the comic art is something everyone is bound to have encountered at least once in their lives, especially in a country like Belgium, which is considered to be the home of the comic strip.
I grew up with the Belgian “Bande Dessinée” and with a few British comic strips, so I thought I might as well compile a list of those comic strips which shaped my youth… and will probably continue to shape my adulthood.
The USA are known to be the place for superhero comic strips, and all the Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Catwoman, …, stuff comes from there. Then you have Belgium, which is known for Tintin, the Smurfs, Lucky Luke, Spirou and the Marsupilami. There’s the UK, with The Beano and Britain’s own Dennis the Menace. There’s Japan, with its massive manga colletion. And there’s also France, with Asterix & Obelix.
I can only speak from my own experience, and cannot therefore develop anything about manga, Wonderwoman or the American Dennis the Menace. But having been brought up with the UK Sonic Comics on the one hand and the Belgian Yoko Tsuno on the other, I guess I’m well placed to at least start comparing them.
Long stories: plot and dialogue
For some reason, the many American superhero comics by Marvel never really fascinated me, because it always seemed to be the same: some person has a double identity, and the secret identity serves to save the world. Batman was better than many, in my view, because he didn’t have any special powers. Reading Superman really made me feel stupid, with what I found was bad dialogue and an uninspiring plot.
Long stories are the norm in the Franco-Belgian comics, and so an album is more than a series of short adventures: it’s a real adventure in itself. Suske & Wiske (known as Spike & Suzy in English) have hundreds of albums taking them to every part of the world and pretty much every time period too. Asterix & Obelix have epic adventures, as does Tintin. Spirou and Fantasio have to solve great mysteries to restore balance to an escalated situation, and usually don’t even need to fight their way through. Dialogue in these comics is much better than in the US comics, because the focus is on the story, not on the fighting scenes (where huge onomatopoeia render dialogue useless).
Short stories: dialogue and humour
In the many different comics composing the Beano, a special kind of humour prevails: it’s all about making fun of other characters. Dennis the Menace is, unlike his American counterpart, a real menace to society: he wants to wreak havoc, and is plain mean. So are Rodger the Dodger, Minnie the Minx and so many other Beano characters. The pranks they play on people are the main source of laughter, but it’s even funnier when they get beaten at their own game. The focus is on laughs, not story.
The UK Sonic Comics, considered by many to be more fledged out and interesting than the USA Sonic Comics because of a deeper focus on characters, are a collection of short adventures of Sonic and his gang against Robotnik/Eggman. Incredibly cheesy dialogue, looking back at it, but the fun is in seeing a blue hedgehog and a flying fox defeat one of the most evil villains in all of comic and gaming history. Nowadays, I mainly like them because of how the characters develop. The story is lame, but the characters are fun. And Knuckles, the Echidna, will always be my favourite console character.
Gaston Lagaffe, on the other hand, is nothing like a hero. He might well be the Belgian incarnation of the anti-hero. He’s a lazy half-arsed slouch who doesn’t ever do anything right, and will do anything to get away from his desk job inside a comic book studio. Very witty dialogue, and crazy inventions. The plot, short as it is (Gaston’s adventures rarely develop on more than one A4 page), is nothing short of brilliant.
Garfield is a little like a cat version of Gaston, though seemingly more intelligent and less clueless about his surroundings. Short but often very good strips, to the point and funny.
Drawing techniques
The drawing of characters in the US comics is much more “square”, which makes them look tougher, as opposed to the prevalence of round faces in Franco-Belgian comic albums, where characters look more friendly and, well, less real. Only a handful of quality Bandes Dessinées (most notably Blake & Mortimer, and, more recently, XIII and Largo Winch) have come out with square characters drawn in a more realistic manner.
The typography used inside the dialogue bubbles also changes a lot, to match the general feel of the drawing, which leads to more “jovial” reading in many Franco-Belgian comic books.
Overall preferences
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether one comic is more “square” than another to me, though it might have a greater influence on people who didn’t grow up with both styles. I know some people who grew up with Tintin and would never dream of picking up an American comic, while I know manga fans who haven’t ever heard of the Smurfs (rather, “hadn’t” until I mentioned these little blue creatures).
What would I recommend reading?
All of the following: Asterix & Obelix, the Beano, Blake & Mortimer, Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, Gaston Lagaffe, Johan & Pirlouit (Johan & Peewit in English), Lucky Luke, the Marsupilami, Scrameustache, the Smurfs, Spirou & Fantasio, Suske & Wiske, Tintin, Les Tuniques Bleues, Yoko Tsuno.
At least, those few are my favourites. And, what do you know, most of them are great for adults too! Well, that’s the excuse I’ll use when I re-read most of our collection in the years to come.