Between Ah! Nana and Okapi: Nicole Claveloux at the Crossroads

Recently reprinted and translated into English by New York Review Comics, sponsored by Daniel Clowes, there has been a renewed attention to Nicole Claveloux’s short-term career in comics in the 1970s. An extremely prolific and well-known illustrator for children’s books and a painter, Nicole Claveloux withdrew from drawing comics in the 1980s—hence, her name is often registered in comics history as part of the momentous, if short-lived magazine Ah! Nana. Modeled on adult comics magazines and feminist periodicals, Ah! Nana marks a key symbolic moment in the recognition of women’s contribution to comics, often attached to names as Florence Cestac and Chantal Montellier. Claveloux’s work, however, gains to be read within a larger corpus at the intersection of children’s literature and comics. As she was drawing stories for the adult underground magazines, Claveloux also crafted Grabote, a wildly popular comics series for the teen magazine Okapi. While Lara Saguisag has recently noted the steadfast rift between childhood and adulthood in U.S. underground comics , it seems that this boundary was slightly more permeable in French graphic culture, especially for women cartoonists who were more likely to engage their drawing talent across a diverse cast of publishers and domains, especially in the field of children’s books. Following recent endeavors to map the “counterpublics” of underground comics, this paper will try to understand, through the case of Nicole Claveloux, how women cartoonists working at the intersection of children’s magazines and adult comics were potentially redefining gender and childhood norms.