Les Discours sur la bande dessinée par ses créateurs

During a long time, French and francophone comics suffered of a poor cultural consideration and artistic autonomy, as they were mostly considered as a child or teenagers’divertissement between the beginig of the twentieth century and the sixties. This misunderstanding explains the rarity of critical and theoretic works on the Ninth Art existing between 1845 – when Töpffer publishes the first essays concerning the relationship between images and text – and the sixties, when the undermining of political, social and sexual way of thinking involves also academic culture and traditional artistic forms. Becoming the instrument of a narrative and thematic renewal, comics start since to be legitimated and analysed on a critical point of view which focuses on their specificity, their specific language/s, their potential, their artistic form and meaning, the author’s aesthetic and ethic choices. It is through a story of theoretic discourse on the Ninth Art that this article wishes to present its evolution, starting with the “pioneers” in Nineteenth century, passing through the critical discourse of the first experimental reviews published in the 60’s to arrive to the famous Cahiers de la bande dessinée and then to other contemporary critical works.