Notes
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In this article I will focus exclusively on the continental production, which is very
different from both the Japanese and Anglo-Saxon traditions.
I develop freely here some observations made by Benoit Peeters in the second part o f
his book. La bande dessinee, Paris, Flammarion, 1993 (probably the best general —
and very broad
introduction to the subject).
Especially when one wanted (or was obliged) to include colour. The best known example
here is that o f E.P. Jacobs, the colleague and later concurrent o f Merge, whose ambitious
colour drawings o f the forties and fifties were severely damaged by the printing
processes o f the day.
For a more detailed critique o f this loss o f good stoiytelling, see Benoit Peeters, La
bande dessinee, o.c. (part two o f this work).
On their evolution, they wrote a book with a speaking title: L ’Aventure des images. De
la bande dessinee an multimedia, Paris, Autrement, 1995 (‘T he adventure o f the images.
From comics to multimedia”).
The phenomenon has been studied (and positively commented) by Bruno Lecigne in
his book Les heritiers d'Hergc\ Bruxelles, Magic Strip, 1982.
My survey is much indebted to material published by Frigobox (a Belgian journal
combining art work and theory published in Brussels) and Comix (a French journal
specializing in contemporary comic strip theory).
1 would also like it to be noted that the comic community, contrary to what happens in
the larger artistic community, is not organized on a planetary scale: if there is a global
village in European comics, this village is mainly European and most o f all French
speaking.