Women in Bandes Dessinées
Karma City by Gabrion
Positive depictions of women and girls in comics are not always naturally occurring things. So to help break the mold, we are offering access to a special collection of French BD translations which include recent works by and about women (see below for links):
The master stroke of Patty Jenkins in bringing Wonder Woman to the big screen is not merely in saving a floundering brand (the DC film franchise) but in raising the game in Hollywood for stories driven by female perspectives. In some cases this has lead to a renewed interest in classic style comic books and forays into the backstories of particular characters (check out the #bringbackNubia hashtag - imploring the acknowledgement of Wonder Woman's little known black Amazonian sister).
Artwork by Kenneth J Franklin: http://portraitsainteasy.com/
People who have grown up with comics and sci-fi TV shows such as Star Trek, often follow these developments with playful derision as the big screen arguably attempts to close the gap in its representation of diverse leads or more fully developed characters, though it invariably lags behind that of its lower budget counterparts.
Indeed, the original Wonder Woman comics conceived in 1941 by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, were considerably more radical in their politics than the latest iteration, excellent though the latter truly is (go and see it now!).
It's worth perusing the annals of comic book history just to see how such characters fare against the politics and expectations of twenty-first century story-telling and determine whether or not in some cases they actually transcend them. Equally, it is fascinating to explore the wider comic book landscape and in doing so discover the voices of female characters who have yet to champion our hearts at the level of the mainstream.
Laureline in the well loved series Valérian and Laureline (first published in 1967)
This is often easier said than done. In France for example, bandes dessinées (literally 'drawn strips') whose appearance and style is aesthetically different to American style comics (the latter usually being thin periodicals of about 32 pages as opposed to hardcover albums), have traditionally served a different readership. In regards to how BD performed and sold in the US market for example, Guy Delcourt, founder of one of the largest independent graphic novel publishers in France, said:
'It’s not a comic-size format, it’s album size, so in [US] comic shops it has been difficult for these comics to be visible, because they didn’t fit into the racks'.
Another reason may be the issue of translation. Whilst hugely on the rise in the Franco-Belgian industry of comics, they have yet to attain the standard set by their Manga rivals outside of their domestic market, Japan, where translation is understood to be more of a priority.
Ultimately this may result in most non-francophone audiences being more culturally familiar with the latest iterations of Captain America or the DragonBall franchise by Akira Toriyama long before many other long-running and popular series such as Valérian and Laureline (which incidentally is the subject of a recent film adaption by Luc Besson, expected to appear in cinemas later next month).
So how likely are we to hear about the strong female characters in bandes dessinées given that the form itself is arguably niche outside of France and the Low Countries? If you're someone who's not already at all into comics, you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the target audience of bandes dessinées was just boys and men. But this provides an incomplete picture of the market in France, home to the Angoulême festival and where comics have attained the status of 'neuvieme art' (a term coined by Morris, the creator of Lucky Luke to describe an art form quite apart from other established categories of visual expression but equally valid to those traditional forms).
To suggest that compelling female characters are not well represented in BD because of the medium's perceived limited appeal in some countries, would be just plain silly however. You just have to know where to look! In the 1970s for example Belgian writer Roger Leloup created Yoko Tsuno, a female electrical engineer of Japanese origin who explores the world and the outer regions of space, through narratives that are heavily technology-driven. At the same time 'the young girl always remains faithful to herself, never forgetting values such as loyalty, friendship and respect for life'. (Cinebook).
Yoko Tsuno created by writer Roger Leloup and published by Dupuis
Yoko is also a skilled scuba diver, holds a black belt in aikido, and can pilot both gliders and helicopters. Unusually, given even modern standards of storytelling, she, as a character (rather than any romance she might potentially entertain) is the centre of the series and many of her closest allies are also women or female extraterrestrials. This comic book series is still popular today and can be found in places like the French Institute's childrens' library in London.
Around roughly the same time, Jacques Tardi accepted a commission from Casterman for a multi-album series which centred a now legendary heroine. In 1976, the first two Adèle Blanc-Sec adventures introduced: 'a young Parisian writer who is not afraid to drink, shoot guns, smoke, or shoot like a man'. The character appears to be somewhat inspired by real-life writer, George Sand and success was immediate.
Spoiler ahead
Despite the fact that Adèle rejects early 20th century gender stereotypes and is usually 'with the boys', Tardi explains that Adèle's death was nevertheless necessitated by the onset of World War I. 'Her feisty nature made it impossible to provide her with a place in the war. She would not have been allowed to fight, and could no more have settled for being a nurse, than she could have remained home rolling bandages'. (CoolFrenchComics.com)
*This is somewhat in contrast to her American counterpart, Wonder Woman otherwise known as Diana, Princess of the Amazons, who could move more fluidly between Themyscira, a matriarchal society where "men may not set foot", and the world of men that had ushered in World War II.
Adèle Blanc-Sec may have been inspired by writer George Sand
Predating the Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec of course, was the iconic, revolutionary and feather-ruffling Barbarella created by Jean-Claude Forest in the mid-1960s. According to Paul Gravett, a London-based journalist who has been involved in comics since 1981, 'Barbarella was a truly liberating creation, not only for her creator, Jean-Claude Forest but also for French and international comics as a whole'.
To put Barbarella’s heyday into some context we need to time-travel back to the
aftermath of the Second World War. Moral panics soon broke out in many countries,
prompted by fears about the future, embodied in children and childhood in general,
and about rising juvenile delinquency, hardly surprising considering the societal
and familial damage caused by the conflict. Rather than deal directly with the more
complex roots of this problem, politicians and various interest groups sought causes
and scapegoats elsewhere in the mass media, and in particular in the least defensible
medium presumed to be solely for children - comics.
For Tardi, Barbarella was the vanguard of a 60s wave of liberated comic heroines in France and he enjoyed, 'developing his “beautiful orchid” into a woman of intelligence and principle, sensitivity and sensuality'. (Gravett).
Whilst many readers find it heartening, (particularly given the context of censorship and rigid sexual stereotypes that would have abounded) to see through Barbarella, a powerful and unapologetic symbol of female sexual emanicpation, it is hard to ignore as Gravett admits himself, that many of these characters were created either by men or for men's interest.
Even Laureline (the creation of Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières), who rescues Valérian from the enchanted Forest of Arelaune in the first adventure and is much loved for her autonomy, outspoken nature and techno-proficiency as a space explorer, does not fully escape the conventions of male-centred story-telling when she is outwardly presented as the female colleague, and inevitably, the love interest of Valérian.
But there is every reason to stay positive and be optimistic about the future! Whilst there will be literal caricatures of women and females that pervade all art forms as well as BD, (most notably the problematic Schtroumpfette, or 'Smurfette') it is always possible to find with a new generation of writers and artists, characters and stories that are naturally positioned to broaden the conversation.
These include political biofictions by the likes of Iranian born Marjane Satrapi's who wrote the sensational Persepolis; social commentaries such as Les Crocodiles by Thomas Mathieu which brings together the real testimonies of women who experience sexual harrassment and everyday sexism; La Légèreté by Catherine Meurisse, an illustrator based at Charlie Hebdo for 10 years, who gives an honest account of how the tragedy of January 2015 weighed on her personal life and career; Le bleu est une couleur chaude, a love story written by Julie Maroh which focusses on two young women in France at the end of the 1990s; the character of Kate Cooper a black chief-in-training at the Bureau of Investigations in Karma City whose first case is to investigate the murder of another woman; the eponymous heroine of Isabellae an Irish sorceress and a master samurai, who is on a journey in search of her lost sister and Diary of a Femen by Séverine Lebfebvre which follows the story of a young French girl who, after a number of negative experiences connected to her social status as a woman in contemporary society, decides to join the movement.
To help inspire you further, we are offering access to a special collection of French BD translations by and about women (including many of the titles above):
To browse our general BD page in English, click here
To browse our general BD page in French, click here
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