SA cartoonists and the French revolution
Apparently we have still to outgrow our superhero phase, but Southern Africa’s comic books nonetheless hold their own in a joint exhibition with France’s finest at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, writes Carlos Amato
Comics are no joke in France. If you need evidence, witness the appearance last month of an engraving of Asterix on one side of the country’s new two-euro coin. It took 2,000 years for the potion-glugging Gaul to knock Julius Caesar off his monetary perch, but he has finally done it.
Exhibit B is the ground-breaking exhibition of South African comics and French bandes dessinées (the French term for comic strips) now on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). Presented by IFAS (the Institut Français d’Afrique du Sud), the show matches some of the most important examples of recent French comics with some sparkling South African comics. The result is fantastic in both senses of the word: a paper bomb of unfettered imagination.
But an even bigger explosion has been happening in the French comics world, says Thierry Groensteen, comics researcher and curator of the bandes dessinées half of the show. In the past three decades, the national output of BDs (as bandes dessinées are commonly known) has grown tenfold — from about 500 titles published every year to about 5,000. Some 45-million copies of those titles were sold in France last year.
To meet this mushrooming demand, there are now 3,000 professional BD creators at work in France — though not all of them make enough money from their books to pay all their bills.
For many, poverty is a small price to pay for inking up their visions. “They work every day of the year,” says Groensteen. “They don’t have weekends. You cannot produce a comic by working only in the evenings. It’s not possible.”
And even Groensteen cannot come close to reading all those stories. But they won’t stop coming. For readers and creators alike, the comic book seems to satisfy a primal impulse, one that silences the frenzied racket of digital life. Each frame feels like a little cave painting; the scale of your tale is limited only by your imagination and the time you put into it. “All you need is a pencil and a piece of paper and a corner of your kitchen table,” says Groensteen. “And that is an extraordinary freedom.”
While the French have been crazy about comics for nearly a century, it took a while for the national cultural establishment to acknowledge the form as the “ninth art”. “When I started researching comics, they were seen as kids’ stuff, the cultural elite was not interested at all,” says Groensteen. “So we were a bunch of passionate people who had read comics in their youth who tried to legitimate the form by publishing fanzines and putting on festivals. It was very marginal at the time — now that has completely changed.”
Nor is there any sign of serious digital disruption on the horizon. “Ten years ago a lot of people thought that digital comics were going to kill the market for printed comics. Everybody was very excited, but it still only accounts for 2% of the BD market’s total income. People are stilling reading comics on paper, and will do so for a long time.”
It’s a sign of the scale of the French comics industry that successful publishers are bona fide tycoons. Mourad Boudjellal made his fortune publishing fantasy and sci-fi BDs before buying Toulon rugby club — where he made the likes of Bryan Habana and Victor Matfield offers they couldn’t refuse. Jacques Glénat, another comics tycoon, is now one of the 20 richest people in France; his name appeared in the Panama Papers leaks.
Graphic reportage
Why the boom? Groensteen says that millions of new readers have been lured into BD stores by the proliferation of new nonfiction genres, notably of graphic memoir, biography and graphic reportage from conflict zones (as pioneered by the unflinching MalteseAmerican Joe Sacco).
And the compelling output of a growing cohort of female creators is also transforming the BD world. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2001), an irreverent memoir of her youth in Iran before and after the Islamic revolution, sold over a million copies and inspired an animated film adaptation.
The global success of Persepolis blazed a trail for a string of other graphic-memoir blockbusters, such as the American writer-artist Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which was adapted as a hit Broadway musical, and Riyad Sattouf’s acclaimed 2015 hit L’Arabe du Futur (The Arab of the Future), an uproarious account of his peripatetic childhood in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s and ’80s.
At the JAG, you can savour pages of artwork by bestselling stars such as Sattouf and Penelope Bagieu, who drew Les Culottées, a recent hit anthology of short biographies of great women who have been written out of patriarchal historiography.
But alongside those commercial stars are artists selected by Groensteen for their beautifully strange and challenging work. “For a lot of very brilliant comics, the audience remains small,” he says. Look out for an exquisite page by Eric Lambé, the Belgian creator of Paysage aprés la bataille. Lambe won the coveted Angouleme Festival prize for Best Album of the Year with this bewitching painted novel driven by ominous landscape images whose power is intensified by the almost total lack of text.
Another great set of drawings is from David Prudhomme’s La Traversée du Louvre, one of several comic books commissioned by the Paris museum with one constraint: everything must happen inside the Louvre.
Prudhomme’s response was a series of pencil observations of the antics of actual museum-goers, sketched with all the amused empathy of ToulouseLautrec.
The SA connection
Given the microscopic size of the South African comics world compared to its French equivalent, the work on show on the other half of the exhibition is hugely impressive. South African curators Ray Whitcher and Tara Weber have skilfully surveyed the blossoming of new talent in South African comics and placed it in context.
Standout pieces include a stellar spread from Daniel and James Clarke’s crowd-funded graphic novel Kariba, which was originally conceived as a 2-D animated film.
Look out, too, for some exuberant pages from the Qintu Collab story, 2070. The Qintu Collab is a team consisting of 18 queer youth from Botswana, Kenya and Zimbabwe, plus three artists and a journalist. They all worked together to produce a comic about the queer youth experience in Southern Africa. You’d expect the output of such a project to have a death-by-committee feel to it, but the work is anything but dull: snappily scripted and slickly drawn.
The South African exhibit’s commentary is, to my mind, unduly snooty in discussing the huge legacy and influence of Bitterkomix, made by two godfathers of alternative South African comics, Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyer. This is nothing new: both artists’ satirical assaults on patriarchy and racism have long been mistaken for patriarchy and racism.
But the show is excellent in documenting the emerging fantasy and superhero traditions in South African comics. The superhero style is rooted in the Supa Strikas studio in Cape Town, which has produced the mass-market kids’ football comic for decades. Along the way Supa Strikas has churned out a stream of artists with lines as smooth as silk. Among its alumni is the prodigious Loyiso Mkize, creator of superhero Kwezi, who looms large in the exhibition.
Groensteen says the prevalence of the superhero style in SA reveals a strong American influence. “That’s fine with me,” he says with barely suppressed disdain, “but in France superheroes are really regarded as a minor subgenre in the comics culture. We do read American comics in translation, which account for about 20% of the French market. But we are not so interested in superheroes.”
OK. That’s fine with us. The sudden popularity of cosplay culture in SA suggests that we are not going to outgrow our superhero obsessions any time soon. But Groensteen has a good point about our deprivation
‘When I started researching comics, they were seen as kids’ stuff, the cultural elite was not interested at all’
when it comes to inspiration from the European comics world. Go to any South African bookshop and visit the “graphic novel” section and you are likely to find one pitiful shelf containing some Marvel comics, maybe a Sandman collection by Gaiman and Moore, maybe Maus by Art Spiegelman, maybe a lost Dilbert or two.
You won’t even find books by South African graphic novelists who are acclaimed abroad — such as Joe Daly, whose work is published by the acclaimed Phantagraphics imprint in the US.
But go to the equivalent section in a Paris bookshop and you’ll find a teeming world of comics from across the world.
Of course it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. We can’t blame local booksellers for failing to supply a demand that doesn’t really exist.
We don’t know what we’re missing, in short. But this brilliant exhibition offers a tantalising glimpse.
The Art of Comics exhibition is at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, corner Klein and King George streets, Joubert Park, until November 18