Museum for Comic Book Art in France!

COMIC BOOKS will have their own Louvre in a museum that has been established in Angoulème, south-west France.

The Musée de la bande dessinée possibly has the largest collection of comic books and original comic book artwork in the world.

This collection comprises of 8,000 original artworks and more than 110,000 magazines and comic books covering all the French favourites, such as Tintin and Asterix right through to American comic strips like Peanuts as well as DC and Marvel Comics.

Hergés comic book hero Tintin and his dog Milou (Snowy)

The ‘bande dessinée’ is a huge industry in France where 33,600,000 (!) comic books are sold every year. Known, in France, as the ‘ninth art’, the comic book was elevated earlier this year by an exhibition at The Louvre which compared the relationship between classical works of art and the works of some of the better known bédéistes as creators of bande dessinées (or BDs) are known.

This follows the opening of a museum dedicated to the work of Tintin creator, Hergé, in Belgium last month which is all good news for cartoonists everywhere. If awareness is enhanced in one area, the ripple effect will lead to an improved perception of cartoons in general.

While the bande dessinée museum’s collection is top heavy with French and Belgian work, it does have a good selection of American, Swiss, Italian, German and even British comic strip art. It has always been a puzzle to French BD fans why the market in the UK is so small (and to us!). There is also a collection of Japanese Manga magazines in the new museum.

The museum’s director, Ambroise Lasalle’s favourite exhibits are the original artworks by André Franquin from his Belgian comic strip Gaston Lagaffe. “They are,” he says, “packed with subtlety and humour but they are also full of great movement.”

André Franquin Cartoon

We wish the museum well and are glad it is joining us in a drive to increase the awareness of comic book art and cartooning in general as an important and exciting cultural artform. LICF