Euro Comix Exhibit Sheds Light on Superiority of the Overseas Genre

The United States, for all our obsession with popular media, is remarkably behind its overseas neighbors in recognition and development of one art form some other nations consider to be as important as film or novels--the comic strip. Although Americans have started to cultivate taste for the work of artists and animators from Japan, where comics have been "taken seriously" for years, realization has yet to hit the U.S. that our Western European neighbors have been developing the graphic narrative into an adult, provocative art form for decades. The French, once again, are light-years ahead.

European Comics, an exhibition at the Boston Public Library, is a traveling display co-sponsored by a number of European-affiliated Boston organizations; its goal is "to introduce European comics to the American public on the 100th anniversary of comics in the United States." The material that has been chosen is interesting and engaging, and the documentation offers a fairly thorough look at the development of comics in French-speaking Western Europe over the last fifty years. Unfortunately, the supporting information is not as richly detailed as it could be, nor does it offer any background material on the history and culture against which it's being presented. The result is that, to the viewer with no previous knowledge of comics history or culture, the documentation will not be as educational as the designers hoped. The layout of the exhibit is also somewhat baffling, and, regrettably, no one at the Library itself seems to be sufficiently well-informed about the exhibit to offer explanations or enrichment.

Still, the comics panels which are on display are well worth seeing. Many, though not all, of the panels have been translated into English; a reading knowledge of French will be helpful but not essential to figuring out what's going on. The exhibit, laid out in roughly chronological order, starts by giving the viewer background on the classic comic weeklies Spirou and Pilote--started up in Belgium in 1938 and in France in 1959, respectively--which gave shape to the gradually maturing aesthetic of French comics. The commentary will take you through the first appearance of the "clean line" style of Herge, the creator and artist of the now-institutionalized mystery/adventure comic "Tintin," starring the plucky boy reporter and his faithful dog, Snowy. The influence of Herge's style has persisted through half a century and has influenced artists throughout the Western European cultural sphere. For demonstration, the exhibit offers thoughtfully selected examples by artists from Holland, Italy, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Spain.

Also present, of course, is "Asterix," the second staunch pillar of French comics. The comic, a series of hilarious chronicles by Rene Goscinny and Albert Underzo, document the adventures of a village of plucky Gauls in an ancient France almost completely dominated by the Romans. Asterix's adventures have appeared as countless films and cartoons in French television and theaters, been translated into dozens of languages worldwide (including Latin) and garnered the indomitable warrior his own theme park, just a little north of Paris. (To gauge the difference in the cultural influence of comics in France and in America, consider the fact that the best-selling book of all time in France is one of Asterix's comic albums.)

Further displays guide you, via individually labeled subcategories, through several of the major genres of French and Franco-phone comics, past and present--the "naturalists," the "realists" and the "absurdists" (whose work may remind viewers of some of the more interesting and surreal experimentation done later by Robert Crumb and others in the psychedelic "head comix" of the American 1960s). In the category "Science Fiction and Fantasy," the visitor will find that a comic strip genre popular in nearly every country except, for whatever reason, the United States. Here you'll see the original incarnation of "Barbarella" in Jean-Claude Forest's slinky black-and-white panels and the classic work of Jean Giraud, a master of the realist style known to science-fiction comics readers throughout Europe and the United States by the pseudonym Moebius.

Other cultural norms are turned on their heads under the category of "Superheroes," where visitors discover that, although the spandex-wearing ubermensches (and uberfraus) may be all the rage in the United States, in Europe they are used mostly for satirical purposes. Only in England does the serious superhero thrive, in incarnations like "Judge Dredd," found in the pages of adult comic weeklies like 2000 A.D. or Warriors. French and Belgian takes on the superhero yield either goofy results, like "Superdupont" by Gotlib and Jacques Lob, or satiric ones, as in the Italian "Ranxerox," a buffed-up, tank-top wearing, green-lipsticked, utterly psychotic superhero who bounces around on all fours with wires trailing out of his head.

Where French comic-making often truly shines, though, is in the realm of the ordinary--the strips about "everyday life." From a slightly slatternly, stay-at-home bourgeois family (Christian Binet's "Les Bidochon"), to a grumpy, jaded modern student (Claire Bretecher's adventures of "Agrippine"), to a wide-eyed, pompadoured, out-of-place teenage suburban rocker (Frank Mergerin's "Lucien"), Francophone strips manage to make the banal intriguing, a worthy topic for art.

The exhibit is rounded off by a small collection of posters from the International Festival of Angouleme, France's annual comic-strip exposition--usually attended by over a hundred thousand people in the course of its four-day run--and a much larger collection of comic albums and spin-off products from France and its cultural neighbors. The commercial products range from the predictable (watches, keychains, slippers) to the completely startling (massive commemorative etched-glass slabs, bottles of wine). Amusing as these are, the overall effect of the exhibit is somewhat disappointing, partly due to an evident lack of support or engagement on the part of the library; unless you have a strong interest in the subject, it's not worth making a trip to Copley to see it. If, however, you're genuinely fascinated by the comics literature of the past half-century done by our European neighbors, or if you happen to be in the vicinity of the Public Library anyway, by all means stop by. You'll find yourself wondering why the United States hasn't figured out yet how great comics for grown-ups can be.