Comics and Novelization

Within the limits of the French-speaking world, this book pieces together a literary history of comics through their novels, from the 19th to 21th centuries. It provides an overview of a poorly catalogued and understudied corpus, while also affording first original insights into them

This book opens a novel perspective on comics and literature interactions. It claims that the two artistic media have always maintained a mutual emulation, for as long as they have coexisted in media culture. To demonstrate this, the present research does not focus on literary adaptations in comics form but rather on a literary corpus that remains virtually unexplored: comics-related novels. The purpose of this volume is to inventory French comics-related novels and to study them. Within the limits of the French-speaking world, this book pieces together a literary history of bande dessinée through its novels, from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Although the comic strip - including the aptly named "graphic novel" - has sometimes been regarded as the disciple of an unsurpassable literary model, do these under-studied adaptations in novel form not rather indicate a mutual relationship, or even an emulation, between the two media?

Autorentext

Benoît Glaude is a researcher at Universiteit Gent and a visiting lecturer at Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He has published several books about French-speaking comics, including his PhD on comics dialogues (La Bande dialoguée, 2019), as well as a volume on novelization in children's literature (Les Novellisations pour la jeunesse, coedited with Laurent Déom, 2020).

Klappentext

Within the limits of the French-speaking world, this book pieces together a literary history of comics through their novels, from the 19th to 21th centuries. It provides an overview of a poorly catalogued and understudied corpus, while also affording first original insights into them

Inhalt

Introduction. Comics-related novels

Comics and literature

A novel perspective on comics and adaptations

Comics novelization and the visual turn of literary writing

Two adaptation processes generating comics-related novels

Towards a literary history of bande dessinée

Chapter 1. Textual margins of early comics

How to verbalize a picture story?

Close reading: Voyages and Adventures of Dr Festus

Captions rewritten as a bridge over redrawn illustrations

Big Little Books and the French book market: a missed rendezvous

From captioned picture stories to serials-under-images

Mickey et Minnie, a precursor to the modern French junior novelization

Chapter 2. Enunciative issues of comics verbalizations

The literary adventures of Tintin

An issue of enunciative responsibility

Literary initiations to a visual universe

Close reading: The Adventures of Tintin

When comics fans write literary panels

From ekphrasis to fanfiction

Chapter 3. Why self-novelize a comic strip?

The illusion of a deeper reading experience

Comics artists and literary illustration

A logic of supplement

Close reading: Acknowledgment of Murders, Ric Hochet's First Case

From graphic to literary novels

A logic of substitution

Chapter 4. The comics heroes' childhood told to children

How to relate the past of comics heroes

The literary prequels of French comics characters

Multiple childhoods of a Belgian-Japanese comics heroine

Close reading: The Froth of Dawn, the First Adventure of Yoko Tsuno

Comics-related French junior novelizations

When a comics character writes his own autobiography

Conclusion. Reading novels as comics novelizations

Comics on the threshold of literary texts

Comics as a frame for multimodal storytelling

Comics in the factory of literary writing

Reading novels as comics scripts

References

Comics-related fiction

Other primary sources

Secondary criticism

Index