Abstract
The 1968 republication of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon has a lot to tell us about French comics fandom and how a comics heritage was assembled. This chapter explores this reappraisal, and the ways in which comics came to be acknowledged as cultural heritage via initiatives to republish works. Comics fandom in the French-speaking world (bédéphilie) was deeply linked to nostalgia, focusing particularly on the United States, whose comic strips of the 1930s were a lost paradise for 1960s adults. Flash Gordon played a central role in raising the cultural status of bande dessinée, a process driven by rivalry between CELEG and SOCERLID, between France and the United States: Alex Raymond’s series triggered virtually unanimous fascination and went through various republications, casting light on the contours of their communities. Based on the Nostalgia Press republication, Socerlid’s Flash Gordan (1968) illustrates how an awareness of comics heritage came to the fore, together with an ambition to legitimise the form by upmarket republications of masterworks of the past.
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Notes
- 1.
The Communist Party eventually abstained as a tactical precaution after France became sucked into the Cold War.
- 2.
The klare lijn or ligne claire is a term that appeared in the 1970s, when a younger generation revisited the aesthetics of Hergé and his followers in the Journal de Tintin (Edgar P. Jacobs, Jacques Martin…). For an introduction to the problems raised by the term, see (Screech 2005).
- 3.
Georges Sadoul, Ce que lisent vos enfants, op. cit., pp. 25–26.
- 4.
Francis Lacassin, “Comment le club des bandes dessinées est devenu le CELEG”, Giff-Wiff, no. 20, May 1966, pp. 34–37.
- 5.
Despite the announcement in Fiction’s January 1962 issue, the association's statutes were only filed with the relevant authorities on 29 March 1962 and then published in the Journal officiel (the official gazette of the French state) on 8 April 1962, a delay caused by difficulties in setting up the association's board.
- 6.
Giuseppe Peruzzo, “Histoire de la revue Linus”, Neuvième Art, no. 11, October 2004, pp. 18–31.
- 7.
Among those working on this latter fanzine were two collectors, Ernesto Traverso and Silvano Scotto, who founded the “Club Anni Trenta” in 1969, which over the course of the 1970s considerably raised the standard of republications (producing entire oeuvres, respecting formats, and so on).
- 8.
The two series in question were “Guy l’Éclair en Frigie”, for which subscriptions were opened in October 1962 and April 1963, comprising, respectively, 24 and 23 slides; stocks of these episodes were soon exhausted.
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Lesage, S. (2023). Flash Gordon and the Transatlantic Construction of Ninth Art Heritage. In: Ninth Art. Bande dessinée, Books and the Gentrification of Mass Culture, 1964-1975. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17001-0_3
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