Why do We Love Comics: On Passions

Recently, I had to answer a question that seemed easy to me: why do I like comic books? This is a question that is more interesting to me than others, and to which I have never really answered Because this answer has always seemed to me to be obvious. Have you ever remembered the deep reasons for your passions? I have tried to do this, and I would like to share with you not only what I have learned from it, but also to make you realize that comics is an art in its own right, an art that I find beautiful, more beautiful than what we identify with daily. And, who knows, I may be able, at the end of this short exposition, to convert you to it. For me, this is the BD, but for you, it may be cinema, literature, poetry, painting, or that I know, the pottery that you will share my reflection.

First of all, I’d say it’s probably because the comic strip puts us back in our childhood. In our childhood memories. It sustains the flame of our youth. Even though we are, of course, far from Old, we sometimes tend to forget our childish soul. The comic book, it, the sublime one for us. To find again, during a reading, from twenty minutes to several hours, a certain form of carelessness, where everything that concerns the US stands before our eyes, but also a certain form of fullness, the same as that which we had as children, at the time when we had fewer responsibilities, fewer things to think about. No logistics CLS, no busy schedules, no hours spent in crowded and noisy public transport.

Some, of course, will call us childish, childish, stuck in a universe that is not ours. They are sometimes right, but their look and their condescending tone when they tell us proves that they do not understand the pleasure that one can feel in returning to childhood, thanks to a comic, or thanks to a book, a film, a painting.

More broadly, we like comics because they border on perfection. For the escape it provides. For the fact that it propels us into an infinity of diverse universes, of worlds, because it feeds our thoughts and sometimes our dreams because it offers us the possibility of identifying with its thousands of characters. Thanks to them, we share the imagination of authors, artists! “Like other literary works,” you might say. To which I would reply ” No, infinitely better than that “. Why? Because lines that you read, images that you look at, fix and admire, your mind animates them, give them a meaning, a movement, a story that is unique to your imagination. It is the fusion, perfect symbiosis between pictorial art and written art. Images can be sublime and sublimated by our imaginations.

In short, to conclude on this first point, the comic strip allows us to let ourselves go, to offer ourselves a small bubble in which to settle down for a little while and to make us forget the pressure we can feel daily. To make us laugh, to thrill with impatience while waiting for the next volume, but also to show us that we are capable of freeing our mind from what we experience every day.

Do we also love him for his story? Tell me, when do you think the comic book was born? In the 19th century, but long before that, the pictorial art that told stories already existed. If comics are art, what should we associate the frescoes of the caves of Lascaux with? The scenes in the Egyptian temples? The friezes of the Parthenon of Athens? To associate the comic strip with all this reinforces the love that we can bring to it. For it is present throughout the generations, and we bear the torch of it, or at least we bear the torch of the form it has taken in our days. And the cartoon’s flame never seems to go out, but to burn more and more. For most of us, comic strips were born in the 19th century. His first masterpiece is the Yellow Kid, by Richard Felton Foucault, and is miles away from today’S comics. This shows that adaptation, evolution, creativity are also integral parts of this art. Even if we are not familiar with all of this, the magic of comics is such that it offers us the possibility to recognize ourselves through one or more of its innumerable styles and themes whether Belgian, French, American, police, adventure, history.

The history, society, fantasy, science fiction, manga. Everything can be transcribed in comic strips. Rahan TO XIII, Titeuf to Garfield, Corto Maltese in blue tunics. Tintin, Asterix, Batman, and more, every style can reveal something in you, bring you what you’re looking for when you open an album.