Igirisujin
Ceinture Marron
Inscrit le: 24 Sep 2003
Messages: 16
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Pays, Ville: Birmingham, England
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 Posté le: 03 Fév 2004 17:32 Sujet du message: le manga et la france
Note du Post : 3 Nombre d'avis : 2 |
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Article du Financial Times:
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1073281501827&p=1012571727166
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Astérix and the marauding manga-maniacs
By Jo Johnson
Published: February 3 2004 4:00 | Last Updated: February 3 2004 4:00
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac must be rotating in his burial place.
The seventeenth century man of letters, venerated locally as the "restorer of French prose", would be horrified at recent events in his home town of Angoulême. Last month, it welcomed 150,000 people to a festival that, over the past 31 years, has become the Cannes of comic books - known as bandes dessinées in France. This year there was even more than usual to infuriate this arch-defender of French linguistic purity.
Manga-mania is sweeping the country. Japanese "graphic novels" - many of them violent and pornographic - last year accounted for almost a third of the 1,860 new comic books published in France, according to Livres Hebdo publishing weekly, compared with about 20 per cent in 2002 and less than 10 per cent in 2001.
The speed of the manga invasion makes it one of the most dramatic cultural shifts since Hollywood overpowered the European film industry. The generation that grew up watching Japanese cartoons on television in the 1980s now reads manga, not Molière.
The fear is that France may become like Japan, where 40 per cent of publications are comics and ever fewer people read any "serious literature".
On the surface, the French comic industry is enjoying a golden age. Sales of comic albums reached a new high last year and represent about 10 per cent of the book market. Whereas to many other nations comics are no more than a childhood indulgence, the French regard comic books as the "ninth art", almost on a par with classic fiction and cinema. Read by seven- to 77-year-olds, comic books provide an escapist break from a heavy-going literary culture and hark back to happier economic times.
In fact, though, it is manga that are fuelling the comic boom. Jacques Glénat, founder of Glénat, which in 1991 published the first best-selling manga - Akira -boasts that his sales of Japanese comics soared 20 per cent last year. In a mature book industry that grew at 0.5-1 per cent in 2003, almost all big comic book publishers have set up fast-growing manga imprints. Only Dupuis, the grand Belgian house founded in 1898, keeps to a manga-free list - but many suspect it too may soon follow suit.
"For a long time we thought manga was just a fad that would disappear, but we were wrong," admits Claude Gendrot, editorial director of Dupuis. "We are now seriously asking ourselves whether we should jump on the bandwagon. But would we not be digging our own grave? As it is not at all clear to us that readers of manga go on to buy francophone bandes dessinées the manga phenomenon represents a grave threat to the whole European industry."
The economics of manga seem unstoppable. Pocket-sized and printed in black and white on cheap paper, they cost less to produce than the lavish, all-colour hardback albums produced in France and Belgium. Margins on manga are also higher because it is much cheaper to pay a licence fee to translate an existing series than to commission an original work from a European artist.
Manga sell for around €6 - half the cost of a traditional comic book. Whereas a French comic series offers readers one volume a year, manga publishers deliver a new tome every month. Tintin, Astérix, Lucky Luke and today's hero, Titeuf, a sex- obsessed 10-year-old, will have to work harder for shelf space. Some new stores in Paris only stock manga.
The appeal of manga reflects a wider fascination with Japanese culture, extending all the way up to President Jacques Chirac, a fan of sumo, and back to the Impressionist movement. Japanophilia is evident in the trend for French publishers to produce comics that read from right to left and no longer delete untranslatable onomatopoeia. Manga-junkies take nerdish pleasure in knowing that boin boin signifies bouncing breasts and bashi bashi the sound of smacking someone on the head.
The increasing sophistication of the manga available in France - at Angoulême this year, 20th Century Boy by Naoki Urusawa won the prize for the best series - helps publishers defend themselves against criticism that they are corrupting youth. "If we did not have manga, a whole generation would have stayed in front of the television and never held a book in their hands," says Mr Glénat. "Better that they read manga than never learn to read at all."
Benoit Mouchart, artistic director of the Angoulême festival, is also optimistic. "Manga is not the 'yellow peril'. It may be paradoxical, but we can almost say that manga is in the process of saving the French publishing industry," he says. "When people come into stores every month to buy manga, they will also buy a Franco-Belgian bande dessinéealbum. And with the profits from their manga bestsellers, publishers cross-subsidise all their other French language publishing activities." With that more hopeful thought, Mr Guez de Balzac can rest in peace.
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