Bart Beaty: Shining A Bright Light on European Comics

By Tim O'Shea

Bart Beaty was a writer I first learned about through Tom Spurgeon's Comics Reporter, where Beaty currently writes Bart Beaty's Conversational Euro-Comics. Thanks to some assistance from Spurgeon, I was able to recently interview Beaty regarding his new book, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. To quote Beaty's publisher, the University of Toronto Press:

"In the last 15 years or so, a wide community of artists working in a variety of western European nations have overturned the dominant traditions of comic book publishing as it has existed since the end of the Second World War. These artists reject both the traditional form and content of comic books (hardcover, full-colour ‘albums’ of humour or adventure stories, generally geared towards children), seeking instead to instill the medium with experimental and avant-garde tendencies commonly associated with the visual arts. Unpopular Culture addresses the transformation of the status of the comic book in Europe since 1990.

Increasingly, comic book artists seek to render a traditionally degraded aspect of popular culture un-popular, transforming it through the adoption of values borrowed from the field of ‘high art.’ The first English-language book to explore these issues, Unpopular Culture represents a challenge to received histories of art and popular culture that downplay significant historical anomalies in favour of more conventional narratives. In tracing the efforts of a large number of artists to disrupt the hegemony of high culture, Bart Beaty raises important questions about cultural value and its place as an important structuring element in contemporary social processes.

Bart Beaty is an associate professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary."

Tim O'Shea (TOS): Your book focuses on seven case studies that argue "that the evolution from a criteria of value with its basis in the novel to one rooted in the artist's book is the most significant shift in the orientation of the comics field in the past century" How challenging was it to settle upon these particular seven case studies?

Bart Beaty (BB): Limiting the scope of the book was one of the hardest things that I had to do. I've been writing about European comics in The Comics Journal and at comicsreporter and elsewhere for almost a decade, and in that time I've talked with hundreds of cartoonists that I find fascinating, and it was painful to have leave so many out of the book. In the end, no one wants to read a 700-page book about comics in Europe so rather than trying to be complete I focused on major themes where I thought I had something original to offer in the way of analysis.

TOS: In earlier drafts of your analysis, did you offer more or different case studies?

BB: Yeah, a lot of material ended up going by the wayside. I had originally wanted a very long section on Le Dernier Cri, who are a brutalist silkscreen printer based in Marseille who do very aggressive (many would say “ugly”) work, but that didn’t fit so I’m saving it for a book that I’m working on now. In the chapter dealing with Joann Sfar, Emmanuel Guibert and Christophe Blain I compare their work to that of Jean Van Hamme, but had originally wanted a longer discussion of earlier figures like Hergé or Jacques Tardi, but that had to go for space reasons. I also had an entire chapter on reprinted work that the small press is resurrecting, but that ended up moving to an anthology that is scheduled to come out next year.

TOS: In the opening acknowledgments, you thank more than 50 people: "this book would never have been written if I had not been able to share ideas with so many of the artists, critics, journalists, editors, and publishers whose work is discussed herein" Can you single out any particular work or person's opinion that you drastically changed your perspective after talking to him or her?

BB: Obviously there are certain cartoonists that I’m closer to than others, and I sometimes heard their voices in the back of my head as I wrote. For instance, Dupuy and Berberian are artists that I talked to at length when I was starting this project and who were really useful in terms of recreating for me the sense of change that was happening at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Certainly Jean-Christophe Menu of L’Association has such a strong critical voice that I found myself thinking about his writings even where I disagreed with them. The same can be said about Yvan Alagbé of Frémok, who always seems to bring me back to reality. But there are a lot, and they all have different perspectives based on where they live and how well things are going in their own careers.

TOS: In discussing chapter three of the book, in your intro, you write : "Chapter three outlines the visual aesthetics of the contemporary European small press, with a particular emphasis on the way that avant-garde and experimental styles have contributed to a new awareness of the possibilities of visuality in the medium. I recently did an interview with Renee French, where we briefly discussed her participation in an upcoming show at the Louvre (along with the likes of Jim Woodring, Anke Feuchtenberger, Thomas Ott, Max Andersson and Tom Gauld), arranged in conjunction with L'Association. How much do you think exhibitions like this have contributed to the "awareness" you address in chapter three?

BB: I think that exhibitions like that one at the Louvre are absolutely crucial to what I’m talking about. Comics exhibitions are only now getting a lot of attention in the US with the Masters show, but they have a much longer tradition in Europe where exhibitions are a big part of festivals like Angoulême and where there are established comics museums. One of the big changes that I see are cartoonists who are aware of their work both as a printed object and something that can be displayed. Not all of the cartoonists that I talk about see things that way (Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar don’t, for example) but for someone like Anke Feuchtenberger, whose individual panels are enormous – several feet square – there is a real sense that what they are doing is not far removed from what contemporary painters and sculptors are doing.

TOS: The fifth chapter of your analysis offers your belief that in the 1990s that autobiography gained prominence in "contemporary comic book production". Can you briefly address the main reasons you felt this occurred?

BB: Autobiography really exploded in Europe at around the same time it did in the U.S. alternative comics scene. Part of the reason is the success of Maus, which really opened the eyes of a lot of people that you could do serious work outside of the normal traditions of comics. In a way, I think a lot of artists saw it as a way of distancing themselves from what earlier generations had done, and it was an easy way to say “Hey, we’re doing something totally different over here”

TOS: Given that chapter five also analyzes works within the market, have you heard back from any of the storytellers that you assessed in that chapter? What's been the reaction in general from the very industry/players that you have analyzed in this work?

BB: It was funny. The book was released about ten days prior to Angoulême and I took a lot of copies with me to give to the artists whose work I talk about. Most of them, of course, didn’t have time to read the book during the Festival, which is a hectic weekend. But by the Saturday night I started hearing from a few people who had read the parts about themselves. No one has been angry, which is great! For the most part the discussions have been excellent. I had a long talk with Martin tom Dieck about the nature of the avant-garde, for example. And at dinner with Max we talked a lot about the idea of comics as popular culture and my contention that they’re becoming “unpopular”. Max didn’t like that, since he very much sees his work as popular, but we had a very good back and forth about it.

TOS: On a larger scale, are there any trends you saw played out in Europe (in the time that your address in your work) that you see starting to play out in the North American market or vice versa?

BB: I think that there are tremendous similarities. In some regards, I think that the U.S. is just a few steps behind Europe. Books like Brian Chippendale’s Ninja are very akin to some of the stuff that interests me in Europe, and the same can be said for Kramer’s Ergot, a lot of the material in Mome and so on. We’re seeing more and more exhibitions over here now, which is fantastic. One other thing is that there is more crossover between the American indy scene and the mainstream than ever before with artists like Dean Haspiel doing The Thing or Dylan Horrocks and Gilbert Hernandez writing superhero stories. That’s very similar to the way that Trondheim, Sfar and those guys all moved from the smaller publishers to the bigger ones without really quitting the small press entirely. I think that a lot of artists see the possibility of existing in both worlds simultaneously.

TOS: Are your comfortable trying to project how much ground that you expect European comics to make in North America in the next five to 10 years?

BB: I’m starting to think that the sky’s the limit. Seven or eight years ago there were virtually no translations of European comics being published in the U.S., and now there are quite a few. Obviously Fantagraphics, NBM and Drawn and Quarterly have continued bringing out new material, but there are also newer venues like First Second and Pantheon ramping up the translations. The huge success of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis really helped moved things along. These days I’m hearing about a new translation in the works every day. There’s a lot of great stuff coming, and I think it will see some exponential growth.

TOS: How long were you "exposed" to European comics before you made the big connection to them and chose to become an expert in the field?

BB: Growing up in Canada, I started reading French comics at a very young age alongside the Archies and Harvey comics that I loved as a kid, and I kept reading them as a teenager. When I was in graduate school in Montreal I really got much more immersed because of the used bookstores, that made a lot of material available to me for the first time. Around that time I was asked by Tom Spurgeon to write on Euro-comics for the Journal and that sort of led me deeper to the point that I realized that there were things that I wanted to say that would be beyond the scope of those reviews. I first started thinking about the book in 2000, so it’s been an awful long process!

TOS: Do you expect/hope that as comics gain legitimacy and mainstream acceptance to a greater degree, that interest in comic scholarship will grow in parallel?

BB: I really do. When I was in grad school I had the sense that there were dozens of comics scholars worldwide, but now I think that there are hundreds. It’s just going to continue to grow. There’s a long way to go before we catch up with art historians and lit profs, but it’s a growth field. This is really helped by the fact that there is more and more variety in the comics field these days, so it attracts people from all kinds of scholarly backgrounds.

TOS: In the introduction, you caution that "this book is in no way a comprehensive overview of the development of European comic book industries in Europe since 1990. Significant trends are omitted, important artists are neglected, and entire genres are forgotten in this book." That being said, do you envision doing a companion book that might focus on the neglected artists and genres?

BB: The book that I’m writing at the moment addresses the comics/”art” relationship through galleries, auction houses, museums and so on, so that will take me in a different direction. But I would love to put together an updated collection of my columns for the Journal as a book and overhaul that as a guide to the really interesting artists, well-known and unknown, in Europe at the moment. I’ve had some initial interest from a publisher or two, but nothing solid.

TOS: Part of your analysis addresses the transition from the 1980s focus on well-written literary comics to the 1990s movement fueled by visual arts. Since the 1990s has the pendulum started swinging back to more literary works (rather than visual)?

BB: It’s hard to say. I think that there are always both present in the field at the same time. Certainly I don’t think that the visual works that I’ve been writing about have ever been in a dominant position, so those artists are still trying to make inroads. I do think that there will be some backlash in the future, but then a new generation will likely take things even further. I think that the evolution of all art forms is a constant give and take battle, and that’s certainly true for comics as they try to move forward as an art form.