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4 years ago by jgrahamc

Am I to understand from this that the New York Times (and perhaps the bien pensant in the US) consider mere "comic books" some sort of gutter culture?

My last trip to Paris I spent a long time in these "comic book" stores. They are absolute goldmines with passionate and knowledgeable staff and incredible selections.

4 years ago by imperio59

France has a long tradition of the "BD" (Bande Dessine = Comic Books) and a thriving community of illustrators and writers who make them. There are many great series which a lot of us French kids grew up with who had pretty intricate plots and were very well crafted.

I agree that sneering at Comic books as "not the culture we wanted" is BS. Culture is culture. French and Belgian comic books like "Asterix et les Gaulois" or "Tintin" or "Gaston La Gaffe" etc... are great works of comedy and art just like anything else.

4 years ago by rchaud

From the article, it doesn't seem like the money is going towards French + Belgian comics either. I am not French, but Asterix and Tintin comics were widely sold in translated versions in my country and across the world.

But mine was also the pre-Internet era, where we'd spend small fortunes on comics and magazines because we had nothing to offset the boredom. With always-on Internet, that's just not a reality now.

4 years ago by dfxm12

Is the money going to French bookstores, though?

4 years ago by Isamu

Moebius, of course.

Right now I really love PTSD by Guillaume Singelin.

4 years ago by julienfr112

Young french people are not buying "BD Franco-Belge", but mangas.

4 years ago by 908B64B197

It's a little late to stop considering comic books as a part of French culture. Asterix has been sold worldwide to 350 millions copies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix

https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/03/asterix-and-the-bl...

I guess they are unhappy about teens buying manga? Real question is why French comic book artist aren't selling in Japan? There's a lot of Japanese tourists in France, that doesn't sound too far-fetched.

4 years ago by mtts

According to the article they’re not buying the indeed fantastic French “BD” comic books but manga.

4 years ago by rootsudo

Manga is very good nowadays, I don't blame the kids. Go with what's in. It's culture.

4 years ago by _rpd

I think the hope was that the money would be used to support local cultural content/events since people in those enterprises have been hard hit by the COVID crisis.

4 years ago by mcguire

That's not bad either, unless they're under the weird delusion that the only valid culture in France is French culture.

(I personally find manga to be excessively drawn-out, even more than American comics, seemingly in order to sell more books. But that's me.)

4 years ago by bsder

This is as old as the medium.

Dickens was paid by the word. This is why "Tale of Two Cities" is a wonderful book with a gigantic pile of garbage in the middle.

(To be fair: The middle of "Tale of Two Cities" has some of my favorite scenes, but, boy, howdy, could it use an editor to chop out about 2/3 of it)

4 years ago by codyswann

More specifically, the article points out the money was supposed to be used to expose the kids to culture that they're not already exposed to. Instead, they're using it to buy more of the culture (magna) that they're already buying anyway.

4 years ago by ithkuil

Are you insinuating that manga is not culture?

4 years ago by dfxm12

They're insinuating manga is not French culture.

4 years ago by duxup

The impression I got from the article was that the author described comic books as separate from "highbrow arts"... but beyond that I got no impression of any of "gutter culture" implications.

I honestly just thought of it as an interesting article about what happens when you do the thing they describe. Not any particular judgment.

4 years ago by jacquesm

Comic books are culture. Whether you like that or not is a matter of taste. Personally I absolutely love 'Gaston' and 'Asterix', but also like some other old school ones. The newer stuff I don't feel much connection with.

4 years ago by yann2

+1

No accident that part of the world produced Herge and Mobieus and inspired Miyazaki.

4 years ago by ashtonkem

Yup, this whole thing has a huge whiff of classicism and snobbery.

4 years ago by SilasX

Regardless of what you consider "culture", the French government had some conception of what kinds of things they wanted the teens to engage in, and this isn't it (even if it's worthwhile in its own right). I think that's the article's point, and the program may respond by restricting the funds' usage in the future.

4 years ago by tsimionescu

Here is a quote from the French governement site presenting the program [0]:

> Envie d’aller au théùtre, voir un film ou un spectacle ? De prendre des cours de photo ? D’un roman ou d’un manga ? [emphasis mine]

Which roughly means

Would you like to go to the theatre, see a film or a show? Take some photography courses? Read a novel or manga?

If the French government didn't intend for the money to be used this way, they certainly haven't told the people designing the site that promotes it.

[0] https://pass.culture.fr/

4 years ago by vlunkr

> the French government had some conception of what kinds of things they wanted the teens to engage in, and this isn't it

Is that true though? Maybe some people in the government feel that way, but it sounds like the goal was just to allow teenagers to buy what they wanted. If they thought kids were going to spend it to go the opera or something, why wouldn't they have put more restrictions on it in the first place?

4 years ago by WastingMyTime89

> the French government had some conception of what kinds of things they wanted the teens to engage in, and this isn't it

What? The French government isn't dumb. If they didn't want, teenagers to spend the pass money on BD, it would have been excluded. As is, I assume the French government is perfectly fine with French teenagers spending it on French produced entertainment in French stores.

4 years ago by arcturus17

Gaston is possibly some of the best humor I've ever seen in any cultural medium.

Tintin was gripping too, and arguably the greatest cultural icon to come from European comics.

In Spain we had a good comic culture from the 50s onwards, with perhaps one of the greatest exponents being Mortadelo y FilemĂłn which had was hilarious and had some international exposure (I've seen it in German flea markets as Clever & Smart)

I agree that comics are culture too, but I can see how this will ruffle some feathers among people expecting that young kids would be buying thick tomes by Chateaubriand or attending Racine plays in droves.

This is a model of subsidy (vouchers, in essence) which some free-market economists can get behind as it still allows agency from individuals or markets. However what we're seeing is the very reason why others would staunchly oppose this kind of model...

4 years ago by jacquesm

I have a story about Gaston, and how funny it is. When I was a kid I would read with a flashlight under the covers after the time that I was supposed to be in bed and sleeping. This worked well for most books but with Gaston I couldn't help myself being in stitches from time to time which invariably attracted unwanted parental attention.

There are a couple that immediately spring to mind, the one where he launches the gas container from the roof of his car, the 'running gag' about the contracts that never get signed and that surprise in fact do get signed and then are promptly shredded by the cat and the badly humored seagull that drops stuff on people.

And the parking meter wars, hilarious.

4 years ago by Agingcoder

And the morue aux fraises (cod with strawberries)

4 years ago by cwizou

As an aside, it's been a bit surprising to see the disconnect on so many topics regarding France in the NYT in the last few months.

This seems like just the latest (and fairly mild) episode of this, but it's still a bit puzzling to me as a former (sort of) journalist to see so much editorialising, and in this case, an utter lack of facts and context.

There's not much on the goals behind that pass, the impact of covid on many of the other options, or any background on the local "bd" culture that would explain the difference to the US comics culture to the reader. The title certainly doesn't help.

At that point I don't know if I'm just getting more picky with time, but the fact to editorialising ratio in the NYT seem to have shifted to, at least to me, a fairly uncomfortable level pretty much every time I stumble onto one of their articles.

4 years ago by not_exactly__

I’ve personally stopped reading NYT specifically because of this editorializing vs just reporting issue. It’s really frustrating to see in individual articles; in the greater scheme of things, it’s sad to observe. NYT has always had blunders (eg 2003 war in Iraq), but this is something else altogether.

4 years ago by nagrom

It's not just France - the way that the NYT treats the UK has become a running joke e.g:

https://londonist.com/london/food-and-drink/until-recently-l...

https://unherd.com/2020/01/what-has-the-new-york-times-got-a...

This weird inability to reflect reality I see day-to-day coupled with the insistence on anti-patterns of behaviour for those cancelling their subscriptions has prevented me from taking out a sub to the NYT. That's a shame, as some of the articles are great.

4 years ago by prof-dr-ir

The second reference you gave lists four opinion pieces, one culinary review whose tongue-in-cheek comment it misinterprets, and one actual news article about the impact of austerity in Britain.

That one news article was a subject of intense discussion at the time which quickly became politicized. A decent overview of the discussion can be found at

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/business/prescot-makes-...

For what it's worth, I wholly subscribe to the OP's viewpoint that the NY times' reports from France have been subpar in recent months - in my view they have been too Americo-Centric and do not sufficiently recognize the different value system in France. But I have often been positively surprised by the paper's reporting on UK issues (and on Brexit in particular).

4 years ago by mcguire

You have to admit that Great Britain has a long-term reputation for boiling food to death. And their sporting culture seems even more Leroy Jenkins than that in the US.

4 years ago by cududa

Our Scottish and US families have long running jokes about one another’s cultures, and the food part was a long one. Until the matriarch on the Scottish side was here with a larger amount of the family and said “well our food is kind of pish in comparison”

4 years ago by tonyedgecombe

>You have to admit that Great Britain has a long-term reputation for boiling food to death.

Not for a long time.

>And their sporting culture seems even more Leroy Jenkins than that in the US.

Currently 6th in the medal table for the Olympics.

4 years ago by asdff

LA Times has even parodied how NYT tends to cover Los Angeles.

https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-nyc-restaurant-scene-apri...

4 years ago by bsder

That was brilliant. Thanks for sharing it.

4 years ago by AutumnCurtain

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/xbkmm

Absolutely brilliant article IMO

4 years ago by 908B64B197

> As an aside, it's been a bit surprising to see the disconnect on so many topics regarding France in the NYT in the last few months.

Not the NYT, but I still remember the "No go zones" CNN boasted about. [0] [1]

I still remember French co-workers having a good laugh at it. It's tough to fact-check anything when you don't speak the language.

[0] https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/01/cnn-apologizes-...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/01/21/natpkg-look-at-pari...

4 years ago by GuB-42

Here is the website for the initiative https://pass.culture.fr/

Manga is explicitly mentioned in the introduction. If the government didn't want teens to buy comics, they would have excluded it, and most importantly, not mention manga on the front page!

If by that initiative, they get teens to go to their local bookstore instead of ordering their comics on Amazon, it is a huge win, and one of the big reasons this pass exists.

4 years ago by mombul

This article misses the point. The point is that at a time where teenagers' finances (= their parents') are not at their best (COVID), where theaters and libraries are closed-ish (COVID), where you can't just hang out freely at a coffee shop that offers free comics to read (COVID), where you can't side down in the aisles of the comic book store (COVID), they decided to give them $350. Nobody believed they'd use it to go see some Shakespeare, and nobody should. It's just dumb classicism.

Good on them to use it for something they LIKE instead of something someome else deems better for them.

4 years ago by makeitdouble

Why is this pass described like in a vacuum when the country we’re still in a middle of a pandemic ?

> They can purchase tickets to movie showings, plays, concerts or museum exhibits. And they can sign up for dance, painting or drawing classes.

Oh you mean they didn’t rush to the theaters, that also were only reopened a few weeks ago, with many closing again ?

And the pass has limitation on what can be bought, only part of it can be spent online, and content or production has to be french and approved by the gov., which really reduces the options.

All in all this is to me a weird take on the situation.

4 years ago by 0xTJ

Comic books are definitely culture. It's art and story-telling. They're at least as worthy of the title as any other book they might buy.

Sure, broadening their culture horizons would be good, if it was easy to enforce spending it on something you don't currently embrace.

I wished, and still wish, I had money that I could justify spending to buy comic books and getting into that.

I'm really not a fan of that sensationalist headline, trying to drive up outrage on both sides, ven though it doesn't say whether buying comic books is good or bad in the headline. The article even gives examples of how it can be beneficial, like teenagers buying from comics local shops instead of going online, or buying records locally, but ignores the fact that there's a pandemic that makes it hard to enjoy certain forms of entertainment that are pushed by this program. Overall, I don't think this is great and honest journalism, even if the content itself is interesting.

4 years ago by mimixco

The NYT title is intentionally derisive and xenophobic. The words "comic books" and the French term bandes dessinées relate to two entirely different experiences.

In the US, comics are considered by the masses to be the bane of pubescent boys or puerile adults obsessed with superheros and cosplay.

In France, graphic books (they're not all novels) are an elevated and widely-used cultural resource. They're found in educated bookstores, museum shops, libraries, and basically everywhere. And you know what? They're terrific!

France (and Belgium) have access to wonderful historical series on every period you can name. Tons of biographies of famous, real people. And beautiful, illustrated tomes which they can use to spark their imagination and learning.

It would be more accurate to say that Americans aren't spending money on graphically illustrated books because that's not an accepted part of our culture here, rather than to try to slam the French for something cool that works well for them.

See also: Scott's McCloud's Reinventing Comics [0] and BDfugue [1], a terrific online store for bandes dessinées.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Comics

[1] https://www.bdfugue.com/

4 years ago by derefr

The NYT is using that term because most Americans have never even heard the more fitting English-language term "graphic novels", and wouldn't know what it meant if the NYT used it.

(Though, also, it's clickbait. They want to shock people into reading the article by asking an implicit question with an evocative contrast: highlighting the discrepancy of mood between a term usually used to refer to high-brow concepts — "Culture" — and a term usually applied to low-brow media — "Comic Books". The body of the article, though investigating a similar tension, doesn't carry that same derogatory editorial thrust.)

4 years ago by mimixco

For sure, but they're not all novels. There's lots of factual graphic books and lots of conceptual things that can be learned from those books.

It's also notable that the NYT did not mention any of the differences between US and French or Belgian "comics."

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