Week 9: European Comics

European Comics have their own characteristics campared to American Comics and Japanese Manga. Especially France and Belgium produce many comics and have their own name “Bande dessinée” or “Bédé”, like America has the name Comic Strips and Japan has Manga. For the style, Bédé is mainly created by one artist unlike Manga artists work with their assistants, but sometimes the Bédé artists divide their roles with art and story.

Unlike the Comic Strips and Manga, the European comics more focus on arts and because of that, an auteurism can be easily found in the European comics. An auteur defines an artist who takes control over all features of synergic creative works. An auteurism insists that the originality and characteristics of artists must be clearly shown in their works. Now it is regarded as a commonsense but even during the mid twentieth century it was not.

One of the great European comic artists is Jean Giraud, whose pen name is Moebius. Since his comics got published, many artists in Europe, America, and even Asia were influenced around 1970s and 1980s, and Jean Giraud became known as the best Sci-Fi artists. The main reason I think that he got acknowledged is because he embraced various styles and worlds from other artists and reapplied them to his work.