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The name "comic" is totally wrong. The french name "bande dessine" illustrates better what it's all about. Take Pyongang by Guy Deslisle for instance. Since no

• klmr 8y ago
  You forgot the translation: “bande dessinée”, literally, means “drawn strip”, or, equivalently, graphic novel. The latter term exists and matches the French wording pretty closely. “Comic”, by contrasts, really only describes a subset.
  • dgellow 8y ago
    “Graphic novels” are called “Romans graphiques” and are their own category of “bande dessinée”. And yes, it’s a quite important thing, not only in France but in Belgium and Switzerland too (at least in Romandie, the French speaking part). I’m in Berlin since a few years now and one of the main thing I miss are places where I can go and read good comics, that’s not really something as developed here, majority of people I meet don’t even know that’s a thing. As a contrast, in Switzerland or France I can go to any Fnac store and spend a Saturday afternoon reading comics from a huge set of artists.
    • klmr 8y ago
      Hmm. I spent my late teens in France, was/am an avid graphic novel reader, and I have never heard the term “roman graphique”. Is it a recent term? It actually sounds like a back-translation of “graphic novel”. The term BD is ubiquitous. If you’re in Berlin check out Dussmann if you haven’t already (it’s hard to miss …). It’s nowhere near as well stocked as an average book shop in France but it does probably have the largest collection of BDs of any shop in Berlin.
      • cgrand-net 8y ago
        Yes, "roman graphique" is a rather recent term (whose usage has slowly grown over the last 15 years, generally applied to BDs with more "serious" topics; it allowed some people to say they don't read plebeian BDs, they read romans graphiques). Speaking of broadening people conception of BDs, I highly recommend people to have a look at La Revue Dessinée, a quarterly news magazine in BD https://www.larevuedessinee.fr https://www.larevuedessinee.fr
        • dgellow 8y ago
          > it allowed some people to say they don't read plebeian BDs, they read romans graphiques I don't know, that's not the way I see it personally. I see roman graphiques as more experimental concerning the narration, art, even how the actual book is produced (experimenting with different type of paper, different format) where traditionnal bandes dessinées have more strict codes they follow. So yes it can feel a bit more serious in some way but you also find weird and funny things.
          • klmr 8y ago
            At least for the English term this is explicitly the reason it was created: to avoid the bad reputation “comic strips” (and the term has been criticised for precisely this, because it’s seen as pretentious).
            • bunderbunder 8y ago
              If the goal was distancing oneself from mainstream comic strips and books, that fell apart pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure the term was popularized by Marvel's Graphic Novels series of books.
              • yesenadam 8y ago
                "Fan historian Richard Kyle coined the term "graphic novel" in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha. The term gained popularity in the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978) and the start of Marvel's Graphic Novel line (1982) and became familiar to the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986 and the collected editions of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1987. The Book Industry Study Group began using "graphic novel" as a category in book stores in 2001." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel I read A Contract with God and some other of Eisner's stuff lately, e.g. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the version of the "To be, or not to be" speech in Comics and Sequential Art - just awesome.
      • dgellow 8y ago
        Yes, Dussman has some good things, the small English store they have in the back is my default go-to place :)
    • Xylakant 8y ago
      While there’s certainly nothing that compares to a well-stocked French bookstore in Berlin, you could try “Grober Unfug” (groberunfug.de) or Modern Graphics (modern-graphics.de)
    • dependsontheq 8y ago
      Sadly it’s only every second year, but take the train to Erlangen next year and visit the https://www.comic-salon.de/de/home https://www.comic-salon.de/de/home
  • realusername 8y ago
    I feel using the original word is better since it represents a different format & art culture, the same way 'manga' is still used in English.
    • klmr 8y ago
      I don’t disagree, I just wanted to point out that there’s a close equivalent in the English language that’s a much better fit than the word “comic”.
  • vidarh 8y ago
    Similar thing in Scandinavia. E.g. "tegneserie" in Norwegian => "drawn series". In modern usage "tegneserie" can refer to a magazine or graphic novel, but you can also explicitly distinguish between "tegneseriestripe" and "tegneserieblad" (strip vs. magazine), and nothing really prevents anyone from making the similar distinction with novel ("tegneserieroman" is not used much, but it's a reasonable extension; some also use "grafisk roman" as a more direct translation of "graphic novel" but it's a misleading translation as using "grafisk" suggest something much wider than "tegneserie", e.g. anything built around a visual presentation would fit)
• alex_duf 8y ago
  To be honest as a French, I don't mind everyone talking about "comics" when referring to French and Belgian graphic novels. It might not capture all the depth of what it really is but at least everyone understands.
  • agumonkey 8y ago
    They both started as comic strips, but now comics mostly means DC / Marvel from the US culture, while in Europe, Franco Belgian went into another flave of comics, and the name B.D.
    • webmobdev 8y ago
      In India, my generation grew up on Tintin, Asterix, Archie comics, Phantom, Mandrake, Superman, Spiderman etc. and local indian comics dealing with Indian freedom fighters and leaders and indian mythology. Somehow I still prefer those kind of comics and korean / japanese comics than those by DC / Marvel (they look technically marvellous, with their computer graphics, but still pale compared to the non-US ones).
      • agumonkey 8y ago
        Didn't know european comics were famous in India. Cool. Also never seen an Indian comics. It's interesting to see how US evolved very different from European. Tiny anecdote, France was quite aware of US comics (including Disney) and I read that there was some anti US reactions to this. Some magazines started as an effort to make more french stories (leftist, ecology). See PIF Magazine, which was funded by the French Communist Party (no joke). Even Asterix is said to be influenced a bit by US super heroes, hence the magic potion giving super powers. The style and humor was different though.
        • bunderbunder 8y ago
          I'm curious, has the US exported much of its non-Disney, non-superhero comics? There's quite a bit more to American comics than that stuff.
• invaliduser 8y ago
  The french typically call «bande dessinée» the french-belgian comics, while using the words «comics» for US comics (typically Marvel/DC/etc, and «Manga» for asian (manga/manhwa/etc). The word «bande dessinée» is also the hyperonym for all the comics genres, although connoisseurs usually don't use it for «Comics» or «Manga».
• johnchristopher 8y ago
  I am pretty sure bandes dessinées comes from "comic strips". Or it's the other way around.
• simias 8y ago
  That sounds a bit pointlessly pedantic to me. "Bande dessinée" is aptly translated as "comic strip", I'm not sure why you couldn't call them "comic books". Of course there are massive cultural differences between American-style comics and the Belgian/French kind but it's also true for many other art forms and we don't feel the need to come up with a different name every time. I suppose there's a precedent with Japanese comics that are usually called "mangas" but at least that's short and easily pronounceable by your average anglophone. "Bande dessinée" will be painful both to pronounce and to write (as you showcase yourself, you forgot the accent and the feminine -e at the end of dessinée). I guess you could borrow the common shorthand "BD" (pronounced bédé).
  • egypturnash 8y ago
    The literal translation is "drawn strip", which doesn't have the continued implication that everything in the media must be comedy that "comic book" does. Americans seem to have mostly settled into accepting this contradiction, with some incredibly unfunny and serious stuff being published as "comics". There's also the term "graphic novel", which sometimes only applies to stories first published as a book , rather than a series of monthly pamphlets, and also still sometimes has people saying "are they full of explicit porn or something?" as a misinterpretation of the "graphic" part.
    • amyjess 8y ago
      Interestingly enough, Stan Lee always preferred the term "comicbook" on the grounds that writing it as one word made it more clear that it was its own thing and not just a book that's comedic. Another term I've seen bandied around is "sequential art".
    • msbarnett 8y ago
      > The literal translation is "drawn strip", which doesn't have the continued implication that everything in the media must be comedy that "comic book" does. There is no implication that "comic books" are comedic in modern American culture. You're over-focusing on the etymology of a term that has since come to mean something quite different. > Americans seem to have mostly settled into accepting this contradiction, with some incredibly unfunny and serious stuff being published as "comics" This is merely how language evolves. We park on driveways. "Fat chance" indicates, in fact, a very slim one. Suitcases are a thoroughly incorrect way to store or transport suits, unless you like creasing them. Civil wars, aren't. Comic books are rarely comedic. We speak in customary meaning, not based on overly literal analysis of component words.
• the_af 8y ago
  As an aside -- and this is not a disagreement with your comment! -- I found Pyongyang by Guy Deslisle horribly condescending. I really disliked it, especially because I also recently read a similar book* about Japan by Igort (who is Italian), Japanese Notebooks, and fell in love with it and its sequel. I really recommend them, in case you haven't read them. * Obviously not similar in political terms, but similar in that it's about a Western man who writes comics, trying to work in an Asian country and fit in a sometimes impenetrable culture. But if you want political, there's also Igort's Russian Notebooks.
  • chimeracoder 8y ago
    The premise was great - given that it's prohibited to take unbiased photojournalism in North Korea, the idea of getting a firsthand account from a graphic novelist and artist instead is an amazing idea! It could have been a great chance to show stories about Pyongyang, including accounts by people living there, that otherwise are literally impossible to show. Unfortunately the book was terrible. Deslisle was so condescending and disrespectful to the people he was covering that it was painful to read. And he clearly had no concept of how to broach, well, journalism. For example, there's one scene where he essentially interrogates a woman who works for him about whether she really believes "all the propaganda". She nervously agrees, then politely excuses herself from the room, and the author uses this to "show" how brainwashed and uncritical these people are, not realizing that this is a completely inappropriate setting for the conversation given the power imbalance, and not bothering to consider that she may not have been telling him the truth.
    • amyjess 8y ago
      Yeah, for all she knows, he may very well have been a spy for the Kim regime, or there might be a hidden microphone present or something, and she and her whole family could end up sent to gulags for answering him. I'm honestly struck by the sheer awfulness of Deslisle's tactics here. He put a woman and three generations of her entire family at risk just for his own personal greed.
      • 8y ago
• goto11 8y ago
  I'd say "comic" is a better translation, since the term BD encompass both self-contained stories (like Poyangang) and album series like Tintin, and newspaper strips. You wouldn't call Asterix a graphic novel. The term Graphic Novel was invented in the US initially to describe comic books which contained a single self-contained story - as opposed to newspaper comic strips and superhero periodicals with never-ending storylines. So it is a subset of comics, which are marketed differently.
• baby 8y ago
  It sounds weird to me as a french, I much prefer the term BD. Everybody calls that a "BD" in french, as opposed to comics and mangas.