A bande dessinée is a French-language narrative made of images and written text. French people refer to a comic book as “BD” which is the abbreviation of “bande dessinée”.
During the 19th century, there were many artists in Europe drawing cartoons, occasionally even utilizing sequential multi-panel narration The Covers was a Page from the Comic Strip inside. The artists such as Gustave Doré, Nadar, Christophe and Caran d'Ache began to be involved with the medium and started drawing separate Covers. In the early 1900s, the first popular French comics appeared. Two of the most prominent comics include Bécassine and Les Pieds Nickelés.
In the 1920s, after the end of the First World War, the French artist Alain Saint-Ogan started out as a professional cartoonist, creating the successful series Zig et Puce in 1925. Saint-Ogan was one of the first French-speaking artists to fully utilize techniques popularized and formularized in the United States, such as Speech balloons, even though the text comic format would remain the predominant native format for the next two to three decades in France, propagated as such by France's educators. Even though Les Pieds Nickelés, Bécassine and Zig et Puce managed to survive the war and modernized the covers adding a lot of Colour. The most notable one being Belgian Greg who did not succeeded to find a readership outside France itself and are consequently remembered in their native country only.
From 1900s to 1930s the Catholic Church, in the form of its then powerful and influential Union des ouvrières catholiques de France, was creating and distributing "healthy and correct" magazines for children. The first popular French comics appeared. Two of the most prominent comics include Bécassine and Les Pieds Nickelés. The Covers were sombre and restrictive.
A further step towards modern comic books happened in 1934 when Hungarian Paul Winkler, who had previously been distributing comics to the monthly magazines via his Opera Mundi bureau, made a deal with King Features Syndicate to create the Journal de Mickey, a weekly 8-page early "comic-book" where the cover was designed like a book cover taking the summary and essence of the whole story and creating something new. The success was immediate, and soon other publishers started publishing comics in this fashion. This continued during the remainder of the decade, with hundreds of comics published mostly imported material. The most important ones in France were Robinson, Hurrah, and the Fleurus presse (on behalf of the Action catholique des enfants aka Cœurs Vaillants et Âmes Vaillantes de France) publications Cœurs Vaillants ("Valiant Hearts", 1929, for adolescent boys), Âmes vaillantes ("Valiant Souls", 1937, for adolescent girls) and Fripounet et Marisette (1945, for pre-adolescents). The World War II from 1939 to 1945 saw a new trend in Comics in France. Nationalistic and Inspiring. They were also forwarded to war trenches for the soldiers for Morale Boosting and Entertainment. The trend of having separate Covers for the Comics to go along with the theme and the current situation.
1929–1940 is described as the birth of the modern French comic. One of the earliest proper comics was Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, with the story Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which was published in Le Petit Vingtième in 1929. It was quite different from future versions of Tintin, the cover style being very naïve and simple, even childish, compared to the later stories. After Tintin's early massive success, the magazine decided to release the stories in hardcover book format as well, directly after they had run their respective courses in the magazine. In the process introducing something new in the French comic world with Designer Covers. Tintin is widely considered the starting point and archetype of the modern Franco-Belgian comic as currently understood, and as amply demonstrated in the vast majority of treatises and reference works written on the subject since the 1960s, and the first to find a readership outside its originating country. As such the Tintin series went on to become one of the greatest post-war successes of the Franco-Belgian comic world, having seen translations in dozens of languages, including English, as well as becoming one of the relatively few European comics to have seen a major, successful, Hollywood movie adaptation as late as 2011, nearly thirty years after the death of its creator.
Abbot Courtois, editor-in-chief of Coeurs Vaillants, asked Hergé to create a series about real children with a real family as opposed to Tintin's ambiguous age and family (and thus more in line with the Catholic norms and values on which the magazine was founded), which resulted in the 1936 comic The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko. But the Covers were retro going back to earlier format of a Blown-Up scene from the inside page.
In 1938, the Belgian Spirou Comics was launched. Conceived in response to the immense popularity of Journal de Mickey and the success of Tintin in Le Petit Vingtième, the black and white/colour hybrid comic featured predominantly comics from an American origin at the time of its launch until the war years, but there were also native comics included. These concerned Spirou, created by the Frenchman Rob-Vel but used mascot and namesake for the new Comic Cover.
1970-80. It was not just the comic scene these new publications and their artists changed, the perception of the medium in French society also changed radically in the 1970s–1980s, in stark contrast to the one it held in the 1940s–1950s. The bande dessinée becomes cultural heritage. Recognizing that the medium-advanced France's cultural status in the world, the cultural authorities of the nation started to aid the advancement of the medium as a bonafide art form, especially under the patronage of Minister of Culture Jack Lang, who had formulated his long-term Quinze mesures nouvelles en faveur de la Bande dessinée (15 new measures in favor of the comic) ministry policy plan in 1982, which was updated and reaffirmed by a latter-day successor of Lang in 1997. It was consequently in the 1980s–1990s era that the medium achieved its formal status in France's Classification des arts (Classifications of the arts) as "Le Neuvième Art" ("the 9th art"), aside from becoming accepted as a mature part of French culture by Francophone society at large. It is common to encounter grownup people reading comics in public places, such as cafe terraces or public transportation, just like people reading books, newspapers or magazines. The Covers started to be designed by well-known artists of the day. They would read the comic and create the covers. Since then, more than one comic artist has received "Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" civilian knighthoods, and these were not restricted to French nationals alone, as Japanese artist Jiro Taniguchi has also received one in 2011 for his efforts to merge the Franco-Belgian comic with the Japanese manga format.
But it is however Jean "Mœbius" Giraud, coined "the most influential bandes dessinées artist after Hergé" by several academic comic scholars, who is considered the premier French standard bearer of "Le Neuvième Art", as he has received two different civilian knighthoods with a posthumous rank elevation of his Arts and Letters knighthood to boot, an honour for a comic artist and something the de facto inventor of the French comics of which he had ever managed to fully free himself from in his lifetime). Exemplary of Mœbius' standing in French culture, was the high-status, high-profile Mœbius transe forme exposition the prestigious Parisian Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain art museum organized from 2 October 2010 – 13 March 2011. As of 2017, it stands out as one of the largest exhibitions ever dedicated to the work of an individual comic artist by an official, state-sanctioned art museum – art as in art with a capital "A" – alongside the 20 December 2006 - 19 February 2007 Hergé exposition in the even more prestigious Centre Georges Pompidou modern art museum (likewise located in Paris and incidentally one of President Mitterrand's "Great Works") on the occasion of the centenary of that artist's birth. Giraud's funeral services in March 2012 was attended by a representative of the French nation in the person of Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand, who also spoke on behalf of the nation at the services, and who was incidentally also the nephew of former President of France François Mitterrand, who had personally awarded Giraud with his first civilian knighthood in 1985, thereby becoming one of the first comic artists to be bestowed the honour.
France's largest and most important comics organization created a Facade with Covers of Comics and library of the Centre belge de la Bande dessinée, housed in a building which as cultural heritage is state-owned, and the entrance of the especially built Musée Hergé, both expressive of the state backing the Franco-Belgian comic receives in its native country. Facade of the main building of the Cité museum with the "Vaisseau Mœbius" on the right, named for the nation's most revered comics artist.
While more recent comics covers can no longer be easily categorized into one art style anymore, due to the increasing blurring of the boundaries between the styles in more recent comic creations – aside from the introduction of new and/or other art styles and the old artists who pioneered are retiring, there were initially three basic, distinct styles within the field prior to the mid-1970s, featured in those comics.