Belgian comics

Belgium is a prominent contributor to the European comics industry with a huge production of comics in all sorts relative to its size and population. In 1980 there were about 300 Belgians listed as comic producers. The majority of them were living in Brussels and Wallonia, with just 50 of them living in Flanders. This does not mean, however, that comics in Belgium are mostly a French language affair, since most of the publishing houses are bilingual and produce the same comics in French and Dutch simultaneously.

There is however a distinctive difference in style, scope and economics between the, mostly French, Belgian part of the Franco-Belgian comics and the purely Flemish newspaper comics. It often seems that in the comics field the French-Belgian border is of much less importance than the language border. This is however misleading since the main 'Franco-Belgian' comic houses are aimed at the complete Belgian market and therefore publish in French and Dutch while employing writers and draughtsmen from all over the country while the purely Flemish houses primarily cater for Flemish newspapers, although some of their more popular comics are also translated into French. Also various smaller Flemish publishers make a living distributing translated French comics and thus in Flanders, Franco-Belgian comics and typical Flemish ones supplement rather than suppress each other.

In a discussion of the style we will therefore make a difference between the Franco-Belgian comics from the three main publishers (Le Lombard, Dupuis and Casterman) and the Flemish newspaper strips.

1 Aspects of the Franco-Belgian comics in Belgium
2 Consequences of the magazine system
3 Evolution
4 From magazines to books
5 The Flemish newspaper strip

[edit] Aspects of the Franco-Belgian comics in Belgium

It is debatable whether the Belgian comic scene began just after World War II, during the war, or even just before the war. The Adventures of Tintin was already popular in the 1930's and Spirou magazine started publication in 1938. Spirou, however, had to scale back its production tremendously during the war years and emerged in full strength only in 1945, only to be followed by Tintin magazine in 1946.

The war years, however, had a tremendous impact on the future course of the Belgian comic industry. Paper was seriously rationed and therefore newspapers had to scale back on their daily comic strips. To make up for this, they had a full color one-page strip in their special weekend edition.^{[citation needed]} For the writers and artists this meant that instead of having to come up with one black-and-white three-panel strip a day they now had one week to do one full page in color. This meant that they were able to put more care into their drawings as well as in their storylines. Also the changed economics of the war years led to artists from such diverse backgrounds as theatre writer or catalogue draughtsman coming together and dreaming up comics, first as a way to pass the time, later as full-time employment.

After the war, newspapers quickly started going back to daily three-panel strips, but the public had taken a liking to the weekly full-color pages and thus the first magazines appeared publishing exactly that: comics at one page a week.

And that was how the Franco-Belgian comic industry in Belgium would remain until the 1980s: The two mayor magazines: Spirou (or Robbedoes in Dutch), published by Dupuis, and Tintin magazine (Weekblad Kuifje in Dutch), published by Le Lombard, would appear once a week in a French and Dutch edition. Next to a word from the editor, a fan page and some general interest articles (such as news on the latest cars and airplanes) the magazine would sport between 5 and 10 one-page full-color episodes from an ongoing story and approximately the same number of one-page gags. In the early years half-page jokes or adventures were also possible, while starting in the 1960s double-page chapters slowly started to take over. Each story was produced by a team of one writer and one artist. Although a writer could work on several storylines at a time, it was rare for an artist to draw more than one comic. On occasion, a writer wrote his own stories, thus doubling his fame. After a story had run in the magazine, it was distributed as an album. Album sales formed a second leg for the publishers and in later years increasingly took over from magazine publications.

[edit] Consequences of the magazine system

A comic belonged to the artist or to the writer-artist team. Although there have been some famous instances where a comic continued after the death of an artist, more often than not a comic died with the artist or ceased to exist when the artist left the publishing house or lost interest or when the writer/artist team split. (A writer was more easy to replace yet continuing a series with a different writer remained the exception rather than the rule). Magazines played on the recognizability of an artist or team and displayed the name of writer and artist on top of each page.
A comic being written one page at a time has to keep his readers guessing until the next installment. Therefore, most often every page would end with a plot twist or a cliffhanger, as well as punch line in order to keep the reader intrigued and willing to come back.
The normal pace of a comic being one adventure a year, stories quickly settled on about 40 pages per adventure and consequently albums range from 40 to 45 pages.
The comic magazines were printed on a standard magazine press and are therefore A4-sized rather than half a newspaper size like their American counterparts. The reprinted comic albums retained this format as well. Instead of pulp, the magazines were printed on white magazine paper and the albums followed suit by being printed on high quality paper otherwise used for picture books. Often they were available in softcover as well as in hardcover with even the softcover edition having a quality otherwise comparable to today's softcover role-playing games (Many American role-playing games are actually printed in Belgium because the comics provided the publishers there with the know-how on how to combine softcover with high-quality contents)
Due to the slow pace with which the storyline unfolded, sometimes a year per story, it was not uncommon for a writer to start a story without knowing its end, making up the storyline as the chapters progressed. As long as you only read one page a week, this does not really matter but in album form one can quickly notice that the adventure in the last pages is completely different from the premises set out in the first pages. For example, a detective could set out to find a car thief and end up solving a mystery of forged paintings.
Also with the storyline unfolding over several months, writers have been known to lose track and suddenly have to pull an ending out of thin air. For the minor series, in which the plotlines were cooked up by a professional in-house writer juggling several comics at once, deus-ex-machina endings and surprising plot twists in the last pages seem the rule rather than the exception.

[edit] Evolution

With the ages, influences from abroad as well as new economy dictates started to change some aspects of the Belgian comic scene, in particular the one-page-per-week ratio while others, in particular the principle of one-artist-one-comic remained stronger than ever.

The first major change was the pace of publication. With storylines becoming too complex to be told one page at a time, publishers quickly moved away from the forty one-page installments in favor of twenty double-pages. As very few artists could draw more than one page per week, this meant that an artist would have several pages drawn in advance before the adventure would start and therefore the writer/artist team had a little more time to work out the plot and to backtrack inconsistencies in the storyline before the plates were published. This also encouraged 'funny' writers to move away from the one-page gag in favor of a three, four, even six page short and this again encouraged editors to publish the short stories in full. Serious stories soon followed suit, this time publishing chapters instead of double-pages and by the late seventies, the magazines sported an equal number of double-page installments, multi-page chapters and one-page gags.

Another change came in the layout of the pages. Whereas the original one page instalment still consisted out of four typically three-panel strips, artists soon began to realise that they had an entire page, often even a double-page, to tell a story and therefore soon began experimenting with half-page pictures, odd shaped picture borders and details flowing from one picture into another.

Finally the ability to put more time into drawing and writing saw a new emergence of the all-in-one artist-cum textwriter who would write, draw and on occasion even color a whole story all by himself.

[edit] From magazines to books

Finally the biggest change came in the mid-80's when the Tintin publishers announced that they were halting the publication of their weekly magazine. This was but the last chapter in a long evolution. With comics maturing, so did its audience and soon the older readers were demanding better storylines and less page-by-page comics while the younger audience wanted to maintain the one-page funnies and short chapter of humorous adventures. In a bold move, Tintin tried to cater to its more mature audience just at the time when this demographic was moving away from magazines altogether in favor of albums. By the late 70's publishers were losing on their weekly magazines while gaining on their books. Le Lombard tried for a while to maintain its magazine as a teaser and announcement bar for the books it was publishing, but the magazine kept losing readers until the publisher finally pulled the plug and concentrated solely on the publication of albums. Dupuis, facing the same problem, restyled its magazine to cater primarily to young readers, while maintaining a cast of writers and artists making more mature stories that were released immediately in album form without having their run through the magazines first.

As of today, even with Spirou magazine still in print, magazines no longer play a major part in the Belgian branch of the Franco-Belgian comic scene. Their inheritance, however, left a lasting mark on the scene and made Belgian comics what they are today.

[edit] The Flemish newspaper strip

In addition to the bilingual all-Belgian magazine comics, a second culture emerged in Flanders. Because of the emergence of the national weekly comic magazines, newspapers in Flanders stuck to their old habit of daily strips with an occasional weekly instalment of extras. This ment that whereas weekly comics were controlled by special comic publishers in Brussels, the newspapers retained their own writers for dailies and kept the album publication of finished stories in their own hand. Typically one writer-artist would deliver one or two black-and-white three-panel strips a day. Since the 1990s, more and more newspaper strips were printed directly in colour. Increasingly today the writer leads a 'studio' of artists, helping him with the details or doing the coloring-in for the full-color album edition. The fact that the artist works for a newspaper provides some typical features of the Flemish newspaper strip/comic book.

The strip appearing on the last page of the newspaper, the artist often plays on contemporary issues or comments on politics and other news. Often caricatures of political figures appear on the sidelines or make a one-line cameo.
Written for a conservative family-minded newspaper the adventurers are much more tame and violence takes on a comical character.
Also there are relatively few single heroes. Often the main protagonists form a band of friends, more often even a family complete with a stay-at-home mother and a too-smart-for-his-own-good son.
Even with a studio of draughtsmen, providing two strips a day remains a grueling task and therefore the lines are much more simpler than in the magazine comics. Typically even a character has only half a dozen poses and facial expresions and is dressed in the same outfit, all this to increase the speed of drawing

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