{"id":365,"date":"2024-01-25T14:53:25","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T14:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/?p=365"},"modified":"2024-01-25T15:00:13","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T15:00:13","slug":"a-boom-in-comics-drawn-from-fact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/a-boom-in-comics-drawn-from-fact\/","title":{"rendered":"A Boom in Comics Drawn From Fact"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Soon after the journalist and historian Val\u00e9rie Igounet heard about\u00a0the killing of Samuel Paty, the schoolteacher whose 2020 murder by an Islamist extremist shocked France, she knew she wanted to write a book about him.<\/p>\n

Paty, who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to students during a class on freedom of expression, was murdered near the middle school where he taught in a Paris suburb. \u201cI absolutely wanted Samuel Paty\u2019s students to be able to read this book,\u201d Igounet said, \u201cand it was obvious that a 300-page book with footnotes would be reserved for a different kind of readership.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, Igounet decided to produce a comic book: \u201cBlack Pencil: Samuel Paty, the Story of a Teacher,\u201d based on two years of reporting and made with the illustrator Guy Le Besnerais, was published in October. It meticulously reconstructs the events leading up to the murder while also showing Paty\u2019s daily life in the classroom. Le Besnerais\u2019s illustrations are accompanied by Paty\u2019s handwritten notes, newspaper clippings and messages exchanged by his students in the weeks before he was killed.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

This growing trend will be on show at\u00a0the Angoul\u00eame International Comics Festival, one of the world\u2019s leading comic book gatherings, which starts Thursday in southwestern France and runs through Jan. 28.<\/p>\n

Matthieu Vincenot, the manager of\u00a0Bulles en T\u00eate, a Paris comic book store, has watched its nonfiction section grow since the shop opened two years ago. \u201cWe decided to dedicate this section to nonfiction comic books because they\u2019re very popular,\u201d he said recently, pointing to three packed shelves at the store\u2019s entrance. \u201cThe readership is very varied. We get people who are big readers of the news, and others who aren\u2019t so much, and therefore learn about current affairs through comic books because they\u2019re easier to read.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though they are booming in France right now, Vincenot pointed out that nonfiction comics are not new and, in fact, originated in the United States. Also known as \u201ccomics journalism,\u201d the genre was pioneered by Joe Sacco, a Maltese-American journalist and cartoonist whose book \u201cPalestine\u201d\u00a0was first published by Fantagraphics in 1993. Based on a 1991 visit by Sacco to Gaza, the book was recently rushed back into print when demand surged after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel\u2019s ongoing retaliation.<\/p>\n

In France, renewed interest about the Middle East also helped propel \u201cThe History of Jerusalem,\u201d a comic book by the historian Vincent Lemaire and the cartoonist Christophe Gaultier, up the best seller charts in January.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Vincenot said he thought the genre took off in France around 2015 with the publication of titles like \u201cL\u2019affaire des affaires\u201d (which means something like \u201cThe Biggest Heist\u201d), a 700-page tome based on an investigation into\u00a0the 2006 Clearstream affair\u00a0that embroiled France\u2019s prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. That book was followed by other successful journalistic comics, including \u201cGreen Tide: The Forbidden Story,\u201d an investigation into algae pollution on the coast of Brittany, in northern France, which was recently adapted into\u00a0a movie.<\/p>\n

A section of \u201cGreen tide\u201d first appeared in\u00a0La Revue Dessin\u00e9e\u00a0(\u201cThe Cartoon Review\u201d)\u00a0<\/em>a monthly magazine that has been publishing investigations in comic strip form since 2013. Aimed at an adult audience, it presents the work of journalists in a more digestible, and often more entertaining, way.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s less intimidating,\u201d said Isabelle Saporta, the head of the publishing house Fayard, which was established in 1857 and focuses on essays, but recently launched a comic book imprint called Fayard Graffik. \u201cIf we want to continue to be an innovative publisher of thinking and new ideas we need to reach out to younger generations.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added that while comic books were more expensive to produce than essays, they also had financial advantages for publishers: They\u2019re shorter and therefore cheaper to translate, and lend themselves easily to film adaptations.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The first comic book published under Fayard Graffik, \u201cThe Vaquita Theorem,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0is based on years of reporting about animal rights and biodiversity by the journalist Hugo Cl\u00e9ment for the French television program \u201cSur le front\u201d (\u201cOn the Frontline\u201d).<\/em>\u00a0Co-written with Vincent Ravalec and illustrated by Dominique Mermoux, the book follows Cl\u00e9ment from Uganda\u2019s gorilla sanctuaries to the upper Gulf of California, where only around 10 vaquitas,\u00a0<\/em>the whale species in the book\u2019s title, still exist.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a very visual memory,\u201d Cl\u00e9ment said in an interview. \u201cI remember things more easily when they are presented in a graph or a diagram, and that is also the strength of comic books: complicated things can be explained simply, with key facts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Illustration also allowed him to depict images that couldn\u2019t be shown on television. One spread in \u201cThe Vaquita Theorem\u201d shows a tradition from the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean known as \u201cgrindadr\u00e1p,\u201d in which hunters drive hundreds of whales into a shallow bay and slaughter them. In this scene, Mermoux\u2019s drawings spare no detail of the horror: The only color on the page is bright red from the animals\u2019 blood filling the sea.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith illustration, you can convey what happened while\u00a0<\/strong>applying a filter to these horrific images,\u201d Cl\u00e9ment said. \u201cThe power of comics is they transmit a lot of emotion, and that also makes them a very effective tool for reaching a broad range of people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Soon after the journalist and historian Val\u00e9rie Igounet heard about\u00a0the killing of Samuel Paty, the schoolteacher whose 2020 murder by an Islamist extremist shocked France, she knew she wanted to write a book about him. Paty, who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to students during a class on freedom of expression, was murdered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":366,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions\/366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}