1.
Comics
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Comics is a medium used to express ideas by images, often combined with text or other visual information. Comics frequently takes the form of juxtaposed sequences of panels of images, often textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia indicate dialogue, narration, sound effects, or other information. Size and arrangement of panels contribute to narrative pacing, cartooning and similar forms of illustration are the most common image-making means in comics, fumetti is a form which uses photographic images. Common forms of comics include comic strips, editorial and gag cartoons, since the late 20th century, bound volumes such as graphic novels, comic albums, and tankōbon have become increasingly common, and online webcomics have proliferated in the 21st century. The history of comics has followed different paths in different cultures, scholars have posited a pre-history as far back as the Lascaux cave paintings. By the mid-20th century, comics flourished particularly in the United States, western Europe, histories of Japanese comics and cartooning propose origins as early as the 12th century. Comics has had a reputation for much of its history. The English term comics is used as a noun when it refers to the medium. Though the term derives from the work that predominated in early American newspaper comic strips. It is common in English to refer to the comics of different cultures by the used in their original languages, such as manga for Japanese comics. The increasing cross-pollination of concepts from different comics cultures and eras has further made definition difficult, examples of early comics The European, American, and Japanese comics traditions have followed different paths. Japan had a prehistory of satirical cartoons and comics leading up to the World War II era. The ukiyo-e artist Hokusai popularized the Japanese term for comics and cartooning, manga, in the post-war era modern Japanese comics began to flourish when Osamu Tezuka produced a prolific body of work. Illustrated humour periodicals were popular in 19th-century Britain, the earliest of which was the short-lived The Glasgow Looking Glass in 1825, the most popular was Punch, which popularized the term cartoon for its humorous caricatures. American comics developed out of magazines as Puck, Judge. The success of illustrated humour supplements in the New York World and later the New York American, particularly Outcaults The Yellow Kid, early Sunday strips were full-page and often in colour. Between 1896 and 1901 cartoonists experimented with sequentiality, movement, shorter, black-and-white daily strips began to appear early in the 20th century, and became established in newspapers after the success in 1907 of Bud Fishers Mutt and Jeff. In Britain, the Amalgamated Press established a style of a sequence of images with text beneath them, including Illustrated Chips
2.
Franco-Belgian comics
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Franco-Belgian comics are comics that are created for a Belgian and French audience. These countries have a tradition in comics and comic books, where they are known as BDs. In Europe, the French language is spoken not only in France but also by about 40% of the population of Belgium. The shared language creates an artistic and commercial market where national identity is often blurred, Flemish Belgian comic books are influenced by Francophone comics, yet have a distinctly different style, both in art as well as in spirit. Among the most popular Franco-Belgian comics that have achieved international fame are The Adventures of Tintin, Gaston Lagaffe, Asterix, Lucky Luke, the term bandes dessinées is derived from the original description of the art form as drawn strips. It was first introduced in the 1930s, but only became popular in the 1960s, the term bandes dessinées contains no indication of subject matter, unlike the American terms comics and funnies, which imply a humorous art form. Indeed, the distinction of comics as the art is prevalent in Francophone scholarship on the form, as is the concept of comics criticism. The publication of Francis Lacassins book Pour un neuvième art, la bande dessinée in 1971 further established the term and these were humorous short works rarely longer than a single page. In the Francophonie, artists such as Gustave Doré, Nadar, Christophe, in the early decades of the 20th century, comics were not stand-alone publications, but were published in newspapers and weekly or monthly magazines as episodes or gags. Aside from these magazines, the Catholic Church was creating and distributing healthy, in the early 1900s, the first popular French comics appeared, including Bécassine and Les Pieds Nickelés. In the 1920s, after the end of the first world war, Saint-Ogan was one of the first French-speaking artists to fully utilize techniques popularized and formulaized in the USA, such as word balloons. In 1920, the Abbot of Averbode in Belgium started publishing Zonneland, a magazine consisting largely of text with few illustrations, which started printing comics more often in the following years. One of the earliest proper Belgian comics was Hergés The Adventures of Tintin, with the story Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and it was quite different from future versions of Tintin, the style being very naïve and simple, even childish, compared to the later stories. The early stories often featured racist and political stereotypes that Hergé later regretted, the success was immediate, and soon other publishers started publishing periodicals with American series. This continued during the remainder of the decade, with hundreds of magazines publishing mostly imported material, the most important ones in France were Robinson, Hurrah, and Coeurs Vaillants, while Belgian examples include Wrill and Bravo. In 1938, Spirou magazine was launched, Spirou also appeared translated in a Dutch version under the name Robbedoes for the Flemish market. Export to the Netherlands followed a few years later, when Germany invaded France and Belgium, it became close to impossible to import American comics. The occupying Nazis banned American animated movies and comics they deemed to be of a questionable character, both were, however, already very popular before the war and the hardships of the war period only seemed to increase the demand
3.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
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Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky is a Chilean-French film and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright, actor, author, poet, producer, composer, musician, comics writer, and spiritual guru. Born to Jewish-Ukrainian and Polish parents in Chile, Jodorowsky experienced an unhappy and alienated childhood, dropping out of college, he became involved in theater and in particular mime, working as a clown before founding his own theater troupe, the Teatro Mimico, in 1947. Moving to Paris in the early 1950s, Jodorowsky studied mime under Étienne Decroux before turning to cinema, from 1960 he divided his time between Paris and Mexico City, in the former becoming a founding member of the anarchistic avant-garde Panic Movement of performance artists. In 1966 he created his first comic strip, Anibal 5, while in 1967 he directed his first feature film, the surrealist Fando y Lis, the result was The Holy Mountain, a surrealist exploration of western esotericism. His son Cristóbal has followed his teachings on psychoshamanism, this work is captured in the feature documentary Quantum Men, directed by Carlos Serrano Azcona. Jodorowsky was born in 1929 in the town of Tocopilla, Chile, to parents who were Jewish immigrants from Yekaterinoslav, Elisavetgrad. His father, Jaime Jodorowsky Groismann, was a merchant, who was abusive to his wife Sara Felicidad Prullansky Arcavi. Angered, he beat and raped her, getting her pregnant. Because of this conception, Sara both hated her husband and disliked her son, telling him that I cannot love you. It was this treatment at the hands of Americans that led to his condemnation of American imperialism and neo-colonialism in Latin America in several of his films. Nonetheless he liked his local area, and was unhappy when he was forced to leave it aged nine years old. His family subsequently moved to the city of Santiago, Chile, becoming interested in the political ideology of anarchism, he began attending college, studying psychology and philosophy, but stayed for only two years. After dropping out, and having an interest in theatre and particularly mime, he took up employment as a clown in a circus and began a career as a theatre director. Meanwhile, in 1947 he founded his own troupe, the Teatro Mimico, which by 1952 had fifty members. Nonetheless, Jodorowsky felt that there was little for him left in Chile and it was while in Paris that Jodorowsky began studying mime with Étienne Decroux and joined the troupe of one of Decrouxs students, Marcel Marceau. It was with Marceaus troupe that he went on a world tour, after this, he returned to theatre directing, working on the music hall comeback of Maurice Chevalier in Paris. In 1957, Jodorowsky turned his hand to filmmaking, creating Les têtes interverties and it consisted almost entirely of mime, and told the surreal story of a head-swapping merchant who helps a young man find courtship success. The director Jean Cocteau admired the film, and wrote an introduction for it and it was considered lost until a print of the film was discovered in 2006
4.
Graphic novel
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A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word normally refers to long fictional works, the term graphic novel is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction. It is distinguished from the comic book, which is used for comics periodicals. Fan historian Richard Kyle coined the term graphic novel in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha, the Book Industry Study Group began using graphic novel as a category in book stores in 2001. In the publishing trade, the term extends to material that would not be considered a novel if produced in another medium. Collections of comic books that do not form a story, anthologies or collections of loosely related pieces. The term is sometimes used to distinguish between works created as standalone stories, in contrast to collections or compilations of a story arc from a comic book series published in book form. As the exact definition of the novel is debated, the origins of the form are open to interpretation. The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck is the oldest recognized American example of comics used to this end, the first American edition was published in 1842 by Wilson & Company in New York City using the original printing plates from the 1841 edition. Another early predecessor is Journey to the Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags by brothers J. A. D. and D. F. Read, inspired by The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck. In 1894 Caran dAche broached the idea of a novel in a letter to the newspaper Le Figaro. In the United States there is a tradition of reissuing previously published comic strips in book form. In 1897 the Hearst Syndicate published such a collection of The Yellow Kid by Richard Outcault, the 1920s saw a revival of the medieval woodcut tradition, with Belgian Frans Masereel cited as the undisputed king of this revival. American Lynd Ward also worked in this tradition, publishing Gods Man, in 1929, the 1940s saw the launching of Classics Illustrated, a comic-book series that primarily adapted notable, public domain novels into standalone comic books for young readers. In 1947 Fawcett Comics published Comics Novel #1, Anarcho, Dictator of Death, by the late 1960s, American comic book creators were becoming more adventurous with the form. Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin self-published a 40-page, magazine-format comics novel, savage in 1968—the same year Marvel Comics published two issues of The Spectacular Spider-Man in a similar format. Meanwhile, in continental Europe, the tradition of collecting serials of popular strips such as The Adventures of Tintin or Asterix led to long-form narratives published initially as serials. By 1969, the author John Updike, who had entertained ideas of becoming a cartoonist in his youth, addressed the Bristol Literary Society, on the death of the novel
5.
Jean Giraud
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Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was a French artist, cartoonist and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim predominantly under the pseudonym Mœbius and to a lesser extent Gir, esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee and Hayao Miyazaki among others, he has been described as the most influential bandes dessinées artist after Hergé. His most famous include the series Blueberry, created with writer Jean-Michel Charlier. As Mœbius he created a range of science fiction and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative, surreal. These works include Arzach and the Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius and he also collaborated with avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the comic book series The Incal. Mœbius also contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science fiction and fantasy films, such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, in 2004, Moebius and Jodorowsky sued Luc Besson for using The Incal as inspiration for Fifth Element, a lawsuit which they lost. Blueberry was adapted for the screen in 2004 by French director Jan Kounen, when he was three years old, his parents divorced and he was raised mainly by his grandparents, who were living in the neighboring municipality of Fontenay-sous-Bois. The rupture between mother and father created a lasting trauma that he explained lay at the heart of his choice of pen names. He became close friends with comic artist, Jean-Claude Mézières, in no small part due to their shared passion for Westerns. In 1956 he left art school without graduating to visit his mother, who had married a Mexican in Mexico, after his return to France, he started to work as a full-time artist. At 18, Giraud was drawing his own comic Western strip, Frank et Jeremie, for the magazine Far West and it was for Fleurus that Giraud also illustrated his first three books. Already in this period his style was influenced by his later mentor. In 1961, returning from service in Germany, Giraud became an apprentice of Jijé. For Jijé, Giraud created several shorts and illustrations for the short-lived magazine Bonux-Boy, his first work after military service. In this period, Jijé used Giraud as his assistant on an album of his Western series Jerry Spring, The Road to Coronado, in 1962, Giraud and writer Jean-Michel Charlier started the comic strip Fort Navajo for Pilote Magazine #210. At this time the affinity between the styles of Giraud and Jijé was so close that Jijé penciled several pages for the series when Giraud went AWOL. The Lieutenant Blueberry character, whose features were based on those of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, was created in 1963 by Charlier. While the Fort Navajo series had had originally intended as an ensemble narrative
6.
Hugo Pratt
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Hugo Eugenio Pratt was an Italian comic book creator who was known for combining strong storytelling with extensive historical research on works such as Corto Maltese. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2005, in 1946 Hugo Pratt became part of the so-called Group of Venice with Fernando Carcupino, Dino Battaglia and Damiano Damiani. Born in Rimini, Italy to Rolando Pratt and Evelina Genero and his paternal grandfather Joseph was of English origin. He was also related to actor Boris Karloff, in 1937, Pratt moved with his mother to Abyssinia, joining his father who was working there following the conquest of that country by Benito Mussolinis Italy. Pratts father, a professional Italian soldier, was captured in 1941 by British troops and in late 1942, died from disease as a prisoner of war. The same year, Hugo Pratt and his mother were interned in a camp at Dirédaoua, where he would buy comics from guards. After the war, Pratt moved to Venice where he organized entertainment for the Allied troops, later Pratt joined the Venice Group with other Italian cartoonists, including Alberto Ongaro and Mario Faustinelli. Their magazine Asso di Picche, launched in 1945 as Albo Uragano, the magazine scored some success and published works by young talents, including Dino Battaglia. His character Asso di Picche was a success, mainly in Argentina, in the late 1940s, he moved to Buenos Aires where he worked for Argentine publisher Editorial Abril and met Argentine comics artists like Alberto Breccia and Solano López. The passage to Editorial Frontera saw the publication of some of his most important early series, Kirk and Ernie Pike, written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld. Pratt taught drawing in the Escuela Panamericana de Arte directed by Enrique Lipszyc and he often travelled to South American destinations like the Amazon and Mato Grosso. During that period he produced his first comic book as an author, both writing and illustrating Anna della jungla, which was followed by the similar Capitan Cormorant. The latter was completed after his return to Italy, from the summer of 1959 to the summer of 1960, Pratt lived in London where he drew a series of war comics for Fleetway Publications, with British scriptwriters. He then returned to Argentina, despite the economic times there. In 1967, Pratt met Florenzo Ivaldi, the two created a magazine named after his character, Il Sergente Kirk, the hero first written by Héctor Oesterheld. In the first issue, Pratts most famous story was published, Una ballata del mare salato, Cortos series continued three years later in the French magazine Pif gadget. Due to his mixed family ancestry, Pratt had learned snippets of things like kabbalism. Pratt did exhaustive research for factual and visual details, and some characters are historical figures or loosely based on them, like Cortos main friend/enemy
7.
F'Murr
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FMurr or FMurrr whose real name is Richard Peyzaret, is a French comics creator. He is most famous for the long-running series Le Génie des alpages, Peyzaret grew up as an admirer of Hergé and André Franquin, but studied Applied Arts for six years in Paris before meeting the BD industry, by arriving at the workshop of Raymond Poïvet. This led to an introduction to René Goscinny and starting work for Pilote magazine in 1971, the unused boards of this strip later formed the basis of his first album, Au loup. While at Pilote, he began his most famous work, Le Génie des alpages in 1973 and this series features an old and a young shepherd, their talking shepherds dog, a flock of mad sheep and other abnormal characters behaving unpredictably in alpine surroundings. When Pilote ceased publication, the series were issued directly into albums and he also held a long associations with several of the other francophone serial magazines of this period. In 1985 he began the strip Histoires Déplacées in satirizing the ongoing Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and these were collected in the 1987 album named Le char de létat dérape sur le sentier de la guerre. A few instances of FMurr translated into the English language were printed in Heavy Metal and National Lampoon magazine in the late 70s and it was translated into Norwegian by Svein Erik Søland and Inge Kristiansen. Le pauvre chevalier Le Génie des alpages #10, Monter, descendre, ça glisse pareil, Les aveugles Le Génie des alpages #11, Sabotage et paturage, Le Génie des alpages #12, Bouge tranquille. Eloge de la pentitude Le Génie des alpages #13, Cheptel Maudit, Le Génie des alpages #14
8.
Jacques Tardi
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Jacques Tardi is a French comics artist. He is often credited solely as Tardi, Tardi was born on 30 August 1946 in Valence, Drôme. A highly versatile artist, Tardi successfully adapted novels by controversial writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, in Malets case, Tardi adapted his detective hero Nestor Burma into a series of critically acclaimed graphic novels, though he also wrote and drew original stories of his own. Tardi also created one of French comics most famous heroines, Adèle Blanc-Sec and this series recreates the Paris of early 20th century where the moody heroine encounters supernatural events, state plots, occult societies and experiments in cryogenics. Another graphic novel was Ici Même which was written by Jean-Claude Forest, best known as the creator of Barbarella, a satire, it describes the adventures of Arthur Même who lives on the walls of his familys former property. Tardi has produced many antiwar graphic novels and comics, mainly focusing on the collective European trauma of the First World War, and his grandfathers involvement in the day-to-day horrors of trench warfare, seems to have had a deep influence on his artistic expression. He also completed a series on the Paris Commune, Le cri du peuple. In the English language, many of Tardis books are published by Fantagraphics Books, Books published by Fantagraphics include West Coast Blues, You Are There, It Was the War of the Trenches, Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot and The Arctic Marauder. In January 2013, Tardi was nominated as a Chevalier in Frances Legion of Honour, however, he turned down the distinction, citing that he will remain a free man and not be held hostage by any power whatsoever. His style can at times similar to Hergés early ligne claire style, paired with meticulous research. Tardis work also satirises the concept of the hero by using a series of inept. His audience is mainly the literary, French-speaking adult public. S, ISBN 2-203-30508-8 Le Mystère des profondeurs, ISBN 2-203-30509-6 Le Labyrinthe infernal, ISBN 978-2-203-00736-9 Putain de Guerre. 2, The Mad Scientist and Mummies on Parade - Le Savant fou and Momies en folie, ISBN 978-1-60699-582-2 Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell - Ô dingos, ô châteaux. ISBN 978-1-60699-620-1 Tardi official site on Casterman Tardi biography on Lambiek Comiclopedia Les Aventures Extraordinaires dAdèle Blanc-Sec Fan site, dead link
9.
Guido Crepax
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Guido Crepas, better known by his nom de plume Guido Crepax, was an Italian comics artist. He is most famous for his character Valentina, created in 1965, the Valentina series of books and strips became noted for Crepaxs sophisticated drawing, and for the psychedelic, dreamlike storylines, generally involving a strong dose of erotism. A film based on his work called Baba Yaga, featuring the character Valentina, was made in 1973, Valentina, Milano Libri Valentina speciale, Milano Libri Valentina con gli stivali, Milano Libri Baba Yaga, Milano Libri Ciao Valentina. Tokyo Al diavolo, Valentina In arte, odesseda, Editori del Grifo Emmanuelle lantivergine, Rizzoli Eroine alla fine, Salomé, Lizard Edizioni Crepax 60|70, Fiction inc. Jekyll e Mr. - ITS CREPAX, Deliriums & Desires, by Stephan
