Introduction

Perhaps your favorite heroes are here ?
In 1995, With the help of the Angoulême International Festival of Comics, and the French Regional Daily Newspapers, Pressibus published the encyclopedia De Lariflette à Janique Aimée (see the chapter Pressibus of our site about comics studies), with many illustrations and a cheap cost (only about french comics). Very often, it is the source of the informations of this site.

De Lariflette à Janique Aimée was also an exposition. When going in Corea, an introduction was translated in english, and you are going to read it now.

From Lariflette to Janique Aimée
    The period that French adults read comics most is from 1946 to 1975. Before the era of TV, this thirty years period was actually the golden age of daily newpapers. Including regional and national newpapers, there are over 100 kinds of ones in France, and the most of them printed 1-12 series of comics everyday. So millions of readers read a great quantity of comics day after day.

    But now, after 20 years, the most of the series have been forgotten by readers. Only the series of children magazines survive. This web site shows the history of french newspapers for 30 years. Except in one page, only the horizontal work is shown.

    We can divide the strips into 3 kinds : 1) comics without words, 2) comics with text under the pictures (often adapted from novels) 3) comics with balloons.

    The change had 4 phases.
    • The first phase was the period of attempt, 1946-1950. Newspapers companies and artists left a lot of marks in this period.
    • During the second, 1951-1959, active creativity and many series were born.
    • From 1960 to 1969, the third period is recognized as a classic phase.
    • The last is the period of decay, from 1970 to 1975. During these years, there were a few bright works, but they did not guarantee the future. Because other comics for adults appeared and exceeded the ready-published works completely.
Agencies
    Artists, writers and newspaper companies was not content with making works only for newspapers. The price of one line of the comics for only one newspaper was too low actually. So one piece must be printed in several newspapers. And the indispensable presence, the agency appeared.

    The role of agency was to made artists and writers producing the tasty series for readers of each newspaper following the demand of daily newspaper company, and offered company the ready-made series of comics. Some series were sold to ten companies and printed.

    Most of the french comics with horizontal development were sold by the four agencies as follows : Opera Mundi, Paris-Graphic, Mondial Presse, Intermonde Presse.

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