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Art and taste in a 19th-century French comic

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posted on 2025-06-12, 09:38 authored by Mark McKinney

Art and taste in a 19th-century French comic

Mark McKinney

In several early French-language comics, or "novels in prints," an opposition between good and bad taste figures in various, usually ironic ways. They include: a sophisticated textual narrator commenting on tasteless and pretentious actions of drawn characters; creating a contrast between the low-brow taste of petit bourgeois characters and the higher tastes of an ambitious authorial double, a painter, in the text; or conversely, mocking the artist's caricatural creations as bad art. One or more related binary oppositions in a classic series also often structure such narratives: Parisian/provincial, French/foreign, urban/rural, sophisticated/simple, etcetera. The stories typically produce a comedy of people out of place, such as a bourgeois in aristocratic spheres, a Parisian in the provinces, a provincial in Paris, or a foreigner in France. The motivations and professions of interlopers are diverse: aspiring artist, foreign emissary, retiree, social climber, student, or tourist. They often produce a carnivalesque, temporary inversion of status, a conversion or role change, after which social values and proper places are usually reestablished, though sometimes with significant lasting changes. This presentation will examine such structures and devices in one early French comic album.

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Biography

Mark McKinney is Professor of French at Miami University (Ohio). He studies cartooning and comics from the 19th through the 21st centuries, and is currently writing about the relationships between comics and other arts in France. He is the author of The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (2011), Redrawing French Empire in Comics (2013) and Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics (2021). With Alec G. Hargreaves, he edited Post-Colonial Cultures in France (1997). He also edited History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (2008). With Laurence Grove and Ann Miller, he founded the journal European Comic Art.

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