In France, Comic Books Are Serious Business
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We do that all the time. The minitel. The credit card chips. Hell the TGV should have been everywhere, and we struggle to sell it to a few countries.
We are a superpower with only 70 millions of people working a mere 35 hours a week and so many occasions to skip work. That's damn impressive.
France could really shine more, technologically and culturally.
Did you know that the biggest (in term of sheer content mass, quality is more subjective) Python blog is a french one ? I know, because I wrote it. 1k articles, 700 being about python.
But it's like being french is a curse that forces you to do great things... And let them stuck in france forever.
('les biftecks' don't have an exclusive on silly rhymes)
From personal experience, growing up in India we always had either Astérix or Tintin to read. Even some of the lesser known works such as those by Giroud were available.
Now that I have been living and working in France for 6 years, one possible reason for this lack of penetration of french products is the language. There is very little effort to actually make the products accessible to the world at large. Now we may discuss the merits and demerits of this but the fact remains that if we want our products to be known all over the world, we have to make it known to the world. And most of the world speaks English.
Mes deux centimes.
Exactly, we should stop searching for excuses.
But agreed, language is a big problem.
Anyway, I leave it to the Germans to set the record straight on the smart-card. (and to the Polish to set the record straight about Marie Skłodowska)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_comics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_card
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_CurieThe TGV is one of the crappiest trains ever. It was made for businessmen/bureaucrats who travel with a satchel, they never realized that folks would actually go in it with suitcases since there is so little space to put them and they had to modify the inside of the trains after the fact to accommodate some space for it.
Also, they never considered that people with disabilities might want to board the train as you need to climb stairs even at the first level.
And let's not mention toilets are always broken and are washed like once a day or something which makes it look like you live in a developing country or something.
Compare that to the shinkansen in Japan and you are in for a good laugh.
It's great that you maintain a python blog, but is it written in french or english? If it is in french, you are limiting your reach. And that's not just limited to french, it also applies to chinese, japanese, german, arabic, etc.
If you want to expand your reach, you have to use english as it is the lingua franca today.
- the XIII comic series, very popular in Francophone countries but not much beyond
- The Bourne Supremacy, directly inspired by the series, a massive movie success worldwide.
We still have issues with this mentality: startups are created to surf on public money, often lacking a real technological advantage (e.g, "the sovereign cloud"). Some services such as Uber could not even have emerged since there conflict with an existing monopolies.
And finally there is the fiscal pressure which is killing the smart and medium companies while the biggest ones have very advantageous rates or even no tax to pay when foreign.
I’m in Berlin since a few years now and one of the main thing I miss are places where I can go and read good comics, that’s not really something as developed here, majority of people I meet don’t even know that’s a thing.
As a contrast, in Switzerland or France I can go to any Fnac store and spend a Saturday afternoon reading comics from a huge set of artists.
If you’re in Berlin check out Dussmann if you haven’t already (it’s hard to miss …). It’s nowhere near as well stocked as an average book shop in France but it does probably have the largest collection of BDs of any shop in Berlin.
Speaking of broadening people conception of BDs, I highly recommend people to have a look at La Revue Dessinée, a quarterly news magazine in BD https://www.larevuedessinee.fr
I don't know, that's not the way I see it personally. I see roman graphiques as more experimental concerning the narration, art, even how the actual book is produced (experimenting with different type of paper, different format) where traditionnal bandes dessinées have more strict codes they follow. So yes it can feel a bit more serious in some way but you also find weird and funny things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel
I read A Contract with God and some other of Eisner's stuff lately, e.g. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the version of the "To be, or not to be" speech in Comics and Sequential Art - just awesome.
It might not capture all the depth of what it really is but at least everyone understands.
Somehow I still prefer those kind of comics and korean / japanese comics than those by DC / Marvel (they look technically marvellous, with their computer graphics, but still pale compared to the non-US ones).
It's interesting to see how US evolved very different from European.
Tiny anecdote, France was quite aware of US comics (including Disney) and I read that there was some anti US reactions to this. Some magazines started as an effort to make more french stories (leftist, ecology). See PIF Magazine, which was funded by the French Communist Party (no joke). Even Asterix is said to be influenced a bit by US super heroes, hence the magic potion giving super powers.
The style and humor was different though.
So my answer would be .. no. US comics = Disney + Marvel + DC. I actually struggle to remember anything else. I'd be happy to know more though..
Also, I had no idea Ghost World was a comic, neither The Walking Dead..
Oh and lastly, not comic per se, but cartoons were a staple of US drawing culture. WB, toons, even the simpsons to an extent.
Frank is by Jim Woodring. It's hard to describe.
Frank does look odd.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3...
If we're just focusing on the modern meanings, I'd say the two are about as close to perfect translations of each other as you could ask for.
It's quite interesting to observe then all the changes that happened between the multiple publication of the same story: https://tintinomania.com/tintin-dans-ses-cases
The word «bande dessinée» is also the hyperonym for all the comics genres, although connoisseurs usually don't use it for «Comics» or «Manga».
Of course there are massive cultural differences between American-style comics and the Belgian/French kind but it's also true for many other art forms and we don't feel the need to come up with a different name every time.
I suppose there's a precedent with Japanese comics that are usually called "mangas" but at least that's short and easily pronounceable by your average anglophone. "Bande dessinée" will be painful both to pronounce and to write (as you showcase yourself, you forgot the accent and the feminine -e at the end of dessinée). I guess you could borrow the common shorthand "BD" (pronounced bédé).
Americans seem to have mostly settled into accepting this contradiction, with some incredibly unfunny and serious stuff being published as "comics". There's also the term "graphic novel", which sometimes only applies to stories first published as a book , rather than a series of monthly pamphlets, and also still sometimes has people saying "are they full of explicit porn or something?" as a misinterpretation of the "graphic" part.
Another term I've seen bandied around is "sequential art".
There is no implication that "comic books" are comedic in modern American culture. You're over-focusing on the etymology of a term that has since come to mean something quite different.
> Americans seem to have mostly settled into accepting this contradiction, with some incredibly unfunny and serious stuff being published as "comics"
This is merely how language evolves. We park on driveways. "Fat chance" indicates, in fact, a very slim one. Suitcases are a thoroughly incorrect way to store or transport suits, unless you like creasing them. Civil wars, aren't. Comic books are rarely comedic.
We speak in customary meaning, not based on overly literal analysis of component words.
I make comics.
I have spent a lot of time reading about the history of the medium.
I have opinions about the terms used for it, and how they have shaped the medium in the past, and how their meanings have changed.
This conflict between the term we use for this art form in America and the ways it shapes what we think "a comic book" can be was an important discussion for comics creators to have had, as the medium grew and changed. Comics has been a medium seen as only suited for children for much of its American lifespan; it's only in the eighties that this began to change, with best-selling work by creators who would tear you a new one if you called their "graphic novel" a "comic book" because Comics Were For Kids and they were making work that was distinctly Not For Kids. (In the sixties, folks making works distinctly Not For Kids mostly called them "comix", and there are still creators who favor that term for their work because they feel a connection to that particular horny, counter-culture kind of energy. In the nineties, Scott McCloud floated "Sequential Art" as an umbrella term, but it never really stuck, even my copy of his later book "The Sculptor" says "graphic novel" on the back.)
The diversity of literal translations of other terms for "stories told as sequential pictures, often with words" is worth reflecting on, especially if you have devoted a significant chunk of your life to the medium like I have. Were the French more open to adult work than Americans because their term for the medium didn't include implications about the content? Or is it just that Americans are weird and uptight?
And on the other side of the world, a literal translation of "manga" is "whimsical/impromptu pictures" and Japanese comics sure grew up a lot faster than American comics - but on the other hand, the sixties saw the coining of the term "gekiga", which literally translates to "dramatic pictures", and was promoted by... creators who wanted to mark their work as being distinct from kid-friendly manga. The term has faded, they're all just "manga" now for the most part (to the best of my knowledge, I am not exactly up to the minute on the current manga scene), but the way this parallels the period of distaste for the literal meaning of "comic book" is pretty interesting! This is a thing people making Serious Work in a medium whose name has connotations of being silly need to grapple with.
Of course, there was also Frederic Wertham and his 1954 book "Seduction of the Innocent", which lead to the creation of the Comics Code. Which essentially set back acceptance of the medium as something you could tell adult stories in for a generation, and it's only in the past couple decades that "comics" have been something it wasn't considered kinda childish for an American adult to read, outside of the subculture of comics aficionados. France had their own crackdown on Immoral BD around the same time, but embraced adult work a lot faster. Did their lack of a term that inherently marked the medium as frivolous help? Maybe it really is that Americans are weird and uptight.
Perhaps we have finally arrived at the point where we can call the overall medium "comics" without ever worrying about the fact that the word originally referred to the comedic content found in much of the form. And that's pretty cool! But the literal meaning of the name has only recently stopped being a thing creators felt a need to really engage with, and the alternative terms still have a life as a cue to booksellers and librarians that they should probably double-check the contents before reflexively shelving a "graphic novel" in the kid's section.
tl;dr: i make comics, and the literal meaning of these words is an important part of the three strands of the global history of this medium.
* Obviously not similar in political terms, but similar in that it's about a Western man who writes comics, trying to work in an Asian country and fit in a sometimes impenetrable culture. But if you want political, there's also Igort's Russian Notebooks.
Unfortunately the book was terrible. Deslisle was so condescending and disrespectful to the people he was covering that it was painful to read. And he clearly had no concept of how to broach, well, journalism. For example, there's one scene where he essentially interrogates a woman who works for him about whether she really believes "all the propaganda". She nervously agrees, then politely excuses herself from the room, and the author uses this to "show" how brainwashed and uncritical these people are, not realizing that this is a completely inappropriate setting for the conversation given the power imbalance, and not bothering to consider that she may not have been telling him the truth.
I'm honestly struck by the sheer awfulness of Deslisle's tactics here. He put a woman and three generations of her entire family at risk just for his own personal greed.
Or she could have assumed, quite reasonably, that Deslisle was a dumb foreigner who could blurt out what she said to whatever person, out of ignorance.
There's another horrible bit near the end where Deslisle is on a tour where they describe alleged torturing of Koreans by US soldiers, and Deslisle thinks (sorry, the bad translation is mine) "our tourist guide was beautiful, and after hearing so many descriptions of torture, I began to imagine myself as a US soldier practicing new torture methods of my own invention on her".
I was speechless after reading that, my little remaining sympathy for Deslisle completely evaporating.
In contrast, Igort and his Japanese Notebooks seem to treat the Japanese with respect, even when they do things that seem strange or unappealing to him (like the stressful work environment of manga artists).
The term Graphic Novel was invented in the US initially to describe comic books which contained a single self-contained story - as opposed to newspaper comic strips and superhero periodicals with never-ending storylines. So it is a subset of comics, which are marketed differently.
Contrast this with a petition initiated and signed by a collective of authors, including Benoît Peeters: https://collectifartistesauteurs.tumblr.com/post/17004407655...
Maybe the art form is taken seriously, yet over half of the comic books, authors cannot make a decent living off this profession in France today.
Sad to see the industry turn this way.
I'm trying to remember the name of one specific comic or series though: sci-fi theme, floating city in space, many different races live there, there is an elite humanoid alien race with blue skin and 6 eyes in 2 columns, with blue blood wearing skin-tight shiny armor, with psycho-kinetic powers, human male poses as one of them and kills a female alien possibly to steal her power, steals also her space ship, IIRC a chase through the space city ensues.
Maybe somebody knows the book, I absolutely cannot remember if this is from Valerian or something else, any hint would be grately appreciated. I think I read it last 20 years ago. Text was in German. Typical Carlsen/Egmont comic book format.
Edit: It's NOT Yoko Tsuno "City of the Banished Ones". Different series or one-shot.
You should check it out.
(Not sure about the actual translated English title, but a literal translation would be "On the frontiers")
Most Valerian comics are great by the way, and they all have been republished recently, at least in France (and probably also US because of the -rather disappointing- Besson's movie)
[EDIT: as an illustration of just how weak the comics market is in the US: Gaston, along with Spirou and Marsupilami, as well as Idées Noires, were all published even in Norwegian - with 5 million Norwegian speakers - pretty much as they were published; Idées Noires was also finally translated to English last year as Franquin's Last Laugh]
There are some gems in American comics too, but part of the problem is that they're often impossible to follow with the incessant cross-overs and re-numbering. Couple that with having the choice of either wafer thin issues or waiting for trade paperback collections, and it's no wonder comics has declined into a niche in the US.
That's not surprising to me, many artists don't get paid a decent living wage for their work (i.e. musicians, painters, video creators, etc). It's an unfortunate reality of going solo and trying to start a sustainable business.
People do value the arts, but the pricing is broken because a present-day artist has to compete not just with peers but also the ancient greats.
Those same people are very conscious about wasting their limited funds so faces wirh the product of 10,000 artists they tend to only spend money on the ‘best’ (could be Twilight) which is usually driven by what’s popular.
Things become popular almost entirely though control over marketing and distribution. These days we have a better chance of going viral but the old gatekeepers are still picking most winners and losers.
Moreover, art is pretty tightly constrained in non-capitalist societies. In communist ones, it tends to be limited to traditional forms and propaganda. In mercantilist ones, it was traditional forms or, if you could find a patron, whatever would keep your patron happy.
I say it is a me necessity because it is impossible (and perhaps a contradiction in terms) to imagine a human culture or society which had absolutely no art at all.
No music, no visual art, no literature, no fashion, no film or theater, no sculpture, no “craft arts” (which are really just plain art) like architecture, pottery, interior design, graphic design, product design, etc ...
Even propaganda and the fashion of military uniforms ultimately depend on art.
It’s just not possible. And somehow if it was, who would want to live in it?
Therefore art is a necessity :)
On the other hand, ludicrous value gets assigned to random pieces of modern art. It seems like capitalism introduces notions of "valuable enough" meaning you can sell your art for a living or "not valuable enough" meaning you cannot sell your art for a living. Any art may still have value, but the question of art value under capitalism isn't what you want it to be but what others say it is, and if existence itself has a price, the price may be high enough or not.
In turn, those libraries create events, participate to the cultural life of their neighbourhoods, create social links.
In the end, it makes it very easy to find a book store, get good advice, create links with sellers (I spend hours talking with the shopkeeper at my comics place), and take an interest in the medium.
So it's not really a random singularity happening there, but also in part the result of a very specific books policy. And of course, the cultural legacy is also super strong !
For shorter books I agree that paper is superior, I don't have to worry about damage, battery level or theft, I can easily borrow and lend them (I think you can do that with Kindle nowadays but it can't be as convenient as lending a physical object).
A kindle is 0.36" (9.1mm) thick. It has the dimensions of a tiny 100-page book I have right here on my bookshelf. Fair enough if you only read books of that size, but even Harry Potter gets massive.
It's also much less fragile than a book. It seems indestructible. Meanwhile my backpack alone turns out to be a book-cover destroyer before we even get into lending books out.
I think most people here would agree that books are bulky and fragile, so it's weird to hear someone suggest that books have these advantages over an e-reader.
One killer feature for me is that e-readers have a backlight so I can read anywhere. E-ink lets me read in the sun. The backlight lets me read without an external source of light. It's a massive convenience. And the battery charge lasts weeks.
It's fair enough if you don't think e-readers are worthwhile to you, but it's in your best interest to figure out why it's not "a solution in search of a problem" for the people who buy them. A better angle is just to ask people why they like something and they'll happily illuminate the mystery.
Now, with a Nook, I love the ability to finish a book at night, realize I want to read longer, and purchase another one immediately. I don't have to plan ahead. There are a lot of upsides to purchasing them online. But, I do miss the culture and community of small bookstores.
(Though of course there are competing distractions, like HN and social media.)
Having a knowledgeable shopkeeper to talk with on the other hand is really a fantastic experience for me !
Another is the available of cheaper international paperback editions online.
For translated books, I do not find bookshops striving to carry as many different translations of the same work as possible, most carry only one, when some works like Homer and the Russians Greats are published in very many translations.
My point is rather than in France the advantages offered by the physical bookstores (namely, its friendly employers) outweighs that, in part because the online marketplace doesn't have a price advantage. Of course, in the end it's a matter of sensitivity to various criterias, stock definitely being a relevant one !
This is a fairly rare experience for bookstores in some of the U.S. geographies I've lived in.
The shopkeepers I encounter aren't widely-read or intellectuals. They're either college students working at slightly above minimum wage to pay for school, or ex-hippies with lots of used books in their garage who figured they could make some money selling them. They have no sense of the intellectual pulse of today (they don't know what ideas are popular), don't have a good mental semantic tree of authors and their works, and worst of all, aren't readers themselves. I don't expect bookstore owners to have the omnivorous interests and breadth of Tyler Cowen, but they should at least have intellectual curiosity and a love of books.
The only exceptions are bookstores near great universities, where the owners tend to be stragglers who loved their university town so much that they stayed. They're usually former English lit, philosophy or other humanities majors who continue to read widely. You can tell a bookstore is good by the quality of their curation -- really good bookstores understand space is a premium and don't stock junk.
That said, you also need someone with a mind for business. Unfortunately this confluence of skills doesn't occur regularly so we live with what we have.
The problem with the large catalog on sites like Amazon is that it's impossible (at least for me) to sort through it if you are just browsing. If I'm in a bookstore I always find new and interesting books that I end up buying and enjoying.
That could have something to do with Amazon's sorting/searching features, which are so bad that the results are often comical, with random unrelated results intermixed with the thing you're looking for.
Default sorting is by the "Featured" variable, which probably means 'makes most money for the seller', rather than something that actually benefits the searcher. This is a guess, it is not defined.
I think they maybe, finally, let you sort items when you're searching outside of a specific category now, but that's a relatively recent development.
It doesn't help that less than scrupulous Amazon sellers are constantly changing products around so that reviews don't line up with the product description. That widget you've found with 100 five star reviews, well, it turns out that the reviews were for a different product, but you can't tell unless you go read enough of the reviews to figure that out.
That's part of it, but the price is a lot of it, too. I rarely go to bookstores anymore, even for books that I know I'll find there, because the books are more expensive than at Amazon.
In France, the software they use is more powerful than Amazon to buy books. The database is clean, deduplicated and well maintained by professionals that know each others.
To allow bookshops to do a margin, they have a specific different agreement with editors. I _think that in general they pay a yearly flat fee to editors (in the tens of thousands of euros) and then get the books at a lower price. If they sell enough copies, they end up a profit.
The big difference is in school books, I just looked into solid mechanics, we are une the 30-70€ range in France and $80-130 range in the US (in a bad comparison, I see stuff completely irrelevant in my query result).
The trick is that the French gouvernement is not passive, it often tell industries that if they don’t change this or that, they’ll just use the law. In the end I feel it works better than in the US. In particular on book, France is under constant watch by free market entities, so they’d better reach some measure of success for the consumer or the EU will just intervene.
The goal is to preserve the French culture, it only works if French people read and write French books. If it's too expensive, people don't buy books, if it's too low, authors don't survive.
Alas, no money either for the author.
And yes, books are expensive in France. And alas again, only a small part of the price goes to the author.
They are pretty much greedy yes. Or, mainly, the big publishers. Small one struggle to survive.
And the worst part of it ? Epub and PDF are almost the same price than the hardcover versions !
The official reason is that it protects small book stores from Kindles (or any ebook reader), but I'm pretty sure it's just publishers lobbying.
And, again, in the end, the author receives only a small part of the sell.
That's atrocious and something I really dislike. I personally believe that ebooks should be cheaper - by subtracting the cost it takes to print the paper books (and that should be the maximum price).
These are marginal when selling ePub, and yet it’s still expensive in France.
Wanna know something even more stupid ?
Most of the time, you can’t buy them from out of France !
I don’t know if this is still true, but two years ago I tried to buy ePub online and couldn’t because I was not in France.
Fun fact ? I was living in the Caribbean on a French island (Guadeloupe), which is run on French laws and administration.
For traditional french comic books, the price is France is I think higher than what I observed in the US and UK.
This is partly due to traditional culture where french publishers prefer full color editions needing more work ( where in the rest of the world we're happily mixing colors and white and black), and partly due too I suppose to a lack of incentive to lower prices when the demand is so high at the moment.
Second hand books are a total free market, and are very popular items.
meaning there is no competition and prices are artificially inflated for no particular reason except some ideological one. I'm not sure it's a good case for regulating the price of books.
My observation: Japan has WAY more bookshops than France without any regulation of book prices. And they produce a LOT more books locally than France ever does.
You make ideology sound like a bad thing.
Depends on the particular beliefs of the ideology, no?
After all the “free market” (for lack of a better term) beliefs in your post are an ideology too ...
Even the most intellectually sound movement can become toxic.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
...
...
Whereas, Christianity doesn't hold a believe, just a religious believe.
Markets tend to do both harm and good to culture, much as trade, migration, and wars have done both harm and good. Culture will always be market driven. However, there is definitely a place for culture outside of ordinary commerce.
My understanding is that the advent of the 78 record managed to popularize the Sligo style of Irish fiddling all over the world and across Ireland. Unfortunately, it caused a lot of local fiddlers to just hang their fiddle up, resulting in a tremendous die-off of regional styles. I'm also given to understand that every holler in the mountains of West Virginia had their own style of banjo. There was once a central Pennsylvania fiddle style. All of these have largely died out. (Imagine you meet a cosplayer from 200 years in the future, and their conception of "American" is a simplified homogenized mix of all 19th and 20th century American culture of all regions. This is the degree of squashing of diversity I'm talking about.)
Pre the printing press you could pretty much just get the bible hand written. With the early press far more then as you didn't need type setters more again.
Sure, if you only have that one data point, that's what you'd think. There's a lot more to it. Prior to widespread literacy, there was a tremendous amount of oral tradition and storytelling. Back in those days, if you wanted media, the family or community had to produce it, itself. (In America in the 1800s, it used to be the norm for at least one member of every family to be capable of performing at a level that would get one paid today.) Why would you think all of those would have been written down? In fact, people who study these things know much was lost. We only have a smattering of what once was.
In general it seem better tech -> lower costs -> more diverse.
The tech we had in the Industrial Revolution up through the late 20th century wasn't as interactive and capable of gathering data, and so wasn't as good at serving the long tail. So there was a bias towards only a few things that were mass produced, and unless you did a lot of legwork, that's what you got. As technology progressed, you had easier discovery/access, more customization, and more choices. In 2019, everything is preserved, everything is available if you just casually search for it. The world wasn't always that way.
I like the convenience of purchasing books online. Admittedly, though, I've lost the whole community and culture of books that small bookstores provided.
As a kid growing up in uk interested in US hip hop the specialist shops and their clientele turned me onto a whole different world.
Eventually some of the big book retailers abandoned it then it was found to be illegal in the courts. After that the supermarkets moved in and discounted the best sellers.
The decline set in for bookshops before Amazon came along.
You are never far from a place selling comic books, graphic novels, trading card games, action figures and such.
Another thing I find different to what I am used to is how they all still buy DVDs and Blurays. Not just the odd one here and there but regularly and have a pretty impressive collection. What I find interesting is that they have good internet here. I got 1Gbit fibre with a whole host of extra (TV package, landline, SIM with 50GB data) for €55/month. And it has been perfect since I got it installed a few months back. I would have thought with such fantastic internet access they would all be using streaming services but nope they love their physical discs!
Edit: And not just movies but full TV show boxsets. Those are like €100-200 !!
I sat down to work out the value difference between a few streaming sites and how much they pay for physical media and streaming is way cheaper as DVDs and Blurays are not cheap! I know you can sell it on but it seems nobody does. They are often given away! It is quite alien to me.
So for your run-of-the-mill blockbuster streaming is fine, but for a movie you really like, nothing beats owning it.
I discovered music listening to my parents' vinyl records, now if they had only listened to radio, what kind of cultural legacy could have they passed on? Their music would have "vanished" by the time I was there, and that's what would happen to my music and movies as well if I only used steaming services.
Streaming is like the fast-food of media, it allows easy consumption of unremarkable content but it doesn't seem fit for remembering pieces of art.
So yeah I get the benefits for your favourite things but for some generic Hollywood action movie? Dunno man that seems like a waste of €20 to me when you can watch it on Netflix or some other service you already subscribe to. I mean they all have Netflix of course. They don't even seem to check if the film is even available to stream on a service they already pay for. Very strange to me.
As a counter point to what you said about music I have found way more music I love thanks to Spotify. I discovered music much like you when I was younger but it wasn't really anything I wouldn't have discovered anyway as it was all popular rock, indie, pop, jazz artists that had wide vinyl/CD distribution. Thanks to Spotify I can listen to some random artist in a small country with close to the same discoverability as Taylor Swift, Jay-Z or Coldplay. Of course that is more to do with the internet that Spotify specifically but I still love Spotify. I listen to so much more music than I did when we had CDs or just the iTunes store. The same is true of TV and movies thanks to Netflix imho.
I had a collection of 100 Blurays a few years ago. Eventually I sold everything when I realized that owning pieces of plastic that get dust on a shelf didn't bring me any joy. I enjoy movies at the theater or on Netflix as much as movies on physical support.
And movies are not going to "vanish" if you stop buying physical copies of them on Amazon. Conserving movies is the job of film archives. You probably have one in your country that offer screenings of old movies. Or arty/independent theaters that offer the same kind of content.
There is a big difference between having something physically available, and knowing you could have it if you wanted. The first one is preferable to many people.
Things don't have to bring you joy at every instant you own them, that's cheap philosophy used as marketing for selling books. Things can also be useful for the future
Interesting choice by the NYT. In my corner of the world, she was well known for writing "Ranma 1/2", while "Inuyasha" flew pretty much under the radar. I'm assuming it must have been the other way around in the US.
It's funny though, Rumiko Takahashi is probably my favourite mangaka (all of her manga was easy enough for me to read when I was first learning Japanese). But when I mentioned her to my wife, the first thing that came to her mind was Urusai Yatsura, which I had never heard of :-) She's written a lot of popular manga!
But that was an oddity for the US, for sure. I'm really fortunate to have had KTEH around as a kid. I also fondly remember watching Doctor Who on Sunday nights.
I am from Turkey. I learned reading and writing before my school age, with the help of graphic novels. Me and many people I know, literally grew up with different Bonelli series. A great number of graphic novelists and artists from Turkey would easily refer to them as "inspiration" or "reason" to start drawing/writing. Zagor, Mister No, Tex and Martin Mystere (or with its Turkish printing title Atlantis) has been really popular, and in more recent years we had the chance to read Julia, Dylan Dog, Nathan Never, La Storia and many other one shot series from Bonelli.
I believe, until the mid-1990s, when you mentioned the term comic (or "çizgi roman", meaning graphic/drawn/illustrated novel), people would come up with those titles rather than Spider Man, or Batman. They have been available along with Italian titles but for a very long time, they were never as popular and widespread.
I am not sure about the usage of term "pulp" (mostly due to English not being my native language), but I'd consider those titles as important and serious as big auteurs' (Pratt, Manara etc...) creations.
I saw it once at a Virgin Records store in Beirut, Lebanon, and I'm kicking myself that I didn't grab it then.
But you are right: all of Moebius's stuff needs to be properly released again, and digitally as well. It's crazy that such a massively influential figure not just in comics but all of pop culture is virtually unknown in the English world these days.
Now that is a title I haven't heard mentioned in a long time.
Now, I see it's a bit too black and white but at the time I loved it ^^.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val%C3%A9rian_and_Laureline#Le...
There are literally (tens of?) thousands series and characters. Usually printed in color hardcovers.
EDIT: I've checked. They have 49.000 series there!
It is taken quite seriously, and we have some wonderful authors.
Games. Unless he doesn't consider games a cultural industry.
(Warning: there are some nsfw ads)
* sillage (wake): https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Wake/Issue-1?id=125469
* meta-barron: https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/META-BARON/Issue-1?id=93964
* incal: https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/The-Incal/TPB-1?id=77077
* beltegeuse: https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Betelgeuse/Issue-1?id=10011...