The Colonial Heritage of French Comics

Although France has changed much in recent decades, colonial-era imagery continues to circulate widely in comics, in part because the colonial archives are easily accessible, and through the republication of colonial-era comics that are viewed as classics. The latter include the Tintin series of comic books, by the Belgian artist Herge, and the Zig and Puce series by Alain Saint-Ogan, a Frenchman.

In this important new study Mark McKinney situates comics in debates about French colonialism, arguing that cartoonists still use representations of colonial history in their comics as a way of intervening in debates about contemporary France and its current relationships to its former colonies. McKinney argues that comics offer unique opportunities to both reproduce and thereby perpetuate colonial ideologies, images and discourses, as well as to deconstruct and contest them. The ways, and the degree to which, they do one or the other tell us a great deal about the heritage of imperialism and colonialism in French comics and society.