Francophile Friday: Beaux Arts magazine's 50 greats

No new bandes dessinées this week: the library is closed for a literary festival. Instead, I'm going to take a look at an article in a special edition of Beaux Arts magazine devoted to comics. It's entitled "La bédéthèque idéale": it's essentially yet another Top 50 Greatest Ever list, in alphabetical order by author, and it's a little... well... eccentric.

To be fair, I don't expect a list created for a French magazine to include all the titles available in English that I would include on my own Top 50 Greatest list (if I were inclined to create such a list). They have to work with what's available in French, which means both that certain English-language works are going to be ignored and that a wide range of French-language works unavailable in English will be included. That's fine. I certainly have no argument with the inclusion of Les Mauvaises Gens, which I talked about last Sunday, or L'Autoroute du Soleil, which I helped translate for Comix Influx, or Partie de Chasse, which was briefly available in an English translation from DC (published with another story under the collective title The Chaos Effect). There are a large number of French titles on the list that I haven't read, but I've heard enough about them to understand why they were included, such as Pascin (allegedly the greatest work by Joann Sfar) or L'Incal by Jodorowsky and Moebius. There are others I've never heard of, which just means I need to read more.

No, it's the works translated from English and Japanese that bother me. To take the manga first: there is only one work by Osamu Tezuka on this list, and it's... MW. Which is a bit of an odd choice. MW? Really? Not Apollo's Song, or Buddha, or Phoenix, or Ode to Kirihito, or Black Jack, or Astro Boy? I don't know what the availability of those titles is in French, but it seems unlikely, on the face of it, that MW would be available when Ode to Kirihito wasn't. And I admit that I haven't read MW (it's on my to-do list), but every review I've come across describes it as a minor Tezuka work -- interesting, in many ways, but minor.

A more general trend can be observed with the other mangaka represented: Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Jiro Taniguchi, Shigeru Mizuki. I don't want to denigrate these creators at all -- they're all deserving of recognition -- but isn't there something a bit self-consciously highbrow about a list that includes all of them but not, say, Rumiko Takahashi or Akira Toriyama or Kazuo Umezu? The list does include Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, but that's as close as it gets to the kinds of manga that are really popular. I like gekiga as much as the next person, but it's hardly representative of all manga, or even of all the really good manga. (And I know for a fact that this isn't just about availability -- Naruto, for example, is available in French, and extremely popular.)

It's not as if the (uncredited) selector is relentlessly highbrow with all the comics on the list: he (or I suppose it could be a she, but given the fact that the list is overwhelmingly male-dominated, I'm going to stick with "he") has no problem adding adventures by Lucky Luke, Blake & Mortimer, Tintin, and Asterix. (Personally, I would have gone for Asterix the Legionary rather than Asterix in Britain, but there's no accounting for taste.) The English-language selection isn't much more diverse than the manga: we have Bone, Peanuts, Little Nemo and two by Alan Moore to represent populism, and apart from that it's the same kind of broadsheet-acceptable moderately-highbrow stuff as the manga: Palestine, Jimmy Corrigan, Maus, Locas, Boulevard of Broken Dreams. And again, it's not that any one specific work out of the list should have been left out (though, again, personally I would have substituted Palomar for Locas because as far as I'm concerned Gilbert Hernandez is more consistently good than Jaime, but I seem to be in a minority there), but rather that as a representation of the comics medium as it exists in the English language, it's distinctly lopsided. I'm all for recognition of non-superhero comics, but when the only superhero comic on your list is Watchmen, you're taking matters to extremes. (Seriously: no Kirby?)

But then, this kind of problem is inevitable once you limit yourself to 50 titles. There's no way you can be truly representative, given that you have only one person's memories and experience to draw on. You can either be deeply personal, which has the merits of being honest and possibly surprising; or you can try to build a canon, in which case you may represent the medium accurately, or you may just end up attempting to justify your own prejudices by claiming they're a measure of objective merit. I'm not sure how "objective" the Beaux Arts list was supposed to be -- the fact that it's not credited to any individual prevents it from being truly personal, and the shortness of the descriptions likewise produces an air of spurious impersonality -- but it ultimately comes across as one person's distinctly biased and individual favourites. Which would be fine, if they were willing to admit to it...