French Literature Reviews - 2026

Benoît Glaude, Comics and Novelization: a Literary History of Bandes Dessinées
Comparative and World Literature

What do George Lowther’s novel The Adventures of Superman, Claude Simon’s The Battle of Pharsalus, Frederic Tuten’s Tintin in the New World, Carlos Sampayo’s The Year the Lion Escaped, the children’s novel series Titeuf by Shirley Anguerrand and Little Vampire by Joann Sfar, as well as several short stories from René Goscinny’s Little Nicolas collections and Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, and even the autobiography I Was Six Years Old in Hiroshima by Japanese mangaka Keiji Nakazawa have in common? Spanning a wide variety of literary genres, all these texts are tied to preexisting comic books. While at first glance these examples might seem exceptional, they actually belong to a body of work that has never been systematically cataloged or specifically studied.

By tackling this subject, Comics & Novelization: a Literary History of Bandes Dessinées opens up a fresh perspective on the interactions between comics and literature. The book posits that both artistic mediums have engaged in a mutual emulation ever since they began coexisting within media culture. To demonstrate this, the research does not focus on literary adaptations into comics, but rather on a virtually unexplored literary corpus: comic book-related novels. Written in English yet centered on French-language creation, this book reconstructs a literary history of the comic strip through its novels, spanning from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. While comics—including the "graphic novel"—have sometimes been viewed as subordinate to an unsurpassable literary model, do these understudied novelistic adaptations not rather point to a reciprocal relationship, and even mutual emulation, between the two mediums?

Scholars of media culture and narrative studies have long examined the shifting boundaries between text and image, particularly in relation to how different artistic mediums appropriate and transform one another over time. The study of intermediality within twentieth-century culture often highlights the porous borders separating popular art forms like bandes dessinees from traditional prose fiction. By focusing on works derived from graphic sources rather than standard adaptations, this volume touches upon broader debates surrounding narrative borrowing, intertextuality, and the evolving status of illustrated narratives within contemporary print culture.

Readers interested in the history of comic strips, graphic narratives, and the reciprocal relationship between visual and literary mediums may find this historical overview particularly relevant. The discussion spans a diverse corpus encompassing nineteenth- to twenty-first-century texts, spanning from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century and focusing on a virtually unexplored literary corpus of comic book-related novels. Written in English yet centered on French-language creation, the work reconstructs a literary history of the comic strip through its novels.