In the last few years, there's been a small flood of French-language art comics being translated into English. But the French comics revolution of the last decade and a half didn't originate with big French publishing companies like Delcourt and Dargaud; it came from the underground--specifically a small, artist-run publisher known as L'Association.
L'Association was launched in 1990 by a group of cartoonists who'd previously worked on an anthology called LABO. They include artists David B., Killoffer, Mattt Konture, Jean-Christophe Menu, Mokeit, Stanislas and Lewis Trondheim. In those days, the big French publishers focused on 48-page, full-color, hardcover graphic novels with a standard trim size, the format of Asterix and Tintin, and still the default format for mass-market comics in France.
L'Association promptly set itself apart by publishing mostly black-and-white books, mostly in paperback, with formats and length determined by its artists. Its books often sell only a few thousand copies, but the company's clout is cultural: being published by L'Asso, as it's known informally, is considered a mark of quality. Over the past 15 years, L'Association has published dozens of superb books, mostly by French cartoonists, but with a few ringers, like French translations of English-language titles by Chris Ware and Dylan Horrocks, and the massive Comix 2000, a 2,000-page hardcover anthology of original, wordless comics by artists from around the world, commemorating the new millennium.
European underground scenes inevitably feed the mainstream eventually, and a handful of L'Association's cartoonists have become very well known in France for their work for other publishers. Delcourt, for instance, has had a huge success with Trondheim and Joann Sfar's Dungeon series, some of which have been published by NBM in the U.S. But one full-on hit published by L'Association itself has also caught on in the States: Persepolis by David B.'s former student Marjane Satrapi. Meanwhile, David B.'s Epileptic (first published in six volumes by L'Association as L'Ascension du Haut Mal) came out in the States from Pantheon early this year, and his newer work is being published by Fantagraphics. Babel is now its own series from Fantagraphics new Ignatz line and other works will soon appear in Fantagraphics' quarterly Mome anthology.
Other books by L'Association-associated cartoonists are also popping up on the lists of North American publishers. The initial publishing schedule of Henry Holt's new graphic novel imprint, First Second, features Trondheim's A.L.I.E.E.E.N. and several books by Sfar (whose The Rabbi's Cat was also published domestically by Pantheon this year). Fantagraphics has published a few titles by the Swiss cartoonist Thomas Ott, and Drawn & Quarterly has published English versions of a couple of books initially published by L'Association itself, most recently Guy Delisle's Pyongyang.
A few years ago, Menu, editorial director of the company, sent L'Association's artists to various parts of the world to bring back travel journals. The fruit of Killoffer's trip to Montreal, Six Hundred and Seventy-Six Apparitions of Killoffer, was recently published in English by the new, U.K.-based graphic novel publisher Typocrat for the English-language market. Menu, Killoffer and Trondheim were also in on the beginning of Oubapo (Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinee Potentielle), an experimental comics association, modeled on its literary ancestor Oulipo, that has published several volumes of the Oupus anthology. Matt Madden, the American cartoonist behind the Oulipo-inspired book 99 Ways to Tell a Story (Chamberlain Bros.), is officially a "foreign correspondent" of the French Oubapo group.
As is generally the case with groups of high-minded European artists of any stripe, L'Association's history has been marked by schisms, manifestos and internal dissent--Mokeit left in its early days, and David B. broke his ties with the company more recently. Menu's recent book Plates-bandes is a prose salvo against what he sees as the weaknesses of the French comics scene, especially big companies capitalizing on what he sees as a watered-down version of the L'Association-style avant-garde. Still, that means that the company's embrace of artistic freedom for its cartoonists has become both more common and more commercially viable.
In fact, First Second's editorial director, Mark Siegel, recently noted in his blog that two artists who've been published extensively by both L'Asso and now First Second are going to be overseeing the next wave of French comics. Lewis Trondheim is now the editorial director of a new comics imprint, Shampooing, within the gigantic Delcourt Publishing house, and Joann Sfar is running an imprint of his own, Bayou, at Gallimard.
