Héros quotidiens des années 50 et 60
Introduction

Perhaps your favorite heroes are here ?
In 1995, With the help of the Angoulême International Festival of Comics, and the French Regional Daily Newspapers, Pressibus published the encyclopedia De Lariflette à Janique Aimée (see the Pressibus chapter of our site about studies in comics, with many illustrations and at a very reasonable price (only about french comics). Very frequently it is the source of the information that appears on this site.

De Lariflette à Janique Aimée was also an exhibition. When it travelled to Korea, an introduction was translated into english, and you can read it below.

From Lariflette to Janique Aimée
    The period that French adults read comics most was from 1946 to 1975. Before the era of TV, this thirty-year period was in fact the golden age of daily newspapers. Including both regional and national newspapers, there are (were?) over 100 different publications in France, and the most of them printed 1-12 comic-strips everyday. So millions of readers read a large number of comics day after day.

    But now, after 20 years, most of the series have been forgotten by readers. Only the series from children's magazines survive. This web-site shows the history of French newspapers during those 30 years.

    We can divide the strips into 3 kinds : 1) comics without words, 2) comics with text under the pictures (often adapted from novels) 3) comics with dialogue-bubbles.

    The change took place in 4 phases.
    • The first phase was the trial-period, 1946-1950. Newspapers companies and artists established the ground-rules during this period and prepared the way for the future.
    • The second period, 1951-1959, was one of active creativity and many series were born.
    • From 1960 to 1969, the third period is recognized as a classic phase.
    • The last is the period of decline, from 1970 to 1975. During these years, there were a few fine strips, but they promised nothing for the future because other comics for adults appeared and superseded the existing work completely. Agencies.
Agencies
    Artists, writers and newspaper companies were not content with creating works just for newspapers. The price of one comic-strip for just one newspaper was actually too high. So one piece had to be printed in several newspapers. And this gave rise to that indispensable entity the agency.

    The role of the agency was to take on artists and writers and to pay close attention to the daily papers in order to offer them new series that corresponded with the tastes of their readership, as well as distributing series that were already in existence. Some series were sold to more than a dozen different publications both at home and , in the case of the larger agencies, abroad.

    Most of the french comics with horizontal development were sold by the four agencies as follows : Opera Mundi, Paris-Graphic, Mondial Presse, Intermonde Presse.

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