You forgot the translation: “bande dessinée”, literally, means “drawn strip”, or, equivalently, graphic novel. The latter term exists and matches the French wording pretty closely. “Comic”, by contrasts, really only describes a subset.
“Graphic novels” are called “Romans graphiques” and are their own category of “bande dessinée”. And yes, it’s a quite important thing, not only in France but in Belgium and Switzerland too (at least in Romandie, the French speaking part).
I’m in Berlin since a few years now and one of the main thing I miss are places where I can go and read good comics, that’s not really something as developed here, majority of people I meet don’t even know that’s a thing.
As a contrast, in Switzerland or France I can go to any Fnac store and spend a Saturday afternoon reading comics from a huge set of artists.
Hmm. I spent my late teens in France, was/am an avid graphic novel reader, and I have never heard the term “roman graphique”. Is it a recent term? It actually sounds like a back-translation of “graphic novel”. The term BD is ubiquitous.
If you’re in Berlin check out Dussmann if you haven’t already (it’s hard to miss …). It’s nowhere near as well stocked as an average book shop in France but it does probably have the largest collection of BDs of any shop in Berlin.
Yes, "roman graphique" is a rather recent term (whose usage has slowly grown over the last 15 years, generally applied to BDs with more "serious" topics; it allowed some people to say they don't read plebeian BDs, they read romans graphiques).
Speaking of broadening people conception of BDs, I highly recommend people to have a look at La Revue Dessinée, a quarterly news magazine in BD https://www.larevuedessinee.fr
> it allowed some people to say they don't read plebeian BDs, they read romans graphiques
I don't know, that's not the way I see it personally. I see roman graphiques as more experimental concerning the narration, art, even how the actual book is produced (experimenting with different type of paper, different format) where traditionnal bandes dessinées have more strict codes they follow. So yes it can feel a bit more serious in some way but you also find weird and funny things.
At least for the English term this is explicitly the reason it was created: to avoid the bad reputation “comic strips” (and the term has been criticised for precisely this, because it’s seen as pretentious).
If the goal was distancing oneself from mainstream comic strips and books, that fell apart pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure the term was popularized by Marvel's Graphic Novels series of books.
"Fan historian Richard Kyle coined the term "graphic novel" in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha. The term gained popularity in the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978) and the start of Marvel's Graphic Novel line (1982) and became familiar to the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986 and the collected editions of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1987. The Book Industry Study Group began using "graphic novel" as a category in book stores in 2001."
I read A Contract with God and some other of Eisner's stuff lately, e.g. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the version of the "To be, or not to be" speech in Comics and Sequential Art - just awesome.
While there’s certainly nothing that compares to a well-stocked French bookstore in Berlin, you could try “Grober Unfug” (groberunfug.de) or Modern Graphics (modern-graphics.de)
Similar thing in Scandinavia. E.g. "tegneserie" in Norwegian => "drawn series". In modern usage "tegneserie" can refer to a magazine or graphic novel, but you can also explicitly distinguish between "tegneseriestripe" and "tegneserieblad" (strip vs. magazine), and nothing really prevents anyone from making the similar distinction with novel ("tegneserieroman" is not used much, but it's a reasonable extension; some also use "grafisk roman" as a more direct translation of "graphic novel" but it's a misleading translation as using "grafisk" suggest something much wider than "tegneserie", e.g. anything built around a visual presentation would fit)
