My last trip to Paris I spent a long time in these "comic book" stores. They are absolute goldmines with passionate and knowledgeable staff and incredible selections.
I agree that sneering at Comic books as "not the culture we wanted" is BS. Culture is culture. French and Belgian comic books like "Asterix et les Gaulois" or "Tintin" or "Gaston La Gaffe" etc... are great works of comedy and art just like anything else.
But mine was also the pre-Internet era, where we'd spend small fortunes on comics and magazines because we had nothing to offset the boredom. With always-on Internet, that's just not a reality now.
Right now I really love PTSD by Guillaume Singelin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix
https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/03/asterix-and-the-bl...
I guess they are unhappy about teens buying manga? Real question is why French comic book artist aren't selling in Japan? There's a lot of Japanese tourists in France, that doesn't sound too far-fetched.
(I personally find manga to be excessively drawn-out, even more than American comics, seemingly in order to sell more books. But that's me.)
I honestly just thought of it as an interesting article about what happens when you do the thing they describe. Not any particular judgment.
Here is an example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus
Yes… this is definitely art in my book.
No accident that part of the world produced Herge and Mobieus and inspired Miyazaki.
> Envie d’aller au théâtre, voir un film ou un spectacle ? De prendre des cours de photo ? D’un roman ou d’un manga ? [emphasis mine]
Which roughly means
Would you like to go to the theatre, see a film or a show? Take some photography courses? Read a novel or manga?
If the French government didn't intend for the money to be used this way, they certainly haven't told the people designing the site that promotes it.
Is that true though? Maybe some people in the government feel that way, but it sounds like the goal was just to allow teenagers to buy what they wanted. If they thought kids were going to spend it to go the opera or something, why wouldn't they have put more restrictions on it in the first place?
What? The French government isn't dumb. If they didn't want, teenagers to spend the pass money on BD, it would have been excluded. As is, I assume the French government is perfectly fine with French teenagers spending it on French produced entertainment in French stores.
Tintin was gripping too, and arguably the greatest cultural icon to come from European comics.
In Spain we had a good comic culture from the 50s onwards, with perhaps one of the greatest exponents being Mortadelo y Filemón which had was hilarious and had some international exposure (I've seen it in German flea markets as Clever & Smart)
I agree that comics are culture too, but I can see how this will ruffle some feathers among people expecting that young kids would be buying thick tomes by Chateaubriand or attending Racine plays in droves.
This is a model of subsidy (vouchers, in essence) which some free-market economists can get behind as it still allows agency from individuals or markets. However what we're seeing is the very reason why others would staunchly oppose this kind of model...
There are a couple that immediately spring to mind, the one where he launches the gas container from the roof of his car, the 'running gag' about the contracts that never get signed and that surprise in fact do get signed and then are promptly shredded by the cat and the badly humored seagull that drops stuff on people.
And the parking meter wars, hilarious.
Interestingly the other comics I read were Phantom, Mandrake, Rip Kirby, Flash Gordon - available via a local publisher, Indrajal Comics [0], that were sent to us monthly (or was it weekly) via a subscription. Got introduced to all the *men much later.
Here is a (French, I hope you can read it, if not you'll have to scrounge for a translated version) sample:
It IS culture.
This seems like just the latest (and fairly mild) episode of this, but it's still a bit puzzling to me as a former (sort of) journalist to see so much editorialising, and in this case, an utter lack of facts and context.
There's not much on the goals behind that pass, the impact of covid on many of the other options, or any background on the local "bd" culture that would explain the difference to the US comics culture to the reader. The title certainly doesn't help.
At that point I don't know if I'm just getting more picky with time, but the fact to editorialising ratio in the NYT seem to have shifted to, at least to me, a fairly uncomfortable level pretty much every time I stumble onto one of their articles.
https://londonist.com/london/food-and-drink/until-recently-l...
https://unherd.com/2020/01/what-has-the-new-york-times-got-a...
This weird inability to reflect reality I see day-to-day coupled with the insistence on anti-patterns of behaviour for those cancelling their subscriptions has prevented me from taking out a sub to the NYT. That's a shame, as some of the articles are great.
That one news article was a subject of intense discussion at the time which quickly became politicized. A decent overview of the discussion can be found at
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/business/prescot-makes-...
For what it's worth, I wholly subscribe to the OP's viewpoint that the NY times' reports from France have been subpar in recent months - in my view they have been too Americo-Centric and do not sufficiently recognize the different value system in France. But I have often been positively surprised by the paper's reporting on UK issues (and on Brexit in particular).
https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-nyc-restaurant-scene-apri...
Absolutely brilliant article IMO
Not the NYT, but I still remember the "No go zones" CNN boasted about. [0] [1]
I still remember French co-workers having a good laugh at it. It's tough to fact-check anything when you don't speak the language.
[0] https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/01/cnn-apologizes-...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/01/21/natpkg-look-at-pari...
It’s not just you. You are waking up from the gell-mann amnesia.
Manga is explicitly mentioned in the introduction. If the government didn't want teens to buy comics, they would have excluded it, and most importantly, not mention manga on the front page!
If by that initiative, they get teens to go to their local bookstore instead of ordering their comics on Amazon, it is a huge win, and one of the big reasons this pass exists.
Good on them to use it for something they LIKE instead of something someome else deems better for them.
> They can purchase tickets to movie showings, plays, concerts or museum exhibits. And they can sign up for dance, painting or drawing classes.
Oh you mean they didn’t rush to the theaters, that also were only reopened a few weeks ago, with many closing again ?
And the pass has limitation on what can be bought, only part of it can be spent online, and content or production has to be french and approved by the gov., which really reduces the options.
All in all this is to me a weird take on the situation.
Sure, broadening their culture horizons would be good, if it was easy to enforce spending it on something you don't currently embrace.
I wished, and still wish, I had money that I could justify spending to buy comic books and getting into that.
I'm really not a fan of that sensationalist headline, trying to drive up outrage on both sides, ven though it doesn't say whether buying comic books is good or bad in the headline. The article even gives examples of how it can be beneficial, like teenagers buying from comics local shops instead of going online, or buying records locally, but ignores the fact that there's a pandemic that makes it hard to enjoy certain forms of entertainment that are pushed by this program. Overall, I don't think this is great and honest journalism, even if the content itself is interesting.
In the US, comics are considered by the masses to be the bane of pubescent boys or puerile adults obsessed with superheros and cosplay.
In France, graphic books (they're not all novels) are an elevated and widely-used cultural resource. They're found in educated bookstores, museum shops, libraries, and basically everywhere. And you know what? They're terrific!
France (and Belgium) have access to wonderful historical series on every period you can name. Tons of biographies of famous, real people. And beautiful, illustrated tomes which they can use to spark their imagination and learning.
It would be more accurate to say that Americans aren't spending money on graphically illustrated books because that's not an accepted part of our culture here, rather than to try to slam the French for something cool that works well for them.
See also: Scott's McCloud's Reinventing Comics [0] and BDfugue [1], a terrific online store for bandes dessinées.
(Though, also, it's clickbait. They want to shock people into reading the article by asking an implicit question with an evocative contrast: highlighting the discrepancy of mood between a term usually used to refer to high-brow concepts — "Culture" — and a term usually applied to low-brow media — "Comic Books". The body of the article, though investigating a similar tension, doesn't carry that same derogatory editorial thrust.)
It's also notable that the NYT did not mention any of the differences between US and French or Belgian "comics."
Whatever cultural products people enjoy, it seems reasonable to expect that they would simply consume more of them if they had more money... Especially considering that the vast majority already has the purchasing power to consume whatever they want.
Can we start to use the vast number of cultural experiments we've conducted to infer which will succeed in producing the desired outcomes? Can we start trying new experiments?
I'd like to see us give cash to students that do well in school or participate in sports, clubs, music, etc. (If the worry is that this primarily rewards students whose parents are wealthy, I'm not so sure. Wealthy kids might not be satisfied by the rewards.)
France has been consuming manga for decades. It's the market with the most translations (more than in the US) and is by itself 40% of the European market. There were already some notable anime coproductions between France and Japan in the 80s.
Amusingly, like with comic books, the culture surrounding mangas in France is actually very different than in the US. As pretty much everyone has been exposed to anime as a child, there is far less of a stigma surrounding it and you can consume some without being seen as a weirdo.
If it hasn't killed BD yet, it probably never will. I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually growing the market.
Edit to answer your question: the framing of the question was 'we gave them money for 'culture', they bought comic books'. Expecting any other outcome would be counterintuitive if you've ever met teenagers. Cinemas, concerts, librairies, indoors activities are all closed. They're supposed to stay home and telecommute to high school (WTF?). General reaction was 'good', 'manga are culture too', 'who could have seen that coming'.
> (Sir Humphrey to Bernard)..subsidy..Is for art, for culture. It is not to be given to what the people want. It is for what the people don't want but ought to have! If they want something they'll pay for it themselves! No, we subsidies education, enlightenment, spiritual uplift. Not the vulgar pastimes of ordinary people.
Getting more kids into physical book and record stores seems like a nice effect as well. Not everything needs to be purchased from Amazon or streamed on Spotify.
I'd also expect to see more live events as the pandemic (hopefully) wanes.
> And while the Culture Pass can be spent on video games, the game’s publisher must be French, and the game must not feature violence — conditions so restrictive that most popular titles are unavailable.
Ah, I was wondering why games weren't higher on the list.
Some good old elitism from NYT. Worth mentioning that France has reduced prices to cultural expos for students, and there are plenty that are free! They can enjoy comic books AND art expos.
Cui bono?
Governments also have far more effective, simpler-to-implement instruments for stopping the operation of undesirable businesses. Tariffs, taxes, and bans.
Previously discussed, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27805709
In theory, democratic capitalist society offers non-zero paths to upward mobility, for welfare recipients to re-enter normal society and earn national currency for market use.
As WeChat and social credit systems have shown in China, widespread adoption of digital payments tends to reduce acceptance of less-restrictive payment alternatives.
Time will tell if CBDC aspirants can displace incumbent currencies, or if CBDC users can have the same upward mobility hope as EBT voucher users.
Let the kids read what they want. If they are reading, it's a win!
Is France's teenage population around 4-5 million?
