Five Years of Editing Les Cahiers de la Bande Dessinée

Thierry Groensteen looks back over the years during which he edited Les Cahiers de la Bande Dessinée, transformed from the earlier Schtroumpf into a publication that promoted analysis and brought challenging and ambitious comics to the attention of readers, in a context where an earlier generation of comics studies pioneers had deserted the medium, and the experimentation of 1970s comics had given way to the dominance of more commercially viable series. Groensteen details the complex labour of putting a journal together, the recruiting of contributors, the coexistence of disparate theoretical approaches, and the hostility from certain quarters of the comics milieu that considered the journal pretentiously intellectual. The legacy of Les Cahiers endures in the form of major works for which it laid the foundations.