The great temporary exhibitions, Poisson Pilote — Comic Art Museum

News Flash

Sunday sketching sessions

Published on 10 September 2024

Join a sketching session led by a cartoonist every 3rd Sunday of the month.
Masterclasses

Discover the secrets of 9th art in the company of exceptional speakers

Published on 12 September 2024

Masterclasses

Throughout this year, the Comics Art Museum is hosting a series of masterclasses. Once a month, we will be welcoming a renowned author. The author will give a talk on the theme and/or angle of…

BSCS on Google Street View

The great temporary exhibitions

\"Your preliminary draft is great, but unfortunately it doesn’t fit into any of our collections\". How many innovative and original cartoon strips have been abandoned after such a terse response?

The situation was bleaker in the 1990’s when a generation of talented young authors had begun to approach the comic strip in a different way, proposing different graphic and narrative models, self-publishing in black and white through some quite remarkable cooperatives and independent bodies.

At Dargaud, Guy Vidal, ex-editor in chief of the monthly magazine Pilote which had brought so many essential authors to fame, had the simple but ingenious idea of publishing this seductive and unclassifiable new type of cartoon strip in a conventional format, at a fair price, by offering it the commercial structures of a major publisher.

Born on 1 April 2000, exactly ten years ago, the Poisson Pilote collection prides itself on having gathered together under one label, in bound, coloured albums, the authors who had come from this alternative cartoon form, from comic magazines, from l’Association (why not give it a mention?), and in turn discovering new authors who have become major ones.

This was certainly no April Fool hoax!

JC De la Royère, BCSC.

Back