La fin de l’histoire, ou l’imaginaire de la mort en BD

• Main Author: René Nouailhat
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Éditions de la Sorbonne 2015-09-01
• Series: Socio-anthropologie
• Subjects: Comics; Imaginary; Fantasies; Death; Living Dead; Die with Laughter
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/socio-anthropologie/2096

The comic strip is an art of graphic representation that vividly expresses human fantasies, in particular those involved in representations of what lies beyond the grave. This article concentrates on how death is treated by Hergé and Jacobs, two classic twentieth-century authors of printed comics in the Franco-Belgian context where comic books developed. In a world in which secularization has gradually effaced explicit religious references, it appears that representations of death remain strongly structured by mythological schemas inherited from the Bible and a Christian referent. More recent comics develop the theme of death in several ways and multiply representations of the afterlife in the realms of the marvellous, the fantastic and the supernatural, thereby stimulating graphic invention. This theme is particularly revealing about the anxieties that preoccupy our contemporary imaginary.