For a long time, it was said that men drew and women were drawn. Between 1974 and 2000, the Angoulême Festival awarded its Grand Prix to only one woman, Claire Brétecher... In the end, over nearly 50 years of existence, this international distinction has only rewarded 7% of female cartoonists. But the festival is concerned about it, as evidenced by initiatives such as the round table held in 2021 on the invisibilization of women in the history of comics.

Regardless of this focus on Angoulême, it seems that the tide has turned in the comic book world, with a much increased visibility of female creators and concomitantly of feminism. Optical illusion or real change in this sector in strong economic growth at the same time as it remains a high vector of pop culture ?

What proportion of female comic book creators?

Female illustrators now represent 12% of published illustrators. This is better than 10 years ago, at the time when booksellers separated the rare " women's " albums from the rest of the comic book library on their shelves. Putting an end to this practice was one of the first demands of the Collective of Comic Book Creators Against Sexism, when it was created in 2013. The first article of its charter presents as " belittling for women authors to be particularized as creating a female comic book".

And to denounce the qualification of " girly " that stuck to the pen of the new figures of the 9th art that were then the future stars Pénélope Bagieu, Marion Montaigne, Emma, Diglee or Margaux Motin.

The equal representation of creators in the comic book shelves is not yet a reality, but certainly we have progressed by leaps and bounds between the end of the twentieth century, which saw Claire Brétecher imprisoned by the Smurfette Syndrome and the Madame Curie Complex, and our time, which no longer even knows how the world of comics has been able to do without the talent of all these artists. Creative.

What vision of femininity conveyed by comics ?

Let us now take a look at the way comics look at women and femininity. Well, the caricature is the ancestral Bécassine, stupid but kind. There is the Smurfette, nice but destined for insipidity simply because she has no other character or personality trait than to represent femininity. In the variations of the feminine, we still find Bonemine, the incarnation of the shrew armed with a rolling pin;  Mademoiselle Jeanne, the naïve lover;  Natasha, the more than perfect flight attendant;  Falbala, the creature straight out of the fantasy of the femme fatale and a whole areopagus of pin-ups with exacerbated sensuality and curves defying the principles of gravity.

In this inventory, we should not forget the superheroines : the first of them, Wonder woman, her sister Superwoman and her cousin Supergirl. Yes, but here's the thing, the sharp eyes have noticed that these superchicks have tended more towards hypersexualization than they have acquired superpowers. Others have pointed out that, strangely, in the comic book, women don't have noses : a barely pronounced shadow in the middle of Natacha's face and two micro-nostrils for Laureline and no more to breathe in Valentina or Gwen Stacy... Even though many male characters have quite a lot of siskins !

Beyond this single matter of pif, it is the whole representation of female beauty that is pointed out: when they are beautiful, they are hotties and the hottie is expressed by the slim waist, the shapely chest, the huge look (by the way, a whole literature on the eyes in manga explores the weight of soft power in the representations of beauty at the heart of a culture from Asia), sensual lips, graceful postures (even in the most acrobatic movements). Does traditional comics have a particularly stereotypical (and rather narrow) vision of femininity ?

Not as sexist as they say, the " classic " comic book ?

A first answer to this question of the weight of gender stereotypes in comics is the necessary distinction to be made between " type " and " stereotype ", explains researcher Pascal Robert. By " type ", we mean all the signals that characterize a character at first glance. The comic book artist does not have the same possibility as a novelist to describe a character in breadth, by expanding on his or her physical and personality traits, on his or her biography, on his or her ambiguities. From the first panel, we have to know who we are dealing with.

Everything in Gaston, from the posture to the hairstyle and the clothing, must exude nonchalance. Everything about Bonemine must evoke the shrew, from the pout to the rolling pin to the fists on the hips. So, yes, the " type " appeals to stereotypes. Thus, comics cling to the reliefs of the collective imagination: when it reduces the color chart of femininity to the housewife and the femme fatale, it is difficult to sketch female characters who go beyond these archetypes.

But that's debatable, says sociologist Marie-Christine Lipani-Vaissade, who looks at the heroines of traditional French-language comics beyond the temptations of caricature : if you read it carefully, Bécassine is not so bad, she even has a hell of a temperament and takes up all the challenges of her time ;  Barbarella shares with Brigitte Bardot a plasticity offered to the " male gaze " as much as a spirit of fierce freedom, irreducible to clichés. And then, from the 1970s onwards, the researcher tells us, comics accompanied the changes in society : the female characters of cult comics gained in thickness, new " types " of women entered the albums and they had more to say in speech bubbles. Moreover, since the feminist revolution is underway, it is also infusing the world of the 9th art.

The boom of " feminist comics"

However, the real boom of " feminist comics" did not take place in the seventies but waited until the 2000s for a whole generation of spiritual girls from Brétecher, with sharp pencil strokes and well-turned minds, to emerge in the sight of the general public.

First on the web and quite quickly in the presses of publishers who sniffed out the underlying trend, the social chronicle comic strip took up all the themes of gender equality: the Matilda effect and the invisibilization of women in the telling of history with Les culottées by Pénélope Bagieu, the albums of  Catel or Séverine Vidal, the fight for women's rights with Chloé Wary or Marta Breen, motherhood and parenthood with Nathalie Jomard, Marie Dubois, Aurélie William Leveau or Lucile Gomez, the couple and the mental load with Margaux Motin or Emma, toxic  masculinity with Liv Strömquist or Juliette Boutant and her project Crocodiles, sexual harassment with Mirion Malle, the reappropriation of the body and sexuality with Tess Kinski, Léa Bordier,  Lili Sohn, Diglee or Laetitia Coryn, the queer question with Carole Maurel or Aude Mermillod when she adapts the Women's Choir by Martin Winckler...

This comic book, which embraces the encounter between the artistic, the political and the educational, contributes greatly to popularizing key notions of the conversation on equality. Never has pop culture been so much at the service of such a sensitive issue in the public debate.

An environment in search of a new balance

Without a doubt, the women of comics and their allies are blowing a new wind on the scene.

It was not without noise in the Landerneau : in 2016, Riad Sattouf refused to be nominated for the Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival (he was finally the winner in 2023) to protest against the invisibilization of his fellow illustrators in the selection ; the same year, a controversy erupted around an album in the Leonard series, accused of conveying a misogyny from another age ; from 2017, a page " Paye ta bulle " lists the testimonies of actresses in the world of comics confronted with the sometimes very uninhibited sexism of publishers, Salon organizers and other cartoonists ; In 2020, several American screenwriters and illustrators were targeted by campaigns to denounce inappropriate actions on social networks; and we can obviously mention the recent " Vivès affair" named after the author accused of disseminating child pornography images through his drawings and of having shown hostile sexism towards some of his colleagues who criticized his work...

Like all artistic circles, the ninth art is grappling with the limit of the antiphons " separating man from the artist " and " distinguishing work from thought " or even " distinguishing between fantasy and reality ". These rhetorical schemes, widely used to discredit any questioning of a creator on issues of sexism or in cases of violence, are obviously no longer enough to close the ban.

The questions of the place of female creators, representations of femininity, and the influence of comics on mentalities are on the table. To provide new answers, the actors and actresses of this complex art must find a new balance so that humor, aesthetics, subversive spirit and narrative remarry harmoniously, on an altar other than that of genre caricature.