September is approaching, bringing early alarms, timetables and notebooks that their owners will optimistically attempt to keep pristine for more than two weeks.
Charlemagne in Toulon has planned a rather different kind of return. On Saturday 5 September, from 2pm to 6pm, illustrators Amandine and Drac will be signing books from several popular children’s comic series at the bookshop at 50 boulevard de Strasbourg.
Amandine is closely associated with Mistinguette and stories involving Anissa, while Drac has worked on Les Filles au chocolat and La Brigade des cauchemars. Publisher Jungle regularly brings both artists to comic and children’s book events.
A children’s comic signing may appear modest beside the hundreds of novels, literary prizes and major author interviews that dominate the French September publishing season.
Yet there is a good reason to pay attention to it.
While adults debate the year’s major novels, children’s books are quietly producing the next generation of readers.
And that process often begins with a drawing.
Heroines who look like their readers
Mistinguette belongs to a kind of children’s comic that prefers everyday disasters to intergalactic warfare.
Its heroine Chloé deals with school, friendships, rivalries, holidays, embarrassment and all the events that seem enormous when you are young enough to be living through them for the first time.
Amandine illustrates the series, written by Greg Tessier. In its fifteenth volume, La course au trésor, Chloé goes away with her school to take part in a sporting competition at a large château. She must deal with her friend Fatoumata, Anissa’s teasing and a rather domineering group of boys.
Nobody has to save the planet.
That is part of the attraction.
Children’s comics often work because they take seriously situations adults may have forgotten were once important: being left out of a group, trying to keep a friendship intact, worrying about what others think or simply attempting to survive a birthday party that is going badly.
Mistinguette’s special birthday edition plays directly with that kind of drama. Fatoumata decides not to hold her birthday celebration because she fears competing with Anissa’s party, prompting Mistinguette to step in.
Sometimes the great adventure is simply making it through Saturday afternoon without a social catastrophe.
From chocolate to nightmares
With Drac, the atmosphere can change dramatically.
The artist and colourist is associated with two series that seem to have little in common at first sight: Les Filles au chocolat and La Brigade des cauchemars. Jungle regularly presents her work on both at public events.
Les Filles au chocolat, adapted from Cathy Cassidy’s novels, revolves around family, friendships, relationships and teenage life.
La Brigade des cauchemars, as its title suggests, prefers considerably less peaceful nights.
Created by thriller writer Franck Thilliez, the series follows Tristan and Esteban, two fourteen-year-olds who enter children’s nightmares in an attempt to discover their source. In the first volume, a girl named Sarah is admitted to a clinic and the boys must intervene inside her disturbing dream world.
As the series develops, the concept expands into memories, secrets surrounding the clinic and a larger continuing story. In volume nine, Elisa, the Brigade discovers that Mordicus has been secretly using Elisa to obtain information about the clinic.
It is a long way from Mistinguette’s school problems.
That contrast is precisely what makes the 5 September signing entertaining: one table can accommodate both the minor catastrophes of teenage life and machines designed to enter nightmares.
Children’s literature was never one genre
The phrase “children’s literature” can make it sound as though all these books belong to one genre.
In reality, it mainly describes their intended readership.
Within it, almost anything is possible: comedy, fantasy, school stories, mysteries, romance, adventure, gentle horror, adaptations and coming-of-age tales.
Comics widen that range further because images provide an immediate way into a story. A child intimidated by a dense novel may be caught by a cover, a character’s expression or a handful of panels glimpsed while browsing.
That does not make comics a simplified form of reading.
They simply require a different kind of attention.
Readers follow dialogue, interpret drawings, understand what happens between panels, notice expressions and mentally reconstruct movements that a printed page cannot physically show.
They are doing quite a lot of work without necessarily experiencing it as work.
For the beginning of a school year, that is not the worst trick imaginable.
A signing at a child’s eye level
Comic-book signings also have a quality that is particularly effective with younger readers.
A novelist generally signs a name and exchanges a few words. An illustrator can make a familiar character appear in a few pencil strokes — a character the child had previously only seen reproduced in thousands of identical copies.
The book changes slightly.
It is no longer simply something that was bought.
It becomes the copy in which somebody drew something specifically for its owner.
Meeting artists can also make the process of creating books more tangible. Behind every finished album is somebody who sketches, starts again, invents characters and spends months producing a relatively small number of pages.
Amandine and Drac are experienced at such meetings. Jungle regularly schedules them at major comic and children’s literature events, including Quai des Bulles and the Salon du livre et de la presse jeunesse.
On 5 September, that experience comes to Toulon.
Another way to begin the school year
A signing session is unlikely to transform every child who attends into a lifelong reader.
Reading rarely works on command.
But it has one substantial advantage when it begins with pleasure: nobody needs to tell a child that they are developing vocabulary or learning narrative structure when all they want to know is how the Brigade will escape from the next nightmare.
The Toulon event therefore arrives at an appropriate moment.
Only a few days into the school year, it offers a reminder that books do not have to be objects opened because a teacher has assigned them.
They can contain a girl capable of ruining somebody’s birthday.
A family obsessed with chocolate.
Or a machine that lets people walk into nightmares.
Amandine and Drac will sign books at Charlemagne Toulon, 50 boulevard de Strasbourg, on Saturday 5 September from 2pm to 6pm. The event will feature work connected with Anissa and Mistinguette, Les Filles au chocolat and La Brigade des cauchemars.
If everyone has to go back to school eventually, there is no reason not to keep a few comic-book bubbles for afterwards.
