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Frederic Boilet and the Nouvelle Manga revolution.

Article Excerpt
WHEREAS NEARLY EVERY REGION around the world enjoys its own domestic brand of visual storytelling, there are three contemporary traditions that can be set apart as either the source of or secondary influence on all the others--namely, bande dessinee (Franco-Belgian), comics (English), and manga (Japanese). Despite the geographic and cultural isolation that allowed each to develop essentially uninfluenced if not completely unaware of the others, all three traditions followed a parallel contour of development from being a medium associated with disposable novelty at the dawn of the twentieth century to one already commanding the stage as a vibrant and literary form in the emergent twenty-first.

In the past two decades, however, the ethno-centripetal forces that kept each particular tradition isolated to its zone of influence have been eroded by the social and economic trends commonly thought of as globalization. The recent explosion of awareness about graphic novels in the United States, in particular, can be attributed to heavy lifting by all three traditions in tandem as evidenced by the critical and commercial success enjoyed by such disparate works as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Craig Thompson's Blankets, and Rumiko Takahashi's Inu Yasha, among many, many others. As these respective markets have drifted unmistakably closer over the past twenty years, the impulse to cross-pollinate both creatively and economically between them has proven equally irresistible. One such effort, Nouvelle Manga, aligns like-minded creators of bande dessinee (BD) and manga under one conceptual banner. Its architect, creator, and critic, Frederic Boilet, founded the movement in 2001 and has since orchestrated the publication of an impressive array of work originating primarily from France and Japan in over nine different languages.

Boilet made his debut as a dessinateur de BD during the early 1980s. While the French market at the time was dominated by meticulously illustrated science-fiction and fantasy stories, Boilet found himself more at home during the 1990s when a confederation of smaller album publishers, most specializing in autobiographical material, re-ignited the general public interest in bandes dessinees. As early as 1990, he traveled to Japan to research Love Hotel, a collaborative graphic album with writer Benoit Peeters. Three years later, Boilet received the Morning Manga fellowship from Japanese publisher Kodansha and spent a year in Tokyo as one of the first Westerners invited to learn the craft of making manga directly from the Japanese. Though Boilet would...