Engines at top speed! Using the adventures of a comic book motorsports hero as an approach to understanding recent French history

Abstract

Jean Graton created a series of comic books called Michel Vaillant, and its motorsports hero bore the same name. Michel Vaillant made his first appearance in 1957 in the weekly Tintin. Young French boys who loved adventure, sports and car racing greeted this publication with great enthusiasm. We studied the first series of Michel Vaillant, composed of 16 comic books produced in the 1960s. We have departed from traditional approaches and have based our method on the analysis of the sources of Graton's inspiration. We link these sources to the comics' text bubbles, visual signs and iconic meanings of the drawings. Our analysis of the comics' iconography based on the establishment of a mass culture dedicated to the automobile brings to light the existence of an urge to go beyond the limits of tradition. Our research highlights that the success of Michel Vaillant is due, in the main, to the series' detailed knowledge of the automobile sports industry, and to the myths of speed, youth and progress that it promulgatesmyths in which its young male readers could see themselves reflected and which would also prepare them for the future.

Sports heroes in graphic narratives

“…They point to the importance of Zatopek as a real-life sports hero of the 1950s whose image deeply influenced the collective imaginationparticularly that of children who, like the readers of Couchaux's comics, were encouraged to become 'little Zatopeks.' Undeniably, the 'Czech locomotive' (Zatopek's famous nickname) testifies to the human fascination for speed, both in sports (Studeny, 1995) and in comics (Laffage-Cosnier, García-Arjona, & Vivier, 2018).…”

“…Ils soulèvent l'importance du rayonnement de ce véritable héros sportif des années 1950 dans l'imaginaire enfantin et collectif, montrant que la bande dessinée tente d'inciter le lecteur, comme autrefois l'admirateur de l'athlète, à vouloir rester un « petit Zatopek ». Indéniablement, la « Locomotive tchèque » témoigne de l'imaginaire de la vitesse à l'oeuvre à la fois dans les domaines du sport (Studeny, 1995) et de la bande dessinée (Laffage-Cosnier, García-Arjona, et Vivier, 2018). Dans l'univers pugiliste, la bande dessinée Yékini, le roi des arènes de Lugrin et Xavier, qui expose les exploits des plus fameuses idoles dakaroises de la lutte sénégalaise, s'inscrit aussi dans cette dynamique.…”

Forever Young! Tintin’s Adventures as an Example of Physical Activity and Sport

“…Other articles have studied political mythologies in Pellos's comics, analyzing an athlete's fate when he goes off to war [8]. Another study of the albums of the comics series Michel Vaillant published in the 1960s uses different tools, drawn from fields such as historical study, management and philosophy, to highlight the myth of the progress of man [9]. This type of scientific approach has been extended also to films and television series, with studies such as, for example, one on the dermatological features of the "villains" of classical cinematography [10], or on the rates, types and frequencies of mortality and survival in the series "Game of Thrones" [11].…”