Taking Parodies Seriously: A Review of Pierre Huard’s La parodie dans la bande dessinée franco-belge (“Parody in French and Belgian Comics”)

Abstract

This article presents and evaluates La parodie dans la bande dessinée franco-belge (Parody in French and Belgian Comics) by Pierre Huard. In this book, the author is interested in examining how parody works and how it evolved in French and Belgian comic books in the second half of the twentieth century. To accomplish this goal, Huard presents an in-depth semiotic analysis of excerpts from ten parodic comic books published in Belgium or France between 1952 and 1994. He shows precisely what the creators of the comic books amplify and modify relative to the genres that they are parodying. He also discusses a tendency in the late 1970s and 1980s towards parodying comic books themselves in addition to parodying novels, movies and TV series.