For ten years now, several publishers and professionals have made the same errors in Japan with French BD that their Western counterparts have always made in France and Europe : to promote and put emphasis on a primarily graphic BD.

This attitude is all the more regrettable as, among the amateurs of daily-life manga on one hand and those of French cinema of the other, the number of Japanese readers who could be touched by something other than the simply « illustrative » or « teenage » BD is undoubtedly significant. The reception accorded my own work by these readers is certainly an indication of this, if not an unshakable proof.

Thanks to publishers like l'Association or Ego comme X, a daily-life BD was born in the '90s as a direction reaction to the illustrative and commercial BDs that paralysed the '80s : this « Nouvelle BD », with a sensibility often very close to that of French cinema and literature, has many albums which should, I think, reach a readership in Japan larger than the usual 5,000 or 6,000 illustration aficionados and professionals.

A consequence of the preponderance of graphic BDs in translation is that the Japanese public has strong prejudices against them today : « A BD is well-drawn Sci-Fi or adventure, but it's very complicated to read or very boring ».
It is to oppose these prejudices - or rather, once again, to circumvent them - that the term « Nouvelle Manga » was coined. With the translations of Tôkyô est mon jardin (Tôkyô wa boku no niwa / Tôkyô Is My Garden), Demi-tour (Hambun Ryokô / U Turn), and with my regular publications in the Japanese press, Japanese readers have discovered a BD that might be « well-drawn » but is also in their eyes « not so badly told » : a BD that is not inevitably complicated to read nor inevitably tedious and that reminds them of the tone and spirit of French cinema... A BD that does not correspond to the image they had of the medium, drawn like a BD but which can be read almost like a manga : a Nouvelle Manga.

The publication in Japan under the label « Nouvelle Manga » of l'Épinard de Yukiko (Yukiko no Hôrensô / Yukiko's Spinach) in August 2001 (Ohta Editions, simultaneously released by the French publisher Ego comme X) and the Nouvelle Manga Event in Tôkyô (10) have been for me occasions to explain to both to the Japanese public and to professional colleagues that BD isn't limited to Bilal and Mœbius and that many authors I consider fantastic and, more importantly, accessible to the Japanese public were born in the '90s. These BDs were written by Fabrice Neaud, David B., Emmanuel Guibert, Matthieu Blanchin, Blutch, Dupuy and Berberian, Frédéric Poincelet and many others. If my BDs are close to the spirit of French cinema or literature, theirs are too : we can therefore also call their work Nouvelle Manga.

I mentioned at the beginning of this text to some of the commonly mentioned differences between BD and manga, and I now declare that these differences are all the more pronounced when one compares commercial BDs with manga.
When aimed at a general or otaku public, BDs and manga tend to build up, on the level of both scenario and of drawings, formulae, stereotypes and nostalgic references to the point that they divide their readership. In France, manga otaku and fans of BD are quick to pit the two styles against each other... But when one looks at « la » manga and BD d'auteur, that is to say more adult manga and BDs, the differences almost completely disappear. While many series targeted at specific audiences can only attract their respective fans (either of BD or manga), who are already familiar with, or nostalgic for, the codes and mannerisms of the genre, smooth and innovative albums by Fabrice Neaud or Kiriko Nananan seem to me perfect for readers of BD and manga, specialists and neophytes, French and Japanese people alike.

The border between commercial BD and manga and auteur BD and manga seems to me to be more obvious and harder to cross than the one that divides the two genres overall...

The Nouvelle Manga aims to be an expression of this complicity, the Franco-Japanese prolongation of French BD d'auteur and « la » manga (the Japanese BD d'auteur) : an author's initiative (as opposed to a publisher's or import library's initiative that would inevitably lead to translations - or imports - of best-sellers) whose goal would be, by creating a bridge between the two genres, to present the readers with the best of the two countries' BDs and manga, and not just what sells most. This in the universal realm of daily life : be it autobiographical, documentary or fictional.

 
Frédéric Boilet
Tôkyô, August 12, 2001

English translation by Olivier Petitpas (Hong Kong, June 20, 2002)
& Ken Hollings (London, July 12, 2003)