France Gave Teenagers $350 for Culture. They’re Buying Comic Books

The NYT clearly doesn't understand that comics are not necessarily considered low brow culture in France and Belgium. Comic books don't have the same reputation in France and Belgium as they do in the USA.

Secondary purpose: CBDC / digital euro training wheels for policy-gated currencies with No Buy lists.

Here is the website for the initiative https://pass.culture.fr/

Manga is explicitly mentioned in the introduction. If the government didn't want teens to buy comics, they would have excluded it, and most importantly, not mention manga on the front page!

If by that initiative, they get teens to go to their local bookstore instead of ordering their comics on Amazon, it is a huge win, and one of the big reasons this pass exists.

The NYT title is intentionally derisive and xenophobic. The words "comic books" and the French term bandes dessinées relate to two entirely different experiences.

In the US, comics are considered by the masses to be the bane of pubescent boys or puerile adults obsessed with superheros and cosplay.

In France, graphic books (they're not all novels) are an elevated and widely-used cultural resource. They're found in educated bookstores, museum shops, libraries, and basically everywhere. And you know what? They're terrific!

France (and Belgium) have access to wonderful historical series on every period you can name. Tons of biographies of famous, real people. And beautiful, illustrated tomes which they can use to spark their imagination and learning.

It would be more accurate to say that Americans aren't spending money on graphically illustrated books because that's not an accepted part of our culture here, rather than to try to slam the French for something cool that works well for them.

See also: Scott's McCloud's Reinventing Comics [0] and BDfugue [1], a terrific online store for bandes dessinées.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Comics

[1] https://www.bdfugue.com/

The NYT is using that term because most Americans have never even heard the more fitting English-language term "graphic novels", and wouldn't know what it meant if the NYT used it.

(Though, also, it's clickbait. They want to shock people into reading the article by asking an implicit question with an evocative contrast: highlighting the discrepancy of mood between a term usually used to refer to high-brow concepts — "Culture" — and a term usually applied to low-brow media — "Comic Books". The body of the article, though investigating a similar tension, doesn't carry that same derogatory editorial thrust.)