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

nytimes.com

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

#51

Post by mcguire »

nagrom wrote: post #42
cwizou wrote: post #25

As an aside, it's been a bit surprising to see the disconnect on so many topics regarding France in the NYT in the last few months. This seems like just the latest (and fairly mild) episode of this, but it's still a bit puzzling to me as a former (sort of) journalist to see so much editorialising, and in this case, an utter lack of facts and context. There's not much on the goals behind that pass, the impact of covid…

It's not just France - the way that the NYT treats the UK has become a running joke e.g: https://londonist.com/london/food-and-drink/until-recently-l... https://unherd.com/2020/01/what-has-the-new-york-times-got-a... This weird inability to reflect reality I see day-to-day coupled with the insistence on anti-patterns of behaviour for those cancelling their subscriptions has prevented me from taking out a sub to the N…

You have to admit that Great Britain has a long-term reputation for boiling food to death. And their sporting culture seems even more Leroy Jenkins than that in the US.

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

#52

Post by tsimionescu »

SilasX wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Comic books are culture. Whether you like that or not is a matter of taste. Personally I absolutely love 'Gaston' and 'Asterix', but also like some other old school ones. The newer stuff I don't feel much connection with.

Regardless of what you consider "culture", the French government had some conception of what kinds of things they wanted the teens to engage in, and this isn't it (even if it's worthwhile in its own right). I think that's the article's point, and the program may respond by restricting the funds' usage in the future.

Here is a quote from the French governement site presenting the program [0]:

> Envie d’aller au théâtre, voir un film ou un spectacle ? De prendre des cours de photo ? D’un roman ou d’un manga ? [emphasis mine]

Which roughly means

Would you like to go to the theatre, see a film or a show? Take some photography courses? Read a novel or manga?

If the French government didn't intend for the money to be used this way, they certainly haven't told the people designing the site that promotes it.

[0] https://pass.culture.fr/

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

#53

Post by yumraj »

jacquesm wrote: post #38
yumraj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never read Gaston, might have to look it up. But I love Asterix and Tintin, which I read while growing up in India. Interestingly the other comics I read were Phantom, Mandrake, Rip Kirby, Flash Gordon - available via a local publisher, Indrajal Comics [0], that were sent to us monthly (or was it weekly) via a subscription. Got introduced to all the *men much later. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indrajal_Comics

Gaston is very funny, don't miss the signatures, which are always a little gag by themselves. Here is a (French, I hope you can read it, if not you'll have to scrounge for a translated version) sample: https://imgur.com/gallery/oTnED

Thanks. I don't speak French, will look for English version..

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

#54

Post by markus_zhang »

This reminds me of a scene from "Yes Minister":

> (Sir Humphrey to Bernard)..subsidy..Is for art, for culture. It is not to be given to what the people want. It is for what the people don't want but ought to have! If they want something they'll pay for it themselves! No, we subsidies education, enlightenment, spiritual uplift. Not the vulgar pastimes of ordinary people.

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

#55

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

swalls wrote: post #28
echelon wrote: post #7

I feel like this behavior could have been predicted. I'm not going to say whether or not purchases of manga are bad, but to think students would consume high brow art and then to be disappointed is after the fact is pretty poor foresight. Can we start to use the vast number of cultural experiments we've conducted to infer which will succeed in producing the desired outcomes? Can we start trying new experiments? I'd l…

Are you implying this wasn't intentional? France (alongside Belgium) practically invented the comic industry, but in recent years I'd imagine that's been getting decimated by east Asian manga. If you want to inspire a generation to revitalise your comic industry, this doesn't seem like a bad way.

> but in recent years I'd imagine that's been getting decimated by east Asian manga

France has been consuming manga for decades. It's the market with the most translations (more than in the US) and is by itself 40% of the European market. There were already some notable anime coproductions between France and Japan in the 80s.

Amusingly, like with comic books, the culture surrounding mangas in France is actually very different than in the US. As pretty much everyone has been exposed to anime as a child, there is far less of a stigma surrounding it and you can consume some without being seen as a weirdo.

If it hasn't killed BD yet, it probably never will. I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually growing the market.

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

#56

Post by asdff »

cwizou wrote: post #25

As an aside, it's been a bit surprising to see the disconnect on so many topics regarding France in the NYT in the last few months. This seems like just the latest (and fairly mild) episode of this, but it's still a bit puzzling to me as a former (sort of) journalist to see so much editorialising, and in this case, an utter lack of facts and context. There's not much on the goals behind that pass, the impact of covid…

LA Times has even parodied how NYT tends to cover Los Angeles.

https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-nyc-restaurant-scene-apri...

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

#57

Post by jacquesm »

yumraj wrote: post #53
jacquesm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaston is very funny, don't miss the signatures, which are always a little gag by themselves. Here is a (French, I hope you can read it, if not you'll have to scrounge for a translated version) sample: https://imgur.com/gallery/oTnED

Thanks. I don't speak French, will look for English version..

Quick and dirty translation, apologies for errors but this should get you the gist:

"Gaston, bring me the last letter of insults from de Mesmaeker"

"I'm curious how long it will take him to retrieve that from his"

"mess...."

"err, thanks"

"Strange, he must have had it in hand by chance".

"Let's do a second test"

"Please fetch me the 4603rd response to the latest contest, it is ur"

"gent"

"Urr... thanks"

"That's not possible, I know the mess in his place"

"And the letter signed 'a new reader of 78'"

"It upsets me, it upsets me"

"And the message sent by that group of hippies"

"He's invented a new system for classification of documents"

"And look, in every piece there are tiny holes, it is a system based on micro-perforations"

"I love my cactus, all of the correspondence organized and visible"

Enjoy :)

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

#60

Post by Agingcoder »

jacquesm wrote: post #44
arcturus17 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaston is possibly some of the best humor I've ever seen in any cultural medium. Tintin was gripping too, and arguably the greatest cultural icon to come from European comics. In Spain we had a good comic culture from the 50s onwards, with perhaps one of the greatest exponents being Mortadelo y Filemón which had was hilarious and had some international exposure (I've seen it in German flea markets as Clever & Smart)…

I have a story about Gaston, and how funny it is. When I was a kid I would read with a flashlight under the covers after the time that I was supposed to be in bed and sleeping. This worked well for most books but with Gaston I couldn't help myself being in stitches from time to time which invariably attracted unwanted parental attention. There are a couple that immediately spring to mind, the one where he launches th…

And the morue aux fraises (cod with strawberries)
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