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Summary This article is discussing comics in the
Belgian newspapers during the years 1945-1950 from two different
perspectives. The first part deepens the policy of comicpublication of twenty
newspapers: which papers published what, how many comics were published, how did
the newspapers cope with the comics, what was their importance, what was the
origin of the comics, how was the interaction with the authors,…? It appears
that in the studied newspapers, comics were important till very important,
apart from a few exceptions. They were used as a salesargument, they were
given a lot of attention and were quite often published. What's also
remarkable is the big diversity of the published items, with regard to style,
genre and country of origine. The Belgian share is here certainly not to be
underestimated. In the second part there is examined if the
comics in the involved papers had an opinionfunction apart from a
relaxationfunction. The answer to this question is obviously yes, although
there are very big differences between the different papers and authors. It's
impossible to give comprehensive explanation, weather political contentions
are present in stories or not appears to be a combination of a whole serie of
factors (the author's point of view, the paper's expectations, the delivery
of stories by agencies etc.). Anyway, it's clear that the comics by the
existing press passed political contentions on to the readers, contentions
going from serious items (the royal question, the cold war, the repression,
the elections, the Second World War, the importance of the democracy, the
danger of the A-bomb and other inventions, communism and anticommunism) till
bland daily trivialities such as punctuality and prices of the trams. Translation by Noortje
Thermote. |