A Boom in Comics Drawn From Fact

Soon after the journalist and historian Valérie Igounet heard about the killing of Samuel Paty, the schoolteacher whose 2020 murder by an Islamist extremist shocked France, she knew she wanted to write a book about him.

Paty, who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to students during a class on freedom of expression, was murdered near the middle school where he taught in a Paris suburb. “I absolutely wanted Samuel Paty’s students to be able to read this book,” Igounet said, “and it was obvious that a 300-page book with footnotes would be reserved for a different kind of readership.”

Instead, Igounet decided to produce a comic book: “Black Pencil: Samuel Paty, the Story of a Teacher,” based on two years of reporting and made with the illustrator Guy Le Besnerais, was published in October. It meticulously reconstructs the events leading up to the murder while also showing Paty’s daily life in the classroom. Le Besnerais’s illustrations are accompanied by Paty’s handwritten notes, newspaper clippings and messages exchanged by his students in the weeks before he was killed.

One in four books sold in France is a comic book, according to the market research company GfK, and a growing number of those are nonfiction works by journalists and historians. In the past year, they have included titles such as “M.B.S.: Saudi Arabia’s Enfant Terrible,” a biography of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by Antoine Vitkine and Christophe Girard; “What Are the Russians Thinking?” based on the cartoonist Nicolas Wild’s conversations about the war in Ukraine during a 2022 trip to Russia; and “Who Profits From Exile?,” by Taina Tervonen and Jeff Pourquié, which looks at the economics of European immigration.

This growing trend will be on show at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, one of the world’s leading comic book gatherings, which starts Thursday in southwestern France and runs through Jan. 28.

Matthieu Vincenot, the manager of Bulles en Tête, a Paris comic book store, has watched its nonfiction section grow since the shop opened two years ago. “We decided to dedicate this section to nonfiction comic books because they’re very popular,” he said recently, pointing to three packed shelves at the store’s entrance. “The readership is very varied. We get people who are big readers of the news, and others who aren’t so much, and therefore learn about current affairs through comic books because they’re easier to read.”

Though they are booming in France right now, Vincenot pointed out that nonfiction comics are not new and, in fact, originated in the United States. Also known as “comics journalism,” the genre was pioneered by Joe Sacco, a Maltese-American journalist and cartoonist whose book “Palestine” was first published by Fantagraphics in 1993. Based on a 1991 visit by Sacco to Gaza, the book was recently rushed back into print when demand surged after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s ongoing retaliation.

In France, renewed interest about the Middle East also helped propel “The History of Jerusalem,” a comic book by the historian Vincent Lemaire and the cartoonist Christophe Gaultier, up the best seller charts in January.

Vincenot said he thought the genre took off in France around 2015 with the publication of titles like “L’affaire des affaires” (which means something like “The Biggest Heist”), a 700-page tome based on an investigation into the 2006 Clearstream affair that embroiled France’s prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. That book was followed by other successful journalistic comics, including “Green Tide: The Forbidden Story,” an investigation into algae pollution on the coast of Brittany, in northern France, which was recently adapted into a movie.

A section of “Green tide” first appeared in La Revue Dessinée (“The Cartoon Review”) a monthly magazine that has been publishing investigations in comic strip form since 2013. Aimed at an adult audience, it presents the work of journalists in a more digestible, and often more entertaining, way.

“It’s less intimidating,” said Isabelle Saporta, the head of the publishing house Fayard, which was established in 1857 and focuses on essays, but recently launched a comic book imprint called Fayard Graffik. “If we want to continue to be an innovative publisher of thinking and new ideas we need to reach out to younger generations.”

She added that while comic books were more expensive to produce than essays, they also had financial advantages for publishers: They’re shorter and therefore cheaper to translate, and lend themselves easily to film adaptations.

The first comic book published under Fayard Graffik, “The Vaquita Theorem,” is based on years of reporting about animal rights and biodiversity by the journalist Hugo Clément for the French television program “Sur le front” (“On the Frontline”). Co-written with Vincent Ravalec and illustrated by Dominique Mermoux, the book follows Clément from Uganda’s gorilla sanctuaries to the upper Gulf of California, where only around 10 vaquitas, the whale species in the book’s title, still exist.

“I have a very visual memory,” Clément said in an interview. “I remember things more easily when they are presented in a graph or a diagram, and that is also the strength of comic books: complicated things can be explained simply, with key facts.”

Illustration also allowed him to depict images that couldn’t be shown on television. One spread in “The Vaquita Theorem” shows a tradition from the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean known as “grindadráp,” in which hunters drive hundreds of whales into a shallow bay and slaughter them. In this scene, Mermoux’s drawings spare no detail of the horror: The only color on the page is bright red from the animals’ blood filling the sea.

“With illustration, you can convey what happened while applying a filter to these horrific images,” Clément said. “The power of comics is they transmit a lot of emotion, and that also makes them a very effective tool for reaching a broad range of people.”