Missed It: Ratier Report 2010 Indicates French-Language Market Still Publishing BD Albums Like Mad

Mon Francais aspire testicules, so there's a good chance I get some of my off-the-cuff commentary wrong, but the publication of the "Ratier Report" -- a concise sales analysis with tons of bonuses assembled by the Association des Critiques et Journalistes de Bande Dessinee and its Secretary-General Gilles Ratier -- has come and gone, and it looks like that more albums than ever were published in the French-language market in 2010. The report notes a five and a half percent gain to just over 5100 titles overall in the graphic novel category (which I believe includes art books featuring comics makers) in 2010 with a nearly six percent gain in new titles overall. Books brought in from other countries and translated placed ahead of those gains, percentage-wise; the number of new, original works showed only an incremental increase from 2009. In terms of category, humor saw the biggest gain. In terms of individual best-sellers, the over 200,000 sales club was dominated by familiar names as has been the tradition in recent years: your Thorgal, your Largo Winch, your Lucky Luke, your Blake et Mortimer. The report seems to consider those books' showing a salutary thing without an Asterix-sized property hitting the market this year. They cite the Twilight adaptation and the Naruto series among their translated books of sales import.

You can download the whole thing here. It's a blast through which to pick one's way. The French-language market does bear some similarity to our own, in terms of the concentration of production with a few big companies and the growing importance to some publishers of a swelling network of comics shows for direct sales. There are severe limits to those comparisons, though, and the mere existence of such up-front information should be one indicator that the French-language market functions differently. There is a dark side to their mostly good news. While their numbers might indicate continued success when looking at comics as a bottom-line business, and it's worth noting that comics' place in the overall French-language, book-buying landscape is a huge difference between that market and the U.S. market, the trend towards more and more comics in the marketplace may exacerbate what many feel is an increasingly hostile atmosphere for work even a little bit outside of the mainstream to find any purchase at all on shelves before the next group of titles slams into the existing ones and makes yesterday's books yesterday's news. It should make one wonder about the continued viability of smaller publishers over there, vital contributors to comics as an art form worldwide, It may also call into question the nature of those books' readership, whether or not there's a significant generational component regarding the sales leaders, an audience that may or may not stick around.
 
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