Belgium Treats Comics as an Art Form Because It Built an Industry Around Them First

The phrase ninth art is used without irony in Belgium, and the reason is industrial rather than sentimental. Between the 1930s and the 1960s a cluster of studios, magazines and publishers based in and around Brussels produced a body of work that shaped European comics as a medium: Tintin, begun by Herge in 1929 in a newspaper supplement, Lucky Luke by Morris, Spirou under Franquin, the Smurfs by Peyo.

What made that possible was the weekly magazine. Tintin and Spirou were serialised week by week, which gave artists a stable income, a rigid deadline and a page format to work in. The clear line style associated with Herge and the looser tradition around Spirou both developed inside those constraints, and the studios trained a generation of assistants who went on to run their own series.

The physical legacy is concentrated in Brussels. The Belgian Comic Strip Center opened in 1989 in a former textile warehouse designed by Victor Horta, which is a fair summary of the city's two main exports occupying the same address. Dozens of painted comic murals are scattered across the centre, a walking route in their own right, and specialist bookshops survive in numbers that would be unusual anywhere else.

The industry itself has changed shape. The weeklies that sustained it have declined, publishing has consolidated into large French groups, and the market has shifted towards the graphic novel and translated Japanese comics. Belgian authors continue to publish at a high rate, but the studio system that produced the classic series is gone and will not return.

The cultural position, though, has held. Comics are taught, exhibited and reviewed in Belgium as literature rather than as a children's category, and the state funds them accordingly. That is unusual, and it is the direct result of a period when the best commercial artists in Europe happened to be working within an hour of each other.