Lecture périodique, contexte médiatique et bandes dessinées

Buying a comic book magazine means engaging in a relationship not with a work, but with a periodical. Reading a comic book magazine appears above all as a press experience that predetermines the understanding of the works. It is based on an editorial reading pact that brings together the heterogeneity of the signatures under a common identity. The intrinsic characteristics of the magazines reflect a specific aesthetic relationship that obeys the specific dynamics of the medium (periodicity, editorial reading pact, polyphony, principle of variety, etc.). Therefore, it would be wrong to think of the magazine first as an antechamber to the album—or even as an offering of a series of juxtaposed or agglomerated works that could be examined alone—without seeing that it establishes the conditions for a specific aesthetic relationship, which should be considered in a global manner. It is the overall relationship to the object, through the editorial reading pact, the recurring sections, the overall organization of the periodical, the fragmentary reading induced by the mosaic of texts and images, the hierarchies it produces, and the possibilities of contextual appropriation it allows, which define the atmosphere of the magazine, and which we propose to examine in this article.