This article is a result of the COMICS project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 758502). This paper is an expanded and revised version of a presentation in the doctoral seminar of the InTRu lab in the Université de Tours, at the invitation of Axelle Glaie, Anouk Gouzerh, Cécile Boulaire and Laurent Gerbier. My gratitude goes to them and to all the people present, for having shared their thoughts with me. I am grateful to Maggie Flinn for her help in writing this paper in English.
1As any artistic media, the experience of a comic is determined by its own form, by its intermedial and cultural context, and by its material conditions of publishing or, more broadly, dissemination. Although this last statement may seem obvious, it does not always receive the attention it deserves. This article will demonstrate that forms of dissemination have long been relevant, by examining their qualities for a French-speaking comic from the mid-20th century. Although digitization and transmedia storytelling broaden our sensory experience of comics nowadays, adaptation and merchandising have been offering similar terms for a long time.
- 1 Although the book does not have a published translation, for reading clarity, I will use this liter (...)
- 2 All references to Tintin magazine in this article will be to the French-speaking Belgian edition. T (...)
2This research will focus on a “Disque d’aventure” produced by the French label Festival in 1960: Alix l’intrépide (“The Intrepid Alix”).1 The first episode in the comics series Alix, set in the Roman Empire in 53 BC, is known as a classic in historical bande dessinée. Nonetheless, translated versions had not been produced until 2010 in Spanish and until 2015 in Italian, while the album has not yet been translated in English. Initially, it was serially published, simultaneously in French and Dutch, in the French-Belgian Tintin/Kuifje magazine (1948-49), then it has been released as a comics album,2 by Le Lombard from 1956, then by Casterman from 1973. These albums have been adapted, for the French-speaking market, into an audiobook on LP vinyl record (1960), into two episodes of an animated television series (1999) and into a children’s novel (2004). The audiobook particularly deserves to be rescued from oblivion, because it makes the comics reader hear with new ears the 1956 album that it adapts.
3The first volume of a long-running and well-studied comics series, The Intrepid Alix has attracted scholars’ attention (quite often for the purpose of comparison with subsequent albums in the same series), due to its treatment of the ancient history (see, among others, Saouter & Sohet 32-34, Gallego 162-164), its underlying homoeroticism (Rivière 9-10, Dennis 95) and, joining these two perspectives, its contribution to peplum’s intermedial genre (Aziza 129-132, Bessières 89-91). Furthermore, this album’s genesis has been recounted via retrospectives, from the reference monograph Avec Alix, reissued several times since 1984 (Groensteen & De Kuyssche 53-56, 97-100, 111-113), to the exhibition The Art of Jacques Martin (see the catalogue: Akyüz et al. 26-35), hosted by the Musée de la bande dessinée in Angoulême in 2018, then by the Cinquantenaire Museum in Brussels. This body of literature has good coverage of the series’ themes, genre, and genesis, but does not say much about its material conditions of reception.
4Alix’s creator, Jacques Martin, was first a comics reader, discovering that medium among others, during his childhood. Born in 1921, Martin was in the target readership of the early adventures of Tintin, launched in 1929 in the Belgian press and picked up by the French press the following year, just as Hergé’s first albums were being published. This coincidence in biography does not only explain Martin’s fascination with Hergé (who hired the younger man to work in his studio from 1953 to 1972), it also shaped his vision of comics, which I will in this article re-situate in the intermedial context of 1920s and 1930s France.
- 3 Such was the case for Zig & Puce, a series created by Alain Saint-Ogan in 1925, whose first songs a (...)
5During the 20s and 30s, the increasing use of speech bubbles fell under an intermedial phenomenon of oralizing (see Glaude, chapter 5), that can be simultaneously observed in francophone novels, in French-speaking comics, and in the early talkies released in French cinemas. Conversely, several comics series were recorded, adapted to stage or screen, and, in turn, they referred to these adaptations in their panels.3 Among these intermedial crossings, comics were adapted into slide projection programs intended for youth organization screenings. The projection of panels from a comics album came along the narration provided by the performer, an activity leader such as a scoutmaster, who read the speech bubbles to the young audience while improvising additional live storytelling, an amateur performance role akin to the work of the “bonimenteurs” of silent films. In the 1930s, Jacques Martin attended such a projection; he was already keen on silent historical films such as Pierre Marodon’s Salammbô (1925) (Groensteen & De Kuyssche 19, 74). This background shaped his vision of experiencing a comic as a performance, as he declared here:
One day, as I was going to my piano class, I walked by the open window of the Châtenay-Malabry patronage [Catholic youth club] and heard intriguing exclamations. I entered to see what was happening. A slideshow was being displayed, from the adventures of Tintin, with a commentator performing the different voices, while mimicking the actions. I did not fully realize what I had seen until much later, being so enthralled that, for a long time, I claimed I saw a real film. (Jacques Martin quoted in Groensteen & De Kuyssche 21.)
6What Martin saw was probably one of the first seven adventures of Tintin (from Land of the Soviets to The Black Island), these having been adapted into “still film” slideshows by the magazine that published them in France, Cœurs vaillants, in order to be shown in patronages. Maybe this intermedial discovery of a “performed” comic encouraged Martin, fifteen years later, to reclaim the plot of a spectacular American best-seller, the novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace (1880), through Fred Niblo’s screen adaptation (1925). The cartoonist recalled this in a 1979 interview:
I watched Ben-Hur when I was a child, with Ramón Novarro on his chariot. He was a handsome man. I don’t know the film director’s name. I vaguely remember some impressive scenes: his leprous mother and sister... and other fragments of the story. But that’s all. Naturally, I have also read the book. But I have never been terribly interested in it. My main concern was the pictures from the film, which I had in mind when I started Alix. (Jacques Martin quoted in Éloy 95.)
- 4 Jacques Martin seemed to be unaware (at least, he never mentioned it to an interviewer) that Fred N (...)
7After settling in Belgium in 1946, Jacques Martin published his first comics in the local press and in Belgian magazines for children such as Bravo! or Wrill, until he submitted a first version of The Intrepid Alix’s first page to Tintin’s director, Raymond Leblanc. The creator acknowledged borrowing a scene from Fred Niblo’s silent film,4 introducing Alix as a “peplum viewer” (Bessières 90, Groensteen & De Kuyssche 55). Indeed, on this page, the young man observes, from the top of a building, the Roman soldiers’ arrival in the city of Khorsabad, in what is now Iraq, while inadvertently dropping rubble on their general, who believes they are being attacked. In a similar scene—though not the film’s opening (Ben-Hur 33:42)—Ben-Hur accidentally drops a tile from the balcony while attending the new Roman governor’s parade in Judea, the accident for which he will be sent to the galleys.
8Before the Alix series, some comics in Tintin magazine had already shown an interest in oriental exoticism (The New Adventures of Corentin Feldoë, The Princess Zulimah or Hassan, the Thief of Baghdad), but none took place in Antiquity. The Intrepid Alix thus inaugurated the peplum genre in French-speaking comics.
Fig. 1. Tintin 1 (January 6, 1949) : 6-7.
The comics are © Éditions Casterman S.A./Jacques Martin (right page), and © Tonet Timmermans 2023 (left page). The illustrations are © Hergé/Tintinimaginatio 2023.
9The epitome of the intermedial genre termed “péplum” in French (Bessières 39-44) is, in the history of film, the historical, mythological or biblical dramas set in Antiquity, including European films à l’antique (Aziza 77) such as the movies from the Cinecittà studios in Rome, and epic Hollywood films, up to Anthony Mann’s commercial flop of The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). For the year 1949, the Italian studios’ big production was Alessandro Blasetti’s Fabiola, where the hero, a Gaul from the fourth century AD, goes to Rome to preach Christianity and distinguishes himself by his pacifism when forced to fight as a gladiator. A survey showed it to be among the favorite films of Tintin’s Belgian readers (September 15, 1949). The “Tintin at the cinema” column, opposite of the weekly page of The Intrepid Alix (January 6, 1949, Figure 1), introduced the main actor of the film, “the French juvenile lead Henri Vidal,” while stating that the director thought he was not muscular enough for the fight scene in the arena. One cannot help but compare the jeune premier actor to the slender teenager Alix, who is always very merciful towards his enemies, even sparing the life of his adoptive father’s murderer during a gladiatorial fight.
10Tintin’s regular readers discovered the serial at a rate of one page per week. It was often published opposite varied columns (“Tintin at the Cinema”, “The Books Corner”, “Listen to the Music”, etc.) and a Quick & Flupke half-page gag or a captioned picture story, Genevieve of Brabant. Occasionally, there were some implicit resonances between the two pages. For example, on the opposite side of the fourth page of Alix adventure, the literary section advises the reading of Quo Vadis, right next to a film column that defines the use of voices in films in these terms:
At the time of silent cinema, when the actors would only roll their eyes and gesture empathetically, no one seemed interested in their voices, as the viewers could not hear them. However, everything changed when voices were added. […] Unlike photogenie, the phonogenie can never be improved. You either have a pleasant voice or you don’t. […] How many actors were quickly forgotten, after a brief success, because of the emergence of “talkies”? Ramón Novarro, the hero from Ben-Hur, John Gilbert, Tom Mix, Harold Loyd, Buster Keaton, and many others? (Tintin 41 [7 octobre 1948]: 6.)
- 5 The action of Fred Niblo’s silent film takes place at the end of the life of Christ. The heir of an (...)
- 6 Following the implacable logic of the remake, a later album in Alix series, Le Tombeau étrusque [“T (...)
11The similarities between Niblo’s movie and Martin’s comic are numerous,5 even if the comics artist did not admit them all (Éloy 95), he was undoubtedly inspired by a novel and a silent film, two “big show” and highly successful productions. Like comics, these two media apparently devoid of acoustic properties invite us to listen, they include, through synaesthetic suggestion at the very least, a sound dimension. The main scene from Fred Niblo’s silent film Ben-Hur is a high production value chariot race (Aziza 251), co-directed by William Wyler, the future producer of Ben-Hur, the 1959 talking movie, famous for this same equestrian scene.6 In the quadrigas race, Lew Wallace’s novelistic narrator suggests with words—as the silent film adaptation does with the flow of pictures—the chariots crashing, the horses neighing, the crowd cheering. In Jacques Martin’s comics pages (36-40), this “sound” generated by synaesthesia, consisting of a rhetorical stimulation of hearing by way of sight, is strengthened by the combination of text and sequential images.
12To provide a sound dimension to the thirty-sixth page, for example, Martin (38, Figure 2) called upon many resources of comics language, with the notable exception of onomatopoeia. On the one hand, the loquacious recitatives give us sound cues; “the cheering of the crowd, screaming and stamping enthusiastically” (panel 6) or “the wood [that] creaks…” (panel 13). This verbal information is sometimes supported, within the image, by ideographs—for instance, the shape of a star, representing a heavy impact, graphically echoes the sentences “[Brutus] angrily cracks his whip” (panel 3) and “the wheel violently hits the bollard” (panel 8). The verbal narration is also supported by sparse bubbles:
[Brutus] realizes with bitterness that his rival will join him. / Curse you, Alix! (panel 2)
A shout of amazement comes out of all the mouths. / By Jove! It’s incredible!… (panel 14)
Fig. 2. Martin, Jacques. Alix l’intrépide. Brussels: Casterman, 2008. 38.
© Éditions Casterman S.A./Jacques Martin.
13On the other hand, sounds and motions are suggested by the staging, which is obviously inspired by the chariot race in Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur movie. Indeed, in the second half of the page, several “camera” angles alternate: one is placed in front of Brutus’ hitch (panels 7 et 11), several shots at ground level focus on a chariot wheel (panels 8, 10 et 12), another “camera” frames the right side of Brutus in medium-long shot (panels 9 et 13), a final one shows the howling crowd (panel 14). All these shots were already used in Niblo’s film (Ben-Hur 1:40:28-1:41:14 and 1:46:04-1:46:28), as was the whip fight between the chariot-drivers (1:45:05 and 1:46:15). A recitative even seems to make a reference to the movie, when “Brutus attempts the classic tactic…” (Martin 38, panel 13, emphasis added). Consequently, one can speak of cinematographic breakdown and compositions which seek to compensate for the absence of sound that characterizes both comics and silent films. Sound effects, realizing the sounds mentioned by the comics recitatives, are produced by synaesthesia, contributing to a spectacular staging, with mouths drawn wide open (screams), ideographs and dust clouds (various impacts, trampling of hooves), or motion and speed lines (chariots crashing).
14One of only two intertitles of the lengthy film scene also seems to have inspired the comic strip; the Brutus bubble threatening Alix, “You just wait, dog!” (panel 6), recalls the imprecation of a Greek competitor against Messala: “You’re fouling me, Roman dog!” (Ben-Hur 1:41:49). A comparison of the two scenes reveals that silent film intertitles function differently from the recitatives in The Intrepid Alix, which are closer to captions in picture stories (Glaude 220-224). While the spectator must imagine most of the cinematic dialogues performed in pantomime by the actors (unless a film commentator improvises them live), the picture story reader learns more about the voices and speeches of the characters in the captions. Another difference lies in the temporality. A reviewer of Marco de Gastyne’s silent film La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc in the late 1920s noted that “Joan of Arc opens her mouth and all that comes out is an intertitle that cuts off the momentum of a cadence. We have interspersed signs instead of a superimposed voice” (Arnoux 3). By contrast, in The Intrepid Alix, verbal discourse does not come from outside the comic, but rather points to a heterodiegetic narrator of a novelistic type, whose voice is inseparable from the images that it captions. This written narration is comparable to the live commentary of the silent film commentators, which links it to a long oral tradition. Rather than “oralizing”, one could speak of “vocalizing”, in the sense that the film’s live explanation as much as the comics’ recitatives gives a voice (or several voices) to a visual narrative.
- 7 That is, 894 panels for 62 pages, each comprising 12 to 17 panels, except for the last one which ha (...)
- 8 In an 1984 interview, Jacques Martin described his scriptwriting practice in literary terms: “I sta (...)
- 9 Symptomatically, during the year 1949, Belgian readers complained to the editorial staff about a de (...)
15Flipping through the album of The Intrepid Alix, in the first edition of 1956, one is impressed by the density of the sixty-two comics pages, each comprising, on average, 14.4 panels and 315 words, distributed across 10 recitatives and 8.7 speech bubbles.7 The comic is particularly wordy, if not literary, in the sense that Martin would have used the term.8 Most of the adventure series in Tintin magazine, until the beginning of the 1950s, perpetuated the intervention of a narrator of a novelistic type, reminiscent of that of the captioned picture stories. Even though they are perfectly synchronized with the scenes, the recitatives tend to slow down the action, unless the reader skips reading them. One can infer that Tintin readers were expecting a certain narrative density, which made them wait for the next instalment; they wanted to get their money’s worth, especially since the new formula of the magazine, launched in the issue where Alix first appeared, led to an increase in the sale price per issue.9 However, read in one sitting in book form, The Intrepid Alix can lack dynamism.
16The temporality of the reception varies between the magazine and the album, but it remains “heterochrone,” to use Philippe Marion’s concept (Marion & Gaudreault 78-79). According to the narratologist, the time of reception is “programmed by the homochrone medium” (cinema, television, radio), when it is not determined by a heterochrone medium (novel, comics), where it remains relatively independent of the time of narrative enunciation. In comics, as Jacques Martin explains, “the image is fixed and persists”:
The cinema allows approximations, because the images go so fast that one does not have time to analyze them. […] On the contrary, the comic strip remains, even if it lacks the film’s volume, sound and movement. One can be more interested in its content, in the details, in the costumes. So that a cartoonist who is concerned with authenticity can no longer afford to make mistakes. (Jacques Martin quoted in Éloy 93.)
17This is not the case with the audiobook adapted from the album The Intrepid Alix, which is intended to be listened to in a time limited by long play vinyl record technology. For a high-fidelity audiobook, a 25 cm 33 RPM record holds about 17 minutes of recording on each side. Director Jean Maurel, author of seven adaptations of the comics series Blake & Mortimer, Dan Cooper, Alix and Spirou & Fantasio in “Disques d’aventure,” justifies their fast pace as follows:
I only had 35 minutes to tell the story, and this fast pace did not bother the children at all. […] In fact, I wanted to follow as closely as possible Jacobs’ work, which is very dense. And the children often listened to a record with the album in hand: woe to me if I had removed a scene! (Jean Maurel quoted in Lehideux 42.)
18In the multimedia reception described by Maurel, the comic’s time of reading is programmed by a homochrone medium, that of the record playing simultaneously. Ultimately, the closeness of the relationship between the sound adaptation and the paper album relied on the listeners.
- 10 Three 78 or 45 RPM records adapted from comics by Jean Graton and Fred Funcken preceded the record (...)
19In 1956, the Festival label, sponsored by Radio Luxembourg, launched a record series with Le Lombard and Dargaud, the publishing houses of Tintin magazine, a partnership that soon extended to the Dargaud’s new weekly Pilote (Marmonnier 22-25, Lesage 180). The series “Le Disque d’aventure”10 was launched by La Marque jaune [The Yellow “M”] (1956), an audiobook realized by a team of radio professionals, including two key figures of The Intrepid Alix (1960): the sound mixer Roger Cloose and Jean Maurel, a producer of detective programs and radio dramas for Radio Luxembourg. The latter genre is among the ancestors of audiobooks. Recalling that radio dramas “frequently presented adaptations and abridgments of already-familiar stories,” Sarah Kozloff (84) considers that “[a]udio books offering ‘dramatized’ productions specifically replicate radio aesthetics,” using “sound effects, multiple performers, music.” The comparison is less relevant for reception than for production, if only because a vinyl record, unlike a radio program at that time, was available for listening on-demand.
20The cover of The Yellow “M” programs the reception of the record series, in a notice addressed to the young listeners:
Thanks to an agreement with the publishers of Tintin magazine, you will be able to relive the novels [sic] that you were most passionate about when reading. […] You will find the exact atmosphere of the novel’s thousand twists and turns and you will discover what you could not hear when reading it, in these real sound images, with a breathless rhythm, executed sometimes like a film […]. The Yellow “M”: a record whose details and richness of sound will take you a long time to know, and that you will want all your friends to hear. (La Marque jaune back cover.)
21It is thus a question of listening, again and again, to a story that is already known from its printed form. Such a record was likely to provoke an experience of repetition, of compulsive reception, during which the child perceived the discrepancies between the versions. For Cécile Boulaire, an audiobook can constitute a “means of prolonging and deepening […] the book project,” or the literary reading, provided the child listens to it several times:
Who does not remember the version of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince recorded by Gérard Philippe in 1954? […A] child who has compulsively played a version of The Little Prince on his or her slot-in record player or, more recently, on a tape or CD player, has an infinitely deeper and finer literary perception of it than someone who has only read it once, because a literary work is a text before being a book. (Boulaire 24.)
22This effect was to be increased when the child leafed through The Intrepid Alix album while listening to the vinyl record. This one, like the audiobook of The Little Prince produced by the same record label, is not exactly a “book-and-record set,” in the sense that it is not accompanied by a booklet. However, the back cover refers the series “Le Disque d’aventure” to “[t]exts published and on sale at Éditions du Lombard and Éditions Dargaud” (Alix l’intrépide back cover). Although the front cover, illustrated by Jacques Martin, reads “A story published in Tintin magazine,” it is the album edition that is presented as the source “text” of the audiobook, in the same way that the edition of a dramatic “text” refers to a performed play. Note the repetition of the terms “novel” and “reading” in the above-mentioned notice of The Yellow “M” audiobook. The first Lombard comics albums showed a similar literary approach, since the back covers of La Marque jaune and Alix l’intrépide, both published in 1956, described them as “the best picture novels drawn by the best artists.” However, this does not mean that the audiobooks literally reproduced the textual content of the corresponding comics.
- 11 The two recitatives in Figure 3 translate as follows: “But, suddenly, Toraya is startled… He drops (...)
23Take, for example, the scene where the treacherous Arbacès invites the heroes to his house in Rhodes, where he tries to poison Toraya, Alix’s friend. Since there is no narrative voice in this passage of the record, all the information delivered by the comic strip’s recitatives and images are conveyed by the foleys (handmade sound effects of everyday life) and dialogues. If one carefully follows a conversation of about one minute between Alix and Toraya (Alix l’intrepide 11:41-12:36), one realizes that the audiobook does not literally reproduce the text of the speech bubbles in the corresponding comics half-page (let alone the texts of the recitatives, entirely removed; Martin 28, panels 1-8), even though it follows the sequence scrupulously. The oral dialogue is more interactional, with more lines, than the written dialogue. In addition, to attribute words to their speakers, the audiobook makes more use of vocative appeals than the comic strip (where the appendix of speech bubbles fulfils this attributive function). The lines supplement the images, for example when Alix, speaking to Toraya, explains a sound effect that had occurred nineteen seconds earlier: “in your surprise, when you saw the trireme, you spilled your drinking cup” (Alix l’intrépide 12:00). Other lines urge the characters (and listeners) to open their eyes: “see” (three times), “it’s strange”, “look”. Therefore, the missing images and recitatives have been put into sounds, through foleys and dialogues, and this is particularly true for the first and seventh panels11 (Figures 3a–3b), which correspond respectively to one and twenty-five seconds of the recording.
Fig. 3a. Transcription of a passage from the audiobook, alongside the corresponding comics panel. Martin, Jacques. Alix l’intrépide. Brussels: Casterman, 2008. 26, panel 1.
© Éditions Casterman S.A./Jacques Martin.
11:41-11:42
Impact of a metal object against the ground.
[Toraya] Oh !
Fig. 3b. Transcription of a passage from the audiobook, alongside the corresponding comics panel. Martin, Jacques. Alix l’intrépide. Brussels: Casterman, 2008. 26, panel 7.
© Éditions Casterman S.A./Jacques Martin.
12:20-12:45
Birdsongs in the background of the dialogue.
[Toraya] Yes, but for safety’s sake, let’s split up. Let yourself slide down this terrace and run towards the port. I will meet you there.
[Alix] But you can’t stay here surrounded by your enemies!
[Toraya] Don’t worry, it won’t take me long to get away. Come on, climb over the balustrade!
24Eleven voice artists perform the eleven roles of the acoustic production. The voices are enough to characterize each of them, since the audiobook does not give a physical description of the characters. Some of them contribute to a sound saturation: Suréna, as well as the proconsul Quintus Arenus, performed by Lucien Hubert and Pierre Chambon, shout constantly. In contrast to these virile tones, Alix has a youthful, even feminine voice. And with good reason: Jean Maurel (quoted in Lehideux 41) had a young female assistant, Claude Vincent, play the roles of Alix, Tintin, and Spirou in several audiobooks and radio dramas. As for Alix’s main enemy, Arbacès (performed by Hubert de Lapparent), he has a nasal voice, higher pitched than those of the soldiers, which betrays his deceit. This is all the more true when he disguises himself as a woman and distorts his voice.
- 12 Joé Noël excelled in this domain. His imitation skills were employed, at the time, by the radio sta (...)
25The record cover credits three sound effects engineers, Joé Noël, Henri Saint-Georges, and Géo Vallery, who provided a small number of different foleys, and obviously made do with what was at hand: they themselves imitated animal sounds,12 created the sound of a cavalcade with the clashing of half coconuts or plastic yogurt cups, etc. Although rudimentary, these “décors sonores [sound scenery]” were recorded first, thus constituting a “sonothèque [sound library]” prior to the work of the performers (Jean Maurel quoted in Lehideux 42-43). And, indeed, their presence in the recording is almost equivalent, quantitatively (Figure 4), to that of the dialogues.
- 13 Like Le Petit Prince [The Little Prince] (1954) and L’Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant [The Sto (...)
26The record cover puts the name of the composer, Gilbert Carpentier, in the foreground, just after Jean Maurel’s, perhaps due to the Grand Prix du disque de l’Académie Charles-Cros he had received for the audiobook Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant [The Story of Babar the Little Elephant] (1957), from the same Festival label.13 However, The Intrepid Alix uses Carpentier’s music only sparingly, and essentially to ensure a transition between sections of the narrative. Exceptionally, brass instruments play a diegetic role during the chariot race (Alix l’intrépide 20:08-22:36), although Jacques Martin’s comics album (36-40) does not depict Roman tuba in this scene, as it does in a later one (54). On the record cover, a notice promising a sonic experience worthy of an epic Hollywood film encourages potential listeners of the record: “Quick, go to Rome… the trumpets are sounding…” (Alix l’intrépide back cover). Indeed, Gilbert Carpentier conducted an instrumental ensemble dominated by trumpets, accompanied by horns, (modern) tubas and other brass instruments. Using the pseudo-archaic style of peplum film music, he employed the C pentatonic scale (without the notes F and B, to avoid semitones), to write two-part melodies in constant intervals of augmented fourths or diminished fifths.
Fig. 4. Chronological overview of the five types of sounds in the audiobook The Intrepid Alix.
27To synthesize the study of the contents of the audiobook, this diagram (Figure 4) distinguishes between five types of sound: music, foley, narration, dialogue, and brouhaha (mingled sounds of voices). There are only twenty-three seconds of silence (never more than three in a row), scattered throughout the thirty-four minutes of recording. Music and narration, two types of sounds that are in a minority, fill the rare pauses in the dialogue, which is omnipresent. The foleys, also very present, as well as more intermittent brouhahas, are superimposed on the other sounds to set the sound scenery. Peplums are films with abundant extras, constantly showing armies on the march and swarming crowds. To translate this spectacular dimension, the audiobook includes brouhahas composed of more or less distinct words. These amplify the sound saturation. Without stereophony (still in its infancy in 1960), the record only has the “mixing” to build a sound space, “especially the volume of the different acoustic signals,” but without being able to play on the “positioning” of these signals (Huwiler 102), so that all the sounds seem to be situated at the same place, which is the center of the acoustic space.
28If the foleys form the sound framework of the plot, the dialogues are its driving force. They leave little room for the narrative voice, provided by a “récitant [narrator]” (Alix l’intrépide back cover), who is none other than Jean Maurel. Unlike the comic strip, the intervention of the narrator in the audiobook remains limited. The chariot race scene is an exception (Alix l’intrépide 20:08-22:36), as shown by the lengthy gap in the dialogues in the diagram above, since the narrator takes over the storytelling, speaking like a radio sports commentator. For the rest, the verbal narration of the comic strip is toned down on the record, contrary to the audiobooks of literary works, narrated by a traditional “oral storyteller,” which play on the effect of “special companionship” that such a narrator offers (Kozloff 92).
29The sensory experience of reading The Intrepid Alix varies according to the material properties of the media of its different versions. These variations are made evident by the cross-media adaptations, even if the question of materiality both concerns and overflows intermediality. As Ian Hague has pointed out, admitting the obviousness that “materiality matters” implies “challenging the idea that comics are a purely visual medium” (Hague 3). The audiobook is not the soundtrack to the comic strip, which does not need it to have sound dimension. Conversely, the “Disque d’aventure” was more than a tie-in, as a means for children to “own” and “hold on to” the comics experience (Kozloff 85), it constituted, along with the magazine and the comics album, “one medium among others in the construction of the work” (Lesage 184).
30This article, by proposing to reread a classical bande dessinée with a new ear, has only half-opened a multisensory perspective on that work. The sonority of the different versions of The Intrepid Alix relies on senses other than hearing, and not only on sight. For all the media considered in this article (magazine, book, record), the first solicited sense is touch, which is necessary to put (and maintain) in action narrative devices such as a paper volume and a vinyl LP record. In 1970, a critic of children’s records, taking the example of a “chewed-up, scratched-up record cover,” affirmed that “children are ready to give their records a place of choice next to their books and their most cherished toys” (Bustarret 8). She described a tactile apprehension of the audiobook by the child, in particular for the stages of its starting up (“to take the record out of the sleeve without putting the fingers on the grooves” [16], etc.), but also when listening to it.
Older children (from eight or nine years old) will sometimes prefer the dialogued, acted versions [among audiobooks], which give them a more vivid impression of action and often encourage them to mime and to theatrical improvisations. (Bustarret 58.)
31The listener’s hands are no longer leafing through a book, they participate with the whole body in a gestural performance (comparable to the air guitar among rock fans) that allows him to play the role he is listening to. Of course, it is not necessary to go that far to recognize the importance of touch in the reception of comics. “Touch is therefore not just an element of the comic itself, but an element of the performance of the comic”, as Ian Hague (107, 117) states: “If hearing was a supplement to the visual elements of comics, touch is surely the foundation that underlies them.” The tactile dimension of these comics thus remains an open and essential avenue of inquiry, starting by reconsidering the reception of comics as a multisensory performance.
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