On November 19, Xavier Girard came to the Faculty library carrying a small bag packed with handmade comics he found on a flea market in his home town of Orléans, France. The comics were drawn, colored, and assembled by a kid (and probably with an adult) in the late 1940s and 1950s. Norbert Moutier, as he was called, passed away in January 2020 and was a known figure in the Z movie world, both for his own films and his fanzines. His childhood comics have remained completely unknown.
Xavier Girard’s unpacking of Norbert Moutier’s childhood comics took up six whole library tables, and was barely enough to display one part of the entire collection. The display of the different books made for a fascinating corpus and a stimulating way of exploring the wildest hypotheses around this unique production and to share broader thoughts around childhood practices, drawing, fannish obsessions, post-war culture, Orléans, the censorship on comics for kids, etc…
In parallel with these handmade comics, we had selected a few items from the Alain Van Passen collection to show the mainstream production of comics magazines for kids in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
