A rose is a rose is a rose, but a bande dessinée is not a comic strip. In the French-speaking world, the BD (for our purposes, a sequential drawing) is held to be nothing less than the Ninth Art, with a noble genealogy going back to the Bayeux tapestry, plus a contemporary network of theorists, critics, publishers, festivals, websites, and art-school programs. Not to mention, of course, the ever-growing numbers of artist-authors who have seized upon the BD as a hybrid zone of experimentation free from the material and mental constraints of the mainstream culture industry. Indeed, the “BD Reporters”

For Sylvie Fanchon, painting comes after: after photography, after film, after television, after video—all these mediations between man and reality with which she weaves a tense dialogue. To technical means, she prefers the hand—its imperfections, which she accepts but does not particularly seek out, as well as its availability; to the dematerialization of the world that these visual means effect, she contrasts the physical contact of painting; to their instantaneity, she responds with slow, careful, layered craft. Faced with the proliferation and inflation of images, she opts for a radical