COVID-19 Bandes dessinées: reframing medical heroism in French-language graphic novels

With reference to four graphic novels published in France and Switzerland in 2020-21, all of which either feature medical personnel or are collaboratively authored by medics, this chapter argues that the first wave of COVID-19 gave rise to an important landmark in the conceptual development of bandes dessinées. It shows that COVID-19 bandes dessinées constitute a definitive turning point in the genre’s lamented tendency to celebrate male heroic models and to underrepresent female perspectives and voices, and focuses on the ways in which bandes dessinées resist the conventional language of medical heroism that was used across the globe to describe “frontline” workers during the pandemic. Drawing on the medical humanities, contemporary feminist thought and Foucauldian poststructuralism, the chapter suggests that bandes dessinées published during the first wave of the pandemic function as a textual space for the creation and dissemination of a new language of COVID-19, one that defiantly eschews political rhetoric and clichéd metaphors of warfare, in favour of a positive reflection on the value of vulnerability.