As I was studying French in grade school, my parents encouraged me to buy a couple Francophonic comic books on a summer trip to Canada. One was Tintin magazine, containing a variety of comic strips and their characters. The other—Star Cine Vaillance, depicting a (disturbingly relevant in 2024) movie about Israelis fighting Arabs—was a photonovel. Published in Paris although edited in Rome, it was available in Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland.
Belgium was a center of magazine publishing, and the book’s foreword, “Time Traveling in a Lost World,” discusses the range of Belgian photonovels and their publishers. Their ephemerality meant a failure until recently to be properly collected and archived, but now they’re well represented in the digitized Photo-Lit collection. From 1954 to 1985, more than 600 photonovels appeared in women’s magazines, with tales that appealed to modern women, not shy to mention divorce, abortion, and domestic violence. Their...