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Sébastien Laffage-Cosnier, Christian Vivier, Jean-François Loudcher
Athletic bodies in illustrated print media targeted at the young. The case of the comic strip series Jean-Jacques Ardent Athlète in the weekly Junior (1938-1939)
Le Temps des médias n°19, Automne 2012, p. 187-204.
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In 1936, the Société Parisienne d’Edition launched the weekly journal Junior to compete with the arrival of American Comics. In the context of this shake-up of illustrated magazines for the young that Pellos (a well-known illustrated sports designer) produced all the episodes of the sports hero ‘Jean-Jacques Ardent’ in the youth-album Junior from 1938 to 1940. ‘Jean-Jacques Ardent Athlete’s sports adventures comprise a corpus of 58 boards of comic strips ; the cartoonist invokes a series of myths and depicts an idealized athletic body of the young ‘Ardent’ shaped for « the School of Life» of a « pure and loyal sportsman». Through sport, the young reader may become a man. Furthermore, far from praising a return to a gymnastic tradition that he considers outdated, Pellos, as a former sportsman, invites his readers to join in fashioning an ideal man through a utopian form of sport.