The chapter in the American graphic novel and the European comic: a precarious segmentation

Historically, even if they share the defining characteristics of the medium, and even if they have eventually converged in the flexible format of the graphic novel, American comics and Franco-Belgian bandes dessinees are not structured in the same way, particularly in terms of episodic and chapter segmentation. In Europe, the publication of two- or three-page serials in weekly magazines and the resulting 48-page albums did not lend themselves well to chapter segmentation, which will only become possible with the appearance of monthly magazines and books with a larger pagination, ostensibly imitating the literary model of the chapter novel. On the other hand, across the Atlantic, we can hypothesize that the emergence of chaptering in the graphic novel is explained by its roots in the standard of the comic book, which constituted a kind of potential proto-chapter for this higher rank unit that appeared in the 1980s. I will focus in particular on two emblematic cases: Ed the Happy Clown by Chester Brown and graphic novels by Daniel Clowes to highlight the relationship between episode and chapter in the American productions, and to contrast this almost spontaneous appearance of chapter segmentation with its more strategic and deliberate introduction into the European comic strip.