Paradoxes of Innovation in French Digital Comics

The word ‘innovative’ and its lexical field of novelty are often used to market digital comics. This obsession with everything new implies a specific link to the past. Anything which breaks with prior methods or forms of graphic creation becomes innovative. However, the formal evolution of French digital comics does not match with this linear pattern of innovation. This paper presents an analysis of the idea of innovation in relation to the long-term history of French digital comics creation. Whilst the technical means of graphic creation have improved since the 1980s, does that necessarily mean that the form and aesthetics of digital comics have evolved simultaneously? What is the role played by traditional printed comics in the aesthetic evolution of digital comics? Starting with the 1990s, it is not the potentiality but the reality of technological innovation that we will try to understand through time.