The Methods of Creating Heroes in Bande Dessinées (By Emphasis on Bande Dessinées of France and Belgium)

Bande dessinée is the name of kind of comic strips which are produced in French language countries like France, Belgium and Switzerland. One of the most important duties of this kind of art is to create heroes and superheroes. In fact, there are different types of methods for producing heroes being used in various countries all over the world like the United States of America, Japan, France, Belgium, etc. The main question of this research is that: What methods do France and Belgium, as the main producers of bande dessinées in the whole world, use to create their own superheroes? And also we ask about the advantages and disadvantages of these methods which the mentioned countries have experienced during the history of bande dessinée production. The goal of this research is to reach to the reasons of success and failures that these countries had in their process of producing bande dessinée and creation of superheroes. The necessity to start this research is to make a good use of others’ experiences of this global and successful art and industry in order to utilize these facts in our own local comic strips and national superheroes. In fact, we have not payed attention to comic strip as a kind art and industry as much as the world has payed attention to. One of the reasons that America or France or other countries had been successful in giving a birth to many superheroes of their own during the past century has been using efficiently of comic strip. There have been too many years that we are noticing that our children need an Iranian hero with their national culture but although in all these years we knew what we need, we have not gone through the right way. As a result, we have tried to fulfill this research and reach to an appropriate conclusion by using various theories about the methods of creating heroes and also by studying the famous successful superheroes of French and Belgian comic strips. We chose French and Belgian ones because their superheroes are not really Super. They live like ordinary people in the society. They are not much more than normal people in any ways; neither in their physical manner nor in their appearance, social life, cultural aspects, etc. Therefore, a strong relationship would take place between audiences and these kinds of superheroes. This relationship could give fans an opportunity to be able to trust their heroes and rely on them. The truth is that whenever they can rely on their heroes, they will choose them as a role model in their lives. Also another reason that we picked French and Belgian superheroes not the American ones, is that French language comic strips have been more popular among different generations in Iran. People have read Tintin bande dessinées or Asterix during recent years. The American heroes are popular, too. But the most of the people are familiar with the cinematic version of them and not the comic ones and in order that we are going to find out about the comic methods of creating superheroes and not the cinematic methods, we are not going to mention the American heroes in this research. As a matter of fact, that is the exact reason that we are searching for it; to find a way in creating superheroes to make them trustworthy. The fact is that the main and the most important audiences of these art formats are children and adolescents. The superheroes’ responsibility is to make a belief in them called trust. They must trust on their hero. That is the duty of a good hero. Whenever he or she could do this job, we can call him or her a successful superhero; someone whom people can imitate from, someone whom people can ask for their solutions in their common problems, someone who can relief them in difficult situations. That is how a real superhero needs to be; someone who trustable.