Representation and Stereotype in the Comics: Images of Near and Middle Eastern Arabs in the Franco-belgian Bande Dessinée

Comics are serious business. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten showed the world exactly how much comics can effect the social landscape. Nevertheless, Jyllands-Posten proved what may be obvious in Europe but is not yet recognized in the United States...a vast change is sweeping over the Western world. This work seeks to examine the changing landscape of Europe from the medium of the comics (in French, la bande dessinée) and posits that social change has altered the face of representations of Near and Middle Eastern Peoples in Europe. As a preliminary study, this theoretical work treats the subject of stereotype as a point of departure, focusing on the fluidity of the stereotype and how it suggests more than cultural differences - it may very well signal the rise of one civilization and the fall of another...