| Summary: | The scarcity of editorial archives has oriented the early history of bande dessinée towards a glorious succession of masterpieces. The patrimonialization of the “ninth art” is largely unfinished, as its history is mostly understood through the stories (re)published in albums, obscuring large parts of the past of graphic narratives. The ongoing digitisation of the written heritage also affects comics, and the contours of their history. With vast corpuses being made available to researchers in digital humanities, the ways in which comics are known is transforming. Between institutional press digitisation projects and “wild” archives, new collections are emerging. Collections that were difficult to access are now just a click away. What these projects have in common is that they put the canonical heritage of the “ninth art” in tension and propose a distanced rereading of it.This article analyses the issues involved in this repatrimonialization of comics. The materiality of the different media that have allowed the transmission of the comic strip heritage conditions singular uses, audiences and issues. Although today’s digitisation projects are opening up the corpuses, many questions remain. Faced with the logocentrism of the tools developed in digital humanities and the difficulties of semantising comics, many difficulties persist in our research practices.
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