| Summary: | In the 1950s and 1960s, French and Belgian comics authors were organized into various unions whose ultimate purpose was to promote their work. These organizations made it possible for them to meet and to fight for their professional rights. Therefore, they asserted themselves as a professional group, seeking to be recognized as journalists, rather than as comics authors, especially since their actual practice of the profession was still very versatile. At the same time, the initiatives of bédéphiles, and therefore of comics fans, were of a different kind: they tended to promote not the profession, but the medium itself, by focusing only on comics . This article thus seeks to analyze why the mechanisms of social recognition that bédéphiles offered cartoonists did not align with the corporatist organization that prevailed during the 1950s and 1960s. In other words, were bédéphiles more involved in the invention of the figure of the comics author than the authors themselves?
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