Along with American comics and Japanese manga, bande dessinée (drawn strip) is one of the great comics traditions. In French, bande dessinée, often abbreviated as "BD," refers to comics in general and to francophone European comics in particular. One of the essential characteristics of Franco-Belgian comics has been the early adoption of the hardback, which has done much to elevate the status of the genre in francophone Europe. This exhibition, through June 29th, presents key moments in the evolution of dessinée volumes, from their initial standardization into a dominant format of 48 pages explorations that have led, in Europe as elsewhere, to a blurring of the distinction between comic books and artist's books.