L'atelier Nawak, berceau ou révélateur d'une nouvelle bande dessinée ?

This article examines the role played by Atelier Nawak in the reconfiguration of the French-language comics industry during the 1990s and 2000s. It is based on a qualitative case study drawing on seventeen interviews with creators of comics and investigates how a shared workspace may have contributed to the emergence of what critics later referred to as the "New Comics" movement. The research is not addressing historiographical debates about the coherence of such a movement but adopts a management and organisation studies perspective to explore how an ordinary place can participate in artistic, organisational and institutional change within a creative industry. The first conclusion of the analysis is that Atelier Nawak was neither a manifesto-driven collective nor the result of a coordinated strategy. It emerged from a very practical need for a shared working space and brought together, somewhat contingently, artists with heterogeneous trajectories, several of whom would later become emblematic figures of the renewal of French-language comics. In that sense, Nawak functioned primarily as a site of informal professional sociability, mutual stimulation, exchanges of advice and productive co-presence, rather than as a formally organised artistic group. The analysis then highlights a mechanism of retrospective labelling. Nawak did not become a central player in the revival because its members deliberately sought to build a symbolic identity. It became important due to the success of several major works produced by artists who had passed through the workshop. As these individual careers gained critical, media and institutional recognition, their origins in the workshop led to it becoming seen as a significant place. It gradually turned into a marker used by publishers, journalists and other gatekeepers eager to identify emerging sites of innovation. Finally, the article argues that Atelier Nawak indirectly, yet meaningfully, contributed to the transformation of editorial norms in the comics sector. Through the aggregation of singular trajectories and works, it helped make visible new narrative forms, graphic styles and authorial positions. In doing so, it participated in the redefinition of legitimacy criteria and editorial possibilities within the field of French-language comics.