The illegitimacy of the comic strip has its own history. It is the result of historical processes that have combined criticism of comic strips with efforts to rehabilitate them. The post-war years were a pivotal time in the process of disqualifying comic strips (then mainly published in children’s magazines) as considerable efforts were made to assert their criminalising and demoralising nature. This type of discourse was institutionalised and enshrined in France by the Act of 16 July 1949, which— until today—has organised (among other measures) controls over the publication of comic strips. At the very least, these controls have sustained the view of comic strips as a potentially dangerous, definitely non-educational and scarcely legitimate form, and have even gone so far as to disqualify them entirely in practice. Thus did the Act of 1949 help to institutionalise, on a relatively enduring basis, the illegitimate nature of the comic strip.