Plomb Dans la Tête

I approached this thinking — with an imperfect knowledge of French expressions — that this would translate into English as “Bullet in the Head,” since the word-for-word translation is “Lead in the Head” and it featured burly men with guns on the cover. Looking into that expression, in French, has given me an experience a bit like this graphic novel by Colin Wilson (of Blueberry fame) and Matz did — some preconceptions shattered, some pleasant surprises, and a slow nod of understanding.

The graphic novel starts like something called “Bullet in the Head” should start, anyway. It’s buddy crooks versus buddy cops: two killers, mandated to assassinate a senatory, destined to butt heads with the two policement assigned to the case, with some reporters friendly to one of the officers on the periphery.

And it’s straight-to-DVD, Steven-Seagal-worthy material at first. Matz is, as we’ve seen with Le Tueur, a dab hand at crackling dialogue, and fans of the U.S. series 100 Bullets could do far worse than to track his work down with a translator close at hand. But even the zippy dialogue can’t really put more than a coat of paint over some crippling Central Casting characters and story: the fastidious $2000-shoes killer and his pragmatic associate; the hot-headed cop and his level-headed partner. The killers are killing; the cops are, well, being cops.

Matz, to his credit, keeps a steady hand on the till, delivering a perfectly servicable cops-and-killers story that starts in New York (the prime location for any mediocre cop fiction, especially when written by people from beyond North America — at this point, there must be more fictional New York cops and hoods than there are real New Yorkers) and then traverses to one of the other Great Stereotypes of American-set crime fiction, New Orleans (close rival: Los Angeles).

The version of Plomb that I’ve been reading is L’Intégral — all three volumes of the series, bound up in 66% format. And thank God for that, because Matz, in a ballsy move, doesn’t pull his Interesting Twist until midway through the second volume. I doubt I would have proceeded past Vol. 1 if I were picking it up normally, and when the sudden swing in the plot comes, it comes fast and furious.

Suddenly, halfway through the second book, things get a lot more interesting.

“Mettre du plomb dans la tête” is, according to my (Quebec) French co-workers, to make somebody more serious — you can also describe somebody who is a bit ditzy as lacking “plomb dans la tête.”

So I think Matz is indulging in some clever punning, there — two of the book’s protagonists are forced to adopt a different and arguably more serious-minded attitude about the way the world works as the story unfolds, and there is no shortage of lead projectiles finding their ways into a variety of craniums.

It seems to be referred to in English as “Headshot,” and has been optioned by Warner Brothers, and there was/is/will be a translated version coming out from Casterman.

The art is… clear. I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, and I don’t mean to, as it’s immaculate and well-rendered and sells everything it needs to sell. But (and Matz needs to absorb some blame here, as he’s a twelve-panel, 1600-word-per-page writer) there’s nothing that stands out here. It’s all good — rock-solid adherence to character, some interesting design ideas (especially for the character of Slide and the *SPOIILER* weirdly clonelike figure that assassinates him), but nothing here goes above and beyond standard fare, and there is a copout on the very last page that annoyed the hell out of me. Whether that sourced from Matz or Wilson, I do not know.

Wilson’s an old pro, and certainly doesn’t need my praise for validation. But compared to, say, Jacomon (Matz’s partner on Tueur) this seems a lot more paint-by-numbers and a lot less interesting.

Recommend it? Heck yes — but now I feel like I’ve oversold the way the story shifts in the middle. It’s not like a Dusk Till Dawn “HOLY CRAP VAMPIRES” turnaround or anything, just some nice spins that accelerate a pretty ho-hum cop thriller (Polar) in an interesting direction.

Solid work, regardless. Well worth checking out.

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Hauteville House Vol. 1: Zelda

When you’re establishing an alternate-history steampunk-lavish cross-world series, especially one that bumps up against our-Earth history fairly significantly, you could do worse than to jump in with both feet.

So right off the bat: well played, Hauteville House.

Without a preponderance of spoilers, here goes: back in a slightly steampunkier version of 1884, Napoleon is continuing his goal of world conquest, which includes sending troops to Mexico to break through a dimensional barrier in the basement of an ancient fort/temple into Something Weird, which they seem awfully blasé about doing.

Our heroes, with a 19th-century scruffy James Bond type named Gavroche in the lead, are part of loosely affiliated global underground organizations opposed to Napoleon, with Gavroche’s cell run by what seems to be Victor Hugo. Hauteville House, by the way, was Hugo’s actual residence after his self-exile from Napoleonic France, hence the name of the series.

Getting further into the storyline actually illustrates what’s been bothering me about Duval’s script: the above two paragraphs appear in the order they appear in the book, but not in chronological order. Meaning that the series starts with a fairly complex and elaborate set piece in the Mexican desert, then we flash back to a feat of derring-do on a ship with Gavroche, and then we follow Gavroche forward as he begins to unravel — with the help of his secret organization, which includes the sexy sexy American agent Zelda (whose American team seems to be both working with and concurrently to the French branch, judging from a neat bit of betrayal and counter-betrayal at the end of the book, and who inexplicably for a minor character is the eponymous character for this first H.H. — it’s not a trend that continues for the other books), starts to unravel the plot that we expect will lead us to said Mexican fort-temple and the weird portal to another dimension.

This, then, is the question: why bother?

The flashback plot (or the current plot, if the first pages of the book are a flashforward — you see the problem) is perfectly serviceable. Thrilling spy adventures, dirigibles, secret hideaways, sexy sexy Americans, killer automatons with chaingun arms, and so on. It rips around touching all the standard bases for the introduction to a series. We have our cast of characters: the maverick hero, the true love interest, the sexy sexy American love interest, the bearded man who smokes a pipe and shouts orders, the grizzled veteran that always comes through in the clutch, and the nebbish accountant-type/comedic foil. And they rip around the planet spying and blowing things up. It’s all got a whiff of “been there, done that,” but it’s not a bad thing. It pushes all the buttons and fills all the holes.

But this starting set piece in the (relative) future doesn’t really add anything to the equation. We know that the clues our heroes are putting together will bring them to the weird Mexican dig, where they will presumably stop whatever it is that the Napoleonic folks are trying to do. But the flashforward isn’t one of particularly high stakes. Folks are workin’ away at a dimensional thingy. There’s gonna be a fight. That’s about the size of it.

So why not tell the story in order? That way we get the satisfaction of discovering things as our heroes do, with no guarantee they’ll even make it to the right place at the right time. The dimensional dig will seem weirder and more spectacular on reveal because we’ll be invested in its discovery, rather than just having the Big Secret dropped in our laps in the first five pages.

It seems like an odd and mildly lazy storytelling choice: I can’t be arsed to make all of the clue-chasing compelling, so I’ll just put the destination up front and that way if the clues are weak nobody will get bored or confused.

As far as the art goes, I keep vaguely hoping Phil Foglio will suddenly appear and take over. It’s more than adequate ranging all the way up to “quite good,” especially with the book’s setpieces: the lethal chaingun-wielding automatons near the end are particularly delightful. It’s hard, though, to shake the feeling that everything between the book’s three or four Big Moments has been kind of dashed off and slapped together; with a little more coherence of intent it could hit either of two sweet spots, one being Folio steampunk whimsy, and the other something more rooted in the mundane, with enough gravity to keep those sketchy lines from wandering off the page. I’m slamming harder than intended: I can’t say enough that the book is perfectly serviceable as is, but there’s nothing to it artwise that really gives me pause to admire.
Well, “chaingun-armed steam-powered lethal robot lady” was amazingly cool, but then again, how could it not be?

I’m being unnecessarily harsh on Hauteville House, in that it’s not a painful read or anything. I’m looking forward to the rest of the books in the series to date as a way to while away some evenings to come. But this seems like one of those cases where the series hype is more hat than cattle; the whole thing is fine without ever reaching beyond any of the standard parameters of a steampunk book into excellent.* Neither the story nor the art really pushes outside the standards: a few dropped names for alt-history relevance, a few zeppelins and steam-powered doodads for the steampunk quotient, a sexy sexy American for the fanboys, and it’s all just kind of there.

Maybe I’m in for a pleasant surprise and the rest of the series will start to move outside the envelope. For now, it gets marks for being solidly adequate, but nothing new under the steam-powered sun.

*I’m aware that having a working knowledge of the “standard parameters” for steampunk bédé puts me firmly in the realms of the damned.

Filed under: Bande Dessinée, Reviews by Shepherd
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Combat Ordinaire and The Wire: Everything Falls Apart

Discussing translation with Joe Johnson, NBM’s translator for Donjon, during Exploring Bédé #2, the conversation turned to tricky turns of phrase and how to deal with them.

Combat Ordinaire was immediately cited by Joe as an example of going a bit beyond the literal with a translation: Ordinary Victories was the title chosen by NBM in the end, because the French “Combat” is a lot more generalized than the English; “Combat” for us is G.I. Combat, guns a’blazing, while the French word spills over into the general sense of “struggle”. Ordinaire, too, is a bit more banal and mundane than the English “ordinary” but Mundane Struggle would have been much more depressing than Combat Ordinaire – combat ends, after all, and there is some glory to be found in it, and “ordinaire” is more matter-of-fact and less pejorative than “mundane.”

Obsessing over this dance around the title of the book is the perfect good jumping-off point for a review of this four-book sequence by Manu Larcenet: as a series it seems perfectly ordinary, but like its title, the more you look into it, the more you can see.

This also applies, strangely enough, to an HBO television program called The Wire. The connection may not be obvious at first flush, but it’s there, trust me.

At first flush, the two things have very little in common. Combat Ordinaire, after all, is a French comic series about a pot-smoking photographer and, eventually, his extended family. The Wire is a grittier-than-dirt cop show about the Baltimore P.D. But both have some interesting similarities, not least among them that they’re the first things recommended when you seek out recommendations from people knowledgeable about either field. Combat Ordinaire is tossed off in the first sentence of most recommendations of contemporary bédé worth exploring, and everybody from Slate Magazine to Barack Obama has listed The Wire as the most important show on TV in decades.

Awards alone are no real basis for comparison, though, or you could hold up The Metabarons and Murder, She Wrote as two peas in a pond. There’s a deeper current that runs between Combat Ordinaire and The Wire, and it refers back to that title again: an introspective examination of what you might have considered mundane, but an examination so compelling that it becomes vital. When you examine the bédé’s second volume, Les Quantités Neglibles, and The Wire’s second season, this approach and the ties it engenders get more readily apparent.

As mentioned in an earlier capsule, there’s an odd resonance between Combat Ordinaire’s treatment of the closing steel plant, Atelier 22, and the second season of HBO’s The Wire. This may be me doing some mental gymnastics to make the connection – one of my top bédé and what is in my opinion the best television show of the 2000s – but I think the link is solid on a number of levels.

First is the treatment of the decline of blue-collar industry at centre stage in a medium that usually doesn’t focus on such things (Ninth Art on the one hand, police procedurals on the other). It’s no secret that most bédé focus on swords, guns, and space, and most cop shows are all about drugs, murder, and shootouts. Even biographical bédé isn’t uncommon, and the first volume of Combat Ordinaire, a biographical sketch, was an excellent entry in the sub-genre. But I’d argue that Larcenet doesn’t hit the stride of genius until the second volume and the introduction of Atelier 22, which is the counterpoint to Mario’s self-indulgent navel-gazing… the gravity that pulls the aged adolescent into manhood. The impending death of Atelier 22 (and its foreshadowing in the suicide of Marco’s father) is what sets up the point-counterpoint of the series and gives the four-volume sequence its weight: what could have been a bédé about a photographer who smokes too much weed, falls in love, and has a kid suddenly grows into a world, and the reader begins to define the protagonist not on the protagonist’s terms but in terms of the world around him. The Wire, similarly, had a brilliant first season, but the closer examination of the drug trade wasn’t really treading particularly innovative ground — the depth of how they treated Stringer and Avon’s crew was unheard of, but “cops and drug dealers” was in broad terms pretty standard fare. The Wire, like Combat Ordinaire, only hit its contextual stride and relevance with the second “volume” — who’d ever imagine a gripping drama pitting a police investigative unit against stevedores? — and the show’s thesis, that it’s not about police vs. criminals but really about how systems break down, came into play.

Second: the relatively unflinching and unromantic gaze that Larcenet and the The Wire crew treat the subject with. In neither medium are the blue-collar workers of outmoded industry particularly heroic – arguably there is more of a romantic bent to Combat Ordinaire, with Pablo being a voice of wisdom and age (and obviously Larcenet’s proxy, in Volume 4) – but the theme isn’t treated as Evil Globalization Versus The Little Guy in either, rather just the reflection of a hard world moving forward. Nothing to celebrate, obviously, but the symptom of a much greater problem. There’s no gang banding together to save the orphanage from the moustache-twirling bankers here. There’s only the aching, inevitable plod of entropy across the broken back of former industrial giants.

Third, somewhat dovetailing with the second: the palettes. This is more obviously an artistic quality than an overt filmic one, but it applies to both, from the subdued greys and sketchy lines of Larcenet (more on this later) to the range of exemplary actors in The Wire doing pitch-perfect portrayals of everything from hollow-eyed defeat to bit-back directionless rage. In a way, Mario’s job and passion – taking portraits of the factory workers as their way of life degrades around them – is a reflection of the craft and care The Wire’s actors and writers took in creating The Docks in the second season of the show; both are slow, deliberate examinations of something most people don’t give a second thought about, and both prove that in this slow, deliberate examination there’s ample beauty and profundity to be found in even the simplest of professions.

And both are the apex of their craft: while you can always find something to pick at with any work of art, it’s hard to find arguments against either that don’t critique the premise rather than the execution: you may not like what Combat Ordinaire (or The Wire) is about, but it’s nearly impossible to fault the craft behind the final product.

I’ll be writing more on Combat Ordinaire later — this is a first look at the series, but as stated above, the more you look, the more you see. There are many more facets to Larcenet’s book… this is just one of them.

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