The thrill of discovery!
An excellent essay is up at Mindless Ones about discovering the glorious world of French SF bédé. Read!
[Capsule] Zoo, Volume 2
Things pick up — sort of — in the second volume of Zoo, with Frank’s art continuing to astonish and the story kinda-sorta solidifying into something resembling a plot. Well, a bit: by the end of the book, the status quo actually changes.
Maybe I’ve been approaching this from the wrong angle, and the whole point here is that it’s supposed to be a slice-of-life book, bereft of any story of particular consequence… but if so, why set it in a fantastical zoo, on the cusp of a world war? I understand mood pieces, and I understand plot-charged narrative, but this is a sort of in-between fugue, where there are all the elements for a plot out there, but the plot never seems to penetrate the heavy mist that hovers around the book. It’s like there’s a dynamic, tense, tragic story to be told about this beautiful and doomed (I’m assuming) enterprise, but somebody snuck in overnight and pumped the place full of ether, and everyone’s just kind of dopily wandering around an extravagant set.
This isn’t entirely fair — there is a strong thread developing in the character’s sub-plots, circling around the broad themes of ideals and compromise, and there is some forward motion — Célestin, the owner of the Zoo, has to decide whether to stay in his (relatively) comfortable settings or to do what he can as a healer in times of war, and Buggy (and Manon) have to confront the idea of selling their cherished art to keep the Zoo afloat — but it’s glacial, and the grinding pace of the story doesn’t seem to do justice to the gorgeous setting. Speaking of gorgeous, the art continues in its unabashed brilliance:
Incidentally, I apologize for scan quality — old scanner, one man working alone, and all that. Hang on — I don’t apologize. Buy the dang book. It looks much better than these scans do.
There’s a bit of a build towards something conclusive in Volume 3, but I’m not sure what that will entail.
[Capsules] Zoo, Volume 1
The first book of a three-volume series about a zoo in Normandy in the days leading up to World War II. Simply spectacular art — take a look.
I can see what the writer is aiming for, I think — the off-kilter story of an unconventional “family” in a charming and magical setting — but there are a lot of false notes in the first volume. I can’t tell if these are intentional plot points that will be followed up in future volumes, something that escapes me due to the cultural divide, or just plain weird writing, but the two most egregious examples in the first volume are the opening: 16 pages of nearly worldless story that focuses on men with beards in what seems to be Russia, and the Only Blond Man and the Only Blonde Woman — and their pet bear (??) get in what seems to be a completely unprovoked fight with the rest of the village and the woman’s nose gets knocked off by a rifle butt (!!). All of this is “narrated” by a children’s story about a she-wolf getting eaten by dogs and how the nose is where your soul is kept. Huh? That, and a queasy sexual relationship between a character that is obviously presented as a young, young girl (she acts more or less like a 12-year-old, albeit a very well-developed one) and an obviously adult character, really leaves me scratching my head about some of the writing choices; this all happens in a kind of slack atmosphere that has me wondering where exactly all this is headed. There’s no “plot,” per se, in terms of dynamic forces in motion: the feeling of the book is basically “hey here are our characters and a bunch of stuff happens.”
That being said, Zoo is worth a look — the art is gorgeous, and the characters are engaging, even while the plot drifts along more or less aimlessly toward an ending that hints that — perhaps — something of consequence might happen in the second volume.
[Reviews] Combat Ordinaire (Part 1)
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.
[Podcasts] Exploring Bédé #2
Now online! Recording these is becoming a highlight of my month, along with seeing how seasoned comics-readers are now starting to discover and explore bédé.
[Site News] Coming up…
I know it’s been quiet ’round here over the last week, so here’s a quick update on what’s being worked on for future additions to the site:
- More translations for M. Mardi-Gras Descendres, but I’m going to wait until I have at least a few more pages up before I update the pdf;
- A full review of the now-completed Combat Ordinaire, which is sublime;
- A full review of M. Mardi-Gras Descendres, when I finish reading it — it is easily the densest French I have ever attempted to work my way through, and it’s a bear to both read and comprehend;
- An article on Bilal, once I’ve refreshed myself on the Nikopol trilogy;
- Upcoming Venerable Bédé column (#1) in Issue #3 of Comics Now! magazine;
- Upcoming podcast (Exploring Bédé #2) with Bryan Deemer;
- A few capsules on some odds and ends.
Thanks for your patience. I’ve picked up a bit more comics writing work lately, and the world-building elements are eating into time I’d normally be spending on this site.
[Podcasts] Exploring Bédé #2: Donjon Delving
Recorded the second in the Exploring Bédé series of podcasts with Bryan Deemer last night. The focus this time is the Trondheim/Sfar magnum opus Donjon (Dungeon in English) — easily among my favourite series, and one of the most ambitious world-building projects in the history of the Ninth Art.
The podcast features a lengthy interview with NBM’s Donjon translator, Joe Johnson, and Bryan gets some good questions in before I start geeking out about multilingual minutia. Should be online fairly shortly.
In passing: the Donjon series is currently being bundled at most Quebec booksellers in 3-for-2 packs by series: you can pick up the first three volumes of Zénith, Crépuscule, Poitron-Minet and Parade for about CAD$30 in respectable bédé shops. I picked up the first Parade bundle at Planète BD when I was in Montréal two weeks ago — it’s an incredible value, and worth the shipping if you don’t live close enough to Quebec to pick books up first-hand.
[Capsules] Le Tueur, Premier Cycle
Another bit of catch-up… this is currently out in English translation from Archia Studios, and was pointed out by somebody in the podcast forums as being excellent. I’m a bit disturbed by the translation — “Long Feu,” the title of the first volume, was translated as “Long Fire,” which totally misses the play on words in the French, where “Long Feu” actually means missing your mark; a misfire or a failed fuse (called “hang fire” in military circles). “Long Fire” doesn’t mean, well, anything, really. The first six pages in the Archia preview are workmanlike, but lack some of the crackle of the French. Bizarrely, it seems that the artist is the person who translated the book, too.
This sort of thing really makes me worry about the experiences that English-language readers are having when they read these in translation. It’s never too late to learn a second language, folks! And Le Tueur is a good place to start — it’s plot-heavy but text-light, so second-language speakers should be able to keep up with the picture-story and assimilate French from the world balloons.
Ahem. Sorry ’bout the tangent.
The edition I picked up was an offer I couldn’t refuse: the first three books, bound in a slightly undersized hardcover, for about CAD$30.
You can’t see it on my scan, but the killer on the cover is embossed, which makes for a very cool cover when you see it at an angle.
Pitch-perfect, both in writing and art. In terms of modern noir, and in contrast to my weekend’s other read, Blacksad, this is a much better-balanced effort: the art doesn’t have nearly as much flash as Blacksad, but Jacamon is confident, intelligent, and draws to serve the story. Matz’s script is amazing, too, and I’m going to have to seek out his Plomb dans la tête now just to see more of his work.
Jacamon brings to mind some perfect distillation of Mark Hempel and Dean Ormston (particularly Hempel’s Breathtaker and Ormston’s The Eaters): spare lines, but absolutely nothing out of place. The Killer (he has no name) is a perfect cipher and yet still personable and sympathetic in Jacamon’s skilled hands — a feat that would be equally impossible without Matz’s script. What makes Matz’s killer really shine is a combination of his utter and complete lack of apology for his work, and the lack of glamour that Matz brings to his “profession.” This is a workaday killer, and doesn’t fly the bad-childhood or no-women-no-kids flags that generally cripple most protagonist assassins into being cuddly compromises for mass consumption: he’s a dull, dedicated, and somehow engaging man who approaches his work like an electrician might. Physically average (and yet, in one surrender to trope, somehow able to attract absolutely gorgeous women to him constantly), not so great in a hand-to-hand fight, and amazingly mundane in his goals (a life plan that consists of (a) make lots of money, then (b) retire to Venezuela). And the plot doesn’t nice him up to keep our attention, and yet keeps our attention anyway, thanks to a fast-moving storyline with lots of little twists and relentless clarity.
The English version is apparently selling well, and there’s even film chatter in the works. Good on Jacamon and Matz — there’s nothing groundbreaking about The Killer, but compared to a lot of the windier, bad-guy-but-really-just-misunderstood “hardboiled” books on the market, it’s refreshing to see a bare-bones approach that fires on all cylinders.
[Capsules] Blacksad: Quelque part entre les ombres
This, and today’s other capsule review (Le Tueur) are more catch-up than anything: not new series, but remarkable ones that are also available in English. First up: Blacksad.
I am not a furry fan, and I’m not a noir-warmed-over fan (although I am fond of innovative noir spins, like Brick and The Big Lebowski). But I’ve heard so much great stuff about Blacksad from so many quarters that — despite the Emo name and obvious furry inclinations — I decided to pick it up. And how can you not fall in love with art like this?
Or this gorgeous noir staple, the fight in the fog?
Beautiful book.
Perfectly mundane writing.
It’s boilerplate noir, with nothing really distinctive about it, and that — especially given the truly breathtaking art — is a letdown. This may be something that gets rectified in later volumes, but other than a couple of puns and the fact that animals of the same family tree tend to hang out together, there’s nothing particularly “animal-y” about the characters in play. It seems like a bit of a loss to go through all the effort of drawing amazing animal heads on essentially human bodies, but then follow that by making them all act exactly like humans with the occasional animal tic. Taking the above fog-fight scene as an example: does that lizard “see” with his tongue like regular lizards? Or is he basically a human thug with a really lizardy head? There don’t seem to be any “mixed species” animals in the book, but obvious cross-species couples, so what happens if a poodle-man gets an ape-woman pregnant? Why are elephant-men and mice-men the same size? Where are the insect people, the shellfish people, the bacteria people, etc.? This, by the way, is why I don’t do so well with furries in general. It’s a nice visual, but doesn’t at all work once you get past the surface, and evidently the author didn’t really want to work at gettting under the surface of the world beyond it being a Bogart movie with funny-shaped heads. As an aside, the dismaying trend of casual misogyny that seems to plague noir knock-offs, where women are virgins, vixens, victims or vultures — is in full effect, too, which seems a shame: if you’re going to go through the effort to turn every player in the book into an animal, why not mess with the tired old gender roles a bit too?
But gorgeous. Man oh man. Just beautiful. I’ll be picking up the next two volumes, and probably the fourth when it comes out, just to admire that amazing artwork.
The first two books, by the way, are available in English. Unfortunately, the English-language publisher, Ibooks, has apparently gone bankrupt. Volumes 1 and 2 of Blacksad are out in translation but consequently out of print, so you’ll have to hit eBay or used sites to find ‘em. This also leaves the translation of #3 up in the air, but that might be a project for this site in the future, when time allows.
Ordering from America: Quebec sources for bande dessinée
This will be edited and updated as time goes by, but somebody today (June 13, 2008) has just asked how to find bande dessinée in the ‘States that isn’t available through Amazon.ca.
A good question, especially since Amazon’s bédé selection kind of sucks.
With not enough research behind me, my off-the-cuff answer is that your best bet is ordering through a native-to-Quebec book chain. Bédé has always been part of the normal order of business for bookstores here (and with my last few visits to chains in Atlanta, it looks like Borders and Barnes & Noble are starting to catch up with several shelves of graphic novels for sale).
The wrinkle, of course, is that these are Quebec-only chains, and the thought of U.S.-based customers has probably never even crossed their minds.
But, off the top of my head, these are the Big Three booksellers in Quebec, with decent Web sites and order functions (shopping carts, etc):
Biblairie GGC is a smaller chain. They only accept U.S. orders via e-mail.
Renaud-Bray is a larger chain, but oddly doesn’t seem to have as deep a selection as GGC. Shipping looks like $12.95 for a first item (base price), and $2.95 for each subsequent item.
Archambault is the other big Quebec chain. Similar shipping charges.
Those shipping fees kind of make me blink at first, but I just sent two Tintin books to a friend in Toronto for about $10 today, so for cross-border shipping — if you’re ordering more than one book at a time, particularly — that’s not too crazy, I guess.
*Update, 16/06/2008: In Montreal yesterday, I wandered into one of the city’s best BD specialty stores, Planète BD, and they’re very happy to prep mail-order for American customers. Their site is just an events blog with no catalogue to speak of, but if you e-mail them they’re very well-stocked and also quick to recommend new books. Ask for François, Laurent or Daniel.
I will do more research on this and update it periodically if I get better sources.
If you need some help with the French on these sites and Babelfish and/or Google aren’t doing the job, contact me and I’ll see if I can help.