La Bande Dessinée à Rennes, part deux

I have a few last comics-related items to report from my time in Rennes last week. Comics actually got name-checked during one of the plenary lectures of the Arthurian conference, along with adaptations of Arthurian literature into other media. And at the big Arthurian exhibit at a museum in town, there was a copy of a bonus volume that accompanied a nine-part BD rendering of the Arthurian saga in a highly Celticized version (e.g., the character known to English speakers as "Gawain" appears as "Gwalchmei," while "Merlin" is known as "Myrddin"--whence Matt Wagner's Mirth from Mage, incidentally).

The conference organizers also gave us little touristy books about Rennes which featured a few items about the city's local comics connections, including some heavyweight French comics. The artist Franquin, creator of Spirou and Gaston Lagaffe and recipient of the first Grand Prix at Angoulême, passed on the production of the Spirou strip to Jean-Claude Fournier, a Breton cartoonist who ran a studio in Rennes. Astérix and Latraviata, a recent volume in the venerable series about antique Gallic antics, includes scenes set in the ancient Roman site that later developed into the city; the volume was appropriately launched in Rennes, with co-creator Uderzo contributing this drawing for the event:

And a few volumes of Tintin have been released by a Rennes-based publisher as translated into Gallo, a Romance language spoken in upper Brittany, including Rennes, and unrelated to neighboring Celtic Breton. Observe the similarity of Gallo to French in this cover to The Secret of the Unicorn (Le Secret de la Licorne in French):

That's all well and good for BD proper. But I was also delighted to see some revolutionary appropriation of good ol' American comics by King Kirby himself, in a poster promoting a socialist organization. Here's the poster as I found it pasted to what looks suspiciously like a refrigerator by the side of the road:

"Dare to change everything--it's now or never" it proclaims: Oser tout changer; c'est maintenant ou jamais.
And here are some details of panels with their newly revolutionary dialogue! When anger bellows...

...a wind of panic blows...bankers go mad...

...the cops get agitated...

...Good people grow worried...

...and [illegible] question...



I have to say, while Kirby may have caught some flack for the square appearance of some of his characters back in the late 60s/early 70s--especially all the men wearing hats out of doors--I think the energy and drama of his cartooning work great to convey a sense of revolutionary urgency here in a diverse group of persons old and young, male and female, black and white. And suffice it to say that I could not imagine panels by Curt Swan or Wayne Boring being convincingly repurposed in this way. Vive la révolution!

La Bande Dessinée à Rennes

Yesterday I celebrated Bastille Day in the beautiful city of Rennes in Brittany. I had come for an academic conference on Arthuriana, but it didn't start until today, so I spent le quatorze juillet on a stroll around the city with my camera at the ready. Its half-timbered houses are kind of intense:



The concierge at the youth hostel had kindly marked some noteworthy sites on a map for me, so I knew to look out for streets like this one, whose dense crowding, as much as its use of timber, attests to its age:



But—and this I swear—I was not deliberately looking out for this window display, just across the street from the church of St-Sauveur:



Apparently, my comics-store-locating fu is still very much active. Luckily for my wallet and my suitcases, the store was closed for the holiday, though I was tempted by this item:



I was less tempted by these items for sale at a specialty art boutique, although I do enjoy les aventures de Tintin:



The figures in the next window of the store, both Smurfs and Tintin-related, were even less appealing, though I do still own a few Smurfs from my childhood days. But then, my wee plastic Smurfs didn’t cost hundreds of euros:



More appealing—and a hell of a lot more affordable—were the Tintin items available at M’Enfin Librairie, a BD-specific bookstore (which was also, thankfully, shuttered). I’d consider paying 9 euros for a stuffed Milou/Snowy doll:



And I kind of wish the store had been open so I could have sent Isaac one of these Tintin postcards (buddy, you’re getting a card with touristy scenes of Rennes; deal with it):



Of course, if I had managed to get into the store, could I have stopped myself from buying some of these mini-comics, gloriously displayed on a spinner rack?



Among the store’s more expensive merchandise, I was most impressed by this diorama based on the cover to Coke en Stock (The Red Sea Sharks):



Compared with the 250-euro Smurfs, that Tintin set’s a bargain at 49.95 euros. Here’s the original cover (photographed from the postcard), for the sake of comparison:



Another (closed) bookstore showed some of the advantages of buying comics in France as opposed to the States. Not only do they have fresh works by Dupuy & Berberian…



… but they’ve got a jump of several months on us Americans when it comes to Art Spiegelman’s reissued version of Breakdowns (which I’d previously seen in Paris as far back as Purim):



Believe it or not, I passed still another BD-specific bookstore, the aptly named Album/la référence BD:



Here it was the Studio Ghibli merch that tempted me, but again I was spared by the store’s being closed. That also protected me from this intriguing mix of my medieval-literature and modern-comics interests, a BD series based on the Roman de Renart (the medieval “beast epic” whose vulpine protagonist gave his name to the modern French word for fox, renard, replacing the Old French goupil):



(I also included the neighboring comic based on the work of Raymond Queneau, given the influence of his oulipo movement on the oubapo movement that has enriched French comics—of which more in a later post).

At this point, I was quite prepared to see no further evidence of comics in Rennes. But there were to be three more sightings in my first twenty-four hours here. At the restaurant where I ate dinner, one of the dishes on the menu was a fish tartine called “Le Capitaine Haddock” (I didn’t have my camera with me, but take my word for it). And earlier I passed by a gaming store that caters to the D&D crowd but which also had some comics- and horror-nerd items for sale. I thought this pairing of world-destroyers from Lovecraft and Marvel Comics was quite fitting, really:



Incidentally, my sightings today weren’t all comics-related, as I kept my eye out for Arthurian sites and objects, as well; but these little comics-related statues of Tintin and Galactus do remind me of one of the many Arthurian items I spotted—for even the windows of antique stores cater to the doll-collecting nerd, albeit of the Round Table variety:



The most delightful Arthurian and comics-related sightings, however, had to be those toward the end of the afternoon in the rose garden of the enormous Parc du Thabor (which apparently features over 900 types of rose in just one small corner of its grounds). Among the many rose varietals I saw were flowers named for King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, and Courtoisie. But there was also this flower, which definitely crowns the BD-related features of Rennes:



And with that delightful tribute to the co-creator of Astérix, I bid you adieu for now!

Lewis Trondheim's Diablotus (1995)

So, three weeks ago I was in Paris for Easter weekend (though strictly speaking I went for Purim), and while there a friend of a friend directed me to a terrific comics shop near the Bastille called OpéraBD. Please, if you are in Paris and you enjoy comics, go to this store. They're open 'til midnight seven days a week, the staff are friendly, and they have ways of emptying your wallet. Just look what they did to me:

Okay, to be fair: not all of these books and comics were purchased at OpéraBD, though I probably could have found most of them there; and to defend myself: they're not all for me! My lovely wife personally chose about a third of these items, and a few are intended as gifts. But all are fair game for blogging comment, and I'd like to say a few words about the tiniest comic of the lot, which I just put in the mail to Isaac as a present (sorry for the spoiler, Kaiser, but it's for the cause!).

The comic in question is a 22-page story from the prolific master of modern BD, Lewis Trondheim, and it's the tale of a little demon whose name is probably the same as the title:

Visually, it's drawn in much the same style as Le Pays des trois sourires (The Country of the Three Smiles), possibly my favorite Trondheim comic, which employs spare but clean black-and-white doodles and which likewise features the occasional walking skeleton. Unlike Le Pays des trois sourires but like Mister O (also possibly my favorite Trondheim comic), Diablotus is a wordless pantomime. Unlike either of those works, which are formally quite constrained (Le Pays reads like one hundred episodes of a daily comic strip, Mister O adheres to a rigid many-panel grid for a series of single-page gags), Diablotus unfolds like an improvisation, one weird thing after another. It's not entirely devoid of plot, inasmuch as certain strands of incident get wound back into the thread of the story after being set aside for a while, but mostly Diablotus is a kind of comic bagatelle, a brief exercise in invention and style that probably shouldn't be asked to bear too much interpretive weight. Take, for example, this two-page sequence (you'll want to click to enlarge, but take care not to read across the whole page by mistake):

Now, if I wanted to get all "lit crit" about it, I could say something about how the dealing out of punishment in this work inevitably implicates both would-be punisher and would-be victim in an exchange of roles and suffering, and I could make a lot of hay out of the way identities are exchanged and reshaped as characters literally try on different skins or resculpt their familiar faces (as at the end of this sequence). But, you know, that kind of reading just doesn't seem suitably playful for a work as gleefully violent and innocent of consequence as this one. Even when ghosts eat each other in this comic, it's good more for a laugh than a meditation on mortality. At least I hope Isaac laughs when he finally gets to read his copy.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to see a single-page, doodly pantomime strip that shows Isaac and me at our most Trondheim-like, please check out "Because of This, I Cannot Love" in Elm City Jams #3 (the strip is included at that link). And if you want to see the sorts of demons we've turned out on occasion, Demonstration also is but a click away...