The Comics Bureau

I’ve pos­ted about this before, but thought that Greg McElhatton’s review of Willy Linthout’s ‘Years of the Ele­phant’ deserved a link.

Linthout cre­ates Charles Ger­mon­prez as his alter ego in Years of the Ele­phant, a busi­ness­man in his 50s liv­ing with his wife Simone, whose son Jack has just leapt off the roof of their apart­ment build­ing to his death. There’s no warn­ing, no sign that this is com­ing, and Linthout appro­pri­ately starts the book with a one-page strip as a typ­ical day is sud­denly shattered by the arrival of police at the door bear­ing the bad news. As Charles is reel­ing from the shock, we get the title pages and intro­duc­tion, almost like the open­ing cred­its after a teaser on tele­vi­sion. In some ways, Years of the Ele­phant starts with a punch to the gut and never relents from that moment on.

It’s dif­fi­cult at times to read Years of the Ele­phant, to see the grief, des­pair, and even delu­sions that Charles goes through in the days, months, and years that fol­low. Jack was Charles’s only son, and the loss quickly turns into a linger­ing specter that refuses to let go. Some scenes look at first to be played for laughs, as Charles tries to save the the pave­ment that Jack’s chalk out­line was upon, or when the click­ing noises of a breath­ing appar­atus are believed to be a mes­sage from bey­ond the grave for Charles. The laughter, though, is almost a hys­ter­ical giggle more than any­thing else. As Charles goes through what appears to be a series of men­tal break­downs, his pre­cari­ous grip on real­ity slips bit by bit. What might ini­tially look to be cop­ing mech­an­isms rap­idly turn into dan­ger­ous delu­sions, ones that help Charles avoid the sad­ness that threatens to over­take him, and as a reader you begin to won­der at what point things will turn back to nor­mal for Charles. Except, of course, in some ways that’s the big mes­sage of Years of the Ele­phant; it will never be “nor­mal” again for Charles. The sui­cide of his only child is most likely going to haunt him for the rest of his life, even if the degree to which it does so might change over time.

Matt Brady, over at War­ren Peace writes up a couple of knock-down art­icles on Didier Lefevre & Emmanuel Guibert’s The Pho­to­grapher. The first is a par­tic­u­larly insight­ful review;

While this is Lefevre’s story, told dir­ectly from his per­spect­ive and mak­ing heavy use of his memor­ies and accom­pan­ied by hun­dreds of the pho­to­graphs that he took, French car­toon­ist Emmanuel Guibert is the one that really brings it to life in com­ics form, cap­tur­ing the like­nesses of every­one Lefevre encountered and mak­ing the land­scapes and vil­lages seem like real, lived-in loc­ales. The pho­tos are inter­spersed through­out the pages, such that they often seem like com­ics pan­els among the rest of the illus­tra­tions, but Guibert fills everything out, mak­ing the char­ac­ters seem to move and live in the way that static pho­to­graphy can’t. But he does this without being showy, stick­ing to muted col­ors and subtle fig­ure work. It’s only when you look closer that you real­ize the great work he does, cap­tur­ing real­istic ges­tures, move­ments, and facial expres­sions, and put­ting just the right amount of detail into the folds of cloth­ing and the objects in the back­grounds, such that the art­work doesn’t stand out from the pho­tos, but also emphas­izes the way they can more fully cap­ture real­ity. It’s all per­fectly paced and put together for the best flow, pro­pelling the eye across the page without call­ing atten­tion to itself.

The second is a short ana­lysis of one sequence from the book;

This is actu­ally nearly four pages of com­ics, with two pan­els per tier, but I sep­ar­ated them and laid them out hori­zont­ally to demon­strate the way Guibert makes the whole thing work as one long walk through a detailed land­scape. It’s pretty gor­geous, like one of those scenes in a Woody Allen movie in which two char­ac­ters have a con­ver­sa­tion while walk­ing down a Man­hat­tan side­walk and the cam­era just fol­lows them, never look­ing away. But what struck me was how well the chan­ging land­scape matches the mood of the scene; at the begin­ning, when the con­ver­sa­tion between Didier Lefevre, the pho­to­grapher of the title, and Juli­ette, the leader of the human­it­arian mis­sion to Afgh­anistan, is lim­ited to a fairly benign sub­ject, they are cross­ing smooth ground:

This of course goes without say­ing, but if you don’t already own a copy, sweep your com­puter from the desk and run out without a coat or shoes to get a copy of this book. I’m sure I’m not alone in stat­ing that this isn’t just a comic book. This is a mas­ter­class in the sub­tleties of visual storytelling.

Paul Gravett writes an art­icle on Angouleme 2010. I really want to get to this. Really badly.

It’s that time of year again when people start mak­ing their ‘Best of the Year’ lists. When it comes to com­ics, I’ll be doing mine quite soon, as well as tip­ping you off on the Most Anti­cip­ated Graphic Nov­els to come out through 2010. Also, as before, I’ll be sound­ing out inter­na­tional con­nois­seurs for their favour­ites. Mean­while, over in France on Fri­day 4 Decem­ber, the 37th Angoulême Inter­na­tional Com­ics Fest­ival announced at its Press Con­fer­ence their three offi­cial selec­tions of the 86 best bande dess­inée books out of nearly 5,000 pub­lished in France in 2009. Can you ima­gine hav­ing this much choice, this huge an annual production?

Head over to Paul Gravett’s site to read a review of Flem­ish car­toon­ist Willy Linthout’s ‘Years of the Elephant’.

And then in a mas­ter­stroke, he solves the ques­tion of how to rep­res­ent and per­son­ify his own dead son by using the chalk out­line of his fallen body. And in turn, this leads to his decision, based on his Flem­ish pub­lisher Ria Schulpen’s sug­ges­tion, not to com­plete his sketched, uninked draw­ings but to leave them in their unre­fined, pen­cilled state, urgent, vul­ner­able, as if to emphas­ise the human hand and heart behind them.

Willy will be appear­ing as part of the Com­ica events this year in con­ver­sa­tion with former children’s laur­eate Michael Rosen on the 23rd Novem­ber at the ICA. Details here.

Richard Bruton over at For­bid­den Planet sings up some praise for Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Fre­deric Lemercier’s ‘The Photographer’.

The Pho­to­grapher, thank­fully, lives up to the prom­ise and then some. It’s no short read either, the amount of visual and writ­ten inform­a­tion that the reader is presen­ted with, both in Lefevre’s beau­ti­ful and haunt­ing pho­to­graphy and Guibert’s incred­ibly express­ive, detailed and emotive art­work sequences makes it really dense, involving and rewarding.

Also well worth check­ing out is Guibert’s Ink­studs inter­view.

Derik Bad­man takes apart trans­lates an art­icle ori­gin­ally writ­ten in French in which David Tur­geon takes apart Gil­bert Hernandez’s Poison River and sees what makes it tick for French site du9.org.

The dens­ity of nar­ra­tion, the abund­ance of situ­ations in a lim­ited space, and the com­pressed rep­res­ent­a­tion of time all par­ti­cip­ate together to give the story a schem­atic impres­sion. In other words, Hernan­dez tells his stor­ies in broad strokes, show­ing details only when neces­sary. Among other things, this allows him to age his char­ac­ters sig­ni­fic­antly in only a few pages or to show the type of large-scale social or polit­ical evol­u­tions that would be dif­fi­cult to notice were the story told “step by step.” On the other hand, these char­ac­ter­ist­ics seems to pre­vent a cer­tain degree of fluid­ity in the story.

Derik Bad­man writes a brief post on Grand­papier, a pro­ject star­ted by Bel­gian pub­lisher L’Employé de Moi. The site fea­tures work in French and Eng­lish as well as a num­ber of word­less strips.

Recent Com­ics Bur­eau pos­tee Darryl Cun­ning­ham com­ments on Derik’s post;

I was recently asked if I wanted to con­trib­ute to Grand­Papier, and have now been doing so for a num­ber of weeks. I find the style of the com­ics on the site to be so much more play­ful than US or UK com­ics. There’s a real fresh­ness about the approach there which made me real­ise how staid Eng­lish lan­guage comix have become.

Look­ing at the qual­ity of the work, this is a hard opin­ion to dis­agree with.

Fol­low­ing a recom­mend­a­tion by Aiden Smith, here is a good review of Lewis Trond­heim and Olivier Appol­lodorus’ Bour­bon Island 1730 over at Madink­beard, which dis­cusses POV and narration.

A ten page pre­view is avail­able at First Second Books.

If you haven’t heard of Lewis Trond­heim before, have a look at his web­site, read up on L’Association, read his inter­view on The Com­ics Journal and buy all his books.