Aristophane has been on my radar for awhile as one of those French comic artists I needed to read more of. This year I am extremely happy to have become acquainted with his work. In conjunction with translating an amazing article on Aristophane by Fabrice Neaud, I ended up reading his epic Conte Démoniaque (L’Association, 1996), a powerful Dante-esque story about hell, demons, and the damned (which I hope to write on at another time) and now comes this translation of Les Soeurs Zabime (Ego Comme X, 1996) as The Zabime Sisters.

First Second clearly picked the more accessible of Aristophane’s major works, this one seemingly targeted at young adults (or at least not, like Conte Démoniaque, a work most people would not give to children with its violence, trauma, and pervasive nudity) but also readable and enjoyable for adults. If not a true all ages book, it is a “most ages” book.

If for nothing else, I urge you to read this book for the art. Aristophane’s expressionistic brushwork is captivating and beautful. His line ranges from a thin sinuosity to thick dense slashes of black. In between is the rare (in comics at least) use of dry brush where the depletion of ink causes a disintegration of the density of the line, allowing for the white of the paper to show through and the bristles of the brush to become apparent. It’s a dense and loose style, even the panel borders are dynamic often with a panel having three thin borders and one that splashes into a thick swath of black. You can enjoy this book just for the art. A case in point, though they are shown in a rather reduced size, are the short stories Aristophane’s French publisher Ego Comme X has made available online (in French). Three early prequel/preliminary stories of a sort to this book (click on the little pages on the right), featuring the Zabime sisters, show off his work even if you can’t read it, though, I should note, in these stories, a slightly less evolved form of his style (ie this book is even better). (For those who do read the French text of these, I’ll add that those stories are also less effective, more childish in a way, than this later version of the sisters.)

The story is a fairly simple realism with characters and situations that are easy to accept and believe. The plot itself, such as it is, flows smoothly like a small fragment of life, a day in this case, the first day of summer vacation for the three Zabime sisters. Oddly, the event that is most built up through the course of the story, is one that barely involves the sisters, a fight between two boys, which is witnessed by only one of the sisters. This fight is mentioned early in the book and provides a momentary element of suspense and a sense of time to the story.

But primarily the story is made of small episodes, a busy day for the sisters as they play. What comes through most to me on my two (three?) readings of the book so far is the how much the children commit what one might call small evils against each other: mean jokes, taunting, humiliation, etc. They fight and forgive. These are not the idealized children you find in many stories where the protagonists are all good and the antagonist is clearly limned. There’s a honesty to the depiction that is quite refreshing.

Aristophane keeps the reader from identifying any one of the characters as the primary protagonist by shifting the focalization frequently throughout. Even the kid who has started the fight and is seemingly hated by almost everyone else, is given some amount of focus that softens (if not forgives) his actions. This shifting of focalization is primarily attained through the textual narration. The narration is not prevalent in the book, it just jumps in at certain moments, almost exclusively to give the reader a brief insight into the thoughts/feelings of a character. This is not thought balloon-like internal monologue, rather, the extradiegetic narrator just tells us something about the character: “Celina got up after making them beg her. She took particular pleasure in being pleased with and in feeling indispensable.” (p.4) “Rodrigues was as proud as his brother, maybe even more so. He was radiating self-satisfaction.” (p.18) These moments of narrative insight color our views of the characters, providing information unavailable through the imagery, pointing out motivations for actions and a limited psychology, often the invisible pleasures of taunting a friend. At some points the narration is less successful, offering much more conventionally descriptive text that is an unnecessary addition to the images, such as this panel:

We don’t really need the text here, and unlike most of the narration, it does not give us an internal information.

The story would be interesting, but only so much if it weren’t for the artwork. Aristophane’s brushwork is so loose and expressive. The panels show a fondness for foliage. The lush foliage of the setting (Guadeloupe) fill the pages, often overwhelming even the characters (see the image below) as if Aristophane were creating the landscape itself as the real subject. And perhaps it is. The story takes place almost completely outside, and most of that time is away from any man-made structures.

The images also use expressive effects to underscore the actions, thoughts, or other diegetic content. A few examples to showcase some of Aristophane’s art.

Here the dry brush technique is used to show movement. Similarly we see the use of expressive abstraction, which is used a few times in the book. Here’s another example:

In the image below we see thick brushstrokes which cover the heads of the children as they suffer from the effects of smoking a pipe stolen from one of their fathers:

Also note the use of a wasp(?) as an adjacent symbol to the tobacco effects. The thick strokes are used in the panel below not only as representative abstractions of foliage but also to bring the reader’s view in line with that of the characters, obscuring the object of attention (a baby bird).

Here, the dry brush is applied very lightly, in contrast to the primarily very dense panels, to bring forth the fear of the children:

At times Aristophane’s compositions are so dense and uniform that they lose focus creating an all-over structure that can elude any easy center of attention, perhaps this mirrors the characters themselves as they too lack clear goals or attention. It’s summer vacation after all, and they are young.

Most comics are a blending of story and art, exceptions are rare (plug that Abstract Comics Anthology I’m in here). A comics creator must be both writer and artist, mixing two not necessarily related skills. While most have balanced skills, rare are those who truly shine in both areas. Often one skill outshines the other (might we point to the prominence of autobiographical comics as an indicator of those who are more artist than writers). The mainstream system of divided labor has the advantage of having writers make the story and artists making the art, letting each play to his strengths (at least that’s the idea). You could probably have a fun conversation out of discussing the relative writer/artist balance of various cartoonists. It’s not always possible to nicely divide what is art and what is story, but in some cases these divisions are foregrounded.

Le Voyage brings on these thoughts. Baudoin is a wonderful visual stylist–his art is dynamic, engaging, lovely to behold–but his writing, or at least the story of this volume, is far less interesting, in fact it seems rather clichéd to me. Simon, the protagonist, one day leaves his wife, child, home, and job and starts off on a voyage. This flight is unplanned, rather at the breakfast table his head strangely opens up and starts showing images above it. The first page starts with his wife telling him that he can’t take their cat on vacation, and the image of the cat appears as if on top/coming out of his head (at first you might think it is the cat, but you can see the cat still sitting there). Then as his wife starts talking about visiting her brother on their way to vacation, the cat on his head becomes encased in a cage after which the image/cat jumps away and the cage moves down around Simon’s whole head.

Simon's wife stays unchanging.

It is interesting to note that throughout this scene, Baudoin, despite his loose and ever shifting line work, draws the wife and the child almost exactly the same across a number of panels. During the first seven panels of the book, the wife is drawn the same in five of those panels, her head shown at the same angle with the same expressionless face. The child appears in three of those panel, each time from the same angle with the same expressionless face. On page three (above) again the wife appears repeated and unchanging (albeit from a different angle than the first two pages) in contrast with the man’s changing form.

This opening sequence immediately sets a theme (the man feels trapped, he must flee) and a style, the expressionist/surrealist images that fill the book acting as extra-real visual indicators of emotions/thoughts.

On his way to work, as he rides the metro, Simon’s head starts spouting out a flood of skulls. He flees the metro car. At this point, we’ve got the man with the wife who doesn’t let him do what he wants (very minor things), and the morning commute to his normal job, which is death to the man. Death! I’m not sure if we are supposed to read the wife as a nag or not — mostly because I don’t read her that way — but, because of Simon’s actions (and the way Baudoin draws her), it seems he does.

Later on, this idea is reinforced by an old woman Simon meets in a train. She talks about being on vacation, leaving her pets (fish) with a neighbor and visiting her brother on the way. She mentions how her husband didn’t like her brother, but it doesn’t matter cause her husband is dead. Throughout this scene, Baudoin makes the woman every more grotesque while a cage slowly builds around Simon’s head. We are clearly meant to equate his wife with this grotesquely portrayed old woman.

As the protagonist of the story, Simon doesn’t ever get critically evaluated by the stories. His actions are never questioned. To me, this places the protagonist close to the writer, an identification between Baudoin and Simon which was further gelled when I read in a brief bio of Baudoin, that he actually had a normal office job which he up and quit one day to make comics. (I’ve also read elsewhere that this is a theme he has revisited numerous times.) Though, here, Simon is no artist, in fact, as a character, he seems to exist purely as an empty vessel to meet the characters and events that are the plot of this story. A women falls in love with but you get no sense of why, what attracts her.

The story is a kind of middle class male fantasy, a grown up version of the adolescent power fantasies that fill superhero comics. Here, the male, trapped by job, wife, and child, escapes to an adventure, where he falls in love with a beautiful woman, makes a friend (with some homoerotic undertones), and gets to do what he wants without having to work. He can even pay lip service to his love for his child without actually talking to him at point between the opening and closing of the story (that is, he only speaks to him at the opening and closing).

Simon’s voyage ends when he calls his house and the answering machine only mentions his wife and child (it’s no longer his house, he says). And when asked what he learned on his voyage, the main lesson seems to be about having the woman he fell in love dance for him. There are a lot of other things going on in this story, but at its heart it is about a man who abandons his family and job to have a romantic affair.

Much of my dissatisfaction with the story is perhaps linked to the beginning and the lack of understanding of the man’s dilemma. What we see previous to his flight is brief and far too clichéd to allow any empathy on my part. And the ending also allows for the son to seem perfectly understanding of his parent’s split, ready to meet the new woman in his father’s life. I’m really surprised to learn that Le Voyage won the Alph’Art prize for best scenario at Angoulême in 1997.

So, yeah, the story has issues, but the art is lovely. You can’t fault Baudoin for his brush work, his dynamic line, his dry brush. Nor can you ignore the aforementioned surreal/expressionist elements of his images. This is most prominent in the form of the man’s open head. Throughout the story his head seem to open up and send out or take in images. This is used both as an indicator of his thoughts/feelings and as an indication of new ideas/perceptions coming to him from the outside world. For instance, at one point his new friend Olivier tells Simon about his own voyage. As Olivier talks, Simon’s head illustrates the narrative (see below). In the opposite way, the closed and expressionless face of Simon’s wife and children seem to express their closed off world.

Also take note of the child playing with the ball in the background of those panels. Throughout the panels where Olivier is telling his story, we can see this child and others playing ball in the background. It seems unimportant (and easy to pass over, I did the first time through), until, at the end of Olivier’s story, Simon is actually hit on the back of the head by that same ball (some small revenge for abandoning his son?). It’s a rather subtle way to show parallel events/actions across a sequence of panels. You don’t see that much in a way that isn’t really obvious (the artist wants you to notice the background events as much as the foreground events).

Baudoin makes use of dry brush techniques to add some texture to his ink work. Note the feathery areas of this panel during a scene where Simon is on a sailboat on a stormy sea.

His drawing is loose to begin with but it really unravels and abstracts when he’s showing emotionally charged motion, such as fights, dancing, or sex.

Simon struggles with another man.

Lea dances.

Despite my brief summary of the book above, there are parts of the story that are impressive if rather baffling, in particularly two scenes towards the end of the book. At one point, Simon sits in front of a large mountain that is reflected in a lake beneath it. His head opens up and the mountain is sucked in, the whole world seems to be sucked in and Simon, in the fetal position, travels through time starting at the big bang. We see him in panels with, in rapid succession: dinosaurs, cave men, knights, soldiers, tanks, etc. a rapid trip through successive eras of history. This is like some kind of meditative experience of one-ness with the world, though Baudoin provides no commentary on it, presenting it without any noticeable inflection. It is reminiscent of similar scenes in Tezuka’s Phoenix, though in that case, Tezuka never fails to offer religious/moral commentary.

This is followed up by a scene where Simon is hiking in the mountains. He reaches to pick some flowers just over a ledge (at least, I think that’s what he’s doing) and falls off. He grabs a branches further down and holds on for his life. His head opens up and lets out a long sequence of objects and people from earlier in the story, as if he is replaying the events of the narrative to that point. Some of the people that come out of his head seem to help him climb back to safety, though that is a little unclear.

The image of Lea helps Simon up from the cliff.

If I were to attempt some reading of this scene, I have to equate it with being pulled back from the brink of suicide. While I think Simon is trying to pick a flower, it certainly looks like he is almost purposefully falling off the ledge. The images that come from his head then, might signal the ways he has come back from this potential suicide, capped off by Lea, his new lover, whose image offers him the last boost to reach safety.

Baudoin originally made Le Voyage in 1995 for the Japanese publisher Kodansha (it was in their Morning magazine). In an interview at du9 (translated into English), he notes how it allowed him to think differently about his work, in particular to stretch out scenes in more panels than he would in working with a traditional French publisher.

Baudoin is mostly non-existent in English, though I understand he is highly praised in Europe. I’ve been meaning to try some more translating, so I startedfinished translating this book over at Comix Influx. It’s fairly light on dialogue (and has no captions) so it should go went quick.

Reich Issue 6 Page 4 Panels 5-6

Issue 6 of Elijah Brubaker’s Reich just arrived from Sparkplug. I’ve been reading and enjoying the series since it started–one of the only serialized pamphlets I still get–but haven’t had the time to write about it. Brubaker’s got a great style, geometric, hatched and patterned, with the occasional burst of abstraction and expressionism. The story itself, a biography of Wilhelm Reich, has also proved interesting. Reich was an unusual thinker and character, and he lived in a tumultuous time (Germany in the early part of the 20th century). I wanted to share these panels (above) from the latest issue, one of the more unusual pairs of panels. The first panel shows Reich’s wife at a skewed, dynamic angle, pointing along the same angle as the abstract shapes and lines that form the background. The way she is represented is the normal way Brubaker portrays the characters, with big heads that have a geometric cut to them. Between the lack of representational background and her closed eyes, we see a transition into thought. The second panel’s composition is dynamic, proving a mix of representational figures and expressionist abstractions. Accompanying the wife’s words, her head seems to open up to display a chaos of thoughts and feelings. The abstractions in the second panel are considerably more quick and nervous than the almost dark pall that backs the first panel. Together they make a great transition that is not both technically attractive and thematically expressive.

Someday I’ll write more about the whole series. I do recommend you give it a try.

Issue two of this most unusual 12 issue series (I reviewed issue one here). The story continues as Castle, protagonist, discovers the dangerous side effects of her anti-depressant, and the Senator goes on a rampage trying to find his son’s killer.

I don’t have a lot to add to what I said in my review of the first issue, but I wanted to point out a couple panels.

Here Santoro uses words in the image, not as a visual representation of sound (sound effects, spoken words) or thought (thought balloons), but as descriptive text. In a way this is an abbreviated, more integrated with the art, way of using narration. He could have used a narrative caption “At his house, Dan was listening at the vent…” Instead the panels are labeled: “Dan’s house”, “Listening thru (sic) vent”, and “Dan”. I find some of this text unnecessary, as the art does convey the listening, and we can assume that if it is Dan’s house, we are looking at Dan. Still, it’s an interesting use of text we don’t see much (John Porcellino does something similar which I mentioned in this post).

I just love the expressiveness of these two panels. Castle has just crushed and snorted her anti-depressants. These two panels have a back and forth motion, the first dynamic with movement, the second almost glacially slow and dark. And how about that blue on her face? Wonderful.

Firemen get Castle after an overdose (just following the previous panels). The abstract shapes in the back so clearly illustrate the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, more impressionistic than realistic, but completely readable and effective (even moreso in context of the rest of the panels).

This should be coming through Diamond to comics stores in the near future, with the rest of the issues to follow monthly starting in the new year. This series is going on my best of the year list.

Again, I’m forced to admit that these aren’t entirely to my liking. This is the beginning of what is considered Sterrett’s best years, and on every page the comics look about to break out into something really amazing. Rarely is that potential reached in this selection of strips.

Sterrett’s art is bright, vibrant, and has a certain flat, angular quality that somehow stays fluid. He uses patterns, checkers and polka dots, especially, to great effect. The brightly colored patterns add a sense of movement to a lot of the images. His style of drawing flowers and plants is oddly abstract, that makes them look like something from an alien planet.

At times he distorts the characters and backgrounds in surprising ways. One strip, which I’ve seen reprinted in a few books, has Paw wandering the house wearing Maw’s glasses. Everything (except Paw, we see him, but everything else we see through his eyes) is distorted like a funhouse mirror reflection. It’s a superb strip, showing what Sterrett could do when he started breaking from the norm.

This is half the Sunday strip.

His night scenes are also wonderful: large swatches of black, a jazzy yellow moon that’s always moving about, and the distortion of perception that comes in the dark when one can barely see.

This is half the Sunday strip.