Im Herzen von Strapazin

EDMOND, un portrait de Baudoin - Coda

If you read the quote below you will understand perfectly why the comics milieu (comics publishers especially) is my enemy.

I also wonder why the State (and I mean every State) spends so much money sponsoring the arts while completely forgetting art comics. It's no one's land, really... Great comics fall outside the industry and outside mainstream culture as well...

...And yet... for a while, at the beginning of the 1990s (and during most of the decade), everything seemed possible... somehow...

EDMOND, un portrait de Baudoin

EDMOND, un portrait de Baudoin (trailer) from Kaleo films on Vimeo.

Pour justifier son refus de lui accorder un prix prestigieux, un éditeur lui confia un jour: "Si vous aviez été récompensé, cela aurait tué la bande dessinée telle qu'on la connait aujourd'hui. Vous, Baudoin, vous ne faites pas la bande-dessinée, vous faites de l'art, de la poesie. Ça ne nous intéresse pas.

To justify his refusal to give him a prestigious award a publisher admitted one day: "If you had received it, it would have killed comics as we know them today. You, Baudoin, you don't create comics, you create art and poetry. That doesn't interest us.

A Comparison

Remember when I said below that craft is not enough to produce great art, but a world vision isn't enough either?...

Robb Armstrong, "Jump Start," Sunday comic strip, January 17, 1993 [originally published in color].

The above Sunday page doesn't represent offensive stereotypes of black people. On the contrary, these characters act and talk like real people which means that the characterization is quite well done... and yet... 

The drawing style is dull: the lines are heavy; the backgrounds either don't exist or are a generic "I drew these books and bookshelves and people, but I could very well draw other books and bookshelves and people instead" kind of backgrounds...

Worst of all though: the situation depicted is rather plain and the worthwhile anti-racist message lacks any kind of punch (even if the punch line, precisely, is the best part of the page). 

Now, compare the page above with these two panels below (I don't think that I need to add anything; the power of the images and the power of the words talk for themselves):

Héctor Germán Oesterheld (w), Alberto Breccia (a), "Mort Cinder," Misterix # 799, March 6, 1964. [Night at the Thermopylae. Some wounded man complains. He must be a Persian to wail like that... / The Fates weaving, laughing because they have almost no thread... So many lives will end soon...]