Philippe Druillet's and Moebius' Approche Sur Centauri - Coda

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1., 2. Moebius' high tech, clean, controlled environment ("Approche sur Centauri"'s first page) contrasts with Druillet's monsters ("Approche sur Centauri"'s fifth page); as Alan Moore put it in his character William Gull's mouth (From Hell volume 7, April 1995): "With all your shimmering numbers and your lights, think not to be inured to history. It's black root succours you. it is inside you." Druillet's and Moebius' character confronts an irrational, dark, world inside himself;

3., 4. in "Cauchemar blanc" another confrontation occurs, between a dream (the nightmare of a racist: him and his pals try to kill an Arab and fail miserably because people do the right thing)...;

5. ...and reality (in which they don't fail and people act cowardly).

The title in white over black mirrors the paradox that's the story's subtext: it's reality that is nightmarish, not the dream world (the nightmare of a racist can only be a good thing: a white nightmare). In Métal Hurlant # 4 (October, 1975) Moebius said (my translation): "there's no reason why a story has to be like a house, with a door to go in, windows to look at the trees outside and a chimney to let smoke out... We can imagine a story like an elephant, like a wheat field or the flame of a match." "Cauchemar blanc" has the form of a möbius strip.
Finally: I have some reservations about the reading order of the inserts in number four: how come we see Barjout with a gun in his hand before seeing him picking it up from the glove compartment?

All images as published in Moebius, Oeuvres completes tome 1, Le Bandard fou, John Watercolor, Cauchemar blanc (Les Humanoïdes Associés, June, 1980).

"Cauchemar blanc," with its contemporary setting and "fait divers" content, is an anomaly in this sci-fi author's oeuvre (a mix of the EC tradition and the underground, according to Bruno Lecigne and Jean-Pierre Tamine: Fac-simile, 1983, Futuropolis: 59). Nonetheless it was highly influential during the seventies in France. It inspired Jacques Tardi, for instance. For that alone it deserves a place in comics history.

Philippe Druillet's and Moebius' Approche Sur Centauri

The only genre that I hate more than science fiction is sword and sorcery fantasy. It seems to me that it's pretty dumb to hate a whole genre, though. I can think of two reasons why this is so: 1) it all depends on what we mean when we say the word "genre" (genre paintings, for instance, are representations of scenes from everyday life; obviously, I would never be against that); 2) even if we have an essentialist view of a certain genre with a bad rep (and we belong to the maledicent choir) there's always the possibility that work x or work y "transcend the genre to which it belongs to" (a very talented film director, to put it mildly, Stanley Kubrick, built his whole career around this concept). The truth is that, from Philip Nowlan's Buck Rogers newspaper comics series to Alejandro Jodorowsky's and Moebius' Metal hurlant's "Incal" mini-series and beyond (the Metabarons Universe, for instance) science fiction in comics has been pretty mediocre. That's why the story "Approche Sur Centauri" (approaching Centauri) by Philippe Druillet and Jean Giraud / Moebius (Metal hurlant # 1; first quarter of 1975) is a surprising little gem.

In the early seventies French comics were living a small revolution. Bruno Lecigne explained what happened then (my translation): "[The comics milieu] witnessed many indelible phenomena being set in motion: readjustment (arbitrarily aimed at children for more than 50 years, comics conquered an adult public; the same public it was destined to in the first place); expansion (in its forms and themes); channeling (the adult market ends up being institutionalized; fixed in tendencies and reference spaces). It can't be doubted that the comics expansion outside of its traditional field before 1970 (culture consumed by children, that is) must be linked to the more general "counterculture" flight. It must be linked to the irruption of a culture at the margins of the establishment. A culture that also produced the massive success of rock [music] and science fiction. This means that the readjustment and the expansion of comics after 1968 are grounded in a series of misunderstandings - but that's another story." (Avanies et mascarade, 1981, Futuropolis: 7; it's not a coincidence that Metal hurlant was translated into English as Heavy Metal.)

I can't continue this tale as Bruno Lecigne would, of course, but, my interpretation of the misunderstanding he talks about lies in the immature nature of most of what was produced back then under the "adult" label. That's why I prefer to talk about a small revolution instead of a real one. To prove my point we just have to look at how easily the mainstream absorbed these innovations (conversely it still can't co-opt the Frémok). Bill Griffith sensed this problem in America as early as 1973: "Hey! I wanta know what's "underground" about rotting corpses! Besides buryin' 'em, huh? And inflated rubber women with bulbous, 48-inch chests? And all that half-baked, crackpot science fiction creeping onto the racks that was pathetic back in the '50s when it was at least new? [...] When an artist's central characters and/or protagonists are depicted as overly developed, seminude musclemen, or robots, or cute humanoids with beguiling eyes, the line between what's loosely defined as "the concerns of underground comix" and simple escapist fiction with, perhaps, a facade of "relevance" becomes more than hazy. It disappears entirely. And, aside from the explicit sex and the use of naughty words, it falls into the "above-ground" category with ease. Which is probably where it belongs and, most likely, will end up." (The Comics Journal # 157, March, 1993: 56 [San Francisco's Phoenix, early 1973].) Moebius' science fiction was very new at the time and helped to revolutionize film's conceptual design with Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and David Lisberger's Tron (1982). (He didn't belong to EC Comics' cheesy tradition, which was what Bill Griffith was referring to when he mentioned science fiction.) Even so all the problems that we can detect in Richard Corben's "prepubescent" fiction (Bill Griffith: 57) also contaminate Moebius' so-called, adult science fiction tales.

Why is "Approche sur Centauri" great, then? Because it confronts our very advanced and rational, clean, technology (as seen in the first panel) with irrational monstrosities that lie in deep space (Philippe Druillet calls this wrong continuum "hyper space"; maybe we would call it "virtual reality" today?). In the end, this little tale explores the same mind regions as Alan Moore's and Eddie Campbell's From Hell.
"Approche sur Centauri" isn't in my canon, but it could be, perhaps? Anyway, the only Moebius' story that definitely belongs in there is "Cauchemar blanc" (white nightmare), L'Écho des savanes # 8 (June, 1974). But that, as Bruno Lecigne put it above, is another story...

Image:
eye candy:
Moebius' pseudo adult-comics: "Absoluten Calfeutrail" (La deviation, 1980, Les Humanoïdes Associés [Métal hurlant # 16, April 1977]).
PS Being a genre that I tend to dislike (mostly because it's riddled with escapism) I haven't read many science fiction comics (my opinion is, thus, not very well-grounded), but I included two stories in my canon that are part of said genre (both tainted by politics, though): I labirinti (labyrinths), by Guido Buzzelli, and El Eternauta (the Eternaut) by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López. I could also include HP by Alexis Kostandi and Guido Buzzelli.

Carlos Sampayo's and José Munoz's Sudor Sudaca - Coda

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1. Alack Sinner' first published page: Alterlinus # 1 (vol. 2, January 1975);

2. José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo meet their creation in "La vita non é un fumetto, baby..." (life's not a comic, baby); Perché lo fai, Alack Sinner?, Milano Libri: 1976;

3. "I love to be with you and I love you..." / "But we'll not meet each other again... ...Why?..." / "Your sadness..." / "My sadness."; dark city: "Città Oscura"'s last page as it was published in Charlie Mensuel # 106 (November, 1977);

4. "I mean... the marines were for the second time in Nicaragua. Well, then Sandino told them to go away, but the marines didn't want to... What were the marines doing in Nicaragua, considering that it wasn't their country?" / "Stealing, killing, occupying, I know what they were doing..." / "I ask the respectable audience. What were they doing?" / "What were they doing?"; "They occupied."; "They protected the United Fruit..."; "Yes, yes, the fruits."; just a puppet show by Muñoz and Sampayo as published in Nicaragua (Casterman: 2000 [1986]);

5. a Diane Arbusesque "comédie humaine" in the foreground while the story is elsewhere: "Città Oscura" (Charlie Mensuel # 106; November, 1977);

6. a kiosko (newsstand) in Parque Rivadavia (Buenos Aires); the characters say: "And now, what?... The kids?"; "The kids are young Negrita."; the sign announces old Argentinian children's comics from the fifties and sixties: Misterix: 290 - 325; Rayo Rojo: assorted numbers; Frontera: years 61 - 62 - 63. Fine state."; a child (mirroring José Muñoz's own childhood) reads Rayo Rojo with enthusiasm (Sudor Sudaca; La Cúpula: 1990 [1983]);

7. an heir apparent to his role models Alberto Breccia and Hugo Pratt, José Muñoz is a master of the chiaroscuro: cover for Charlie Mensuel # 106 (November, 1977).

Texts by Paul Gravett and Oscar Zarate:

http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/096_munoz/096_munoz.htm

A Muñoz & Sampayo interview with Matthias Wivel and T. Thorhauge:

http://www.metabunker.dk/?p=177

Carlos Sampayo's and José Munoz's Sudor Sudaca

Carlos Sampayo and José Muñoz did, in my opinion, the only real noir comics series (or otherwise) ever: Alack Sinner (first appearance in the Italian magazine Alterlinus: January 1975; the magazine was numbered # 1 every January; 1975 was the mag's second year). Even so they weren't happy duplicating the stereotypes of the genre and their series improved immensely when the clichéd ex-cop private detective became a taxi driver. The only thing that mattered from that point on were human relationships and the big, grotesque, protean, expressionistic, dark, city of New York around the main characters.

José Muñoz described Alack Sinner's creation in an interview with Eddy Devolder (my translation): "We always talked a lot more about our lives in our comics than about the books that we've read or the films that we've watched. [...] [W]e gave ourselves a lot in our relationship. That's how Alack Sinner was born. [...] The whole story of Alack Sinner and his daughter, for instance, is a transposition of what I experienced with my own daughter." (José Muñoz: Le dessin duel; Vertige Graphic: April 1994: 43.) Conversely: "Alack Sinner was born from our fascination with melancholic, tender, nocturnal, characters." (44)

About New York, here's what José Muñoz said in the same interview: "As a place in the mind, New York, which we visited in 1981 only, offered us the possibility of telling stories in which we could mix a varied array of milieux. But, deep inside ourselves, New York was like an ideal Buenos Aires. [...] At that point we didn't have, by the way, any eagerness to tell stories with an Argentinian background." (44)

I remember a scene in one of my favorite movies, Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky (1966) in which Andrei is just walking. At a certain point a rider appears, coming from the opposite direction. The camera focuses this new character for a while until the horseman disappears. This simple, strange, interlude always seemed to me the mark of a genius (something as weird as Goya's dog). It reminds us that there's life beyond the diegesis. The world is larger than the stories we are witnessing. In the stories of the Alack Sinner's series and also in Sudor Sudaca (spic's sweat; the word "sudaca" is as offensive as the word "spic," but the origin is different: it comes from the word "sudamericano," "South American") the same effect happens when bystanders are depicted by José Muñoz in an expressionistic way. Carlos Sampayo also allows us to read graffiti, "hear" fragments of the people's conversations, or "listen to" their thoughts. Muñoz and Sampayo transport us to a nightmarish Diane Arbusesque world. Alack Sinner is part of that meagre gallery of what I called elsewhere "the absent hero." Against North American inspired mass art hero mythology, the true anti-hero that is Alack Sinner disappears gradually to show the world around him. This is an Argentinian tradition that goes back to the often lauded Oesterheldian "collective hero" (what we have here is the anonymous collective anti-hero).

Sudor Sudaca (first appearance in Frigidaire # 19, June, 1982) is a short series of short fragmented stories about the experience of being an immigrant. This topic can also be found in a couple of Alack Sinner episodes: "Constancio y Manolo" (Constancio and Manolo; Charlie Mensuel # 98: Mars, 1977); "Pépé l'architecte" (Pepe, the architect) in Le bar à Joe (Joe's bar; published in book form by Casterman: 1981 [1978]).

José Muñoz was the most successful comics artist to attend the Escuela Panamericana de Arte during the fifties. He was Alberto Breccia's student and admired Hugo Pratt's art. At a very young age he began drawing for Editorial Frontera. He drew Ernie Pike episodes and assisted Solano Lopez as a ghost artist in El Eternauta (writing by Héctor Germán Oesterheld). In 1963 Hugo Pratt hired him to draw Precinto 56 for Misterix magazine. The series' main character, Zero Galván, was a kind of Alack Sinner's forefather (scripts by Eugenio Zappietro, alias Ray Collins). In 1972 José Muñoz leaves Argentina. He'll meet Carlos Sampayo in Barcelona. Needless to say that Sudor Sudaca is a distillation of their experiences as immigrants in Europe. As Carlos Sampayo put it in the intro to La Cupula's edition (1990: 8; my translation): "Today, temporarily reduced to being a Sudaca, I'm a foreigner forever; that's what I am where I live - Spain - and, going back, that's what I would be in my homeland. Personally I think that I have no other roots than the language in which I express myself, writing and talking, thinking and dreaming (sometimes I also dream in Italian, a language that's part of a not so distant past). My roots are in the language of my childhood (my homeland, as Fernando Pessoa put it refering to the Portuguese language).

I'm a foreigner forever, not yet as free as the air, but I aspire to its state of weightlessness."

An important piece of the puzzle is missing: politics. Muñoz and Sampayo said some bad things in their comics about their cousins from the north's world hegemony; but that's another story...

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the confrontation between the clean, self-righteous (right wing) hero of mass comics and Muñoz and Sampayo's anti-hero (a North vs. South confrontation?): "Scintille (...fiamme, fumo...)" (sparks, flames, smoke): Perche lo fai Alack Sinner? (why do you do it, Alack Sinner?); Milano Libri: 1976.

PS A great essay that mentions Sudor Sudaca (the only thing that I don't understand is why "Fernando Pessoa" is substituted by "popular belief" at the end: page 25):

http://www.camouflagecomics.com/pdf/06_reggiani_en.pdf

Vincent Fortemps' Cimes - Coda

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1. someone falling into the abyss in a Vincent Fortemps' comic before Cimes: Frigobox # 1 (November, 1994); an allegory of the risks we take to attain what we desire?;

2., 3. vulture and carrion; plus: a drunkard vomiting in Cimes (Fréon: 1997; as someone put it in the Frémok site: one of the heights of the art form; the two panel page is used by many artists to dissociate themselves from a children's comics' look);

4. seagulls in La digue (Amok: November 2001);

5. "Cale sèche" (dry dock): Liplezen / Lieux sans frontières / Distant Voices; Vincent Fortemps in color: artists from three groups (Bill, Pelure Amère, Frigoproduction) draw Molenbeek (February, 1995);

6., 7., 8.: three artists who published in Frigobox:

6. Alberto Breccia's page in Frigobox # 4 (September, 1995);

7. Frigorevue's publisher Alain Corbel's page for "La fosse" (the pit; Récits de villes: Frigobox série II vol. 2 - Fréon: February 2000);

8. Martin tom Dieck's page in "Territiroirs: (ciré)" (an untranslatable word play between "territoire" - territory - and "tiroir" - drawer -; "ciré" means "waxed"): Récits de villes: Frigobox série II vol. 3 (Fréon: October 2000).

Vincent Fortemps' Cimes

I agree with almost everything that Jean-Christophe Menu has to say about comics and the comics milieu (from the top of my head, I just remember not being as enthusiastic as he is about Jean-Claude Forest). I particularly remember a great text signed by him in Oupus 1 (L'Association: January, 1997): "Ouvre-Boîte-Po." In L'association's great magazine L'éprouvette Jean-Christophe Menu tried to revive the concept of the avant-garde because (my translation) "If we embrace the idea that everything was already done in literature and the visual arts the avant-garde is effectively impossible (this seems to be confirmed by the immense vacuity of these fields' production); it's not the same thing for comics yet, maybe. Comics are belated." (L'éprouvette # 1; L'Association, January 2006: 174.) Jean-Christophe Menu is right if we consider the restrict field only. As he puts it (again, my translation): "If we compare comics with other disciplines, they're at a primitive stage. Not only because of their poor criticism, but also because of their practitioners' lack of interest in putting their language in perspective with anything else (even their own history)." That's why those who watch the comics phenomenon from afar (writing books about them even (!): e. g. David Carrier in The Aesthetics of Comics; The Pennsylvania State University Press: 2001) claim that comics don't evolve. In his excellent book Unpopular Culture (University of Toronto Press: 2007; 70) Bart Beaty calls this late avant-garde a "Postmodern modernism." From this point of view few comics publishers were as avant-garde as Belgian publishing house Fréon. After graduating from Sint Lukas (Saint-Luc) school in Brussels, Thierry Van Hasselt, Vincent Fortemps, Olivier Deprez, Jean-Christophe Long, Olivier Poppe, felt that their work didn't fit in any publishing house around. That's when they decided to publish Frigorevue (1992). Joining forces with Alain Corbel they'll publish four issues of the magazine until 1995. Many other artists will see their work published both in Frigorevue and Frigobox (ten issues of the latter were published from 1994 to 1999): Denis Deprez, Dominique Goblet, Eric Lambé, Paz Boïra, Frédéric Coché, etc... (Argentinians, and Uruguayan, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Alberto and Henrique Breccia included, proving that their work is as avant-garde as the most extreme ones in the restricted field; a special word also for Spaniard Ricard Castells). It was in Frigobox # 5 (December, 1995: 31 - 37) that Jan Baetens published his essay "Autarcic Comix" (an European alternative comics convention: Brussels, October 6 - 8, 1995) where he noted: "Autarcic Comics [...] is not postmodern. Conversely it is - and that alone is an event - an aspiration that's decidedly modern."

Cimes (heights), by Vincent Fortemps, is a wordless book published by Fréon in 1997. Fortemps' technique is quite unusual to begin with: litho crayon on acetate, scratched with an X-Acto knife. One of the most vivid proofs, in my opinion, of most comics artists' conformism is the baffling persistence of old modes of expression and techniques. Why do they continue to work like their grandfathers did without questioning caricature and India ink on white paper?
Anyway, Cimes is also a very somber book, with ominous musicians playing a dark music (one imagines) in most of the pages and vultures circling high above the heights of the title, waiting for those who are pushed from the top of the mountain (I also imagine Cimes as animation: it would be great). Vincent Fortemps' art is highly impressionistic, suggesting a lot more than showing or telling anything. We construct the story on our heads, nothing's pre-digested...
Apart from Cimes Vincent Fortemps also participated in Frigobox with "Par les sillons" (through the tracks), a rural tale. He published also the book La Digue (the sea dike) at Amok (2001; Amok and Fréon merged, forming Frémok - FRMK - on June 22, 2002), among other books, most notably the monumental Chantier Musil (coulisse) - Musil's working site (backstage) -; 2003. Chantier Musil was a dance show by choreographer François Verret. In it Vincent Fortemps drew in loco projecting his drawings behind the performers.

Frémok's site:
http://www.fremok.org/

An interview (in French):
http://du9.org/Freon-les-agitateurs-culturels

Chantier Musil:
http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_03/aug03/sm_rev_compagnie_francois_verret_0803.htm

The first ten pages of Chantier Musil (coulisse):

http://www.fremok.org/images/livres/PDF/chantiermusil.pdf

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Pedro Nora's interpretation of Art Spiegelman's Maus. Catalogue of the Self-Service exhibition at Casa Fernando Pessoa (with poems by Jan Baetens; June - September); Bedeteca de Lisboa, Fréon: 2001.

Duarte d'Armas' Livro das Fortalezas

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This is the first book mentioned on my blog that's not listed in my first post. This is so because I don't think that it is a great work of art. It's an amazing and fascinating curio though, and, I suppose, an anomaly in the extended comics field's history (if, by any chance, any of you know of something that resembles Duarte d'Armas' Livro das Fortalezas - the fortresses' book -, I'd love to hear about it, of course).

In my last post I wrote, describing a link: "A Robert Weaver slideshow (a visual reportage, way before Joe Sacco: February, 1962)." Now, can you imagine a visual reportage done in 1509, 1510?

Around that date king Manuel I of Portugal (r. 1495 - 1521), was worried and wanted to know in which condition were his defences near the border. To get this info he sent draughtsman Duarte d'Armas (Duarte de Armas in today's orthography), with a valet on foot, who drew all the towns that he visited while surrounding the rectangle: from the South to the North and, then, from the East to the West. His book (done in parchment) is a travelogue.

Unfortunately Duarte de Armas was more interested in buildings than he was interested in people. Even so he shows us some brief glimpses of life as it was at the beginning of the 16th century. Particularly shocking to our contemporary eyes are the gallows with which every town "greeted" newcomers. Maybe this was a warning to ill-intentioned individuals.

Images (all details);

I'm following Duarte de Armas and his valet:

1. Duarte de Armas uses a plumb line in Olivença (today Olivenza, Spain; an "atalaia" is a watch tower);

2. Duarte de Armas and his valet arrive at Ouguela (notice how the horse is still drawn in Gothic style; because of privileged economical relations with the Flemish region, Italian renaissance would arrive very late to Portugal);

3. women near a well in Montalvão;

4. ominous gallows in Penha Garcia (the stereotyped rocks are also typically Gothic);

5. Duarte de Armas and his valet climb to Monsanto (they are depicted at the mountain base and a bit higher in the same image - this way of showing the passing of time was common in the Gothic style);

6. Duarte de Armas and his valet are leaving Bragança heading West; someone is hanged;

7. boats in front of Tuy (today, Tui) in Galicia, Spain;

8. lacking a bridge Duarte de Armas, his valet and horse are transported by barge in the Minho river near Vila Nova de Cerveira; huge galleons are sailing the Atlantic Ocean (another one is being constructed on the river's bank).