From our continental correspondent – News from Philippe Berthet | The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

From our continental correspondent – News from Philippe Berthet

Fri, Oct 31, 2008

From our Continental Correspondent, General

In an interview in the latest issue of Zozolala, one of the most venerable Dutch comics news magazines, French comics superstar Philippe Berthet revealed that his hit series Pin Up is not buried after all. Pin Up, created together with writer Yann Le Pelletier, was Berthet’s big breakthrough with a large audience in the 1990’s, ten years after he started publishing. With story arcs that typically spread across three books, the series draws a broad portrait of the United States as an archetype, with the army, gangsters, movie stars and glamour.

Pin Up 1 Philippe Berthet. Yann Dargaud.jpg

(Philippe Berthet and Yann’s Pin Up 1, with the Bettie Page influence worn very much on the sleeve; album published by Dargaud)

The stories always revolve around the adventures of Dottie, a young girl who looks a lot like Bettie Page and never seems to age, even though the Pin Up storyline spans three decades. The first arc played out against the backdrop of the Second World War and had a quite nice cameo by Milton Canniff. Issues four to six evoked the Cold War in the 50’s, when Gary Powers crashed his U2 spy plane on USSR territory. The last arc, issues seven to nine, was a smorgasbord of elements from the 1960’s: Vietnam, Tiki art, Las Vegas, you name it. With their combination of ligne claire art, beautiful girls (the book’s called Pin Up after all) and crime, the books proved a steady success.

In 2007 Yann and Berthet started a similar series, Poison Ivy (see an earlier article here), playing on another cultural archetype, the ultra-secret military group of super-powered individuals. This led his fans to believe that the Pin Up cycle was complete, and that Dottie would finally be able to get some rest. Not so, it turns out, as Berthet has announced a fourth cycle. This time the book would be drenched in science fiction, but not as we know it these days. Berthet:

“There will certainly be a new episode. The next part will be a science fiction story. Not the science fiction as we know it nowadays, but the typical SF from the fifties and sixties, showing how Americans saw the future then. By now our storyline has taken us until the end of the 60’s. That was really the end of the era of the traditional pin-up. If we continue Dottie’s adventures after this, it will probably be as flash-backs“.

Pin Up Poison Ivy.jpg

(a page from Pin Up: Poison Ivy, by Philippe Berthet and Yann, published Dargaud)

At the same time, Berthet announced that he is currently working on a book for a spin-off series to the hit comic XIII. In that series all books focus on one of the supporting characters of the XIII story. The first book, by Ralph Meyer and Xavier Dorison, will feature master criminal La Mangouste, while Berthet’s own (written by Eric Corbeyran) will be about Irina Svetlanova, the Russian hitwoman who is constantly on XIII’s trail. The book will be published in 2009.

Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium and his look at Berthet was in no way influenced by the sexy Bettie Page themed graphics, he denies that categorically; you can read more of his work on his own Ephemerist blog.