Yes, Welcome to Boboland, home of all the, well, bobos! If you spend most of your days in our modern-day cities, chances are you already know your way around. Most likely you know a good deal of bobos yourself. It may even be the case, but I wouldn’t want to cause offence, that you are a bit of a bobo yourself.
After all, what is a bobo? A bobo is a person, male or female, who’s most likely to live in the city and work in trendy, creative or service-oriented sectors. Bobo’s are self-centred and even narcissistic by default; they fail to grow up and take responsibility for their lives; they have an attention span of about 10 seconds, consume like there’s no tomorrow and what stuff around them looks or sounds like is much more important than what it really is. Sounds kinda bleak, right? As if Aldous Huxley got it right all along. But wait, it gets funny.
For Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berbérian, winners of the Grand Prix at the Festival of Angoulème earlier this year, the essence of Boboland is Paris. Parisians have always tended to look at their city as the centre of the universe (you mean it isn’t?!?! Who’s going to tell them? – Joe), with the rest of France as some semi-developed, provincial backwater. In Boboland, even the City of Lights has lost all its lustre. Everything is fake and superficial, nothing is profound anymore. TV presenters constantly call their guests by wrong names and a bio bistro simply buys (cheaper) food in the supermarket because, after all, it is “mostly an attitude”. Making films for vertical TV screens is akin to creating a new art form. And if you buy a shirt off a beggar who just fished it out of your bags for less than you paid for it in the shop, you did a bargain.
(an excerpt from Bienvenue A Boboland pinched from Dupuy and Berberian’s website; my French isn’t very good but I believe the well-heeled lady is asking the man struggling to live on the street in a tent why he didn’t tell her he was selling property in this area of the city. I’m guessing, but the image of the tent may well also allude to a chronic problem with affordable housing in Paris which saw a protest with hundreds of tents erected in the city centre the other year and which has been covered a lot in the French media)
Dupuy and Berbérian quite often injected their Monsieur Jean books with a healthy dose of satire and topical humour, but the main focus remained on the quite personal trials and tribulations of their main character. In Boboland, the cast is quite limited, but the main attraction is the shear idiocy that they all share. Here, the satire can pull all the stops and go over the top, culminating in a hilarious take on the helpathons and live aids of this world: a media campaign to feed the hungry by distilling foodstuffs from the nails and hair of people in the West. The slogan: give something of yourself – in English, of course; after all, this is Boboland (hmm, they have a point; I noticed a lot of English phrases used in shops and restaurants in Paris this year, especially trendy shop windows – Joe).
But even when they frown upon their characters’ stupidity, they never despise them. All disdain is tempered by Dupuy and Berberian’s (because they both draw parts of the story as they often do) sweet and soft style, with lovely, summery colours and a wavy, dancing line.
With short stories like these, Dupuy and Berbérian only confirm that they are among the best of France’s contemporary cartoonists, not only because they simply deliver good work, but also because they are able to catch the mood of the times in their work. And with that, they are among the likes of Lauzier, Brétécher and, why not, Wolinski.
What: Bienvenue à Boboland
Who: Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berbérian
Where: Fluide Glacial, 2008
Will appeal to: fans of Michel Rabagliati, Joe Matt, Kevin Smith, Terry Laban, Evan Dorkin.
Come on publishers (Drawn and Quarterly, perhaps?), this is another one very worthy of translation.
Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium, where he often worries his life alternates been Bobo and Coco; you can read more of his work on his own Ephemerist blog.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:14 am
In fact (if I may intercede), you’re right about the guy who is a homeless man living in a tent on the Canal St Martin (you can recognize the bridge behind) where they did settle last winter with help of associations but you’re wrong about the dialogue. She’s asking him0 if he might have heard of any appartement to sale in the neighbourhood. The Canal Saint Martin is indeed a very nice place to live and perfect for bobos. :)
October 1st, 2008 at 8:35 am
Ah, thanks, Glorb – my French is very rusty, I can get a fair chunk of it but rarely all of it, one of these days when I have time I should do some classes again to brush it up.
October 20th, 2009 at 9:20 am
I can second the request for an English translation. I just picked this up this week, and I adore it. Much of the satire and conceit works just as well in New York City or Chicago, and I wish I could share it with my friends from there, who would just devour this. (Looking for a translation led me here!) What’s more, as with the Monsieur Jean albums I’ve read, the language isn’t even that tricky, making translation a trivial manner (though it might be a graphical challenge, considering how intertwined text and art are.
As for the dialogue, glorb beat me to the correction by a year. All the same, I would translate it idiomatically as, “Might you have heard something about a condo for sale in this area?” That captures the bobo aesthetic best in its American form. We don’t buy apartments. We rent them. Bobos, however, buy condos.