The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

With Brussels ’09, the year-long comics festival in the Belgian capital, slowly but surely coming to a close, the final big exhibition opened last weekend in the Bozar, the Arts and performance palace in the heart of the city. Whereas the previous eye-catcher had been held in the chambers of the Musée Royal des Beaux Arts, this time we had to delve deep into the catacombs of the concert centre, for Sexties, a celebration of the birth of the adult comic in the 1960.

Rather than painting a complete overview of the rise of comics aimed at adults in the liberated decade that were the 60′s, the organisers opted to focus on four artists who, each in their own way, were instrumental in the success of the genre : Jean-Claude Forest, best known for Barbarella, the Belgian artist and designer Guy Peelaert (Pravda), Paul Cuvelier (Corentin and Epoxy) and Italian cartoonist Guido Crépax.

(poster for the Sexties adult BD exhibition in Brussels, art by the one and only Guy Peellaert)

For the casual observer, the only similarities between the four of them would be that they were all now dead and they all somehow achieved notoriety drawing comics with naked women in them. And in fact, for once the casual observer would be right. Due to a quite uninspired juxtaposition of the four cartoonists’ art and the total lack of context (except for a very stereotypical soundtrack featuring the Beatles, Serge Gainsbourg and the Rolling Stones, and a series of very serious, very high-brow theories on the exhibited works, after a while all you saw was one page of story featuring a more or less naked woman after another.

Which is a shame, because all of the artists made works that were actually quite amazing in their own right. Forest, for example, excelled in telling Odyssey-like yarns in which his heroine, Barbarella, travels from one exotic place to another, meeting all kinds of strange peoples and creatures. It was amazing to see how, throughout the years, the size of the original art for these stories grew from an ordinary page to strips that measured at least a meter in width. Also, Forest’s cunning use of photocopies in order to be able to work faster, was quite funny.

Peelaert’s use of pop art elements brought a welcome splash of colour in the otherwise quite dreary black-and-white palette that the others used. Next to original pages from the Pravda stories (which showed how Peelaert continued to tinker with them even after they had been published, cutting them up and pasting them together again in a better order), the show included a pilot for a Pravda animated series (which wouldn’t have been out of place amongst the old MTV cartoons) and assorted artwork for galleries and magazines. It was quite interesting to see how Peelaert continued to experiment with his graphical technique throughout his career, even up to his death in 2008.

Paul Cuvelier was a bit of an odd one out in this bunch, in that he got published more than two decades before the others, when Hergé ran artwork by him in Le Petit Vingtième. Later Cuvelier would join the ranks of Hergé, Jacobs and all the other classic greats at Tintin magazine, where he would create the exotic adentures of Corentin in the Far East. But Cuvelier was frustrated by the limitations that the comic art form posed for him, and he quite soon quit alltogether to completely dedicate himself to his painting. In the 1960s he would return with Epoxy, one of the first comics for which Jean Van Hamme wrote the script, a meandering story losely based on Greek mythology, featuring fauns, centaurs, cyclopses and hordes of scantely clad women. Without any sign of genetalia, mind you, because “classic art didn’t show that either”.

(Epoxy by and (c) the estate of Paul Cuvelier, published Le Lombard)

For Italian fumettisto Guido Crépax, the organisers had decorated a whole room with black drapes and stringy curtains, and a droning voice going on and on about his heroine, Valentina, created a quite surreal atmosphere. Crépax was a master in the representation of scenes of extreme discomfort and abuse, in which he seemed only limited by his own imagination. Even though he published his books over a period of almost thirty years, their pages seem to be totally interchangeable, and all feature the same girl : thin, with pouty lips and a Louise Brooks haircut. Even though some of the pages in the exhibition were really exquisite, such as the ones in which he tries to represent a certain scene from as many vantage points as possible, while creating an almost classical composition with the panels, others were merely repetitive, bordering on boredom.

Sexties isn’t a bad exhibition, it is merely lacking in variety and context – similar, non-erotic art from the same period by people like Druillet or, later, even Tardi or Comes would have created a very interesting backdrop to this, quite often quite exquisite artwork. Sexties is on display until January 3rd, 2010, at the Bozar, Rue Ravenstein, 23, 1000 Brussels; more info can be found here and here.

Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium and thinks if you can remember the nude frolics of 60s comics you weren’t actually there; you can read more of his thoughts on his own Ephemerist blog.