“For the website of the Poynter Institute journalism school, comics journalist Dan Archer created a two-page primer on comics journalism, its origins, methods and best examples, and he obviously used the comics format to do so.  It’s truly the best introduction to the genre I have ever seen…. “

Yep, Wim’s right. Well worth a look:

(comic strip © 2011 The Poynter Institute, used for review purposes)

It’s Finnish animation studio Filmkmompaniet’s second feature with the Moomins.  An earlier movie, Moomin and Midsummer Madness (see trailer below), was created by using and reformatting footage from the original TV series (giving the Moomins actual dialogue in the process).  This one, however, is an all-new creation, which uses digital 3D techniques to conjure up that vintage stop-motion feel that made the early animation so adorable.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCe9rylUb4

The story of the film, which is directed by Maria Lindberg, is eerily topical.  When the Moomins wake up one morning, they find their that their colorful, cheerful valley is completely covered in dust.  For once, it’s not a Nordic volcano that’s erupted, but a comet which, as a philosopher predicts, will cause the end of the world.  Moomintroll, Snufkin and Sniff take up a journey to the mountains observatory to find out if that’s really true.  What begins as a summery rafting trip quickly changes in a big adventure… (sounds a lot like one of the Pooh movies, if you ask me)

On their site, Filmkompaniet also mentions a Moomin TV series of 78 episodes which should be in production at the moment.  As yet, no UK or US  release date has been announced.  In the mean time, here’s a quick look at singer Bjork’s title track to Comet Chase :

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCe9rylUb4

Mekanik Strip is not just the best (or at least the coolest) comics store in the fair city of Antwerp, it’s also a quite unique gallery which regularly showcases artwork by some of the world’s most famous cartoonists, as well as graphic art by up and comic artists, illustrators and designers.

Every year Belgian artist Eva Cardon (a.k.a. Ephameron) brings together young artists and illustrators from all over the world, makes a selection of their work and puts it up in the Mekanik Gallery under the Art Trek monicker.  For the seventh edition, she has selected artists from Belgium, Canada, Brasil, France, Holland, the UK and the US.  The result is a dazzling array of techniques, materials, themes and sizes, representing the richness of today’s graphic and illustrative art.

I particularly liked the fairly small drawings by Maxwell Holyohe-Hirsch (who recently also did a few illustrations for the New Yorker, no less), and the felt and textile collages by French artist Lil’Shy (which, to be honest, I hadn’t expected).  Besides those, there’s also work by Apetown (BE), Dominique Goblet (BE), Hedof (NL), Luke Ramsey (CA), Marcello Velho (US), Michael Swaney (CA), Nathaniel Russell (US), Nicolas Burrows (UK), Quentin Vijoux (FR), Rim (BR), Vanessa Dziuba (FR) and, of course, Ephameron herself.

Drop by at 73 Sint-Jacobsmarkt, Antwerp – the exhibition runs until September 13th.

Yes, this little post is once more about Pieter De Poortere and his anti-hero Boerke.  I know I tend to hammer on the same nail sometimes, but this time I have good reasons for it.  Not only is Pieter one of the best cartoonist in Europe today (and I’m choosing my words), and his Boerke gags are unsurpassed in their combination of sweet and cute graphics mixed with dark and cynical subject matter, in his newest book, The Son Of Hitler, Pieter is lifting everything he’s done before up to a new level.

This book, his first for the French comics giant Glénat, is not just a loose compilation of page gags in which Boerke stumbles stupidly in one painful situation after the next, it is no less than a retelling of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, the Second World War. In six short chapters, the different phases of the War are presented, from its earliest roots in the German defeat in WWI on, right through to the new life for escaped Nazi war criminals in certain parts of South America.  When a young corporal, who is simply called Adolf, gets wounded in the trenches, he is comforted by a local nurse.  He flees back to Germany, leaving her behind with their freshly produced offspring, Boerke.

After the well-known assassination attempt on Hitler, it turns out that he’s no longer able to have children, which leaves the future of his political dynasty in dire straits.  With the help of his Nazi Doctors he and his lover Eva create a sort of Frankenstein monster (this part is sounding almost like a Mignola short story for Hellboy! – Joe).  When a second bomb kills this child (who looks suspiciously like another well-known quiffed comic hero), Adolf receives news of his other son, who’s supposed to be living in occupied Belgium.  Boerke, in the mean time, has managed to get himself transported to a concentration camp, together with an RAF pilot and a little Jewish girl he had been hiding in his basement.  Hitler manages to rescue him, and Boerke is ready to take up his role as Fuhrer-to-be.

(Boerke find himself deported to one of the most despicable places ever conceived, the concentration camps, in Le Fils d’Hilter by and (c) Pieter de Poorter, published Glénat)

The whole book is a rollercoaster of every possible cliché in the genre of the World War II story: Jewish refugees, the French resistance, demonic medical experiments, and, of course, Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, all thrown together in a romp that is at once devilishly funny and at times unsettlingly cringeworthy.  No subject is sacred for DePoortere, who manages to combine seemingly totally unrelated elements to a new and hilarious concept (in one of the best passages in the book, Boerke dresses up as a female prisoner in order to be able to find his Jewish girl, only to find himself thrown out her compound, which is reserved for lesbian prisoners – even with the gruesome reality that this fragment brings to your mind, you can’t help but laugh at the sheer stupidity of the situation).

In terms of graphical style, De Poortere has even perfected his storybook-like graphics to a new language, a sort of evil bastard son of the Ligne Claire.  He tells his story in a deadpan, monotonous manner, using nine panels on every page.  As a hilarious bonus, each new chapter is preceded by a “where’s Wally”-like spread, in which you have to find the main character of the chapter, but which also contains hints of what’s to come, references to all kinds of movies, television series and books (try and find René’s mother, for example), and little in-jokes.

(“Ou est Adolf?” Showing the fun side of trench warfare with a Where’s Wally style spread in Le Fils d’Hilter by and (c) Pieter De Poorter, published Glénat)

Like I said, with this book De Poortere is treading on dangerous ground.  Previous books saw Boerke confronted with taboo situations as well, but up till now, his creator has never tried to really go as far as possible on his subject.  I’m not sure if an English or American publisher is going to be willing to bring out an English edition of this book (in Dutch the book was only published after the name of Hitler was left out of the title), but even if that’s not the case, it hardly contains any text, so reading it should be a problem even if you don’t read a word of French.  Take a gamble, and get this book.  You will not regret it.

Pieter De Poortere, The Son Of Hitler (Le Fils d’Hitler), published by Glénat, 2010.  ISBN 9782723470735, 15 EUR.

Even though it’s no longer the indespensible comics mag it used to be in the 1960′s, and even though it doesn’t seem to appear on a regular schedule anymore, Pilote Magazine still lives on as a series of specials, or hors-séries as the French call it.  You could say that publisher Dargaud is still trying to cash in on the venerable name, but that would be doing  an injustice to the quality of the actual issues.

This summer’s hors-série is completely devoted to the relationship between comics and that bigger brother of popular culture, movies.  It contains a number of short essays from professionals in both fields, interviews with creators who have been active as cartoonists and/or filmmakers, and overviews on how comics and movies relate to one another in different parts of the world.  A number of portfolios about film-related comic art (posters by Floc’h, or character studies by Enki Bilal) make sure it’s not all boring text.  What really makes this issue worth the money, however, are the contributions by the cartoonists themselves. It would seem that the magazine’s editors have given a number of the best comics professionals of the country (120 in total) free rein, with the sole constraint being that it should be about film.

Ex-lauréate in Angoulème, Blutch, kicks off with a four-page treatise on the nature of film, presented as a dialogue between a grumpy old theorist and a dancing young girl.  Pierre Christin and JC Mézieres tell the story of how they tried to get the film, Hard to be a God, realised, which is not the success story you would expect (and, indeed, they conclude that they probably should have talked about Bilal’s Bunker Palace Hotel or Besson’s Fifth Element, both of which they worked on, and which did turn out to be a success).   Jean Giraud reflects on the possibilities of modern technology (CGI !  3D ! ) for classic films, while Hervé Bourhis makes a case for the importance of the moustache in films.  Amusante !

It is really an issue to last a summer holiday.  And I haven’t even talked about strips by R. Crumb, Bastien Vives, Charles Berbérian, or Florence Cestac (to name but a few, at the risk of forgetting one or two essential contributions).  And it’s a good way to practice your French while keeping yourself occupied in a culturally correct fashion (instead of just roasting yourself on the beach).

Pilote – La BD, Nouvelle Star du 7e Art is available in all good magazine and book stores in France (and other French-speaking parts of the world) for a mere 7,90 EUR.  Get yourself a penpal, make the trip, or get yourself a copy online.  And while you’re at it, why not try to get a copy of that other venerable French comics magazine, L’Echo Des Savannes, which celebrates summer with a bumper special full of comics.

Monsieur Feraille by Winschluss and Cizo – If you combine a vitriolic feeling for satire, a fanatical knowledge of pop culture and an amazingly versatile graphical style, you get Monsieur Feraille.  He is the Tin Man gone bad, Mickey Mouse when the masks come off.  Monsieur Feraille embodies all that is evil in today’s society : violence, exploitation, polution and unbridled egotism.

Les Frustrés by Claire Bretécher – This series of gag strips, which started in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1973, is the ultimate chronicle of the left-wing revolutionaries of May 68.  In an almost surgical way, Bretécher shows them and their failed dreams as they are : more or less educated, more or less middle-class, more or less emancipated, but above all : bored and dissatisfied.

Les Amis by François Ayroles – If ever there was a comic equivalent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (“Hell, that’s all the others”), it’s this small book.  Ayroles traces the friendships of a number of young men and women in a French city, and shows that social discourse is awkward by definition, nobody is honest, everybody is looking out for number one and friendship is an illusion.  Check my earlier review for more.

Ma Maman Est En Amérique, Elle A Rencontreé Buffalo Bill by Jean Regnaud and Emile Bravo -Little Jean’s mother has died, and his father hasn’t had the courage to tell him.  She is supposed to be in America, that mythical land of dreams and opportunities.  Slowly though, Jean discovers that many of his dreams are false, and that this discovery is all part of growing up. (Fanfare/Ponent Mon published an English language edition of this too – Joe)

Un Homme Est Mort by Kris and Etienne Davodeau – After the Second World War, the city of Brest is one big (re)construction site, where thousands of workmen toil to build a city of the future.  When they go on strike for better working conditions, they are met with brutal reprisals.  This book shows the origins of the intense opposition between left and right, which would dominate French politics for the rest of the 20th Century.

Les Petits Ruissiaux by Rabaté – One hot summer somewhere in the French Province (i.e. not in Paris), and old man who thought his life was over and all he could expect was fishing and dying, finds adventure, new experiences and love through a series of accidental occurances.  It’s a french movie on paper : talkative, slightly humorous, only registering what’s happening – a great, great comic.

La 2,333e Dimension by Marc-Antoine Mathieu – Jules Corentin Acquefacques, Mathieu’s hero, doesn’t have adventures like a normal comic book hero.  Instead, he struggles with all the formal aspects of the medium : perspective, color, linearity, the confinement of the strip and the page.  Formalistic to the extrem, these books never fail to be funny and exciting.

Et voila, there you have it.  Fourteen BD that to me, say “France”.  Naturally, I will have forgotten most of the titles that you had expected here.  So, why not draw up your own list ?  I’m not going anywhere.

Astérix Le Gaulois by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo – I don’t think I’d be able to credibly give my list of 14 great French BD without including Astérix.  Everything I know about France, about regional differences and specialties, and about man’s pettiness in general, I learned from the little gaul.  This series (well, let’s say up and until Astérix et les Belges) is the best satire on life in Western Europe in the 20th Century bar none.

Blueberry by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud – It would seem to me that the US would rather limit Gir’s output to the sci-fi work he did as Moebius, but I prefer the raw Western saga about the very flawed Lieutenant Blueberry, the stubbled lonesome cowboy who really shoots faster than his shadow — to kill.  When read from first to last, this series shows French comics growing up in terms of content, theme and graphical prowess.  Start with Angel Face or Ballade Pour Un Cerceuil.

Monsieur Jean by Dupuy and Berbérian – This is the ongoing chronicle of an up-and-coming famous author in Paris, his struggle to make it in the literary world, and his continuing battle with the world around him, with women, children, friends and passers-by.  What makes this series interesting is not just the sitcom-like atmosphere, or the great 60s-like art that both authors contribute to, but the fact that Jean, although an everyman, grows from book to book.  He overcomes his fears, changes his views, and generally finds his way.  Also try Dupuy and Berbérian’s Journal d’un Album, one of the best accounts of what it takes to create a real good comic.

Route De Nuit by Jean Graton – Rather than fast cars, advertising and ludicrous sound effects, this early episode in the long-running series Michel Vaillant is about honesty, friendship and growing up.  It’s set amongs those other knights of the road : cross-country truckers.  In the early ’60′s France was still a large country, and in this book, these distances play an important part.  It also taught me that crime is often a last resort for desperate people.

L’Aigle Sans Orteils by Lax – Continuing the vast distances theme, this book chronicles the early years of one of the most heroic sports events ever : the Tour de France.  Before high-tech bikes or multi-million dollar advertising deals, the Tour was a battle against technical failure, the elements and your own human weakness.  When it ended in glory, that glory was immense.  When it ended in failure, that failure was bottomless.  I wrote about this book earlier for the blog.

L’Ascension du Haut Mal by David B – This six-part series tells the story of how the author’s family learned to cope with his brother’s epilepsy, but it is much more than that.  David B also draws a quite revealing portrait of what it means to be young in the 1970′s, when all traditions were questioned and new life was an experiment.  The book is also a great experience in terms of graphical style, which is at once naive and brutally realistic, and exquisitely combines real life elements with the world of dreams and the subconscious.

Approximativement by Lewis Trondheim – The ultimate autobiographical graphic novel, in which BD powerhouse Trondheim broadly exhibits all his frustrations, obsessions, fears and shames.  Rather than his Petits Riens webcomics, I choose this, as it shows how Trondheim develops as an artist, but also as a storyteller.  The book also paints a fascinating picture of the Paris comic world, and of the early years of  l’Association, the revolutionary small press that Trondheim helped found.

When I was in Angouleme last year I met a very friendly elderly gentleman at the booth of Akileos, one of the smaller publishers that try to get a piece of the French mainstream comics pie.  His name was Chris Flamand, and although he was a cartoonist in his own right, he was there to promote a book that he wrote based on his memories from his youth, and the holidays he spent with his family in the French countryside.  Rather than drawing this book, which he called Vacances à Saint-Prix, himself, he asked his son Julien to do it.  This had the interesting effect that the story was rendered with a lot more detachment than Chris would have been able to do, while at the same time the story suddenly spanned one more generation, giving it a lot more gravity than just a childhood memory.

The book must have been somewhat of a succes (it won the Audience Award at the Longvic Festival in 2009), and this year Flamand Père et Fils present their second collaboration, Quand je Serais Grand… (When I Grow Up…).  Even though it’s not really explicitly promoted as such, it is really the sequel to St-Prix.  This time it’s 1965, the year when young Chris sees Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in the cinema and decides he wants to become a “dessinateur”.  Everybody thinks he’s talking about technical drawings, plans and stuff, but no : Chris wants to do the stories he devours in Mickey Magazine every week.  It’s not a professional choice that’s in high regard, but his parents at least don’t ridicule his childish attempts at creating a comic.  Chris reads everything he can find, and develops a quite elaborate vocabulary, that he also learns to use correctly, albeit with all the necessary bumps along the way.

The story is not a classic thematic “how I became” story though – young Chris has many other interests besides comics, not in the least music, chemistry and… girls !  but when he receives his report card, and gets to choose between a carreer in the Postal Service, or a quite uncertain future as a comics artist, his mind is made up.  He will spend his life giving life to his characters, telling stories, being read and leaving a trace of his existence.

That is precisely what makes this book so special.  Again, a large number of childhood memories are stringed and intertwined into one narrative, but this time the thematic structure has a goal.  The Flamands don’t just want to commit memories of old times to paper so as not to forget them, they want to tell the story of how Father (and Son) became what they are.   As with all stories, that is not a straightforward one, which should not be told in a straightforward way.

The art of Flamand Fils has matured since the last book – it would seem that he has mastered a graphic language that his quite his own, and that threads a thin line between caricature and bitter-sweet childlike drawings.  The colouring greatly helps in setting the mood and in keeping the nested stories readable.

Quand Je Serais Grand is a book that will doubtlessly appeal to many, and the fact that it is profoundly French may even add an exotic je-ne-sais-quoi to that appeal.  Children are able to read the book, but in order to fully appreciate it, you should already have left your childhood behind, while keeping your inner child alive…

Flamand Père et Fils – Quand Je Serais Grand. Published by  Akileos, 2010. ISBN 978-2-35574-048-0

What do you get if you combine the best cliches of the hard-boiled detective genre with puss-in-boots ?  You get Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guardino’s excellent Blacksad series, about the adventures of a private eye trying hard to stay on the straight and narrow, while all around him the sleazeballs and no-goods are trying to get their wicked ways.  Except that John Blacksad is a cat, and a black one at that; he does everything a detective does : falling in love with the wrong women, getting harrassed by the law and by rich suspects’ enforcers, and in the end, he quite often fails to get paid as well.

Earlier this month, Dark Horse published the first three episodes of this series in a handsome, hardcover collected edition (what the French would call an Intégrale).   This volume collects all stories that have been published so far.   In the first one, Somewhere Within The Shadows, we are introduced to detective John Blacksad, who lives and operates in New York in the 1950′s, or at least a city that’s very much like the New York of the crime stories of that era.  Blacksad investigates the death of Leon Kronski, a movie writer and his  last known lover who disappeared. He gets arrested by the police, but  Smirnov, the police commissioner, explains that because of ‘pressure upstairs’ he himself cannot investigate the matter any further. Blacksad takes matters in his own hands and follows the money all the way to the top.

The second story, Arctic Nation, further develops the theme of racism and racial segregation in Blacksad’s world, a theme that had already been hinted upon in the first story.  Blacksad accepts a job from an elderly elementary school teacher who wants him to find a young bear girl who has been kidnapped, probably by the Arctic Nation, a racist political and terrorist organisation.    All kinds of intrigues unravel around the case, involving social injustice, extortion and interracial love affairs.  The story ends in a quite violent climax which is supposed to solve everything, but in fact only leaves a sour taste.  This story also introduces Weekly, the Ebony White to Blacksad’s Spirit.

In the third and final story, Red Soul, the cold war is raging in all its ugliness.  Blacksad finds himself in the middle of a web of intrigues and plots again, this time involving anti-communist movements, nuclear physicians and survivors of the Holocaust.  This story turns out to be Blacksad’s Tintin et Les Picaros, as his own naive and limited view on things turns out to be insufficient to solve problems that rage on a global scale, such as the nuclear arms race or the aftermath of the second World War.  He is also confronted with memories from his own youth, when one of his mentors turns out to have quite a lot to hide…

The appeal of this series is, in my opinion, twofold.  To begin with, Guardino’s art is magnificent.  His cityscapes are as menacing as they come, and his action scenes are as close as you can get to actually filming them.  His past as an animator at Disney is apparent in his portrayal of his animal characters, whom he gives facial expressions and movements that are as lifelike as can be.  One of the main problems when transposing your characters with animals, is that animals tend to vary in size more than humans do, and you need to be very careful in picking the right kind of animal, lest your art becomes farcical.  In the first book, the occasional oversize mouse or frog does turn up, but later on all characters have their natural sizes, and this greatly contributes to the book’s verisimilitude.  On a similar note, the age-old conundrum of the man-animals vs the animal-animals is solved by not paying too much attention to it : fish are fish, and nothing more.

The second great quality of the books is that they are not just (very well-wrought) detective stories that so happen to be played by animals.  For each of the characters, the right type of animal has been carefully chosen.  An older schoolteacher is a doe, and a crime boss’ bodyguards are (naturally) rhinos.  But it goes further than that.  Certain animal treats are exploited quite cunningly in the story : criminals are quite often lizards or amphibians since they are, well, cold-blooded.  And finally, in the Blacksad’s, an innate race division exists between animals with fur (who are higher in status) and animals wihtout.  Later, in Arctic Nation, this is rendered even more explicit when a white power movement is introduced that puts animals with white fur above animals with a colored fur.  And Blacksad suddenly is outed as a Shaft-like black machoman.

And while I was re-reading the Blacksad books for this piece, Flemish comics blog Strip Turnhout reports that after five years, Guardino and Canales have completed a fourth album in the series.  L’enfer, Le Silence will be available on September 17th, and will once more delve deeper into Blacksad’s personal history, as he is confronted with the dead body of Natalia Wilford, an actress he once spent the happiest days of his life with.

Canales & Guardino : Blacksad.  Dark Horse, 2010.  ISBN 978-1-59582-393-9.  Instore and also available at the FPI webstore.