Random Thoughts

Rhââ Lovely 1 by Gotlib (1976)

Gotlib was a prolific cartoonist, working from the mid-sixties until his recent death. He started out doing comics for the French Pilote magazine before co-founding two magazines, l’Echo des savanes and Fluide Glacial. Out of his dozens of albums, c. nothing has been translated to other languages.

Runepress made a go at it in the early 80s with these four albums, which collect work originally published at l’Echo (the first and third); the second was serialised in the music magazine Rock et Folk; and the fourth in Fluide. And it’s not difficult to see what attracted those weird Danes to this, er, corpus: It’s relentlessly scatological and weird.

But it’s not just poop and semen jokes for the fun of it. Gotlib, in these strips (originally published in 1973) makes fun of people trying to present a bourgeoisie front by showing that they, too, pick their noses and wipe their asses. (But do all French stand while wiping? Tardi draws it that way too…)

Oh, geez. Is this 9gag or something? This is a serious blog!

Or… perhaps not. Yes, I didn’t mention it in the introduction, but there’s a lot of phalluses, figurative or actual, in these comics.

Hm, the first few pages quotes here might leave the impression that it’s all pantomime, but it’s not. About half the pieces are these extremely wordy and very witty skits. At least the Danish versions are very funny, but I’m guessing the original Greek is also a bunch of laffs.

Hamster Jovial et ses louveteaux by Gotlib (1974)

OK, so we have poop jokes and silly word play: It sounds like wholesome fun that you’d see translated to all languages in the world and kept in print indefinitely, instead of Runepress making a go at it for two years and then Gotlib would never be seen again?

There’s a lot of sex jokes in these books, and I’m not going to excerpt the ruder ones. This is a family oriented blog! As Lambiek says, “Already risqué back in the 1970s many gags are nowadays perhaps even more disturbing to those who are easily offended.”

In this album, all the jokes are about a Scout leader and his flock, and if a Scouting/sex joke comic sounds like a major seller to you…

But, in general, it’s really, really silly and absurd.

Rhââ Lovely 2 by Gotlib (1977)

Things reach the apex of things-that-shouldn’t-be-posted-on-wordpress.com-ness in the third album. Here’s the least rude page:

And there’s a trip featuring Allah, Jehovah and the rest yukking it up and watching porn flicks.

The funniest strip is the Excorcist parody that features a possessed boy instead of a girl, but since the boy has a hard-on through the entire strip, I’ll just excerpt this gag instead. Yes, the possessed boy poured ink out the window onto the priest.  Did Mad Magazine do the same joke?

Pervers Pépère by Gotlib (1981)

After all this depravity, you might expect Gotlib to take it a notch up with something called “Pervers Pépère”, but it’s innocent in comparison.

There’s a lot of convoluted fart jokes. But by this time, it’s the 80s, and perhaps Gotlib felt the need to step back from the outrage.

Instead most of the jokes here are about the reader or the characters thinking that something involving genitalia is going to happen, but then it doesn’t. And that gives Pervers Pépère a laugh. So his perversity is that he doesn’t go for the sex…

But as with the un-hilarity of the implied rape threat above, most of these strips seem to be looking for a punchline without finding it. Instead we’re just presented with an absurd thing that Pervers Pépère does and then… nothing.

So, to recap: When Gotlib is virtually unpublishably obscene, he’s really funny, but when he’s not, he’s just not that funny. If this is the general gist of his career (and I’ve just read these four books, so this is a very uninformed assumption), then it’s not surprising that he remains unknown outside of France.

This post is part of the BD80 series.

Le génie des Alpages by F’Murr (1976)
Comme des bêtes by F’Murr (1977)

Le génie des Alpages is a series started by F’Murr(r) in 1973. It was originally serialised in the French Pilote magazine and then collected in albums from 1976 on. The Norwegian editions I have seem to (unusually enough) to track the French publications closely.

For the first years, F’Murr adheres to a two-page gag format. In the albums, every two-page spread is a little tale of escalating insanity with constant asides and wordplay. The Norwegian translators have really put their hearts into this thing: There are so many puns on various forms of words for “sheep” in these books that the mind reels.

While there’s an impressive amount of nonsensical punning going on, it’s also a series that full of visual gags.

Oh, what’s it about? It’s about a flock of sheep in the alps who all have funny names and various personality quirks (one’s in love with an eagle, one’s an inventor, and so on) and their shepherd and his dog. Along with the ram, the latter two are supposed to be the authority figures in the herd, but they’ve mostly abdicated in the presence of all the lunacy.

F’Murr loves to play with the construction of the comics themselves, like on this indicia page where the sheep complain about the unprofessionalism of whoever composed these rickety panels.

I’m not going to attempt to translate any of these strips, because… it’s too much work, but here’s a nice non-wordy strip. You have the rude tourist who wants to find snow (and there’s none to be found), and then… the murderous funicular kills him. There’s a high death toll in these strips, especially for the tourists.

The murderous funicular isn’t a recurring character in the series, and that’s typical of F’Murr. There are some recurring gags, but he’s impressively inventive: Use a gag once, and then never again.

Barre-toi de mon herbe by F’Murr (1977)
Un grand silence frisé by F’Murr (1978)

The Alpages “universe” is basically a steady state world. Cataclysmic things happen in every other strip, but things return to normal the next one. However, things subtly change over the years: We get a new shepherd, for instance, while the old one drops by from time to time and is reminded why he stopped showing up.

The series isn’t particularly topical, but here we see one of the sheep adorning herself with safety pins, which must be a reference to punk, which was starting around this time. (She tries to help the hung-over ram with the droopy horns.)

Around this time, F’Murr started doing longer strips, too: Mostly in the six to ten page range. For one of the first one, we get an introduction from these very Tintin-looking monks (who are apparently readying the book for publication) and they discuss how they’re going to feature the next, longer piece in the album without disturbing the rhythm. They decide on an all-black interstitial page.

The piece introduced this way, er “The analphabet darkness”, is possibly a parody of the metaphysical sci-fi comics becoming popular in France at the time. Or perhaps F’Murr just wanted to draw a volcano. Who can say?

Les intondables by F’Murr (1980)
Tonnerre, et mille sobots!! by F’Murr (1983)

The artwork also develops over the year. It becomes more detailed and consistent, I think…

And there are also atypical panels like this (which is about the sheep owners trying to suppress the a sheep uprising (the sheep want control over the means of production (yes, this is the early 80s))).

The strips become even more meta, which many a strip dealing with the sheep rearranging the scenery. Perspective is fun.

The series sometimes references Groucho Marx directly, and the humour certainly tends toward the Marxist, but it also has a Krazy Kat vibe going on with the scenery.

Dans les nuages by F’Murr (1987)

By the late 80s, many of the quirkiest bits have receded. In the early years, you might have five different gags happening at once across a two-page story, but the well of ideas seems to have gotten a bit drier as the years pass.

But there’s always new twists to how the gags unfold.

And then… collage!

When the final album translated to Norwegian appeared, you start getting some of those normal gags about not having an idea for a gag. The two workers putting up the scaffolding here complain about things having gotten more boring lately, but “he’s been doing this for a while”. “Who’s interested in sheep these days?”

Still, the weirdness keeps on going.

And this is the final panel, and I wondered whether perhaps F’Murr meant this cliffhanger as an ending of sorts, but nope. Seven more albums have been published after this, the last one in 2007.

This is a very strange series, and I’m surprised that the Norwegian publishers managed to get eight volumes published. The Danes only got three done before they had to give up. And that’s unusual, because Denmark is (and had) a bigger comics audience than Norway. Perhaps it was a labour of love for the Norwegian translators (who remained the same people throughout the years) and editors?

I don’t know. Perhaps it was a runaway hit in Norway? This was all before the Intertubes, so I guess we’ll just never know.

F’Murr has also done a large number of non-sheep-related comics in France. Only one has been translated into a language I can read, and from that one I can guess that the reason might be that he’s just hard to translate. There’s a lot of French references, and lots of word play. Anybody taking this on has a bit of a task ahead of them.

This post is part of the BD80 series.

Scènes de la vie de banlieue by Caza (1979)

Caza is a prolific French artist (real name Philippe Cazaumayou) who has been doing comics since the early 70s (and continues to publish to this day). However, very little has been translated into any language I can read. (Except various stuff in various issues of Heavy Metal, but I can’t seem to find an index at the moment…)

So this post is just about two works, and kinda encapsulates a lot of what’s great and frustrating about French comics.

The first book is a Danish omnibus collection of Caza’s mid-70s work for Pilote under the collective name “Scenes of Suburban Life” (if I were to hazard an English translation. Or “Scenes from Life in Suburbia”?). These were released as three separate albums in France, but (in an unusual move for the Danes in 1980) released as one single tome. Which is a good idea, I think.

I remember buying this book. We were on a holiday in Copenhagen, and I visited my first real comic book shop for the first time, and I literally died. Literally! I was 12, and it was all rather overwhelming. I chose this book out of all the ones available probably a lot because it was bigger than the rest. And because it looks really cool.

I remember reading the verbiage on the right-hand page above like it was a serious sci-fi text, but later my older sister read the same page and started laughing. A lot. That’s how I realised that this was supposed to be funny.

And it is. The very word-heavy pieces can be a slog to get through if you’re not in the mood, but they’re quite playful in the way they pile absurdity upon exaggeration. And, of course, the artwork is very appealing in an occasionally disgusting way.

Many of the stories are about the French everyman Marcel Miquelon (seen in the topmost panels above with his wife (of various names)) who’s disturbed by noise coming from the flat above. He investigates and happens upon one absurd thing after another, usually getting killed in the process.

Not all of these have aged all that well, though. This one, for instance, he visits his nice black neighbours and they turn out to be cannibals (that presumably kill them). The end. Yes, that’s absurd, but is it funny?

For once Marcel gets a revenge on Caza. After having a horrible nightmare where Caza tortures him (once again), he takes decisive action against the artist (who lives above him, of course).

These pieces are meant to be funny, of course, and they are, but they also want to engage with society. Behind all the humour, there’s a real anger and disgust with modern society. Caza also offers various symbolic and fantastic ways out of the predicament, and they’re sometimes kinda moving.

All in all I have to say that I had really good taste when I was 12.

Laïlah by Caza (1988)

But then… eight years later we have Laïlah. Back in the early 80s, in my early teens, when I was buying most of the comics featured in this blog series, it seemed like there was a never-ending flow of great French-ey comics from Europe flowing into my hands. And then it kinda stopped. I had no idea why, at the time, but I turned to American comics instead.

As I understand it now, what had happened in France is that following the success of Metal Hurlant, there was a major shakeup in the way comics were published. The old weekly stand-bys like Pilote magazine saw a drastic decrease in readership. This again led to an implosion in venues older comic artists had to publish their work in. So when I was starting to read these comics, it was already really over, but there was a backlog of things to translate.

While in the early 70s it seemed like anybody could publish anything, in any genre, now what sold was porn, sci-fi and, of course, sci-fi porn. Laïlah is from that apotheosis of the 80s French-ey scene.

It’s still nicely drawn, but not with the same obsessiveness and attention to detail as in the Banlieue stories. One of the stories in this album (originally published in Metal Hurland) is humorous (illustrated above), while the other two are very… er… mystical. Which is another common path for French artists in the 80s (viz. Simon le Fleuve).

Caza is still publishing today, but (like I said) not available for me to read. Perhaps it’s just too French? I don’t know. The Banlieue book is still funny, but perhaps you need an older sister to tell you so.

This post is part of the BD80 series.