A chaotic trip to the Big Apple
Friends Dani and Zoé have always dreamed of discovering New York. The two Torontonians took advantage of their university vacations to reunite in the American metropolis after several months of separation. Fiona, a classmate, accompanies them on this journey full of twists and turns. The dream quickly turns into a nightmare as the trip which was to include shopping, good meals, visiting museums and discovering emblematic monuments takes a completely different direction for Dani. While she has to deal with the budding romance between Fiona and Zoé, she soon finds herself all alone wandering the streets of the city. Cousins Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki created together, based on their childhood memories, an intelligent album about the transition to adulthood. The work, punctuated by well-crafted dialogues, is also a magnificent tribute to the city that never sleeps.
Ismaël Houdassine
New York, New York
★★★ 1/2
Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, Rue de Sèvres, Paris, 2024, 448 pages
In Search of Lost Time
Winner at the last Angoulême festival of the Fauve d’or prize for best album for Monica, the legendary independent cartoonist Daniel Clowes, renowned for his works combining raw reality and sociological surrealism, delivers a complex, dense and unclassifiable kaleidoscopic graphic novel. This opus with drawers camped in the sixties probes the neuroses of American society through the existence of an ordinary woman in search of identity who we follow from birth to her death. At the heart of a splendid, despairing odyssey, steeped in fantasy, the tormented heroine finds along the way imaginary ghosts and other very real ones, and an entire universe illustrated in bright and shimmering colors. Divided into nine interconnected short stories, each story has its own aesthetic style. Vacillating between melancholic chronicle and bad dreams, the album – probably Daniel Clowes’ most intimate – immerses us in a maelstrom of emotions which does not leave us indifferent.
Ismaël Houdassine
Monica
★★★★
Daniel Clowes, Éditions Delcourt, Paris, 2024, 106 pages
Go through the storm
There are those albums that we dive into and discover that we won’t have a chance of getting out until we reach the end. And that’s exactly the effect we had Black spruce, signed Aurélie Wilmet, a Belgian author now based in Denmark, who offers us a modern tale whose action takes place in the Far North, during the 1940s. Wilmet features Violette, a bush pilot who must settle in Kuujjuaq with her husband, appointed head of the Hudson’s Bay Company counter. She resumes her piloting activities, following a stormy separation, and gets lost in the middle of a storm, waiting for help which may never come. If the scenario is quite conventional (which is not bad in itself for a modern tale), the drawing, for its part, takes us back to the sketches made on the motif by the Canadian nature painters of the early 20th century.e century. Superb in its simplicity and execution!
François Lemay
Black spruce
★★★★
Aurélie Wilmet, Super Loto, Le Bourg, France, 208 pages
Hide this biodiversity that I cannot protect
Martin PM has scientific comics in his blood, it goes without saying. Greatly versed in albums with a documentary and scientific flavor, he is particularly interested in the transmission of current issues affecting, among other things, the environment, as he does here with A completely natural sacrifice. Failures in protecting biodiversity in Quebec, which lives up to its title very well! We are talking here about three specific projects which concern citizen groups, which the author followed in their questions on the ways of doing things of the Ministry of the Environment and on its positions regarding the protection of different natural environments. Are we really surprised to learn to what extent everything seems to be decided on the corner of a table, according to the actions of the promoters, while the State does not really care, due to lack of resources among other things, about this who lives on their own territory? To ask the question, is to answer it !
François Lemay
A completely natural sacrifice. Failures in protecting biodiversity in Quebec
★★★ 1/2
Martin PM, La watermelon and Atelier 10, Montreal, 2024, 176 pages