a dive into the world of the circus and “freaks”

After adapting the cult novel 1984 by George Orwell, Fnac France Inter 2021 Comic Book Prize, Xavier Coste returns with The man with the lion’s head, an album published on August 24 by Sarbacane editions. This time he signs the original screenplay, a moving story of “freaks”, which questions the animality and savagery of men, which is not always where we expect it.

The story begins with the arrival in New York of an ocean liner: an elegant man, gleaming shoes on his feet, frock coat, smokes on deck. But in the middle of the crowd arriving in a city that makes the whole world dream, it is above all the head of this man that we notice: a lion’s head. Hector Bibrovski was born at the end of the 19th century, his face and body covered with hair, like his father, a circus “artist”.

Siamese sisters, sword-swallower, trunk man, giant are his traveling companions, but more than all the other beasts of the fair, it is he, this boy with the head of a lion who fascinates the crowds of the cities of Europe where his circus takes place. Beneath his wild beast appearance, the man with the lion’s head hides a sensitive soul, a cultured being who reads Moby Dick and draws circus animals.

His life takes a new turn when he is recruited by the biggest American circus. If the man with the lion’s head goes on tours and now earns a lot of money, he still feels alone in a world that sees the circus in decline, dethroned by new forms of entertainment such as cinema.

With this album, Xavier Coste immerses us in the world of the circus and the “freaks”, these creatures which made as much as the animals the salt of the shows of the golden age of the circus. The author subtly questions the question of animality and savagery through the portrait of a fair “beast” full of sensitivity and refinement, constantly tormented by the desire to return to its animal state.

The story is told to us in the first person. It is therefore through his own voice that we discover the singular personality of this lion man with a tender heart, living in the middle of a gallery of strange characters. Deformed beings that circus bosses exploit without scruple and throw away like vulgar objects when the spectacle of their difference no longer thrills the crowds. Who, animal or man, is wilder? This question runs through this magnificent album without providing the expected answer.

Very inspired, the author seizes the universe of the circus and the freaks with a very free graphic design, multiplying the materials and the shape of the pages, like this world out of format. We think of Fellini’s cinema, of Tod Browning’s film of course (Freaks, 1932), but certain plates, very pictorial, also evoke the paintings of Marc Chagall… This very successful graphic novel both by its subtle narration of the solitary quest for a different being, and by its striking imagery, is one comic albums not to be missed for the start of the 2022 school year.

“The man with the lion’s head”, by Xavier Coste (Sarbacane, 208 pages, €29.00)