We enter from the title that Football-Fantasy, Zviane’s most recent album, will not be an ordinary book. This sturdy 520-page comic tells the story of a mad scientist and two of his guinea pigs on the run in a country with an incomprehensible language plagued by all kinds of political upheavals. It runs, it backfires, it cries and it dreams throughout this abundant story that its author sees as a fable.
Excerpts from Football-Fantasy
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Two narrative threads that touch each other
There are two main story arcs in Football-Fantasy : the story of the flight of two young girls pursued by killer robots and the events that made them fugitives. These two stories unfold in parallel, but the timeline is clear thanks to narrative tips (a timeline) and a judicious use of color for the present and a mixture of white, gray and black for the past. . The start is breathtaking: Frédérique and Annabelle flee at full speed after the murder of their protector and end up in Football-Fantaisie, a town in an imaginary archipelago located off the Gaspé Peninsula where the inhabitants speak an incomprehensible language and which goes through a period of election and social movements. The entire first half of the book focuses on this escape and on the hunt for young girls launched by the scientist who used them as guinea pigs.
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Quirky reality
Zviane does not hide it: she likes it when “reality is a little next to reality”. Her inclination for the absurd and quirky humor are well known to those who have long followed her. His Fruit bestiary, The cat’s host (with Iris), Meatloaf with dissonance and several other of his books stretch the boundaries of realism in their own way. Even his most intimate stories – Apnea, The second – exist in spaces cut off from the world. We are not surprised that Football-Fantasy was born from a dream that she had and that she continued in comics by constructing this absurd story in which a mad scientist experiments with children in the hope that they will manage to manipulate matter.
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Mirror of society?
Division of public opinion, mass movement (nods to Printemps érable, the FLQ and the demonstrations that followed the suspension of Maurice Richard in the 1950s), language war, Football-Fantasy talking about Quebec. Zviane, mischievous as she can be, even reverses the roles in her imagined country: it is not French that is threatened, but rather the invented language spoken by the population of the archipelago, a sort of anomaly on the North American continent. “We can draw parallels, agrees the cartoonist, but I would like us to be able to see this story as a big fable. There is no big message or big criticism of the company. ”
“Language is an identity in my story. It is a bit of a nod to the situation in Quebec. But there is not really a common language, everyone speaks a little their own language: there is one who lisp, one who stutters, another who speaks with the nose and the children speak with spelling mistakes. The mass is made up of this multitude, ”explains Zviane.
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The big and the small
What interested the author more, during the five years of work that she put on this album, it is the relation of the big to the small, that of the individual and the mass. The scientist’s experiments aim at something like the manipulation of atoms, but lead to something else that is potentially destructive. And despite all the social upheavals, life goes on and remains strewn with intimate dramas: the young Frederique who feels abandoned by her parents, Olivier who has difficulty living her loves at a distance, little Annabelle (a really cute character) who cries, who cries, who laughs despite the dangers that threaten them, Fred and her.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
An experimental pavement
“I had imposed on myself the constraint not to make sketches [en commençant Football-Fantaisie] and go straight to it in ink, which I had never done before, says Zviane. It gives a style of drawing which is more all wrong because I have a lot less control: if you make a mistake, you get stuck with it. It influenced my drawing a lot. ” Football-Fantasy is also his first color comic. More often than not, they are lively and frankly accentuate the drama that is being played out or the feelings of the characters. They also give a frankly playful aspect to this adventure full of twists and turns and threads that protrude, but unlike any other.
Football-Fantasy
Zviane
Pow Pow editions
520 pages
In bookstores now