Long live Kébec in comics!
For this expanded edition of the second volume of BDQa meticulous work devoted to the history of comics in Quebec and originally published in 2014, the author, screenwriter and professor specialist in the genre Michel Viau tackles a particularly fertile creative period in Quebec: the 1970s.
The young boomers then had both feet in the counterculture and were counting on making themselves heard by launching fanzines and magazines devoted to the genre of comics with a totally local flavor, in order to counter the invasion of American superheroes, often poorly translated and adapted to the quick.
One thinks, here, of the band of the Hydrocephalus which revolved around an important pioneer of comics, Jacques Hurtubise, a few years before he confused the legendary magazine Fang. Even if most of the initiatives only lasted a few issues, we still saw a number of talents hatch there that eventually made Kébec (as it was written), fertile ground for the phylactery.
BDQ, volume 2 The spring of Quebec comics, from 1968 to 1979
★★★ 1/2
Michael Viau
Francois Lemay
Take good care of your garden
For his first comic strip, titled Weedingthe multidisciplinary artist Geneviève Lebleu invites us to enter a disturbing universe with surreal allures, against the backdrop of a psychedelic garden.
Above all, we must not delude ourselves and get caught up in the game by this intrigue which has everything banal, that of the afternoon tea shared between friends, in what could be any suburban bungalow. That would be too easy!
It is rather, here, a question of a stolen husband, of an ill-consumed divorce, but above all of this disturbing garden which manages to take control, for completely mysterious reasons, of those who dare to venture there to spice up their infusion that will do anything but calm anxieties.
With a design that is reminiscent of that of the American Nick Drnaso (whose album sabrina was the first comic strip to be a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize in 2018), Lebleu signs a beautiful and distressing introduction, marked by an already very personal style.
Weeding
★★★
Genevieve Lebleu
Francois Lemay
A twisted story
Our private bike is trying for the umpteenth time to pass the driving license. Only here, in full examination, he sees a young woman in a wedding dress who is trying to throw herself on the ring road. Jerome saves her in extremis. The survivor proves to be more than grateful: she settles downright with the helpful binoclard in the raincoat Bogart, in the apartment that he usually shares with his adored Babette, often absent flight attendant. Love triangle ? What are you thinking there!
Dangerous gear, yes, and unexpected ramifications: a twisted story, where no one really has the best role. Where the spiral of jealousy comes very close to carrying the Jérôme-Babette couple.
This is the strength of this episode, the 28th in 40 years for Alain Dodier’s improbable detective series: we no longer know who to believe, while the suspense grows exponentially. Say goodbye to deductions, hello to strong emotions and crazy desires. Who manipulates? Who lets himself be manipulated? Only certainty: no permit for the private sector.
Jérôme K. Jérôme Bloche, volume 28And for the worse
★★★★
Alain Dodier
Sylvain Cormier
A trap you can’t get out of
And Linus tells. It is under this pseudonym (Charlie Brown’s Linus) that we first read Pierre Christin in the weekly Pilot. With his friend Jean-Claude Mézières, he sends real Wild West comic reports. From the idea of a flooded New York will arise their futuristic saga: Valerian and Laureline. Novelist as much as screenwriter (for Bilal, Goetzinger, many others), Christin is still, at 83 years old, the ace of aces of the perfectly tied story. The Pigalle interlope of 1950, of which he makes the central character of this comic strip, is not a dictionary of slang nor a heap of clichés, but a trap from which there is no escape. Through the destiny of a young guy, Antoine, known as Toinou, freshly arrived from his village, we plunge into an environment that is not caricatural, without pity. Arroyo’s line, refined to imitate the late Hubinon in the “classic” revival of Buck Danny, works with a scalpel on the sepia pages, with maniacal precision in the signs and storefronts, but also the faces. Tandem of swords: Christin has found another accomplice.
Pigalle, 1950
Sylvain Cormier