(Paris) The Rabbi’s Cat, the successful comic book series by Joann Sfar, comes out on Thursday in a new format, closer to the graphic novel. Let the fans be reassured: it’s not because it’s over.
Posted at 11:12 a.m.
In four “collections”, Dargaud editions bring together the first nine episodes of this story of a talking feline in the Jewish community of Algiers in the 1930s.
A few centimeters less in height, a few more in thickness, a more rounded cover… The object moves away from the classic format of the Franco-Belgian hardcover album.
“The form given by Dargaud is closer to the graphic novel. It fits in the bag, and it will bring closer The Rabbi’s Cat of a readership… I don’t know what to call it, maybe literary. I was happy with the proposal,” the author told AFP.
The series has sold 1.6 million copies, according to the publisher. It has 11 volumes to date, since the first which dates from 2002, and the last two which are therefore not yet included in this format.
“There is a 12and writing for over a year. The cat is a small character who has accompanied me for a long time. I wait for him to speak to me. Otherwise, I don’t force myself,” explains Joann Sfar, 50.
Because at the same time, he devotes energy to an autobiographical comic strip.
“It will be 170 pages, a story that tells of my childhood and my adolescence in Nice, with the political commitment of my father who was deputy mayor Jacques Médecin, and how from 16 to 21 years old I was tempted by activism. … As if I were giving keys to understanding the Rabbi’s Cat “, he confides.
The adaptation of Rabbi’s cat in animated film in 2011, when the series had five volumes, had earned him a César. But also a titanic work to bring this universe to the big screen, causing nine years of comic strip interruption, from 2006 to 2015.
“It’s very fragile, and I don’t know why it worked myself,” according to the author. “I tried to re-enchant my memories of the Maghreb, to recreate my village of Asterix, with the conscious desire to make it a very cosmopolitan place. There is no fatality in the clash of civilizations: we, in the Maghreb, we have this habit of supporting the other”.
Politics sometimes bursts in, with allusions to the history of this French Algeria brought to light by the presidential campaign, via the radical positioning of a son of Jews from Algeria, Éric Zemmour.
We thus see the reappearance of an anti-Semitic mayor of Oran, Father Lambert, or the strange mania of the Republic to validate a rabbi… by testing his mastery of French with a dictation.
“There is a porosity to the ambient concern. But the most political stories are those that have the least appeal. Readers tell me that they prefer that I dig into family history, or even religion,” reports Joann Sfar.