One last blues before leaving

Frantz Duchazeau traces his path in the margins. Those where his characters evolve, like the bluesman Robert Johnson, figure of the “Deep South”. A legend of American popular music whose last days he retraces.

Robert Johnson’s aura and influence in the world of music are as considerable as his life was brief. Died at the age of 27, like Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, he is the first on this list, since he died on August 16, 1938, after 3 days of agony, in Greenwood, in the State of Mississippi.

A posthumous glory

These are these Last days of Robert Johnson that Frantz Duchazeau chose to tell. He is not the first to be interested in this character who lived on the margins in comics. We are thinking in particular of the excellent Love in vain by Mezzo, on the drawing, and Jean-Michel Dupont, on the screenplay. But Duchazeau is one of the most legitimate when it comes to putting the blues into images.

We had already noticed his charcoal line, made of Indian ink worked with a brush, when he signed in 2008 The Dream of Meteor Slim. Today we find him of remarkable maturity. It literally makes the light of the South of the United States vibrate.

Duchazeau depicts the drift of the bluesman, who hangs out with a friend and his guitar – when they have one – along dirt roads, between cotton fields, in miserable dives where he downs bourbon and raises the girls, and even in the cities where it is better to shave the walls when you are black.

“Robert Johnson is wandering. Whatever happens, he traces his path. In a cloud of dust and the humidity of the Deep South, the Deep South, from which he was trying to escape.”

Frantz Duchazeau,

at franceinfo

Cutting the road with the devil

A whole mythology was born around this musician, who was said to have signed a pact with the devil. The reasons for his death? Poisoning by a jealous husband? Syphilis attack? Radical pneumonia? Simple assumptions. Either way, Johnson would never arrive on stage at Madison Square Garden, where glory awaited him a few days later. What remains of him are two or three vinyl discs, a few photos and now this road trip by Frantz Duchazeau:

The Last Days of Robert Johnsonpublished by Sarbacane.