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Alexandre Vigneault

The Press

Amazing introduction to philosophy

Who are you ? Where does the world come from? Sophie Amundsen is very annoyed by these complicated questions left in her mailbox by a mysterious philosopher. Step by step, guided by a strange correspondence course in which she had not even registered, the teenager was introduced to the history of philosophy, became almost friends with thinkers from ancient Greece and learned to see the world with new eyes.

Great bookstore success at the time of its publication in 1991, the novel Sophie’s world, by the Norwegian Jostein Gaarder, popularizes in an amazing way the great currents of thought that have forged our visions of the world over the centuries. Its comic book adaptation by Nicoby (drawing) and Vincent Zabus (screenplay) makes its subject even more accessible to young and old reluctant to type a brick of more than 600 pages.

Without having read the novel in question, we deduce that the essence of the subject is there. That its transposition into comics even gives it wings: in addition to walking in the footsteps of Plato, Socrates or Saint Augustine, Sophie visits Athens and Rome, cities that the book gives to see as much more than to imagine, which is a more when there are pedagogical aims.

Vincent Zabus’ story, which we guess is essentially faithful to Jostein Gaarder’s novel, has undergone an update that makes it current: Sophie is concerned about climate change, has a cell phone and acts like a teenager from the 2000s. And if the subject may seem dry, the approach is on the contrary playful (especially on the visual level) and makes very accessible concepts which, in the context of the school, could make some pupils yawn.

The adaptation is only in the first volume, but the project is extremely well put together. Sophie’s world is a comic to put in all hands.

Sophie’s world, T. 1

Nicoby and Vincent Zabus, after Jostein Gaarder

Albin Michael

260 pages

9/10

Power to the imagination !

Marie and Nathalie are getting older, but they continue to compete in imagination by still playing their favorite game: if we were. Well known to magazine readers Curium, which is the first to publish the boards of Axelle Lenoir, this game is all about pretending. Marie and Nathalie — sometimes also Jane Doe, Nathalie’s girlfriend — imagine themselves to be characters from Star Wars, princesses (yes, yes), put themselves in the shoes of Jane Doe herself and, this is surely not not such a great invention, wonder how they would live if they were in confinement… Axelle Lenoir, who was nominated for an Eisner Award, the Oscars of American comics, for the English translation of the first volume, still amazes with this news batch of impossible adventures which pose a new challenge to the two virtuosos of the imagination, confronted with the realization in the real world of some of their follies. The drawing is lively, the dialogues are always so tasty. A word of advice: if you come across a dusty old lamp, pay attention to the wishes you would like to make. You never know what can happen…

If we were, T. 2

Axelle Lenoir

Cold Front

92 pages

8/10

A sensitive gaze

Having left for Haiti for a change of scenery — he is fleeing from a person he does not name — Keelan Young plans to learn more about the mushrooms (the “djondjon” of the title) found on the pearl of the West Indies and their medicinal use. His adventure will take him everywhere in this country, which he will travel up and down, often on foot, where he will meet men and women who could advance his mycological research, which gives him the opportunity to the portrait of a welcoming and resilient population. Keelan Young signs here a story with a rather static narration – the narration largely dominates the dialogues – whose distant character is partly compensated by the sensitive gaze he poses on people. His thrifty style, a clear, slightly oily line, skilfully sets the scene, but lacks expressiveness. The Montreal artist, for whom this is his first step into comics, has an overall delicacy on which he can build for the future.

djondjon

Keelan Young

Hands free

108 pages

6/10

Colorful Norse Epic

Sarah is about to shoot her first fiction film entitled New Quebec and it promises to be quite an adventure: she and her team are leaving for Schefferville, where they will work with the Innu and Naskapi, among others. Caroline Lavergne, a friend of Sarah, joined the filming with the idea of ​​chronicling it in a comic strip. Somewhere between documentary and autofiction, Sarah’s movie is both an open door to the underside of cinema and a portrait of life far north of Sept-Îles, where no road goes. Caroline Lavergne relies on a clear expressive line sometimes close to the sketch that she dresses with a rich and very beautiful palette of often faded colors. She thus paints lively scenes that give a lot of tone to her humorous story, but which also touches on serious subjects such as the economy of the mining town and relations with members of the First Peoples.

Sarah’s movie

caroline lavergne

New address

236 pages

7/10

Other outings

The man with the lion’s head

Xavier Coste, author of a fantastic adaptation of 1984 by George Orwell, returns with the story of a circus beast, the lion man of the title, once again visually magnificent.

Corto Maltese

Juan Diaz Canales (screenwriter of Blacksad) and Rubén Pellejero are once again the architects of a new adventure by Corto Maltese set in interwar Berlin. Leaving for Berlin to find a friend, the hero discovers that he has been murdered and conducts his investigation in a city confronted with the rise of Nazism.