Initiated by Casterman editions, in 2018, the pocket-format comic book collection has gained followers. More manageable and at an unbeatable price (about 10 euros), the works offer a wide range of themes and authors to introduce a new readership to the ninth art. Between graphic novels, intimate story, humor or thriller, there is something for everyone.
This year, Casterman editions have gone a step further, reissuing, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Angoulême festival, a soft cover collection of 13 award-winning albums, most of them from its prestigious collection To be continued, for the modest price of 12 euros. A prestigious farandole of classics accessible to all.
In April 1973, the employees of the Lip factory mobilized against the dismantling of their company orchestrated by the shareholders who benefited from the support of the State. The conflict will last almost a year. Sequestration of executives, occupation of the factory, demonstrations, distribution of leaflets… The employees of the factory deploy all the means to obtain their case. Faced with the inflexibility of management, a solution is needed: run the factory without the bosses. “We make! We sell! we get paid!” chant the workers who will embark on the adventure of the self-managed factory. Laurent Galandon and Damien Vidal’s album, prefaced by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, immerses readers in this conflict which will mark the history of the workers’ struggle through the course of the character of Solange, who will emerge from this metamorphosed, emancipated experience. Unbridled enthusiasm, virtues of autonomy, moments of dejection, violent clashes with the police or conflicts within the insurgents, unbridled media coverage… The book addresses the different facets of this incredible collective odyssey, which made bend the governing bodies. If the victory is short-lived, the factory will be dismantled in 1977, the human adventure remains no less memorable. And the two authors were able to restore all the emotion.
Dargaud, 9.50 euros.
Simon, the buyer of the family bookstore, is facing financial difficulties which force him to consider closing it. When he witnesses, powerless, the suicide of a woman, his life changes. The trauma plunges him back into the painful memories of his childhood. Then begins a period of intense introspection before finding redemption. The reader follows him in the wandering of his memories tainted by guilt where madness awaits him at every moment. Relayed by delicate graphics enhanced by elegant black and white, the first intimate story by Aimée de Jongh (author of the excellent Jours de sable ), offers a captivating staging. Interweaving present and future, nightmarish moments and episodes of pure poetry, it keeps the reader in suspense from the first to the last page. A nugget.
Dargaud, 9.50 euros.
“The prone shooter position” is hitman Martin Terrier aka “Christian’s” favorite. Implacably cold, the man kills with disconcerting ease. When, at the end of a contract executed in London, he decides to stop his activity, his sponsor does not hear it that way. However, nothing can divert the killer from his decision. Still in love with his childhood sweetheart, a wealthy young girl who promised to wait for him ten years until he made his fortune, he is determined to honor his commitments. Hitman is a very lucrative business. Hunted by the Italian mafia, close to death at every moment, confronted with the massacres of his mistress and his cat… Since he decided to hang up his gloves, Martin Terrier has been drooling. And to top it off, his beloved forgot about him. Taken from the eponymous novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, undisputed master of thrillers, The position of the lying shooter illustrated by the fervent admirer of the genre Jacques Tardi recalls how a writer and an illustrator manage to find each other to magnify a literary text through images. Dark, with bitter violence, the panting story of Manchette under the pencil of Tardi is enhanced with intense black and white and a fascinating gallery of characters that the designer sketches with virtuosity. Tardi draws unforgettable villain faces.
Futuropolis, 9.90 euros.
“The recommendation is excellent and the place is important…But I fear that you are too young, Mademoiselle”… When Alice Guy presents himself to Léon Gaumont for a position as a shorthand typist, she answers him with a hint of insolence: “Don’t worry, I’ll pass!” This keen sense of the repartee seduced the director of the Comptoir Général de Photographie, a company of optical and photographic equipment. The beginning of a great adventure for the one who will become the first female director in the history of cinema. In this fascinating drawn biography, the author couple José-Louis Bocquet and Catel brilliantly illustrate the prodigious journey of this pioneer. With the watermark of an era and the vagaries of the birth of cinema. Unique woman in a world of men, Alice Guy braved by her enthusiasm, her passion for the profession, the sexist or macho considerations of her time. Despite everything, behind this fascinating portrait of a woman are also those of great men, benevolent and confident, helping her to climb the ladder from Louis Gaumont to Louis Feuillade via Gustave Eiffel. Exciting.
Casterman, 10 euros
United States, Alabama, town of Montgomery in the 1950s. Segregation is in full swing. In public transport white and black do not mix. And when a white person doesn’t have a seat, black people have to give up their seat. One day in 1955, from the height of her fifteen years Claudette Colvin refuses to submit to this law. Abused by the police, imprisoned and doomed to be judged, the young girl could have stopped there. But militant associations are seizing on this umpteenth injustice to fight against segregation. She urges Claudette Colvin to plead not guilty and sue the city. A few months before Rosa Parks, the teenager rocked the course of history. Inspired by the eponymous story of Tania de Montaigne, Emilie Plateau pays a tasty tribute to the one who was a pioneer in the fight for civil rights in the United States. The album, devoid of boxes, immerses the reader in the intimacy of a young black girl in a segregationist America marked by cruelty and profound injustice. Its simple, precise and effective graphics enhance the strength of the story of a heroic personality whose name, however, will be forgotten.
Dargaud, 9.50 euros.
This complete version of the poignant trilogy The Memory in the Pockets confronts the reader with the pangs of the family secret. The Lesignal household arouses the admiration of all. Invested in their life in the neighborhood, the mother, Rosalie, giving French lessons to children in difficulty, the son, Laurent, following in her footsteps in a reception center for refugees, the generosity of the family has no equal to his joie de vivre. More taciturn, Sidoine the father seems to live the course of his life with distance. Nothing seemed, however, to be able to shake this family harmony. But when Laurent asks his parents to host Malika, a young pregnant woman without papers, the veneer fades to give way to a dark reality. False pretences, heavy secrets, repressed suffering, stigmata of war… Based on his family history, Luc Brunschwig has developed a poignant and captivating story, brilliantly illustrated, around memory and family transmission. Sidoine’s story is marked with the seal of misfortune and unbearable pain. Telling it, for the old man, is impossible. But the truth eventually emerges in all its bitterness. And forever changes the lives of his loved ones. For better and for worse.
Futuropolis, 13.90 euros.
“A biting satire on the wanderings of prophets and religions of all kinds” rightly summed up Casterman editions about Jean-Paul Krassinsky’s album, when it was released in 2016. The book features Rhesus, a monkey from space stranded on the frozen Japanese mountains of Jigokudani among wild macaques. The primate astronaut understands very quickly that he is facing idiots. He becomes the Chosen One and the prophet of the cult of… Diou. In line with the fables of Aesop or La Fontaine, Krassinsky uses animals to denounce the failings of his contemporaries, which in his own words “gave him the necessary distance between the seriousness of the subject and the acid humor”. He thus uses great freedom to criticize religions by relying on a delicate black and white drawing, which has nothing to envy to the watercolor colors of the original comic strip. A delight.
Casterman, 10 euros.
Hyppolyte is a Guir, a round character close to the Moomins, to whom the authors dedicate their album. He mopes. His cochineal wife has disappeared. A talking animal, the Crumpled Muzzle tells him that Cochenille, pregnant, has gone to give birth like all the Guiresses at the Lagune aux nids. This son of the village shaman who has never left his land, decides to go in search of him to unknown lands. Our hero is in a hurry and will unleash the wrath of the Mountain God. And break the harmony that reigns in the country of Guirlanda. Magnificently supported by Mattotti’s fine pen strokes, the album revisits the classic tale, borrowing multiple and eclectic literary references, from the Moomins to the unfathomable worlds of Moebius and Fred. The album takes the reader on an epic, poetic and dreamlike adventure, a true hymn to beauty and tolerance. A wonder.
Casterman, 10 euros
A silent first page, at the end of which these few words open a masterful work: “Je mapel Silence é je suis genti”. Thus begins Silence, in 1979 in the prestigious collection (To Follow) by Casterman. The album, awarded in 1981 in Angoulême, tells the story of a simple hero baptized Silence. On more than 150 pages, the story takes the reader to the heart of a small village in the Ardennes called Beausonge. A poetic and violent parable on racism and the impossibility of integration, Silence deserves to be (re)discovered, if only for the beautiful, inventive and pure graphics of this master of black and white. Designer of witchcraft and rural life, Didier Comès made difference a marvelous exception. Friend and disciple of Hugo Pratt, he knew how to create a singular universe, at once cruel, rustic and magical. Must read.
Casterman, Angoulême 50th edition, 12 euros
“If I hadn’t created my own world, I would probably have died in other people’s,” said Anaïs Nin. Free and open to the satisfaction of her desires, the world of the famous American diarist was forged by a long and trying introspection. Married in the 1930s, at the age of twenty, to financier Hugo Guiler, the young woman will feel torn between her narrow life as a wife and a more fulfilled existence. Sincerely in love with her husband, Anaïs Nin will deploy a myriad of double lives and lies to satisfy her quest for freedom. Fascinated by her diary since her adolescence, the author Léonie Bischoff, 39, offers a tasty and prodigious adaptation of the early years of the artist in the making. The album is set in the early 1930s. Anaïs Nin lives in Louveciennes, torn between her social obligations and the desire to escape from a world of shackles. Feeling trapped, she finds an escape in writing her diary. And wins the possibility of flourishing in his art. Stunning.
Casterman, Angoulême 50th edition, 12 euros
