Summer is the time for comics and graphic novels. They are an easier read when hanging out by the pool, or on the beach, than that 624 page whopper you finally have some time for, now that it’s the holidays.
Comic Books & Graphic Novels
From Mad Magazine, The Beano, Billy Bunter and Asterix while growing up . . . to Charles Adams, Robert Crumb’s Kafka, Maus and Persepolis as an adult . . . comic books, and more recently, longer more complex graphic novels, are a delight. As culture has moved from being a print to a visual one, great novels like The Three Musketeers or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way are now available in comic book versions. The trend is growing and business is booming. Those literati who turn their noses up at them are missing out!
Newspapers picked up on the attraction of the comic strip a century decades ago. More recently bloggers have been getting in on the act with comicblogs. (Garfield minus Garfield and Simon’s Cat are favourites.)
Enterprising, indie French publisher, Massot Éditions, has pulled off a clever publishing coup by releasing Un Autre Regard (Other Ways of Seeing) based on blogger Emma’s comic strip. (Her facebook community numbers over 200,000 fans.) Her take on news stories and accepted “truths” – be they on law and order, immigration, feminism, holidays, sexism at work, giving birth, or the clitoris – challenges the status quo and questions what liberté, égalité, fraternité really means in France today.
We’re all going on a summer holiday . . .
Back at work from maternity leave, when Emma tells her colleagues she is off to Brittany, they tease her for taking another holiday. *Joke* She remembers how childbirth, and the pain and exhaustion that follow, not helped by medical attitudes, are anything but restful.
Her bum’s bigger than mine . . .
They don’t care about us
Hurricane
The human problems of an increasingly reactionary western civilisation which Emma flags up are not going away any time soon, quite the contrary. President Trump has openly referred to women as “aesthetically pleasing objects” thereby condoning their objectification. He has told the police: “Don’t be too nice to suspects” thereby endorsing brutality. And his remarks made following the Charlottesville protests draw a moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists. As Britain heads towards Brexit it is likely the “special relationship” with the US will intensify; along with all manner of subterfuge and denial from poodle politicians in the British government.
Un Autre Regard (Other Ways of Seeing) is a French book ripe for translation which deserves to be made available for an English-reading audience. The comic strip format enables Emma to convey her ideas fast and effectively, reaching the most readers possible. She asks who the forces of law and order are protecting in reality. Who indeed? What do YOU think?
Un Autre Regard (Other Ways of Seeing) by Emma | Massot Editions | May 2017 £10.99 PB 110pages | ISBN: 9791097160036
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