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Best Comics of 2019: An International Perspective Part 3:

Year in Review

As still more Year-in-Review reports come in from my international correspondents, I’ll be posting them here in the third Part of this 2019 International Perspective. Huge gratitude and appreciation to these connoisseurs for their reviews and recommendations. I hope you find this annual survey as enlightening as I do!

BELGIUM - GERMANY - SPAIN

Read Part 1 of this International Perspective here…, and Part 2 here…


Belgium & The Netherlands

Selected by Gert Meesters

Gert Meesters is associate professor of Dutch language and culture at the University of Lille, France. He is a co-founder of the comics research group Acme in Liège, Belgium and co-edited essay collections about French publishing house L’Association, the comics magazine (À Suivre) and the character Spirou. Since 2001, he has been writing weekly comics reviews for the Flemish news magazine Knack.

2019 was a great year for Dutch-language comics. I could have easily chosen over twenty interesting new comics, but I limited myself to three debuts and three works by experienced cartoonists.


Beatrice
by Joris Mertens
Oogachtend

About half a century ago, the young Beatrice sells gloves in a big gallery, reminiscent of shopping galleries in Paris, Brussels or Antwerp. On her way to work, she regularly notices a red bag that doesn’t seem to belong to someone. One day, she decides to satisfy her curiosity and she takes the bag home. It contains a photo album that gives her lonely existence a magical twist. With these simple story elements, Belgian cartoonist Joris Mertens has drawn an impressive debut at the age of 51. His experience in film and television can explain why he succeeds in telling the whole story wordlessly, although some of it is quite complex. Yet Beatrice is above all a triumph of atmosphere and style. Mertens’s mixed historic city, with overtones of Paris, feels realistic and fairytale-like at the same time. The drawings are sketchy and sometimes extremely detailed, the reds and browns referring to the work of Nicolas de Crécy, whereas the romantic urban feeling reminds one of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie or Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Beatrice  has revealed a cartoonist with great potential, as has already been noticed abroad: early in March, Mertens’s debut came out in French from the big publishing house Rue de Sèvres.


Tremen
by Pim Bos
Ballon Media

A man travels though an arid landscape on the back of an animal, a kind of dromedary without a head. He meets humanoids and passes by installations apparently in a state of decay, whose purpose the traveller seems to know, unlike the reader of the story. Despite the traveller’s prior knowledge, his journey is not without risk. That is about all the story there is in Tremen, the debut of Dutch cartoonist Pim Bos, but imagination and strange atmospheres abound. The main asset of the book consists in the skilful black and white drawings which show an active imagination at work rendering the unknown surroundings in which Bos’s characters live. The book really offers a world in which to dwell. As a wordless science fiction journey, Tremen  cannot escape comparisons to Moebius’s Arzach . It can even be seen as a homage, although Tremen‘s story codes seem more difficult to crack. Bos does not give you much to build your interpretation on. The interactions between the creatures in the book and the objects shown are so strange that Shaun Tan’s The Arrival comes to mind. Tremen  was published by Dargaud for the French market even before the Dutch public had a chance to discover it.


Buck: The First Man on Earth
by Frederik Van den Stock
Oogachtend

Belgian cartoonist Frederik Van den Stock has been drawing comics for more than ten years, but Buck: The First Man on Earth is his official debut. It is a colourful alternative history of mankind. Van den Stock’s Adam goes by the name of Buck and lives in a natural paradise, where plants and animals call for attention. Van den Stock clearly does not attempt to be historically accurate, as he shows dinosaurs and mammoths walking peacefully together in the scenery. The events show the same anachronistic attitude. Buck not only invents language, the concept of God and art, but even money, artillery and the A-bomb. Even though the main character faces the deluge, and the disaster of the Tower of Babel as well, the story especially focuses on the lack of female companionship. Van den Stock clearly had a lot of fun drawing animals everywhere in the book and the fauna index at the end of the book turns Buck into a Where’s Wally type of puzzle book.


Bouvaert: Elegie voor een ezel (‘Bouvaert: Eulogy for a Donkey’)
by Simon Spruyt
Ballon Media

After an international breakthrough with Junker, his acclaimed graphic novel about Prussian nobility, and the fairy tale Papa Zoglu, Simon Spruyt bases his most recent book on the art world in Antwerp in the 17th Century. Bouvaert is a fictional biography of an artist who seems to have a lot in common with Peter Paul Rubens. Like many colleagues of the period, Jan Bouvaert goes to Italy to learn from the best. He paints portraits of beautiful duchesses at the special request of his local patron and works on a big altar piece. Meanwhile, his brother Pieter takes care of their mother at home and tends to the family shop. After hours, he continues writing an unlikely eulogy, a common literary exercise at the time, about the donkey. When Jan returns to Antwerp, his career only becomes successful after the enterprising Isabella, a young girl from a wealthy family, takes an interest in him. Spruyt uses the art of Rubens’s time to create Bouvaert’s work, but also recreates artistic discussions in the salons of the time. Typical of his work is the irreverent humour. The ambition of the artists is often countered by awkward situations or down-to-earth considerations, e.g. when it becomes apparent that a lot of Jan Bouvaert’s work consists of erotic work for the private quarters of rich men. Spruyt’s book is rich, well-documented, well-told and funny. Bouvaert was translated into French immediately by Casterman.


In Hollandia Suburbia 1: De aankomst (‘In Hollandia Suburbia 1: The Arrival’)
by Guido van Driel
Concerto

A teenage band in a typical Dutch neighbourhood goes by the name of In Hollandia Suburbia. One day, one of the band members loses an arm when a mysterious metal disc lands on it. In a sealed well drilled to find gas, a creature seems to be living. The leading police inspector quickly links the events to aliens. Cartoonist and film director Guido van Driel does not restrict the plot to one string of events. What sets this book apart are the anecdotes and seemingly unrelated subplots that eventually do play a role in the advancement of the story, such as a joke with a lost dog, a grandmother meeting aliens or the band’s bass player trying to seduce a girl with a headscarf. The book starts with the death of a main character and flashbacks tell the preceding events in little pieces. Since De aankomst, at 176 pages, is only the first book of two, many bewildering parts of the puzzle do not seem to fit yet. Knowing Guido van Driel, every piece of the mystery will eventually hit the right spot to make everything come together by the end of the story.


Taxi!: Verhalen vanaf de achterbank (‘Taxi!: Stories from the Backseat’)
by Aimée de Jongh
Scratch Books

Taxi is a book that can easily be underestimated. While browsing, one only sees very similar taxi rides in a very functional black and white drawing style. So readers who already know De Jongh’s previous work, The Return of the Honey Buzzard or Blossoms in Autumn (with star writer Zidrou), might wonder whether Taxi is a step backwards. The opposite is true. Contrary to those earlier books, Taxi is based on her own experiences. It is entirely composed of conversations with cabdrivers in Los Angeles, Jakarta, Paris and Washington D.C. The structure of the book is wonderful: instead of telling short stories about every ride individually, De Jongh continually jumps from one conversation to the next and back. With every driver, she manages to touch a sensitive spot. In Jakarta, De Jongh’s character talks with the driver about their both losing their fathers. In L.A., she realises that she absolutely wants to talk to an unfriendly cabdriver because she is lonely in the city. In Paris, the muslim chauffeur passes by the Bataclan concert hall after the terrorist attacks. Even though every encounter in itself is already worth telling, the merit of the book lies in the way De Jongh weaves the conversations together and always seems to find the right tone. The book is also available in English from Conundrum Press.


Germany

Selected by Christian Gasser

Christian Gasser is a Swiss fiction-writer, journalist and lecturer at the Lucerne University of Art & Design. He reviews comics for various newspapers, magazines and radio-networks in Switzerland and Germany. He is also the co-editor of the comics-magazine STRAPAZIN and a member of the “Max und Moritz Preis”-Jury of the Erlangen Comic-Festival. His latest books are: Animation.ch. Vision and Versatility in Swiss Animated Film (2011, as an enhanced e-Book in 2016), Comix Deluxe (2012), Rakkaus! (Finnish: Liebe) (novel, 2014).


Knock Out!
by Reinhard Kleist
Carlsen Verlag

A gay box-champion who by accident fatally injures his adversary in a world-title boxing match, after having been provoked by his homophobic jokes – and who, between fights, designs fashionable ladies’ hats? That was Emile Griffith (1938-2013). He became a boxer more by chance than anything else and enjoyed his greatest successes as World Champion in welter-, light middle- and middle-weight in the 1960s. He became famous, rich, but also controversial and ultimately remained an outsider. Life in the tough and very male world of boxing wasn’t easy for Griffith, being black and gay, and traumatised by the accidental killing. Alongside his glamorous life as a champion, he led another, secret life with his gay lovers and his hat-designs. He was of course also the victim of many social injustices and osctracism – and began, one day, to fight these discriminations not only within the boxing ring, but also outside it. Emile Griffith’s life was definitively tough, but also dazzling and unusual, and it reveals a lot about the social context in which he grew up and lived. Reinhard Kleist was predestined to give that life an interesting shape without losing sight the bigger picture. With his successful graphic novels like Cash, Castro and Nick Cave, Kleist has proven his talent for biographies which cast a surprising light on their subject; and with the earlier Boxer, another biographical comic about a Jewish boxer in a concentration camp, he has already drawn quite a few dynamic and intense fist-fights. In Knock Out!, Kleist tells Griffith’s life-story around that fatal blow. After the fight, the victim, now a ghost, confronts Emile Griffith, and makes him tell him his story. It’s a nice twist to keep the life-story focused, and turn it into an absorbing and very cinematic graphic novel.


Spain

Selected by Alfons Moliné

Alfons Moliné is an animator, translator and writer on comics, animation and manga. He is the author of a number of books, including El Gran Libro de los Manga (Glénat, 2002) and biographies of Osamu Tezuka, Carl Barks and Rumiko Takakashi. His most recent work is a history of Ediciones Vértice, the publishing house that first brought Marvel’s superheroes to Spain.


Epílogo (‘Epilogue’)
by Pablo Velarde
Nuevo Nueve

Active in the comics field since the mid-1990s, after a two-year stint in New Zealand, where he worked in advertising and animation, Pablo Velarde from Seville is one of the key contributors to the venerable satirical weekly El Jueves, where he has published such popular series as Amigas las tres (‘The Three Girlfriends’) and Custodia compartida (‘Joint Custody’). Now he has tackled his first graphic novel, with impressive results. Set in the mid-1980s, Epílogo is centred around Rodrigo Mendoza, a man who had always rejected his own father because he had worked for Franco as one of his toughest censors. However, during a visit to a photography exhibition about resistance during Franco’s dictatorship, Rodrigo finds out that his father actually led a double life, and this prompts him to change the notion he had of him and see him as a hero. This search for his father’s true past involves Rodrigo in a tangled plot, which shows us how memories can be tricky or easily manipulated. In Epílogo, Velarde abandons his usual cartoony style, somewhat influenced by Bill Watterson, for a more realistic one, albeit stylised and sleek, crisply rendered in black and white and showcasing a particularly masterful depiction of buildings. That’s not surprising considering that, just like Daniel Torres, Velarde also studied architecture before devoting himself to comics. Narrated at a frantic pace, this 240-page story is read in one sitting, leading to an unexpected epilogue (hence the story’s title). Epílogo has already been translated into French, and further international editions should follow soon. While we’re waiting for Velarde’s next graphic novel, his work can be discovered at his website.                                                         


Inframundo (‘Infraworld’)
by Pep Brocal
Astiberri

Pep Brocal is one of the members of the generation of young edgy artists that emerged in the 1980s Spanish comics scene, when the market for adult comic magazines (Cimoc, Zona 84, Cairo, El Vibora, Comix, etc.) was in its heyday. Brocal has enjoyed for nearly 35 years a fruitful, creative career that extends not just to comics, but also to other areas such as illustration and advertising. In recent times, he has achieved new highlights with his graphic novels Alter & Walter (2013) and Cosmonauta (2017). In both of them, Brocal presented a deep insight of the yearnings and frustrations of human nature. With his new work, which might be said to form a trilogy with the previous two, he takes one step beyond. The main character of Inframundo is Amalia, a middle-aged woman that leads a dull, mundane life and works as a concierge at an apartment building. One day, a mysterious visitor takes Amalia’s cat, carrying it away in his suitcase. When trying to recover her pet, Amalia gets plunged into the Infraworld, the universe of those who have no soul, where she will witness her own hell and other people’s hells, finding out in the process that one’s own reality can be much wider and richer if one broadens one’s perception of it. Brocal’s style, which over the years has absorbed such influences as the Franco-Belgian ligne claire and EC horror comics from the 1950s, among others, reaches its peak here, showcasing a thoughtful use of colour as a narrative resource, often employing just one or two hues per panel, as well as sepiatone for flashback scenes, coupled with innovative page layouts… and a cameo by Bruce Lee to boot. Inframundo is more than just a modern re-telling of Dante’s Inferno: in the words of another great Spanish comics author, Paco Roca, Brocal’s 312-page opus is “an initiatory journey in which the protagonist learns that, in her descent into the abyss, what is truly important is to flow”.


El Buscón en las Indias (‘The Swindler in the Indies’)
by Alain Ayroles & Juanjo Guarnido
Norma Editorial

Multi-award winning artist Juanjo Guarnido, widely known for his Blacksad saga with Juan Díaz Canales, revives with the help of French writer Alain Ayroles a classic of seventeenth-century Spanish literature, El Buscón (‘The Swindler’), a novel by Francisco de Quevedo belonging to the picaresque genre. In this newly-created sequel to the original work, we find roguish but likeable Don Pablos de Segovia, alias El Buscón, traveling on a galleon en route to the New World. After a series of mishaps, he finds himself in the Americas with a map that should lead him to the mythical lost city of El Dorado. For our antihero, this is the beginning of an exciting venture with no shortage of dangers, friends and enemies… A project matured over nearly ten years, and originally planned as an 80-page story but eventually extending to 160, El Buscón en las Indias boasts a script that cleverly blends satire with adventure, while Guarnido’s artwork bursts with lush details, dazzling colours and dynamic poses and facial expressions, a vestige of his experience in the animation field before he switched to comics. All this reveals his extensive work at research and documentation about the period in which the story is set, the ‘Siglo de Oro’ or the Spanish Golden Age. Published in France by Delcourt as Les Indes Fourbues (‘The Deceitful Indies’), and in Spain by Norma, it has been issued simultaneously in a regular hardcover edition and in a large-size deluxe edition with slipcase and bonus features, limited to 2,000 copies. It’s worth noting that El Buscón en las Indias has also raised interest even in circles unrelated to comics.
                 
Bonus list:
La Divina Comedia de Oscar Wilde (‘Oscar Wilde’s Divine Comedy’) by Javier de Isusi (Astiberri)
Carne de Cañón (‘Cannon Fodder’) by Aroha Travé (La Cúpula)
Llegará el invierno (‘Winter Shall Come’) by Alfonso López & Pepe Gálvez (Navona Gráfica)
Mies by Agustín Ferrer (Grafito Editorial)
En la oscuridad (‘In the darkness’) by Sara Soler (Planeta Comic)
La auditora (‘The Auditor’) by Jon Bilbao & Javier Peinado (Astiberri).


Read Part 1 of this International Perspective here…, and Part 2 here…

Posted: April 6, 2020

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