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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Article: PG Previews November 2013
Posted: August 31, 2013
As we start slipping into the autumn, November 2013 brings us still more delights including new graphic novel projects from the likes of Matteo Farinella, Charles Forsman, Howard Hardiman, Ilya, Roman Muradov and Jesse Reklaw and others, and very welcome translations of some outstanding bandes dessinées and manga and no less than two new books about Alan Moore as well as Trina Robbins’ ultimate ‘her-story’ of America’s women cartoonists and deluxe monographs on Rube Goldberg and Hergé. Now I won’t trumpet my own brand new book from Tate Publishing and Yale University Press, Comics Art, as my pick of the month, that would be a bit too self-promotional of me!
What I will choose as my November pick is Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlman and Kerascoët from Drawn & Quarterly, which I’ve been looking forward to seeing in English for ages. In 2010 I selected this as a particular favourite after it was first published by Dupuis in 2009 and nominated for an Angoulême award. Back then I wrote: “The single stand-out book I have read and re-read, that horrified and charmed me and haunts me still, is Jolies Ténèbres [its French title, literally ‘Pretty Shadows’]. This is exquisitely drawn by Kerascoët (pen-name of Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset taken from her home town) and co-written with Fabien Vehlmann. You might have come across Kerascoët’s Miss Don’t Touch Me with writer Hubert in English from NBM. Good though that is, Jolies Ténèbres is exceptional.
“This is such a unique, unsettling amorality tale, from its opening sequence in which charming Aurore and her friends find their tea unfortunately interrupted as the large dollops of red gloop start falling onto them. A mass exodus follows, and it is only then that we we see them pour out onto the forest floor, leaving behind them the decomposing body of a little girl. The fantasy realm of Richard Dadd’s feverish fairy paintings collides here with the murder mystery puzzle of who killed this child and will they get away with it. Your moral compass goes all over the place and loses you, as you look for some guidance to the actions and motives of these mercurial, cute yet cruel little woodland creatures. Lizzie Spratt from Walker Books shared my enthusiasm: ‘This has to be one of the most compelling works of moral philiosophy. I want to discuss! I want others to discuss! It’s so cleverly conceived and put together - the mixture of beautiful watercolours and realism combined with these charming cartoon characters with their bulging innocent eyes, but with all their self-concern, their hunger and the grimmest view of what makes nice and what makes nasty.’ Or as I put it, ‘Shadows have never been prettier, or darker’.”
Read the rest of my Previews here…
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.
