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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Happy Holidays!
Posted: December 24, 2014
It’s that time of year, so let me thank you for visiting my website, I hope you’ve found it fun and informative. To wish you the jolliest of holidays, I’d like to share with you a French children’s comic I was drawn to at a BD collectors’ fair a few weeks ago in Paris. This is a telling front-cover image of ‘Noël 1914’ in this centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War and the kind of little-known (at least to me) item of comics history that I love coming across.
This eleventh issue of the bi-monthly IMA, L’Ami des jeunes actually dates from December 1955, and ties in to the opening two-page illustrated text story.Thanks to Bernard Joubert, I’ve learnt that this cover signed ‘A.G.’ is by André Galland, an illustrator who died in 1963 and is now largely forgotten. The tale of ‘Noël 1914’ inside is written by ‘A.Y.L.’ , alias A.Y. Lopin, director/editor of the publication. Not surprisingly, his story is highly sentimentalised, as the elderly Breton couple Tonton and Tatie (Uncle and Auntie) reminisce about the little girl Geneviève whom Tonton as a young soldier or ‘poilu’ on patrol found on a farm on Christmas Eve 1914, hiding under her bed, since her parents had been dragged away by ‘les Prussiens’. Geneviève dreams of Santa bringing her parents back and bringing her a doll.
So for Christmas morning, the soldiers make a Christmas tree from three guns and decorate it with candles and on the floor the simple wooden doll that Tonton has carved for her. Geneviève ends up being cared for and raised by the country couple for five years, and the story closes years later with the adult Geneviève paying a return visit and bringing her childhood doll with her.
For all its slushiness, this vignette does demonstrate to its readers that by 1955, those young French adults who had survived the horrors of the First World War would have been in their Sixties, like Tonton and Tatie, and show how the traumas of that conflict continued to echo long after.
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