European Graphic Novels+

Hang on tight!!

Swarte has always been someone who tickled me, with his beautifully clean, mad, pleasing designs. For now, this will have to serve as a minor introduction to his work.

Joost Swarte is a Dutch graphic designer, illustrator and architect, and one of the most famous Dutch comic artists internationally, even though he has not made that many actual comics. Most of his better known series, like Jopo de Pojo, Anton Makassar and Katoen en Pinbal (1972-1979), were made in the 1970s. Afterwards he became far better known as an illustrator and architect.

Swarte is not just a follower of the "Clear Line" tradition of Hergé and Edgar P. Jacobs, but is actually the very person who coined and popularised the phrase "Ligne Claire".

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Swarte draws in a very calculated, technically-precise style with much attention to bright colours and elegant design work. Swarte is additionally (co-)initiator of magazines Modern Papier and Scratches, as well as the festival Stripdagen Haarlem, and the Hergé Museum in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium.

--Lambiek, with edits & additions by Johnny

More here, with samples: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/s/swarte1.htm

Took me a while, but I finally got it!
It's an homage to Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir, to the left.

No idea what album this is from, I'm afraid. Anybody know..?

Hey folks-- I'm not feeling too well these days, so I wanted to release some of my notes & scans, just in case.

In this case, there was a fully-constructed page from Tintin and the Picaros, but it got cut for space considerations, as sometimes happens. What's particularly amazing in this case is that George Remi himself (Hergé), took the interviewer step-by-step through the process, in a commentary / supplementary book "Musée."

So I've been working on notes & translations from that book, and it's indeed pretty fascinating, but life is life. Let me just give you the full scans, if you're interested:

https://imgur.com/gallery/ANex7EE

Sorry folks, I'm not feeling that well (multiple health issues).

I'm really happy how this sub / community has come so far, much of the posts being aided and abetted by those of @[email protected] and @[email protected].

If you don't mind, for the time-being, I'll just come in once in a while with a fresh post.

It started when I sneaked into the adult comic department of my local library, in the early nineties and (much too early for my twelve year old mind) read the works of Matthias Schultheiss for the first time. His drawing and his colouring has always stood out to me and for good reason. He is respected as one of the biggest german comic artists, especially for his releases during the eighties.

Today I would like to give you a little peek into his most renowned series, The Sharks of Lagos. The story revolves around the adventures and struggles of main character Patrick Lambert, a former sailor who turned into a pirate. The modern piracy scenario is depicted with painful realism, which I was unaware of as a kid. In fact, twelve year old me thought it was hyperbolic to the extreme. Well, adult me knows that I could not have been more wrong. If you are unfamiliar with nowadays piracy and it´s social and political background, I very much recommend watching this unusually well done documentary (Englisch) on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfanBWX3Fwg

After watching it you will see that in fact nothing in the comics is too exaggerated, at least in the first cycle of the story. Let´s start with the cover art of the series:

First cycle, published 1987-1990:

Second cycle, published 2014-2020:

As you can see, Schultheiss took quite a long pause between the cycles. The success of the first cycle of The Sharks of Lagos and also of The Truth about Shelby caused his subsequent breakthrough as a comic artist, which culminated in him -as the first german comic artist ever- getting his own exhibition, at the 1992 comic festival in Angoulême.

Fueled by success, Schultheiss then went on and attempted to conquer the US and the Japanese markets. Therefore he developed his version of an american super hero series called Propellerman and a manga series called In the Center of Madness. Both flopped on the targeted markets. Disappointed, he turned away from comics and became a writer of scripts for TV shows and children books.

It took fifteen years until he tried again and had a successful comeback with Woman On The River and Daddy, leading to the continuation of The Sharks of Lagos, after his former publisher Splitter approached him and asked if he might want to go on with the series.

Naturally the visual styles of the two cycles are different from each other after such a long temporal gap. It starts with the technique, the first cycle was done in the old school analog style of the eighties, while when doing the second cycle Schultheiss had already switched to working digitally. It goes on with the layout, which is quite traditional in the first cycle but has the panels liberally distributed all over the place in the second, whenever it fits the plot.

The writing style also changed. The first cycle was already full of brutal violence, rape and cruelty but always in ways to be expected from a realistic modern piracy scenario. In the second cycle the violence has a somehow sadistic look to me in the way it is presented and also seems to be more of a tool to illustrate Lambert´s transition from a badass pirate into a comicesque supervillain but enough of the spoilers, let´s get to the samples:

First cycle:

Voodoo Tricks

Survival

Mass Execution

Second cycle

Defying the Elements

Phở

Boarding Party

As I see it, he's a great, prolific artist, seen above with Le Cycle de Cyann.

https://www.lambiek.net/artists/b/bourgeon.htm

This is easily one of the greatest graphic novel series (3 tomes) I've ever read. It's by Lewis Trondheim, creator of the brilliant Donjon mega-series, plus Ralph Azham, McConey / Lapine, and countless others.

FIRST THOUGHTS: Maggy initially struck me as a likeable 'Bridget Jones'-type youngish woman, in many ways charmingly trying to figure out how best to apply her canny bag of talents to modern life. A talented ingenue, as it were? But good gracious-- the series is so much more than just that.

Our story begins with Maggy freshly hired, yet due to unexpected events, she swiftly goes from 'boring part-time secretary serving a boring PI' (i.e. a dick, a detective), all the way to finding herself deeply embroiled in a painful lottery-ticket-gone-wrong web of murder.

Who is Maggy, anyway? She's young, but canny, resourceful, cynically humorous. She's bold as brass, on the verge of going DOWN.. or NOT, really?

In strolls a new character:

Now we got two. Let's DO this.

Time to get these barstids!

Yeap... bit of an old spoiler, dammit.

Protect yourself, sure... unless someone 'protects themselves even better!'

Any last thoughts, my friend..?

For me, Maggy's such a fun, revelatory, multi-dimensional character, the likes of which we rarely ever see. And especially as a female character! I must say I'm deeply proud of Trondheim for realising this nuanced, realistic series... deeply-satisfying as it is.

CONCLUSIONS? This is an absolute masterclass of a 3-book crime-off-the-rails series. Please check it out if you can. And personally? What particularly impresses me is Trondheim's typically 'light-hearted touch' upon every component, from story to art. It is a level of 'loose mastery' I'm not sure I've ever seen before across comics.

Note: the idea of this blog / site / subr / community is to welcome a pleasant diversity of talents upon a 'Euro-style' expression of artistry and comics, specifically.

Now, here-- Riad Sattouf (creator of "The Arab of the Future"), little blond kid, is back in Syria, early 80's, I think it was?

The first Moebius pic I've ever posted here, haha.

One of the main reasons he's so memorable is because Williams designed a brilliant, treasure-hunt puzzle-book in 1979 that set the stage for geocaching today, not to mention a bunch of other types of 'hidden treasure-type' puzzles.

The ultra-famous picture-book of his was called Masquerade. Indeed, I had a copy as a kid, enjoyed the pics, but didn't have the slightest clue how to solve it. Actually, the 'solving' turned in to fiasco of sorts, which you can read plenty more about online...

So let's just do a bit more of Kit Williams' art:

A delightful mashup of design, puzzle, and symbolism; that's me loving it, yes!

It's from the embarrassing-as-hell album Tintin au Congo (1931 originally, 1946 in color).

The story of how Hergé evolved from 'know-nothing, Belgium insular' to 'evolving world man' is touched on pretty well in Ampton's articles, I think. [link]

EDIT: Despite my criticism above, what we're looking at here is in fact a nice example of polished LC (ligne claire), something which went on to define much of the artform and storytelling sense of BD for... well, it's coming up on 100yrs now. oO

Uderzo designed this Astérix poster for a comics festival in 2002, I think it was.

Some others did, too! Check out the fun: [link]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.mindoki.com/post/199908

Backside of the card:

72 THE BREEDER

Female rular of Syldaine-Cygnos, the BREEDER demanded the return of the Wild Pecker known as the HORNY GOOF in time for theFall Coitus. APPEARANCES: The Horny Goof (1974) (in Moebius 0).

Looks a bit dangerous, but I guess they know what they're doing.

Album of the whole short comic.

Above we have a mischievous little "marsu," directing today's parade. Do we know where we're headed, exactly? (Franquin)

René Hausman

Morris!

Mézières

And once again, Franquin.

Fun fact: elephants, along with crows, dolphins, parrots, octopuses, whales, and we naked apes are considered the smartest, cleverest animals on the planet by the body of science.

Elephants even have funerals, graveyards, and go in to mourning for the loss of their loved ones.

I don't know if Chuck was off his meds that day, but the kids don't seem to mind too much. The drivers, however...

I also happened to find a similar pic, and it's the cover of a biographical BD, which unusually included two CD's complimenting Chuck's story & history. Looks rather promising, I'd say.