Embalmed Ones, Fabulous Ones, Those That Tremble as if They Were Mad

There are no outrageous surprises on the collated Eurocomics list (though individual choices, of course, are more idiosyncratic). Rather, the critics who participated in the poll chose works which (a) have been translated into English, (b) have been canonically sanctioned as works of influence and merit by important critics, and/or (c) span the major periods of Eurocomics production. Perhaps a good way to discuss such a diverse group of books is to pigeonhole them into chronological periods, like so:

The Origin: The comics of Rodolphe Töpffer (published in Switzerland between 1833 and 1846). Töpffer’s status as the inventor of the comic book, and as the format’s first accomplished artist, was solidified by David Kunzle’s Töpffer biography (2007) and the Kunzle-edited collection Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (2007). These resources certainly made it easier for me to teach Töpffer, and learn to appreciate him myself. When I first read The Story of M. Jabot (1833), and noticed how Töpffer repeated words and images every time Jabot was trying to recover from a humiliating incident, I laughed out loud. Not bad for a comic book almost 200 years old.

The Classics: The Adventures of Tintin albums by Hergé (published in Belgium and France between 1930 and 2004); Astérix the Gaul by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (published in France in 1961); the Moomin books and comic strip by Tove Jansson (published in Finland between 1945 and 1993); and the Corto Maltese albums by Hugo Pratt (published in Italy and France between 1967 and 1992).

Boy reporter Tintin remains amazingly popular, influential enough to spawn both the upcoming Steven Spielberg / Peter Jackson Adventures of Tintin blockbuster film, and such alt-comics emulators of Hergé’s visual style (called la ligne claire, the clear line) as Chris Ware and Jason Lutes. Tintin’s worldwide popularity remains unsullied by Hergé’s own collusion with the Nazi occupiers of World War II Belgium, as discussed in Pierre Assouline’s Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin (1998; first English-language edition 2009).

Astérix is likewise part of the canon, albeit one drawn in a knockabout bigfoot style rather than in la ligne claire. Readers everywhere recognize Astérix and his sidekick Obelix, and probably learned most of their knowledge about Rome and the Gauls from Goscinny and Uderzo. It’s interesting that the majority of HU critics chose the first Astérix volume, Astérix the Gaul (1961), as their choice; personally, I prefer the albums from the mid-to-late 1960s, like Astérix the Legionary (1967). If you haven’t read any Astérix yet, though, maybe you should start from the beginning — and stop before Astérix and the Great Divide (1980), when Goscinny dies and Uderzo takes over the writing.

Although not as well-known in the United States as Tintin or Astérix, Tove Jansson’s Moomin comic strips and children’s books have been wildly popular during the last 60 years in Finland, Sweden, Europe, and elsewhere. (A far-flung example: New Zealand alt-cartoonist Dylan Horrocks has been a world-class Moomin fan since his early childhood.) Today, North American comics readers have come to love the oddball characters and storybook milieu of Moomin courtesy of Drawn and Quarterly’s translations of the complete run of the Moomin comic strip and several Moomin storybooks (including Who Will Comfort Toffle? [1960]).

In the case of Corto Maltese, the influence runs in the opposite direction, from America to Europe. Inspired by comic-strip dramatists Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith) and Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon), Italian artist Hugo Pratt developed his own realistic style, and his own adventure character, freebooter Corto Maltese. Of all the works in the “Classics” category, Corto Maltese is the hardest to find in English — virtually all the Corto volumes published in America by NBM and others are out of print — but the inky beauty of Pratt’s images is a universal language.

The Revolutionaries: Blueberry by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1965- ); Alack Sinner by Carlos Sampayo and José Munoz (1975-1988); Arzach by Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1975-76); The Hermetic Garage by Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1976-78); Fires by Lorenzo Mattotti (1986).

Like Corto Maltese, Blueberry and Alack Sinner are European reflections of American genres. Blueberry is Charlier and Giraud’s take on the Western, featuring Mike Blueberry, a cowboy and cavalryman increasingly trapped in post-Civil War political conspiracies, while Alack Sinner is a scarred noir detective who navigates the ideological hotspots (the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, Black Power) of Sampayo and Munoz’s own time. I call Blueberry and Alack Sinner “revolutionary,” however, because both deviate from and deconstruct genre through new techniques in art and storytelling; later Blueberry albums reflects the seismic changes in Giraud’s art when he adopts his “Moebius” persona (about which, more below), while the Alack Sinner story “Life Ain’t a Comic Strip, Baby” (translated in Fantagraphics’ Sinner #5, 1990) self-reflexively inserts Sampayo and Munoz into their fictional noir world.

It’s established comics lore how genre cartoonist Jean Giraud ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms, enthusiastically embraced the ‘60s counter-culture, and, under the pseudonym “Moebius,” wrote and drew the trail-blazing story “The Detour” (1973) for the relatively conventional French comics magazine Pilote. What followed was an explosion of creativity from Giraud — he co-founded perhaps the most influential comics magazine in history (Métal Hurlant [1974-2004], which off-shot into various languages, including America’s Heavy Metal [1977- ]) while continuing to explore unsettling, surreal territory in his Moebius-signed art. The four gorgeously-drawn, ferociously colorful, wordless stories that constitute the original Arzach cycle are named after a stone-faced pterodactyl rider who glides through a fantasy world with to its own subterranean cause-effect rules. Even trippier is The Hermetic Garage, which grew from a two-page throwaway in Métal Hurlant into a fully-formed science-fiction universe (and odd tribute to Giraud’s favorite authors, including Samuel Beckett and Michael Moorcock). Moebius’ comics sputter in and out of availability in English, which is a shame, though in the case of Arzach the language barrier isn’t a problem.

Lorenzo Mattotti’s Fires, perhaps the most radical of the “revolutionary” comics, combines Moebius’ subjective storytelling with the themes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as a naval officer struggles to understand his encounters with a tropical island culture. Most importantly, Mattotti’s painted images are so tactile and vibrant that critic Paul Gravett calls Mattotti “without doubt the most dazzling colourist working in comics today.” While I can point to numerous cartoonists influenced by Munoz and Moebius— Frank Miller is influenced by both — I’m hard-pressed to identify someone who’s followed Mattotti’s repudiation of ink line and explorations into solid blocks of color. Of all the entries on the Eurocomics list, Mattotti’s aesthetic is the closest to sui generis.

The Contemporaries: Epileptic by David B. (1996-2003) and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2000-2003).

Both Epileptic and Persepolis were published by L’Association, the French art-comics publishing collective founded in 1990 by David B. and other prodigiously talented cartoonists (including J.-C. Menu, Lewis Trondheim and Patrice Killoffer). The excellence of the L’Asso backlist ensures the collective’s place in the canon, but other factors contributed to its popularity in the United States, most notably the translation and dissemination of key books via Chip Kidd and Pantheon’s graphic novel division, and Bart Beaty’s celebration of L’Asso in his “Eurocomics for Beginners” column in The Comics Journal and in his scholarly book Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (2007).

Epileptic is David B.’s searing chronicle of growing up in a family disrupted by a brother with severe epilepsy and depression; the scenes where B(eauchard)’s parents turn to macrobiotic diets and communal living to “cure” his brother’s disabilities are among the most harrowing and truthful I’ve ever read in an autobiographical comic. Paradoxically but effectively, David B. opts to depict his life in Expressionist visuals, depicting his brother’s epilepsy as fluid demonic patterns, and self-help gurus as looming, out-of-proportion golems. Marjane Satrapi adopts some of B.’s strategies—autobiography rendered in stark black-and-white graphics—but she has her own story to tell, about her childhood and young adulthood in post-Islamic Revolution Iran. 9/11 and the rise of Jihad vs. McWorld tensions turned Persepolis into a transatlantic bestseller.

I expect this list of canonical Eurocomics to expand considerably in the coming years. If we repeat this exercise in ten years (as the British Film Institute does with their “Top Ten Poll”), I’m sure that the effects of Fantagraphics’ Jacques Tardi reprint project will place a book like Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches (1993) on the list. (Actually, I’m surprised that Trenches didn’t make it this time.) And maybe in a decade new translation projects — A Blake and Mortimer collection? An anthology of Italian underground comics from magazines like Cannibale and Frigidaire? — will lead to a revised Eurocomics canon, though it’s hard to imagine the dethroning of Tintin. But who knows? We didn’t expect the fall of the Berlin Wall either.

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34 thoughts on “Embalmed Ones, Fabulous Ones, Those That Tremble as if They Were Mad

  1. The English language Eurocomics canon has definitely been changing recently. Hopefully someone can publish Andre Franquin in English soon as he is to my mind an important omission from this list’s ‘classics’ category. I was also a bit surprised by the absence of the many important non-Asso contemporary French cartoonists — people like Christophe Blain or Dupuy & Berberian who have been fairly well published in English. Hopefully we would see them as well as newer talents like Bastien Vives or Brecht Evens in a list ten years down the line.

  2. As it stands, it’s a bit of stretch to call the list international, but those are some good non-American comics of course.

    One thing: the Moomin strip was not published in Finland originally, but in the UK.

  3. Thanks for the correction, Matthias–I’m far from a MOOMIN expert.

    Andrew, it IS interesting that a lot of the non L’Asso cartoonists haven’t made a bigger splash here in the States. Though it has vocal supporters, Blain’s GUS AND HIS GANG still seems an underread, under-appreciated book.

    Likewise the Dupuy-Berberian stuff; I was at the 2003 San Diego Comicon where Dupuy and Berberian were invited guests, but the audience for their panel was small and Drawn and Quarterly hasn’t published more of their work. Bart Beaty’s proselytizing on behalf of the L’Asso group had a big influence, but it didn’t work for Dupuy/Berberian…why?

  4. I should have put Dominique Goblet in my list. “Faire Semblant C’est Mentir” would definitely have made my top 20 list. It would have been a two-fer: woman cartoonist and eurocomic!

  5. Hugo Pratt’s writing in the Corto Maltese series was hugely influenced by Héctor Germán Oesterheld.

    Moebius was “born” in _Hara-Kiri_ magazine as a rip-off of Will Elder. It evolved tremendously after that, of course.

  6. The first missing artist that springs to my mind is yugoslavian Enki Bilal, who lives and works in France since the 70’s.

    Franquin is certainly a more influential artist than Uderzo in the bigfoot style (Hergé used to call him the best cartoonist alive), and he was for a long time the biggest name in Spirou magazine, the third big mainstream BD magazine with Tintin and Pilote, which is an extra reason to talk about him here.

    Finally, Gottlieb was also hugely influential with the hyper-pop, hyper-surreal Rubrique-à-brac (and others), published in Fluide Glacial.

    I could probably keep going for some time (starting with italian masters Sergio Toppi and Dino Battaglia), but the most shocking absentees are the three above, I believe.
    For more, just ask. ^_^

  7. Craig, in terms of the two contemporary books that actually made the list, I think they’re kind of just gimmes as by far the two most prominent works in English by contemporary European cartoonists, l’Asso or otherwise. More generally, though, I think some part of the prominence of l’Asso cartoonists over others is because they fit into an established narrative very clearly. Through Beaty and others, English-speaking readers are at least somewhat aware of the l’Asso story — an important force that shook things up and changed the game when they first appeared. It’s far less clear where Blain, Dupuy & Berberian, or others of equal skill/importance (say Blutch, Baru, even Tardi) fit into the broad strokes of a general narrative about the evolution and various strands of French/European cartooning.

    Also, agreed that Bilal is another important miss.

  8. I think Domingos would cheer the omission of Bilal (I actually prefer some of his collaborations with Christin to his more (?) admired/popular solo work).

    Also, Franquin in English is still available quite easily in the form of the Kim Thompson translated Z comme Zorglub.

  9. Matthias, I was chatting with a Mindless One on twitter, and he suggested that making the poll more international would probably require partnering with European and/or Japanese outlets. It’s an intriguing idea…but one which would certainly make the whole endeavor exponentially more difficult, logistically. Still, it’s something to think about over the next ten years, I guess (presuming HU is even around in ten years.)

  10. The Moomin strip by Tove Jansen was first published by in England in 1954 in the Evening News, but is based on the series of books in a series about the” Finn Family Moomentroll” or, “Trollkarlens hatt.” They began in 1945.
    They are as wonderful as the strip.

  11. What we really need is not a Top 10 (although this is a great thread) but a “100 Eurocomics Every American Should Read” list (complete with online/back-of-the-book translations.) :)

  12. fwiw, the Blake and Mortimer books (at least some of them) are being translated/published by Cinebook.

    Having actually read the essay now: I’m surprised, but probably shouldn’t be, how conservative the choices are.

  13. “Matthias, I was chatting with a Mindless One on twitter, and he suggested that making the poll more international would probably require partnering with European and/or Japanese outlets.”

    I’d LOVE to know if there are any existing “Greatest of All Time” polls for Eurocomics and manga, respectively. It’d be nice to be vaguely aware of what I’m missing out on by only speaking one language.

  14. Josselin: I’m officially asking for more. Please?

    Derik, thanks for the tip about the Blake and Mortimer volumes, though I hope I didn’t give the impression that I’m a big fan. I read some of the translated Comcat volumes from the 1980s, and found the stories too wordy and the art somewhat stilted. Others like them more than me.

    I hate to argue with Domingos when he’s tolerating/almost liking something, but I’ve never been a Bilal fan. His faces seem painfully inexpressive, and there’s an overworked quality to all his images that I find claustrophobic and off-putting. I like grotesqueness, but Bilal’s art feels unconsciously, artlessly grotesque to me..

  15. The very first Moomin strip, “Mumintrollet och jordens undergång” (1947), was published in Finland, although that strip is quite different from the ones published by D&Q. I also have to say that the Moomin books are WAY better than any of the comics.

  16. Caro: “What we really need is not a Top 10 (although this is a great thread) but a “100 Eurocomics Every American Should Read” list (complete with online/back-of-the-book translations.) :)”

    If you mean only Eurocomics with English translations, that would be reasonably easy to arrange considering how few of them have actually been translated. I bet a sizable proportion of people out there own over 50% of that list.

    Craig: The reason why I know Domingos doesn’t like Bilal that much is because I complained to him when a list of “best” European comics (which came out 5-10 years ago) had La Foire aux Immortels in the top 10. So I think Domingos would be quite approving of your disdain. I think the series’ (and Bilal’s) popularity continues considering the price of a page of original art from that series.

  17. Noah, sorry, it wasn’t really meant as a criticism. I totally understand the issues. The TCJ listmakers were wise enough not to include any non-English-language works and thus avoided embarrassing themselves, but that’s hardly the way forward in this day and age, and as I said, there are some good European comics on the list, as well as a smattering of Japanese ones.

    Bilal has not aged well, incidentally, and his current work is just an embarrassment. *Lots of other European cartoonists I’d put on the list before him.

    As for best of European comics lists, Indy Magazine did a pretty decent one, focusing on recent (French-language) ‘graphic novels’, back in 2004. Apart from the horrid Sambre and a few overrated trifles, it’s actually quite solid.

  18. No, no; it’s a totally valid criticism. I was actually shocked at how many European participants Robert managed to get, and even so it’s obviously really skewed anglophone.

  19. For what it’s worth, I grew up in Romania reading mostly French comics (some Italian and some British too, and the trickle that came out in Romanian, mostly sci-fi), yet my list, which I wrote as soon as I got the request but then decided not to submit, included only Anglophone, mostly American, works. It’s not just a matter of what one grew up with…

  20. Andrei, I am really surprised by your answer. I read once that what you experience between 10 and 18 totally shapes your later tastes, and always found it to be true. Congratulations on freeing yourself from that influence.

    Craig, thank you for being kind enough to respond to my desperate call for attention !
    I haven’t actually taken the time to make a proper list, and I’m not exactly sure what should be on it (either unavoidable classics or contemporary books who have enjoyed great critical acclaim, or both), but here are a few recent French titles that deserve attention.

    Tout Seul (All Alone) by Christophe Chabouté is a great way for non-French Speakers to discover this artist as it is almost wordless. He also adapted To Build a Fire (Construire un feu in French), by Jack London, which should be very accessible to English-speakers as a lot of them already know the story and, again, text is minimal.

    Baru is in the Indy Magazine list with l’Autoroute du Soleil, written for Kodansha at a time when you couldn’t really draw 200-page B&W stories for the French market (where the 48-page color hardcover is king). But his best work is probably Les années Spoutnik, about growing up in a communist village in 1950’s France (especially for american readers who have a very different vision of communism than Europeans). Only problem, of course : the language.

    Il était une fois en France (Once upon a time in France) is about a Jewish businessman during the occupation. Joseph Joanovici, an incredibly complex character, meddles with crime lords, the resistance and nazi officials, helping and fighting each when it seems the best solution for HIM. This is the most critically acclaimed series of the moment and a fascinating read, but really only to those who read French, for the drawing is good, but somewhat classical.

    The newest name in French comics is young Bastien Vivès. His last book, Paulina, has received unanimous reviews, but if you don’t speak French, Le goût du Chlore has very few dialogs and is also very good, in a low-key way.

    Finally, a personal favourite is Mutafukaz, by Run, a crazy action story filled with Lucha Libre, LA gang culture, Fine Arts references and visual humor. Plus the drawing styles change all the time. Maybe not a future classic, but to me one of the most exciting works published recently.

    Okay !
    I think I’ll stop here for now, and let you tell me more precisely the kind of titles you’re interested in.

  21. It really shouldn’t be surprising (or maybe it says something about the medium of comics that it is surprising). I wouldn’t put in my music top 10 my favorite band from when I was 13 (Pink Floyd), nor in my painting top ten my favorite painter from back then (Dali). We grow up and learn more and our tastes change. Which doesn’t mean, pace Domingos, that I only had “grown-up” comics in my top 10 (to want everything to be “grown up” is such an adolescent attitude), but the “children’s comics” I did have are ones that I learned to appreciate much more recently, and that I probably would have thought were childish back when I was 13.

  22. There have been a few European attempts to determine the best comics:
    – by the German magazine “Comic Speedline” (7 or 8 of its critics, I believe, so about as many voters as “The Comics Journal” poll)
    http://www.top100comics.de/list_international.php

    – by the comics festival of Amadora, Portugal, in 2004
    http://www.omelete.com.br/quadrinhos/cartas-da-metropole-festival-de-amadora/
    I’m not sure how the list was made (perhaps someone could translate the link above). The only voter I know is Tom Spurgeon, whose ballot can be found on his website.

    – a list of best French-language comics only, “put together with the help of an informal group of fifteen artists, writers, editors and fans”.
    http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/top10.htm

  23. I am one of the european participants. Grewing up in the 1970s with a wide range of mostly american, french and belgian titles dominating the german market at that time, I liked Robert Crumb as well as Phillipe Druillet. Anyway, my list includes only two european titles: “Fires” by Mattotti and “V for Vendetta” by Moore & Lloyd.
    Most of the franco-belgian stuff of the 80s and 90s bored me to death, so american artists like Howard Chaykin with “American Flagg” or Frank Miller with “Ronin” were much more interesting back then and had a big influence on my reading habits.
    Today I admire artists like Jeff Lemire and Alison Bechdel, Tsutomu Nihei (who sometimes reminds me a lot of Druillet) and Hideshi Hino or Patrice Killoffer and Éric Liberge as well. But I think it´s a little bit too soon to consider them as “classic” or influential right now.
    Two suggestions of european titles (one old, one new) published in english language: “Shelter” by Chantal Montellier (“Heavy Metal”- Magazine, in serialized form)and “Miss Don´t Touch Me” by Kerascoët/Hubert (NBM).

  24. Noah:

    “Matthias, I was chatting with a Mindless One on twitter, and he suggested that making the poll more international would probably require partnering with European and/or Japanese outlets. It’s an intriguing idea…but one which would certainly make the whole endeavor exponentially more difficult, logistically. Still, it’s something to think about over the next ten years, I guess (presuming HU is even around in ten years.)”

    For euro-comics, I suggest a collaboration with the site Du9:

    http://www.du9.org/

    I’ve done some work for them, and they’re serious and dedicated, very close to HU’s sensibilities. Contact Xavier Guibert there.

  25. There are a number of European sites that might work; far fewer Japanese ones I know about (which reflects the language barrier more than anything.) But who know what’ll be around in 10 years? That’s an eternity on the internets.

  26. The real problem of course is that any European reader/critic available to the HU is likely to be orientated towards US comics anyway or they’d be elsewhere… So the level of knowledge of Eurocomix is still less than ideal. I include myself in this as well.

  27. Well, I’m not exactly sure that’s the case. Matthias and Domingos know a lot about Eurocomics.

    It’s true that anyone interested in HU is likely to be familiar with American comics, but not necessarily true that said folks won’t have a knowledge of European ones. If that makes sense.

  28. I was back in the Chicago area this past weekend and I stopped by a comic book store in Wilmette, Ill., to visit an old friend of mine who runs the place.

    While he was handling some customers, I perused the racks and soon found myself flipping through a couple of Tintin anthologies. I came within a hair’s-breadth of buying one, but put it back because the panels were so frickin’ small, and the lettering was so hard to read.

    Instead, I bought the Boom! Studios anthology of Don Rosa Donald Duck stories, and a couple of back issues: Eerie #13, and the 1968 Creepy annual.

    I don’t know why, but I just can’t pull the trigger on reading Tintin.

  29. ———————
    R. Maheras says:

    … found myself flipping through a couple of Tintin anthologies. I came within a hair’s-breadth of buying one, but put it back because the panels were so frickin’ small, and the lettering was so hard to read.
    ———————-

    Are those the lil’ hardcover editions, with three stories in one volume? I hated that “reducedness”*, though — since the one-story, large-size Tintin books were so expensive — got a few in that small size a few years ago at the local Barnes & Noble.

    (I found myself using a magnifying glass — I kid you not — on Chris Ware’s later “Acme Novelty Library” books. Reductio ad absurdum is not a good thing, Ware!)

    *And how obnoxious that, thanks to the manga influence, so many comics are being shoehorned down to that small size in book form! It sure substantially damaged “The Comics Journal” to get that Procrustean Bed treatment.

    Comics is a visual medium; to shrivel down the size to save on paper/printing expenses is as shortsightedly self-damaging as for a movie theater to reduce the size of its screens. Sure, you can cram more into one building; but you weaken the impact of what you’re offering

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