Salammbo

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Philippe Druillet is one of those artists, like Moebius, who upon being exposed to his work immediately divides your life into a pre/post situation.  There’s the way you saw comics before Druillet and the way you saw them after.  And like Moebius, he is an artist who despite his work in comics, and hollywood–goes largely ignored by North American audiences above the age of growing up on Heavy Metal magazine.  The only book of his that is easily accessible is the brilliant coda to his Loane Sloane epic, Chaos.  That work sent me down a rabbit hole of works like Vuzz, La Nuit, the Lone Sloane series and others–but through them all there was one work that stood above all of the rest monolithic in it’s splendour.  And that work was his Salammbo trilogy.  Based on the novel by Flaubert which I have not read, written in a language I couldn’t understand–and yet it was the work from which I could not turn away.

In Salammbo, Druillet combines all of the techniques he had been using to that point in his artistic career to create something finally completely beyond the sum of its parts.  His work here reaches a plane on which a HR Giger or Beksinski painting might sit.  He has created in these ecstatic sublime future primitive tableaus a procession of almost religious holiness.  This is an all A-sides album.  Just banger after banger after banger.  He is so assured in every element of his composition that you can’t help but be held in rapture with his storytelling.  His coloring palette which to this point would at times overtake the images themselves–is now at one with them, without sacrificing any of their garish insanity.  A lot of these pages presage later work by Brendan McCarthy with their neon airbrushed quality.
 

 
The character designs of even basic background characters in Salammbo are stunning.  There are no cut corners here.    So when you see these epic battle scenes–the scale can only be described as positively apocalyptic.  The only modern comparison there is is James Stokoe’s work on Orc Stain.  But this is a scale even beyond that.  Where in Orc Stain a battle scene might involve hundreds flying around with giant beasts and crumbling buildings–with Druillet it’s hundreds of thousands, filling the page–almost threatening to explode it with their strange alien fashions until they finally fade off into the distance of the horizon.
 

 
And the detail is enough to make you want to quit ever trying to create comics.  Pure fuck you pages.  The amount of thought and storytelling Druillet puts into a simple headdress is enough to make you want to just go home.  Every dress, every helmet–seems to have it’s own mini-opera playing itself out in it’s designs.  Stories within stories within stories.  I can’t even imagine how large the originals for these pages had to have been.  Some of these pages hit you like murals, even if you are viewing them on a tiny mobile phone.
 

 
This is a comic which transcends its own language.  It is a work that in terms of wild imagination made manifest rivals the greatest universes sci-fi has created in any visual medium.  The cumulative effect of page after page of this is a testament to the insane rarefied air that this medium can exist in.  There is not another medium that can convey more processable information per square inch than the comics medium–and Druillet stretches that maxim to it’s zenith.  You could not hope to duplicate this work in any other medium without lessening it.

And the master here in just the bordering techniques that Druillet has become synonymous for is simply stunning.  Generally speaking when other artists have tried cutesy things with their borders–their achievement at best languishes on the shores of ignorable embellishments–but with Druillet the panel border IS the panel is the story is the image as the whole.  They make the pages mythological to take in.  It’s a technique he’s pulled from religious art practices–but in Salammbo he has finally sublimated that technique into his own language.  In Salammbo we have the revealing of the true Druillet speaking authoritatively in his own voice, beholden to none.  And he does this all…IN AN ADAPTION of someone else’s novel.  Which is kind of just showing off.
 

 
And while all of Druillet’s work is terrific and worth finding if you can–Salammbo is the one work that if I had to sell someone on Druillet, as being on par with Moebius in terms of significance in comics, Salammbo would be that comic.  Of course, as with Moebius, I’d take just about anything I can get at this point.  I know the comic industry isn’t like this cosmic juggernaut of making good things happen to good books–but it is hugely embarrassing that works such as this are not more easily accessible in the North American market.  Kevin Eastman and Heavy Metal Magazine seem like the only people who give a damn.  Which is messed up.  We need another Kevin Eastman to come in and push this stuff back into the fold.
 

40 thoughts on “Salammbo”

  1. Maybe you should have hated Druillet instead! That might have stirred up discussion.

    I’m really intrigued by this guy, but I’ve only seen his work online. It looks like that’s the easiest way for a USA resident to see this stuff; random images on blogs and Tumblr. It’s frustrating, but I may not be able to handle so much concentrated PROG RAWK if I held a whole book of it in my hands.

  2. Didn’t Druillet do two versions? I can’t remember, it’s been too many years. You’re right, along with Arzach, this was the high-water mark of French comix.

    The novel is magnificent, completely over the top, a proto-Maldoror but w/o the teenager angst, ie. an adult depravity of language that reaches all the way to the syllabic, tactile level (in French only, alas). Hollywood could never screw this one up because Flaubert’s words would brain-rape ’em first.

  3. Mahendra: “You’re right, along with Arzach, this was the high-water mark of French comix.”

    What? You’re kidding right? Suddenly Bruno Lecigne didn’t write Avanies et Mascarade, Hara-Kiri was never published, Fred never did his Le petit cirque, Tardi never drew La bascule à Charlot, Bazooka never published their Bazooka Production, Francis Masse never existed (and, yes, I’m still in the 60s and 70s). Is this some kind of alternative universe?

  5. Ha ha, not kidding! Masse & (early) Tardi are very good … but the classicism of draftsmanship & dreammanship in Arzach & Salammbo, it is something very different in its essence.

  6. @Domingos Tardi has about as much to do with what Druillet does on a page, as Godard does to Jean Rollin. That’s like me saying the new Kendrick Lamar album is pretty dope, and you saying “tut tut Francoise Hardy”

  8. I would be surprised if WE didn’t have common ground. But if you are referring to Druillet vs. Tardi/Masse–then yeah I agree. I don’t know what the basis of a conversation like that would be, beyond that they do all make comics. And are french.

    The context within which Druillet sits, I would think prohibits that comparison.

  9. Arzach & Salammbo are world-building comix, the only way they intersect our own world is thru a certain kind of visual grammar and logic. They do not refer to our world lightly.

    That’s where they branch away from Tardi, Messe et al

  10. Druillet and Tardi were both published in Heavy Metal (often in the same issue). Tardi’s Polonius was all about the world-building. Is that not enough common ground?

  11. OK, I’ll explain myself a little more: Mahendra calls “world-building” to what I call “escapism.” If we’re talking about worlds, we’re worlds apart. As for Tardi I didn’t mention Polonious (which I never read, to tell you the truth, but if it’s one of those noir things I never will).

  12. If you feel that it is, feel free to make the comparison. I would love to read it.

    I don’t feel like the reasons that make Tardi a great and regarded artist, have a lot to do with the reasons I like Druillet.

    I also am ambivalent about a discussion whose sole purpose is to establish a hierarchy which is I feel already in place. I think artists such as Tardi are already extremely covered and beloved by critics–whereas someone like Druillet has slipped through the cracks precisely because of these sort of lists. As a taste, he tends to not be regarded by the TCJ/Fanta type stuff–and in the heavy metal camp–he’s in Moebius’s shadow. So despite making insane work–most people haven’t seen any of it in north america.

    But if you think it would be fruitful to compare the two, and think it would enhance the understanding of Druillet–go for it.

  13. Polonius is a post-apocalyptic fantasy series that was serialized in the early issues of Heavy Metal and hasn’t ever been reprinted in English. Fantagraphics has indicated that they have no interest in reprinting it, so it’s probably never going to be reprinted. But that’s bye-the-bye.

    Druillet’s context is that he was one of a group of young upstarts in the early 70s who felt that Francophone BD publishing of the time was too confining, so he and his stoner artist buddies formed a new magazine to publish the stuff they wanted to draw. If your view of BD is defined by what came out of Heavy Metal, it’s like only ever hearing the Sex Pistols and generalizing that you enjoy British music. These guys don’t really even scratch the surface of what’s available.

    But Tardi was absolutely part of that crowd for a while – like Moebius, he bounced back and forth between the revolutionary world and the mainstream world of magazines like Pilote and Spirou. Moebius just saved his really amazing stuff for les Humanoids.

  14. Having said that, I agree that Druillet doesn’t get mentioned much, except in the same breath as Moebius. His color work should be celebrated – while acknowledging that he was a terrible writer. And he wears his Kirby influences on his sleeve.

  18. It’s a shame that the French artists get called the “Heavy Metal” camp because HM not only supplemented the sexism already present in the work, they added bad translations and a horrendous American van-artiness into the mix.

  20. Well, a lot of the Buzzelli stuff seems to be fantasy. Dino Battaglia has done really nice stuff in this realm, E A Poe stuff. Of course Breccia too.

    Ledroit’s Requiem is really impressive but I’m not really with his style but I admire how far he takes it.

    I have Druillet’s Yragael/Urm, La Nuit, Chaos and Delirious. I missed Salammbo somehow. I never really got into Moebius aside from some amazing pictures here and there. There are even aspects of Druillet I’m not into. Some of the European scifi/fantasy stuff is a bit too cold for me, a lot of the faces these artists draw are completely devoid of personality.

    Is there really that much more of this type of stuff from france in the 70s that really needs to be seen? I’d love that to be true, there is a lot of Philippine, south american, italian and spanish horror and fantasy stuff I’d love to see printed. Some of the spanish stuff is pure Hawkwind and prog rock.

    Heavy Metal doesnt really do the genre justice at all, there is good stuff trickled across some issues now and then. I’d like to see this sort of work find a home today (as long as it was good), I’d say my work more or less goes into this category.

    Sad to see Buscema in that video drawing Silver Surfer, he spent his life doing genres he didnt like and even his artbooks were devoted to superheroes. He grown to hate Conan too. I think he wanted to do crime and westerns.

  21. Robert have you looked at the losfeld published stuff like kris kool, jodelle and saga de xam? If I ever get a large sum of money I really want to get saga de xam. Kris kool is caza but I think its better than where his style morphed.

    Its a shame heavy metal became a pejorative because that torch really hasn’t been picked up by anyone else in north america.

  25. @domingos I dig Dino Battaglia. I’m also a fan of Breccia. I’d actually like to write something on Breccia, but am still a little intimidated, and I haven’t been able to find enough stuff of the stuff I want to write on of his. Also Fernando Fernandez.

  26. Sarah Horrocks: “I can’t even imagine how large the originals for these pages had to have been. Some of these pages hit you like murals, even if you are viewing them on a tiny mobile phone.”

    Druillet’s originals are certainly some of the largest modern OA currently being produced. The auction listing for a Salammbo DPS online indicates a size of 66 by 100cm. And some of his more recent Lone Sloane sequels are 95 by 73.5cm. Image areas are about the same as a Prince Valiant original.

    Btw, is the coloring/air brush work in those Salammbo pages from an early edition? I don’t remember the book being quite so brightly colored. In fact, some of the original art I’ve seen seems to have deeper hues which look closer to their presentation in Heavy Metal.

  27. I’m quite certain that’s a later recoloring. The original edition has flatter, brighter colors as far as I remember.

    Druillet at his best (i.e. 1970s) is underrated, though he has a hard time not coming off a little ridiculous in Salammbo, I think. It’s very self-important, though clearly also personal work. He’s the John Martin of comics, and that’s not just a criticism.

    Thanks, Sarah, for bringing him up! However, I would have loved to have seen a little more critical engagement in this piece. As it stands, it’s pretty much straight panegyrics.

  32. Sorry, I’m late to this discussion. Robert Adam Gilmour, I don’t know if you are alerted to this comment (I have no experience with posting on threads) – your comment about the coldness of the characters’ faces in european SF and fantasy comics is interesting. Can you expand? Maybe give examples of european artists whose characters’ faces you find cold and expressionless? And which american or other artists do you find exemplary when it comes to this kind of expression?

  33. ————————
    Sarah Horrocks says:

    The character designs of even basic background characters in Salammbo are stunning. There are no cut corners here.
    ————————

    Even that splendidly stylized lettering contributes…

    ————————
    There is not another medium that can convey more processable information per square inch than the comics medium–
    ————————

    An important perception, even if that ideal is rarely achieved.

    ———————–
    …and Druillet stretches that maxim to it’s zenith. You could not hope to duplicate this work in any other medium without lessening it.
    ———————-

    Very much so.

    ———————–
    James says:

    It’s a shame that the French artists get called the “Heavy Metal” camp because HM not only supplemented the sexism already present in the work, they added bad translations and a horrendous American van-artiness into the mix.
    ————————

    Though I first saw Tardi there, Bilal; Erik Drooker “became more widely known as a cartoonist when his short story ‘L’ (my favorite comics story) appeared in Heavy Metal.” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Drooker ]

    Regrettably, this more imaginative and artistically adventurous fare dwindled away, replaced by trashy Euro soft-core with SF/fantasy overlays…

    ———————–
    Matthias Wivel says:

    Oh, and his more recent work, including his painting, is horrid. Just terrible. He’s lost pretty much everything he had. Stuff like this. (http://blog.lefigaro.fr/bd/2010/06/philippe-druillet-le-retour.html )
    ————————

    Oh, my. Blue boobs? (How about that “jiggle” effect?) What an embarrassingly painful decline; it’s even worse than De Chirico’s.

    (When the latter went along a “neoclassical” path, the results were so atrocious and bad for his critical rep, he resorted to “backdating” these works to make it seem they were painted when he was good.

    Sorry, must Google:

    http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/20554

    http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/giorgio-de-chirico?before=1350080544

    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZBM6Lea14ak/Sc_GOCw3lsI/AAAAAAAAAqA/7pTCsiNCODk/s320/de+chirico+2.jpg

    http://calitreview.com/images/chaos_Chirico.Gladiateurs.jpg

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/artimageslibrary/5829495986/

    Urk! I take that back; new Druillet is not anywhere as bad as later De Chirico…)

  35. Glad you were impressed!

    Chia, eh? http://www.sandrochia.com/paintings-1970_130

    Yikes!

    (We oughtta have a discussion thread about “worst works by major creators”…)

    ———————-
    Morning Prayer of a True Painter, 1942

    by Giorgio De Chirico

    Lord, let me always improve as a painter.
    Untile the last day of my life, O Lord.
    Let my paints help me always to progress.
    Grant me, O Lord, greater intelligence and strength,
    Stronger health and will,
    So that I may improve my emulsions and turpentine,
    So that they may always help me more…
    ————————–

    https://d30dcznuokq8w8.cloudfront.net/works/r/bal/9/2/9/439929_full_570x417.jpg

    http://en.wahooart.com/a55a04/w.nsf/Opra/BRUE-8EWHCN

    Here De Chirico sticks one of his early works’ mannequin heads onto a “neoclassical” body: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eftEncJetfY/0.jpg

    “God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is ‘no’.”
    ? Dan Brown, Angels and Demons

  36. I was joking, I still don’t know what to think about this link between Chirico and Fascist art. This guy thinks that it is a joke too. An heads up: you are mixing the two Chirico brothers.

    I like Enzo Cucchi though. And Clemente too…

  38. Joel, I honestly find this a worldwide problem that has been around forever and I dont know why it doesnt bother that many people. In the 70s Spain and Philippines often had this problem (in the horror and fantasy genre, not condemning whole countries comics here!), amazing artists like Ramon Torrents drew faces that were beautiful but very vacant. There was complaints at the time about the art looking too much like fashion illustration, but part of it was that I think the american artists felt quite threatened by the talent of these guys. I loved Jose Luis (not to be confused with Jose Luis Garcia) and his faces were sometimes not very interesting. Marato was quite good sometimes but he has this problem too.

    I’ve never read any Bilal, but I always felt this about him, same with Crepax and Manara. Druillet and Ledroit I’m awed by and that everything else is so good about them highlights the lack of real emotions in the faces even more. Druillet doesnt suffer for it so bad because his work is not as character driven as Ledroit.

    I’m a brit and I’d say it was a problem here too with a lot of the more realistic artists. East asian comics often have the energy and life in the characters but the lack of variety in faces and lack of more nuanced expressions hurts the stories. A lot of American alternative comics all about emotions lack convincing “actors” to make the emotions mean anything.

    As I said before, I dont want this to seem like one country is amazing at it. Loads of Image artists and ones inspired by Image only do a couple of faces with not much expressive range.
    One of Frazettas weaknesses was the predictable faces that werent cold exactly but didnt have much personality. A Frazetta book tried to deflect this criticism by quoting Frazetta saying that he just didn’t love his attempts to do different girls faces so he stuck to the same face. But this drawing in the link below is different and for my money, the best face he ever did…

    http://us.ebid.net/for-sale/color-plate-the-tempters-devil-frazetta-gga-print-31840385.htm

    …I think she is way sexier than most of his women, I think he could have managed this more often if he tried.

    Crumb does great faces. Ditko at his best does amazing faces but he might not have been appropriate for more realistic nuanced drama, but the energy was really there. Corben is probably my best example, I don’t think he has had enough of the right type of stories to really show off how good his “actors” are.

    I really don’t read much comics anymore so this isn’t anything like wide ranging examples. Nice drawings by the way Joel.

  39. Robert, the Frazetta picture that you linked to is indeed intriguing. I have never been able to find Frazetta interesting, not so much because of the faces and characters, but mainly because his single images are always composed in a very repetitive way, always concentrated on one single element that is placed in the center, with almost no conflict or tension composition-wise. The one you linked to is the first that I could smile at, and you are right, the expression of the girl’s face is unusual and alive. I also like the attitude of the devil character in his fancy red cape. (Great drapery drawing by the way!)

    I have never heard of Ramon Torrents and Jose Luis – must look them up! And I thought I knew my way around comics. I really liked Bilal and Manara when I was a teen, and I still like them, I must admit. But they were only good in the 70s and 80s, since then they have both become very formulaic, I also liked their faces, I think, but you are right that there is a problem, a problem that is so widespread that it’s hard to find a cartoonist who is free from it. Maybe it has to do with the sameness and repetition that comes frome drawing from your imagination, something that cartoonists are almost forced to do by nature of the medium, as opposed to drawing from observation.

    The whole issue of faces and facial expression in comics is a very fascinating one. I will try to make this short, so as not to stray too far away from this thread’s topic which is of course Druillet. The first thing that came to my mind after reading your reply, Robert, is that maybe the problem of cold and expressionless faces in comics also has a background in reality. How many people do you see around you every day who have lively and expressive faces? A lot of people are walking and sitting around in public with some kind of frozen “mask” on their faces, be it even something of a petrified grin in some cases. Chris Ware had some interesting things to say about that in his big interview with Gary Groth from years ago.

    Also, the question is: How do you represent a face in a drawing? One possibility is the realistic approach, but the problem is that one will always end up with something that will be kind of stiff compared to the real face of a person, by virtue of the very nature of the picture which does not move, like a real face moves. I think that is why a painter like Francis Bacon resorted to some sort of abstraction to “get at it”. He used the expression and impredictability of an abstract brush stroke to mimic the expression and impredictability of a real face.

    When I think of comics where I like the faces, the first thing that comes to my mind is Will Eisner’s A contract with god. Especially in the first story, the Frimme Hersh character’s face changes a lot over the course of the story, not only in terms of facial expression, but also in the way that Eisner draws it, which is very unusual for comics. You can see in this comic how there is a strong tension between Eisner’s learned and automatic comic-style face patterns and a strong expressive desire which breaks apart these patterns from inside. In some panels, this leads to fantastic juxtapositions. Another example would be José Muñoz in his best period (the story “Pepe” from the Joe’s Bar cycle) – here also, comics clichés are rivalling in a really wild way with an inspired expressive drive, which makes for some of the most memorable faces of comics history for me.

    Does anything of this have anything to do with Druillet, thus justifying this digression on this thread? I think it does. Druillet’s faces may not be realistic, and they are certainly stiff and sometimes frozen. But that is not all there is to them. Sarah wrote about the compelling background characters in Druillet’s comics, and I want to confirm this. I have never really followed Druillet’s work, but I have come across it several times, and it was always a fascinating encounter. For me it was also Salammbo, which is why I am glad that Sarah chose this particular work to write about. When I was 16 or 17 I found pages of it in collections of the german version of Métal Hurlant at a local bookshop, and I remember standing there several times, without ever buying these collections, just staring at the tiny small figures in these big mass battle scenes. I couldn’t relate much to the bombastic aspect of it, but the tiny little characters had something to them. And they had such intriguing faces! Very different from the sometimes stiff faces of the central characters. And I think that had something to do with Druillet letting his penstrokes loose and run wild while drawing these small tiny things.

  40. (someone just posted a link to this on my tumblr dashboard)
    If you’re still curious about the size of the original pages, they seem to be about 100×70 cm

    Source : auction sites :
    http://www.auction.fr/_fr/lot/druillet-ldquo-salammbo-ii-rdquo-planche-originale-405847#.U_kezaMi5vA
    http://www.pba-auctions.com/html/fiche.jsp?id=54072&np=3&lng=fr&npp=20&ordre=&aff=2&r=

    Reading this makes me realize how much I took artists like Druillet or Moebius for granted. I read their book at the public library as a teenager.

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