« J’fais dans la bande dessinée, qu’est bien plus pop que le ciné!* » — J.C. Forest (Une chanson, 1973)
On the eighty-ninth anniversary of his birth, let’s salute in passing one of the great pioneers of French comics, namely Jean-Claude Forest (Sept. 11, 1930 – Dec. 29, 1998), Barbarella’s creator, the man who, in the early 1960s, ushered strictly-for-kids bandes dessinées into decidedly more risqué and adult realms of eroticism, fantasy and fun.
Born on September 11, 1930 in the Parisian suburb of Le Perreux-sur-Marne, he passed away in 1998 at the age of 68, but not before leaving behind a body of work of breathtaking depth and variety. Barbarella aside (sorry, miss): Le Copyright (the springboard for Nikita Mandryka‘s Le Concombre masqué), Hypocrite, Mystérieuse matin midi et soir (his wild riff on Jules Verne’s L’île mystérieuse), Bébé Cyanure, Les Naufragés du temps (illustrated by Paul Gillon), Enfants c’est l’Hydragon qui passe… « et j’en passe », as they say.
Here are a few highlights to give you a sense of the man’s imagination, versatility and tremendous draftsmanship, in chronological order.
An excerpt is from Les colères du mange-minutes (1965-66), the second volume of Barbarella’s adventures. Yes, there was a film adaptation, but it’s, well, pretty vapid. Director Roger Vadim was kind of the Gallic John Derek; both were fair-to-middling directors whose chief talent was womanizing. Though one has to admit it *was* quite a talent.« No, you mustn’t love me… » Detail from the cover of giff wiff, revue de la bande dessinée no.22 (Dec. 1966), previewing its article on Forest’s 1965 experimental tv cartoon Marie Mathématique, which you can watch here. It features the dulcet tones of Le beau Serge, certainly one of the most overrated artistes of the 20th century. Too much competition to call the race to the bottom, though. 😉Born out of a misunderstanding between the editorial team of Pif Gadget and Forest, Mystérieuse matin midi et soir proved too labyrinthine for the magazine’s young readership, cost the publishers a bundle, and only two of its three parts appeared in Pif. Fear not, it was collected in album form the following year. This is a page from part 1, which saw print in Pif Gadget no. 111 (April, 1971).
A sequence from the rollicking N’importe quoi de cheval…, featuring Hypocrite, another of Forest’s spunky heroïnes. From Pilote Mensuel no. 6 (Dargaud, Nov. 1974).
A pair of pages from the melancholy, elegiac Enfants, c’est l’Hydragon qui passe « Children, there goes the Hydragon » (Casterman, 1984).
I’m sure it’s mere coincidence, but the boy, Jules, seems to be modelled after yet another Gainsbourg “muse”, pop nymphette Vanessa Paradis.
« If you don’t want to be idolized by the masses, you don’t become an author, you become a plumber-welder! » — Entretien avec Mandryka, Les cahiers de la bande dessinées no. 28 (1975), conducted by Numa Sadoul
Nikita Mandryka was born October 1940 in Bizerte, Tunisia, to Russian émigré parents. His grandfather had fled the Russian Revolution in 1921 aboard a warship he was commanding. Nikita’s first professional strip appeared late in 1964 in Vaillant (Boff, in Vaillant no. 1024, Dec. 27, 1964), soon renamed Vaillant, le journal de Pif , then Pif Gadget in 1969. While he’s best known for his loquacious, dominoed cucurbit, Le Concombre Masqué, today we’re going to harvest the riches of his somewhat less familiar, but equally absurdist creation, the free-form strip Ailleurs (“Elsewhere”). The feature debuted with the inaugural issue of Pif Gadget and made its bow with issue 35, a few months down the line.
Mandryka left Pif Gadget on good terms (and returned over the years), and with a solid reason: while Pif’s editorial team rightly adored his work, its left-field humour left the majority of Pif’s young readership quite baffled, and sometimes infuriated. Mandryka’s place in the magazine may have been secure, but he yearned for an audience that actually understood him. This he would find at Pilote, with its teenage readership, and all the more so with L’Écho des Savanes (which he cofounded, in 1972, with Claire Bretécher and Marcel Gotlib).
Pif’s was an unusual case: its most singular, daring, arguably most valuable strips were those least appreciated by the kids. And that slice of the readership, you’ll have guessed it, tends to express its opinions more freely and vehemently than their elders, who did love (but more quietly) the somewhat abstract, second degré (offbeat, ironic) features, such as Marcel Gotlib and Henri Dufranne‘s Gai-Luron*, the recently-departed Massimo Mattioli‘s M. Le Magicien or Henri Crespi‘s Nestor. Still, the savvy editorial team, who after all had made the magazine a massive hit, keenly grasped the import of editorial balance and trusted its collective taste and instinct over the “wisdom” of the accountants and marketers… who, at the height of the magazine’s popularity, pulled a mutiny and… sank the ship. So, in hindsight, Mandryka was right to leave.
Ailleurs‘ début, from the inaugural issue of Pif gadget / Vaillant no. 1239 (March 1st, 1969); If it goes “zgunk”, it’s not a zgonk, it’s a zgunk.
As an english equivalent to « Sacré vingieu! », I propose « Dagnabit! »Ends with a sarcastic « Glory to the ten millionth discoverer of our planet! »« An original solution to the parking problem. »From Pif gadget no. 23 / Vaillant no. 1261 (July 1969); now you know what the legendarily stoic members of The Queen’s Guard do whilst at leisure.From Pif gadget no. 33 / Vaillant no. 1271 (Oct. 1969); idea provided by Tabary (Jean or his brother/ghost Jacques? We may never know).The final Ailleurs strip, from Pif gadget no. 35 / Vaillant no. 1273 (Oct. 1969). This would have made a great skit for Jacques Tati‘s peerless Mr. Hulot.Nikita’s just heard a really good one during this photoshoot for a L’Écho des Savanes advert.
Writer-Artist-Colourist Jean Cézard (né Jean César), born March 23, 1924 in the small French village of Membray, saw a ghost in his room when he was ten years old. In the morning light, the spectre turned out to be naught but one of his mom’s blouses, but the seed was sown: the incident would inspire his most famous creation, Arthur le fantôme justicier.
Arthur first manifested himself (though still invisible!) in issue 449 of comics weekly Vaillant (December 20, 1953). The editorial team realizing the character’s vast potential and charm, Arthur then returned with issue 451 (January 3, 1954), this time fully visible (when he so desired) and he was set for the afterlife. After his creator’s 1977 passing, Arthur’s adventures continued for a time in lesser hands, but really, Cézard was irreplaceable.
Arthur was Cézard’s favourite series to work on, because he could set the little revenant’s* adventures anywhere and any when, and he certainly did.
It’s all but impossible to single out an absolute favourite Cézard page, but then again, I’m not held to such arbitrary limitations. Here’s the closing page of Un fameux coup de tabac, from Pif Gadget no. 33 (i.e. Vaillant no. 1271, October, 1969) Those colours!And here we have a true splash by Jean Cézard. I wanted to showcase his astonishing aptitude for rendering castles (haunted or otherwise), not to mention complex action scenes. Arthur le fantôme et les nuisances was published in Pif Gadget no. 113 (Vaillant no. 1350, April, 1971).La naissance d’une ville fantôme (“Birth of a Ghost Town”), set of course in the American West (ah, ces Français et leur ‘Far West’) ran in issue 155 of Vaillant’s successor Pif Gadget in February, 1972.Dans le bain… (“In the Bath…”) ran in Pif Gadget no. 212 (March, 1973). By this point, at its peak, with a print run of 540,000 copies, Pif Gadget sold more than its three main competitors (Pilote, Tintin and Spirou) … combined. Then somebody got greedy, with the usual results.Should anyone wonder whether Cézard could also handle a less crowded, sparer layout, his covers for Arthur Poche should settle the issue. This is Arthur Poche no. 9 (July, 1966).While Cézard was quite a fast worker (in a given month, he could produce around 20 pages, which means, in his case, writing, pencilling, inking, lettering *and* colouring), when it came to the half-comics, half games pocket-sized quarterly Arthur Poche, he merely provided covers. The Arthur material therein was the work of Cézar-trained Michel-Paul Giroud. This is Arthur Poche no. 11 (January, 1967).This is Arthur Poche no. 12 (April, 1967).This is Arthur Poche no. 23 (January, 1970)
Les Éditions Toth, an ambitious Parisian publisher, set out to restore and reprint the works, but after five volumes (2002-2006), the enterprise seems to have stalled. However, another specialty publisher, Éditions du Taupinambour, picked up the gauntlet and published all of Cézard’s Pif Gadget Arthur stories (1969-77) in 13 volumes. That leaves, it seems, a gap of five years or so.
In closing, an anecdote about the loneliness of the long-distance cartoonist, told by Pif’s finest editor-in-chief Richard Medioni (1947-2016) in his definitive chronicle of Vaillant’s rise and fall, Mon camarade, Vaillant, Pif Gadget : l’histoire complète, 1901-1994 (2012, Vaillant Collector): « So I begin to read the episode that Jean has brought — when an author hands me his new pages, I necessarily read them in his presence, because I’m eager to read them, of course, but also out of respect for the work accomplished — and I admire it.
As I read on, Cézard comments here and there… when I laugh, he smiles. Sometimes, he points out a detail in the drawing that I missed… he never ceases to observe me and appears satisfied when I react as he had hoped.
Suddenly, it dawns upon me just how important such a session is to him. I bring up the notion and he explains:
“I spend days at my drawing table, alone, without a soul to appreciate my toil. And it’s a lot of time. No-one to give me a sense of what works and what doesn’t, what will bring a laugh and what will fall flat. So, when I come here, in seeing your response, I get that indispensable connection with my audience…” »
-RG
*Arthur, unlike, say, Casper, isn’t the shade of some dead child: his parents made him the old-fashioned way.
Guillermo Mordillo (1932 – 2019), known simply as Mordillo, was an Argentine artist of Spanish parentage. Through his long and productive career, he released more comic albums than you could shake a stick at… and at 86, was still active in the comics field. His easily recognizable style, love of bright colours and oft-surreal humour make his work memorable despite his persistent profligacy.
It would be impossible to provide an overview of his body of work in one post, but it is my pleasure to furnish a fun sampling of his œuvre. Most images below have been gleaned from Opus 5 (Glénat, 1984) and Safari (Glénat, 1990), unless indicated otherwise.
The following two images were scanned from early 1970s issues of Pif Gadget.
In the mid-70s, Mordillo’s cartoons were used by Slovenian artist Miki Muster to create Mordillo, a series of cartoon animations that ended up being 400 “episodes” long (for a total of 300 minutes – each episode is under a minute). These droll snippets were broadcast in over 30 countries between 1976 and 1981. Should you have a few minutes to spare for a chuckle or two, have a look at this video (recorded by somebody in Germany on VHS tape in the 90s and, many years later, uploaded to Youtube – what lovely, contorted pathways some of these things take).
Who's Out There? 