Appollo and Lewis Trondheim, Bourbon Island 1730 (FirstSecond, 2008), $17.95, paperback; Chris Blain, Gus and His Gang (FirstSecond, 2008), $16.95, paperback.
One of the highlights of the fall season
around my house has become the new titles from FirstSecond,
whose praises we have not been shy about singing in these
virtual pages over the past couple of years. Of the many
reasons for so singing has been FirstSecond’s commitment to
bringing a fuller range of the remarkable and unique world
of French comics to American readers. And this fall, it is
the two titles from France that stand out among the
increasingly diverse range of books that First Second is
publishing.
Bourbon
Island is
illustrated and co-written by Lewis Trondheim, arguably the
most productive guy in comics in any corner of the
universe. Trondheim collaborates here with Appollo, who is
a force in the world of French comics but entirely unknown
in my house. Part of Trondheim’s genius and the secret to
his success, aside from his idiosyncratic and effortless
line, has been his collaborators, and Appollo’s
contribution to the novelistic integrity of
Bourbon
Island is clear
from early on (Trondheim can wander in blissful and
delightful ways, but this is not a wandering affair but a
very tightly constructed book). Set in the early 18th
century, Bourbon
Island uses
Trondheim’s unique touch with anthropomorphized animals to
tell the story of a world between—between the anarchy of
pirates and buccanneers and the cold cruelty of governors
and laws; between colony and empire; between slavery and
freedom. The book focuses on several protagonists, but we
are first introduced to Raphael Pommeroy, who has come to
the island as an assistant to an ornithologist in search of
the lost dodo. Pommeroy, however, has fallen under the
spell of the pirate tales he has consumed and continues to
consume on ship, and as soon as he is on the island he
declares his independence from the professor and sets out
to be a pirate. Such an ambition might have been meaningful
a half-century earlier, but all the pirates we meet in this
book are domesticated—nostalgic perhaps for the old ways,
but aware that their time has past.
The closest to the romantic life of the pirates Pommeroy
can find on the island, although he is too blind to realize
it, are the maroons, runaway slaves who have headed off
into the heights of the islands cliffs and set up their own
communities from which they continue to taunt the colonial
authorities. The daughter of the wealthy landowners
appreciates the romance of the maroons, and the difference
in their fantasies makes for a great deal of friction
between the two. Of course, in both cases, they are
fantasizing and romanticizing from position of white
privilege, and never to the benefit of the objects of their
romances. In its own quiet and extremely smart way,
Bourbon
Island serves as
one of the great historical novels about the cusp of
history between the Dark Ages and Enlightenment and about
those who were aggressively shut out of sharing the
benefits or the spoils of imperial history. Told in prose,
the book would be captivating, but in graphic form with
humanoid animals representing all the characters—and with
no discernable “racial markers” to tell us slave from
planter from pirate—the absurdity of human history becomes
doubly and hysterically tragic. This is an impressive book,
and, I suspect, an important one—arguably one of
Trondheim’s best and most lasting works.
The second French work FirstSecond has published this fall
is from an artist I know much less well, Chris Blain. But
now I want to know everything I can about the man
responsible for Gus and His Gang
(all the more so since he has
become something of a whipping boy in French comics
criticism of late). Gus tells the story of three outlaws of the
old west, living in a surreal western landscape (as opposed
to the “realistic” one we know from John Wayne movies?)
where banks and trains give up their loot but the women are
as complex, challenging and tough as the safes at Fort
Knox. In fact, the time given to the actual heists that
keep Gus and his gang in the pink could be reduced to a few
pages, leaving the rest of this book to the struggles of
trying to make sense of love. When, about 2/3 of the way
through the book, Gus, our gunslinging titular hero,
disappears entirely, we don’t know if it was a heist or a
love affair gone wrong that finally got him—but the
evidence thus far suggests the latter. The rest of the book
focuses primarily on Clem, his seemingly reluctant
sidekick, a gunslinger with a couple of shocks of red hair
and a family back home to cramp the style of his single
partners. If Gus is a free-wheeling, sharp-shooting
neurotic, Clem is a much more complex animal. And when he
rides off with what remains of the gang in fancy dress
announcing himself to be “a handsome outlaw,” he remains as
hard to get a fix on as when we first encounter him in
Gus’s hideout at the book’s beginning.
The art is frenetic without every being out of control,
witty without ever losing sight of its pathos. The writing
is somehow simultaneously tender and brutal, expressing a
deep sense of affection for these arrested developments and
a harsh microscope on their failings. One cannot help but
suspect that there is more than a little bit of Blain
himself (at least on the level of fantasy-life) in these
man-boys and their lifestyle, but he is too mature an
artist not to see the humor and the shame in the fantasy.
And it is a comics-lovers book, not caught up in being the
next great American (or French) Novel, but fully enjoying
each and every sequential moment of the dance between the
panels.
There is no doubt that there is something different about
French comics, there is no doubt. There is a lightness of
touch that Americans somehow seem to be faking when they
put it on, and a sense of joy with the form that does not
come natural to those of us on this side of the Pond. But
there is often a glibness, a slightness that prevents many
of their best creators from rising to the challenge of the
Great Book. These two books meet that challenge without
ever losing sight of the grace and pleasures uniquely—aw
heck, I’m gonna say it—French!
