Back to Basics, Vol. 5: Revolutions by Jean-Yves Ferri and Manu Larcenet

I'm still croggled by the idea that someone would have the idea "hey, this aspect of my life would make a great, fun, light-hearted comics series" and then have the idea "this other guy should write it so I can draw myself doing the things he writes about!"

But that's what happened in the Back to Basics series, which I am now at the end of. Round about the turn of the century, Manu Larcenet moved to the French countryside and decided to make a series about that. He teamed up with Jean-Yves Ferri to write those stories - I have to assume Larcenet told Ferri about incidents in his life and gave him some vague plot outlines, otherwise the whole thing becomes too silly and fictional for me even to imagine - and then Larcenet drew what Ferri wrote about fictionalized Larcenet. Since the series is semi-autobiographical, Ferri is also an occasional character, and the creation of the very stories we're reading (and their promotion, in one of the books) is an element of the humor and the plot.

There were five books in the series: Real Life, Making Plans, The Great World and The Flood all came before this final book, Revolutions. The whole thing wrapped up by 2008, with translations into English only coming a decade later - Revolutions, in this edition, was published by Europe Comics digitally in 2017, with a translation by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

There are definitely elements that repeat: Manu and his partner, Mariette, moved to the sleepy rural Ravenelles to begin the series, and the various rustic types there - especially a local old lady and hermit - are recurring characters. But each book tends to have a different plot structure, and a new complication, which are not necessarily picked up in later books.

The Flood, for example, was largely the "we now have a baby" book. That baby is now a toddler, and she's not quite as central this time, though Manu and Mariette do know that you can never ignore a small child. This book, on the other hand, is one part "Mariette is going back to school" (for something the book never makes clear) and one part "there is a contentious election in this sleepy town" (which is oddly more serious and political than anything else in the series).

The current mayor, who has been a minor and mostly pleasant character throughout the series, is still mostly a bumbling rustic but now is also a secret schemer with shadowy allies, who wants to get rich by building a Krashdiscount "megamarket" in town. Manu-the-character gets caught up in the political campaign, though we don't see anything positive about the other candidates - and only realize there are more than two very late in the book - mostly as a way to ramp up his anxiety and confusion, which admittedly are central elements of the whole series.

The jokes about Mariette changing and growing (subtext: away from Manu) also seem more important and less frivolous than the stories in previous books. The tone of Revolutions is roughly the same as previous books, but the things Ferri and Larcenet are making jokes about are much weightier and less goofy than before, which makes the book more than a little uneasy. I know nothing about Manu Larcenet's personal life, but Revolutions implies a whole lot about why it's the last book in the series - whatever in his life transformed into these stories, it was contentious and problematic and messy.

So Back to Basics doesn't end quite as well, or as pleasantly, as it started. But even this last volume is funny, and mostly light-hearted. Maybe I should say that it always strives to be light-hearted, as darker thoughts poke in, intrusively, here and there.