Young Albert by Yves Chaland

Sometimes it's hard to remember that a style is not just one creator. All these years later, on the other side of an ocean, I tend to collapse "clear line" - the Belgian ligne-clair movement and related work - into just Herge and Tin-Tin, and think of anything else as either a follower or parody of Herge.

But Herge was not alone: the point of a movement is that a bunch of people move. (I also learn that Herge's ligne-clair was somewhat in opposition to the "Marcelline School" of Spirou, which was more energetic, though both look very similar to American eyes seventy years later.) And one of the other movers in Belgian comics was Yves Chaland, who died shocking early, in 1990 in his early thirties. I'm eliding a lot of history here; Chaland was part of a resurgence or recreation of Marcelline, under the name of "Atomic style," in a way that I think was both deliberately nostalgic and parodying nostalgia in the way of those punk '70s. 

Young Albert collects a Chaland series that originally appeared in Metal Hurlant - it was a half-page, on the inside front cover, and only rarely ran more than one installment for a story. As far as I can tell, it started sometime in the late '70s, and this English-language edition is a translation of the book that appeared in 1985.

I knew it was a period piece, since it was from the '80s. What I didn't realize is that it's a period piece because it's set - at least inconsistently, more clearly starting about halfway through - during the privations of the occupation during WWII. I suspect that's baked into the style - if you're working in a mode created by four Spirou cartoonists in the late '40s, there are going to be some references to the war years.

Albert himself is our main character, a loudmouth, opinionated, demanding young man - old enough to be physically strong enough for violence among his peers and willing enough to do it, young enough to still be clearly "a kid" rather than an adult, however old you want to believe that is - whose voice drives all of these comics. Albert may be wrong on occasion, but he is never in doubt - and he is always willing to roll out his long, detailed explanations of how everything works.

His world, at first, seems to be the early post-war one - perhaps an echo of his creator's own childhood, or the childhoods of slightly older people of the same generation. But that's never the point of the stories, so the way it slides into deprivation and Occupation later is surprising but not shocking. Albert's world is one where various kinds of horrible ends - heart attacks, violence from man and beast, mishaps of all kinds - are lurking around every corner, but Albert is sure he knows all of the ways to survive and win out in this world. (That's the point of Albert: he is sure of everything, all the time.)

Chaland's tone is serious and focused. Albert may be misguided a lot of the time - may be a hothead and radical in random and quirky ways - but we are right there with him, and his plans and ideas make as much sense as anything else in his world. It's a world that needs strong opinions, one where just bearing up against the horrors makes everyone tough and gnarly.

There is irony here, but it's deep-baked irony. I don't know if I can plumb it: I suspect you need to be Belgian, growing up the generation after this devastating war, hearing your elders pontificate about what happened and what they had to do, and wanting a voice to take that in a different direction. That's who Albert is: the post-war generation's reaction to the platitudes and memory-holing of the war generation, that young person's punk insistence that everything always sucked.

Chaland is remarkably subtle here, for a series about a viewpoint character giving us his radical opinions about everything. He is always alongside Albert without quite endorsing his hero, as if to say "he may well be right, you know."

And the art - again, as an American several generations later I can't guide you through true ligne-claire and first-generation Marcelline and whatever Atom brought to the table. Chaland's line is tight and precise, his people look really similar to Herge's to my eye, and there's energy and action in his panels, even in these short half-pagers.

This is more radical than I expected: tougher, starker, sterner. It's the "young" of ambition and rebellion rather than the "young" of nostalgia and happiness. And it was also a welcome reminder of the depth and breadth of the world: Belgium may be a small nation, but even a small nation is pretty big, with history and artistic movements and concerns that are as complex and involved as anywhere else.