Cruising Through the Louvre by David Prudhomme

I've always been fond of oddball publishing projects and quirky series - maybe because when you've worked in an industry, you're familiar with how it's supposed to work, and so get fascinated when someone deliberately does things a different way.

And so I keep coming back to the Louvre collection, a multi-year project of the actual world-famous museum, in which random cartoonists - mostly French, with a couple of Japanese thrown in just to be confusing - each make a completely different bande desinée that takes place, in one way or other, at that museum.

That's it: that's all they have in common. The characters in the story spend time in the Louvre. Now, so far the museum has been central to every book I've seen, but perhaps it doesn't have to be. The series has ranged from the post-apocalyptic SF of Nicolas De Crecy's Glacial Period to the slice-of-life An Enchantment by Christian Durieux. According to a Goodreads list, the series started in 2005, and the 22nd book appeared in 2022, so it may not be done even now.

David Prudhomme's Cruising Through the Louvre was published in French in 2012, and this Joe Johnson translation came to the US in 2016. This is probably the most down-to-earth - I don't want to say obvious - book in the series. It's about a man: Prodhomme. He's walking through the Louvre, looking at the art but almost more so looking at the people, and seeing the art reflected in them. He's talking to his partner (wife, girlfriend, the book isn't clear) on the phone, and talking about his plans for this very book that we're reading.

The effect could be '90s alt-cartoonist - the "it's all about me!" style - but it really isn't. Prudhomme is central here, but mostly as a viewpoint to see the art and the people, more of a camera than a voice. Cruising is about what he sees rather than what he thinks - it's a quick read, with relatively few words, driven by large panels with Prudhomme's soft blacks and colors - I think he works in art crayon or some kind of tones/pencils; his work is full of shades and tones, more in the black/grey spectrum than anywhere else.

We see people who match the art they're looking at, or reflect it, or just stare at it. People of all kinds: young, old, men, women, various races and sizes and clothing types and expressions. All here, in this museum, to look at art and feel something because of it.

This is one of the more successful of the books in the series, I think. It captures - in a puckish way; there's a fantasy element towards the end I haven't mentioned - the feeling of actually wandering through a good museum in a way the other books haven't. There's a randomness to it, and a sense that the experience is partially formed by the crowd, not just the works. Pruddhomme has a great eye for odd, specific faces - faces that are cartoons, since he is a cartoonist - and makes them all come to life, even as he shows them all, generally, only once.