Dante's Inferno by Paul & Gaëtan Brizzi

The last time I read a comics adaptation of Dante, it was by Seymour Chwast. This one, you might say, is from the opposite end of the picture-making spectrum, all soft pencils in a detailed, almost photorealistic style as opposed to Chwast's bold colors and carefully-designed simplicity.

And clear, obvious distinctions like that are good: living in a world with multiple graphic adaptations of Dante, you want to be able to define them against each other as clearly as possible.

Dante's Inferno, unlike the Chwast book from over a decade ago, just adapts the first and most famous of Dante's three sections of the Divine Comedy. Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi - brothers who have mostly worked in animation together for the last few decades - use some of Dante's words, but mostly present this story visually, in cinematic full-bleed pages packed with striking images and magnificent effects. They have animators' eyes for gesture and expression and, in particular, for the large arresting image - the book irises out from the usual four-to-six white-bordered panels per page to full-page or full-spread images at least once per Circle, for maximum effect.

The relative lack of text keeps the focus on the main characters - Dante himself, journeying through Hell to find his dead love Beatrice, and his guide, the classic poet Virgil. Most of the text in the book is their conversation: Dante's wonder and fear, Virgil's explanations and some of his negotiations with all of the strange doomed creatures they meet.

That's the story of Dante's poem, for anyone unfamiliar with the original. The author himself is moping about a forest near his hometown of Florence, since his great love Beatrice has recently died. Virgil appears - long-dead author of The Aeneid and Dante's poetic role model - and says he will lead Dante to her. But Virgil does not reveal that the trip will go through literal hell until they're within the gates. (Seems like a thing one's mentor would want to mention at the outset, so one could be properly prepared with strong footwear, the right mental attitude, and some appropriate traveling snacks.)

Anyway, Inferno is the journey down through the nine circles of Hell, in Dante's poetry filled with lovingly-described scenes of the torture in various inventive ways of all sorts of people, particularly those he knew and loathed. It's followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso, covering Dante's journey through the other two portions of the Christian afterlife. The other two bits are less popular, and I see no indication that the Brizzi brothers intend to continue this work to adapt them - though, of course, they might.

The Brizzis show us a lot of the creatures and people in Hell - at least one group per circle - but they've quietly simplified the presentation and removed the long Dantean descriptions of various groups of sinners, the horrible things they did in life, and how they are being tortured in inventive ways in Hell. Those who have read Inferno know quite a lot of it is made of that catalog - oh, here are the simoniacs, who are in the third of ten ditches in the eighth circle, Malebolge, and they are evil because they sold holy things, and they are punished by being left head-down in holes in the burning landscape with only their feet showing. It's all a bit like Medieval Mad Libs: the SINNER TYPE is in the REGION OF HELL because they committed VERY SPECIFIC SIN and are punished in INVENTIVE WAY.

Dante sees all of this, and is horrified and/or gratified - the latter when he sees people he knew, and is happy to see them being tortured in Hell - at all of it. Eventually, the two of them make it to the bottom of Hell, where a gigantic goat-like Lucifer breaks out of a frozen lake (the thermodynamics of Hell do not bear close scrutiny) and our heroes are able to jump onto his head to get themselves to the exit.

(Rather convenient of the King of Lies, I'd say - provides good service to visitors. Five stars.)

The Brizzis make compelling pages here, and they have a fantastic, world-famous story full of striking images to work from. Their version of Dante loses the tedious catalog of sins and torments for visual grandeur and a near-epic feel. It may disappoint some hard-core Dante fans, who want more details on exactly how the murderers are tortured, and what the virtuous pagans are up to, but, for most readers, this is either a fantastic introduction to Dante or a gorgeous reminder of his work.

The Black Incal by Alexandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series drawn by Mœbius and written by Jean-Michel Charlier.)

Humanoids republished the original Incal series - in six volumes this time, matching the original French albums, unlike the Marvel 2-in-1s - in 2012, going back to the original French colors by Yves Chaland and taking out some minor censorship that had crept into English-language editions in the '90s. And so, for no good reason, I'm taking another look at this series.

The Black Incal is the first of the six albums of the main series, written by Alexandro Jodorowski and drawn by Mœbius. The stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early '80s; Jodorowski went on to write a lot more in this universe - some of it under an "Incal" title and some not, a few with Mœbius but mostly not. And I have to admit that I do not have a high opinion of Jodorowski's work, though I've mostly read the comics he wrote for Mœbius - he's also a filmmaker and has done lots of other projects, so I may be reacting most strongly to their gestalt. (The worst thing I've seen is Madwoman of the Sacred Heart, if you want to see my heights of spleen and bile.)

The Incal, on the other hand, starts off as more-or-less conventional skiffy adventure, with only a few eruptions of Meaning. Our hero is John DiFool (a worrying name, admittedly), a "Class-R" private investigator in one of those ultra-urbanized, stratified medium futures, in an underground city on what seems to be Earth. He starts out being beaten and terrorized by mysterious masked figures, is thrown to what should be his death, and then saved by the Cybo-Cops. He tells them a plausible story - which might even be mostly true - about him bodyguarding an aristo woman for a night of debauchery among the lower classes before things went sideways and he ran away and was knocked out in the inevitable gigantic service tunnels.

John neglects to mention that he got a strange box from a gigantic dying "mutant," or that other mutants and the alien Berg (from another galaxy, Jodorowski offhandedly remarks, to underscore how little he understands how any of this works) are fighting over this MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin itself is The Incal, a small luminous pyramid that talks and can bestow strange and wondrous powers on its possessor in ways that aren't clear at all in this book. Descriptions of the series call it "The Light Incal" in distinction to the Dark Incal, the title object that John is sent by the main Incal to find in the back half of this book.

Most of this book is frenetic action overlaid with lots of talking. It's the kind of action story where people narrate their every last action and emotional state, like a '60s Spider-Man comic with slightly less quipping but vastly more emoting. John gets one story of What He Needs To Do and What It All Means from the Incal, but, as I recall, this changes somewhat as the series goes on, and the story gets bigger and more grandiose. There are various forces arrayed against John, but we're not clear yet on who they all are, how they connect to each other, or what they want. But it is clearly John on the run with the vastly powerful thingamabob, with All Hands Against Him.

Oh! Also, near the end, one group of villains hires the Metabaron, a sleek figure in a metaleather jacket with a metashaved head and steely metaeyes, to find John and retrieve the Incal in his metacraft. (OK, not every noun associated with him has "meta" attached to it - but a hell of a lot of them do, in a way that gets silly within two or three pages.)

It ends entirely in the middle of the action; John has been captured yet again by someone we're pretty sure is a villain and the Metabaron is getting metacloser. I suspect every volume ends more or less that way; I'll see.

The Dark Incal is stylish and would move really quickly if it weren't for all of the repetitive dialogue. Mœbius's art is detailed - maybe to the point of being overbusy a few times, but mostly right in that sweet spot of Big SF action, with lots of gigantic constructed stuff looming and swooping around. I have the lurking suspicion that it will all add up to less than it seems, but that may be my memories of the last time I read it. It is the epitome of '80s SF adventure in French comics, in all of the good and bad ways.

The Provocative Colette by Annie Goetzinger

The Provocative Colette has a preface by Nathalie Crom - who is not credited in the book but seems to be a French literary journalist - talking about the image the public has of Colette as an old, immobile woman, and contrasting it to the portrayal in this book. But I doubt most English-language readers have any image of Colette that strong - here, she's known primarily as the author of Gigi, and maybe of Chéri as well. I don't think I've actually read any Colette, and I knew only vaguely about her career - married to an older man, originally writing works published under his name, a vague sense that she had a lot of stereotypically French scandals, a vaguely Belle Époque timing.

That's not incorrect, but BD creator Anne Goetzinger goes into a lot more detail here, in a book that covers Colettes's whole adult life but focuses most closely on the initial phase of her career. Whether you have the presumptions of the French or the Americans, Goetzinger will set you right with detailed, well- constructed pages and long narrative captions to explain it all.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1871; this book begins on her wedding day in 1893, to the popular writer Henry Gauthier-Villars - who, in a fortuitous bit of foreshadowing, met Colette's family because the wet nurse for his illegitimate son was part of that household. Colette and family live out in the countryside, but marrying Gauthier-Villars - who wrote under the pen-name "Willy" - means she will move to Paris immediately and be part of Willy's high-society life.

Willy is a notorious libertine, the kind of man whose sole hobby and pastime seems to be having sex with other women. (That has always seemed exhausting to me, but I suppose everyone has the things they love most in life.) Colette doesn't realize this for a while, but eventually does, and reacts badly, with what seems to be a psychosomatic illness her mother has to come and nurse her out of. Afterward, Colette starts having affairs with other women herself - Goetzinger doesn't say so here, but I suspect lesbian dalliances were seen, by Willy and Frenchmen in general, as not "real" in the way a woman's affairs with men would be. I have no idea how the young Colette would have characterized her sexuality in a modern context, but she does seem to have slept with men exclusively after her marriage with Willy ended.

On the professional side, Willy was a "novelist" something in the James Patterson mold - he had ideas, and hired jobbing writers to actually write the books for him. Along the same lines, he encouraged or pushed or forced Colette to fictionalize her life into a series of novels about "Claudine," published under Willy's name and very popular. The Paris crowd seems to have fairly quickly realized Colette was the real author - I think they all knew Willy didn't really write his own books to begin with - and she also developed a second career as an actress, often as Claudine.

Those are the two themes of Colette's life, and of the book: her various affairs, first mostly with women and then with men, who did not get older as quickly as she did; and her various careers, as a journalist and novelist and dancer and actress and general stage performer. Goetzinger's hundred pages here carry Colette up to 1924, when she was just over fifty and when she broke up her second marriage by carrying on an affair with her husband's teenage stepson. As I understand it, Colette's biggest literary success and acclaim was in the 1920s and '30s, so Goetzinger deliberately cuts her story short at that point - this is explicitly the story of what formed Colette, and turned her into the woman who wrote the books than French audiences would recognize.

From my seat, a hundred years and an ocean away, it seems that Colette was scandalous for being a famous French woman who behaved exactly like a famous French man would, and did. I might think the whole thing sounds hugely tiring - all that running about, slamming bedroom doors like a farce - but it is oh-so French, and we have to allow nations their characteristic quirks.

Goetzinger, as I understand it, is one of the greats of French comics, working mostly in historical formats, like this book and Girl in Dior, the only other book of hers I've seen. She's had a forty-plus year career, of which (I think) not a lot has been translated into English. But this is a fine biography of an interesting writer who had a quirky, particular life, and Goetzinger's art makes it engaging and lively.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 4: Holiday in Budapest by Yves Chaland

This fourth Freddy Lombard book has me rethinking the whole series. The first three books didn't say when they took place, so I assumed they were "contemporary" - set roughly when they were written, in the '80s. That seemed plausible, in that timeless Eurocomics way, and the '80s is pretty historical to us today anyway.

But the fourth book, Holiday in Budapest, is explicitly set in 1956 - that and "Budapest" will tell the more historically-minded of you some major events in the bande desinée - and they've got the same car as in the first book, and are wearing the same clothes as before. So maybe the whole thing was historical all along, and I just didn't realize it. (The previous books are The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon, The Elephant Graveyard, and The Comet of Carthage.)

It's the summer of 1956, and our three heroes - Freddy, Sweep, and Dina - are in Venice. Dina is giving Latin lessons to Laszlo, the fifteen-year-old nephew of a Hungarian politician, staying in a grand hotel with his aunt in something that isn't meant to be exile yet but could turn into it if necessary. Freddy and Sweep have no prospects as usual, and are camping by a lake and working on their car in a desultory fashion.

They're poised for a new adventure, in other words - or at least Freddy and Sweep, the less forward-thinking and disciplined characters are. Dina seems to be doing just fine, and could probably have a normal life if she didn't keep getting swept up with these careless, thoughtless young men into danger and trouble.

Lazslo's parents died in one of the many Russian crackdowns in Hungary; his uncle is a politician who we readers can tell (even if Laszlo doesn't appreciate it) very carefully navigates his complex political environment to keep his family as safe as possible. Though "as possible," right now, is "not very," which is why his wife and ward are in Italy, outside the Soviet sphere of influence.

Dina somewhat indulges Laszlo's romantic and revolutionary notions, but it's Freddy and Sweep who offer him their car and their company for a roadtrip to Budapest, to get him close to the action and (they think) get them some of the family money for their help.

So Laszlo runs away, with Freddy and Sweep thinking their helping him back to Hungary will get them in good with a new government and lead to big payouts. Dina chases them, getting to Budapest first to warn Laszlo's uncle.

And things are uneasy and unsettled in Hungary. There is a popular uprising, bubbling in both the political class and the general population, but the Russians and their political officers are solidly in charge currently. Opinion on whether the Soviets would just let Hungary peacefully go its own way are divided - the firebrands insist that the will of the people cannot be stopped, even if the streets run red with blood.

Laszlo would be a firebrand if he were a little older; he's an attempted firebrand, at least. His uncle locks him up to keep him safe, but again Dina indulges him, and again Laszlo finds a way to sneak out to find more trouble.

About the same time, the Russian tanks roll in.

The last roughly third of Holiday in Budapest is full of street-fighting and armies, sieges of offices and running around to get forms signed to, they hope, save Laszlo from being shipped as a political prisoner to Siberia. (Because of course he got picked up and detained by the invading forces almost immediately; he is young and strident and doesn't have the sense God gave a horsefly.)

There's a lot of action and color and interesting moments and historical detail here. The historical event is the center of the book; Freddy himself is secondary at best in his own story. (Sweep, being more hotheaded, drives more of the action - and Dina even more so.) And creator Yves Chaland draws it all magnificently, with great architectural and military details that never detract from his clean, crisp story-telling.

I still have a hard time getting my head around what the point of the Freddy Lombard series was - my sense is that it was reacting to and reworking ideas and styles and viewpoints from the history of Belgian and French comics of the previous forty years, so each book should probably be seen as a counterpoint to specific older works. If so, it's not something a monoglot English reader could trace forty years later, so I'll just gesture in that direction, and note that an answer might possibly be found in that territory, if my guess is correct. If not...I'm open to other theories.

Bad Break, Vol. 1 by Philippe Riche

Sometimes names just slow down a crime story. You've got three main characters, you can see who they are, and you know what they're doing. So why do you need names?

That may have been creator Philippe Riche's point, or maybe the laconic style he uses in Bad Break, Vol. 1 - minimal dialogue most of the time, few captions except when showing someone narrating past events, only the minimum explanations required - just meant the names never quite made their way into the book.

Bad Break opens outside a junkyard, somewhere in France. A man removes his bandages, fixes his clothes, walks towards the owner and his helper. He's our main character, though he's the most mysterious: a tall, gaunt, bald man in what was probably once a very nice suit, a dealer in antiquities, mostly of the human-remains kind.

The beefy young assistant at the junkyard helps the dealer find a specific junked car, from a wreck just the day before. The driver was killed. Well, the dealer was the driver, and he's not dead now. But, as we go further in Bad Break, we realize he was killed in the crash. He's probably been killed a number of times, but it doesn't take. The dealer retrieves a briefcase of important material from the car, and asks the assistant to help him get back to the city.

The dealer is being pursued by a gang he calls "head choppers" - large tattooed men, possibly of a different nationality. They want to kill him; they try to kill him. The assistant uses the dealer's gun to kill one of them in a confrontation at the train station.

The third is a porn actress. We see her on a poster that says "Reb X" - maybe that's her name? She has a tattoo, a very specific tattoo. The dealer has been tracing the history of similar tattoos, through an old book. We're not sure why. We don't know how the "head choppers" figure into it. But the three set off together to find out the true history of the tattoos, chasing down an old man the dealer once knew.

This is only the first half of the story; they don't find the answers by the end of these pages. They only just barely get together. We as readers know the vague shape of the mystery, understand that there's something at least mildly supernatural - how else does the dealer keep coming back from death?

Riche draws this in a loose, deeply assured line, with rough panel borders and grey tones. He can draw a lot of specifics: that's clear from the opening in the junkyard, with pieces of cars that experts could easily identify. But his focus is on these people, and their mysterious quest. It's not over yet: there's one more book to come. But this first half of the story is interesting, quirky, compelling, satisfying.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage by Yves Chaland

The Freddy Lombard books are Belgian creator Yves Chaland's major work, according to everything I've seen. He died very young - in 1990, at barely more than thirty - but he'd done this five-book series over the previous decade, along with some other random works. I started with Chaland, maybe because I always go at things from an odd angle, with his quirkier, spikier collection of shorts Young Albert, and have read the first two Freddy books over the past year: The Will of Godrey of Bouillon and The Elephant Graveyard.

Those first two Freddy books started fairly conventionally (both stories in Elephant and the one in Will): Freddy and his friends Dina and Sweep are young and poor, and wander into a situation where there's the potential for adventure and remuneration, and so jump at it. Adventure then ensues.

The Comet of Carthage isn't playing that game; it isn't going to set up its plot or explain anything up front. It is about as in medias res as any book can be; we don't even see Freddie and his friends until the eighth story page (of 46).

What Comet does not tell you up front includes:

• We are in the French Mediterranean port of Cassis.
• A massive comet is approaching (this particular city?!), which will cause a tidal wave that may wipe out everything.
• This comet last appeared two thousand years ago, right at the time of the fall of Carthage, and This Is Important.
• Freddie and friends are near Cassis, camping on the beach, gathering crabs to sell their claws to...someone.
• They also may be searching for random old artifacts, or maybe they just find one or two without really looking for them on purpose.

The book opens with the storm rising, a dead body found on the beach, and a woman fleeing this city whose name we don't know. (Her name, either, I mean. She's Alaia and the dead woman is Ava - both of them are Tunisian, we eventually learn, and in France without papers.) Alaia tries to flee town on the local bus, to get to Marseille and, we think, get further away from there.

But the single road connecting Cassis with the outside world has washed away, so the bus is stopped. Alaia tries to pick her way around the broken section, on crumbly limestone cliffs, but she falls, injured and knocked out. Freddy finds and saves her, bringing her back, unconscious, to the camp he's sharing with Dina and Sweep.

By this point, the reader will have picked up some of the above backstory, but will also notice that the characters are talking around the situation, over-dramatically, and a few of them, especially Freddy, seem to be obsessed with the fall of Carthage and with the ancient Phoenician civilization for no obvious reason.

Alaia has been working as an artist's model in Cassis for Phidas, who I think is also Tunisian or Phoenician or something like that. He is tempestuous and demanding and mercurial, as a secondary-character artist in a fictional work often is, and Alaia is sure that he murdered Ava when she was done posing, that he's done it many times before, and that she is next. This is, obviously, why she fled.

But there's no way out of Cassis. Freddy says he'll help her, but his help, as we've seen in the previous books, is freely offered and energetically delivered but only occasionally useful.

Phidas both grabs and browbeats Alaia when she leaves, so she does go back to him - multiple times over the course of the book - and we do see him act violently in other ways. It's entirely plausible that he's a Bluebeard-esque murderer, we think. Whether he and Alaia and maybe Freddy are acting out roles from the fall of Carthage is much murkier and more confusing, made doubly so by the fact that no one actually makes that possibility clear at any point and the dialogue dances on the edge of being deliberately obscure.

Meanwhile, the usual mad scientist in a Franco-Belgian BD - here called Professor Picard - arrives in his bright red submersible, having run out of fuel. He has no French money, and the locals are suspicious of him. Well, they're suspicious of everyone about everything, being whipped into a frenzy by the approaching comet, and shouting wild-eyed things that may be more of the Carthage-come-again stuff or just random racist Frenchness. (Against the dark-skinned Tunisians as well as against the Belgians like Picard and our heroes.)

The comet does hit in the end, the flood waters rising and battering Cassis. Before that, the local rabble march with torches and Frankenstein rakes, yelling various things and attempting to stone Freddy and Alaia to death at one point. Everyone believes there is a single culprit for all of the bad things happening in Cassis: thefts of fuel, electricity cut off, Ava's murder, the comet itself, and perhaps even the perfidy of the ancient Carthaginians. They are wrong: multiple people have done multiple things, and the comet, I think, is just a natural phenomenon. (At least I hope it is; there's one portentous flashback, so it may actually be some sort of supernatural wrecking ball after all.)

Comet is a weird story, told somewhat sideways, and definitely the most interesting and exciting of the three Freddy books I've seen so far. Chaland's art is supple and precise, particularly good at big drama and ominous atmosphere. I don't know that I would call it entirely successful at what it sets out to do - and the dialogue is more than too much a lot of the time, in ways that make me wonder if it's quoting something I'm unfamiliar with - but it is big and bold and confident and I wish more books would take big risks like this one does.

The Major by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

Moebius was always self-indulgence. That was the name Jean Giraud used on works that were imagistic, symbolic, allusive, surreal. He had other names for other work: Gir, his full name.

Like so many things in anyone's life, it got more so as it went along. Early Moebius stories were short imagistic fantasies. Mid-period Moebius were longer but still generally story-shaped flights of fancy. Late Moebius...well, we all know what happens to an self when it keeps being indulged, over and over again, for years.

I think The Major functions mostly as a warm-up for the longer but similar Inside Moebius project (published in France in six volumes from 2001 through 2010 and in English as three omnibuses in 2018), even though it was completed later. It's also set in Desert "B" - a complicated French pun on the term for comics, bande dessineé, and on a slang term for giving up smoking pot, which Giraud was trying to do at the time - and has a lot of the imagery and ideas of the longer work.

But that's more like looking at periods in a painter's work than like tracing parallels in the books written by a novelist: both Major and Inside are deeply self-indulgent, metafictional, random, vague, and mercurial. The Major even more so, since it was created - according to some notes in this edition, not entirely in this order, either - over a period of ten years in a notebook. It's in multiple sections, which don't entirely cohere, and it also includes a bunch of non-narrative drawings at the end - somewhat like Inside did, but, in Inside, that feels like a culmination of something, whereas here it just feel like some drawings from a notebook.

Major Grubert is the main character; he's living in a hermit's box in that desert. The box is barely large enough for a human being and seemingly made of stone, so the reader may wonder how Grubert avoided dying immediately of heatstroke - but this is not a book in which logical thinking and concerns about consequences will have any purpose. That box - one of many that we see in the desert - is much larger inside, TARDIS-style, and seems to be linked to all of the other boxes through "Corridors" that Giraud doesn't explain. We don't know why Grubert is there, what he's doing, how he got there, how this story connects to any other Grubert stories. Actually, Moebius fairly explicitly says, up front, that anyone with the same little moustache is Grubert, Eternal Champion-style, which he seems to think solves those issues.

Two other men come to Grubert, in his current role as oracle, with random philosophical questions. There are two sets of these men: they may be different, or the same people under different names. The three talk in the ways that people who smoked an awful lot of pot for an awful lot of years talk, and similarly believe themselves to be profound.

Other things happen, mostly randomly. Like Inside, there's a bit of flying or falling, with people impacting at high speed into the desert sands with no ill effect. It doesn't add up to much, but the point isn't to add up: it's to have moments, and indulge those random Moebius thoughts.

So I have to say that The Major is successful, since it does what it sets out to do. That is weird and goofy and borderline pointless, but it does it, and Giraud's art is quirky and fascinating throughout as usual. If you read The Major, spend more time on the pictures than the words.

Sartre by Mathilde Ramadier and Anais Depommier

Most books like this have a subtitle, but not this one. It is just Sartre. Take him as he is, or walk away - those are your options with the book, as it is with all things Sartrean.

This is a French graphic novel, written by Mathilde Ramadier and drawn by Anais Depommier. And I immediately have to take back what I just said - maybe it's a subtle difference between how English-speakers view Sartre and how his countrymen do - because the 2015 Dargaud edition had the longer, more descriptive title Sartre, Une existence, des libertés. This 2017 US edition was translated by Peter Russella and published by NBM.

It is a biography in comics form of the writer and philosopher - straightforward and chronological, starting with his youth and ending the main story in 1964 when he refused the Nobel Prize. (Sartre consistently refused all prizes and awards in his life as part of his philosophy: he thought that a person could always change at any point, so judging anyone before they were dead was impossible. I am probably mangling his argument here.)

Actually, it nearly becomes a twinned biography - Simone de Beauvoir is almost as important to the book as Sartre is himself, as she was in his life. We even get her words in captions, as we do Sartre's, a few times throughout this book. (One minor production note: their captions are tinted to distinguish them from the white-background captions, which are the books' narrative. I found, reading this digitally, that those captions were scattered enough that the color difference wasn't clear - though they tend to be used for scenes of either Sartre or de Beauvoir away from the other, so they're always clear in context.)

For a man who lived through WWII in Paris and was at least nominally part of the Resistance to German occupation, Sartre led a quiet, sedentary, bookish life. The thrills of this graphic novel are primarily intellectual, the conflicts inter-personal and brought out in long complex conversations in drawing rooms over fine food and between cigarettes. It's a very wordy book, as I suppose it had to be - Sartre was a man of words, more so than even most writers.

Ramadier and Depommier don't focus on the many sexual adventures of Sartre and de Beauvoir, though they do have a few moments to indicate they are happening (continuously, all the time, in the background of the intellectual activity) and also show the beginning of their relationship with a frank in-bed conversation in which Sartre says (this is my blunt translation out of Sartre-speak) "I want to fuck a lot of people, and I think you do, too - but let's always come back to each other and tell each other about it, to stay the most important people to each other."

This is a book full of words, and I have to credit both Ramadier for making it all work in the first place and Russella for turning it into clear English that fits into the panels and tells (what I have to assume is) the same story. It is not an exciting book, and it will be deeper and more interesting the more a reader is familiar with Sartre's life, thought, and major works, but it's a solid introduction even to people who only vaguely know who Sartre was or why he matters. 

Bigby Bear, Vol.3: The Explorer by Pilippe Coudray

The subtitle explains it: these single-pagers take Bigby, and occasionally his friends as well, off to further-flung regions than their usual mountains and forests.

As far as I can tell, creator Philippe Coudray has been telling stories about this bear for some time - he's called Barnabé in French, and some of his stories were translated as "Benjamin" a few years back by First Second. These three books from Humanoids - I've already covered Vol. 1 and For All Seasons - may collect some of the same material as the First Second volumes, or may be entirely separate. But, either way, this is a world Coudray has returned to over a period of time: this book lists original copyright dates of 2012-2019, and was published in English (translated by Miceal Beausang-O'Griafa) in 2020.

That gets me to Bigby Bear, Vol. 3: The Explorer. It contains ninety-nine single-page stories about Bigby, often featuring Rabbit, who I guess we call his best friend. There are other rabbits, small bears, and other creatures, too: Bigby has a fish and a bird (non-talking, most of the time) as pets who are part of some gags. Bigby's explorations include space, in rocketships sometimes shiny and modern and sometimes rustic and handmade, so there are aliens a few times as well. Oh, and a Yeti. And even a few humans, just in case we thought we had a good sense of how this world works.

I should say that Coudray clearly made these stories originally for younger readers. They're inventive and fun, with a delight in reversals and transformations, often wordless and never very wordy - though Coudray, or maybe Beausang-O'Griafa, doesn't avoid longer, more complex words and ideas; I just flipped randomly to one about an Electroencephalograph. There's also a vague sense of education or learning - the smaller creatures look to Bigby to explain things to them, and he's spending a lot of this particular volume going to new places, in space or under the ocean or just further away than normal.

Coudray has a confident, simple cartooning line, with medium-bright, high-contrast colors - it's not a hugely cartoony world, but it is a somewhat cartoony one, clearly a bit simplified from a realistic view. And his pages here are quirky and interesting - pitched at a younger audience, definitely, but not talking down to them or limited to them. This is an amusing series, on a light, accessible level, full of mild but thoughtful gags and a anything-is-possible attitude.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard

I'm still not quite sure what the deal is with Freddy Lombard - the man himself or the series of bandes desinées he's the hero of - even as I'm starting to wonder if there is a deal to begin with. This is a five-book series, all album-format, that came out in the Franco-Belgian comics world in the '80s, all written and drawn by Yves Chaland. They were translated into English substantially later - this edition by Sasha Watson for publication in the US in 2015.

Freddy lives with his friends Dina and Sweep: all of them seem to be in their mid-twenties and have the kind of plot-convenient poverty where they complain about money a lot, live in lousy flats where they dodge the landlord because they don't have the rent money yet, and are willing to dive into just about any kind of adventure if there's a promise of a payday at the end. Maybe that is the deal: young, on the make, living on remittances from a vague relative in Australia, and otherwise mostly blank to be part of any possible story.

And my sense is that Freddy is the title character, rather than Dina or Sweep, because...well, he looks like the hero: blonde Belgian guy with a quiff, Tintin face, tan trenchcoat. Maybe because he's the most hot-headed and active, or maybe he has that personality because he is the hero - either way works.

The Elephant Graveyard is the second book of Freddy's adventures; it has two stories and came out in 1984. (It follows The Will of Godrey of Bouillon, from 1981.)  The two stories are untitled, but the first one is about a trip to Africa to retrieve a valuable photographic plate and the second - the one that gives the volume its title - is about a series of murders linked to Africa and to elephants.

(I say "Africa" rather than anything more specific because that's how the book puts it. The natives in the first story might also look visually a bit racist to some people - they don't talk or act like stereotypes, mostly, but they are designed in a very outdated, um, high-contrast style.)

Both have adventure-story plots, handled confidently and cleanly by Chaland, though there might be an undertone that he doesn't quite believe in it all - it's just a bit too frenetic, too quickly-paced. (Though that may be an artifact of cramming two stories with their own complications into one album. I may also be influenced by having read Chaland's more deliberately norm-breaking Young Albert.)

In any case, Freddy (with Sweep and Dina) get pulled into these two adventure stories - hearing screams from a house as they pass and from the flat upstairs from where they live - and dive into them. In the first case, a rich collector is willing to pay them to go to Africa, so they do without any fuss, and run an expedition out to find a remote tribe and get the photographic plate before the agent of a rival (British, of course) collector gets there first. In the second case, they find a dead body and get caught up in the investigation - while Freddy also speculates that there's a vast treasure (the fabled elephant graveyard, full of ivory) behind it all.

He's wrong about that - about their getting a fortune, at least - but he's always wrong about that, since the premise of the series is that they're poor. He's right, or at least confidently sure, most of the time.

This volume has somewhat more conventional plots than Godfrey did - the stories go more or less as expected and end well, with a lot of action and tense dialogue along the way. Chaland's art is expressive as usual, very good at story-telling. I might even go so far as to recommend new readers start here; it introduces Freddy and his world better than Godfrey.

Seoul Before Sunrise by Samir Dahmani

It's a bit quirky for a book about a young Korean woman to be by a Frenchman and translated into English, but we live in a big, quirky world. And creator Samir Dahmani lived in South Korea for several years, so this is a world he knows - well, he clearly didn't grow up as a girl there and move to Seoul for university, but you know what I mean. (The translator is Nanette McGuinness, for the record.)

Seoul Before Sunrise is a moody, quiet story - told in what looks like watercolors, mostly soft and muted, with lots of deep blues and blacks for this mostly-nighttime story. It's Seong-ji's story: she came from a provincial city, did well enough on her standard tests to get into a good accounting program in a Seoul university. But her best friend, Ji-won, got into a slightly better university, and now the two of them will not be as inseparable as they were before.

This is a big deal for Seong-ji. The reader realizes, fairly quickly, that it's not that way for Ji-won: she's fine with moving on, going on to the next thing in her life, while Seong-ji is mourning her past, unsure and tentative and at sea in the new big impersonal city.

Seong-ji works overnight at a convenience store to help pay for her school: it's quiet and slow, with just a few random customers over the course of a shift. One customer in particular, a woman in her thirties, forms a weird friendship with Seong-ji - the older woman is quirkily bohemian, not concerned with any of the things Seong-ji has been taught are most important (looks, popularity, career), and spends her nights breaking into random people's apartments just to be there and experience their lives.

(She talks in vague generalities, I'm afraid: like a lot of similar characters in a lot of media, she's meant to be the voice of passion and art and mystery, so her creator keeps everything muddy and nonspecific and applicable to everything in the world even when that's not as useful as more specificity would be.)

Her new friend drags Seong-ji along on various break-ins - which are totally fine, since she works for a property-management company, so she has keys and codes to get in anywhere she wants, and, anyway, she never takes or breaks anything. Seong-ji is too much of a mouse to argue against this, and, besides, is intrigued with this new world she discovers - the world of strangers' lives at night.

There are experiences which don't seem to be in normal default reality, but Dahmani doesn't want to pin these down to being a real intrusion of fantasy into the night world, or an altered psychological state, or anything else - again, he's keeping things vague to cover all of the possibilities.

Well, there's one possibility a close reader will have realized really early: Seong-ji likes girls. She really liked her friend Ji-won, and finally realizes that. She catches up with her old friend to let her know, which does not go well at all.

And then the book ends confusingly, with Seong-ji disappearing for the last section, even though this is entirely her story. Dahmani leaves it vague - yes, again - about what actually happened - and lets the reader guess or speculate what happens next for Seong-ji. It's a frustrating ending, but in character with the earlier vagueness.

Seoul After Sunrise is a book of mood and vibes and feelings, carried by strong art that makes that mood live and true. I would have preferred if the words were a bit more pointed, but that's not the book this creator wanted to make.

Pink Floyd in Comics by Tony Lourenço, Thierry Lamy, and various artists

First of all, it's just the tyranny of the calendar that lands this book on this day: I'm working about six weeks ahead currently, and this is the book I read next, and this is the Wednesday the post will fall on. There is no plan to it being Christmas today.

Second, I need to get into the credits quickly, which are much more voluminous than I expected when I picked this book up. The title page credits (deep breath) Main editor Nicolas Finet, Comics writers Tony Lourenço and Thierry Lamy (Lourenço took the first half; Lamy the rest), Cover Christopher (no other name; this seems common in French comics, and I have no idea how they decide who gets what name), Articles Nicolas Finet, Graphic design Marion Lovila, and Translation Peter Russella. That doesn't include the artists of the twenty-eight chapters, who are listed on the following two pages - no artist does more than one chapter, and two of them bring (separate) colorists along with them.

This thus is a book that took thirty-five creators - Christopher also did art for one of the chapters, and Finet was both editor and article-writer - to bring into the world. That's not a record, since encyclopedias exist, but it's impressive for a pop comics biography of a psychedelic band.

You may guess from that list, and possibly from a prior knowledge of the "Music Legends in Comics" series from NBM (or, I think, Petit a Petit in their original French), that this is a dense book filled with detail. You would be correct.

Pink Floyd in Comics tells the story of the band from the early 1960s through the time of publication (2022 in France, 2024 for this English-language edition), in copious and potentially exhaustive detail. Breaking it into twenty-eight chapters allows every phase of the band - every album, major tour, and movie soundtrack, plus sidebars like Hipgnosis (the design company that did nearly all their covers) and Syd Barrett's short post-Floyd solo career, to get its own chapter. The breakup gets a couple of chapters, the various reunions and almost-reunions get a few chapters, too - we're only about two-thirds of the way into the book when we hit The Final Cut, which for many people is the end of the "real" Pink Floyd story. (For others, that would be A Saucerful of Secrets, which is arguable but not terribly useful fifty years later.)

Like the other books in the series, each chapter is told first in comics, in a narrative way, and then in an article, with more detail and references. It's a fairly long book for a comics biography to begin with, at 230ish pages, and nearly half of that is the prose articles, so it is longer and denser than even it seems. It may be too long for a bio of a psychedelic band, frankly - I think of myself as a fairly major Floyd fan, with detailed opinions on things like The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (self-indulgent but great) and the post-Waters Floyd (not self-indulgent but also never great and often struggling to be good) and this was a bit too much for me. I didn't really care to get multiple pages about what it was like to work with Antonioni on Zabriskie Point, for example.

So my take is this: Pink Floyd in Comics will give you all of the Pink Floyd you can stand. Possibly much more than that. But, unless you actually are Roger Waters or David Gilmour, you will not want any additional details or background or context that this book does not give you. And, if you do want a comics history of Pink Floyd, or are intrigued by that idea in the slightest, this is not just currently definitive, but would be impossible to dethrone at any time in the future.

New Life by Xavier Betaucort and Yannick Marchat

Usually, creators of non-fiction works try to present themselves in the best light possible. None of us are saints, but, in our own heads, we're absolutely sure we're right, and what we did was the correct thing to do.

There are exceptions, of course - what we might call "poor-me" memoirs, for example, that are all about wallowing in the horrible things the creator did. Even there, it's firmly past-tense, with the focus firmly on "look how brave and honest I am to tell you the horrible things I did; I'm clearly a really good person now."

New Life doesn't venture that far, but writer and main character Xavier Betaucort is remarkably comfortable depicting himself as deeply self-centered and grumpy. (The art is by Yannick Marchat, who draws Betaucort subtly differently from other characters - he has a shock of white hair, which is thematically important, and Tintin-esque oval eyes, deep wells of light blue, unlike the more realistic eyes of other characters.)

It starts with a mid-life crisis. Betaucort isn't quite this blunt, but the version of him in the book is unhappy in his marriage and unhappy in his job. So he quits the job for the freelance life, and quits the marriage to start playing the field. The ex-wife gets barely any dialogue and no name, and the break-up, as presented, is all on his side - he's sick of it, he moves out, and it's done.

Soon afterward, forty-eight-year-old Betaucort - one major running thread throughout the book is his age; he has a brother who just died and he's feeling the "less life ahead than behind" so common in late middle age - meets Lea, and starts a new relationship. (She seems to be a fan; he meets her during a signing - this would be a potential red flag in a more serious, comprehensive book.)

Lea is slightly younger - just forty - and the two start building a life together, slightly hampered by the fact that Betaucort lives a couple of hours away from Lea, and apparently (being a freelancer now) can't just move to where she is. Lea has no children, and has been told by her gynecologist that she can't have children; she's accepting of that.

And Betaucort thinks of that part of his life as done, and is happy that way: he had one kid, the kid is now grown-up, mission accomplished.

But New Life is about an "oops." Lea does get pregnant, it is a healthy viable fetus, and this is the story of the nine months of turmoil and change, mostly about Betaucort acting out all of his mixed emotions until, finally, at the very end, the baby is born.

Again, Betaucort comes across as somewhat of a jerk. During the "late but not confirmed" early section, he muses how they've talked about children, but it's "a complicated issue, given my age."

Let me reiterate that Lea is forty. If anyone's age is an issue in a pregnancy, it would be hers. I can't tell if Betaucort never thought about that (or cared) in his actual life, or if he's presenting himself that way because the book is entirely about his ambivalence, but the character of Betaucort has some pretty major blinders on, and this is not the story of how he takes them off. Lea never pushes back much against Betaucort's neurotic worries and passive-aggressive attacks - she comes across as the perfect supportive spouse, magically fertile and endlessly patient while this guy figures out what he wants.

I did find this Betaucort to be a bit of a jerk, and I hope the real-world Betaucort actually loves his new girlfriend more than he shows his semi-fictional avatar to do. But it makes a better story this way, so whatever qualms I may have about him as a human being, he more than makes up for as a comics creator. Since I'm very unlikely to ever meet him in person, cynical and self-centered me is happy that he prioritizes the things that make his books better, and I entirely approve.

Bigby Bear, Vol.2: For All Seasons by Philipe Coudray

This time out, the single-page stories and gags about Bigby Bear and his friend Rabbit - and occasional other dwellers of this forest or mountain or whatever - are organized into a loose four-part structure, corresponding to the seasons of the year.

And these are clearly still comics originally aimed at a younger audience: there are many indications, but one of the most subtle and telling is that the year begins in "Fall." For kids, that is when a year begins.

Bigby Bear, Vol. 2: For All Seasons has just about a hundred comics pages - say twenty-ish for each season, plus some half-titles - and the gags are along the same lines as the first book, which I read earlier this year.

Philippe Coudray's art is charming in that old reliable style, with backgrounds a bit more detailed than the relatively simple, straightforward figures, all held together by strong, confident lines. And his gags are a little smarter and quirkier, often relying on odd bits of cartoon physics or changes in perspective, than one might expect.

I did a little exploring, after reading this book, to see if Coudray had made comics for adults as well - when you enjoy one book by a creator, it could be a fluke, but two is a good basis for confidence - and I see that this fellow is named "Barnabé" in his homeland. Also, some of his stories were translated earlier as "Benjamin" Bear - looks like there were a couple of short volumes from Toon Books. So I wasn't successful in finding anything Coudray made for people my age translated into English - he seems to have mostly spent his career working for younger readers, and mostly had parts of this series translated - but if your knee-biters are looking for more Bigby, they might be pleased to find Benjamin.

And they probably will, if they have taste: these are fun little moments in an engaging style, pitched at the kind of smart, inquisitive elementary-schoolers who want to know the why of everything and delight in seeing problems solved in quirky cartoon ways.

The British Invasion! by Hervé Bourhis

Pop culture is a thing, but it's not one thing. Even if you're talking about one specific year, different groups - even different people - have massively varied touchpoints. Is 1994 the year defined by Forrest Gump or Kurt Cobain's death, The Lion King or the introduction of the first PlayStation?

Hervé Bourhis's new book The British Invasion! - published last year in his native France, newly translated by James Hogan [1] for its English-language debut today - is an almanac of pop culture, which inevitably means it will be focused on the things Bourhis is most interested in and paid the most attention to.

For Bourhis, the core of pop culture is pop music. That's reasonable to me: it's defensible, and if you're creating a list of the most exciting, interesting, and important contributions of the UK to global culture, starting in 1962 with the Beatles and the first James Bond soundtrack makes a lot of sense.

As the title implies, Bourhis is focused on the culture of the UK. And, as his name implies, he's seeing it from a perspective in France. So his experience of British culture is from continental Europe - he mentions Eurovision a lot more than an American making a similar book would, for example - as well as being his own choices. That said, Bourhis does seem to have gone out of his way to be as comprehensive as possible: he's most interested in music, but he's delivered a reasonably complete and deeply browsable almanac of sixty years of British popular culture here.

British Invasion! goes year-by-year from 1962 through 2022. Each year leads off with a piece of music - sometimes a single, mostly an album, occasionally something a bit odder - as the big cultural touchpoint for that year, on its own page. Then Bourhis has a two-page spread of smaller boxes of many of the other interesting things going on that year, music and movies and art and culture and a little bit of politics (each Prime Minister is mentioned) under the heading "British Patchwork." The fourth and last page for each year is one small drawing in the middle of the page, of another iconic moment: the introduction of Dr. Who, Mary Quant's miniskirt, the rediscovery of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, the introduction of the Eurostar train.

I wouldn't recommend reading British Invasion! straight through - it's a book of tidbits, for snacking on at odd moments. Maybe read a year or two at a time, maybe pick it up and look up your birth year, maybe leave it on a coffee table and poke into it randomly as the mood takes you. However you read it, it's a fun book, and Bourhis has an astonishing reach here: I doubt there's anyone who won't learn about bits of popular culture they didn't previous know about. (For me, I was with him on music up to about 1990, when apparently I went full American Grunge and the UK went its own way.)

[1] Not the one most of my readers are thinking of: that's James P. Hogan, and he died more than a decade ago.

Freddy Lombard, Vol. 1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon by Yves Challand

When you discover a creator, there's always that question: is this work typical? If and when I come back for more, is it going to be the same sort of thing?

It's why genres exist, and why artists tend to stay within genres at least semi-consistently. It's why going electric - or country, or not country, or whatever - is a big deal: those are moments when big chunks of the audience can say "Hey, wait, this isn't what I was looking for" and walk away, possibly forever.

Of course, once the creator is dead, it's only of academic interest: no one's reaction is going to change anything ever again.

Yves Chaland was a Belgian comics creator who died young: his career spanned about fifteen years and he died in 1990 in his early thirties. I read his Young Albert a few months back: that was a half-page strip that ran in Metal Hurlant for about the first half of his career, and turned out to be more radical and political than I expected (in a good, committed, energetic way).

Chaland's most famous series is Freddy Lombard: the hero looks a lot like a grown-up version of "young Albert." (Though that may just be Chaland's style, or even how Belgian cartoonists tended to make their heroes blond young men.) So, going back to Chaland, Freddy was the next step - as far as I can tell, nothing else he did has even been translated into English, so it was an easy choice.

The Freddy Lombard series includes five albums: they've been published both as omnibuses and separately in English, but the current editions, from Humanoids, are individual and digital-only (for anyone else looking). And the first one is Freddy Lombard, Vol. 1: The Will of Godfrey of Bouillon, originally published in 1981.

Our heroes are Freddy himself and his two friends, Dina and Sweep. They are young, they are poor, and I gather every book sees them wander into some new adventurous situation mostly for those young/poor reasons. Here, they're driving a clunker through the rain on a deserted highway, trying to get to Sedan for some unstated reason. But the car breaks down, and they trudge to the nearest town, Bouillon, and stop at the local inn for dinner and lodging.

Of course, they're broke, and can't pay. The innkeeper threatens to call the cops, but the local Duke, George Bouillon, is also eating dinner there, and overhears the commotion. He offers both to pay for the three and to give them jobs. His famous ancestor, Godfrey of the title, liquidated his holdings in 1096 to fund a Crusade - but the persistent rumor for the last millennium is that he only spent half the money, and left the rest stashed somewhere, with a coded message for his son to say where. George has only just now reunited the two halves of the coded message, and plans to find and retrieve the treasure - but he needs diggers to get into the secret underground cavern he expects.

Freddy and friends agree - this is the kind of series, I think, where they agree to do whatever, because that's how the plots go - and head off to bed in the inn, ready to dig up treasure first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, both the innkeeper and another diner at the inn each separately wring their hands in fiendish glee (well, not quite literally, but close) at the thought of stealing away this famous treasure from the Duke and his new friends.

But Freddy has a dream of Godfrey's era in the night, and that takes up more than half the album - pages 6 to 22 out of 29 - which has a vaguely parallel but separate plot, in which Freddy, Dina, and Sweep help save Godfrey from bandits, become part of his household, and are involved in planning for the Crusade. The two expected villains from the frame story, the innkeeper and the unnamed other diner, also appear here in similar villainous roles.

Freddy is awoken, leaving the historical story/dream unfinished, by a commotion in the morning: the bible with the secret map has been stolen! Oh, wait, no, it hasn't. Great! So they're off to find the treasure.

They do, and it's not what they expected. One of the villains then traps them in the underground cavern, planning to come back much later after they are dead. But there's another way out of the cavern, and a mysterious figure shows it to them before disappearing. So they get out - without a treasure, but free and alive.

Yay! And bang the album ends.

It's a fun adventure story on every page, maybe a bit juvenile but in that vaguely Tintin/Spirou style. The overall plot, though, is the kind that turns out to be pointless in the end: not only is there no treasure in the frame story, but the majority of the book is about the dream, with no plot resolution for that at all. I guess it could be seen as a cynical, dying-fall ending - and maybe that's what Chaland intended - but it's an oddly structured book that sets up a bunch of expectations and then deliberately fails to live up to them.

Weirdly, that makes me more interested in reading more of Freddy's adventures. Chaland was an excellent artist, in his own variation on that Belgian ligne clair style, and he's clearly structuring this story deliberately to confound expectations. Standard adventure stories are a dime-a-dozen, quirky broken ones are rarer and more interesting. Now I want to see if Chaland did that for the later Freddy stories as well.

Audrey Hepburn by Michele Botton and Dorilys Giacchetto

There are a lot of biographies in comics forms coming out these days - the ones I'm seeing tend to be from European creators, mostly French, so my assumption is that it's just a normal part of the larger comics universe there. And, of course, regular prose biographies are common, in the US like everywhere else, so it only makes sense that they would exist in comics form, too.

Except that the comics form in the US has been shoehorned into a genre box for most of its existence - assumed to be only for superheroes and other visually splashy adventure stories, typically at least appropriate for children if not entirely aimed at them.

So I'm both happy to see them, and wonder, just a bit, about what that Euro market for nonfiction bande desinée actually looks like when it's at home. I'm sure that what makes it over to the US is only a subset - most obviously, the books about Americans and people who had major careers in America. So I wonder what those shelves look like, in a random store somewhere in Europe. But I don't know, and probably never will.

All that random thought was sparked by this new book: a solid, if a bit high-level, look at the film career of Audrey Hepburn, written by Michel Botton and drawn by Dorilys Giacchetto - two clearly accomplished, mid-career professionals from Italy whose work I've never seen before. It's a fairly new book: published last year in Europe and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this NBM English-language edition, which is out today.

Giacchetto has a bright, crisp style and an impressive focus on Hepburn's face throughout - she's good with depicting clothing design, too, and draws cartoony versions of all of the main characters while still keeping Hepburn obviously herself throughout. There's a lot of dynamics in her art, a lot of acting on the page in her figures, especially Hepburn. She doesn't slavishly mimic real faces for the other famous people in the book - her costars are often turned half-away or just show up briefly, though we do see a lot of her first husband Mel Ferrer - which also helps keep Hepburn central throughout.

Botton has perhaps a harder job, as he admits in a short afterword. The book is about 160 pages of comics, which is a lot - but still not much for a long, busy career in the movies, and even less for a full bio covering Hepburn's childhood and later UNICEF years. Botton does provide glimpses of both of those ends of her life, but not in depth: his core is that film career, which is what the audience really wants to see.

So we open with Hepburn at twenty, just about to get the life-changing part in Gigi, and there are only brief flashbacks amid the generally straightforward flow of successive chapters. Botton doesn't use captions or otherwise anchor the scenes in years or places, so - particularly for those of us who are not Hepburn fanatics - it may be opaque at times exactly what year a particular page takes place on, or whether we're in London or Hollywood.

But, of course, a more heavily written, caption-filled book would have less space for Giacchetto's art, which would be a great loss. So let me say, like most visual biographies, that this one is mostly for the people who know the general outlines already, who are Audrey Hepburn fans at least in a small way, and who don't need to be told the details.

For example, we never learn when or where she was born, and I don't think her third husband's name - he's an important thematic figure, supporting her in her late work with UNICEF - is mentioned, either. We do get at least a few panels about each major movie, usually with the name of the director and a sense of how it affected Hepburn.

Readers who love Hepburn's movies should jump on this book. Giacchetto isn't aiming to draw Hepburn slavishly, but her panels have Hepburn's energy and verve and style and enthusiasm and boundless smile. And the story is just the pieces those fans most want to see, arrayed well and told clearly. This is a model of the kind of book that knows what it needs to do and does it precisely.

Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater by Jean-Claude Forest

I like to center the positive, as much as I can, so I'll start out by saying: this book has a single, consistent plot throughout, and isn't a fix-up of disjointed stories like the first book. It still bounces around more than a little, since I think that's the way creator Jean-Claude Forest liked to work, but it's a roughly 80-page comics story from the early 1970s, which is earlier than I thought we'd see something consistent at that length.

So that is commendable, and interesting, and noteworthy.

Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater is still a Barbarella story: everything I mentioned about the first book is still here, to the same degree. It's very talky, and the talk is bafflegab most of the time. The world-building is a weird combination of overly baroque, quirkily uninformed, and entirely nonexistent. Characters are mostly ciphers who do things to make the plot advance another page or three - even Barbarella is, at best, a caricature mid-century "woman" subject to massive mood swings, from lust to anger to sadness, each one overwhelming at the time, in the standard pop-culture "Dames! What'ya gonna do?" laziness.

This time out, we begin with Barbarella as impresario of a circus - a sexy circus, in ways the narrative emphasizes but resolutely refuses to describe or show - in a milieu that seems to be just the solar system, though one filled with "worlds" (I assume habitats and terraformed moons, though I frankly doubt Forest thought that far). This is very different from the galactic scope of the first book's opening, but don't mind that, because a water-breathing man with a teleportation device has come to join the circus, for murky motives, and that will send the circus, for insufficient reasons, to "the obscure worlds," which "supposedly evolved in another space-time."

Like most of Barbarella, this is nonsense, but Forest commits to it: not just regular nonsense, but nonsense compounded and extended into a fantastic frothy edifice, by the time he's done.

Again, the bulk of the action takes place on one world: the spaceship Barbarella and her merry band of circus performers take to Spectra is important as both a method of travel and a plot token, but once they do the bafflegab aligning of time-streams and Barbarella is on Spectra, space-travel is off the menu for the rest of the book.

As in the first book, there are factions with silly names fighting over Maguffins with silly names and male leaders that Barbarella can fuck to get her way, as much as she wants anything in particular beside getting to fuck them. It probably all could make sense to the devoted mind, with enough study, several large sheets of graph paper, and gallons of strong coffee. But the point is that events happen, tables turn, Barbarella goes through all of her emotions (and the beds of most of the other main characters), and everything gets back to something like normal in the end.

Given the time-dilation effects, it should be several hundred years later in the normal universe at the end of the book, and there's a shrug in that direction, but who knows? As far as I can tell, this was the end of the Barbarella stories, and they stopped just as coherently as they began. (Which is: not a whole lot.)

Bottom line: there are very talky, confusing, goofy French comics, whose point was to be "sexy" in a way that will look quaint or pass unnoticed for most modern readers. Forest's art is dynamic and interesting; if you can see it large, and fight your way through the far-too-many captions covering it, that's probably the most intriguing aspect of Barbarella these days.

Superman Isn't Jewish (But I An...Kinda) by Jimmy Bemon and Émilie Boudet

With supposedly-nonfiction books, I'll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that's pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we're being told, how constructed they are, to know how to respond.

But it's not always clear how much the book is claiming to be nonfiction. This graphic novel - or bande dessinée, since it's originally from France - is in the "Life Drawn" series from Humanoids, which I thought meant it was clearly, well, drawn from life. But I just took a look at their website, and the series is described as "Biographies and slice-of-life tales that show us what it means to be human" - and, more specifically, Wander Antunes's adaptation of Twain's short story Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, which I read recently, is also included in the program. So my assumption that of course anything published as "Life Drawn" would be nonfiction has been proven to be inoperative.

In other words: this is probably close to true, more or less. But only...kinda.

Superman Isn't Jewish (But I Am...Kinda) is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a French boy, Benjamin, and covers mostly his youth in the late eighties and early nineties, in a large extended family with a (now-divorced) Jewish father and Catholic mother. It was written by the film director and screenwriter Jimmy Bemon and drawn by Émilie Boudet, first published in France in 2014 (when Bemon also made a related short film with the same name) and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2018 English-language edition.

Jimmy is immersed in Jewish culture and history by his father's side of the family, encouraged to believe himself part of a long, storied cultural tradition stretching back five thousand years, one of the chosen people. And he's happy with that part.

But being Jewish also meant that he was circumcised at birth - which is vastly less common in France than it is in the US, something Bemon didn't need to point out to his original audience but might make his histrionics come across weirdly to American readers - and so he is Different From Other Boys.

There are other issues as he grows up - undertones of how much "Jewish" means "Zionist" to a bunch of schoolboys, some of whom are Arabic, things like that - but the chopped willy is the big one. Benjamin is worried that, when he ever gets together with a girl, she will point and laugh, and then tell everyone else.

Superman Isn't Jewish is relatively short and conversational, like a film driven by a single narrative voice. We don't see a whole lot of Benjamin's young life: just what matters to his possibly-Jewish identity. He has classes with a rabbi, and celebrates his bar mitzvah. There's a moment where he's pulled in to be the tenth man for a minyan. But he doesn't quite feel Jewish, and eventually works up the courage to tell his father that. This is a mostly amiable, positive book, so that goes OK in the end.

I do wonder a bit how much of Jimmy is in Benjamin, and what there is of Jimmy that didn't make it into Benjamin. But that's the inherent question of semi-autobiographical fiction, isn't it? In the end, this is a nice story about a good kid who figured out how he wanted to live and found happiness, in bright colored pencils and big faces from Boudet's art - that's a fine thing to have.

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.