European Graphic Novels+

Manfred Deix was an Austrian artist. The masterful ugliness of his pictures is unrivalled. Specialized in the depiction of not just the physical but also the mental, social and political ugliness of his surroundings, he captured austrian society in a unique way. Usually he targeted his fellow Austrians, politicians, the catholic church, conservatives and neo-nazis. Sometimes he also just did funny stuff though, like weird Donald Duck or Asterix & Obelix interpretations.

"Austria"

Old fashioned Austrian, singing a sad traditional. Unknown title

Arnold Schwarzenegger on a visit in Austria

"Horrible. In 2012, hunting accidents peaked"

"One of the greatest in the world, Donald Duck, turned 75 in June. Nowadays he lives retired in Duckburg."

Self portrait, 1996

Self portrait. Wall painting in Bleiburg, Carinthia.

unknown title

NSFW spoiler

"Beach Baby"

NSFW spoiler

Asterix sneaks up on Obelix

NSFW spoiler

"News from the Vatikan: They are going wilder than ever before"

He's a concept & video game artist, currently working at Amplitude Studios.

What particularly caught my eye is that he seems to start via traditional methods (pencil, watercolor and ink), which then gets scanned and finished off via digital tools, not unlike the pioneering work by Richard Corben on Denz about 30 years ago.

Lots more good stuff at his ArtStation and Instagram.

I noticed that this poster by André Juillard is quite popular around the internet. After a little digging, I found that it's not just a one-off piece, but corresponds directly to tome 2 of the Arno adventures, scripted by Jacques Martin and illustrated by Juillard. Following the example of the Sphinx piece above, I decided to search for more of the architectural panels from the book.

Yes, that's actually Emperor Napoleon along for the ride!

In 1984, Martin created the historical series - "Arno." Through its central character, the Venetian musician Arno Firenze, the series chronicles events occurring between the French Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic Empire. Arno gets involved with the revolutionary movement in Paris of 1789 and is eventually recruited in Napoleon Bonaparte's army. Martin once again strove for historical accuracy and tried to depict the Corsican emperor in a balanced way. Napoleon is portrayed as a brilliant politician and military strategist, but at the same time a formidable tyrant. --Lambiek

Martin was a French comic creator who worked alongside colleagues Hergé, E.P. Jacobs and Paul Cuvelier as part of the original team of Tintin magazine artists. He's best known for creating the young Ancient Roman Alix (1948- ) and the contemporary journalist Lefranc (1952- ), whose adventures are continued to this day. Over a career of six decades, Martin became one of the most influential creators of historical comics. Besides the Roman age, Martin set his stories in ancient Greece (Orion, 1990-2011), ancient Egypt (Kéos, 1991-1999), the Napoleonic era (Arno, 1984-1997) and the reign of Louis XIV (Loïs, 2003- ).

Artist André Juillard is one of the most productive and influential artists of historical comics in France. Born in Paris, Juillard attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, taking courses in comics from Jean-Claude Mézières and Jean Giraud. He began his professional career as an illustrator for the children's magazine Formule 1 in 1974.

In short, he's illustrated a landslide of series, which can be checked on Bedetheque.

As for this particular album, there's a summary on the back cover. Google and I translate it thusly:

1798 : the French Revolution is exported to the Orient. Napoleon leads a French expedition to discover what he may in the shadow of the ancient pyramids, in these hostile lands. Harassed by the Mamelukes, pursued by Admiral Nelson's fleet, Bonaparte is the plaything of all perils. However, another threat hangs over him - “Red Spade”. What is the mysterious plot against the young general which Arno Firenze, his companion from Italy, is trying to thwart? And who is the enigmatic Bedouin who follows in their footsteps? Friend or enemy, warrior or infidel..?

I'm not too familiar with these characters and this series, but I understand André Franquin originally created a marsupilami character as part of his work on Spirou, then took the rights with him when he left, spinning them in to a new series of the same name. After his death, other creators worked on a new volume of series, such as Batem, as seen above. [Lambiek]

Note their incredibly long tails, which are like a super-powered fifth limb. I kind of wish I had one of those, as silly as it might look.

This nice piece is by Didier Convard, from his series Chats ("cats").

From what I can tell, cats are the dominant species in this reality, with humans amusingly playing more of a primitive, underclass role.

More on Convard at Lambiek (note: he's not to be confused with Didier Conrad), and more samples from Chats here.

I believe this is from a collected work, name of Les Dieux, published by Phylactere publishing house.

Some big names there, yes, but what was this project, anyway..?

I thought this was morbidly fun post for Halloween, and note the drole Henry Kissinger character.

This little story was originally published in the mid-to-late 70's, and later included in the Memories trade paper back (Humanoids, 2005). Bilal is known for such works as the Nikopol Trilogy, Légendes d'Aujourd'hui, and Partie de chasse. I was going to say Serbia's Enki Bilal, but...

Bilal was born in Belgrade to a Czech mother and a Bosnian Muslim father. When he was five years old, his father managed to emigrate to Paris. Enki and the rest of the family followed four years later. Bilal has no sense of belonging to any ethnic group and religion, nor is he obsessed with soil and roots. He said in one interview: 'I feel Bosnian by my father's origin, a Serb by my place of birth and a Croat by my relationship with childhood friends, not to mention there's my Czech half'. --WP

I'm not sure which year this dates from, but it seems these calendars are still being produced. As for the classic BD character--

Corto Maltese (Andalusian slang for "quick hands") is a laconic sea captain adventuring during the early 20th century. A "rogue with a heart of gold", he is tolerant and sympathetic to the underdog. Born in Valletta, 1887, he's the son of a British sailor and an Andalusian–Romani witch. As a boy growing up in the Jewish quarter of Córdoba, Maltese discovered that he had no fate line on his palm and therefore carved his own with his father's razor, determining that his fate was his to choose. Although maintaining a neutral position, Corto instinctively supports the disadvantaged and oppressed.

The character embodies Pratt's skepticism of national, ideological and religious assertions. Corto befriends people from all walks of life, including the murderous Russian "Rasputin," British heir Tristan Bantam, voodoo priestess "Gold Mouth" and Czech academic Jeremiah Steiner. He also knows and meets various real-life historical figures, including Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Butch Cassidy, James Joyce, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Frederick Rolfe, Joseph Conrad and others. His acquaintances treat him with great respect, as when a telephone call to Joseph Stalin frees him from arrest when he is threatened with execution on the border of Turkey and Armenia.

Corto's favourite book is Utopia by Thomas More, but he never finishes it. He also read books by London, Lugones, Stevenson, Melville and Conrad, and quotes Rimbaud.

The Corto Maltese stories range from straight historical adventure to occult dream sequences. He's present when the Red Baron is shot down, helps the Jívaro in South America, and flees Fascists in Venice, but also unwittingly helps Merlin and Oberon to defend Britain, and helps Tristan Bantam to visit the lost continent of Mu. --WP

Just above is the famous Esther cartoon turned in to a mega-meme. You may have seen it in different form here and there, but the 'meme' idea was to alter the word "slut" to whatever the meme-creator thought cleverest. Haha?

Little did people know that such was only the tip of the toenail when it came to the crazy-hilarious "Esther" cartoons. Yes-- Esther Verkest, it turns out, is a total, unpredictable savage. She's the brainchild of Kim Duchateau, a Flemish Belgian wunderkind.

What's the password? Bzzt! What's the password? Bzzt! ^&@!#$ Oh nevermind, I have better things to do..!

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Yes.. yes, good boy Renaat! What?! Who the hell's Renaat? Sorry sorry, I was close! What do you mean, you were close?!

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Seriously, this is one of the most 'boomeranging' characters I've ever seen in my life. The basic conceit is that Esther's a relatively normal, decent human being that the audience can ogle to death because she's incidentally an attractive young woman. In fact, SHE'S arguably the wicked fiend here, and it's the helpless audience who are actually the innocent little lambs, a delightfully unexpected turning of the traditional tables!

Oh dear.

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Ooh, ooh, Esther! A falling star! Let's make a wish! >granted!<

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*Ugh, I don't feel so good. Those mussels from earlier weren't fresh.

Oh, shutup! Can't you just rub some lotion on?

Aaron, you idiot! You put too much lotion on again!*

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Again, we're not talking about brilliant comedic masterpieces here, but yes-- there's indeed a crazy, deranged aspect about Esther that-- well, actually, it's kinda brilliant in it's own deranged way, no? C'mon, work with me here--

Bah: I'm getting tired of trying to translate my horrible Dutch in to English, but here she's on holiday, thoughtfully making an absentee display for the peeping tom across the street. Of course, he-- crazy, weirdo, Peeping Tom is caught trying to do the same:

Fernando, what are you doing! we'll miss our flight! - Coming, dear, coming..!

Oh great, now it's an ABBA joke...

Okay, here we have Esther and her blue-skinned best friend, stuck on the road side. They're in quite the spot, until... someone finally has a great idea--

You just can't argue with logic like that!

Okay, okay, last series, here we go--

1. "Hello, I'd like to get to know you better" / Esther counters with rectal prostate exam chart, man goes screaming, terrified in to the distance / "Always works!"

2. "You don't look bad... what would you think if you & I...?" / "Yes, fantastic! Would you like to become a member of our Big & Betsy fan club?!" / "Always works!"

3. "Ooh, I've never seen you before. Do you sometimes feel like...?" / "I have been deaf and dumb since birth. You can support me by buying this doll or giving it whatever you want" / "Uh, uh, I have to go, sorry!" / "Always works!"

4. Hello, do you come here often? Can I offer you a drink? / Pervert! How dare you come begging for a blowjob after watching you screw my dog on my best sofa! / "Damn, sometimes it doesn't always work."

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Note: violence against women is something I do not endorse in any way, shape, or form. If I have screwed up in any particular way upon such, then may this post be swiftly deleted, and please accept my sincere apologies.

The goal of this post is to discuss whenever "AI art" is good, bad, or irrelevant to graphic novels.

I have been playing around with AI image creation tools since last year. Midjourney first, then Dalle, and most recently Stable Diffusion.

All images in this post I "created" using Moebius based text prompts today. The quotation marks are intended as the only thing I have created are text prompts. Whenever the AI created these images is highly debatable. If I feed an AI model ten thousand panels of Moebius art and the AI returns one panel based on them, then who is the creator?

Feel free to discuss the legality (copyright) of this technology, who should get the royalties or the credit. Or to discuss whenever it is ethical, but what is really interesting to me is to determine if this technology is good, bad or irrelevant for us, graphic novels readers.

I know that a true connoisseur is likely to differentiate within the below images and the true work from Moebius, but for how long? We are at the verge of reaching a point where this differentiation will be impossible. Moebius passed away in 2012, so this differentiation may be possible with external tools, but what about living artists? Furthermore, what if a living artist publishes a book using AI generated art based on his own work. Is that acceptable? Should the artist disclose the AI use to the public? All that will probably come with regulation, or not, who knows.

I prefer human-made art before computer-made art, especially when it comes to graphic novels. This despite knowing that some of the artists that I follow already use CGI to a greater or lesser extent, that is fine... But AI generated art is in another level, something that I do not want to welcome with open arms. Having said that, is the same as with any other technology, like it or not, it is here to stay.

So what is your opinion on this matter?

P.S: I believe I am not breaking any community rule, but if I am then please delete this post.

So far I've only read a bit of his stuff published States-side in Heavy Metal magazine. While I aim to swiftly correct that, I do already love Torres' "ligne claire" and imaginative compositions.

More about Torres' fabulous work at Lambiek and Bedetheque.

These are the Krostons, a wicked little band of fools out to conquer the world. More here.

Being evicted from the sewers by the Head Rat seems appropriate for this Wednesday.

Animaleries is a 64pg book published by Fluide Glacial in 2015. It's chock full of flights of fancy like these, involving animals and familiar objects & scenarios.

Solé was first published in ~1971, evidently influenced by the psychedelic culture of the times. Some of his work is a bit much for me (the Frank Zappa 'dirty socks' piece comes to mind), but his draftsmanship and imagination are undeniably top notch.

More about him and his work here.

This is a wonderfully-fun, charismatic pirate's tale that rises well above similar fare. At 200 pages, it's easy and fun to read, with attractive, cartoony art, but what sets it apart is the excellent, gripping plot and superb storytelling. Even though the author Schweizer is an American, overall this feels a lot more like a 'Euro' work, hence why I've decided to share it. (see the sidebar for more about that)

So to our tale-- we start off on a merchant ship with something of a tense, building Mutiny on the Bounty situation due to the captain skimping on rations and running the crew ragged. "Catfish," our young protagonist, tries to speak up for one of his ailing fellows, but is accused of mutiny by the captain in a moment of extreme paranoia. Just as Catfish is being strung up, a pirate ship is spotted on the horizon, which swiftly runs our ship down.

In the sequence below, our protagonist has an audacious plan to help his new (pirate) captain lure in an English pirate hunter, one who's also carrying a treasure-hold of taxes from the Jamaican colonies.

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Previously, a rather unwise act of mercy on Catfish's part during the merchant captain's execution made him a bitter enemy out of the cruel, dangerous first mate. For the rest of the book, the main plot theme is thus a running battle of wills between our man and the hulking brute. We'll take a closer look at him in the final sample.

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Above we see a sequence that for me hearkened back to the excellent Master & Commander (2003) film, which explored a variety of hardships such tall ships of the time encountered.

The book is certainly loose and simple in graphics, heavy on the line-work, yet balances that with relentlessly fresh energy and expressiveness.

I really can't say enough about the storytelling. There's no wasted panels, no extra story that doesn't help move the book forward, and no overexplaining. It's very much a 'show, don't tell' kind of work, in which everything works together beautifully. Indeed, I found it quite a nice example of Chekhov's gun.

Above we see a page from the big finale between Catfish and the bloodthirsty first mate!

The book was published by Oni Press (~2015), and is a color reworking of an earlier B&W version. There's evidently a series of these "Crogan" books, and if the others are as good as this one, I think readers everywhere are all in for quite some treats.

Above is the fabled porte du temps (door of time), located in the Somonite desert. All three of these images / locations appear in L'archiviste, a companion book to the series. (I'm making this post because of the nice intro to book three published yesterday, here)

Le Lac Vert, Arrivee de l'Expédition Loms-Nered (the Green Lake, setting for the arrival of the Loms-Nered expedition)

The Obscure Cities (Les Cités Obscures) is a BD series created by Belgian artist François Schuiten and French writer Benoît Peeters. First serialized in magazine format in 1982, the series has been published in album format by Casterman since 1983. New installments of the series were published throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in varying formats, including full-color, partial color, greyscale, and B&W, as well as photo comic, picture book, and multimedia formats. The series is distinguished by Schuiten's realistic rendering of diverse contemporary, historical, and imaginary architectural styles. --WP

Mont Michelson - La Distraction de l'Astronome

In this fictional world, humans live in independent city-states, each of which has developed a distinct civilization, each characterized by a distinctive architectural style. The series has no unifying narrative, instead telling a series of unrelated stories, using its fictional setting as the basis for magic realism and social commentary.

Schuiten's graphic representations and architectural styles is, among other historical themes, heavily influenced by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta, who worked in Brussels at the turn of the 20th century. An important motif is the process of what he calls Bruxellisation, the destruction of this historic Brussels in favor of anonymous, low-quality modernist office and business buildings. --WP

A nice overview and wiki-resource for the series is HERE, in English & French.

This is my first time reading a book on the "The Obscure Cities" series and I loved it. The art and the story were unique and intriguing.

The authors worked on the book in the mid-eighties and contacted Orson Welles to base the main character likeness on him! This is probably one of the last Welles collaborations in any medium before he passed away in 1985.

But this is just anecdotal, the main appeal of the book is the art, heavily inspired by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a famous Venetian architect from the 18th century who was known by his “Imaginary Prisons" etchings.

I am happy that I discovered these series and I am looking forward to keep reading them.

This is a riff on a well-known sequence from The Calculus Affair (1956), album 18 in the Tintin series. Original page below:

It's also one of the many times in which the original French is altered somewhat to better fit English-speaking audiences. In the original, Putin (Haddock) exclaims "Thunder!," then "A thousand portholes!"

NOTE: This image is claimed by both X and Deviantart. I'm not quite sure who the original online artist is at this time. In any case, Slava Ukraini.