European Graphic Novels++

As I expressed a couple weeks back, I’m rewriting the top section of the sidebar so it’s clearer what kind of content is encouraged here. I’ll give you what I have so far, so please free to comment, ask questions and/or make recommendations. I’ll take everything in to account before making the change. Following is the new text I propose:

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-60691-BD-Chateau-des-Animaux.html

https://www.amazon.com/Lone-Sloane-Salammb%C3%B4-Philippe-Druillet/dp/6554482601

Continuing on from THIS introduction, here’s another case of Steadman taking Tenniel’s art to the cleaners, so to speak. We have some rather exquisite line-work, combined with the usual touches of vulgarity and madness, altho rather subtley done this time. The white king’s face gives it away, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_on_the_Moon

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-76623-BD-Bibliomule-de-Cordoue.html

Good gracious, is this a wonderful series.

Madeline said, ‘Pooh-pooh!’

I’m afraid I have no more info for this one, other than it appears to be a watercolor, either digital or physical. “Luchia-a” is the name of the file, with the title above being my own invention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_Tibet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_comics#Pep_magazine

Me, I’m head-over-heels for Osamu Tezuka’s stuff, and a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s work, both for a long time now, altho of course Miyazaki only made a small amount of manga, I believe. ("Nausicaä” etc) And of course, mad respect to Katsuhiro Otomo for the legendary “Akira” series, plus his other works.

Deathbulge is a British webcomic that’s been running for years. The author, Dan Martin, took a break for a while in order to produce a videogame, but has been back at it recently. The comic itself is irreverent, crazy and hilarious when hitting its groove, and at other times, possibly just ridiculous and gross. The following strip is arguably the longest, craziest and goriest one yet.

Francisco’s a young, skateboarding farm dude who started drawing from around 5yo, and was already selling art by around age 12.

https://www.bedetheque.com/auteur-659-BD-Baloo.html

John Tenniel was the original artist for Lewis Carroll’s* “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), and its sequel “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871). *pen-name for Victorian-era renaissance-man Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Black_Gold

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-80594-BD-Bibliothecaire-d-Auschwitz.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goroyZbVdlo

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-60294-BD-Route-de-la-vie.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO12yGhOi3g

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_714_to_Sydney

Over the years there have been a few times when users critiqued me for posting something which wasn’t ‘purely BD / Euro comics / Euro art’ in nature. Generally, I’ve pointed them to the sidebar, recommending that they read it and understand that there’s an intentional looseness here in terms of material we focus on.

A classic “wimmelbild,” which is now an official flair here.

Very nice historical fiction, and to me, interesting and rather unique work on the shading, color-fills, and faces.

His grandfather Wilhelm Larson was an immigrant, so Gary was second-gen.

I found the three-tome series The Last Atlas ("Le dernier Atlas") to be ambitious, but uneven, mostly a powerhouse, thrilling page-turner, while in its last stretch plodding, with too many minor plots pursued, Pirates of the Caribbean 3-style. :P

I noticed the other day that Google’s Translate service seems to have upped its game in terms of blocking text well. It used to produce surprisingly-random text sizes in a surprisingly random range of dark grey shades, but now things are lined up and blocked out much more smoothly. It hit me that one could now effectively read entire BD’s via this method, unlocking a vast amount of foreign-language material that would otherwise take me significant time and effort to read, in French and Castellano’s cases.

I have several of these drawn just for Xmas and New Years’ of 2015. I suppose I could ask GPT if it could update the year for the others. We’ll see…

Note that most of these (French language) magazines have been archived - digitized. You can find them at various places online, for example the network of sites that offer college textbooks for free. Anna’s *cough* place, Library *cough* and similar.

See the Webcomix! thread for more of these and others.

About six of these I don’t know at first sight.

Trondheim on the script! :D

“Sweet Dreams,” Thomas Warkentin (German-Russian Mennonite, next-gen in States) (Heavy Metal magazine, 1979)

Sylvain Chomet’s Les Triplettes de Belleville is easily one of the great accomplishments of movie animation, and something that one can watch on repeat, discovering new features with every viewing. Now, I’d shared it’s pop song breakthrough hit a week ago, but here I want to talk about the movie, as a whole:

(right-click as needed)

Totally new-to-me artist, who does seem to be from Ukraine based on various clues. Evidently his clients are mainly Europeans looking for modern art, posters and digital works to be created from their family coat of arms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-KChYBFiB0

Here we go:

It’s from the brilliant Irish sendup of Catholicism, i.e. “Father Ted": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted

graphic novel by Payne (Elkins, it seems, was editor this time around rather than writer). What The Tide Reveals looks big but some of that is due to the thickness of the paper; regardless, you’ll absolutely fly through it, and before we even get into details I thoroughly recommend it. I read it at Hallowe’en and it’s a suitably atmospheric and chilly tale, perfect for the shorter days and longer nights.

Oh sure, Remsen’s ancestry is Dutch-Germany, but isn’t Karen herself, in fact… American?

Oof, I just lost the body of my post I’d been working on for the past hour. (this one’s from the “Soda” series, specifically T13 “Pasteur Sanglant")

You know… there’s sort of a theme of semi-morbid, historical human curiosity that’s run through my life, but also there are some personal health reasons which dictated, essentially: “you simply can’t make a career out of such curiosity.” And such is life, of course…

Actually, it’s a re-work of the cover from British writer Alan Moore’s "Providence" series. That serie’s gotten very good reviews indeed, and fits in to a trilogy of works, which includes Neonomicon and The Courtyard.

EDIT: Oh, darn it. I just realised this book already came out in English about 2wks ago. I think the publisher in the States is *Papercutz*, with the UK publisher being *Orion* / *Hachette*.

Browsing YT yesterday, I was amazed to discover that I’d never heard of this little classic, before. oO

From what I’ve found, this piece keeps coming back to Theo Bouvier, a Parisian artist, and yet his typical space-exploration work looks nothing like this one, y’know?

(right-click as needed)

I’m imagining the title here being "Going for a new tattoo?," based on the sign. It’s by German cyberpunk artist Puia, who runs Baka Arts. As of the moment it doesn’t look like he’s doing any BD, but I think he’d be a great fit.

The above image jumped out to me on Pinterest of all places, in which I was simply enjoying the pleasant “LC” style. (for anyone unsure about the meaning of “LC,” please see sidebar)

https://www.bedetheque.com/BD-Impenetrable-503154.html

Just finished this one, and found it a fine album, indeed. It’s by consistently-excellent artist Ana Miralles and writer Emilio Ruiz.

This translates to “Dry Cleaning,” and was published by Rue de Sèvres in 2022, a publisher I don’t remember hearing about before.

Nice book, published by Fantagraphics.

That’s Enchanted Forest, above.

Yesterday, @blaze@piefed.zip posted a LEGO Mosaics primer to !lego@piefed.social, and it was there that I had the pleasure of being introduced to Pontiérr’s work. ‘Mosaic portraits’ are not a new thing of course, but Gerardo is taking these in interesting new directions:

Pretty wild panel I thought worth sharing! And from publisher Humanoids page:

Mssr De MesMaeker is of course one of Spirou Magazine’s most important clients, perpetually on the verge of signing lucrative contracts with office-boss Fantasio.

Hoppe is a Polish-German artist currently working in Brooklyn. His site:

To nobody’s surprise (haha), I’ve got various notes on this one:

Welp, here’s lookin’ at you, kid. It’s my 2nd attempt to do a scheduled post, and hopefully it works this time. There’s also several points of interest, here:

Dangit Bobby*, I hadn’t seen this one for nigh unto forty year! Yes, and seeing this the other day smacked me right back to childhood, when I was first blown away by Dutch artist Escher’s amazing, calculated mirror-surface studies (as above), impossible 3D designs (small sample below), and pleasant, hypnotically-interwoven pattern-morphings (further down).

In fact, the poster evidently reads more like: "Donate to the Victims of War. Dmitry Donskoy.", from early on in WW1, date of 1914.

Jansson of course was the Swedish-Finnish genius who created the Moomins for an all-ages audience, via text novels, a long-running strip, and GN’s. I want to say it drew somewhat upon American Charles Schulz’ work on Peanuts, in which novel character-types were introduced in a fairly LC-style, exploring just what it is to be a thinking, emotional being. But the Moomin-stories were in fact vastly more whimsical and adventurous, with absurdist fairy-tale and folk story dimensions.

Partly a test to see if PF.S is fully back from certain performance issues spanning roughly the last 12hrs or so.

These come from Sabbah’s 133pp "Ladies of Legend" GN. I found it both fun to read and surprisingly thought-provoking, as the author really digs in to the implications and modern interpretations of 21 female historical & mythical figures.

These are from V2 of the "The Golden Age":

This panel appears in T5 of the Dick Hérisson detective series by Didier Savard. TBH, I’ve had a copy in my BD folder for ages, and simply liked the image, which vaguely reminded me of the classic Red Rackham’s Treasure.

It’s been a while, so I figured I’d dash off a bit of an ol’ update.

The writer is the venerable Jean-Pierre Dionnet, co-founder of Métal Hurlant. An earlier, Romanesque story of his was posted HERE. In the following sequence, we see a small establishing story to give us a better understanding of this god-like character, who will go on to challenge the up-and-coming Lilith, depicted on the cover further down:

I wish there was a full comic adaption of Neuromancer by Giménez. The existing adaptation by Tom De Haven and Bruce Alan Jensen is admittedly very artsy, but I personally never liked the visuals that much. This image on the other hand looks much more like what I imagined while reading the Neuromancer novel.

Stålenhag’s a Swedish bloke who’s created a load of charming, impressive story scenarios and scene re-creations across prehistoric, sci-fi, and post-apoc settings. In terms of his art, he has a real knack for bringing things to life almost in a photographic sense, yet pulling back from that just enough to add a touch of cartoony fun. :D

He did this cover for SF & fantasy author Jack Vance’s text novel Le Jardin de Sulorum. I find Argentinian Gimenez’ work to be regularly jaw-dropping, and… looks like we might have lost his previous posts here in the August move. Ah well, more stuff to restore for me. 😅

The premise here is light as a feather– a Dungeons & Dragons-type character is in a videogame setting, in which he’s attempting to ‘exit the game level,’ presumably to take a nice rest. Frequently that involves attempting to rescue a princess along the way.

I understand Bablet did this piece as sort of a love-letter to video games from his youth.

It’s by Appollo (writer) and Brüno (artist), a creative team who’ve already brought us quality series such as “T’zée”, “Commando Colonial” and “Biotope.” (which I previously reviewed HERE)

From an earlier, short interaction we had, Mssr Lvxferre was kind enough to help catch me up with some nice Portugais & Brésilien comics & graphic novels.

Sometime back I decided to read this series of six tomes rather leisurely, so as to hopefully savor it a bit more fully. Well, as of today I just finished T2, and boy… was it worth the wait. oO

Balbuzar is an older kids book, in the popular ‘text and picture’ format. The story is quite the absurdist tall tale, in a certain classical tradition, but really nothing too remarkable to me. It’s moreso the completely over-the-top, hilarious imagery of Pillot that had me chortling in appreciation.

Yes, that Jordan Mechner*. I just started his "Templiers" two-parter GN, and in the collected-edition preface, he explains that he’s seen and read any number of historical fiction works, but he’d never come across anything outside of prose works that told the story of the spectacular, nefarious downfall of the Knights Templar, formerly the absolute badasses of mighty Catholic orders.

D’oof… I don’t think I’d gotten to Cabanes before. He’s of course the artist across any number of significant BD, but… well, I just liked these four little wordless ones I’d collected across the years:

Madeleine Riffaud (1924-2024) was a French Resistance fighter, poet, journalist and war correspondent. After active resistance to the German occupation of France during WWII, she reported for the communist newspaper “L’Humanité” and other left-wing publications on the Algerian War (during which she survived an assassination attempt) and on the French & American wars in Vietnam. Her reporting on Vietnam was informed by four years she spent in the North in the early 1950s, and in the 1960s by the connections she developed in the South with the Viet Cong. –WP

. https://i.imgur.com/JpfVzsH.jpeg (right-click as needed)

In terms of surreal-inspired work, there’s a bit of a ‘Jim Woodring’ vibe here, but Rickheit’s work initially tends to be more quiet, contemplative, and slightly spooky, with settings which are generally Victorian, steampunk, and ‘mad scientist’ in inclination. But sometimes horror and gore is just around the corner.

First panel reads: "Come back, Jeremy : it’s too dangerous!!!"

An American reviewing a French graphic novel about an American story that took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

This is one of the first of (perhaps) many posts to come, ones which unfortunately didn’t manage to migrate over from our original instance, i.e. the late, great Lemm.ee. Much thanks to @emuspawn@geostationary.orbiting.observer ("David in Space") for tracking this one down.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36351373

Oof, it’s been a while since I read the Final Incal series, but I recently discovered that there was in fact a bit of difficulty, heartbreak and drama involved with this one. At least, in terms of how Jean Giraud ("Moebius") had to bow out after doing only the first book of this iconic, final Incal series.

Here’s our previous taste of ‘Coudray / Barnaby,’ which included seven strips: https://piefed.social/post/742436

One of the many, fun little dream/nightmare sequences from the "Monsieur Jean" series.

(right-click as needed to zoom in)

* Fact is, the wobbly coconut-shaped thing that sits on top of my bodily frame simply doesn’t know all that much about this guy.